Sweet Fruit, Sour Land

by Rebecca Ley

  He smiled at me as he watched my fascination over the way the syrup bubbled, the way the mixture poured into a baking pan, just like apples, only more glutinous. I thought his smile was endearment, and he was fascinated with me the way I was fascinated with peaches.

  I didn’t think of why. I didn’t think of peaches as a form of something more intricate and delicate and powerful; but I couldn’t have known it then.

  I sat next to the oven the entire time the crumble baked, so afraid it would burn, or break. I consulted the recipe for apples several times, but it had its limitations, and so did he. He didn’t know, and didn’t bother to pretend to, and so just watched me watching the pudding, as I held the tea towel firmly between my hands, ready at any moment to retrieve it from the belly of the clanking-iron wood-burning oven. We sweated in the kitchen. All the doors and windows were open, but the smell it conjured made up for the heat.

  It was another world.

  It was summer, so it didn’t get dark until much later. But when it did, just as the crumble was ready to come out, he feigned surprise that there were no electric lights to be turned on. ‘All the sockets are there,’ he said, and I pretended not to have ever noticed. I pretended I didn’t always look at the hanging parts where lightbulbs used to be, and the switches and plugs that used to contain something. He said he could help wire some things up, so I could benefit from that hour of electricity people had as part of Mrs P’s fair distribution policy. I didn’t know how to tell him, yes you’re entitled to that hour, but only if you can afford it. I thought of people like him who got that hour, and wondered what they did with it. If they got it every day, every evening, did they sit and luxuriate under its warmth? Or did they take it for granted, and not think about the light that arrived in the evenings?

  I lit the candles and placed them on the table between us. I laid the pan on a tea towel and cut into it, the peachy flesh oozing from its coarse topping. He looked hungrily at it, and that was the first time I saw him want something as much as I did. ‘Fascinating,’ he said, as I slopped it out onto a dinner plate for him. This would have been an underwhelming exclamation were it not for the look on his face.

  ‘I hope it’s okay,’ I said, ‘I didn’t know.’ I gestured towards the pan and back to the book. He raised his fork and took a bite and said, matter-of-factly, ‘I think you did.’ I wasn’t sure if it was a compliment or an accusation, but I was too happy to be looking at the mess of peaches to take it into account.

  I dug into the crumble in front of me. My mouth soared as I tasted its sweetness, dense and sickly. The peach I held in my hands became the sweetness in my mouth. If my tongue and fingertips were connected it was because of peaches, if my body knew each part of itself and recognised another part, it was because of peaches. If I were a human; a sentient, knowing being, that was one thing, not several, I knew it because of peaches.

  I imagined my mother sitting down to her dinner table and eating a tart – apple at least – and knowing myself, finally, what she’d known throughout my entire childhood, and through to the end of her life. It connected me to her, one last time. I missed her, and must have realised then, it was not because she talked about eating peaches, but because she used to say when she was happy, j’ai la pêche, I’m peachy, chirpy, I feel great! Maybe to her, peaches was not just a term for joyfulness but also the name was the thing, and when she said she felt peachy, she recollected this fruit in her mind. It made me realise again she was a dearly happy woman.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he asked, and I realised my face was a prism of worry. But really it was ecstasy, and the only way it could register upon me.

  I smiled. ‘Thank you for bringing them to me. They’re so wonderful.’

  ‘Good,’ he smiled back. ‘I thought it might be good. Even in the dark.’

  My mind wandered back to him, and wondering what he was doing with me. And the delight of the crumble only made it worse, this not knowing. ‘I’m glad I found a recipe,’ I said.

  ‘I knew you would. Was it your mother’s?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘These recipe books are always second generation now, not much going about. You’ve never used it,’ he gathered, ‘but you kept it.’

  ‘Doesn’t everyone?’

  ‘I suppose so. But maybe they don’t talk about it.’

  I wanted him to talk about it. I wanted to tell him about that day when she died and I sat with my grandmother in her living room, leafing through all the recipe books and the things she loved, and decided then and there, to get rid of everything that couldn’t be used. Except that one book my grandmother kept – did she keep it? Or did I retrieve it later, from the box that was going to be thrown away, my guilt keeping me from pragmatism? I didn’t tell him about it, not then. ‘They’re not much use to most people I suppose, books about cakes. But they’re nice to look at.’

  ‘I’m glad I gave you a reason to use it.’ He looked at the crumble, and he was pleased.

  ‘I haven’t eaten like this for years,’ I said, ‘Or maybe, ever? I can’t remember what it was like when I was a child, before the blackout.’ I raised my hand to my forehead as though my fingertips might be able to draw it out. ‘I sometimes think my mother’s stories are wound up in my own memories. So I can’t remember what I did eat, and what she just told me about.’

  He smiled. ‘If you tell me the thing, I might be able to tell you if it was around.’ He looked down, he second guessed himself, ‘Or maybe that’s a stupid game. What am I? Ten years older than you? I can’t remember for you.’

  I nodded. But I liked this idea that he might be able to retrieve my own memories for me. That he could tell me what chocolate from purple foil tasted like, or crab meat from its shell. Any shellfish at all, before the water got too warm. Could he tell me what coral looked like? What a reef is and the fish that swam there? Before everything bleached white and died, before the earth boiled itself up. Could he tell me about snowy winters or mild summers, could he remember for me earth that wasn’t flooded, people safe in their homes? Had he tasted rice from the Vietnam rice bowl? Or seen electricity burn all day? Had he seen a lift go up and down and those endless escalator stairs and cars stuck in traffic? Or planes, did they used to get stuck in traffic? Could he retrieve for me the taste of caramel, and the sight of it dripping down my mother’s chin, and her expression and laugh as she told me she once saw the Pacific Ocean.

  ‘Milka,’ I said. ‘With the caramel. Milka chocolate.’

  ‘Yes,’ he smiled, ‘We had Milka here. It’s plausible.’

  So I did see the caramel then, once, the kind that came already packaged wedged in a chocolate bar. I did see it, and it wasn’t just her telling me about it.

  He looked at me questioningly. ‘You’re curious,’ he said, ‘I like that. Most people don’t ask so many questions. I like that about you.’ I knew he liked me, then. Not just pity. He grinned when I didn’t say anything and he picked up his fork awkwardly. I thought he was thinking about the peaches. ‘What do you like about me?’

  I felt my throat close up and words disappear from my mind like I’d never had a thought. He must’ve assumed there wasn’t one thing I liked about him. But I liked that he gave me things, I liked that he treated me like I was important, I liked that he treated me any way at all, I liked the shape of his top lip and the freckle on his cheek. I wanted to possess it.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘You’re kind.’

  ‘Kindness is important.’

  He moved his chair over to me, he took my hands.

  ‘Have you ever seen a frog?’ I said. I didn’t know if he expected me to keep talking. ‘I saw one in a story book once, I heard they were gone now.’

  ‘I’ve never seen a frog.’

  ‘Do you know the noise they made? Have you ever heard it on tape?’

  ‘I’ve heard it.’

  ‘What a noise.’ I was babbling, and his hands clasped mine, firmly, and his eyes were focused on mine, fixed, like he
had decided something. I’d decided, too.

  ‘If I could bring you a frog, I would. I’m afraid it might be too late for them though.’

  It was too late for everything. ‘Yes. You would?’

  He kissed me on the cheek, my forehead, my eyebrow, my chin. ‘I would.’

  My lips parted but I didn’t kiss him back.

  ‘I’d bring you whatever you wanted.’ He murmured. He kissed my ear, my hair, my neck. ‘I’d bring you Milka. I’d bring you a cool icehouse to live in and a floating city above the world. I’d bring you the world itself.’

  I did kiss him back then, and as I did so I imagined the world he’d give me, from hundreds of years ago full of colours and textures I’d never seen. I imagined him packaging it up like a box of peaches and my surprise as I opened it. There’s my mother’s house, I’d say, and there are her lightbulbs and sockets, there’s her television box and her video player and her computer. There’s a frog, jumping high, making that glottal noise. And there we are sitting on green lush grass in the summer, a cool breeze about our heads.

  He gave me that, from the first kiss. He retrieved a memory of something I never saw, something I never knew. That’s a kind of world, isn’t it?

  The first world he gave me was the kindest.

  Part 2

  Jaminder

  Churchgoing

  1

  London made me hard like the rind of an old grapefruit. In this new country, I’m glad of it. The rind protects me from this life, able to keep the soft pickled flesh of my memories safe underneath. It makes it harder to unpeel and get at them whenever I like.

  It’s hard to tell if there are more grapefruits left in the world than people. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know, and I don’t suppose it matters. I haven’t seen a grapefruit in a long time, but I know that it exists, somewhere, in a different climate. Even if that climate is just in someone’s mind.

  The argument could also be made that London made me soft. That I was insulated, coddled, that I had access to whatever I wanted. I know you’d make this assessment. I’d like to tell you that you are wrong. We may have had more than some people, but it didn’t stand up to much. Isolation can’t be measured by the amount of people or the amount of parties. The abundance of food or warmth, or the abundance of physical freedom. Isolation is a state of mind.

  The further north we came the less we had. When we arrived there was oatmeal. They made it into porridge for us and we ate the slop like pigs at the trough. We kept going. The rain fell. The vegetables grew rotten and puffy, cabbages were small and slimy. We crossed over into Scotland, a new country. I remember the point where it happened, because we were crossing over a road (it used to be a path for cars, because it was wide and blank and surrounded by barriers), and there was a sign that told us. ‘We’ve done it,’ Mathilde said to me. ‘We made it.’

  ‘In a sense,’ I said.

  We kept walking, and the wet of the ground swallowed our shoes. We passed over people, and bodies, and I held my knife close to me.

  We arrived here, where the factories are, and Mathilde taught me on the way how to use a needle. I even sewed her wounds when I needed to.

  Now there is only oatmeal. Potatoes too, and some vegetables, but it depends on the crop. We split them in half before we eat them, we check. But now oatmeal grants me mercy. It is mundane, but it is also the thin veil between us being here and us not. I pray for oatmeal and I am overcome by it. I bless it, with a prayer I’ve made up in my head, to no being I know of, that knows of me.

  Mathilde comes home to me, she tells me, ‘I saw a cat today, I haven’t seen one in years.’

  I shake her by the shoulders, her head bowed. ‘Tell me where it went, where did it go?’

  She doesn’t want to tell me. She doesn’t say anything, she’s trying not to cry.

  ‘Tell me,’ I say, over and over, until there are finger marks indented on her shoulder. I can feel them forming. I relent.

  ‘Don’t, Jaminder,’ she says, all the same, as though it will make a difference.

  I leave the house with my knife.

  Mrs Campbell tells us every day that work is the best antidote to sadness. She announces it, as we collect our bowl food and sit down at the benches on our lunch breaks. She says it as though we have been telling her how sad we are, but I think she might be projecting. I think she’s said it so many times it doesn’t mean anything to her anymore. I don’t think she even registers it. It means something to me.

  The first stitch Mathilde taught me was the basic running stitch. She reached into her rucksack and pulled out a small fabric box covered with buttons, and inside were different sized needles, different coloured threads. She passed the end of a piece of black thread between her lips and looked at its tip with one eye closed before she slipped it through the eye, threaded it through the needle, and began.

  This little dexterous movement made me feel comforted. For once I felt that she was the one who knew what she was doing, that she could make the decisions. She had blind faith in the power of a stitch. After working on Mrs Campbell’s pedal-powered sewing machines these last weeks, I do too.

  London made me hard because I had to shield my inner life from all those parties. All those people. I had to shield myself from you. I had to tell myself lies, until they became true. It was only when we arrived here, in this small factory town so far north from where we came, that I started to unpick them. I realised what I knew, and what I told myself I didn’t. It is only here that I can see in plain sight all the awful things we left behind. After all these years, it is only here I can finally see it.

  London made me soft because I got used to things. Fullness. Satiation. I tell Mathilde the price we’ve paid for a little freedom is a little hunger. But I’m not sure these things balance each other out. They can’t be measured, so I can’t persuade her. I hide my hunger from her by tapping my fingernails on the hardcover of the book we read at night, and the work surface on which our sewing machines sit. She hides her hunger from me by sewing, stitch after stitch. She brings her work home with her. At night, after dinner, she mends bits and pieces.

  Ruby, our new companion at work, tells us that hunger is a state of mind. Because her children (two boys, both alive) have never known any different, they don’t complain. They don’t cry about food. The implication there is that we do.

  I think about our boy, and how little he complains. I place my hand on his head and wonder, in this washout, how far he’ll get.

  I rub my stomach after lunch, when Mrs Campbell rings her bell and tells us it’s time to get back to work. I try and deduce if I’m still hungry, or if it’s just a memory. I unfold the pieces of fabric at my work station and look across at Mathilde. I want to lean over to her, and laugh, and say, do you remember what cheese tastes like? Do you remember melted cheese? I’d laugh because it would be a small joke; because she’s French, and surely once in her life her blood was made up of raclette. But I’ve learnt she doesn’t appreciate these jokes and would rather not talk about the things we remember, or the things we don’t have.

  I wish for cigarettes. I wish for the bitter taste of tobacco and the sickening nicotine that would wash away my appetite. I try and forget cheese. I try and forget hunger. I’m not dying, I tell myself. I won’t die without cheese. But some days, as trivial and insignificant as it sounds compared with everything else, it does feel that way. On those days I make sure I walk about the streets of the town before it gets dark, and look in the windows, and remind myself how lucky we are. I try, I promise, to remind myself.

  I’m not promising anything to you, I hope you understand. I don’t feel I owe you that. In a sense, it’s the opposite: I promise it to all those women. It’s them I owe it to.

  Perhaps the gap that cheese leaves is the gap that God might fall into. Hunger gives you some false association with something godly, because there’s nothing else to plug that hole. Hunger is a form of meditation, a form of concentration. That could just
be what I tell myself when I think of that hunk of British cheddar, or straining paneer with my grandmother, or whatever else I might miss. It could just be what I tell myself because of all those years in that Catholic school on the Euston Road. Most of us were brown and few of us were Catholic, but it still had the power to get under your skin. I still think of being thirteen and being laughed at in English class for not shaving my legs, the hair thick and dark, hiding them under the folding table. I still remember the things the Sisters said to us, even though I never believed them. It started a narrative in my head I don’t think I ever forgot.

  The truth is, we were once Gods. We once had the power to eat as we liked, whenever we wanted (and what was more difficult, and sought after, was a kind of restraint). We engineered our entire lives, the worlds we lived in. We made them warm, we made them cool. I remember the feeling so vividly of kulfi, the ice cream my grandmother made. I would arrive home and she’d gesture extravagantly to the freezer, giddy with her surprise for me. She spent the afternoon boiling the cream and condensed milk, adding the cardamom and spices, sprinkling on almonds and pistachios and freezing them in moulds, until they became the thing that I adored.

  What was that other than godly? There is nothing more holy than the power to make something from its individual parts, and give it to someone in a gesture of love.

  In the absence of our own godly power, it’s easier to think that you might be able to hear the voice of the divine.

  I hear your voice too, but that is nothing like God.