Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

had flung open the door waving her Bible and warning them of eternal damnation. This was confusing for the Mormons because they thought they were in charge of eternal damnation. But Mrs Winterson was a better candidate for the job.

    Now and again, if she was in a sociable frame of mind and there was a knock at the door, she left the poker alone and sent me out the back door to run up the alley and peer round the corner down the street to see who was there. I ran back with the news and then she decided whether or not they could come in – this usually meant a lot of work with the fly-spray air freshener while I went to open the door. By now, discouraged by no response, the visitor would be halfway down the street so I had to run and fetch them back, and then my mother would pretend to be surprised and pleased.
    I didn't care; it gave me a chance to go upstairs and read a forbidden book.
    I think Mrs Winterson had been well read at one time. When I was about seven she read Jane Eyre to me. This was deemed suitable because it has a minister in it – St John Rivers – who is keen on missionary work.
    Mrs Winterson read out loud, turning the pages. There is the terrible fire at Thornfield Hall and Mr Rochester goes blind, but in the version Mrs Winterson read, Jane doesn't bother about her now sightless paramour; she marries St John Rivers and they go off together to work in the mission field. It was only when I finally read Jane Eyre for myself that I found out what my mother had done.
    And she did it so well, turning the pages and inventing the text extempore in the style of Charlotte Brontë.
    The book disappeared as I got older – perhaps she didn't want me to read it for myself.
    I assumed that she hid books the way she hid everything else, including her heart, but our house was small and I searched it. Were we endlessly ransacking the house, the two of us, looking for evidence of each other? I think we were – she, because I was fatally unknown to her, and she was afraid of me. Me, because I had no idea what was missing but felt the missing-ness of the missing.
    We circled each other, wary, abandoned, full of longing. We came close but not close enough and then we pushed each other away forever.
    I did find a book, but I wish I hadn't; it was hidden in the tallboy under a pile of flannels, and it was a 1950s sex manual called How to Please Your Husband .
    This terrifying tome might have explained why Mrs Winterson didn't have children. It had black-and-white diagrams and lists and tips and most of the positions looked like adverts for a children's game of physical torment called Twister.
    As I pondered the horrors of heterosexuality I realised that I need not feel sorry for either of my parents; my mother hadn't read it – perhaps she had opened it once, realised the extent of the task, and put it away. The book was flat, pristine, intact. So whatever my father had had to do without, and I really don't think they ever had sex, he hadn't had to spend his nights with Mrs W with one hand on his penis and the other holding the manual while she followed the instructions.
    I remember her telling me that soon after they were married my father had come home drunk and she had locked him out of the bedroom. He had broken down the door and she had thrown her wedding ring out of the window and into the gutter. He went to find it. She got the night bus to Blackburn. This was offered as an illustration of how Jesus improves a marriage.
    The only sex education my mother ever gave me was the injunction: ‘Never let a boy touch you down there’ . I had no idea what she meant. She seemed to be referring to my knees.
    Would it have been better if I had fallen for a boy and not a girl? Probably not. I had entered her own fearful place – the terror of the body, the irresolution of her marriage, her own mother's humiliation at her father's coarseness and womanising. Sex disgusted her. And now, when she saw me, she saw sex.
    I had made my promises. And in any case Helen had gone away. But now I was someone who wanted to be naked with someone else. I was someone who had loved the feel of skin, of sweat, of kissing, of coming. I wanted sex and I wanted closeness.
    Inevitably there would be another lover. She knew that. She was watching me. Inevitably she forced it to happen.
    I had finished my O levels and done pretty badly. I failed four, got five, and my school had closed down, or rather it had become a comprehensive school