Sexing the Cherry (11 page)

LIES 2: Time is a straight line.

LIES 3: The difference between the past and the future is that one has happened while the other has not.

LIES 4: We can only be in one place at a time.

LIES 5: Any proposition that contains the word 'finite' (the world, the universe, experience, ourselves...)

LIES 6: Reality as something which can be agreed upon.

LIES 7: Reality as truth.

Safe, sound and protected. That's how I wanted Jordan to be. When he left me I was proud and broken-hearted, but he came from the water and I knew the water would claim him again.

I carried on my old ways for a while, breeding the dogs and traipsing down to Hyde Park to show them off in a fight. The Puritans wanted an end to that too; they had in mind that a park should be a place to walk about, not a place to have an adventure and make a living. I have a mind to think that people can walk about anywhere, it's the other distractions they crave, even more so now that the death of the King has put an end to the future as a place we already know. Now the future is wild and waits for us as a beast in a lair.

I resolved for Jordan's sake, and Tradescant's, and the memory of the King, to spit on the Puritans whenever I passed them and to wear in my hair bright braids of clashing colour whenever I had occasion to be near one of their churches. Many of them have set upon me for my insolence, and most of those are dead. Out of charity, such as I am famed for, I left one or two to be crippled.

One night as I was leaving Hyde Park, sawdust covering me as though I were a cow hung for meat, a man stepped out of the shadows and called me 'madam'. I have always been at the mercy of good manners, and so I listened politely, my head on one side, and agreed to go with him to a meeting house. He said it concerned the liberty of us all.

The meeting house, in a filthy inn off Blackfriar's fields, was already full when I arrived with my dogs. I had a barrel of water off them to revive the most bruised and bleeding, and then I sat quiet while a man in the cloth of Jesus led us in prayer and then asked us to consider two passages of the Old Testament.

He said Thou shalt not kill' is a tenet of our faith, but we should too be aware of another part of the Law of Moses: 'an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth'.

I have long been interested in these contradictions and looked forward to a full rendering of their meaning. The preacher went on to say that for us, as Royalists, avenging the King's murder was a matter of urgency, and yet we could not break the Holy Law.

I blushed here, having broken it many times.

Then you must go in secret and quiet, and gouge out your enemies' eyes when you see them, and deprive them of their teeth if they have them. This fulfils the Law of God.'

I was very taken with this rendering, and could only wonder how it had not come to me voluntarily before now. It is a thing to have learning and so be able to interpret the Scriptures.

We agreed to meet at the full and new moons to encourage one another, as the disciples of old.

I had only a little way to walk home, and hardly expected to find such an early opportunity to exercise my calling. Hearing a horse behind me I moved to one side, but not soon enough to escape the touch of a whip. I turned in a fury and saw it to be a pock-marked, leather-faced, drab-witted ancient, got up in grey with a flat lace collar too big for modesty. I pulled him from his horse and popped his eyeballs with my thumbs, and then, forcing open his jaw as I would to get a chicken bone out of a dog, I loosened his teeth with my heel and soon had them mostly out and wrapped up in his own handkerchief.

By the time of the full moon I had done gallantly, I thought, and went to the meeting to hear stories of injury and revenge. I was suspicious to see that no one had brought any trophy of their right-doings, and so, as an encouragement, I tipped my sack of takings over the floor. I had 119 eyeballs, one missing on account of a man who had lost one already, and over 2,000 teeth.

A number of those in the room fainted immediately, and the preacher asked me to be less zealous in the next fortnight or, if I could not be, at least to leave my sack at home.

I was hurt by this; he had put no quota on our heads, and it seemed to me that my zeal had only made up for the sloth of others.

I did not stay for refreshments. I set off alone and fed the eyeballs to my dogs and used the teeth as drainage for my watercress bed. I had decided to continue my sabotage alone when I was approached again by the whore from Spitalfields whom I hadn't seen for seven years. She was older and less beautiful but her figure still showed the discipline of her trade. She seemed nervous and I wondered what it was she wanted from me.

It came to pass that she and her sisters, as she called them, had taken to murdering those Puritans who visited their brothel. Over this they had no difficulty - what troubled them was the disposal of the bodies. They would not trust a man to help, and already the bodies were so thick in the cellar that she feared an outbreak of the plague. Would I help? I was strong enough.

I had been lonely enough since Jordan had left, finding little in the way of companionship. Men and women seem sly-mouthed to me, and when they rub up against you purring friendship it is often a different thing they have in mind, something to their own advantage. I have been hurt before with my ready heart and I am wary now of blandishments and easy tongues.

I made up my mind to help her because of her straightforwardness and because bodies mean nothing to me, dead or alive. I would cry for my dogs and my boy but the rest may vanish as they please.

The brothel was a place of great skilfulness. When we came to the door a wooden flap was lifted and a pair of ferret eyes took us in. Inside there were noises of pain and misery such as we will hear in Hell. This counterfeit of the damned seemed strange to me, the more so when I was allowed to peep into a chamber and saw a man, naked but for a mask he wore, being branded on the buttocks with a hot iron. The woman who plunged the livid stick into his flesh was no taller than a child and looked a child from behind, though I was told she was well over sixty. When she turned around I saw her face was wrinkled and patched and her lips were white.

Pig fat,' said my accomplice. 'She is entirely covered in pig fat but the lips are larded to whiten them.'

I asked why this was.

'The man is a farmer of pigs. He loves pigs, but his wife no longer allows him to creep into their hindparts with his member. He comes to us and we punish him for his temptations. Look.'

I put my eyes back to the flap and saw that the man had been branded with the sign of a rutting pig. He was groaning with pain, but when the dwarf woman turned him over with her still-hot prong his member was swollen and hard out in front of him with lust. I heard a snorting, and a pig was driven into the room, wild with fright. The man leaped at it and, holding it fast between his legs, continued his pleasure with deep thrusts while the dwarf heated up the iron again.

'Is this the usual manner of satisfaction?' I asked.

There is no usual manner/ she said. There is only the unusual. These men are of God's Elect, do you not know?

Surely God's Elect are entitled to pleasure?' Then she laughed hideously and told me the man was a great supporter of Cromwell and would be dead by morning.

'Do you trade only in Puritans then?'

'We trade in those who need us. Have you not seen their sheets with holes?'

I said I had not, but had heard of them from the wife of my parson, Preacher Scroggs.

'We have no shortage of preachers here,' she said. 'Look.'

She led to another door and opened the flap. On a low bed a woman was being entered in the usual position, but on top of the man was another man, clinging as a beetle to a raft and busy by the back passage.

'How heavy that must be for the woman,' I cried, and at the same moment the two men sat up and began embracing each other and wiping each other's faces with their emissions.

It was then that I recognized them.

'It is Preacher Scroggs and Neighbour Firebrace.'

My friend clapped her hand over my mouth and drew me into a private room where cakes were set out for the two of us.

I explained my association with those unrepentant vermin and asked if I might have a favour in return for my pains with the bodies.

She said I might, and the next time Preacher Scroggs and Neighbour Firebrace visited the Spitalfields brothel this is what happened...

It was a fine night, the moon fair in the clouds, the weather warm. I had spent the few days previous constructing a revolving panel set in the wall. I fastened myself to the offside and waited for my clients to arrive.

Scroggs came first, in a purple nightdress affair. Then Fire-brace in a toga of some kind. They were to play Caesar and Brutus before the quarrel. Unable to contain myself, I waited long enough to see Firebrace's monstrous member rise beneath his skirts, then I swung into the wall and shot the revolving panel into the room. Both men screeched and were much taken aback, but they could not tell it was me, only some giant in the uniform of an executioner. My platform was an executioner's dais and I had a block upon it carved by myself. I had whetted the axe only an hour before. It still sparkled in the candlelight.

'I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him,' I said, quoting from a playwright whose name I can't remember.

The pair laughed nervously and Firebrace said he hadn't paid for any extra entertainment.

'Then you can pay for it now,' said I, stepping down and swinging at him with my axe. I missed on purpose, but it gave them a chance to see how sharp the thing was, as it sliced the bed in half.

'Please continue with your pleasure.' I waved my hand in a gracious gesture.

Scroggs reached up to ring the bell, but I chopped the cord and one of his thumbs as he did so. I have never seen so much bobbing and screaming over a minor injury.

Firebrace, not in the least loyal, but most like to Brutus in his treachery, tried to escape through the window, but I soon had his leg off and left him hopping in circles and begging for mercy.

I pulled off my mask and let them see me.

'Preacher Scroggs, on to the block if you will.'

He would not, and I was forced to hold him there myself while I tied him to the rings I had thoughtfully provided in case of such cowardly manners.

Think of the King,' I said, 'who lay on the block as a lamb to slaughter and never uttered a word.'

Then, without more ado, because I am not a torturer, I took his head off in one clean blow and kicked him off the block.

By this time Firebrace was whimpering in a corner and had soiled his toga with excrement.

'What a sight,' I sneered. 'Are you weeping for your leg? I will bring it and reunite it with your body.'

I fetched his leg from by the window and offered it to him, but he only lamented more loudly and begged me to spare him.

'I may not spare you,' I said. 'For I would rather spare all those who would come into contact with you, were you to be left alive.'

Then I picked him up by the neck, the way a terrier does a rat, and dropped him senseless on the block. That he was unconscious was better for him, my axe having lost its edge so that I was obliged to use two strokes before I could fully sever the head.

My work finished I opened the door, and an eager crowd of good gentlemen poured in, anxious to disport themselves amongst these ruins.

I looked back and saw that one already had Scroggs on the remains of the bed. He was mounting him from behind, all the while furiously kissing the severed head.

I went to the pump where I had once washed myself and all my clothes in favour of love, and I took off what I was wearing and doused myself properly. I wanted no trace of that ungodly pair. When I was clean I walked home naked and burned my clothes in a quiet fire. No one saw me. Like the angels, I can be invisible when there is work to be done.

THE NATURE OF TIME

My experience of time is mostly like my experience with maps. Flat, moving in a more or less straight line from one point to another. Being in time, in a continuous present, is to look at a map and not see the hills, shapes and undulations, but only the flat form. There is no sense of dimension, only a feeling for the surface. Thinking about time is more dizzy and precipitous.