Written on the Body Read Free

‘monstrous’. Monstrous to tell him. Monstrous. I thought of Caliban chained to his pitted rock. ‘The red plague rid you for learning me your language.’
    Later, when I was freed from her world of double meanings and masonic signs I did turn thief. I had neverstolen from her, she had spread her wares on a blanket and asked me to choose. (There was a price but in brackets.) When we were over, I wanted my letters back. My copyright she said but her property. She had said the same about my body. Perhaps it was wrong to climb into her lumber-room and take back the last of myself. They were easy to find, stuffed into a large padded bag, bearing the message on an Oxfam label that they were to be returned to me in the event of her death. A nice touch; he would no doubt have read them but then she would not have been there to take the consequences. And would I have read them? Probably. A nice touch.
    I took them into the garden and burned them one by one and I thought how easy it is to destroy the past and how difficult to forget it.
    Did I say this has happened to me again and again? You will think I have been constantly in and out of married women’s lumber-rooms. I have a head for heights it’s true, but no stomach for the depths. Strange then to have plumbed so many.
    We lay on our bed in the rented room and I fed you plums the colour of bruises. Nature is fecund but fickle. One year she leaves you to starve, the next year she kills you with love. That year the branches were torn beneath the weight, this year they sing in the wind. There are no ripe plums in August. Have I got it wrong, this hesitant chronology? Perhaps I should call it Emma Bovary’s eyes or Jane Eyre’s dress. I don’t know. I’m in another rented room now trying to find the place to go back to where things went wrong. Where I went wrong. You were driving but I was lost in my own navigation.
    Nevertheless I will push on. There were plums and I broke them over you.
    You said, ‘Why do I frighten you?’
    Frighten me? Yes you do frighten me. You act as though we will be together for ever. You act as though there is infinite pleasure and time without end. How can I know that? My experience has been that time always ends. In theory you are right, the quantum physicists are right, the romantics and the religious are right. Time without end. In practice we both wear a watch. If I rush at this relationship it’s because I fear for it. I fear you have a door I cannot see and that any minute now the door will open and you’ll be gone. Then what? Then what as I bang the walls like the Inquisition searching for a saint? Where will I find the secret passage? For me it’ll just be the same four walls.
    You said, ‘I’m going to leave.’
    I thought, Yes, of course you are, you’re going back to the shell. I’m an idiot. I’ve done it again and I said I’d never do it again.
    You said, ‘I told him before we came away. I’ve told him I won’t change my mind even if you change yours.’
    This is the wrong script. This is the moment where I’m supposed to be self-righteous and angry. This is the moment where you’re supposed to flood with tears and tell me how hard it is to say these things and what can you do and what can you do and will I hate you and yes you know I’ll hate you and there are no question marks in this speech because it’s a fait accompli.
    But you are gazing at me the way God gazed at Adam and I am embarrassed by your look of love and possession and pride. I want to go now and cover myself with figleaves. It’s a sin this not being ready, this not being up to it.
    You said, ‘I love you and my love for you makes any other life a lie.’
    Can this be true, this simple obvious message, or am I like those shipwrecked mariners who seize an empty bottle and eagerly read out what isn’t there? And yet you are there, here, sprung like a genie to ten times your natural size, towering over me, holding me in your arms like mountain