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

her has taken up my whole life and now I live attached to myself like a codicil. It is not because I lack interests; indeed, I have recently reworked Leonardo’s drawings and built for myself a fine watermill. It is that being with her allowed me to be myself. There was no burden to live normally. Now I know so many stories and such a collection of strange things that I wonder who would like them since I cannot do them justice on my own. The heart of a whale is the height of a man …

    I left her at dawn. The street was quiet, only a cat and the electric whirr of the milk van. I kept looking back at the candle in the window until it was as far away as the faint point of a fading star. In the early sky the stars had faded by the time I reached home. There was the retreating shape of the moon and nothing more.
    Every day I went into the shop where the Jews stood in stone relief and I bought things that pleased me. I took my time, time being measured in four ounces. She never came in.
    I waited outside her house for some years until a FOR SALE sign appeared and a neighbour told me that the woman next door had vanished. I felt such pleasure then, to know that she was wandering the world, and that one day, one day I might find her again.
    When I do, all the stories that are folded into this one can be shaken out and let loose, but until then, like the lives of saints, more is contained than can be revealed. The world itself will roll up like a scroll taking time and space away.
    All stories end here.

O’Brien’s First Christmas
    Anyone who looked up could see it: TWENTY - SEVEN SHOPPING DAYS TO CHRISTMAS , in red letters, followed by a storm of dancing Santas, then a whirlwind of angels, trumpets rampant.
    The department store was very large. If you were to lay its merchandise end to end, starting with a silk stocking and closing on a plastic baby Jesus, you would have belted the world. The opulence of the store defeated all shoppers. Even in the hectic twenty-seven days to Christmas, even including the extended opening hours, there was no exodus of goods that could make the slightest impression on the well stocked shelves.
    O’Brien, who worked in the Pet Department, had watched women stacking their baskets with hand and body lotion in an attractive reindeer wrap. Customers who looked quite normal were falling in delight upon pyramids of fondant creams packed in Bethlehem-by-Night boxes. It made no difference. Whatever they demolished returned. This phenomenon, as far as O’Brien could calculate, meant that two-thirds of the spending world would be eating sticky stuff or spreading it over themselves on December 25th.
    She poured out a measure of hand and body lotion and broke open a fondant cream. The filling was the same in both. Somewhere, in a town no one visited, stood a factorydedicated to the manufacture of pale yellow sticky stuff waiting to be despatched in labelless vats to profiteers who traded exclusively in Christmas.
    O’Brien didn’t like Christmas. Every year she prayed for an ordinary miracle to take her away from the swelling round of ageing aunts who knitted her socks and asked about her young man. She didn’t have a young man. She lived alone and worked in the Pet Department for company. At a staff discount of 35 percent it made sense for her to have a pet of her own, but her landlady, a Christian Scientist, did not approve of what she called ‘Stray Molecules.’
    ‘Hair,’ she said, ‘carries germs, and what is hairier than an animal?’
    So O’Brien faced another Christmas alone.
    In the store shoppers enjoyed the kind of solidarity we read about in the war years. There was none of the vulgar pushing and shoving usually associated with peak time buying. People made way for one another in the queues and chatted about the weather and the impending snowfall.
    ‘Snow for Christmas,’ said one. ‘That’s how it should be.’ It was right and nice. Enough presents, enough money, clean