Read Online The World and Other Places by Jeanette Winterson - Free Book Online Page A

air. His dream was the first dream, when men in plus fours and motorcycle goggles pedalled with the single mindedness of a circus chimp to get their wooden frames and canvas wings upwards and upwards and upwards. It was a solo experience even when there were two of you.
    What did Amy Johnson say? ‘If the whole world were flying beside me I would still be flying alone.’ Rhetoric, you think, frontier talk. Then you reach your own frontier and it’s not rhetoric anymore.
    My parents were so proud of me when I joined the Air Force. I stood in our cluttered living room in my new uniform and I felt like an angel on a visit. I felt like Gabriel come to tell the shepherds the Good News.
    ‘Soon you’ll have your own wings,’ said my mother.
    My father had bought a bottle of Scotch.
    In my bedroom, the model aeroplanes had been carefully dusted. Sopwith Camel. Spitfire. Tiger Moth. I picked them up one by one and turned over their balsa wood frames and rice paper wings. I never used a kit. What hopes they carried. More than the altar at church. More than a good school report. In the secret places, under the fuselage, stuck to the tail-fin, I had hidden my hopes.
    My mother came in. ‘Will you take them with you?’ I shook my head. I’d be laughed at, made fun of. Yet each of us in our bunks at lights-out would be thinking of model aeroplanes and the things from home we couldn’t talk about anymore.
    She said, ‘I gave them a wipe anyway.’

    Bombay. Cairo. Paris. New York. I’ve been to those places now. The curious thing is that no matter how different they are, the people are all preoccupied with the same things, that is, the same thing; how to live. We have to eat, we want to make money, but in every pause the question returns: How shall I live?
    I saw three things that made this clear to me.
    The first was a beggar in New York. He was sitting, feet apart, head in hands, on a low wall beside a garage. As I walked by him, he whispered, ‘Do you have two dollars?’ I gave him the folded bills, and he said, ‘Can you sit with me a minute?’
    His name was Tony. He was a compulsive gambler trying to go straight. He thought he might land a job on Monday morning if only he could sleep the weekend in a hostel, get some rest, be clean. For a week he had been sleeping by the steam duct of the garage.
    I gave him the hostel money and a little more for food and the clenched fist of his body unfolded. He was talkative, gentle. Already in his mind he had the job, was making a go of it, and had met a sweet woman in a snack bar. Was that the gambler in him or ordinary human hope? Already in his mind he was looking past the job and the apartment into the space that had turned him over the wall.
    ‘Nobody used to look at me,’ he said. ‘Even when I hadmoney, I was one of those guys who get looked through. It’s like being a ghost. If no one can see you you’re dead. What’s the point of trying to live if you are already dead?’
    He shook my hand and thanked me. He was going to the hostel before it closed, or maybe he was going to a dog. I can’t know. I don’t need to know. There’s enough I need to know just for myself.
    I said there were three things. The second was a dress designer living over her studio in Milan. She was rich, she was important. She liked airmen. I used to sit with her in the studio, she never had time for a meal or a trip somewhere, she ate like an urchin, one leg hooked round her stool, palm full of olives. She spat the stones at her models. We were talking one night and she got angry. She prodded me with the shears she kept on her work table.
    ‘Stop thinking,’ she said. ‘The more you think, the faster you cut your own throat. What is there to think about? It always ends up the same way. In your mind there is a bolted door. You have to work hard not to go near that door. Parties, lovers, career, charity, babies, who cares what it is, so long as you avoid the door. There are times, when I am