Gut Symmetries by Jeanette Winterson Read Free Book Online Page B

scatter the ships to the four corners of the earth and although my father was too young for ships with sails, like other water-men, the wind still excited him. A fair wind. A new world. The recklessness of the sailor that my father loved.
    These were his happiest times, the times when his paperwork was done, when he could hear his secretary rattling at the upright Remington as though it were a church piano. He worked evenings and early mornings so that he could make a gap to slip through, a private space after coffee and before lunch, when the piers were busy with every kind of activity, legitimate and not.
    He knew the gangmen and the loaders and the truck drivers and the harbour pilots, and as he leaned on his rail, watching, sometimes waving, other men joined him, lit a cigarette, told him the news and with a slap on the back, moved on. The easy fraternity of working men was comfortable to him. No one here asked him what school he had attended.
     
    As he gossiped and lounged the noise of the Remington stopped. His secretary came out from the low line of offices that huddled to the waterfront. There was an urgent call for him. Would he step inside at once?
    Sighing, he threw down his cigarette and went inside, straightening his tie. He listened briefly. 'Yes. Yes.' Then he threw down the receiver and threw his secretary up into the air.
    He had been made a Director of the Line.
    He left his desk with its four black telephones and filing tray, and without stopping to collect any luggage, bought an aeroplane ticket for the evening flight. In 1959 flying was odd, glamorous, expensive and blissful. There was a fifteen-minute check-in time and my father walked across the tarmac and boarded the twin-propeller plane with only his toothbrush to declare.
    He had risen in the world and now he was going to prove it.
     
    When he arrived home my mother was not expecting him. His secretary had not made the instructed call. Mother was in the bath, with bubbles up to her neck, and my grandmother, on the bath-stool, was reading out loud from the Bible. This was their regular Sunday visiting hour, and having little in common and less to say, they had hit on the happy idea of spiritual elevation. My mother never listened to what my grandmother read, but she felt she was doing her duty by her family and by God, and it saved her the trouble of going to church. My grandmother, who was firmly convinced by the Word of the Lord, took more pleasure in that hour than in any other of the week, including 2 p.m. Thursday when she drew her pension.
    They had begun with Genesis and were now at the Book of Job, with whose trials my grandmother sympathised, especially since she had recently developed a boil.
    As she read 'Who will avail me in my tribulation?' the door flew open and my father reached down into the bath and scooped out my mother whole and carried her off into the bedroom.
    My grandmother, who was not a nervous type, said to herself, 'David must have got his promotion.' Nodding, she finished the chapter, let out the bath water and trudged home.
    Meanwhile, in a maze of soggy sheets and copies of Woman's Weekly, my father speared my mother on his manhood.
    'I should have tidied up first,' she said.
    'Harpoon Ahoy!' said my father. And somewhere in all this I was.
     
    On the night of my birth my father got the madness on him and told my mother he had to go tugging.
    'I'll come with you,' she said. 'I feel well.'
    Accordingly, my father put on his Jolly Jack Tars and my mother wrapped herself up in her mink coat. In those days their car was a three-litre Rover, really, a leather three-piece suite and cocktail cabinet on wheels. My father purred down to the docks looking like a criminal, while my mother fixed herself a strictly forbidden gin and tonic in the back.
    When they reached the docks my father backed into a loading bay and my grandmother stepped out of the shadows.
    'David,' she said.
    She was wearing a black oilskin that had been her