Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

by Jeanette Winterson

Once, in winter, she had been forced to go there to buy a corset and in the middle of communion, that very Sunday, a piece of whalebone slipped out and stabbed her right in the stomach. There was nothing she could do for an hour. When we got home she tore up the corset and used the whalebone as supports for our geraniums, except for one piece that she gave to me. I still have it, and whenever I’m tempted to cut corners I think about that whalebone, and I know better.

‘There’s time enough for you to get a boy.’ ‘I don’t think I want one.’ ‘There’s what we want,’ she said, putting down a jack, ‘and there’s what we get, remember that.’

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.

We were quiet, and I traced the outline of her marvellous bones and the triangle of muscle in her stomach. What is it about intimacy that makes it so very disturbing?

‘They’re looking in the wrong place,’ I thought. ‘If they want to get at my demon they’ll have to get at me.’

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.

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.