Sexing the Cherry (10 page)

Then he told me how it had been the last time the plague had struck. It had started quietly enough, a few guitars in the moonlight, a few love-notes sent under cover of darkness. Then the mayor had fallen for a shop-girl and draped his chain of office over a public toilet. Then every single monk in the monastery was caught masturbating in front of a statue of Hildegard of Bingen. They ignored the call to prayer at five a.m. Indeed they ignored it for so long that the old man hired to ring the bell died of heart failure. He was still pulling at eight o'clock, and so were the monks.

Worse, ordinary men and women, with no eccentricity in their natures, began to eye one another and die for love. Every day new graves were dug in the hillside. The grave-digger himself was so struck by the woman he was burying that he wrenched the lid from her coffin and got in. After hours of pleading his family lost patience and threw the soil in themselves. After that the dead were thrown into the river, and then of course everyone who was left died of contamination. Except the monk, who was on a fast and drinking only holy water from the monastery cellar, and the whore, who drank no water at all.

'The people who live here now,' he said, 'are completely happy and disease-free. You should settle here yourself. It would do you good.'

I decided to look round the place and began by going to a stall to buy some bread. The young woman behind the stall was unsmiling, though I smiled a good deal. Eventually she said, 'What you're doing is illegal. You should stop it.'

'What's illegal?'

Tailing in love with me.'

Tm not falling in love with you.'

'Why are you smiling then?'

Before I could answer she pulled out a book and looked under 'S' in the index. She read out loud: 'Smiling is one of the earliest signs of love. If someone smiles at you, be sure they have another intention.'

Tm very sorry,' I said, my teeth in a straight line.

After that I went to buy a mouth-organ, and I was very careful not to smile at all.

'Have you a little guitar or a mandolin?' I asked.

I might as well have asked for the bones of the Holy Mother to be dug up, so wrathful and insulted did the shop-keeper appear. I explained I was a stranger, and he softened a little and told me that guitars and mandolins were forbidden, as were violins. He had a nice tuba, if I was interested. Politely, I declined the tuba and waited for some enlightenment. He directed me to the city museum.

The museum was a gloomy edifice. No one seemed to be looking after it; there were no guides and no other visitors. It was a Museum of Love. As I walked into the main chamber I was greeted by a statue of Samson, blind and defeated, chained between two pillars in the fleshy palace of the Philistines. Sitting at his heel, laughing gleefully, was Delilah. She was holding his hair.

Very soon I found the outlawed guitars and mandolins. They were hung high on the wall, and underneath was a fierce inscription describing them as: 'INSTRUMENTS OF LUST AND FURY'.

Near-by was a bunch of dried red roses. Over there, Cupid's bow and arrow. There were stale sugar hearts in glass cases, and bad poems pinned firmly to the table. Saddest of all was a carefully stuffed small dog with a bow round its neck. The medallion said: 'i LOVE YOU'.

I was sorry to see under the section marked 'PROFLIGATES
AND WANTONS AND THE HARM THEY HAVE CAUSED' Our OWtt
King Henry towering over his unfortunate wives.

Since I was alone, with no one to challenge me, I reached up and took the guitar from the wall. I blew away the dust and tested the strings. They were loose but not rotten. I carefully tuned them one by one and strummed a gentle chord.

I had been singing quietly for a while when I noticed a pair of feet in front of me. Then another pair and another. I was surrounded by the citizens. They said nothing to me and, seeing there was no escape, I continued to play. Gradually, singing as if in a trance, they began to join in, and one or two slipped their arms round the waists of their companions. We continued in this way until it was almost dark; then one of the men, an innkeeper, shouted that we must all join him in a celebration and that I must come too, and continue my tunes. We straggled out into the night, and at the inn one of the women set up Cupid's bow and arrow over the bar. She laughed - she didn't know what it was, but it was forbidden and she liked it. About midnight, as I was thinking of going to sleep, a shouting and wailing began in the street outside. It was the monk on his purple pallet and the whore on her burnished throne. They had come with the Chief of Police. I wasted no time, but fled through the window holding on to the guitar. The girl slung the bow and arrow over my body and blew me a kiss.

Much later, years later, I heard that from that night the plague of love had overtaken the city once more, but this time it had not followed the normal pattern. The monk had gathered together the entire citizenry and warned them that unless they gave up their wicked ways at once they would all die. The penalty for love, he reminded them, was death. They took a vote and unanimously agreed to be put to death. The monk and the whore shot them all and found themselves alone. They would have to begin again. Wearily they climbed into bed.

When I left the city where love is an epidemic I rejoined Tradescant's ship and we continued our course towards the Bermudas. It was Tradescant's plan to stock up with seeds and pods and any exotic thing that might take the fancy of the English and so be made natural in our gardens. It was our hope to make more of a success of the new fashion of grafting, which we had understood from France, and had already done to some satisfaction on certain fruit trees.

Grafting is the means whereby a plant, perhaps tender or uncertain, is fused into a hardier member of its strain, and so the two take advantage of each other and produce a third kind, without seed or parent. In this way fruits have been made resistant to disease and certain plants have learned to grow where previously they could not.

There are many in the Church who condemn this practice as unnatural, holding that the Lord who made the world made its flora as he wished and in no other way.

Tradescant has been praised in England for his work with the cherry, and it was on the cherry that I first learned the art of grafting and wondered whether it was an art I might apply to myself.

My mother, when she saw me patiently trying to make a yield between a Polstead Black and a Morello, cried two things: Thou mayest as well try to make a union between thyself and me by sewing us at the hip,' and then, 'Of what sex is that monster you are making?'

I tried to explain to her that the tree would still be female although it had not been born from seed, but she said such things had no gender and were a confusion to themselves.

'Let the world mate of its own accord,' she said, 'or not at all.'

But the cherry grew, and we have sexed it and it is female.

What I would like is to have some of Tradescant grafted on to me so that I could be a hero like him. He will flourish in any climate, pack his ships with precious things and be welcomed with full honours when the King is restored.

England is a land of heroes, every boy knows that.

I slipped away from our main ship soon after we had weighed anchor, to fetch water and make a tour of the islands. Tradescant never objected to these wanderings: he took it for granted that I would bring something back to justify my absence. And he knew I liked to be alone, a habit I have learned from my mother, who has always been alone.

As I rowed towards an inhospitable-looking rock it became clear to me that when I think about her, or dream about her, she is always huge and I am always tiny. I'm sitting on her hand, the way she holds her puppies, and picking at her face for something, I don't know what. She's laughing, and so am I.

She is like a mathematical equation, always there and impossible to disprove.

I think she may have been found herself, long before she found me. I imagine her on the bank, in a bottle. The bottle is cobalt blue with a wax stopper wrapped over a piece of rag. A woman coming by hears noises from the bottle, and taking her knife she cuts open the seal and my mother comes thickening out like a genie from a jar, growing bigger and bigger and finally solidifying into her own proportions. She grants the woman three wishes and throws the bottle out to sea, and now she has forgotten all that and sits with her dogs watching the tide.

Above me the gulls burst in white battalions, and ahead of me the tall rocks loom. To the north of this tiny island is a tract of sand where the sea cuts through like a tongue. I will pull up my boat at this deep divided shore and see what signs of life there are. Islands are metaphors for the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.

My own heart, like this wild place, has never been visited, and I do not know whether it could sustain life.

In an effort to find out I am searching for a dancer who may or may not exist, though I was never conscious of beginning this journey. Only in the course of it have I realized its true aim. When I left England I thought I was running away. Running away from uncertainty and confusion but most of all running away from myself. I thought I might become someone else in time, grafted on to something better and stronger. And then I saw that the running away was a running towards. An effort to catch up with my fleet-footed self, living another life in a different way.

I gave chase in a ship, but others make the journey without moving at all. Whenever someone's eyes glaze over, you have lost them. They are as far from you as if their body were carried at the speed of light beyond the compass of the world.

Time has no meaning, space and place have no meaning, on this journey. All times can be inhabited, all places visited. In a single day the mind can make a millpond of the oceans. Some people who have never crossed the land they were born on have travelled all over the world. The journey is not linear, it is always back and forth, denying the calendar, the wrinkles and lines of the body. The self is not contained in any moment or any place, but it is only in the intersection of moment and place that the self might, for a moment, be seen vanishing through a door, which disappears at once.

THE FLAT EARTH THEORY

The earth is round and flat at the same time. This is obvious. That it is round appears indisputable; that it is flat is our common experience, also indisputable. The globe does not supersede the map; the map does not distort the globe.

Maps are magic. In the bottom corner are whales; at the top, cormorants carrying pop-eyed fish. In between is a subjective account of the lie of the land. Rough shapes of countries that may or may not exist, broken red lines marking paths that are at best hazardous, at worst already gone. Maps are constantly being re-made as knowledge appears to increase. But is knowledge increasing or is detail accumulating?

A map can tell me how to find a place I have not seen but have often imagined. When I get there, following the map faithfully, the place is not the place of my imagination. Maps, growing ever more real, are much less true.

And now, swarming over the earth with our tiny insect bodies and putting up flags and building houses, it seems that all the journeys are done.

Not so. Fold up the maps and put away the globe. If someone else had charted it, let them. Start another drawing with whales at the bottom and cormorants at the top, and in between identify, if you can, the places you have not found yet on those other maps, the connections obvious only to you. Round and flat, only a very little has been discovered.

HALLUCINATIONS AND DISEASES OF THE MIND

OBJECTS I: A woman looks into her bag and recognizes none of her belongings. She hurries home. But where is home? She follows the address written in her purse. She has never seen this house before and who are those ugly children wrecking the garden? Inside a fat man is waiting for his supper. She shoots him. At the trial she says she had never seen him before. He was her husband.

OBJECTS 2: A man visits a famous country house. He strays from the guided tour and finds himself in a quiet sitting room he knows to be his own. He finds his pipe and book on the footstool where he left them. He reaches into the walnut cabinet for a glass of port. He remembers how happy he used to be in this place and doesn't understand at all why he later appears in court and has to pay a large fine for making free with a National Interest. What puzzles him most is where his dogs were. Usually the beagles are by the fire.

The young man turns astonished; he knows of no King, only a Queen, who is far from being dead. He opens his mouth to protest the joke and finds he is face to face with John Tradescant. Above them the sails whip in the wind.

TIME 2: They are cat-calling the girl as she comes out of school. She hates them, she wants to kill them. They tell her she smells, that she's too fat, too tall. She walks home along the river bank to a council flat in Upper Thames Street. The traffic deafens her. She climbs up the steps at Waterloo Bridge to look at St Paul's glinting in the evening. She can't see St Paul's. All she can see are rows of wooden stakes and uncertain craft bobbing along the water. She can't hear the traffic any more, the roar of dogs is deafening. Coming to herself, she kicks the bunch of hounds and drags her blanket shawl closer to her. For a moment she felt dizzy, lost her balance, but no, she's home as always. She can see her hut. She laughs, and the wind blows through the gaps in her teeth. Jordan will be waiting for her. She doesn't have to see him to know he's there.

LIES 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember.