Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

out and her grandma was babysitting. The boys had gone to bed. I was sitting on the floor of the caravan. Janey came and put her arms round me, then she kissed me, really kissed me.
    I was crying then, and kissing her, and we got undressed and into the little caravan bed, and I remembered, my body remembered, what it was like to be in one place and to be able to be there – not watchful, not worried, not with your head somewhere else.
    Did we fall asleep? We must have done. There were the car headlights sweeping across the caravan. Her parents were coming home. I felt my heart beating too fast, but the lights were not a warning. We were safe. We were together.
    She had beautiful breasts. She was all beautiful, with a rich thick triangle of black hair at the fork of her legs, and dark hair on her arms and in a line from her belly to her pubic hair.
    In the morning when we woke early she said, ‘I love you. I've loved you for ages.’
    ‘I was too scared,’ I said.
    ‘Don't be,’ she said. ‘Not any more.’
    And her clearness was like water, cool and deep and see-through right to the bottom. No guilt. No fear.
    She told her mother about us, and her mother warned her not to tell her father, or to let him find out.
    We took our bicycles. We went twenty miles and made love under a hedge. Janey's hand was covered in blood. My periods had started again.
    The next day we cycled to Blackpool. I went to my mother and asked her why she had done it. Why had she locked me out? Why didn't she trust me? I didn't ask her why she no longer loved me. Love was not a word that could be used between us any more. It was not a simple do you?/don't you? Love was not an emotion; it was the bomb site between us.
    She looked at Janey. She looked at me. She said, ‘You're no daughter of mine.’
    It hardly mattered. It was too late for lines like that now. I had a language of my own and it wasn't hers.
    Janey and I were happy. We went to college. We saw each other every day. I had started driving lessons in a beat-up Mini on a piece of spare land. I was living in my own world of books and love. The world was vivid and untouched. I felt free again – I think because I was loved. I took Mrs Winterson some flowers.
    When I got back that night, the flowers were in a vase on the table. I looked at them . . . The stalks of the flowers were in the vase. She had cut off the heads and thrown them on the unlit fire. The fire was ready-laid, and on the neat black layer of coal were the white heads of the little carnations.
    My mother was sitting silently in the chair. I said nothing. I looked at the room, small and spruce, at the brass flying ducks over the mantelpiece, at the brass crocodile nutcracker next to the mantel clock, at the clothes rack that we could raise and lower over the fire, at the sideboard with our photographs on it. This is where I lived.
    She said, ‘It's no good. I know what you are.’
    ‘I don't think you do.’

    ‘Touching her. Kissing her. Naked. In bed together. Do you think I don't know what you're doing?’
    All right . . . this was it . . . no hiding this time. No second self. No secrets.
    ‘Mum . . . I love Janey.’
    ‘So you're all over her . . . hot bodies, hands everywhere . . .’
    ‘I love her.’
    ‘I gave you a chance. You're back with the Devil. So I tell you now, either you get out of this house and you don't come back or you stop seeing that girl. I'm going to tell her mother.’
    ‘She knows.’
    ‘She what?’
    ‘Her mother knows. She's not like you.’
    Mrs Winterson was quiet for a long time and then she started to cry. ‘It's a sin. You'll be in Hell. Soft bodies all the way to Hell.’
    I went upstairs and started packing my things. I had no idea what I was going to do.
    When I came down my mother was sitting stock-still staring into space.
    ‘I'll go then . . .’ I said.
    She didn't answer. I left the room. I walked down the dark narrow lobby, the coats on their pegs. Nothing to say. I was at the front door. I heard her behind me. I turned.
    ‘Jeanette, will you tell me why?’
    ‘What why?’
    ‘You know what why . . .’
    But I don't know what why . . . what I am . . . why I don't please her. What she wants. Why I am not what she wants. What I want or why. But there is something I know: ‘When I am with her I am happy. Just happy.’
    She nodded. She seemed to understand and I thought, really, for that second, that she would change her mind, that we would talk, that we would