Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson Page B

a Piranesi nightmare. The logical paths the proper steps led nowhere. My mind took me up tortuous staircases that opened into doors that opened into nothing. I knew my problem was partly old war wounds playing up. Put in a situation that smelt anything like the one with Bathsheba and I hit out. Bathsheba had always been asking for time to make definite decisions only to come back with a list of compromises. Louise, I knew, wouldn’t make compromises. She would vanish.
    Ten years of marriage is a lot of marriage. I can’t be relied upon to describe Elgin properly. More importantly I’d never met the other Elgin, the one she’d married. No-one whom Louise had loved could be worthless, if I believed that I’d have to accept that I might be worthless too. At least I had never pressured her to leave. It would be her own decision.
    I had a boyfriend once called Crazy Frank. He had been brought up by midgets although he himself was over sixfeet tall. He loved his adopted parents and used to carry them one on each shoulder. I met him doing exactly that at a Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition in Paris. We went to a bar and then on to another bar and got very drunk and while we were in a shot bed in a cheap pension he told me about his passion for miniatures.
    ‘You’d be perfect if you were smaller,’ he said.
    I asked him if he took his parents everywhere with him and he said that he did. They didn’t need much room and they helped him to make friends. He explained that he was very shy.
    Frank had the body of a bull, an image he intensified by wearing great gold hoops through his nipples. Unfortunately he had joined the hoops with a chain of heavy gold links. The effect should have been deeply butch but in fact it looked rather like the handle of a Chanel shopping bag.
    He didn’t want to settle down. His ambition was to find a hole in every port. He wasn’t fussy about the precise location. Frank believed that love had been invented to fool people. His theory was sex and friendship. ‘Don’t people always behave better towards their friends than their lovers?’ He warned me never to fall in love, although his words came too late because I had already fallen for him. He was the perfect vagabond, swag bag in one hand, waving with the other. He never stayed anywhere long, he was only in Paris for two months. I begged him to come back to England with me but he laughed and said England was for married couples. ‘I have to be free,’ he said.
    ‘But you take your parents wherever you go.’
    Frank left for Italy and I came home to England. I was torn with grief for two whole days and thenI thought, A man and his midgets. Was that what I wanted? A man whose chest jewellery rattled when he walked?
    It was years ago but I still blush. Sex can feel like love or maybe it’s guilt that makes me call sex love. I’ve been through so much I should know just what it is I’m doing with Louise. I should be a grown-up by now. Why do I feel like a convent virgin?
    The second day of my ordeal I took a pair of handcuffs to the library with me and locked myself to my seat. I gave the key to the gentleman in the knitted waistcoat and asked him to let me free at five o’clock. I told him I had a deadline, that if I didn’t finish my translation a Soviet writer might fail to find asylum in Great Britain. He took the key and said nothing but I noticed he’d disappeared from his place after about an hour.
    I worked on, the concentrated silence of the library giving me some release from thoughts of Louise. Why is the mind incapable of deciding its own subject matter? Why when we desperately want to think of one thing do we invariably think of another? The overriding arch of Louise had distracted me from all other constructs. I like mental games, I find it easy to work and I work quickly. In the past whatever my situation I have been able to find peace in work. Now that facility had deserted me. I was a street yob who had to be kept locked