Blenheim Orchard

by Tim Pears

  Sheena cycled on, into the glare of the morning sun, annoyed she’d not brought her sunglasses. That was what she’d been trying to remember when Blaise thumped downstairs. It was bright and hot as August already, this glassy Tuesday morning in June.

  A little further along the canal Sheena came up off the towpath and cycled west along Aristotle Lane, between the recreation ground and the Canal Walk Development. At the corner of Waterside estate, one path, which always smelled of dogshit, led to the bridge over the railway, and on to Port Meadow. The other ran here, all around the outside of the fresh wooden fence of the new Phil and Jim primary school site.

  Sheena leaned her bike against a metal stanchion and locked it. She pushed through the swing gate and looked up and down the railway line. To her left she could see Oxford Station, and a congregation of carriages and platforms and red lights; to her right the three tracks curved off out of sight a couple of hundred metres away. There was nothing coming from either direction, so she crossed on wooden boards laid between the rails. Through another metal gate, crudely weighted to swing shut behind her with an ugly clang, Sheena entered the Aristotle Lane allotments. Beneath her rucksack, her T-shirt stuck to her back.

  From double-dug, deep-weeded, manured and seeded plots green shoots sprouted. Large versions of the beansprouts Hector had grown on the kitchen windowsill for school; of Ezra’s pots of basil planted at weekly intervals. Jill McTear had always preached the grow-your-own gospel.

  ‘Look at the size of our garden,’ Sheena complained.

  ‘Get an allotment,’ Jill invariably suggested. ‘The taste when you’ve grown vegetables yourself: there’s no comparison.’

  Sheena walked between the plots. Here and there short old men pottered between shed and bed of their allotments. Gathered sticks or bricks or buckets. They erected delicate structures out of bamboo poles and willow switches, with the patience of visionaries. Experimental skeletal frames for buildings that would grow organically.

  None of them, as far as she could see, was actually digging in their carefully laid-out plots: it was as if they were less gardeners than retired observers of a collaboration between seeds and soil.

  A tall, thin young man with a blond moustache, who nodded hello, was digging a long trench. Sheena also passed one or two women, thirtyish, with small children playing in a section of the plot like a sand pit. The mothers plunged spades into black soil, stamped them further in, heaved each clod up; bent over to tug weeds loose.

  In the far corner of the allotments was an overgrown area of scrub and bramble. Sheena negotiated a path around thorns and between nettles, lifted her feet over wild roots. Bent branches and stooped beneath them. The place was another, tiny piece of wasteland. A satellite to the Wasteland.

  Sheena picked her way into a small clearing. In the middle, invisible from outside, was a low bender, covered with drab canvas. Mole was sitting cross-legged staring at a Butagaz burner, its flame a haze. A small kettle was heating up. Mole raised his gaze to Sheena, and nodded. She sat across from him, swinging her rucksack off her shoulder to the ground, and pulled out wrapped items of food. Mole swapped the kettle for a small frying pan and cut a knob of butter into it, even before Sheena unwrapped and passed him two sausages from Feller’s Organic Butcher’s. The pan accepted them with a sizzle. Unsurprised by her arrival, now he seemed to know exactly what she’d brought him: he took her gifts of eggs, bread, tomatoes, mushrooms, teabags and milk, nodding at each item as if she’d merely delivered his order. He was truly psychic, she thought. Or was it that wherever Mole pitched his tent people took it upon themselves to bring him alms? And what they gave was entirely predictable.

  Who knows? It wasn’t something Sheena was going to ask him. Mole said so little he deterred her from talking. He made her hear the redundancy of her words; the fatuity of her voice. Its imposition upon the silent air.

  Mole wore army-surplus clothes. He was squat and stocky, with a black mop of curly hair and a full beard. His cooking style, with the one pan on a single hob, was deliberate, methodical: when the sausages were fried he took them out and put them on a plate to one side; melted more butter, cut carefully up and fried mushrooms and spitting tomatoes. Cut bread. Buttered bread.

  Sheena Pepin had first seen Mole when she was up a ladder, tying a banner between willow branches on which were brightly daubed the words: THE SKY IS HELD UP BY THE TREES. Looking down she’d seen a man walking slowly, bent over, deep in concentration. When she reached the ground she saw that beneath a Neanderthal beard and grime was a youthful face, and that, hovering between his thick, filthy fingers, two thin and delicate dowsing rods twitched and swung.

  ‘What do you reckon?’ Sheena had asked the young diviner. ‘Are there force fields here? Occult energy. Do ley lines converge below us?’

  He took his time before gazing back at her, with black eyes that Sheena felt burrow into her. Then, solemnly and shyly, Mole had nodded his head of matted hair.

  Last Friday, shortly after dawn, Sheena had waded through the rank water of the reedbeds. Mole followed her, four more in their group behind, crouched down in the boggy water, groping slow and muted in the light and smoky morning. Reptilian in their wetsuits and drysuits, they slid through the swampy breeding habitat of water voles, stirring up with their movement fetid odours. Up ahead, Sheena spotted a guard standing on the canal path: he was facing away, east towards the back gardens of the houses on Hayfield Road and south along the towpath. She turned and made a gesture of silence with a finger to her lips. Mud squelched in her footsteps underwater. Willow branches above their heads squeaked against each other.

  A little further on they hauled themselves out, and squatted on a dry spur amongst the high reeds. Sheena turned, to find Mole already passing her the pencil-thin periscope she’d just decided she was ready to employ. She nodded in acknowledgement, smiling to herself at the way his taciturnity infected others: you soon imagined you were communicating as psychically as he did. She peered through the reeds at a fluoro-jacketed man with a tripod and theodolite. Another with a red-and-white-striped totemic stick, moving together through the Wasteland.

  Drivers had turned off the engines of their bulldozers and stood smoking, awaiting their masters’ orders like the beaters of some country-house shoot. Checking her watch, Sheena turned and nodded to Mole and the others crouching behind him. And at ten minutes to eight precisely, on the last Friday morning of the spring of 2003, out of the reedbed the skinsuited waders had risen and run.

  Mole did everything with cautious intent. He moved with an anthropoidal lumber that drew attention to his physical strength, and also suggested that he could spring into action any time he wanted. He’d appeared at the Wasteland just after it was registered as a Town Green, as if to join in the celebration. In retrospect it was as if he knew the celebrations to be illusory, and the campaign would need fresh impetus in the months to come.

  Sheena watched him. ‘How old are you, Mole?’ she asked. She thought he might be anything between twenty-five and thirty-five, or even older, behind that beard and tanned, weatherbeaten skin. She didn’t expect him to answer the question. As if her inability to guess were due to some purposeful evasion on his part, a measure of intentional disguise.

  Mole broke one egg, and then another, into the pan. The gelatinous liquid solidified, and whitened. He scooped tiny spoonfuls of hot butter on top of the intact yolks. ‘Twenty-four,’ he said.

  Sheena watched him eat, this young man who lived with so little. He nodded to her occasionally with a certain grave gratitude. She felt no flutter in the stomach, no exciting uncertainty; no, nor trepidation either, coming here again, the fourth or was it the fifth time, even though she realised plain enough that people knew this stranger was here, and were watching. Allotment holders, forever having the fruit of their labours nicked, and being undermined by bottle-diggers, were snoops from necessity. Sheena had become a recognisable local figure, too, and surely there were people who knew people she knew
. Yet she allowed herself to act with a careless, numb bravado.

  They drank tea as the sun rose higher. It beat down upon them and also upon the earth, warming it up, drawing the vegetation that grew inside the soil out and up towards its life-affirming heat. Mole rolled himself a cigarette. They sat in silence. Sheena closed her eyes. Her blood moved thin and easy around her body. Without sight, her other senses became keener: she could hear the air vibrating around her, could feel it on her skin, could smell the ground coming to life around her. She sensed the potential of all the slumbering life in the earth’s crust as it warmed towards the sun. Stirring. Realising its opportunity.

  When she opened her eyes it was to find Mole looking at her. He put down his enamel mug. Without rising to his full height he turned and crawled into the bender. Sheena followed. They lay on groundsheets and blankets people had given Mole. The smells of woodsmoke and patchouli oil that came off his clothes were stronger inside the tent and so, as she removed them, was the aroma of his body. She kissed and caressed him, his beard a both unpleasant and arousing novelty to her, like the stale tobacco taste of his mouth. Sheena could feel herself moisten well before, for all the sensual exploration of her caresses, Mole hardened. When eventually she felt his erection firm in her grasp she took him into her.

  She didn’t need him to touch her with his fingers or his tongue. All she wanted him to do was to move back and forth, back and forth, and that is what he did, with a slow deliberation. The longer he thrust at her the more Mole perspired in the warm bender, and the more the smell of his sour sweat was infused with the scent of patchouli, and a yeasty tang of beer.

  ‘Yes,’ Sheena exhorted him. ‘Keep going. Yes, don’t stop. Just keep going like this.’ The sun beat down on the canvas, and into the heat of their exertions.

  With every move they made Mole gave a deep grunt. In his gradually quickening breath the smell of dope emerged from his lungs. His libido, slow to rise, promised to be as obtuse as his speech, reptilian, unimaginative, resolute, and it was all Sheena wanted.

  ‘People are still asking what women want,’ Simon had said at some point the previous Sunday. ‘Six hundred years after the Wife of Bath. No, Ezra, I say, what do you think? Tell me, Sheena. Would a woman want a man who gave her orgasms, but never asked her for one of his own? Would she like that?’

  Simon leaned back. Sheena and Ezra and Minty waited out what was only a rhetorical pause, knowing not to interrupt their friend when he was about to bestow upon them the answer to his own question.

  ‘Well, of course she would,’ he’d said, leaning forward. ‘And of course she wouldn’t. That’s the point, isn’t it? Men and women appear to be equally complex, unpredictable, infuriating creatures. Who both, oddly enough, like to screw.’

  Simon spoke such nonsense, he really did, but he made Sheena laugh; there weren’t many who did that. Poor Ezra, who tried so hard for her. Who wanted so much to do the right thing for his partner, her every orgasm something they toiled for, an effort, a labour, each session a clumsy foray into her erogenous zones, a blind search for her clitoris or G spot, an attempt to bring something new – a different angle, a different rhythm – and invariably the falling back to tried and trusted old routes to a well-worn satisfaction.

  What did she do for him, though? Well, something: he usually got it up for her. Though it occurred to her he’d not asked for a blow-job in years. The truth was, Sheena admitted, she’d been in love with Ezra, once, without his ever having really turned her on. Her own sensuality remained as much of a mystery to Sheena as it ever was. Each of her small children had been edible – to gaze at their bodies could literally make her salivate; a common maternal response. With Hector this hunger continued, was as powerful now, as he moved to the brink of puberty and began to withdraw from her physical affection. Hector seemed so gorgeous to Sheena: when she was still allowed to cuddle him it wasn’t hard to imagine taking their caresses further, into full-blown seduction.

  It was for the children, Sheena told herself, that they stayed together this long. She and Ezra were friends, companionable shapes of wood bobbing in water, and each had come to an accommodation with his or her own need. Ezra surely knew of her cursory liaisons, opportunities that had presented themselves from time to transient time. But something had to give. If there were only Blaise and Hector they could float as free from each other as they wished once Hec was sixteen or so – except that now there was Louie, their accidental gift; their beautiful punishment for one lazy, late-night gamble.

  ‘Yes, yes, go on … God,’ she moaned at the muscular bearded troll who was burrowing into her, thrusting deeper. ‘Don’t stop. Keep going.’ This was sex: Sheena could feel deep inside, at the liquid edge of sensation, a distant wave. It was slowly approaching. She knew that beyond it there’d be another, and another, just as long as this animal in his stifling lair was able to keep fucking her, overpowering her amongst the smells of canvas, dope and sweat, which mingled in the tent with the juicy, sweet-smelling hunger emanating from herself.

  Blaise and Ezra Pepin whacked the ball at each other with an eager aggression. Ezra threw himself around, relishing despite his fatigue the thirst of his lungs and sweat on his skin. The Ferry Sports Centre hall smelled of sour old rubber, and the overhead lights filled the arena with a stark and hostile luminosity designed to render human beings wan, pallid, overly realistic. But neither father nor daughter, alone at a table-tennis table this Tuesday lunchtime, paid heed to anything other than their contest.

  Blaise got her body behind every shot, and swung the bat with the whole of her right arm. She moved with a surprising and supple fluidity, easing back on to her toes between strokes, while her father made his shots with a flick of the wrist and moved jerkily, snappily, in an effective but awkward manner that appeared old-fashioned, as if it had developed for the way that ping-pong used to be played, but was being rendered extinct by evolving technique.

  Their rallies were conversations between them, each serve the proposal of some notion intended to inspire quick-witted repartee.

  Here, what do you think of this?

  Interesting, but had you considered: Crack!

  Fine. Yes. And how about: Crack!

  Ah, but on the other hand: Crack!

  Fascinating point you raise, but then: Crack!

  Blaise had put on weight around the age of seven or eight, and carried it as a temporary accompaniment. She moved with the grace of the lean child she’d once been, and the woman she’d started to become, her body morphing, elongating, in front of her father’s eyes.

  ‘Shot!’ Ezra conceded, as the white plastic bubble flashed past him, a note of pride in his voice which suggested, had anyone been there to hear it, that since it was his offspring who’d made the shot then he deserved some measure of credit.

  Ezra had to remind himself that there was more time, always more time, than you thought. Blaise’s bat struck the ball with such a loud bony thwack that even if the projectile was not actually a blur in your vision then the terror that sound invoked could make it so. But only for a millisecond. Then the blur resolved itself into this light and airy globe which, if Ezra stepped back away from the table, slowed down and drifted towards him, allowing him time to position himself, to freeze in a stance of readiness for a split second of his own. Before striking with a whip of his wrist, to stun the ball with a fatal blow. Ping-pong as martial art.

  They stood well back from the table, then, both father and daughter, neither forced to by the other’s excellence, in truth, so much as opting each to do so because it was from that position that they could play long rallies of spectacular smacks and whacks. Of leaping defensive lobs, and last-gasp retrievals.

  ‘The champion’s soaking it up!’ Ezra commentated on himself, his trainers squeaking on the lacquered wooden floor, lunging grunts echoing in the high roof. Blaise’s white polo shirt clung wet with perspiration.

  Although it was from that position that they had the most fun, Ezra kept an
unfair advantage in reserve. As Blaise went ahead, 3-2 in their best of seven games, so Ezra inched closer to the table, hitting the ball back earlier, forgoing the pleasure of open rallies for a cramped, competitive effectiveness. From a crabbed hunch he chopped and sliced the ball, making sly drop shots and acute angles, forcing his daughter to scramble after shots she couldn’t quite reach.

  ‘It’s not fair, Daddy,’ Blaise shrieked, her face flushed, as she saw victory slip from her grasp, again, and he had to concede that it wasn’t. One day Blaise would beat him, Ezra accepted. But not yet, not this day, even if it was her birthday – a fact to which neither had made reference – and if he could put off that day as long as possible it was, he trusted, as many fathers surely had before him, as much for her as for himself.

  * * *

  It was the custom in the Pepin family, initiated by Ezra from witnessing its like amongst the Indians he’d studied, to make no acknowledgement of someone’s birthday until the evening.