Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

by Jeanette Winterson

I was beginning to wonder if I’d ever been anywhere. My mother was treating me like she always had; had she noticed my absence? Did she even remember why I’d left?

I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had.

It’s a visitor’s privilege to be foolish.

I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don’t think of God as my betrayer.

I miss God who was my friend. I don’t even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it. I have an idea that one day it might be possible, I thought once it had become possible, and that glimpse has set me wandering, trying to find the balance between earth and sky.

As it is, I can’t settle, I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me.

There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other’s names.

I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man, because they want to be the destroyer and never be destroyed. That is why they are unfit for romantic love. There are exceptions and I hope they are happy.

The unknownness of my needs frightens me. I do not know how huge they are, or how high they are, I only know that they are not being met.

One thing I am certain of, I do not want to be betrayed, but that’s quite hard to say, casually, at the beginning of a relationship. It’s not a word people use very often, which confuses me, because there are different kinds of infidelity, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it. By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else’s.

I kept looking at her,, and wondering how we ever had a relationship; yet when she first left me, I thought I had blood poisoning. I couldn’t forget her. Now she seemed to have forgotten everything. It made me want to shake her, to pull off all my clothes in the middle of the street and yell, ‘Remember this body?’ Time is a great deadener; people forget, get bored, grow old, go away. She said that not much had happened between us anyway, historically speaking. But history is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe knot it up a bit more.

I told her I didn’t need her letters to remember what had happened.

She asked me what I was doing, and I longed to say I was sacrificing infants on top of Pendle Hill or dabbling in the white slave trade. Anything to make her angry.

When the first coloured pastor came to her house, she had tried to explain to him the significance of parsley sauce. Later she found he had lived most of his life in Hull.

‘After all,’ said my mother philosophically, ‘oranges are not the only fruit.’

she said the thing 🫵😁

I thought about the dog and was suddenly very sad; sad for her death, for my death, for all the inevitable dying that comes with change. There’s no choice that doesn’t mean a loss. But the dog was buried in the clean earth, and the things I had buried were exhuming themselves; clammy fears and dangerous thoughts and the shadows I had put away for a more convenient time. I could not put them away forever, there is always a day of reckoning. But not all dark places need light, I have to remember that.

the impossibility of my life that made me hope to go to bed and wake up with the past intact. I seemed to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.

he was dizzy and wanted to give in to the pull and wake up round familiar things.

And of course, the choir liked to make tapes, to sing the demon away.

I was glad she had a hobby, but not pleased that my particular sins were listed in the self-help kit. Still, at least she hadn’t stuck in a passport photograph, warning the North-West to lock up their daughters.

‘Why’s Dad bought you a catapult?’ ‘I asked him to, it’s to get rid of them cats next door.’ And she told me how she’d tried everything from scraps to menaces. But still they peed on her prize roses. She was going to ping at them now with dried peas.

Families, real ones, are chairs and tables and the right number of cups, but I had no means of joining one, and no means of dismissing my own;