The PowerBook by Jeanette Winterson Read Free Book Online Page B

man with an accordion was playing on a balcony to a party of Japanese. I had been sitting for a couple of hours, carefully concealed behind my Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses, frames thin as the slit in a burka. I had not intended to be fashionable, merely I had bought my sunglasses in Italy, which amounts to the same thing.
    I was typing on my laptop, trying to move thisstory on, trying to avoid endings, trying to collide the real and the imaginary worlds, trying to be sure which is which.
    The more I write, the more I discover that the partition between real and invented is as thin as a wall in a cheap hotel room. I can hear voices on the other side, running water, the clink of bottles, the sound of a door opening and closing. When I get up and go out into the corridor, everything is silent, no one is there. Then, as soon as I reckon I know the geography of what isn’t and what is, a chair scrapes in the room beyond the wall and a woman’s voice says, ‘You don’t understand do you?’
    When I sit at my computer, I accept that the virtual worlds I find there parallel my own. I talk to people whose identity I cannot prove. I disappear into a web of co-ordinates that we say will change the world. What world? Which world?
    It used to be that the real and the invented were parallel lines that never met. Then we discovered that space is curved, and in curved space parallel lines always meet.
    The mind is a curved space. What we experience, what we invent, track by track running together, then running into one, the brake lever released. Atom and dream.
    It was night.
    He sauntered onto the terrace and was shown to a table by a waiter. Yes, I knew what she would be doing. I had seen it before.
    I went quickly into the hotel, up to the third floor and along the corridor to Room 29. She was just coming out in a little black dress, scanning her face for the last time, before she snapped the silver mirror shut and slipped it back into her bag.
    I stood still, waiting for her to finish.
    She suddenly looked up, her face total surprise.
    ‘What are you doing here?’
    ‘Aren’t you pleased to see me?’
    ‘Yes. No, listen, I’m busy tonight.’
    ‘I saw.’
    ‘You’ve been spying on me.’
    ‘Only a little. Is he your husband?’
    She nodded.
    ‘How about tomorrow then—lunch?’
    She shook her head.
    ‘You choose a time then.’
    ‘How about the Middle Ages?’
    ‘The food isn’t that good.’
    She started walking down the corridor towards the lift. I kept up with her, though I didn’t put out my hand. She was frowning and she didn’t speak as we sped silently down in the moving hall of mirrors. When we got out into the lobby, she paused.
    ‘This isn’t a good idea.’
    ‘You told me you’d be here.’
    ‘I didn’t think you’d come after me.’
    ‘Think of it as a coincidence.’
    ‘I have to go now. Walk out with me and say goodbye.’
    ‘Goodbye?’
    ‘I don’t want to get into explanations.’
    ‘With me or with him?’
    ‘With either of you.’
    ‘So you’ll just say I was someone you met in the lobby.’
    ‘If he notices.’
    ‘Depends what channel he’s on.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Never mind.’
    ‘Don’t make a scene, will you?’
    ‘I’m not a playwright.’
    ‘Ali?’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    She squeezed my hand and went over to her table. He stood up. There was a glass of champagne waiting.
    ‘
Deux coupes de champagne.
’ She had said in Paris. Now I suppose it was ‘
Du coppeta de champagne.
’ Champagne, like English, is an international language. She spoke it fluently.
    I hesitated, watching them, and then I decided to leave a note at the front desk. I wrote—‘Pizza Materita—Anacapri—until 10.30 p.m.’

    I don’t stay in Capri. It’s too crowded, too expensive and too noisy for me. I rent a little place in Anacapri, high up on the hillside overlooking the sea. I read, swim, work and feed the stray cats on mince.
    When I first came here, I realised from the pitying