Weight by Jeanette Winterson Read Free Book Online Page A

thoughts.
    Heracles looked away and all he seemed to see in the fire was Hera’s mocking smile.

Leaning on the Limits of Myself
     

    What can I tell you about the choices we make?
    Fate reads like the polar opposite of decision, and so much of life reads like fate.
       
    When I was born my mother gave me away to a stranger. I had no say in that. It was her decision, my fate.
    Later, my adopted mother rejected me too. And told me I was none of her, which was true.
    Having no one to carry me, I learned to carry myself.
    My girlfriend says I have an Atlas complex.
       
    When I was small, my bedside lamp was a light-up globe. Accrington wasn’t on the map, and England,hardly so, but the seas of the world seemed infinite, and I thought I could sail them until I came to a better place; a place that would be a yes and not a no.
    When I was smaller than small, in the orphanage, the room outside my window had a big globe pendent light, made of white china. It looked like the moon. It looked like another world.
    I used to watch it until the image of it became sleep, and until the last tram whooshed past, the bend in the road made audible by the air concertina’d in the rubber pleats.
    The globe and the tram were my companions, and the certainty of them, their unfailingness, made bearable the smell of sour milk, and the high bars of the cot, and the sound of feet on the polished lino, feet always walking away.
    I am good at walking away. Rejection teaches you how to reject. I left my hometown, left my parents, left my life. I made a home and a life elsewhere, more than once. I stayed on the run. Why then, did theburden feel intolerable? What was it that I carried?
    I realise now that the past does not dissolve like a mirage. I realise that the future, though invisible, has weight. We are in the gravitational pull of past and future. It takes huge energy – speed-of-light power – to break that gravitational pull.
    How many of us ever get free of our orbit? We tease ourselves with fancy notions of free will and self-help courses that direct our lives. We believe we can be our own miracle, and just a lottery win or Mr Right will make the world new.
    The ancients believed in Fate because they recognised how hard it is for anyone to change anything. The pull of past and future is so strong that the present is crushed by it. We lie helpless in the force of patterns inherited and patterns re-enacted by our own behaviour. The burden is intolerable.
       
    The more I did the more I carried. Books, houses, lovers, lives, all piled up on my back, which hasalways been the strongest part of my body. I go to the gym. I can lift my own weight. I can lift my own weight. I can lift my own weight.
    I want to tell the story again.

Private Mars
     

    Atlas was watching Mars.
    Mars has no life. It has an atmosphere of a kind, thin and volatile, and its surface is home to dust storms and hurricanes.
    The surface of Mars has no soil; it is covered in something called regolith – a mixture of dead rocks – some boulders, some pebbles. They formed valleys and causeways and there were signs that water had once flowed through them, aeons ago.
    There is no water now. At least not on the surface. Underneath the surface is permafrost a mile deep. Below that are aquifers of brine with a freezing point of minus twenty centigrade.
    Some afternoons, on Mars, the weather is as sunny as Australia. By night, the carbon dioxide liesin mists of dry ice in the bottom of the arid valleys.
    What would it take to melt the ice and free the water?
    What would be needed for a single plant to grow?
       
    Atlas, the gardener, sometimes imagined himself smashing deep wells into the unconscious frost, and reviving life on the sun-abandoned planet. He would shovel away the regolith and bring in fertile soil. Soil is the active surface of a living planet. He would lie in the dirt and dream.
    His dreams were always the same; boundaries, desire.
       
    In the