The World and Other Places by Jeanette Winterson Read Free Book Online

stars: Lepus, the hare, his favourite food.
    Orion isn’t always at home. Dazzling as he is, like some fighter pilot riding the sky, he glows very faint, if at all, in November. November being the month of Scorpio.

Lives of Saints
    That day we saw three Jews in full length black coats and black hats standing on identical stools, looking into the funnel of a pasta machine.
    One stepped down from his little stool and went round to the front of the machine where the pasta was stretching out in orange strands. He took two strands and held them up high, so that they dropped against his coat. He looked like he had been decorated with medal ribbon.
    They bought the machine. The Italian boys in T-shirts carried it to the truck. The Jews had bought the machine so that they could make pasta like ringlets to sell in their shop. Their shop sold sacred food and the blinds were always half drawn. The floor was just floorboard not polished and the glass counter stood chest high. They served together in their hats and coats. They wrapped things in greaseproof paper. They did this every day except Saturday and when the machine came they made pasta too. They lined the top of the glass counter with wooden trays and they lined the trays with greaseproof paper. Then they laid out the ringlets of fusilli in colours they liked, liking orange best, in memory of the first day. The shop was dark but for the pasta that glowed and sang from the machine.

    It is true that on bright days we are happy. This is true because the sun on the eyelids effects chemical changes in the body. The sun also diminishes the pupils to pinpricks, letting the light in less. When we can hardly see we are most likely to fall in love. Nothing is commoner in summer than love, and I hesitate to tell you of the commonplace, but I have only one story to tell and this is it.
    In the shop where the Jews stood in stone relief, like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the fiery furnace, there was a woman who liked to do her shopping in four ounces.
    Even the pasta that fell from the scales in flaming waterfalls trickled into her bag. I was always behind her, coming in from the hot streets to the cool dark that hit like a church. What did she do with her tiny parcels laid in lines on the glass top?
    Before she paid for them she counted them. If there were not sixteen, she asked for something else, if there were more than sixteen, she had a thing taken away.
    I began following her. To begin with I followed just a little way, then, as my obsession increased, I followed in ever greater circles, from the shop to her home, through the park past the hospital. I lost all sense of time and space and sometimes it seemed to me that I was in the desert or the jungle and still following. Sometimes we were aboriginal in our arcane pathways and other times we walked one street.
    I say we. She was oblivious of me. To begin with I kept a respectful distance. I walked on the other side of the road.Then, because she did not notice, I came closer and closer. Close enough to see that she coloured her hair; the shade was not consistent. One day her skirt had a hanging thread and I cut it off without disturbing her. At last, I started to walk beside her. We fell in step without the least difficulty. And still she gave no sign of my presence.
    I rummaged through the out-of-print sections in second hand bookshops and spent all my spare time in the library. I learned astronomy and studied mathematics and pored over the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci in order to explain how a watermill worked. I was so impatient to tell her what I had discovered that I began to wait for her outside her house. Eventually I knocked on the door and knocked on the door sharp at 7 a.m. every morning after that. She was always ready. In winter she carried a torch.
    After a few months we were spending the whole of the day together. I made sandwiches for our lunch. She never questioned my choice of filling though I noticed she threw