Free Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson

true that when Elgin began, he didn’t realise that his obsessional study of carcinoma would bring more substantial benefits to himself than to any of his patients. He used computer simulations to mimic the effects of rapidly multiplying rogue cells. He saw gene therapy as the likeliest way out for a body besieged by itself. It was very sexy medicine. Gene therapy is the frontier world wherenames and fortunes can be made. Elgin was wooed by an American pharmaceutical company who got him off the shop floor and into a lab. He’d never liked hospitals anyway.
    ‘Elgin’, said Louise, ‘can no longer wrap a Band-Aid round a cut finger but he can tell you everything there is to know about cancer. Everything except what causes it and how to cure it.’
    ‘That’s a bit cynical isn’t it?’ I said.
    ‘Elgin doesn’t care about people. He never sees any people. He hasn’t been on a terminal care ward for ten years. He sits in a multi-million pound laboratory in Switzerland for half the year and stares at a computer. He wants to make the big discovery. Get the Nobel prize.’
    ‘There’s nothing wrong with ambition.’
    She laughed. ‘There’s a lot wrong with Elgin.’
    I wondered if I could live up to Louise.
    We lay down together and I followed the bow of her lips with my finger. She had a fine straight nose, severe and demanding.
    Her mouth contradicted her nose, not because it wasn’t serious, but because it was sensual. It was full, lascivious in its depth, with a touch of cruelty. The nose and the mouth working together produced an odd effect of ascetic sexuality. There was discernment as well as desire in the picture. She was a Roman Cardinal, chaste, but for the perfect choirboy.
    Louise’s tastes had no place in the late twentieth century where sex is about revealing not concealing. She enjoyed the titillation of suggestion. Her pleasure was in slow certain arousal, a game between equals who might not always choose to be equals. She was not a D.H. Lawrence type; no-one could take Louise with animal inevitability.It was necessary to engage her whole person. Her mind, her heart, her soul and her body could only be present as two sets of twins. She would not be divided from herself. She preferred celibacy to tupping.
    Elgin and Louise no longer made love. She took the spunk out of him now and again but she refused to have him inside her. Elgin accepted this was part of their deal and Louise knew he used prostitutes. His proclivities would have made that inevitable even in a more traditional marriage. His present hobby was to fly up to Scotland and be sunk in a bath of porridge while a couple of Celtic geishas rubber-gloved his prick.
    ‘He wouldn’t want to be naked in front of strangers,’ said Louise. ‘I’m the only person, apart from his mother, who’s seen him undressed.’
    ‘Why do you stay with him?’
    ‘He used to be a good friend, that’s before he started working all the time. I’d have been happy enough to stay with him and live my own life, except that something happened.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘I saw you in the park. It was a long time before we met.’
    I wanted to question her. My heart was beating too fast and I felt both enervated and exhausted, the way I do when I drink without eating. Whatever Louise had to say I wouldn’t have been able to cope with it. I lay on my back and watched the shadows from the fire. There was an ornamental palm in the room, its leaves reflected to a grotesque outsize. This was no tame domestic space.
    In the hours that followed, waking and sleeping with a light fever that bore on me out of passion and distress, it seemed as if the small room was full of ghosts. Therewere figures at the window gazing out through the muslin curtains, talking to one another in low voices. A man stood warming himself by the low grate. There was no furniture apart from the bed and the bed was levitating. We were surrounded by hands and faces shifting and connecting, now looming