Sweet Fruit, Sour Land

  Rebecca Ley grew up in Oxford. She has a degree in History of Art and Philosophy from University College London and a Masters in Creative Writing from City University. Her essays have appeared in Water Journal and Wander Magazine, a literary magazine she co-founded. She was shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize 2017. She currently lives in North London.

  First published in Great Britain by

  Sandstone Press Ltd

  Dochcarty Road

  Dingwall

  Ross-shire

  IV15 9UG

  Scotland

  www.sandstonepress.com

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored or transmitted in any form without the express

  written permission of the publisher.

  Copyright © Rebecca Ley 2018

  Editor: K.A. Farrell

  The moral right of Rebecca Ley to be recognised as the

  author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  The publisher acknowledges subsidy from Creative Scotland

  towards publication of this volume.

  ISBN: 978-1-912240-33-3

  ISBNe: 978-1-912240-34-0

  Cover design by Stuart Brill

  Ebook compilation by Iolaire Typography Ltd, Newtonmore

  For my parents

  Contents

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Part 1 - Mathilde: Tender

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  Part 2 - Jaminder: Churchgoing

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  Part 3 - Mathilde: Stitches

  1

  2

  3

  Part 4 - Jaminder: Piano Lessons

  1

  2

  3

  Part 5 - Mathilde: Blackberries

  1

  2

  3

  Part 6 - Jaminder: The Wolf, The Door

  1

  2

  Part 7 - Mathilde: Matilda

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  Part 8 - Jaminder: Another Home

  1

  2

  3

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  I found a lemon yesterday. It was wrinkled and old and down the back of the food cupboard at work, but it had some bounce left in it yet. I wanted to show it to you, even now. I stood in the kitchen in our fifteen-minute break and broke the skin. I laid it out, unwinding it, squeezing what was left of its flesh, and tore it out of itself. I splayed it and scraped its insides out and smelt them – citrus gone bad. I washed the skin, and pricked it with my fingernails, trying to see – or smell, or taste – if there was anything left in the zest. I rinsed it under the tap, and kept the base intact, where the skin meets at its core (do you remember how they work?) and left it to dry out.

  I got a needle and thread from my work station. The thread was black but it worked all the same. I sewed it back up together from each bit that I peeled and tore, and it looked quite good like that; it looked like a whole piece of fruit again. But Mathilde came in and laughed at me. She did that to keep the shock of seeing a lemon off her face, I could tell.

  ‘Fruit art?’ she said. I didn’t think it was art. I thought what would have been art would be the way that you’d have looked at it, if you could see how I’d preserved it. That would be the art, the look on your face, if only you could see it.

  On the bad days I think about calling you. Our landlady has a phone, if you can believe it. It stays on all day, as it needs so little electricity. Did you ever know that? Sometimes when the evenings are quiet I go to her house. I tell her I might make a call, but I only pick it up and listen to the dial tone. I like the tinny electric noise. I hold it fast against my ear and hear the sound even after I’ve replaced the receiver. I think of dialling in your number. I’m trying to forget the numbers, you see, one by one. I think I’ve forgotten half of them, but I’m not sure which ones.

  Sometimes I look at all this rain coming down and wonder if you ever have a day where you look at the rain, too. I think about the Thames Barrier, and London’s little peaks and troughs, and I feel very far away. There’s little sun here, so the solar power is mostly useless. Not like in London, where it powered what it could.

  If the sun has a kind of sentience, I’d like to apologise to it. If it can remember the beginning of the Earth, maybe it can remember the beginning of man and all that’s come with us. I’d like to apologise for what we’ve done. Or maybe our apology is our suffering for it now.

  I think about the beginning because it’s better than now. I think about the avocados we used to have. Plenty of them. The vanilla ice cream we added to them; the sugar; the milk. My grandmother blending the mixture and handing it to us in ceramic bowls. The way she held the avocado in her hand and peeled its skin, the way it squished into the blender as we waited expectantly by the counter. I dream of Mama Boga and her basket of avocados. I dream of the Nairobi sun and the dry, kind heat. I imagine taking that avocado from Mama and holding it in my hand. A thing I couldn’t dream of touching now: its scaly flesh; its weight, like a small breast of agriculture, a plump divinity.

  How strange the things you end up worshipping, that you would never guess.

  Part 1

  Mathilde

  Tender

  1

  After we came to London, I dreamt of my mother again. She appeared to me fully formed, her dark hair in Velcro rollers and her mouth pulled together in a small smile. I reached out to touch her, wanting to feel the blank surface of her skin, and the folds of her eyelids, and the weight of her shoulders. Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed with supernatural skills and became her. I opened my mouth and her voice came out, and I looked down and saw her perfectly oval nails on my hands. I turned to the window, with our old green shutters, looking out on Rue des Rosiers, and knew, the way you know in a dream, that I was her.

  I was a young woman standing above our little cobbled street. I opened the windows, pushing hard against the wood until the glass panes flung before me, and I could smell the myrtilles baking in their tarts from the café downstairs.

  I walked to our small kitchen, seven floors up from the street, one step from the space of the living room and two from the window, and put the kettle on the hob. I tore up mint leaves with the same dexterity she did. I brought down two blue mugs painted by hand, with small yellow flowers around the rim.

  The kettle started to gurgle, and I looked again at my hands, my mother’s hands, and in that same alarming state of self-awareness, I knew I had aged, considerably. The folds around my knuckles were pronounced and there were brown spots up my arms. I moved them up and down, like a bird, and felt the fullness of them move with me. I had grown old, and was afraid, and the kettle hadn’t boiled yet. I rubbed my hands on a tea towel, which was spattered with old crêpe batter – but crêpes were nowhere to be found – and I sat on my bed, which now appeared in the living room. Just as I sat down, I found I couldn’t lift myself from it. I made several attempts, trying desperately, but they only made me weaker until I had to lie back and look at the ceiling. It was cracked and speckled with mould and I remembered how for years we’d been meaning to re-paint it. I lay on my back and the window was still open, and the tart was still baking, and the kettle was still boiling, but I could only watch it, and sense that it was going on without me.

  Possessed with that other dreamers’ skill, I lifted of
f, and out through the window – either in body or consciousness it was hard to tell – and now the Paris of Marais cafés and trinket théières was left behind. In my aviation I saw Paris for what it became, later, after my mother died, and we left.

  I saw the President’s family hiding in the attic of L’Alimentari on Rue des Ecouffes. I saw the rebels, round every corner, with their guns: the towering machine-like things the gendarmes once had. And then, in a dreamlike whimsy, I drifted above the whole country, and saw the land for what was left of it: scorched and tropical, parched and cracked, diseased. I don’t know if I, as my mother, was surprised or upset. In this floating omniscient state, my only feeling was of being very far away from it all, and only wanting to retire back to the kitchen, put the mint plant back on the windowsill, close the shutters, and drink the tea.

  The French community in London would all say the same; they all had dreams of the homes they once had. And they would suggest these dreams were a sign of guilt, that we got out and others didn’t. I say this, but I can’t be sure. After I left with my grandmother, we moved as far away from French people as we could. I tried to forget my own language, and small French affectations. They took practice to shake.

  I should’ve changed my name, but I couldn’t rid myself of it. Because in my dreams, as my mother, I knew I was looking for small infant me. In them, I said my own name, just as she once said it, and you just can’t forget a thing like that.

  Years afterwards, Mathilde was still my name, and as an adult, I still dreamt of my mother. Years later, after we’d come to London, and fled Paris.

  Years after we’d pulled the ladder up after us.

  2

  Clothes were strung on the branches of the Heath’s trees. If I think of anything now, it is the smell of London soap and the sound of slapping cotton in the wind. I would wander to the farm’s edges and stare in the windows of the cottages that met me there. I saw a man with a hat tucked neatly over his forehead, asleep against a trunk, leg jutted out in front of him. He was meant to be keeping an eye on his carrots and potatoes at the back of his cottage. I walked along the public meadow and watched them too. Sometimes they gave you leftovers if you looked at them a certain way. If you looked hungry and scared, but not too afraid; civilised with tidy hair but with dirt underneath your fingernails and a smudge against your face.

  They were the ones with the food, so they were the ones with the power.

  I worked in the sewing shop with my grandmother, which was clean work and difficult in a different sort of way, so before I made it to the cottages I would scrape my hands under the mud on its borders and brush my hair with it, raking it with my fingers.

  We’d usually do as well as anyone else with the rations, but it was worth it, in the hope of a few extras. If there was another farmer’s strike, it was also best to have more, in case. That day was quiet, and the people there weren’t looking for any kind of distraction or charity, and were only bent double all day in their patches, pulling up cabbages. Still, I stopped and watched them, the people with their hands in the soil, who seemed to have so much authority. They’ve brought the country to its knees, was what Mrs P was always saying. But we were also told that this kind of industry didn’t exist far outside of London. There was a reason no one left.

  I spent time walking over the once-grazed grass, now manually cut, and imagined the flocks of sheep trotting over it, bleating. My grandmother said you could never quite get close enough to touch them, but you could try. I imagined pressing my fingers into the soft woolly fuzz, patting their solid backs and seeing their heads turn in curiosity towards me. The sheep were long gone when I arrived, but the vegetables remained. After school, most of us worked there. I’d been spared, my grandmother told me, by sewing. She had been spared too, but only after making her way over here with the wave of immigrant labourers recruited after the blackout.

  I walked there and imagined I was amongst them, my own hands blackened from soil and bent from picking, trying to stuff an extra mushroom in my pocket, instead of being pinched by a pin and bent by a needle.

  I walked up to the fences and put my hands against the wire. Sometimes they looked at me like I was eyeing up the carrots and waiting for them all to go, to scale the allotment walls. But I had no way to tell them I only wanted to be where the people were, and feel a part of it. It wasn’t anything more than that.

  I was free to go as I liked, which meant walking right to the top of Parliament Hill and looking out at the grey city, the tallest buildings the most crumbled of all of them. I imagined going to them, sitting on top of Big Ben and listening to its loud and reverberating gong, a sound lost to us. But if Big Ben was only the name for the bell, not the clock tower, it became meaningless, I suppose, once it stopped ringing.

  It wasn’t worth staying for long, meandering on my own and getting too close to Kenwood House where the squatters were. I walked over to the west side of the Heath, past the neat lines of crops and through the woods, out to the village on the other side. I walked down the hill and stopped on the way to check in on the grocers. There were some apples that had turned in the heat, left to rot in their baskets on the side in the hope someone might be desperate enough to buy them. But there were beetroots; one of those valuable things that if you take care of and grow right you can have all year round. You could save them for a while too, in case there was a strike to eat through. I handed the woman at the counter my coupons and clutched the soily jewels to my chest, imagining the earthy sweetness and bright pink juice I’d stare at in the sink after they’d been cut, knowing the tips of my fingers would be stained for hours. I’d put some on my lips and my grandmother would laugh at me.

  I rubbed my face in an old shop window, trying to look presentable again before going back. Sometimes I’d come back from the Heath with a few vegetables and pretend the grocer had dropped a little extra in for us. This pleased her.

  I walked in and bundled the beetroots on the side. My grandmother raised her eyebrows without saying anything, her mouth full of pins. She held a long trailing dress in her hands (a silver-blue fish of a dress, nothing like I’d ever touched), and she was sitting, hand-sewing each glinting button-like bead onto the material with meticulous care, one after the other. She gestured for me to sit next to her and she pulled the thread up in a deft motion, holding it taut and showing it to me, then threading it back down in a loop. I watched her putting the last glinting sequin onto the skirt long enough for the tallest of women until it fell, complete, around the floor of the workshop, reminding me of a fish I hadn’t seen from a sea I hadn’t seen.

  It had been her life for weeks, and I’d known it. I knew how it hurt her to part with the clothing coupons she was saving for fabric before the client paid her. But these commissions were rare, delicate things, and still there was the old way about them: making the thing first and fitting it, before any questions were asked, any money exchanged. I asked her how she knew the woman would pay and she gestured to her hair. ‘She smelled like lavender,’ she said, ‘Not hard work.’

  ‘And what if she doesn’t pay you?’ I asked, fingering the slip of paper she kept pinned to the dress’s neck with the client’s name and telephone number on it.

  She threw up her hands in dismay, ‘Well, then,’ she said. ‘C’est la fin des haricots.’

  We laughed about it, but if the woman hadn’t shown up and paid us, like we hoped she would, it might as well have been the end of the world. The end of our little world.

  The note on the dress read ‘Gloria’, and I rolled it around my tongue and imagined her. I slipped a hand down the bodice and touched the sleek lining, my dry fingertips snagging on the fabric. I could see her, the Gloria in my head, smelling of lavender and sweet, all red cheeks and waved hair, touching me on the shoulder and laughing with me.

  When Gloria arrived to collect the dress at the shop, she was better than all of that. She made an impression on me like a knife in butter. I stood behind my grandmother, afraid to look
at her, tall and more beautiful than I could have imagined, and smelling like bergamot. I imagined her rows of perfumes and the choice she made each day, deciding on her scent. I pressed my hair behind my ears and looked at my shoes, the laces dragging along the floor. I touched my hair again.

  My grandmother had no such shame with her, thrusting the dress at her and taking the money gladly, not even looking up from her ledger when Gloria exclaimed about the exquisite job she’d done. ‘I can’t believe it, it’s magic. What a talent, Madame.’ She held the dress up by its shoulders so that the pink tissue paper slid to the floor. I wanted to pick it up and fold it, save it for another order. She stepped forward and trod on it. ‘Oh, what Paris must have been like,’ she said.

  I looked at my grandmother, afraid, surprised she’d told Gloria where we were from.

  ‘I mean, before,’ Gloria said, fiddling with the hem.

  My grandmother shrugged. ‘It was marvellous, bien sûr,’ she said, instead of the real thing.

  Gloria nodded, accepting the claim. I wanted to open my mouth and gesture to the city outside, and say: I go to the hill almost every day and look at the abandoned crumbling buildings and imagine my Paris like that, but it must be worse. I try and visualise it, but I can’t. But logically I know it must be worse than that, all parched and wiped out, with not even the windows left as they are left here, no glass left even in the window frames.

  I wanted to ask her if she’d ever marvelled at the glass left unshattered in her windows. But instead, I said quietly, leaning forward towards her, ‘You’ll look beautiful in it, I’m sure.’