Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal_ - Jeanette Winterson [72]
I like the hotel and I often stay there. I stayed there the night before my father’s funeral.
The next day as my father’s coffin was carried into the church I broke down. I had not been in that church for thirty-five years and suddenly everything was present again; the old present.
When I stood up to speak about Dad, I said, ‘The things that I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.’
I was thinking about that as I ate my dinner quietly in my room.
There is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feeling. It isn’t.
When we are objective we are subjective too. When we are neutral we are involved. When we say ‘I think’ we don’t leave our emotions outside the door. To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.
My own failures of feeling were a consequence of closing down feeling where it had become too painful. I remember watching Toy Story 3 with my godchildren, and crying when the abandoned bear turned playroom tyrant sums up his survivor-philosophy: ‘No owner, no heartbreak.’
But I wanted to be claimed.
I had styled myself as the Lone Ranger not Lassie. What I had to understand is that you can be a loner and want to be claimed. We’re back to the complexity of life that isn’t this thing or that thing – the boring old binary oppositions – it’s both, held in balance. So simple to write. So hard to do/be.
And the people I have hurt, the mistakes I have made, the damage to myself and others, wasn’t poor judgement; it was the place where love had hardened into loss.
I am in a taxi going out of Manchester. I have flowers. I have the address. I feel terrible. Susie calls me. ‘Where are you?’ No idea, Susie. ‘How long have you been in the cab?’ About fifty years.
Manchester is either bling or damage. The warehouses and civic buildings have become hotels and bars or fancy apartments. The centre of Manchester is noisy, shiny, brash, successful, flaunting its money as it always did from the moment it became the engine of England.
Travel out further, and the changing fortunes of Manchester are evident. The decent rows of solid terraces have been slum-cleared and replaced with tower blocks and cul-de-sacs, shopping compounds and gaming arcades. Indian cash-and-carry outlets seem to make a living, but most of the small shops are boarded up, lost on fast, hostile roads.
Now and again, forlorn and marooned, there’s a four-square stone building that says Mechanics’ Institute or Co-operative Society. There’s a viaduct, a cluster of birch trees, a blackened stone wall; the remains of the remains. A tyre warehouse, a giant supermarket, a minicab sign, a betting shop, kids on skateboards who have never known life any other way. Old men with bewildered faces. How did we get here?
I feel the same anger I feel when I go back to my home town twenty miles away. Who funds municipal vandalism and why? Why can decent people not live in decent environments? Why is it tarmac and metal railings, ugly housing estates and retail parks?
I love the industrial north of England and I hate what has happened to it.
But I know these thoughts are my own way of distracting myself. The taxi is slowing down. This is it, JW. We’re here.
As I get out of the cab I feel trapped, desperate, desperately frightened and physically sick. Susie has always said to me to be in the feeling and not to push it away, however difficult.
I have a hysterical impulse to sing ‘Cheer Up Ye Saints of God’. But no, that’s the other childhood, the other mother.
The door opens before I knock. There’s a man there who does look rather like me. I know I have a half-brother so this must be him. ‘Gary?’ I say. ‘Hello, sister,’ says Gary.
And then there’s a scuffle from the kitchen and two tiny dogs appear bouncing up and down like hairy yo-yos, and from a tangle with the washing line, which at below-freezing temperatures shows true optimism, in comes my mother.
She is small, bright-eyed, with