Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

by Jeanette Winterson

She had never heard of mixed feelings. There were friends and there were enemies.

We had no Wise Men because she didn’t believe there were any wise men,

First of all she thanked God that she had lived to see another day, and then she thanked God for sparing the world another day. Then she spoke of her enemies, which was the nearest thing to she had to a catechism.

She was wrong, as far as we were concerned, but right as far as she was concerned, and really, that’s what mattered.

(sometimes my mother invented theology).

A couple of weeks later I heard her telling Mrs White about it. She said they dealt in unnatural passions. I thought she meant they put chemicals in their sweets.

She would get a child, train it, build it, dedicate it to the Lord: a missionary child, a servant of God, a blessing.

‘This world is full of sin.’ We stood on the hill and my mother said, ‘You can change the world.’

I couldn’t attract her attention, so I took an orange and went back to bed. I had to find out for myself.

I’m going home to get your pyjamas.’ What was she doing? Why was she leaving me here? I started to cry. My mother looked horrified and rooting in her handbag she gave me an orange. I peeled it to comfort myself, and seeing me a little calmer,

It’s always the same with diversions; you get involved.

plasticine

My mother couldn’t come till the weekend, I knew that, because she was waiting for the plumber to check her fittings.

‘The only fruit,’ she always said.

But of all her loves, Elsie’s favourite was W. B. Yeats. Yeats, she said, knew the importance of numbers, and the great effect of the imagination on the world.

‘All things fall and are built again And those that build them again are gay.’

‘There’s this world,’ she banged the wall graphically, ‘and there’s this world,’ she thumped her chest. ‘If you want to make sense of either, you have to take notice of both.’

‘That? Oh just Eddy’s sister, I don’t know why I put it there,’ and she turned the page. Next time we looked, it had gone.

The sermon was on perfection, and it was at this moment that I began to develop my first theological disagreement.

petulant

delegate?’

My new husband turned to me, and here were a number of possibilities. Sometimes he was blind, sometimes a pig, sometimes my mother, sometimes the man from the post office, and once, just a suit of clothes with nothing inside.

There was a woman in our street who told us all she had married a pig. I asked her why she did it, and she said ‘You never know until it’s too late.’

There are women in the world. There are men in the world. And there are beasts. What do you do if you marry a beast? Kissing them didn’t always help. And beasts are crafty. They disguise themselves like you and I. Like the wolf in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. Why had no one told me? Did that mean no one else knew? Did that mean that all over the globe, in all innocence, women were marrying beasts?

She spread the cards. ‘There’s time enough for you to get a boy.’ ‘I don’t think I want one.’

It was like the day I discovered my adoption papers while searching for a pack of playing cards. I have never since played cards, and I have never since read Jane Eyre.

‘You should never have married him,’ scolded Nellie. ‘I didn’t know what he was when I married him did I?’

‘I like them two,’ said Nellie firmly, ‘and who’s to say they do anything?’ ‘Mrs Fergeson across saw them getting a new bed, a double bed.’ ‘Well what does that prove? Me and Bert had one bed but we did nothing in it.’ Doreen said that was all very well, but two women were different.

Eventually, I thought, I’ll fall in love like everybody else. Then some years later, quite by mistake, I did.

homeopathic.’

She wasn’t with the Lord then, but she had high standards.

She stroked my head for a long time, and then we hugged and it felt like drowning. Then I was frightened but couldn’t stop.

‘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.

Very often history is a means of denying the past. Denying the past is to refuse to recognise its integrity. To fit it, force it, function it, to suck out the spirit until it looks the way you think it should.

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.

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

She never spoke of what had happened and neither did I.

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

‘Do you deny you love this woman with a love reserved for man and wife?’ ‘No, yes, I mean of course I love her.’ ‘I will read you the words of St Paul,’ announced the pastor, and he did, and many more words besides about unnatural passions and the mark of the demon. ‘To the pure all things are pure,’ I yelled at him. ‘It’s you not us.’ He turned to Melanie. ‘Do you promise to give up this sin and beg the Lord to forgive you?’ ‘Yes.’ She was trembling uncontrollably. I hardly heard what she said.

‘She’s a woman of the world, even though she’d never admit it to me. She knows about feelings, especially women’s feelings.’

Quite suddenly I turned and kissed her. We made love and I hated it and hated it, but would not stop.

‘Meantime, don’t let her out of this room, and don’t feed her. She needs to lose her strength before it can be hers again.’

Can love really belong to the demon?

‘Well, the demon you get depends on the colour of your aura, yours is orange which is why you’ve got me. Your mother’s is brown, which is why she’s so odd, and Mrs White’s is hardly a demon at all. We’re here to keep you in one piece, if you ignore us, you’re quite likely to end up in two pieces, or lots of pieces, it’s all part of the paradox.’

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

In her head she was still queen, but not my queen any more, not the White Queen any more. Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.

I took out the largest and tried to peel it. The skin hung stubborn, and soon I lay panting, angry and defeated. What about grapes or bananas?

‘Come on lads, let’s git to bloody bed.’

‘Eh luv, don’t.’ Someone put their arm round her. ‘It’s nowt.’ ‘After all me work,’ sobbed May.

I had no quarrel with men. At that time there was no reason that I should.