Sexing the Cherry Read Free Page A

on the river. From this he learned how the wind affects a sail, but he never learned how love affects the heart. His patience was exceeded only by his hope. He spent days and nights with his bits of wood salvaged from chicken crates, and any piece of paper he could steal became a sail. I used to watch him standing in the mud or lying face down, his nose almost in the current, his hands steadying the boat and then letting it go straight into the wind. Letting go hours of himself. When the time came he did the same with his heart. He didn't believe in shipwreck.
    And he came home to me with his boats broken and his face streaked with tears, and we sat with our lamp and mended what we could, and the next day was the first day all over again. But when he lost his heart there was no one to sit with him. He was alone.

    In the city of words that I have told you about the smell of wild strawberries was the smell characteristic of the house that I have not yet told you about. The runners of these plants spread from the beds bounded by stone tiles and fastened themselves over terracotta pots and flaking ironwork and hid the big flags that paved the courtyard. Anyone coming to the outer gate would find themselves confronted by waves of green dotted underneath with tiny red berries, some clutched in spiders' webs like forgotten rubies. There was a way through to an oaked door, and beyond the door the square hall of the house with other doors leading off it. There were four suits of armour in the hall, and a mace.
    The family who lived hi the house were dedicated to a strange custom. Not one of them would allow their feet to touch the floor. Open the doors off the hall and you will see, not floors, but bottomless pits. The furniture of the house is suspended on racks from the ceiling; the dining table supported by great chains, each link six inches thick. To dine here is a great curiosity, for the visitor must sit in a gilded chair and allow himself to be winched up to join his place setting. He comes last, the householders already seated and making merry, swinging their feet over the abyss where crocodiles live. Everyone who dines has a multiplicity of glasses and cutlery lest some should be dropped accidentally. Whatever food is left over at the end of the meal is scraped into the pit, from whence a fearful crunching can be heard.
    When everyone has eaten their fill, the gentlemen remain at the table and the ladies walk in order of precedence across a tightrope to another room, where they may have biscuits and wine with water.
    It is well known that the ceiling of one room is the floor of another, but the household ignores this ever-downward necessity and continues ever upward, celebrating ceilings but denying floors, and so their house never ends and they must travel by winch or rope from room to room, calling to one another as they go.
    The house is empty now, but it was there, dangling over dinner, illuminated by conversation and rich in the juices of a wild duck, that I noticed a woman whose face was a sea voyage I had not the courage to attempt.
    I did not speak to her, though I spoke to all the rest, and at midnight she put on flat pumps and balanced the yards of rope without faltering. She was a dancer.
    I spent the night in my suspended bed and slept badly. At dawn I was leaning out of the window, a rope round my waist.
    The moon was still visible: it seemed to me that I was closer to the moon than to the ground. A cold wind numbed my ears.
    Then I saw her. She was climbing down from her window on a thin rope which she cut and re-knotted a number of times during the descent. I strained my eyes to follow her, but she was gone.

    It must have been in about 1640, when Jordan was something close to ten, that he met John Tradescant on the banks of the boiling Thames. It was a summer so hot that a housewife never had to lay a fire for her roasted pig; all she need do was tether it in the yard for an hour. For myself, the wafts of heat