Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

by Jeanette Winterson

  ‘Do you want me to ring the number?’ said Susie.

  Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes.

  Susie went downstairs with my phone and I did what I always do when I am overwhelmed — I went straight to sleep.

  Susie came back upstairs to find me snoring. She shook me awake. ‘That was your mother.’

  And a few days later, a letter arrived, with a photo of me at three weeks old — looking pretty worried I think. But Susie says that all babies look worried —and who can blame us?

  The letter tells me how she was sixteen when she got pregnant — my father had jet—black hair. How she looked after me for six weeks in a mother and baby home before she gave me up. ‘That was so hard. But I had no money and nowhere to go’

  She tells me I was never a secret — me — who thought via Mrs Winterson that everything had to be secret — books and lovers, real names, real lives.

  And then she wrote, ‘You were always wanted.’

  Do you understand that, Jeanette? You were always wanted.

  14

  Strange Meeting

  . . . my mother came running down the street after me. Look at her, like an angel, like a light—beam, running alongside the pram. I lifted up my hands to catch her, and the light was there, the outline of her, but like angels and light she vanished.

  Is that her, at the end of the street, smaller and smaller, like a light—years—away star?

  I always believed I would see her again.

  The Stone Gods (2007)

  I

  WAS TALKING TO MY friend the film director Beeban Kidron. She directed Oranges for TV, and we have known each other a long time. We have both been volatile and difficult people — with each other as well as with many others — but we have both arrived at some sort of settlement with life; not a compromise, a settlement.

  We were laughing about Mrs Winterson and how monstrous and impossible she was, but how absolutely right for someone like me, who, like her, could never have accepted a scaled—down life. She turned inwards; I turned outwards.

  ‘What would you have been without her?’ said Beeban. ‘I know you were impossible, but at least you did something with it. Imagine if you had just been impossible!’

  Yes... I had an unsettling experience in Manchester. I had opened an exhibition of women surrealists at the Manchester Art Gallery, and late at night I found myself with the sponsors in a bar.

  It was one of those bars that used to be a basement for the rubbish, but loadsamoney Manchester, the original alchemical city, was turning all its dross into gold. Why store bin bags in your cellar when you could flood it with blue light, ship in a pyramid of leggy chrome stools, cover the crappy walls with distorting mirrors, and charge twenty quid for a vodka Martini?

  A very special vodka Martini of course, made from potato vodka in a smoke—blue bottle and personally mixed before your eyes by a camp barman with good hand movements.

  That night I was wearing a pinstripe Armani skirt suit, a pink vest, Jimmy Choos, and — for reasons I can't go into here — I had a spray tan.

  I suddenly realised that I would always have been in this bar that night. If I hadn't found books, if I hadn't turned my oddness into poetry and the anger into prose, well, I wasn't ever going to be a nobody with no money. I would have used the Manchester magic to make an alchemy of my own.

  I'd have gone into property and made a fortune. I'd have had a boob job by now, and be on my second or third husband, and live in a ranch—style house with a Range Rover on the gravel and a hot tub in the garden, and my kids wouldn't be speaking to me.

  I'd still be in the Armani, with the spray tan, drinking too many of these vodka Martinis in too many of these blue basement bars.

  I am the kind of person who would rather walk than wait for a bus. The kind of person who will drive out of my way rather than sit in traffic. The kind of person who assumes that any problem is there for me to solve. I am not capable of queuing — I'd rather give up on whatever I have to queue for — and I won't take no for an answer. What is ‘no'? Either you have asked the wrong question or you have asked the wrong person. Find a way to get the ‘yes’.

  ‘You need to get to the “yes”,’ said Beeban. ‘Some sort of yes to who you were and that means settling the backstory. I don't know why you do, after all this time, but you do.’

  I suppose it is because of the forking paths. I keep seeing my life darting off in the different directions it could have taken, as chance and circumstance, temperament and desire, open and close, open and close gates, routes, roadways.

  And yet there feels like an inevitability to who I am — just as of all the planets in all the universes, planet blue, this planet Earth, is the one that is home.

  I guess that over the last few years I have come home. I have always tried to make a home for myself, but I have not felt at home in myself. I have worked hard at being the hero of my own life, but every time I checked the register of displaced persons, I was still on it. I didn't know how to belong.

  Longing? Yes. Belonging? No.

  *

  Ruth Rendell called me. ‘I think you should just go and get it over with. Now that you have found your mother you must see her. Have you spoken to her on the phone?’

  ‘No’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘I am scared.’

  ‘There'd be something wrong with you if you weren't scared!’

  I trust Ruth and I (nearly) always do what she tells me. It was unlike her to ring me up and quiz me but she had a feeling I was running away from this. And I was. I had spent a year bringing this moment nearer and nearer and now I was stalling for time.

  ‘What train will you get?’

  ‘All right . . . AU right.’

  All right. So in spite of the snow and in spite of the fact that the TV news was telling us all to stay at home, I took a train to Manchester. I decided to stay the night in a hotel and get a taxi to see Ann the next morning.

  I like the hotel and I often stay there. I stayed there the night before my father's funeral.

  The next day as my father's coffin was carried into the church I broke down. I had not been in that church for thirty—five years and suddenly everything was present again; the old present.

  When I stood up to speak about Dad, I said, ‘The things that I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.’

  I was thinking about that as I ate my dinner quietly in my room.

  There is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feeling. It isn't.

  When we are objective we are subjective too. When we are neutral we are involved. When we say ‘I think’ we don't leave our emotions outside the door. To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

  My own failures of feeling were a consequence of closing down feeling where it had become too painful. I remember watching Toy Story 3 with my godchildren, and crying when the abandoned bear turned playroom tyrant sums up his survivor—philosophy: ‘No owner, no heartbreak.’

  But I wanted to be claimed.

  I had styled myself as the Lone Ranger not Lassie. What I had to understand is that you can be a loner and want to be claimed. We're back to the complexity of life that isn't this thing or that thing — the boring old binary oppositions — it's both, held in balance. So simple to write. So hard to do/be.

  And the people I have hurt, the mistakes I have made, the damage to myself and others, wasn't poor judgement; it was the place where love had hardened into loss.

  I am in a taxi going out of Manchester. I have flowers. I have the address. I feel terrible. Susie calls me. ‘Where are you?’ No idea, Susie. ‘How long have you been in the cab?’ About fifty years.

  Manchester is either bling or damage. The warehouses and civic buildings have become hotels and bars or fancy apartments. The centre of Manchester is noisy, shiny, brash, s
uccessful, flaunting its money as it always did from the moment it became the engine of England.

  Travel out further, and the changing fortunes of Manchester are evident. The decent rows of solid terraces have been slum—cleared and replaced with tower blocks and cul—de—sacs, shopping compounds and gaming arcades. Indian cash—and—carry outlets seem to make a living, but most of the small shops are boarded up, lost on fast, hostile roads.

  Now and again, forlorn and marooned, there's a four—square stone building that says Mechanics’ Institute or Co—operative Society. There's a viaduct, a cluster of birch trees, a blackened stone wall; the remains of the remains. A tyre warehouse, a giant supermarket, a minicab sign, a betting shop, kids on skateboards who have never known life any other way. Old men with bewildered faces. How did we get here?

  I feel the same anger I feel when I go back to my home town twenty miles away. Who funds municipal vandalism and why? Why can decent people not live in decent environments? Why is it tarmac and metal railings, ugly housing estates and retail parks?

  I love the industrial north of England and I hate what has happened to it.

  But I know these thoughts are my own way of distracting myself. The taxi is slowing down. This is it, JW We're here.

  As I get out of the cab I feel trapped, desperate, desperately frightened and physically sick. Susie has always said to me to be in the feeling and not to push it away, however difficult.

  I have a hysterical impulse to sing ‘Cheer Up Ye Saints of God’. But no, that's the other childhood, the other mother.

  The door opens before I knock. There's a man there who does look rather like me. I know I have a half—brother so this must be him. ‘Gary?’ I say. ‘Hello, sister,’ says Gary.

  And then there's a scuffle from the kitchen and two tiny dogs appear bouncing up and down like hairy yo—yos, and from a tangle with the washing line, which at below—freezing temperatures shows true optimism, in comes my mother.

  She is small, bright—eyed, with an open smile.

  I am very pleased to see her. ‘I thought I'd get the washing done before you got here,’ is her very first line.

  It is just what I would say myself.

  Ann knows about my life. I sent her the DVD of Oranges as a kind of ‘This is what happened while you were out’. She feels distress at Winterson—world and my other mother's flamboyant craziness upsets her. ‘I'm sorry I left you. I didn't want to, you know that, don't you? I had no money and nowhere to go and Pierre wouldn't bring up another man's child.’

  I had thought as much . .. but I didn't say anything because it didn't seem fair to Gary for his new half—sister just—arrived to start laying into his deceased dad.

  I don't want her to be upset. ‘I don't mind,’ I said.

  Later, when I relay this to Susie, she decides, when she can stop laughing, that this is the world's most inadequate response. ‘I don't mind? Just put me on the step until the van with the Gospel Tent comes by. I don't mind!’

  But, it's true ... I don't mind. I certainly don't blame her. I think she did the only thing she could do. I was her message in a bottle thrown overboard.

  And I do know, really know, that Mrs W gave me what she could too — it was a dark gift but not a useless one.

  My mother is straightforward and kind. This feels odd to me. A female parent is meant to be labyrinth—like and vengeful. I have been worried about declaring the girlfriend because Ann has already asked me about a husband and children. But the girlfriend must be declared.

  ‘Do you mean you don't go with men?’ she says.

  And I suppose that is what I mean.

  ‘I have no problem with that,’ says Ann.

  ‘Me neither,’ says Gary.

  Hold on ... that's not what's supposed to happen . . . what's supposed to happen is as follows:

  I am determined to tell Mrs Winterson that I am in love. I am no longer living at home but I would like her to understand how it is for me. I will be going to Oxford soon and enough time has passed from the happy/normal moment. That's what I think, but I am learning that time is unreliable. Those old sayings about Give It Time, and Time is a Healer depend on just whose time it is. As Mrs Winterson lives in End Time, ordinary time doesn't mean much to her. She is still indignant about the wrong crib.

  She is polishing the coal scuttle with Brasso. She has already polished the flying ducks over the mantelpiece and the crocodile nutcracker. I have no idea how to begin so I open my mouth and I say, ‘I think I am always going to love women in the way that I do ...”

  At that instant her varicose vein in the top of her leg bursts. It goes up like a geezer and hits the ceiling in a crimson splash. I grab the Brasso cloths and I am trying to stem the flow . . . ‘I'm sorry. I didn't want to upset you . . .’ Then her leg erupts again.

  By now she is lying backwards in the chair with her leg up on the half—polished coal scuttle. She is looking at the ceiling. She doesn't say anything.

  ‘Mum ... are you all right?’

  ‘We've just had that ceiling decorated.’

  What would my life have been like if she had said, ‘Oh, your dad and I don't have a problem with that'?

  What would my life have been like if I had been with Ann? Would I have had a girlfriend? And what if I hadn't had to fight for a girlfriend, fight for myself? I am not a big believer in the gay gene. Maybe I would have got married, had the kids, and then gone off to get the spray tan, etc.

  I must have fallen silent, thinking about all this.

  Ann says, ‘Was Mrs Winterson a latent lesbian?’

  I choke on my tea. That is like Burn a Koran Day. There are some things you can't even suggest. But now that it has been suggested I am overwhelmed by the awful thought. I am pretty sure she wasn't a latent anything — it might have been better if some of her tendencies could have been latent. I suppose she might have been a latent murderer, what with the revolver in the duster drawer, etc., but I think it was all on the surface with her, just hopelessly scrambled. She was her own Enigma Code and me and my dad were not Bletchley Park.

  ‘I just wondered,’ said Ann, ‘what with her saying, “Never let a boy touch you down there.’”

  ‘She didn't want me to get pregnant.’ Oh dear. Not the right thing to say, but then Mrs Winterson was dead set against illegitimacy as it used to be called, and had nothing but contempt for the woman who gave me my chance at life and Mrs Winterson her chance at me.

  ‘I have had four husbands,’ said Ann.

  ‘Four?’

  She smiles. She doesn't judge herself and she doesn't judge others. Life is as it is.

  My father the miniature miner from Manchester was not one of the four.

  ‘You've got his shape, narrow hips, we've all got wide hips, and you've got his hair. He was really dark. Very good—looking. He was a Teddy boy’

  I have to think about this. My mother has had four husbands. My other mother might have been a latent lesbian. My father was a Teddy boy. It is a lot to take in.

  ‘I like men myself, but I don't rely on them. I can do my own electrics, my own plastering and I can put up a shelf. I don't rely on anybody, me.’

  Yes, we are alike. The optimism, the self—reliance. The ease we both have in our bodies. I used to wonder why I have always felt at ease in my body and liked my body. I look at her and it seems to be an inheritance.

  Gary is well built but compact. He loves walking. He thinks nothing of walking fourteen miles on a Saturday afternoon. He boxes too. They have kept their working—class pride in who they are and what they can do. They like each other. I watch that. They talk. I listen to that. Is this what it would have been like?

  But Ann had to work all the time because Pierre left her when the boys were little. And I suppose I would have had to look after my brothers. And I would have resented that.

  I remember what she wrote on the adoption form. Better for Janet to have a mother and a father.

  But her sons didn't have a father at h
ome for long. And neither did she. Her own father died in the 1950s.

  ‘There were ten of us,’ said Ann. ‘How did we fit into two bedrooms? And we were always doing a flit when we couldn't pay the rent. My dad had a handcart and he'd come back and shout, “Pack up, we're off,” and what we had went in the handcart and we started again. There were a lot of cheap places to rent in those days.’

  My maternal grandmother bore ten children, two died in infancy, four are left. She worked all her life, and when she wasn't working she was a ballroom—dancing champion.

  ‘And she lived to be ninety—seven,’ said Ann.

  I go to the bathroom. All my life I have been an orphan and an only child. Now I come from a big noisy family who go ballroom dancing and live forever.

  Ann's youngest sister Linda arrives. She is technically my aunt, but she is the same age as my girlfriend, and it is ludicrous to be collecting aunts at this stage in life.

  ‘Everybody wants to meet you,’ says Linda. ‘I saw Oranges on the TV but I didn't know it was you. My daughter has ordered all your books.’

  That shows willing. We have all got adjustments to make.

  I like Linda, who lives in Spain, where she runs women's groups and teaches dancing, among other things. ‘I'm the quiet one,’ she says. ‘You can't get a word in edgeways when that lot are all together.’

  ‘We should have a party,’ says Ann. Then she says, with an almost Mrs W—style segue, ‘Every morning I wake up and I ask myself, “Why am I here?'”

  She doesn't mean ‘Oh no, I am still here’ — it isn't quite Mrs W She really wants the question answered.

  ‘There must be a meaning but we don't know it,’ says Gary. ‘I'm always reading about the cosmos.’

  Linda has been reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, which she recommends to Gary.

  This is the old Manchester working—class way; you think, you read, you ponder. We could be back in the Mechanics’ Institute, back in the Workers’ Extension Lectures, back in the Public Library Reading Room. I feel proud — of them, of me, of our past, our heritage. And I feel very sad. I shouldn't be the only one to have been educated. Everyone in this room is intelligent. Everyone in this room is thinking about the bigger questions. Try telling that to the Utility educators.