What Becomes

by A. L. Kennedy

  The pack says it’s delicious and can be enjoyed at many different times. I have certainly tried it at many different times. I’m not sure I could pinpoint the truly enjoyable ones. I would allow that the range of flavours is impressive – but normal human beings could only be expected to tolerate three: Strawberry, Nothing and Chicken. I think Nothing’s my favourite.

  His powders did the job. And they contained chromium chloride and sodium molybdate, phosphorous, iodine, biotin: numerous arcane materials upon which he was apparently meant to thrive.

  I may have been undernourished previously.

  At lunchtime Peter whisked up his lunch in his personal mug with his personal fork and then drank it in the basement, because if you own the shop you can choose not to man the till at busy times and you should be able to stay undisturbed and chilly for the whole of your break if you want. It always was chilly in here – that was its disadvantage as a hiding place.

  Fintan gangled down the steps at twenty past one. His trainers and jeans, emerging before him through the trapdoor, were even more paint-stained than usual which would mean that he’d been creating all night – probably some kind of sci-fi tableau – his descriptions of them generally sounded ghastly. He was laughing.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What?’ Fintan seeming slightly alarmed when Peter stood up from among the boxes and pallets of stock.

  ‘I said what. What are you laughing at?’

  ‘Oh, yes . . .’ Fintan paused and it was clear that he’d come down intending to talk to someone who wasn’t Peter.

  ‘You were looking for Tim.’

  ‘Yes.’ He scratched under his two T-shirts, giving a glimpse of gingerish belly fur.

  ‘He’s not on yet. What were you laughing about?’

  Fintan surrendered, because presumably any audience would do. ‘I was out straightening up the display outside?’

  Peter hated this – the way people made statements now as if they were questions, as if there was nothing definitive any more. It was American habit, or Australian.

  It’s bloody stupid, is what it is.

  ‘Yes, you were out with the display . . .’

  Fintan rubbed the grubby-looking area within which he was trying to summon up a moustache. ‘Right . . . and this old lady comes along? And she picks up a box of strawberries and she’s tugging my sleeve and I’m wanting her to let me alone, because I thought she was complaining, but she wasn’t.’ Fintan grinned.

  ‘And what was she? Having a heart attack? Prop-ositioning you?’

  ‘She wanted to know what to do with strawberries?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She wanted to know what to do with strawberries. I mean, she was four hundred years old and she didn’t know what to do with them and there’s not much you can, like – is there? – add cream and sugar, or you make jam? So I’m listing stuff . . . strawberry crumble, strawberry pie, strawberry gravy, strawberry pudding, fricasse of strawberry risotto. Just this big fucking list and she’s, like, just listening to it? Absolutely.’

  This was Fintan who interfered with sharon fruit. Which was to say that all the assistants did and had and quite probably would – once one of them discovered the secret, you couldn’t contain it. The knowledge that pressing your finger, pushing it in through the skin of a sharon fruit, felt so much, and so plainly, exactly like fingering something else that no young, hairy, grubby fruiterer could resist it – that wisdom could not be suppressed.

  They used to be called persimmons, not sharons. Give them a chav name, this is what happens – they’re easy – they’ll let anyone have them, any time.

  Fintan was still talking. ‘Why do they pick me? There was another weirdy earlier – which of these oranges will be the sweetest? I just pointed – random . . . Why not?’ He stretched. ‘That’s . . . and, anyway, how could you live that long and not know what to do with a strawberry for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘Maybe she was senile.’

  ‘Yeah . . . I fucking hate them all.’ Fintan hiccoughed a final giggle and then ducked and scrambled back up to the shop.

  Peter went and put on the kettle, washed out his mug at the sink in what was supposed to be their earth-free area.

  Bloody, bloody hell and damnation, I employ savages.

  Because they don’t bother me and they’re cheap.

  It occurred to him that the woman might simply have wanted company, a chat. If you were lonely enough, you might do that.

  Because you’d want to change. People can change.

  And, talking of change, my wallet has to go: I’ve had enough of it. You can’t have a brown wallet – it’s not right – and mine isn’t even brown, it’s beige. Why would anyone make beige leather? Can’t have respect for yourself when you’re dealing with that every day.

  It was badly designed, in any case, I should have noticed when I bought it. Not enough places for all of the cards you’re meant to carry so that you can drive your car and borrow books and rent out videos and pay by cheque and leave your parts to strangers when you’re dead.

  But it does give you this stupid, little pocket that wouldn’t fit anything useful – when they designed it, what did they think? ‘We’ll have to provide them with somewhere to store three pence in coppers, or a lock of hair, some pepper.’ And there’s space for a photograph, only it’s fronted with mesh, a black mesh, so if you put a picture in there, your sweetheart, or whoever, would be staring at you through a fog. She would be like a prisoner, like someone who couldn’t see you at all.

  But by two thirty it was venomously raining and Pete couldn’t bring himself to leave the shop, never mind search out purveyors of quality wallets. So he replenished the mangoes – they were high-maintenance, mangoes – and the navel oranges and gave someone young a student discount, although she had no proper identification.

  Probably has a cheap wallet – no room for her student card.

  And they all come here for discounts, anyway: pensioner discount, staff discount, pal of staff discount, fancied by staff discount.

  Not that it mattered. Flowers were what made the money. He could give the rest of it away, if he wanted – as long as Moira was lurking and tying bouquets and getting the love-sick to pay through the nose for carna-tions, or orchids, or roses: the floral cliché of their choice.

  It’s the thought that counts.

  But people like thoughts demonstrated.

  A twinge kicked in about his kidneys, perhaps a muscle out of sorts, but he felt he should keep on working at the till, because it formed a good distraction and there was nothing worse for pain than brooding.

  Love-sick.

  Love-sickened.

  Love-sickness.

  There’s bound to be a workshop you can take for that.

  Or you could simply stand in your shop and hear yourself dying and do the job that is supposed to pass your time – and then see her.

  His day – that day – had not been ready for seeing her.

  His days were not ambitious in that way.

  Other customers had been about because it was lunchtime, but they were just the usual. She wasn’t. She was made of something different.

  Silly, how you went home and you thought about her, having nothing else to occupy you beyond a small number of television programmes about Hitler and sharks, anything else being really too much of a challenge, if not an insult, to the mind.

  ‘They ought to combine them. “Hitler’s Sharks” – everybody would watch that.’

  Your voice higher than it should have been, because of your thinned blood – she was thinning your blood – and this was the tenth, the eleventh time, that she’d been in – buying apples, russet apples – and, for some reason, she was late, not with you at half past one – as had become the custom – more like almost half past five which is when you close. The place is already empty – no last-minute death race for parsnips – Fintan mooching in the basement, doing God knows what, and so there is only you and her together and you’re talki
ng.

  To be more precise, she is talking. ‘It doesn’t really matter what’s on, I just go to sleep, anyway. Nine o’clock and I’m in my bed. That’s dreadful, isn’t it.’ She is on her way home and wearing the striped scarf she always does – stripes along the length and not the width – and you know that her hair is soft, although you haven’t touched it: you’ve memorised it – tumbled by the weather when she comes in and threads of light through it, mixed with the brown – and she has the type of fur-edged, padded coat that suggests she feels the cold and she is called Amanda and isn’t uncomfortable telling you that and she knows that you are Peter, she knows you, and there is nothing dreadful, there could never be anything dreadful, about her being in her bed.

  ‘Not as dreadful as trained Nazi sharks preying on merchant shipping and holding our plucky island race to ransom.’ And you are adrift with her and racing, ‘Do you know we’re just about to . . . ? Is that all you . . . ? Because at half past five . . . ?’ And down in the basement Fintan is having manual sex with fruit, is feeling fruit, ‘The apples . . . ?’ And with you, there is nothing definitive any more.

  ‘They’re what I want, yes.’

  ‘Well, you just have them. They’re going off. That is, they’re fine to eat, they’ll be fine for days. But everything’s going off in the end, isn’t it?’

  All of which, amazingly, doesn’t make her punch you and run away. She only takes the apples and puts them in her backpack. She doesn’t leave you. ‘Russets are nice, aren’t they?’

  You nod. ‘A fine apple. ’Course, if I could get Adams Pearmain, I’d give you them.’

  She only smiles and doesn’t ask why and that means you don’t get to tell her they are the best apples in the world, but still your progress with her is almost too unimpeded, topples you in your head – the way you’re being with her and her with you: the way it makes you laugh and heats your hands, your chest – and she is younger than you, you’re not sure by how much, but she’s younger.

  Maybe she’s looking at you and thinking that you’re older and believing that’s a nice thing, as nice as apples.

  ‘Fintan! Lock up, will you?’ You are not feeling the cold. ‘I’ll walk you out, if you’d like.’ You could be in your shirtsleeves, letting it snow, and still come to no harm. ‘And wash your hands, Fintan!’

  ‘You don’t have to.’ She smiles. ‘You don’t have to come with me.’

  ‘No, I could do with some air. Very difficult to breathe in here – cigar smoke. It’s the broccoli – they all smoke. I confiscate their matches, but they just get more – I think from the cauliflowers – they are related, after all.’ And, already beyond your control, your mouth says, ‘D’you know, I could do with a coffee, too.’

  This making her take your wrist, slightly clumsy. She squeezes your wrist, so that the shop hangs for a moment, lifted in hope. Then, ‘I can’t tonight,’ before she lets you go.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Next time. If you’re here.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Your upper arms unmanageable while you shrug at her, wordless, and then shepherd her out and along the street, because that seems correct – because of this frailty you find in her, a body that ought to be cared for.

  For a while you do not notice you are shivering.

  She points up ahead. ‘I just catch the underground.’ Small hands that seem calm. ‘And then it’s the train and then I walk back.’

  This unfolds and tears in your stomach. ‘Because you live . . . ?’ The street dark with autumn.

  ‘In Edinburgh.’

  Mildly distant. ‘Right.’ But not impossibly so. ‘I see.’ The glow from the sign for the underground already visible. ‘Hell of a journey . . .’ And your head already keen to suggest that she should move closer, that this would be sensible, that you should have some say in where she lives.

  ‘I know. Commuting . . . But I’m getting used to it. I have a good job here, a good flat there. Not good as if they’re impressive, or anything, just good because I like them.’ Lovely that she’s shy like this, self-effacing. ‘It means I read a lot, too – coming in, going back. I haven’t got through this many books since I was a teenager.’

  There had been a small kiss when they parted and no more shivering, his temperature fixed.

  Got back and Fintan hadn’t even noticed I’d been gone. Empty upstairs and I’d left the door unlocked – could have been robbed blind.

  But I wasn’t entirely stupid – I just endangered my business for a while: I didn’t blunder off into expecting that Amanda would let something happen, not between us, not really.

  I wasn’t entirely stupid. Only happy.

  Which is beyond stupidity, beyond any capacity for thought.

  Peter banged the till hard enough to hurt his hand, brought himself back to here and now. This attracted Tim, a little concerned. ‘Yes, chief?’ Tim with the currently crimson sideburns and the succession of threatening T-shirts.

  Makes me sound as if I’m running a fire station. Or a tribe. The greengrocer’s tribe – any excuse for dancing round the spuds . . . Lordy, all the high jinks and madcap antics we enjoy.

  ‘Look, I’m going to split some swedes in the basement. You take over.’ Peter darting off to the back of the shop and down the stairs, because otherwise he’d have to suffer Tim’s sympathetic expression.

  Being pitied by a colour-blind twenty-year-old: precisely what I do not need.

  What he did need was the cleaver and a good sack of swedes to halve and quarter, pretending this rendered them manageable and handy for single people, when in fact it just prevented him punching walls.

  No one eats swede, anyway: it’s old-fashioned.

  He cleaved with unnecessary force.

  He wrapped the first four slices in plastic.

  He took another swede and cracked it, released that vaguely rancid scent.

  He realised once again that the act of slicing was always less helpful than he hoped.

  I never can split open the right thing.

  His shoulders were starting to rise and clench – you had to watch that or you’d get these atrocious headaches.

  I wasn’t entirely stupid.

  The boys, Tim in particular, had made more of matters than they should. Whenever Amanda arrived they would scurry off like schoolgirls. Or if Peter was stuck in the basement, they’d trot and fetch him and no pretence left that she was here for apples, for any kind of shopping.

  Not that Pete was often downstairs, because she’d eased into the new habit of arriving at something past five and this became something he watched for, maybe once or twice a week, his vertebrae crouching in him until she appeared and he could leave with her and go to the coffee shop – the one with the filthy coffee, but at least it stayed open late – and they’d talk about books.

  Nothing else.

  She gave him books.

  The same words that were in her mind, now in yours, still warm.

  Books that seemed to indicate she knew him and what he would like.

  Started off neutral: DeLillo, Jim Thompson: then Flann O’Brien, so you’d get a laugh. Then the James M. Cain: desperadoes and speed and sex. And sex.

  He’d wanted to reciprocate. She’d never done the Russians, so he gave her Anna Karenina – all that love and honour and theories about The Land – and he’d gone out and bought lots of Chekhov so that she could have it. Chekhov who married late.

  Older men and younger women. Very nineteenth century.

  He celebrated with delighted complaints. ‘You give me too much.’ And this was true – she did.

  ‘I have too many books.’ She was looking at him.

  ‘Got me reading again.’

  ‘You’ve got me eating more fruit.’ She was looking at him in a way that changed his face, made him different.

  ‘So you’ll live longer, which is good.’

  ‘You’ll live a long time, too. I insist.’ She was looking at him and making him loved – which is every difference
in the world.

  And she gave him R. Crumb – big book of his cartoons: bits of philosophy and Catholic schoolgirls with monster tits and fucking: people fucking guiltily, people fucking freely, people fucking anything.

  Looking at drawings of cocks that she must have looked at.

  Looking at a scrawny, naked man, caught in a box, twisting and struggling in this tiny box, his soft, little dick lolling down, defeated.

  You never know what someone means to send you.

  And she lent him a fat hardback, an anthology of poems – poetry not quite his thing – but he took it home and waited until bedtime, had a shower and cocoa to get comfy and then slipped down snug into bed and opened up.

  It was all right. Not fantastic. But all right.

  Stuff about buildings, deer, a broken window, dead relatives, love.

  And then he was parting page 26 from page 27 and there was a hair.

  Hers.

  Goldenish with little kinks in it and curved across the paper.

  He touched it.

  Long enough to stretch from the tip of his middle finger to the tenderest place in his wrist.

  It touched him back.

  He felt goldenish and afraid.

  Because it’s always better to be contented than in love. But when you’ve had nothing for so long, you get greedy and confused. You want to be more than contented, you want to be burned up alive and made again. You want always to have a loved face.

  Why wouldn’t you want that?

  He didn’t think he’d altered in the way he was with her after that. It had only made more sense that he should start taking the train to Edinburgh at weekends, going to see her – and sharing new coffee shops, new books: the cold, malty air and the drizzle letting her soak into him, his clothes. They went to the big new cinema and held hands and giggled, but still kept holding. They took their pictures in the photo booth at the railway station.

  In my wallet: her hair just cut and we wanted to immortalise it – this haircut – and her lips are quite thin but they have this delicacy and it seems she’s about to speak or smile, and she was looking at me, letting me have the way that she looked at me.

  In my wallet.