Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal_ - Jeanette Winterson [71]
‘What would you have been without her?’ said Beeban. ‘I know you were impossible, but at least you did something with it. Imagine if you had just been impossible!’
Yes … I had an unsettling experience in Manchester. I had opened an exhibition of women surrealists at the Manchester Art Gallery, and late at night I found myself with the sponsors in a bar.
It was one of those bars that used to be a basement for the rubbish, but loadsamoney Manchester, the original alchemical city, was turning all its dross into gold. Why store bin bags in your cellar when you could flood it with blue light, ship in a pyramid of leggy chrome stools, cover the crappy walls with distorting mirrors, and charge twenty quid for a vodka Martini?
A very special vodka Martini of course, made from potato vodka in a smoke-blue bottle and personally mixed before your eyes by a camp barman with good hand movements.
That night I was wearing a pinstripe Armani skirt suit, a pink vest, Jimmy Choos, and – for reasons I can’t go into here – I had a spray tan.
I suddenly realised that I would always have been in this bar that night. If I hadn’t found books, if I hadn’t turned my oddness into poetry and the anger into prose, well, I wasn’t ever going to be a nobody with no money. I would have used the Manchester magic to make an alchemy of my own.
I’d have gone into property and made a fortune. I’d have had a boob job by now, and be on my second or third husband, and live in a ranch-style house with a Range Rover on the gravel and a hot tub in the garden, and my kids wouldn’t be speaking to me.
I’d still be in the Armani, with the spray tan, drinking too many of these vodka Martinis in too many of these blue basement bars.
I am the kind of person who would rather walk than wait for a bus. The kind of person who will drive out of my way rather than sit in traffic. The kind of person who assumes that any problem is there for me to solve. I am not capable of queuing – I’d rather give up on whatever I have to queue for – and I won’t take no for an answer. What is ‘no’? Either you have asked the wrong question or you have asked the wrong person. Find a way to get the ‘yes’.
‘You need to get to the “yes”,’ said Beeban. ‘Some sort of yes to who you were and that means settling the backstory. I don’t know why you do, after all this time, but you do.’
I suppose it is because of the forking paths. I keep seeing my life darting off in the different directions it could have taken, as chance and circumstance, temperament and desire, open and close, open and close gates, routes, roadways.
And yet there feels like an inevitability to who I am – just as of all the planets in all the universes, planet blue, this planet Earth, is the one that is home.
I guess that over the last few years I have come home. I have always tried to make a home for myself, but I have not felt at home in myself. I have worked hard at being the hero of my own life, but every time I checked the register of displaced persons, I was still on it. I didn’t know how to belong.
Longing? Yes. Belonging? No.
*
Ruth Rendell called me. ‘I think you should just go and get it over with. Now that you have found your mother you must see her. Have you spoken to her on the phone?’
‘No’
‘Why ever not?’
‘I am scared.’
‘There’d be something wrong with you if you weren’t scared!’
I trust Ruth and I (nearly) always do what she tells me. It was unlike her to ring me up and quiz me but she had a feeling I was running away from this. And I was. I had spent a year bringing this moment nearer and nearer and now I was stalling for time.
‘What train will you get?’
‘All right … All right.’
All right. So in spite of the snow and in spite of the fact that the TV news was telling us all to stay at home, I took a train to Manchester. I decided to stay the night in a hotel and get a taxi to see Ann the next morning.