Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

by Jeanette Winterson

‘If mine touched me I’d have him put away,’ said Doreen grimly. ‘Would you?’

there is something noble about a whelk.

What could I say next? How could I make her stay? ‘Would you like a baked potato?’ I offered wildly.

literally me

a large first-aid kit in case the demon combusted somebody.

‘just as Christ bade the swine leap into the sea, so I rinse the demon under this tap.’

‘Somebody take those bongos off him.’ But nobody did,

only the day before he had cleansed a whole family in Cheadle Hulme.

valid

‘That’s his Salvation Flag,’ I told Melanie. ‘Whenever someone gets saved he hoists it up.’

Pierre had jumped from his bicycle, offered her his onions, and named her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. ‘Naturally, I was flattered.’

naturally

‘Well, I thought it must be love.’ But this puzzled her because Pierre wasn’t very clever, and didn’t have much to say, except to exclaim how beautiful she was. Perhaps he was handsome? But no, looking in the magazines, she realised he wasn’t that either. But the feeling wouldn’t go away.

literally me

Perhaps I wasn’t a child of God at all, but the daughter of a Frenchman.

sacre bleu!!

My mother coyly explained that she was in love, and that she often felt strange, but that wasn’t the reason for her visit. ‘You may well be in love,’ said the doctor, ‘but you also have a stomach ulcer.’

and shortly fled the country to avoid him.

When I reached Melanie’s it was getting dark. I had to cut through the churchyard to get there, and sometimes I’d steal her a bunch of flowers from the new graves. She was always pleased, but then, I never told her where they came from.

we hugged and it felt like drowning.

There was something crawling in my belly. I had an octopus inside me.

‘Do you think this is Unnatural Passion?’ I asked her once. ‘Doesn’t feel like it. According to Pastor Finch, that’s awful.’ She must be right, I thought.

TIME IS A great deadener. People forget, get bored, grow old, go away.

that is the way with stories; we make them what we will.

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently.

The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It’s all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat’s cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more.

photos will burn, and memory, what is that? The imperfect ramblings of fools who will not see the need to forget.

that tiresome messiness associated with live things. Crap and complaints and the need for affection.

The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home, like all the men who now live with mermaids at the bottom of the sea. Or the people who found Atlantis.

the opinion of many that they were crazy.

And when I look at a history book and think of the imaginative effort it has taken to squeeze this oozing world between two boards and typeset, I am astonished.

God saw it. God knows. But I am not God.

Besides, I wasn’t quite certain what was happening myself, it was the second time in my life that I had experienced uncertainty. Uncertainty to me was like Aardvark to other people. A curious thing I had no notion of, but recognized through second-hand illustration.

Uncertainty was what the Heathen felt, and I was chosen by God.

She didn’t like having the Heathen in the house. ‘Leaves a bad atmosphere,’ she always said.

the fornication occasion.

We were quiet, and I traced the outline of her marvellous bones

What is it about intimacy that makes it so very disturbing?

‘I love you almost as much as I love the Lord,’ I laughed.

‘Melanie is a gift from the Lord, and it would be ungrateful not to appreciate her.’

‘Do you deny you love this woman with a love reserved for man and wife?’ ‘No, yes, I mean of course I love her.’

‘To the pure all things are pure,’ I yelled at him.

‘I love her.’ ‘Then you do not love the Lord.’ ‘Yes, I love both of them.’ ‘You cannot.’

I went along with her, not thinking of anything but Melanie and her loveliness.

This was too much.

At that moment I thought the demon would come and carry me off.

We made love and I hated it and hated it, but would not stop.

‘Renounce her, renounce her,’ the pastor kept saying, ‘it’s only the demon.’

If I had a demon my weak point was Melanie, but she was beautiful and good and had loved me. Can love really belong to the demon?

‘The Lord forgives and forgets,’ the pastor told me. Perhaps the Lord does, but my mother didn’t.

There are different sorts of treachery, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it.

It’s new-fangledness, that’s what it is.’

When my mother heard about this, she was furious, and crossed Nellie off her prayer list. My dad put her on his instead, so she didn’t miss out.

I felt nothing. But when she’d gone, I pulled up my knees under my chin, and begged the Lord to set me free.

To the pure all things are pure.