reading

And thanks to: my agent and my friend, Caroline Michel. The team at Chatto, especially Juliet Brooke and Becky Hardie. Rachel Cugnoni and Áine Mulkeen at Vintage. My colleagues at the University of Manchester, especially John McAuliffe. Laura Evans who managed the copyedit and my mad proofs, and Val McDermid who solved a problem. And to Susie Orbach – who married me.

ABOUT THE BOOK

A baby girl is abandoned, banished from London to the storm-ravaged American city of New Bohemia. Her father has been driven mad by jealousy, her mother to exile by grief.

Seventeen years later, Perdita doesn’t know a lot about who she is or where she’s come from – but she’s about to find out.

Jeanette Winterson’s cover version of The Winter’s Tale vibrates with echoes of Shakespeare’s original and tells a story of hearts broken and hearts healed, a story of revenge and forgiveness, a story that shows that whatever is lost shall be found.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeanette Winterson OBE has written 10 novels, children’s books, non-fiction and screenplays, and writes regularly for the Guardian. She was adopted by Pentecostal parents and raised in Manchester to be a missionary, which she wrote about in her first novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and twenty-seven years later in her bestselling memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? The Winter’s Tale tells the story of Perdita, the abandoned child. ‘All of us have talismanic texts that we have carried around and that carry us around. I have worked with The Winter’s Tale in many disguises for many years,’ Jeanette says of the play. The result is The Gap of Time, her cover version.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Fiction

Non-fiction

Children’s Books

Watery Star

I was on my way home, the night hot and heavy, the way it gets here this time of year so that your skin is shiny and your shirt is never dry. I’d been playing piano in the bar I play in, and nobody wanted to leave, so I was later than I like to be. My son said he’d come by in the car but he never came.

I was on my way home, maybe two in the morning, a cold bottle of beer heating up in my hand. Not supposed to drink on the streets, I know, but what the hell, after a man’s been working nine hours straight, serving shots when the bar’s quiet, playing piano when it gets busy. Folks drink more when there’s live music, and that’s a fact.

I was on my way home when the weather broke in two and the rain came down like ice – it was ice – hailstones the size of golf balls and hard as a ball of elastic. The street had all the heat of the day, of the week, of the month, of the season. When the hail hit the ground, it was like throwing ice cubes into a fat fryer. It was like the weather was coming up from the street instead of down from the sky. I was running through a riddle of low-fire shrapnel, dodging doorway to doorway, couldn’t see my feet through the hiss and steam. On the steps of the church I got above the bubbling froth for a minute or two. I was soaked. The money in my pocket was stuck together and my hair was stuck to my head. I wiped the rain out of my eyes. Tears of rain. My wife’s been dead a year now. No use in sheltering. Might as well get home.

So I took the short cut. I don’t like to take the short cut because of the BabyHatch.

The hospital installed it a year ago. I watched the builders day by day while I was visiting my wife. I saw how they poured the concrete shell, fixed the steel box inside the shell, fitted the seal-shut window, wired the heat and light and the alarm. One of the builders didn’t want to do it, thought it was wrong; immoral, I guess. A sign of the times. But the times has so many signs that if we read them all we’d die of heartbreak.

The hatch is safe and warm. Once the baby is inside and the hatch is closed, a bell rings in the hospital and it doesn’t take long for a nurse to come down, just long enough for the mother to walk away – there’s a street corner right there. She’s gone.

I saw it happen once. I ran after her. I called out, ‘Lady!’ She turned round. She looked at me. There was a second, the kind that holds a whole world – and then the second hand moved on and she was gone.

I went back. The hatch was empty. A few days later my wife died. So I don’t walk home that way.

There’s a history to the BabyHatches. Isn’t there always a history to the story? You think you’re living in the present but the past is right behind you like a shadow.

I did some research. In Europe, in the Middle Ages, whenever that was, they had BabyHatches back then. They called them Foundling Wheels; a round window in a convent or a monastery, and you could pass a baby inside and hope that God would take care of it.

Or you could leave it wrapped up in the woods for the dogs and wolves to raise. Leave it without a name but with something to begin the story.

A car skids past me too fast. The water from the gutter douses me like I’m not wet enough already. Asshole. The car pulls up – it’s my son, Clo. I get in. He passes me a towel and I wipe my face, grateful and suddenly tired out.

We drive a few blocks with the radio on. The freak-weather report. A supermoon. Giant waves at sea, the river over its banks. Don’t travel. Stay indoors. It’s not Hurricane Katrina but it’s not a night out either. The cars parked either side of the road are halfway up their wheels in water.

Up ahead there’s a black BMW 6 Series smashed full frontal into the wall. The doors are open both sides. Some small junky car is rammed into the back. Two hoods are beating a guy into the ground. My son leans on the horn, drives straight at them, window down, shouting, ‘WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK!’ His car slews in as one of the men fires a shot at us to take out the front tyre. My son spins the wheel, thuds the car into the kerb. The hoods jump in the BMW, scraping it the length of the wall, shunting the junky car across the street. The beaten-up guy is on the ground. He’s wearing a good suit. He’s maybe sixty. He’s bleeding. The blood is washing down his face under the rain. He says something. I kneel next to him. His eyes are open. He’s dead.

My son looks at me – I’m his father – what do we do? Then we hear the sirens start up from somewhere far off like another planet.

We bounce the busted tyre back round the corner and drive slowly down the road that passes the hospital. An ambulance is leaving the emergency garage.

My son stops the car and goes to get the gear to change the wheel. For a moment I sit sodden and still on the soaked car seat. The lights of the hospital slice through the windows; I hate this hospital. I sat in the car like this after my wife died. Staring out of the windscreen seeing nothing. The whole day passed and then it was night and nothing had changed because everything had changed.

I get out of the car. My son jacks the back and together we lift off the wheel. He’s already rolled the spare from the trunk. I put my fingers into the ripped rubber of the dead tyre and pull out the bullet. Whatever we need we don’t need this. I take it to drop it down a deep drain at the edge of the kerb.

Somehow, I get a sense this is all connected – the BMW, the junky car, the dead man, the baby.

I walk towards the hatch and my body’s in slow motion. The child’s asleep, sucking its thumb. No one has come yet. Why has no one come yet?

I realise without realising that I’ve got the tyre lever in my hand. I move without moving to prise open the hatch. It is easy. I lift out the baby and she’s as light as a star.

Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;

The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide;

When other helpers fail and comforts flee,

Help of the helpless, oh, abide with me.

The congregation is strong this morning. Around two thousand of us filling the church. The floods didn’t put anybody off coming. The pastor says, ‘“Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.”’

The Church of God’s Delivery started in a shack, grew to a house and became a small town. Mostly black. Some whites. Whites find it harder to believe in something to believe in. They get stuck on the specifics, like the seven days of Creation and the Resurrection. I don’t worry about any of that. If there is no God I won’t be any worse off when I’m dead. Just dead. If there is a God, well, OK, I get what you’re saying: so where is this God?

I don’t know where God is but I reckon God knows where I am. He got the world’s first global app. Find Shep.

I live quietly with my son, Clo. He’s twenty. He was born here. His mother came from Canada, her parents came from India. I came here on a slave ship, I guess – OK, not me, but my DNA, still with Africa written in it. Where we are now, New Bohemia, used to be a French colony. Sugar plantations, big colonial homes, beauty and horror all together. The ironwork balustrades the tourists love. The little eighteenth-century buildings painted pink or yellow or blue. The wooden store fronts with their big glass windows curved onto the street. The alleys with dark doorways leading down to the ladies of pleasure.

Then there’s the river. Wide as the future used to be. Then there’s the music – always a woman singing somewhere, an old man playing the banjo. Maybe just a pair of maracas the girl shakes by the cash register. Maybe a violin that reminds you of your mother. Maybe a tune that makes you want to forget. What is memory anyway but a painful dispute with the past?

I read that the body remakes itself every seven years. Every cell. Even the bones rebuild themselves like coral. Why then do we remember what should be long gone? What’s the point of every scar and humiliation? What is the point of remembering the good times when they are gone? I love you. I miss you. You are dead.

‘Shep! Shep?’ It’s the pastor. Yes, thank you, I am all right. Yes, what a night it was last night. God’s judgement on the million crimes of mankind. Does the pastor believe that? No, he doesn’t. He believes in global warming. God doesn’t need to punish us. We can do that for ourselves. That’s why we need forgiveness. Human beings don’t know about forgiveness. Forgiveness is a word like tiger – there’s footage of it and verifiably it exists but few of us have seen it close and wild or known it for what it is.

One night, late, deep night, the dead of night – they call it that for a reason – I smothered my wife in her hospital bed. She was frail. I am strong. She was on oxygen. I lifted the face cone and put my hands over her mouth and nose, and asked Jesus to come and take her. He did.

The monitor was beeping and I knew they’d be in the room soon. I didn’t care what happened to me. But no one came. I had to go and fetch someone – the place had too few nurses and too many patients. They couldn’t be sure who to blame – though I am pretty certain they thought it was me. We covered my wife with a sheet, and when eventually the doctor showed up he wrote ‘Respiratory Failure’.

I don’t regret it but I can’t forgive it. I did the right thing but it was wrong.

‘You did the wrong thing for the right reason,’ the pastor said. But that’s where we don’t agree. It may sound like we’re just tossing the words around here, but there is a big difference. He means it is wrong to take a life but that I did it to end her suffering. I believe it was right to take her life. We were married. We were one flesh. But I did it for the wrong reason and I knew that soon enough. I didn’t do it to end my wife’s pain; I did it to end my own.

After church I went home. My son was watching TV. The baby was awake, very quiet, wide eyes on the ceiling where the light made shadow bars through the slatted blinds. I picked her up and let myself out again and headed for the hospital. The baby was warm and easy to carry. Lighter than my son had been when he was born. My wife and I had just moved to New Bohemia. We believed in everything – the world, the future, God, peace and love, and, most of all, each other.

As I walked down the street carrying the baby I fell into a gap of time, where one time and another become the same time. My body straightened, my step lengthened. I was a young man married to a beautiful girl and suddenly we were parents. ‘Hold the baby’s head,’ she said as I carried him, my hand enfolding his life.

That week after he was born, we couldn’t get out of bed. We slept and ate with our baby lying between us on his back. We spent the whole week just staring at him. We had made him. With no skills and no training, no college diploma and no science dollars, we had made a human being. What is this crazy, reckless world where we can make human beings?

Don’t go.

What’s that you say, mister?

I’m sorry, I was daydreaming.

Fine looking baby.

Thank you.

The woman walks on. I find I am standing in the middle of the busy street holding a sleeping baby and talking to myself. But I’m not talking to myself. I am talking to you. Still. Always. Don’t go.

See what I mean about memory? My wife no longer exists. There is no such person. Her passport has been cancelled. Her bank account is closed. Someone else is wearing her clothes. But my mind is full of her. If she had never lived and my mind was full of her they’d lock me up for being delusional. As it is, I am grieving.

Engine roar of a motorcycle. Cars with their windows down and the radio on. Kids on skateboards. A dog barking. The delivery truck unloading. Two women arguing on the sidewalk. Everybody on their cellphone. A guy on a box shouting, EVERYTHING MUST GO.

That’s fine by me. Take it all away. The cars, the people, the goods for sale. Strip it back to the dirt under my feet and the sky over my head. Turn off the sound. Blank the picture. Nothing in between us now. Will I see you walking towards me at the end of the day? The way you did, the way we both did, dead tired, coming home from work? Look up and we see each other, first far away, then near? The energy of you in human form again. The atomic shape of your love.

Nothing? Then the sky is nothing and the earth is nothing and your body is nothing and our lovemaking is nothing …

She shook her head. ‘Death is the least important thing in my life. What difference will it make? I won’t be here.’

‘That’s the cruelty,’ she said. ‘If I could live my death for you I would.’

I reached the street where the hospital stands. There’s the BabyHatch. Just then the baby I’m carrying wakes up and I feel her move. We look at each other, her unsteady blue eyes finding my dark gaze. She lifts up one tiny hand, small as a flower, and touches the rough stubble of my face.

The cars come and the cars go between me and my crossing the street. The anonymous always-in-motion world. The baby and I stand still, and it’s as if she knows that a choice has to be made.

I walked round the block thinking I’d think about it, but my legs were heading home, and sometimes you have to accept that your heart knows what to do.

When I got back my son was watching the TV news. Last night’s storm update and personal stories. The usual government officials saying the usual things. Then there was another call for witnesses to come forward. The dead man. The man was Anthony Gonzales, Mexican. Passport found on the body. Robbery. Homicide. Nothing unusual about that in this city except for the weather.

How did I raise a son who trusts the cops? My son trusts everyone. I worry about him. I shake my head. He points at the baby.

My son looks at me in disbelief and dismay. I can’t keep a newborn child. It’s illegal. But I don’t care about that. Help of the helpless. Can’t I be that person?

I have fed her and changed her. I bought what I needed from the store on the way home. If my wife were alive, she’d do what I’m doing. We would do this together.

It’s as though I’ve been given a life for the one I took. That feels like forgiveness to me.

There was an attaché case with the child – like preparing her for a career in business. The case is locked. I tell my son that if we can locate her parents, we’ll do that. So we open the case.

Clo’s face looks like a bad actor’s in a budget sitcom. His eyes bulge. His jaw drops.

Crisp, packed, stacked notes like a prop from a gangster movie. Fifty bundles. Ten thousand dollars in every bundle.

Underneath the notes there is a soft velvet bag. Diamonds. A necklace. Not little snips of diamonds – big-cut and generous like the heart of a woman. Time so deep and clear in the facets that it’s like looking into a crystal ball.

Underneath the diamonds there’s a piece of sheet music. Handwritten. The song says ‘PERDITA’.

We moved to a new neighbourhood where we weren’t known. I sold my apartment and I used that money and the cash in the case to buy a piano bar called the Fleece. It was a Mafia place and they needed to get out so they were fine about the cash. No questions. I put the diamonds in a bank box in her name until she turns eighteen.

I played the song and I taught it to her. She was singing before she could talk.

I am learning to be a father and a mother to her. She asks about her mother and I say we don’t know. I have always told her the truth – or enough of it. And she is white and we are black so she knows she was found.

Spider in the Cup

Leo and his son, Milo, were looking out of the full-length window in Leo’s London office towards City Airport and the Thames Estuary. Milo liked to watch the planes taking off. He was nine and he knew all the departure and arrival times off by heart. There was a big chart on the office wall of the routes served by the airport – lines of arterial red like a body-map of the world.

‘Nobody wants him,’ said Milo. ‘He’s run away and he’s on his own. That’s why he lives in the airport.’

Leo explained that a wanted man isn’t the same as a man who is wanted. ‘It means the police are after him.’

Milo thought about this. He was writing a story for school. The teacher had told them to try and write an opening line that contained all the rest of the story – like in a fairy tale that starts ‘A King had Three Sons’ or ‘There was an Ogre who loved a Princess’.

‘He’s not a murderer, this man who lives in the airport,’ said Milo. ‘But he hasn’t got a home.’

‘Maybe he should work harder,’ said Leo, ‘then instead of living at the airport he could afford to catch a plane. Look – British Airways to New York City via Shannon.’

‘When the dinosaurs became extinct,’ said Leo, ‘they didn’t really die, they went into hiding until they could come back as aeroplanes.’

‘When we die, do we go into hiding until we can come back as something else?’ asked Milo.

‘Your mother thinks so because she is a Buddhist. You should talk to her about that.’

‘I never think about it,’ said Leo. ‘Take my advice: don’t think about anything you don’t have to think about.’

Leo had been fired from his bank the year Milo turned four: 2008 was the year of the global crisis and Leo had helped it along, accumulating what his CEO termed ‘reckless losses’. Leo thought this was unfair. Everything he did with money was reckless, but no one wanted to fire him for his reckless profits.

As he left the bank for the last time, in his chalk-stripe Hugo Boss suit and Lobb shoes, some anti-capitalist kids demonstrating outside had thrown eggs at him. Leo stood for a moment, looking down at the omelette of his suit. Then he tore off his jacket and grabbed two of the kids, throwing them down onto the pavement. He punched a third against the wall and broke his nose.

Another of the kids was videoing the whole thing and Leo was arrested the next day. His CEO identified him from the footage.

Leo was convicted of common assault, but his lawyer got him off a jail sentence on the grounds of diminished responsibility (being fired) and provocation (eggs). In any case, his victims were unemployed troublemakers. No one seemed to notice that Leo was unemployed too.

It was the unfairness of it all that Leo resented as he paid his fine and court costs. Leo hadn’t invented capitalism – his job was to make money inside a system that was about making money. That meant losing money too; the crash was really a game called musical chairs – while the music was playing no one cared that there weren’t enough chairs. Who wants to sit down when you can dance? In the past he had lost amounts the size of a small country’s GDP but he always had time to get it back and more. When the music stopped he had – temporarily – leveraged all his chairs.

After three months drinking himself into a rehab clinic, and three weeks drying himself out, he had been advised to seek counselling for loss of self-esteem.

For six months twice a week he took a cab from his home in Little Venice to a well-known Eastern European analyst in Hampstead. He hated the soft-clicking door into the therapy room. He hated the kelim sofas and the clock and the box of tissues. He hated the fact – two facts actually, one for each foot – that the analyst wore black socks and brown sandals and kept talking about what he pronounced as AMBI-VAYLENCE.

Leo thought about breasts while the analyst was talking about Melanie Klein. The following week Leo brought a copy of Nuts magazine to his session. He gave Dr Wartz a Sharpie and asked him to circle the good breasts and put an X across the bad breasts.

‘Objectification of the simultaneously loathed and loved object,’ said Dr Wartz.

Leo remembered that Dr Wartz had written an important book called Objectifying the Object. He began to drift over a brief History of the Object in History because he was learning that a word has to be used twice over to sound smart.

First there were no objects – just energy. Then after Big Bang or Creation, depending on your point of view, the world itself became an object (a meta-object?) filled with other objects. These needed to be named – the Naming of Objects. Later on, quite a lot of objects were invented: the Invention of Objects. Then, he supposed, with wars and general human idiocy, there was the Destruction of Objects.

Then he thought of inventories, archives, stock sheets, catalogues, lists, taxonomy: the Index of Objects. There was a book his wife liked, by some American writer, called The Safety of Objects. Leo himself knew all about the Status of Objects, by which he meant Objects of Status, like his helicopter (sold). Since quantum theory there was the Oddness of Objects, and, if you were a deep thinker, the Meaning of Objects. And what about the Meaninglessness of Objects?

Yes. When you had so much money that you could buy anything, everything, then you could know what Buddha and Christ knew; that worldly goods were worthless. It entertained him that this knowledge could be got by going in exactly the opposite direction to the great spiritual traditions of the world.

But you can, thought Leo, back in his office. That is what a surveillance system is for.

Soon Leo realised that he did not need to pay £500 a week for two sessions of fifty minutes to understand that he had not been loved as a child. Or that he had filled the emptiness with ‘Grosz Gain’, as the doctor put it.

‘We all self-medicate,’ said Leo to Dr Wartz. ‘I do it with money. The drinking was a reaction. I’m over it now.’

Leo left therapy, gave up drinking and started his own hedge fund specialising in leveraged brokered buy-outs of businesses that could be asset-stripped and loaded with debt, making a good profit for his investors, and, of course, himself. He called it Sicilia because he liked that it sounded just a little bit Mafia. He was Italian on his mother’s side.

Sicilia soon had £600 million of managed funds and Leo was going for the billion. There was nothing better than cash shortages on the ground for making money out of thin air.

Back in his office Leo saw that he had confused Milo. Milo was darker and more reflective than his father – more like his mother. Father and son came together over simpler things than life and death. Leo took Milo to football and swimming. He didn’t do homework with him or read to him – MiMi did those things.

Leo nodded. ‘Take your school bag into the kitchen – get some milk and one chocolate biscuit, OK?’

Milo liked his father’s offices. There were always people to make a fuss of him and things to eat, and best of all there were the planes.

Leo hugged Milo. They loved each other. That was real. Milo was all right again now. ‘There was a man lived in an airport,’ he said, going out.

Leo turned back to his desk – made by Linley out of long planks of Russian birchwood sanded fine as glass. The office was white space: virgin walls, polar leather sofa, Eskimo carpet. There was a big blown-up black and white photo of his wife on the wall. He kept the digital version as his iPhone screen. The only colour came from a red neon wall sign designed by Tracey Emin.

The neon said ‘RISK=VALUE’. It was part of a quote Leo had seen at an OCCUPY demonstration: What You Risk Reveals What You Value. The quote had bothered him until he changed it. When he started his new company he had commissioned the neon.

Leo was laughing at his own joke when Cameron closed the door. Cameron was ex-army. He knew how to take an order.

Cameron took this in but he didn’t understand it. ‘You want a visual surveillance system in your wife’s bedroom?’

Leo looked impatient. ‘You are in charge of Security and Transport at Sicilia. This is delicate. I don’t want an outsider doing the job. I want the camera to link through here to my personal screen.’

Cameron was uncomfortable. ‘I have seen these things on adult viewing sites – but …’

‘I’m not jacking off on my wife’s pixellated tits if that’s what you’re worrying about. And we’re not pimping her for twenty quid every seven minutes to a construction worker on an iPhone with his hand down his trousers. This is marital. This is divorce.’

‘Why do you talk like that? Is it because you are Scottish? She’s my wife, not my lady wife. I don’t have a man wife.’

And then Leo thought of Xeno. And he thought it in a bubble of insight that he burst.

‘The truth is, Cameron, that I think MiMi is having an affair. And I want to catch her at it. You know why they call it a webcam?’

‘It’s a spider’s web, Cameron, for catching insects. I can’t sleep at night because my bed is crawling with insects.’

‘You think the sow can’t squeal with pleasure because her belly’s swinging with piglets?’

‘You mean, have I seen her with anyone? No. Did the private dick who’s been trailing her for two months find out anything I don’t know already – where she goes, the man she sees, her emails, texts? No.’

Leo slammed the halves of the pencil onto the desk and came round to Cameron. Cameron squared his feet, relaxed his knees, locked his stomach muscles and stood quite still as Leo walked up to him. Cameron knew how to handle himself. And he knew about Leo’s temper. Leo’s face was so close that Cameron could see his pores. He was careful not to make eye contact.

‘Amsterdam,’ he said as the plane took off. Then, without turning round, he said, ‘She can see the man she’s seeing every day of the week and no one thinks about it twice. Except me. I think about it sixty times a minute.’

Leo turned back into the room. ‘It’s not just women who have intuition, Cameron. I’ve known Xeno all my life.’

They had met at boarding school at thirteen. Both boys had been sent away by fathers who had gained custody over unfit mothers. Leo’s mother had left his father for another woman. Xeno’s mother was alcoholic and mentally unstable. The boarding school was neither fashionable nor academic but it allowed their fathers to believe that they were bringing up their sons when in fact their sons were barely at home.

Weekends at the school were quiet because most of the boys went home. Leo and Xeno invented worlds where they could live.

‘I’m in a forest,’ said Xeno. ‘My own cabin. Rabbits come and I shoot them. Bang bang bang.’

They listened to David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ and Xeno got into country and western. Sometimes he thought he was Emmylou Harris.

They didn’t want to be like the other boys and that was just as well because they weren’t like the other boys.

By fifteen they were inseparable. They joined the school shooting club and competed at the target range. Xeno was more accurate because he was calmer. Leo was faster and sometimes won because he fired more shots. They invented a game: GUN BULLET TARGET. Win two rounds and you were the gun. Lose one and you were the bullet. Lose two, and you were the target. Then Xeno added MOVING TARGET and said it made him feel free. Leo didn’t understand that. He just wanted to be the gun.

One night after target practice they had sex. It was a cliché. Shower. Hard-on. Three-minute handjob. No kissing. But the next day Leo kissed Xeno in the bike shed. He kissed him and he touched his face. He tried to say something but he didn’t know what it was. Xeno didn’t say anything. That was like him. Xeno was a bit of a girl anyway, Leo thought. He had grey eyes like a cat and soft, dark hair that fell over his eyes.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE BOOK

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Fiction

Non-fiction

Children’s Books

Watery Star

Spider in the Cup