Frankissstein. Jeanette Winterson

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      The dead or the undead? he said. A ghost or a vampyre; what will you choose?

      What would frighten you most of all?

      He pondered this for a moment, turning on his elbow to face me, his face so close I could breathe him in. He said, A ghost, however awful or ghastly its appearance, however dreadful its utterances, would awe me but would not terrify me, for it has been alive once, as I have, and passed into spirit, as I will, and its material substance is no more. But a vampyre is a filthy thing, a thing that feeds its decayed body on the vital bodies of others. Its flesh is colder than death, and it has no pity, only appetite.

      The Undead, then, I said, and, as I lay with my eyes open wide with thinking, he fell asleep.

      Our first child died when he was born. Cold and tiny I held him in my arms. Soon after I dreamed that he was not dead, and that we rubbed him with brandy and set him by the fire and he returned to life.

      It was his little body I wanted to touch. I would have given him my own blood to restore his life; he had been of my blood, a feeding vampyre, for nine dark months in his hiding place. The Dead. The Undead. Oh, I am used to death and I hate it.

      I got up, too restless to sleep, and, covering my husband, wrapped a shawl round me and stood at the window, looking out over the dark shadows of the hills and the glittering lake.

      Perhaps it would be fine tomorrow.

      My father sent me away for a time to live in Dundee with a cousin, whose company, he hoped, would improve my solitude. But there is something of a lighthousekeeper in me, and I am not afraid of solitude, nor of nature in her wildness.

      I found in those days that my happiest times were outside and alone, inventing stories of every kind, and as far from my real circumstances as possible. I became my own ladder and trapdoor to other worlds. I was my own disguise. The sight of a figure, far off, on some journey of his own, was enough to spark my imagination towards a tragedy or a miracle.

      I was never bored except in the company of others.

      And at home, my father, who had little interest in what was fit or otherwise for a young, motherless girl, allowed me to sit unseen and silent while he entertained his friends, and they spoke of politics, of justice, and more than that too.

      The poet Coleridge was a regular visitor to our house. One evening he read out loud his new poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It begins – how well I recall it –

       It is an ancient Mariner,

       And he stoppeth one of three.

       ‘By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,

       Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?

      I crouched behind the sofa, a mere girl, enthralled to hear the tale told to the wedding guest and to picture in my mind the awful journey at sea.

      The Mariner is under a curse for killing the friendly bird, the albatross, that followed the ship in better days.

      In a scene most terrible, the ship, with its tattered sails and battered decks, is crewed by its own dead, reanimated in fearful force, unhallowed and dismembered, as the vessel drives forth to the land of ice and snow.

      He has violated life, I thought, then and now. But what is life? The body killed? The mind destroyed? The ruin of Nature? Death is natural. Decay inevitable. There is no new life without death. There can be no death unless there is life.

      The Dead. The Undead.

      The moon was clouded over now. Rain clouds rapidly returned to the clear sky.

      If a corpse returned to life, would it be alive?

      If the doors of the charnel house opened and we dead awakened … then …

      My thoughts are fevered. I hardly know my mind tonight.

       There is something at work in my soul which I do not understand.

      What do I fear most? The dead, the undead, or, a stranger thought … that which has never been alive?

      I turned to look at him sleeping, motionless, yet living. The body in sleep is a comfort although it mimics death. If he were dead, how should I live?

      Shelley, too, was a visitor to our house; that is how I met him. I was sixteen. He was twenty-one. A married man.

      It was not a happy marriage. He wrote of his wife, Harriet: I felt as if a dead and living body had been linked together in loathsome and horrible communion.

      It was on a night when he walked forty miles to his father’s house – in that night and dreamlike trance he believed he had already met the female destined to be mine.

      Soon enough we met.

      When my household duties were done, I had the habit of slipping away to my mother’s grave in St Pancras churchyard. There, I pursued my reading, propped against her headstone. Soon Shelley began to meet me in secret; my mother’s blessing on us, I believe, as we sat either side of the grave, talking of poetry and revolution. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of life, he said.

      I used to wonder about her in her coffin below. And I never thought of her as rotted, but as alive as she is in the pencil drawings of her, and more alive yet in her writings. Even so, I wanted to be near to her body. Her poor body no use to her now. And I felt, and I am certain that Shelley felt it too, that we were there all three of us, at the grave. There was comfort in it, and not of God or heaven, but that she was alive to us.

      I loved him for bringing her back to me. He was neither ghoulish nor sentimental. Last resting place. He is my resting place.

      I was aware that my father had secured her body against the diggers and the robbers who take any corpse they can for ready money, and they are rational enough – what use is the body when it is no use at all?

      In dissecting theatres all over London there are bodies of mothers, bodies of husbands, bodies of children, like mine, taken for liver and spleen, to crush the skull, saw the bones, unwind the secret miles of intestine.

      The deadness of the dead, said Polidori, is not what we fear. Rather we fear that they are not dead when we lay them in that last chamber. That they awake to darkness, and suffocation, and so die in agony. I have seen such agony in the faces of some new-buried and brought in for dissection.

      Have you no conscience? I said. No scruples?

      Have you no interest in the future? he said. The light of science burns brightest in a blood-soaked wick.

      The sky above me severed in forked light. The electrical body of a man seemed to be for a second lit up and then dark. Thunder over the lake, then, coming again, the yellow zig and zag of electrical force. From the window I saw a mighty shadow toppling down like a warrior slain. The thud of the fall shook the window. Yes. I see it. A tree hit by lightning.

      Then the rain again like a million miniature drummers drumming.

      My husband stirred but did not wake. In the distance the hotel flashed into view, deserted, blank-windowed and white, like the СКАЧАТЬ