Free Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson Page B

that cause the trouble.
    I lay down on the hard wooden floor of my new zen sitting room and contemplated a spider throwing a web. Blind nature. Homo sapiens. Unlike Robert the Bruce I had no ingenious revelations only a huge sadness. I’m not the kind who can replace love with convenience or passion with pick-ups. I don’t want slippers at home and dancing shoes in a little bed-sit round the block. That’s how it’s done isn’t it? Package up your life with supermarket efficiency, don’t mix the heart with the liver.
    I’ve never been the slippers; never been the one to sit at home and desperately believe in another late office meeting. I haven’t gone to bed by myself at eleven, pretending to be asleep, ears pricked like a guard dog for the car in the drive. I haven’t stretched out my hand to check the clock and felt the cold weight of those lost hours ticking in my stomach.
    Plenty of times I’ve been the dancing shoes and howthose women have wanted to play. Friday night, a weekend conference. Yes, in my flat. Off with the business suit, legs apart, pulling me down on them, a pause for champagne and English cheese. And while we’re doing that somebody is looking out of the window watching the weather change. Watching the clock, watching the phone, she said she’d ring after her last session. She does ring. She lifts herself off me and dials the number resting the receiver against her breast. She’s wet with sex and sweat. ‘Hello darling, yes fine, it’s raining outside.’
    Turn down the lights. This is outside of time. The edge of a black hole where we can go neither forward nor back. Physicists are speculating on what might happen if we could lodge ourselves on the crater sides of such a hole. It seems that due to the peculiarities of the event horizon we could watch history pass and never become history ourselves. We would be trapped eternally observing with no-one to tell. Perhaps that’s where God is, then God will understand the conditions of infidelity.
    Don’t move. We can’t move, caught like lobster in a restaurant aquarium. These are the confines of our life together, this room, this bed. This is the voluptuous exile freely chosen. We daren’t eat out, who knows whom we may meet? We must buy food in advance with the canniness of a Russian peasant. We must store it unto the day, chilled in the fridge, baked in the oven. Temperatures of hot and cold, fire and ice, the extremes under which we live.
    We don’t take drugs, we’re drugged out on danger, where to meet, when to speak, what happens when we see each other publicly. We think no-one has noticed but there are always faces at the curtain, eyes on the road. There’s nothing to whisper about so they whisper about us.
    Turn up the music. We’re dancing together tightly sealed like a pair of 50s homosexuals. If anyone knocks at the door we won’t answer. If I have to answer we’ll say she’s my accountant. We can’t hear anything but the music smooth as a tube lubricating us round the floor. I’ve been waiting for her all week. All week has been a regime of clocks and calendars. I thought she might telephone on Thursday to say that she couldn’t come, that sometimes happens even though we’re only together one weekend in five and those stolen after-office hours.
    She arches her body like a cat on a stretch. She nuzzles her cunt into my face like a filly at the gate. She smells of the sea. She smells of rockpools when I was a child. She keeps a starfish in there. I crouch down to taste the salt, to run my fingers around the rim. She opens and shuts like a sea anemone. She’s refilled each day with fresh tides of longing.
    The sun won’t stay behind the blind. The room is flooded with light that makes sine waves on the carpet. The carpet that looked so respectable in the showroom has a harem red to it now. I was told it was burgundy.
    She lies against the light resting her back on a rod of light. The light breaks colours under her