Frankissstein. Jeanette Winterson

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 palace of the dead.

       Strange shadows on you tend …

      I must have gone back to bed, for I woke again, upright, my hair down, my hand clutching the bed curtain.

      I had dreamed. Had I dreamed?

      I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantom of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.

      Such success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handiwork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade; that the thing which had received such imperfect animation would subside into dead matter, and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench forever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life. He sleeps, but he is awakened; he opens his eyes, behold, the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.

      I opened mine in terror.

      On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a story.

      Story: a series of connected events, real or imagined. Imagined or real.

      Imagined

      And

      Real

       Reality bends in the heat.

      I’m looking through a shimmer of heat at buildings whose solid certainties vibrate like sound waves.

      The plane is landing. There’s a billboard:

       Welcome to Memphis, Tennessee.

      I’m here for the global Tec-X-Po on Robotics.

      Name?

      Ry Shelley.

      Exhibitor? Demonstrator? Purchaser?

      Press.

      Yes, I have you here, Mr Shelley.

      It’s Dr Shelley. The Wellcome Trust.

      You’re a doctor?

      I am. I’m here to consider how robots will affect our mental and physical health.

      That is a good question, Dr Shelley. And let’s not forget the Soul.

      I’m not sure that’s my area …

      We all have a Soul. Hallelujah. Now, who are you here to interview?

      Ron Lord.

      (Short pause while the database finds Ron Lord.)

      Yes. Here he is. Exhibitor Class A. Mr Lord will be waiting for you at the Adult Futures Suite. Here is a map. My name is Claire. I am your point of contact today.

      Claire was tall, black, beautiful, well-dressed in a tailored dark green skirt and pale green silk shirt. I felt glad that she was my point of contact today.

      Claire wrote out my name-badge with a brisk, manicured hand. Handwriting – a strangely old-fashioned and touching method of identification at a futuristic tech expo.

      Claire – excuse me – my name – not Ryan, just Ry.

      I apologise, Dr Shelley, I am not familiar with English names – and you are English?

      Yes, I am.

      Cute accent. (I smile. She smiles.)

      Is this your first time in Memphis?

      Yes, it is.

      You like BB King? Johnny Cash? And THE King?

      Martin Luther King?

      Well, sir, I was talking about Elvis – but now you bring it to my attention, we do seem to have a lotta Kings here – maybe something about calling this city Memphis – I guess if you name a place after the capital of Egypt, you gonna see some pharaohs – uh-huh?

      Naming is power, I say to her.

      It sure is. Adam’s task in the Garden of Eden.

      Yes, indeed, to name everything after its kind. Sexbot …

      Pardon me, sir?

      Do you think Adam would have thought of that? Dog, cat, snake, fig tree, sexbot?

      I am thankful he didn’t have to, Dr Shelley.

      Yes, I am sure you are right. So tell me, Claire, why did they call this place Memphis?

      You mean back in 1819? When it was founded?

       As she speaks I see in my mind a young woman looking out of a sodden window across the lake.

      I say to Claire, Yes. 1819. Frankenstein was a year old.

      She