Gut Symmetries by Jeanette Winterson Read Free Book Online Page A

worn clean clothes to work, that was their pride, but none had ever worn clean clothes home. For them it had been mother with a boiling hip-bath and a packet of soap flakes. My father went to work clean and he came home clean. This was an endless source of satisfaction to my grandmother who never lost her own whiff of elbow grease but delighted in the sweet smell of success.
    My father loved the sea and should have been an active seaman but there were more opportunities indoors for a bright boy who had a way about him. He compensated by wheedling his way onto the tugs, and because there was still an apprenticeship mentality about the Company, his oddity was tolerated. What harm could it do and wasn't all experience useful? Besides, he did it in his own time and it made him popular with the men.
    In 1957 he married my mother. She was Irish, nearly well-to-do, the daughter of a partner in the firm who was based in Cork. My father had seen her at the Annual Dinner and Dance and vowed that he would marry her. For two years they exchanged letters and gifts until romance, persistence and a promotion won the day. On their wedding night, at the Hotel Ra-Ra (décor: Merseyside-Egypt), my father took off his pyjamas so that his wife could see him man qua man, then told her that he would not make love to her until he had been made a director of the line. He put on his pyjamas again and after a moment or two of violent shuddering, fell asleep.
    My mother lay awake pondering the matter and applied with some urgency to her father next morning. What could be done? Nothing. The young man had only recently been promoted in charge of the Atlantic crossings. He would have to prove himself there. Unfortunately he resisted all attempts by my mother to prove himself elsewhere. In despair my mother consulted my grandmother who suggested they try the Navy Position. This down-to-earth advice was not well received by my father who had already added a veneer of conventional morality to his conventional respectability.
    He would not sodomise his own wife. Instead he went to New York. There he is, built like King Kong, as ambitious as the EmpireStateBuilding, as wide-eyed as Fay Wray, and as much a dream, an invention, as the movies and America itself. He was a giant projection on the blank screen of other people and that was his success. He was not a ruthless man but he believed in himself. That marked him out from the many others who believed in nothing at all.
    The dream: to pan the living clay that you are and find gold in it. Perhaps my father was a treasure chest because he seemed to be able to lay up for himself inexhaustible riches. Whatever he tried succeeded. He should have been a Venetian merchant pacing the Rialto. He should have been Marco Polo winning furs out of Muscovy. Is that him, on the log rafts in Quebec? Is that him riding rapids with the snow mantling his shoulders? He was a man who belonged with an elk, with a moose. A whale man, a bear man. Instead he wore a loose suit and a trilby and learned how to net a profit. His hauls were the biggest in the Company and he turned them in like a little boy. In those days his true self was still fighting with his assumed self, and winning. Person and persona, the man and his mask had separate identities then, he knew which was which. Later, the man my mother married died before his death and the man who had come to be his counterfeit wore his clothes.
    But that was in the future, and in 1959 my father was in the fullness of his present, he could do no wrong.
     
    It was a shining morning, he was leaning on the harbourside rail, watching the cranes load the ships. The world poured through his fingers; spices, wine, tea, green bananas, coconuts, American golf clubs, blankets made of wool with satin hemmed round the edges. Today they were loading nylon stockings, Monroe look-alikes stamped all over the cardboard boxes.
    The wind was warm, trade wind with generosity and travel in it, a wind to