Free Boating for Beginners by Jeanette Winterson Page A

deluge if they deem it necessary to keep the faith. They are fanatics, and reasonable people will never deal with their excesses until reasonable people find a counter-myth in themselves and learn to fight fire with fire. It's very potent, that Punch and Judy show book. The Romantics didn't need it because they found their own fire; but almost every other quasi-revolt has gone back to it, because when the heart revolts it wants outrageous things that cannot possibly be factual. Robes and incense and larger-than-life and miracles and heroes. It's all there, it's heart-food, and the more we deprive ourselves of colours and folly, the more attractive that now legitimate folly will become.
    But read it; read it for its arrogance, its sleight of hand. It's very beautiful, and it's a pointer for living. The mistake is to use it as a handbook. That way madness lies. When Mrs Munde delivered herself into the everlasting hands of the Almighty she did so because her heart was too loud for this muffled world. She was out of place. She loved the stars and she had no one to talk to; she found romance and it wasn't enough. She was not free-thinking in a sense that would have allowed her to question the institutions that made her moody: her family, her marriage, her career prospects. Suddenly she was offered a choice that gave her the space to be safe and eccentric at the same time. She took it, and the mind gave way a little — as minds do in the face of a massive compromise that can't be articulated. She's soggy round the edges and peculiar in her outlook but her heart is still loud; and to keep the roaring inside, however you do it, must be worth something.
    Gloria sighed. As yet she hadn't had a calling and so she didn't know the power that involved. She didn't know that on the wild nights no one can call you home except the one who knows your name. For Mrs Munde the wild nights came very often, her lion heart being what it was. She couldn't risk not reaching home again; and so if the Lord could bring her home, and the Lord wanted her to make hamburgers, she was going to do it. It seemed to her like a bargain.
    They fell into silence until they reached home. Gloria thought of going to bed. She wanted to touch her mother, but that was such a new feeling she decided to leave it until another time. There might not be any Gross Reality around to save them if it started to go wrong. Mrs Munde said she was going to stay up and read Genesis again.
    'The film won't be as good as the book,' she sighed. 'They never are.'
    Gloria just smiled. She didn't care about the film. It was a means to an end as far as she was concerned — her own ends, her own development.
     

     
    'I'll see you for breakfast. We can eat my fish.'
    Once in her hammock Gloria fell instantly asleep, and dreamed that she was walking through a valley of stars that all seemed very close until she tried to touch them. One star she wanted more than the others, and followed it for many miles until she came to a lake. Exhausted, she sat down and noticed that the star was sitting down too, but in the water. Laughing she got up and plunged in to catch it, but it broke in her hands. Each time she tried to catch it it broke again, but when she sat beside it, it stayed whole. She looked up and saw that it was really in the sky and its image in the water. She didn't understand. Then at her elbow she heard a tapping and it was the orange demon.
    'What's going on?' she demanded.
    'It's your first lesson in plural reality,' it said, and vanished.
     
    Doris was in a bad mood. She had been hired as a cleaner and now they wanted her to take on a bit-part as an unbelieving crone. It wasn't especially demanding, just involved wearing old clothes and shaking her fist a lot as the great Unpronounceable tried to force everyone to repent, and when they didn't — false gods being difficult to give up — he would destroy them. Doris didn't like what she'd seen of the script. She knew it was a