Free Art & Lies by Jeanette Winterson Page B

doesn’t see herself, sees no evidence of self. There are no plaques to say where she has been. Where has she been? Here? There? Nowhere? Carrying white roses never red.
    Her body is an apocrypha. She has become a book of tall stories, none of them written by herself. Her name has passed into history. Her work has not. Her island is known to millions now, her work is not.
    Sappho, passing through the dark streets, leaving no trace, no footprints, looks ahead and does not see herself. The history of the future has been written and her work isn’t in it. Where are her collected poems, that once filled nine volumes, where are the sane scholarly university texts? Sappho (Lesbian c. 600 BC Occupation: Poet).
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    It was a long time ago. The fish-swelling sea and the boss of the sun. Between her eyelids the sun is still caught. When she presses her fists against her eyes, the sun prints starfish on her retina. She can see herself reflected in the water, the waves breaking up her image, carrying it in pieces across the sea.
    It was a long time ago. Longing belly-swelling under the sun. She had a daughter called Cleis. She lay on your sunned body as a lizard lies a rock. She didn’t blink, she never closed her eyes, she kept her eyes open while she loved you. Did she write to please you? She wrote to please you as the sun pleases the water where it falls.
    Shine on me Sophia, purge me clear and white, burn the dead places and quicken the live. A fish jumps in the pool.
    Love me Sophia, through time, beyond the clock. Help me forget my life.
    Sappho, passing through the dark streets, leaving no footprint, no trace, saw two women embracing in a doorway. What were their names? Andromeda, Atthis, Dicca, Gorgo, Eranna, Gyrinno, Anactoria, Micca, Doricha, Gongyla, Archeanassa, Mnasidika …
    It was a long time ago.
    I thought I saw something tonight. It was some time between 4 and 5 am, after the last drunk and before the first bird, the happy hour when even the supermarkets observe a small raft of silence. I like to walk through the city then, square-inch-packed with wasted life, mile by mile government deserted. This is a place to be alone.
    Nobody talks, and if they do, it’s knife talk or money talk, please don’t cry for help. Please don’t cry.
    You won’t will you? It’s a physiological fact that under torture it is not possible to cry. ‘She shows no remorse. Stab her again.’ This is the desert. The damned circle of the dry.
    Please don’t cry. The government has offered the private sector a gold-plated watering-can to refresh the city. Over there, by the last Queen Anne house, marooned by the stockyard, gaoled by the crane, they’re going to build a cancer hospital and forty-five period residences for the terminally ill. Wonderful. Think of the jobs. The cleaners, the patrol guards, the night staff, the bedpan swillers, the dog handlers, the driver that brings the sterilised dressings, the operators that hygienically dispose of pancreas, bowel, stomach, voice box, liver, bone. One man’s raddles are another man’s pay. They are calling the scheme Prometheus.
    I looked at the house, dark, a face turned away, but then I thought I saw a face turned towards me. A woman, slender, without means, balanced on the thin ridge of the house. Beside her, the winking red warning lights of the stockyard crane, behind her, the rose white moon.
    Sappho, standing under the street lamp in a wide skirt of light, thinks she hears the sea dashing at the kerb, thinks she hears the wind through threadbare sails. But it is only the wind blowing the litter, only a leaky cistern above her head, what will remain? What she hears or what she thinks she hears? What she sees or what she believes she sees? After all, what does she see, but an arrangement of molecules affected by light, what does she hear but a story of her own?
    This is what I saw. A woman, naked-painted, in camouflage colours. Orange against the sodium lights, purple against the