Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal_ - Jeanette Winterson [36]
We circled each other, wary, abandoned, full of longing. We came close but not close enough and then we pushed each other away forever.
I did find a book, but I wish I hadn’t; it was hidden in the tallboy under a pile of flannels, and it was a 1950s sex manual called How to Please Your Husband.
This terrifying tome might have explained why Mrs Winterson didn’t have children. It had black-and-white diagrams and lists and tips and most of the positions looked like adverts for a children’s game of physical torment called Twister.
As I pondered the horrors of heterosexuality I realised that I need not feel sorry for either of my parents; my mother hadn’t read it – perhaps she had opened it once, realised the extent of the task, and put it away. The book was flat, pristine, intact. So whatever my father had had to do without, and I really don’t think they ever had sex, he hadn’t had to spend his nights with Mrs W with one hand on his penis and the other holding the manual while she followed the instructions.
I remember her telling me that soon after they were married my father had come home drunk and she had locked him out of the bedroom. He had broken down the door and she had thrown her wedding ring out of the window and into the gutter. He went to find it. She got the night bus to Blackburn. This was offered as an illustration of how Jesus improves a marriage.
The only sex education my mother ever gave me was the injunction: ‘Never let a boy touch you down there.’ I had no idea what she meant. She seemed to be referring to my knees.
Would it have been better if I had fallen for a boy and not a girl? Probably not. I had entered her own fearful place – the terror of the body, the irresolution of her marriage, her own mother’s humiliation at her father’s coarseness and womanising. Sex disgusted her. And now, when she saw me, she saw sex.
I had made my promises. And in any case Helen had gone away. But now I was someone who wanted to be naked with someone else. I was someone who had loved the feel of skin, of sweat, of kissing, of coming. I wanted sex and I wanted closeness.
Inevitably there would be another lover. She knew that. She was watching me. Inevitably she forced it to happen.
I had finished my O levels and done pretty badly. I failed four, got five, and my school had closed down, or rather it had become a comprehensive school without a sixth form. That was part of the Labour government’s education policy. I was able to go on to a techanical college to take my A levels, and with some grumbling Mrs Winterson had agreed, providing I worked on the markets in the evenings and on Saturday to bring some money into the house.
I was glad to get out of the school and make a fresh start. Nobody thought I would come to much. The burning place inside me seemed like anger and trouble to them. They didn’t know how many books I had read or what I was writing up in the hills on long days alone. On the top of the hill looking out over the town I wanted to see further than anybody had seen. That wasn’t arrogance; it was desire. I was all desire, desire for life.
And I was lonely.
Mrs Winterson had succeeded there; her own loneliness, impossible to breach, had begun to wall us all in.
It was summer and it was time for the annual holiday in Blackpool.
This holiday consisted of a coach ride to the famous seaside town and a week in a backstreet boarding house – we couldn’t afford a sea view. My mother sat in a deckchair most of the day reading sensationalist literature about Hell, and my father walked about. He loved walking.
In the evenings we all went gambling on the slot machines. This was not deemed to be gambling proper. If we won, we got fish and chips.
When I was a child I was happy with all of this and I think they were happy too, in that brief, carefree, once-a-year one-week holiday. But our lives had got