Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson Read Free Book Online Page A

cunning means that the user will have to ask at least five times how to get there. Although I lowered my voice, particularly in deference to MOTHER AND BABY , I was returned no such courtesy. ‘Venereal Disease? Down theend turn right turn left straight on through the gates past the lift up the stairs down the corridor round the corner, through the swing doors and there you are,’ yelled the male nurse, carefully stopping his trolley-load of dirty sheets on my foot … ‘You did say VENEREAL?’
    Yes I did, and I said it again to the junior doctor rakishly swinging his stethoscope at the OUTPATIENTS . ‘Clap Clinic? No problem, you’re not more than five minutes away by wheelchair.’ He pealed with laughter like a posse of ice-cream vans and pointed in the direction of the incinerator chute. ‘That’s the quickest way. Good luck.’
    Maybe it’s my face. Maybe I look like a doormat today. I feel like one.
    On the way out I bought myself a large bunch of flowers.
    ‘Visiting someone?’ said the girl, her voice going up at the corners like a hospital sandwich. She was bored to death, having to be nice, jammed behind the ferns, her right hand dripping with green water.
    ‘Yes, myself. I want to find out how I am.’
    She raised her eyebrows and squeaked, ‘You all right?’
    ‘I shall be,’ I said, throwing her a carnation.
    At home, I put the flowers in a vase, changed the sheets and got into bed. ‘What did Bathsheba ever give me but a perfect set of teeth?’
    ‘All the better to eat you with,’ said the Wolf.
    I got a can of spray paint and wrote SELF - RESPECT over the door.
    Let Cupid try and get past that one.
    Louise was eating breakfast when I arrived. She was wearing a red and green guardsman stripe dressing gowngloriously too large. Her hair was down, warming her neck and shoulders, falling forward on to the table-cloth in wires of light. There was a dangerously electrical quality about Louise. I worried that the steady flame she offered might be fed by a current far more volatile. Superficially she seemed serene, but beneath her control was a crackling power of the kind that makes me nervous when I pass pylons. She was more of a Victorian heroine than a modern woman. A heroine from a Gothic novel, mistress of her house, yet capable of setting fire to it and fleeing in the night with one bag. I always expected her to wear her keys at her waist. She was compressed, stoked down, a volcano dormant but not dead. It did occur to me that if Louise were a volcano then I might be Pompeii.
    I didn’t go in straight away, I stood lurking outside with my collar turned up, hiding to get a better view. I thought, If she calls the police, it’s only what I deserve. But she wouldn’t call the police, she’d take her pearl-handled revolver from the glass decanter and shoot me through the heart. At the post-mortem they’ll find an enlarged heart and no guts.
    The white table-cloth, the brown teapot. The chrome toast-rack and the silver-bladed knives. Ordinary things. Look how she picks them up and puts them down, wipes her hands briskly on the edge of the table-cloth; she wouldn’t do that in company. She’s finished her egg, I can see the top jagged on the plate, a bit of butter that she pops into her mouth from the end of her knife. Now she’s gone for a bath and the kitchen’s empty. Silly kitchen without Louise.
    It was easy for me to get in, the door was unlocked. I felt like a thief with a bagful of stolen glances. It’s odd being in someone else’s room when they’re not there.Especially when you love them. Every object carries a different significance. Why did she buy that? What does she especially like? Why does she sit in this chair and not that one? The room becomes a code that you have only a few minutes to crack. When she returns, she will command your attention, and besides it’s rude to stare. And yet I want to pull out the drawers and run my fingers under the dusty rims of the pictures.