Art & Lies by Jeanette Winterson Read Free Book Online

room to room. I have tried to remember the things she sees with self-justifying power.
    At Christmas, when all my family line up for the annual guided tour of the house, I try to keep up, but I fall further and further behind. When they gather on the bottom step of family life, to weep a few tears over the babies they used to be and the mother and father they used to be and the dinners cooked and squabbles mended, it’s easy to be drawn in. They do draw me in, they scribble me in all their pictures, then lose their temper when I don’t recognise myself.
    ‘Wasn’t she pretty?’ (my mother again). ‘Of course in those days she had long hair.’
    My brother likes to get roaring drunk on Christmas Day, and when he’s drunk he begs his little sister to come and sit on his knee. ‘Get lost Matthew,’ has been my seasonal reply, which might have been a mistake because, no sooner have I said it, than my entire family of uncles, aunts, cousins, in-laws, charges up to the nursery, headed by my father. My mother, sentimental on sherry, tells everyone how her children used to play together like puppies, even fall asleep in the same bed. She wipes away her twelve-month tears. ‘We were a happy family,’ she says. ‘Take no notice of Picasso.’ As if any of them ever did.
    Late at night, when each member of the family had gone to sleep in their rightful family bed, Picasso crept out on to her narrow stone staircase and felt the cold under her feet. Cold not comforting like the broad wooden boards her family trod upon. Cold not comforting, the way lies are comforting, so long as they can be believed. Solid, honest, private cold. She was away from the humid babble of voices. She was out of the stoked-up conspiracy to lie. The fantasy furnace, where truth was chopped into little pieces, and burned and burned and burned.
    She climbed the stairs. She hated her brother. She climbed the stairs. She loved her mother. She climbed the stairs. Who were those loud fat people, who filled the spaces so that there was never enough air to breathe, never enough light to see by? Who were those people who used the past like a set of rooms to be washed and decorated according to the latest fashion? Who were those people whose bodies were rotting with lies? They were her family. She climbed the stairs.
    She was out now, over the slates of the house, out beyond the silent chimney pots and the crackle of the satellite receivers. Out past the upper branches of the huge plane trees that had fronted her house for more than three hundred years. She was way out past good behaviour and common sense.
    She was level with the crane that hung over the stockyard. Every day, in hard hats and goggles, men welded at impossible heights. The air hissed, gold sparks spat the silver steel, the smell of burning skin. Every day there was a little more of the cancer hospital, a little less of the stockyard.
    The crane waited. Tomorrow it would bend down its yellow arm and scoop up the blue cattle gate. The gate was blue, but for the top bar, worn shiny through years of forearms. It was a blue cattle gate painted with history, not war or politics, but blood stock, beer prices and the occasional broken heart, 1710–1995. Since then, the yard long abandoned, the gate had been alone. Not tomorrow. Out now, over the steel, the concrete and the dumper trucks, carefully into the back of the lorry, and away to the agricultural museum. The grid beneath would be recycled.
    The city recycles everything, but, it has not yet found a way to separate the materials from the memories. As houses have been demolished to make way for more and more roads, people have begun to roam in posses, looking through the city skips for a part of their past. For many, the new developments hardly exist, the people look through them into lost terraces and low tenements, where they were happy.
    Men and women who used to live nearby, before the Compulsory Purchase Orders, like to walk back on a Sunday