Art & Lies by Jeanette Winterson Page B

My mother? My father? My brother? The world?
    I’ve been unfortunate, it’s true, hard-hurt and despised. But should I tell that tale to every passer-by? Should I make my unhappiness into a placard and spend the years left decorating it?
    There is so little time. This is all the time I’ve got. This is mine, this small parcel of years, that threatens to spill over on to the pavement and be lost among careless feet. Lost. The water out of the sieve and the river run dry. The quietly contained sea where the waters don’t break.
    I want to run up the hill in the freedom of the wind and shout until the rains come. I call the rain with my head thrown back. Fill up my mouth, fill up my nostrils, soak the parched body, blood too thick to flow the channels. I will flow. Flow with summer grace along a crystal river. Flow salmon-flanked to the sea.
    Why dry? Why dammed up when the hidden spring informs the pool? How to bore down to where the water is? How to cut an Artesian Well through the jelly of my fear?
    I blame myself for my part in my crime. Collusion in too little life, too little love. I blame myself. That done, I can forgive myself. Forgive the rotting days where the fruit fell and was not gathered. The waste sad time. Punishment enough. Enough to live wedged in by fear. Call the rain.
    Call the rain. Drops of mercy that revive the burnt earth. Forgiveness that refills the droughted stream. The rain, in opaque sheets, falls at right-angles to the sea. Let me lean on the wall of rain, my legs at sea. It is giddy, this fluid geometry, the points, solids, surfaces and lines that must undergo change. I will not be what I was.
    The rain transforms the water.

Handel
     

S HE IS , perhaps, thirty-five. She wears her hair as lions do. Male lions of course. Why, when we compliment our women, do we compare them to the male beast? Lion hair, eyes of peacock blue, a swan’s neck (the male’s being longer and whiter), panther grace, skin soft as antelope hide. I had an Arab acquaintance, a homosexual as it happens, who told me that the male antelope is the softer. The female coarsens through breeding. ‘Isn’t that so?’ he said, as we were walking past the Maternity Ward.
    Men prefer one another, I am quite sure of that, women are a kind of indulgence. I don’t expect my Arab friend to like them, he doesn’t, but I find it odd when my heterosexual friends don’t like them either. My colleagues don’t like their wives. They do desire their mistresses. Other women do not come within the scope of their consideration. There are nurses, mobile bedpans, we call them, and there are an increasing number of doctors who are women. Fortunately most of those remain in the lower ranks, either out of vocation or family ties, I say fortunately and I mean fortunately for them. Consultants are not well mannered except to paying clients. I work with a man who always asks the women whether or not their breasts get in the way of the stethoscope. They blush, he laughs, slaps me on the shoulder in that chummy conspiratorial way, ‘Handel will see to you,’ he says. ‘Best pruner in the business.’
    I do apologise. I do apologise. I do apologise …
    *
     
    ‘Will you stop saying “Sorry,” Handel? They are the ones who are supposed to be sorry. That is what they have come for, to say sorry, this is Confession.’
    My priest despaired of me. It was his duty, my training, that we should sit side by side in the little veiled box that separated us from the penitent by a thin lattice of sin.
    ‘Father I have sinned.’
    ‘Sins of the flesh or sins of conscience?’
    ‘Sins of the flesh.’
    Yes, always sins of the flesh, nobody has any conscience.
    ‘Begin.’
    Those long Friday afternoons, the stories the same, no matter the teller always the tale. No evidence there for the individual life. Shop lifting, wife beating, work dodging, betrayals, infidelity, infidelity, infidelity, the common denominator crime. The men bragged, it was in