Oranges From Spain

by David Park

  ‘You’re crazy, Roon, wired-to-the-moon crazy. How’d we know which caravan was McShane’s? Have you never seen those caravan parks? – there’s hundreds of bloody caravans and they all look the same. We’re going back now before it’s too late. With your record, you’ll go inside if you’re caught – have you thought of that?’

  Roon slumped into defeated silence. The tape ended but he made no attempt to replace it, staring forlornly out of the passenger window like a prisoner on his way to the condemned cell. A rectangle of yellow light fractured the greyness as the entrance to a social club was held open by a doorman. Three middle-aged women emerged, struggling with coats and handbags. A young boy came out of a side street carrying a snooker cue, then two girls dressed in yellow and orange with ribbons in their hair. A bicycle tyre necklaced a street lamp.

  ‘Going inside doesn’t worry me,’ he replied in a slow and sullen voice. ‘It isn’t so bad. Colin O’Neill said it was a dead-on place and he’s been there often enough to know. So it doesn’t worry me.’

  ‘Anything would seem better to Colin O’Neill than where he lives. Have you ever seen it? It’s a real pit. He probably thinks he’s been sent to a holiday camp. He’s a real big-time gangster and all. Burning down mobile classrooms or doing old age pensioners’ meters – that’s about O’Neill’s limit. He probably only does it to get sent away.’

  Despite all his efforts, Roon could not stop himself grinning. The grin dispelled his despondency and he reverted to his original mood. As a couple of girls stood waiting to cross the road, he rolled the window down and shouted an intimate greeting that caused them to turn their heads away and giggle with enjoyed embarrassment.

  ‘Hey, Joe, we could touch for real class with a car like this. No scrubbers – just real class. They’d be fighting each other to get off with us. We could have our pick.’

  ‘Girls is only trouble – you’re better off without them. Take my advice – stay away from them, Roon. They spend your money and when it’s gone they’re after someone else.’

  ‘They’ll not spend my money – I never have any. It must feel good, though, to have a good-looking girl on your arm. The guy who owns this probably has a different one every night. Real class looks and clothes, the lot. Probably does the business right there in the back seat. What you think, Joe?’

  There was no answer. Joe sat still and silent, his eyes flicking repeatedly to the mirror and his hands tightening on the wheel. He wasn’t sure. It was too early to do anything that would distinguish them from other cars and yet he needed to be ready. He let Roon go on talking – there was no point in panicking him. He might be mistaken. It was important not to panic. Even if it was a police car it didn’t mean that they were being followed, and it might just as well be a routine patrol, totally unaware of their existence. Reducing their speed, he drove carefully and correctly, meekly staying in the inside lane, and as they approached the first turn-off he signalled and left the main road. His first glance in the mirror told him it was a police car and they were being followed. Automatically, his foot pressed down on the accelerator and the car surged forward. Roon’s unspoken question was answered by a sideways flick of the head and still more speed. As understanding filtered through to him, he slid lower into the seat and braced his feet against the front of the car. Joe expected, and partly wished, it to be like the films, but no sirens screeched hysterically or lights flashed, only a reciprocal increase of speed and steady pursuit.

  The street flashed by in a blur of rain-washed speed, and then another and another, each a perfect echo, unwinding and ravelling in a matted nightmare. Sweet Jesus – a dark figure stepped out from between parked cars … an instinctive swerve and the narrowest of misses. Every corner, brakes and gears screaming their angry protest. Directionless, following the road, taking corners blind, fear in the throat and churning the stomach. Holy orisons to an unloved God, swear words bursting out like the dispersal of bitter seed; a million Hail Marys – a promise of countless candles burning brightly in the intensity of momentary sincerity. An old man on a bicycle, unsteady, wobbling in confusion before falling on to the pavement and hitting his head. Children standing open-mouthed and staring before indifference washed over them and sent them back to the reality of play.

  Roon looked at his companion and was frightened by his expressionless stare. Then he whimpered and squirmed more tightly into the seat.

  ‘I’m scared, Joe. I don’t want to go inside. Colin O’Neill said the first thing that happens is they give you a kicking, then they lock you away on your own for days. I’d go crazy, Joe.’

  He started to cry.

  ‘No one’s going to give you a kicking. Trust me, Roon. They can’t take us while we stay in these streets. If we can lose them for a few minutes we’re not far from home, then we can bale out and run for it. Now, stop crying and get that cloth and keep the windows from steaming up.’

  The car’s headlights sparked a dog’s eyes into fire. Roon, happier with a task to concentrate on, rubbed furiously at the windows as if intent on polishing the glass. Suddenly and inexplicably, they found themselves in a dead-end – a one-sided street of blocked-up derelict houses. Opposite stretched a vast open area levelled for redevelopment where already some work had started and a building site had been established. Without hesitation, he vaulted the car into the heart of the blackness and headed for the distant lights that promised freedom. The car bumped and skidded over pot-holed waste ground strewn with bricks and debris, the two occupants bouncing up and down like riders on a bucking bronco. Roon’s legs locked rigid, his eyes closed, and his hands gripped the sides of the seats until his knuckles blanched. His mouth struggled silently to form the words of forgotten prayers. Something large smacked up against the underside of the car, causing it to veer violently to the left before the driver wrestled it back on to its original course. Joe aimed blindly at the lights ahead and fought desperately to keep control of the steering that seemed now to have a wild life of its own. With back wheels skidding, they slithered like a snake over the final stretch, before righting on the road opposite. Then, with a change of gears, they raced in the direction of safety. Unwilling to trust the mirror alone, they both turned sideways in their seats and squinted intently over their shoulders. The road behind them was clear. Roon let rip a shout of unbridled joy and clenched his fists in front of his face like someone who had just scored a match-winning goal. They had made it, and as the realisation broke over them, the tension burst and they drowned in an ecstasy of relief and exhilaration.

  ‘We did it, Joe! We did it! You were bloody magic. Wait till the lads hear about this. Eat your heart out, O’Neill! I thought we’d had it – I really did. It was like something out of a film. You were magic, Joe!’

  Joe relaxed in the praise and pumped the car’s horn several times to sound a raucous fanfare of celebration, familiar streets and places increasing their feeling of security. The writing on the walls glistened in the wet like letters of love. A feeling almost like regret stirred in his heart. Soon it would be time to ditch the car, and he had grown attached to it. They had been through a good deal together and he couldn’t help feeling something akin to loyalty. His hands caressed the wheel and he avoided thinking of its eventual end.

  ‘Well, Roon, you’re almost home.’

  The eye blinked for the last time. The heart’s home; broken glass cemented along the top of a wall like coloured icing on a cake; a wave of wire, twisted and barbed; deserted entries like barren black branches on a winter tree. The heart’s home, a crumbling sarcophagus about to crack open.

  ‘Almost there, Roon. Back to our Pleasure Dome. Back to where we belong.’ Splashed and dented, the black car crested the empty road. Up ahead the two landrovers partially blocked the street, their blue lights spinning. A police sergeant standing in the middle of the road shuffled his feet nervously and wished the wait was over. A radio crackled with static. The blue lights whirled. In a shop doorway, a policeman shouldered a rifle and turn
ed up his collar against the rain.

  Oranges from Spain

  It’s not a fruit shop any more. Afterwards, his wife sold it and someone opened up a fast food business. You wouldn’t recognise it now – it’s all flashing neon, girls in identical uniforms and the type of food that has no taste. Even Gerry Breen wouldn’t recognise it now. Either consciously or unconsciously, I don’t seem to pass that way very often, but when I do I always stop and look at it. The neon brightness burns the senses and sears the memories like a wound being cauterised; but then it all comes back and out flows a flood of memory that nothing can stem.

  I was sixteen years old and very young when I went to work for Mr Breen in his fruit shop. It was that summer when it seemed to rain every day and a good day stood out like something special. I got the job through patronage. My father and Gerry Breen went back a long way – that always struck me as strange, because they were so unlike as men. Apparently, they were both born in the same street and grew up together, and even when my father’s career as a solicitor took him up-market, they still got together occasionally. My father collected an order of fruit every Friday night on his way home from work, and as children we always talked about ‘Gerry Breen’s apples’. It’s funny the things you remember, and I can recall very clearly my mother and father having an argument about it one day. She wanted to start getting fruit from the supermarket for some reason, but my father wouldn’t hear of it. He got quite agitated about it and almost ended up shouting, which was very unlike him. Maybe he acted out of loyalty, or maybe he owed him some kind of favour, but whatever the reason, the arrangement continued.

  If his name is mentioned now they never do it in front of me. It’s almost as if he never existed. At first it angered me – it was almost as if they thought I would disintegrate at its sound – but gradually I came to be grateful for it. I didn’t even go to the funeral, and from that moment it was obvious my family sought to draw a curtain over the whole event. My mother had taken me away for a week’s holiday. We stayed with one of her sisters who lives in Donegal, and I’ve never had a more miserable time. Inevitably, it rained every day and there was nothing to do but mope around and remember, trapped in a house full of women, where the only sounds were the clink of china cups and the click of knitting needles. It was then the dreams started. The intervening years have lessened their frequency but not their horror. When I woke up screaming for about the tenth time, they took me to a special doctor who reassured them with all the usual platitudes – I’d grow out of it, time was a great healer, and so on. In one sense I did grow out of it – I stopped telling anyone about the nightmares and kept them strictly private. They don’t come very often now, but when they do only my wife knows. Sometimes she cradles me in her arms like a child until I fall asleep again.

  I hadn’t even really wanted a job in the first place. It was all my father’s idea. He remembered the long weeks of boredom I had complained about the summer before and probably the nuisance I had been as I lazed about the house. I walked right into his trap. He knew I’d been working up to ask if I could have a motorbike for my next birthday. The signs weren’t good, and my mother’s instinctive caution would have been as difficult a barrier to surmount as the expense, so it came as a surprise when my father casually enquired if I’d be interested in starting to save for one. I took the bait, and before I knew what was happening, I’d been fixed up with a summer job, working in Gerry Breen’s fruit shop.

  I didn’t like the man much at first. He was rough and ready and he would’ve walked ten miles on his knees to save a penny. I don’t think he liked me much either. The first day he saw me he looked me up and down with unconcealed disappointment, with the expression of someone who’d just bought a horse that wasn’t strong enough to do the work he had envisaged for it. He stopped short of feeling my arm muscles, but passed some comment about me needing to fill out a bit. Although he wasn’t tall himself, he was squat and had a kind of stocky strength that carried him through every physical situation. You knew that when he put his shoulder to the wheel, the chances were the wheel would spin. He wore this green coat as if it was some sort of uniform, and I never saw him in the shop without it. It was shiny at the elbows and collar, but it always looked clean. He had sandy-coloured hair that was slicked back and oiled down in a style that suggested he had once had an affinity with the Teddy boys. The first time I met him I noticed his hands, which were flat and square, and his chisel-shaped fingers. He had this little red pen-knife, and at regular intervals he used it to clean them. The other habit he had was a continual hitching-up of his trousers, even though there was no apparent prospect of them falling down. He was a man who seemed to be in perpetual motion. Even when he was standing talking to someone, there was always some part of him that was moving, whether it was transferring his pencil from one ear to the other, or hoisting up the trousers. It was as if there was a kind of mechanism inside him. Sometimes I saw him shuffle his feet through three hundred and sixty degrees like some kind of clockwork toy. For him sitting still would have been like wearing a strait-jacket, and I don’t think any chair, no matter how comfortable, ever held him for more than a few minutes.

  On my first morning, after his initial disappointment had worn off and he had obviously resolved to make the best of a bad job, he handed me a green coat, similar to his own but even older. It had a musty smell about it that suggested it had been hanging in a dark cupboard for some considerable time, and although I took it home that first weekend for my mother to wash, I don’t think the smell ever left it. The sleeves were too long, so all summer I wore it with the cuffs turned up. My first job was chopping sticks. As well as fruit and vegetables, he sold various other things, including bundles of firewood. Out in the back yard was a mountain of wood, mostly old fruit boxes, and for the rest of that morning I chopped them into sticks and put them in polythene bags. At regular intervals he came out to supervise the work and caution me with monotonous regularity to be careful with the hatchet. It was obvious I wasn’t doing it to his satisfaction; his dissatisfaction was communicated by a narrowing of his eyes and a snakelike hiss. As far as I was concerned, there weren’t too many ways you could chop sticks, but I was wrong. Unable to restrain his frustration any longer, he took the hatchet and proceeded to instruct me in the correct technique. This involved gently inserting it into the end of the piece of wood and then tapping the other end lightly on the ground so that it split gently along the grain. When he was assured I had mastered the method, he watched critically over my first efforts.

  ‘Too thick, son, too thick. Did your da never teach you how to chop sticks?’

  It was only when I had produced a series of the thinnest slivers that he seemed content. I suppose it meant he got more bundles of firewood, but you wouldn’t have got much of a fire out of them. It made me feel guilty somehow, like I was an accessory to his stinginess. ‘Did your da never teach you how to?’ was a phrase I heard repeatedly that summer, and it inevitably prefaced a period of instruction in the correct technique and subsequent supervision.

  The rest of my time that first morning was divided between sweeping up and humping bags of spuds from the yard into the store-room. No matter how often I brushed that shop floor, it always seemed to need to be done again. I must have filled a whole dump with cauliflower leaves, and I never stopped hating that smell. Perhaps, if I’m honest, I felt the job was a little beneath me. By the time the day was over, my back was aching and I was still trying to extract splinters from my hands. The prospect of a summer spent working like that filled me with despondency, and the attraction of a motorbike lost some of its appeal. I thought of telling my father I didn’t want to go back, but was stopped by the knowledge that I would have to listen to eternal speeches about how soft young people were, and how they wanted everything on a plate. That I didn’t need, and so I resolved to grit my teeth and stick it out.

  The shop was situated at the bottom of the Antrim Road, and while it wasn’t that big, every bit of space
was used, either for display or storage. It started outside on the pavement where each morning, after carrying out wooden trestles and resting planks on them, we set out trays of fruit, carefully arranged and hand-picked, designed to attract and entice the passer-by. Above all this stretched a green canvas canopy which was supported by ancient iron stanchions, black with age. When it rained it would drip on to the front displays of fruit and so all that summer I had to carry them in and out of the shop. Inside was a long counter with old-fashioned scales and a till that rang as loudly as church bells. Under the counter were paper bags of every size, miles of string, metal hooks, bamboo canes, withered yellow rubber gloves, weights, elastic bands and a paraphernalia of utensils of unfathomable purpose. On the wall behind the counter was an assortment of glass-fronted shelving, sagging under the weight of fruit and vegetables. Above head height, the walls were covered in advertising posters that had obviously arrived free with consignments of fruit and looked like they had been there since the shop opened. On the customer side was more shelving and below it a clutter of wooden and cardboard boxes that seemed designed to ladder tights or catch the wheels of shopping trolleys. If there was any kind of logical system in the layout, I never managed to work it out. I got the impression it had evolved into a sprawling disorder and that so long as everything was close at hand, the owner saw no reason to change it.

  In the back of the shop was a store-room where among merchandise and debris stood a wooden table, two chairs, a gas cooker and a sink. The only other room was a small washroom. Beyond this was a small cobbled yard, enclosed by a brick wall topped with broken glass. Over everything hung the sweet, ripe smell of a fruit shop, but in Mr Breen’s shop it was mixed with a mildewed mustiness, a strange hybrid that stayed in my senses long after I had left the scene.