Sweet Fruit, Sour Land Page 3

  Of course, part of the watch was to make sure everyone in the village was doing things just as they should.

  She started scrubbing the counter. She wiped it furiously, over and over, and I spoke her name but she didn’t stop. She wiped her finger against the surface, tasted it. I came and stood beside her.

  ‘Touch it,’ she said, ‘Can you taste the gooseberries? Can you smell them?’

  Of course I could, because it was so foreign. I thought that smell had got into everything. I smelt it for days afterwards, in my bed. I smell it now, still; everywhere and in everything.

  I shook my head. I hugged her and soaked up her smell, of parsley she’d planted in the garden. She hoped we’d have enough water that summer that it would survive.

  As I pulled away she sniffed again, smelling me for tartness. ‘It makes me anxious, sometimes,’ she said. ‘The people that walk past the house. I always feel like they’re looking for something.’

  She looked at the scraps of fruit, now in the bin. I knew she was thinking, as she always did, of that day. Years after we’d come to London, and she had the shop. They came straight through our front door, with no warning, into the kitchen. They did it to everyone on our street. They went through everything. Every scrap of food we couldn’t account for with our coupons was noted. Everything was taken away; our cards, too. We stood in line for days to be re-issued them, along with everyone else. We were warned about the black market. We were warned about the rules. We could’ve starved. One more week and we would have.

  She bought those gooseberries from the grocer’s shop. Little balls of joy. But it was something different, and so it made everyone afraid, having to account for something like that. When the farmers were protesting not being paid fairly for produce, when it was collected by the government to be redistributed, the risk of looking like you’d bought something on the black market was not insignificant.

  ‘It’s just different now,’ she said, ‘You just can’t trust anyone like you used to.’ She turned on the tap to wash her hands and the pipes croaked and gurgled and a dribble of water escaped its mouth, then stopped. ‘That’s it for today, then,’ she said, and hit her hand against the tap’s neck until another dribble escaped. ‘Merde.’

  ‘It’s okay, we’ve saved enough until tomorrow,’ I tried to take the worry out of her, I was always doing that. But I was only a child during the blackout, I couldn’t remember it the way she could. She always thought when the water stopped, when the lights turned out, none of it would ever come back on. I didn’t believe in that possibility, not then.

  ‘What are you making?’ I said.

  ‘Putain,’ she said, as though I were an irritant, and had reminded her. ‘It will have to do without sugar.’ She had a small jar of cream she’d managed to buy that day and she sniffed at it. She moved it towards me so I could check it hadn’t curdled too.

  ‘Gooseberry fool,’ she said.

  4

  George arrived at my door uninvited. He was dressed smartly in a synthetic jumper that looked knitted by a machine. New, and far too warm for this weather. His shoes were in such good order they looked like they would squeak and press upon his toes. He came with a newspaper under his arm, and sure enough Mrs P’s face loomed out of it.

  I didn’t ask how he got my address or had known my grandmother would be at her shop, but I was sure he’d accounted for it.

  I led him into the kitchen and started to clear things from the table. I looked around, desperately, to try and see the house how he would see it, for the first time. It was poky and worn, but it was clean, at least, and my grandmother kept things in the best condition she could.

  ‘Did you see in the paper there’s been another outbreak of Dengue?’ he said.

  ‘Where?’ The north was closed-off and cooler, but I knew nothing of the continent. We’d stopped buying newspapers three years before.

  ‘Spain, what’s left of it. They think there’ll be another migration to the north.’

  ‘There’s nowhere else to go.’ Since the blackout, Scandinavia’s borders were firmly secured, firmer even than ours.

  He looked out the back window, past the chipped gouges of paint on the sill, through the murky glass, out to the parched garden. He looked back at me, at my jeans, my hands in the pockets. I moved my hands up and rubbed them together. I didn’t know what he was thinking of. But he made a comment about my pathetic vegetable patch, and how it would dry out to death in this weather. I ignored it because I had to believe I’d be able to grow something.

  ‘It’s quiet round here,’ he said.

  ‘Same as anywhere.’

  I thought of the people in Spain. The sticky air, the arid earth that crunched. I laid awake at night, trying to imagine what might be worse. Dying down there in the heat, the tropical weather torturing you, until the only thing that isn’t in drought is the moisture in your own body. Then that leaving you, too.

  I thought of what got people here. Trees splitting onto your bicycle, the hot walls beating at you, not built for this weather. Getting E.coli from old rations, things that have been left to spoil. Or starving. That happened to people who weren’t alone, who gave all they had to their families, who didn’t account for the strikes. Who had children. They tried to account for that, they tried to incentivise you. But if there wasn’t enough food, it didn’t count for anything.

  I thought about it logically, what was worse, and sometimes wrote it down.

  That’s when he placed something on the work surface. I didn’t know what it was. It was an egg shape, something textured and wrinkled. I thought it was a pear.

  ‘I’ve brought you something,’ he said. And I looked at it.

  ‘A fruit?’

  He looked at it, he didn’t know. ‘Or a vegetable?’ he said, as though he was asking the thing itself. That’s when I knew it really meant something. ‘It’s an avocado. Have you heard of it?’

  I thought about pretending I had, so that he might think I was older than I was, that he might think something good about me. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Have you?’

  He laughed, the way he did when he thought I’d just missed the mark. ‘I brought it to you didn’t I? You can mash it up and cut it open and…’

  I didn’t think he knew what it was. We both looked at it. I marvelled that he could get hold of things. ‘You shouldn’t have brought a thing like that,’ I said, ‘It’s not safe, with the watch.’

  He laughed. ‘They won’t come here. I’ll make sure of it.’ He shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Friends in high places?’ I said, as a joke, but I was frightened.

  ‘When you’re a Minister you know what’s going on, you have some control.’

  ‘You work with Mrs P?’ I said. I didn’t ask, Minister for what.

  He smiled. ‘Don’t we all?’

  I looked at the thread of his jumper and wanted to touch its softness. But I thought it would be unbearably warm in this summer humidity. The thought of it clinging to his arms like that disturbed me. But its neatness gave me the impression he might know the answer to something. He ran his hands through his hair and I watched the grey strands and I watched the dark ones. I watched his fingertips.

  He moved closer to me and placed his hand next to mine on the counter. That’s the first time we touched, or almost touched, but it mattered all the same. Getting close was just as monumental as the thing itself.

  ‘You’re a small bird,’ he said, or at least that’s what I thought he said, but he murmured it so close to me and I didn’t want to ask him to repeat it. That sounds right, though, he would’ve said that.

  ‘I’m going to help you,’ he said, and I didn’t know what that meant either. All I knew is that there was a man in my kitchen who was older than me and knew something about the world I didn’t. With everything the way it was, it mattered.

  ‘My neighbour died last week,’ he said, his hand next to mine.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

  ‘She used to keep old
packets of sugar in drawers around her house. She used to collect them from the old cafés.’ His hand moved closer, but didn’t touch mine. ‘She talked about streetlights, and tiny computers. She said her head was filled with noise.’ He laughed, but I think even then I could tell the laugh wasn’t sincere. He would have given a lot to have a computer. ‘It was peaceful, anyway. She lived a good long while.’

  I nodded, wanting to ask what a good long while was, wanting to compare it to my mother’s good long while. I tried to imagine his neighbour’s face, but couldn’t. I thought about where the sugar was now.

  He reached into his coat pocket and took out some paper. At first I thought it might be a newspaper clipping, or a picture, and I thought I’d like to see what she looked like. But then he unfolded it and placed it alongside the avocado on the counter. He left it there, arching up at its long indented folds. I pressed it down with my hand.

  ‘You didn’t,’ I said.

  ‘I want you to have it.’

  ‘But it’s fraud.’

  ‘It’s not fraud when you have nothing.’

  ‘Debatable.’

  That’s when his hand did grasp mine, that first time. I wondered why he’d want to touch my hand, and was it in the same way I wanted to touch his.

  ‘There’s no point in ethics now. Don’t even think of it. Take it.’ He raised his voice and stepped towards me. He squeezed my hand, a little too tight. ‘You must take it.’ He released his hand to place it on my shoulder.

  ‘I can’t take it,’ I said. ‘I feel too bad about it.’

  But I didn’t, because if I died, I’d want someone to have my ration card. I’d want everyone to have what they wanted. My house, my muddy garden, my plant pots, my kitchen tiles, my eyes, my skin. I’d want them to take it all and use it and put it back into the earth where it belongs. I’d want my body to be fertiliser to grow trees and carrots. I’d do anything.

  I didn’t feel bad, but I was afraid. ‘You know the old saying? Food first, then morals,’ he said. He looked at me. ‘I’ll keep it. If you ever need it, I’ll have it.’ He nodded towards the garden.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. But I was worried that this gesture was a final thing, and an indication he wouldn’t return.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I worry about you and your vegetable patch. There but for the grace of God.’

  I knew he meant he had more than me, but he didn’t owe me anything. I couldn’t think of anything to say, wanting to ask if he’d be back, fearing that if I did it would prompt him to never return. Better not to know. So instead I found myself murmuring under my breath the rest of the phrase. He looked at me quizzically as I said, ‘Go I.’

  I bit into the avocado, and almost immediately spat the whole thing back out. The skin was leathery but the inside moist and slippery. It was sinister. The remnants in the sink stared back at me. The green was sickly; a pale, luminous green, not like a courgette. The flesh was thick and doughy, but not as doughy as a banana: smoother, sleeker, disconcerting.

  The mound of the seed rose up at me from the half-cut portion on the chopping board. A large conker of a thing. I tried to prise it out, smushing the flesh surrounding it as I did so, laying perfectly against its round casing. It was just as I remembered kiwis, but not acidic, not transparent, no bite.

  This was no fruit. I scraped out what I could from the shells, but didn’t eat it in childish delight. I tried to think if I had them once, at dinner maybe. I could place some foods from my young childhood. Odd constructed artificial things, but not this. Perhaps they were early to go. People talked about them, I knew that much; but trying to place them in any context of a meal was impossible. I tried to remember the years of panic, when things started to disappear. Running around supermarkets, my mother’s hand clutched round mine, her skin turning white. But I couldn’t distinguish the before from the after, not all of it. We were lucky to make it as far as we did, and I was luckier even than my mother. The childhood panic made it hard to remember what was missing now and what was a fantasy. What never existed at all. What I only used to placate myself in dreams.

  I brought a small piece to my lips and slowly chewed. It disintegrated easily in my mouth, creamy and mealy. I started to whisk the flesh in a bowl and it became a soft, malleable, thick sauce. I dropped the avocado shells in the food bin. They lay there, curved up on themselves, conspicuous. I took them out and cut them up into mulch with my knife and placed them back. The waste would be collected the next day. I ate the bowl of avocado in one go, even though I was disturbed by the taste of something different. I spent the rest of the day walking around the village, worried I had something green in my teeth. I looked at people and wondered if they could tell. I wanted to ask them if they’d ever had the magical dragon eggs, if they’d felt the pickled, wrinkled, puckered, plummy weight of it in their hands. Or if they’d never even seen one. I imagined holding it out to each person I walked past, and them dismissing it, confused, not knowing what it was.

  5

  George came back, after the avocado. He called on the telephone and said he was glad I answered, that he’d caught me. I didn’t tell him I’d been looking out the window at the wilting plants and dehydrated earth and had been waiting for a phone call, too afraid to leave the house in case I’d miss it. I didn’t tell him I had spent the afternoon staring at each room when I should have been stitching and cleaning. Counting the boxes of matches and candles and laying them out on the table, only to return them, in the same order. I just said, Yes, and let the silence hang there. He checked my grandmother was busy for the evening, as she routinely was, and told me he was coming to visit.

  ‘I have something for you,’ he said. And I laughed, and asked if it was another avocado, and hoped it wasn’t, thinking of its wrinkled skin.

  ‘Something else,’ he said, ‘You’ll have to wait and see.’

  He brought it round that same evening. It was a box, and it was heavy, I could tell as soon as I opened the door because his leg was pulled up under it, balancing its weight. I helped him carry it to the kitchen table and he smiled at me.

  ‘I hope you know a good recipe,’ he said. But I didn’t know any.

  I opened the top of the box and peered inside. It looked like apples, I looked at him, I said, apples, but he kept smiling and I knew it was something different. Even apples in summer was strange. I touched them and they were furry, they made the skin on the tips of my fingers feel different.

  ‘Peaches,’ he said, and I knew that was a term of endearment. Also perhaps a fruit, but not here, not in this country. He took one from the box and handed it to me. I pressed it in-between my fingers and it was soft, not like an apple.

  ‘Should I peel it?’ I said, and felt stupid all the same, not knowing how to eat things I hadn’t had before.

  ‘No, just bite it,’ he said, looking at me expectantly, and I did, too hard against the softness and my teeth crashed together and the skin burst. The juice dripped all over my hand. I only laughed, not out of embarrassment but out of joy because it was so different and sweet. He didn’t eat one right away, and I assumed that was because he had his fill when he wanted.

  ‘They’re overripe,’ he said, ‘so we need to do something with them.’

  ‘Eat them?’

  ‘We can’t eat them all. We need a recipe for a peach crumble.’

  My grandmother had kept one book, the rest I threw away, boxes and boxes of them. I found the cookery books when I cleared out my mother’s house. I’d looked through them and felt desperately sad for all the things that she’d known I wouldn’t be able to make and had never tried. My grandmother kept one, though, and it was the most worn and spattered. I found it when we unpacked, those first few days in London. It was just a recipe book for cakes, and I think she kept it in hope that if she ever got the right amount of sugar, the right amount of flour, she might be able to make something.

  He gestured inside the box, and lifted a few peaches out, and I saw, hidden underneath,
a bag of sugar. ‘In case you didn’t have any,’ he said.

  He was right, and I looked at it, full and straining and tried to remember the last time I’d seen a bag of sugar like that.

  I got the book quite easily from a shelf in the kitchen, and found a recipe for apple crumble, which we used, and tried to amend for peaches. I washed them, holding two or three in my hands at a time, getting the measure of them. I watched them, sitting in my palm and askew on my fingers. I counted them, in my head: one, two, three, and then tried to count the shape of it, but it didn’t have a number.

  It struck me with food – especially the type that came straight from the earth and that I’d never held before – that everything had a name, and I didn’t always know it. That someone, somewhere, would say the word ‘peach’ and know exactly what a peach was, and it would conjure up the taste and texture of the thing in their mind, even though to me the name peach was just its name and wasn’t the thing itself. Maybe to him, peach was the thing itself.

  I used to wonder how long it would take for the reference to the thing to actually become the thing. I knew even then that I’d never have enough time to taste everything and put names to them, and learn the names, and know the things themselves as well. It was clear to me, holding the peaches I’d never held in my hands before, that they were abstract things and might remain so. It didn’t stop me from cutting them softly, gently, and watching them roll and slop on my chopping board cleared of vegetables. I sometimes squeezed them but mostly just plopped them into the pan and poured all the grains of sugar over them, a thing I did know well, after all.

  He sat on the kitchen stool and watched me the entire time. Never offering to help (I noted), but in his watchful gaze a kind of consideration that he must have thought was helpful or at least a contribution towards this act of putting things together in a way I’d never done before. By the time I’d scraped together enough floury and fat crumble for the top, I could smell the sweet syrup the peaches made on their own, and I thought I would recognise the smell of peaches again, if I ever had the fortune to smell them.