Gut Symmetries by Jeanette Winterson Read Free Book Online

shuffle and swank, a gin bottle Fred Astaire.
    Against the rage and the self-pity and the shock was one single clear . . . thought/feeling?, that in the months before this, no, the years before this, I had heard it coming. It was like a steel ball, a ball-bearing, rolling somewhere around the apartment.
    'What is that? What's come loose?' and I used to make Jove crawl round under the furniture and re-screw all the castors, and for weeks it would stop. Then, suddenly, unmistakably, across our wooden floors, the ball-bearing, rolling, rolling.
    We used to joke that we had a ghost.
    We did. Me.
    Was it her that waits behind the mirror?
    Was it her that clutches at the air and cries?
    Was it him, smiling, challenging?
    Was it another part of me that I had not met?
    I said I had neglected myself. There's a photo of Jove and me years and years ago when we were married. He is shy, awkward, daring, defiant, the street boy pulling himself up to the avenues. I am staring out of the sensitive paper, with a look I used to have, quizzical, determined. We were new, new people in a new place and the shine was still on us.
    When we killed what we were to become what we are, what did we do with the bodies? We did what most people do; buried them under the floorboards and got used to the smell.
    I've lived my life like a serial killer; finish with one part, strangle it and move on to the next. Life in neat little boxes is life in neat little coffins, the dead bodies of the past laid out side by side. I am discovering, now, in the late afternoon of the day, that the dead still speak.
    Past? Present? Future? The language of the dead. Totality of time.

PAGE OF SWORDS

    June 8 1960. Liverpool, England. Sun in Gemini.
    I was born in a tug-boat. My mother whelped me in a mess of blankets while my noctivagant father towed in the big ships.
    His was the night vessel, the vessel on oily waters, his was the light shining in the darkness, come home, come home.
    He worked for a shipping company and had done so since he was fifteen. He had started at the end of the war as an office boy and fourteen years later was to be made a director of the line. To celebrate he made love to my mother and I was conceived.
    By day my father was a smart and increasingly smarter man. By night, or to be truthful, by three nights a week, he manned a tugboat. There he is in a greasy donkey jacket and seaman's balaclava. Spinning the thick cable from the windlass and bringing in the banana boats, the grain boats, the boats of Turkish silver, and the boats full of Irish, shamrocks round their hearts.
    When I was born the waters were still alive. My father too, was still alive, strong and burly, as wide as he was tall, with an enormous chest that looked as though it could tow the cargo boats itself.
    His own family were Liverpool limeys; had always worked the docks, the boats, in the Navy or as Merchant seamen. The women had worked in the clutter of cargo offices up and down the quays. His mother, my grandmother, had been the Official Polisher of Brass Plaques and some said that when she had finished her Friday round the shine of it was so bright that it tipped the waves like a skimming stone and could still be seen in the harbour of New York.
    His father, my grandfather, was killed in a war farce when an American torpedo scuppered the wrong boat. As a result, my grandmother was paid a sizeable pension and was able to have her wild strong son privately educated. She poured her money into him as though he were a treasure chest. He learned well, looked well, and if anyone questioned him about his Mersey terrace two up two down he simply knocked them out. Throughout his life my father has dealt with difficult questions by knocking them out. What is unconscious does not speak and that included the hidden part of himself.
    In 1947, certificated and handsome at eighteen, he was given a lowly job-with-prospects at Trident Shipping (Progress,Tradition, Integrity). All of his family had