Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

am in love. I am no longer living at home but I would like her to understand how it is for me. I will be going to Oxford soon and enough time has passed from the happy/normal moment. That's what I think, but I am learning that time is unreliable. Those old sayings about Give It Time, and Time is a Healer depend on just whose time it is. As Mrs Winterson lives in End Time, ordinary time doesn't mean much to her. She is still indignant about the wrong crib.

    She is polishing the coal scuttle with Brasso. She has already polished the flying ducks over the mantelpiece and the crocodile nutcracker. I have no idea how to begin so I open my mouth and I say, ‘I think I am always going to love women in the way that I do ...”
    At that instant her varicose vein in the top of her leg bursts. It goes up like a geezer and hits the ceiling in a crimson splash. I grab the Brasso cloths and I am trying to stem the flow . . . ‘I'm sorry. I didn't want to upset you . . .’ Then her leg erupts again.
    By now she is lying backwards in the chair with her leg up on the half—polished coal scuttle. She is looking at the ceiling. She doesn't say anything.
    ‘Mum ... are you all right?’
    ‘We've just had that ceiling decorated.’
    What would my life have been like if she had said, ‘Oh, your dad and I don't have a problem with that'?
    What would my life have been like if I had been with Ann? Would I have had a girlfriend? And what if I hadn't had to fight for a girlfriend, fight for myself? I am not a big believer in the gay gene. Maybe I would have got married, had the kids, and then gone off to get the spray tan, etc.
    I must have fallen silent, thinking about all this.
    Ann says, ‘Was Mrs Winterson a latent lesbian?’
    I choke on my tea. That is like Burn a Koran Day. There are some things you can't even suggest. But now that it has been suggested I am overwhelmed by the awful thought. I am pretty sure she wasn't a latent anything — it might have been better if some of her tendencies could have been latent. I suppose she might have been a latent murderer, what with the revolver in the duster drawer, etc., but I think it was all on the surface with her, just hopelessly scrambled. She was her own Enigma Code and me and my dad were not Bletchley Park.
    ‘I just wondered,’ said Ann, ‘what with her saying, “Never let a boy touch you down there.’”
    ‘She didn't want me to get pregnant.’ Oh dear. Not the right thing to say, but then Mrs Winterson was dead set against illegitimacy as it used to be called, and had nothing but contempt for the woman who gave me my chance at life and Mrs Winterson her chance at me.
    ‘I have had four husbands,’ said Ann.
    ‘Four?’
    She smiles. She doesn't judge herself and she doesn't judge others. Life is as it is.
    My father the miniature miner from Manchester was not one of the four.
    ‘You've got his shape, narrow hips, we've all got wide hips, and you've got his hair. He was really dark. Very good—looking. He was a Teddy boy’
    I have to think about this. My mother has had four husbands. My other mother might have been a latent lesbian. My father was a Teddy boy. It is a lot to take in.
    ‘I like men myself, but I don't rely on them. I can do my own electrics, my own plastering and I can put up a shelf. I don't rely on anybody, me.’
    Yes, we are alike. The optimism, the self—reliance. The ease we both have in our bodies. I used to wonder why I have always felt at ease in my body and liked my body. I look at her and it seems to be an inheritance.
    Gary is well built but compact. He loves walking. He thinks nothing of walking fourteen miles on a Saturday afternoon. He boxes too. They have kept their working—class pride in who they are and what they can do. They like each other. I watch that. They talk. I listen to that. Is this what it would have been like?
    But Ann had to work all the time because Pierre left her when the boys were little. And I suppose I would have had to look after my brothers. And I would have resented that.
    I remember what she wrote on the adoption form. Better for Janet to have a mother and a father .
    But her sons didn't have a father at home for long. And neither did she. Her own father died in the 1950s.
    ‘There were ten of us,’ said Ann. ‘How did we fit into two bedrooms? And we were always doing a flit when we couldn't pay the rent. My dad had a handcart and he'd come back and shout, “Pack up, we're off,” and what we had went