Sweet Fruit, Sour Land

by Rebecca Ley

  Sometimes, as I walk about this small town, with its dwindling population, reliant entirely on the trade Mrs Campbell has set up, I say the words, out loud. I don’t say it to God, or even to you, but just to myself, just so I can hear it. I’ll say it, in the gloomy light, over and over again. And as I say it, I’ll imagine the things I’m saying are real, and that imagining is a small satiation. So that when I return home, to my Mathilde, I won’t have to say it to her. I won’t have to make it real for her.

  Cheese, I’ll say, chicken curry, cheese toasties with leeks, creamy dhal. Squeaky aubergines and blueberries. Beef, bone marrow, ghee. Kulfi. Creamy kulfi. Saintly kulfi.

  It’s a way to stay sane, so as not to forget. It’s a plea, but the hopeful kind. I feast on it.

  Mathilde asks me what I’ve been doing and I say I was praying.

  I don’t know if this answer upsets her more than the truth.

  2

  I walk along the path by the river to get to the factory. I wear my overalls and cover my head with my jacket. The rain never ceases up here, and carries with it a kind of mysticism that it never had in London. That might be attributing too much romanticism to it. It is unending, relentless. It gives life to us, and feeds us, but it washes as much away.

  The mist rises from the river and meets the rain in a fog. I’m drowned in it. I hold my fingers out and the rain pats them. I slip them back into my pockets. It’s getting colder. My boots are sucked into the path, encased in mud. But the walk is comforting. This place shows no signs of ever having housed cars or lights or restaurants with terraces and gas ovens. It shows no sign of anything. Nothing echoes here, nothing speaks of a lost time. I find it matters less and less.

  As I walk along, I imagine my life as a palimpsest of before. I think of all the ways Mathilde and I talk to each other, with our words and our hands, and how artificial they are. They speak only of a memory. I imagine this is why Mathilde stopped speaking French, as a way to let go of the things that no longer exist. Even the way I look is an echo, and there is not much left of it here. There is no other marker to make me different.

  We’ve been equalised. We all live the same lives. We all have nothing.

  There’s a lump on the side of the road, further ahead. I will walk past it. I look at my boots. I tread firmly. I squeeze my hands in my pockets, checking their numbness. I could circle back, and go around. But this is the quickest way. It might be nothing. I wish for Mathilde to be next to me, but I know she manages to walk this path alone, too. It looks like some abandoned heap, a piece of tarp. Less likely is that it’s something. Some clothes. A package.

  I tell Mathilde there’s nothing to be scared of all the way up here. Apart from the obvious: the weather and the food and the people we don’t know. I said it to her several times when we first arrived, put our rucksacks down at the nearest place, dried our hair on the towels they gave us. They looked at our clothes and called us rich kids from the big smoke. A name that stuck even after all that smoke went. Even though London isn’t that well thought of up here, they couldn’t fathom why we left, not with the power down there, and Mrs P’s distribution of energy. We all bundled into bed that first night, while we decided what to do, and I said it, over and over again: you don’t have to be afraid, you don’t have to be afraid. I think I was afraid, and I was trying to convince myself, but I was convincing her. I look after her.

  What I didn’t say was, you don’t have to be afraid of him. Even if that’s what I meant.

  I repeat it to myself like a mantra. Even as I repeat it, I think of the words I choose to use. I think of the way we have chosen them to mean something, and that is the way we identify with each other now. Every word we speak in our little London way has little to do with now. They are the only markers we have that show we once existed in a different form, in a different place. That we were once different people.

  Sometimes I look at Mathilde, and think, would I recognise her if I hadn’t travelled all this way with her? Are there any signs that she is still the same person? That she once loved lemons, and she was once French, that she was once a young woman, and that was all she was. I don’t think I would. Except for that small turn of phrase, a strange way she says, ‘It’s pissing it down’, with a very un-English lilt, a very awkward turn of the head. That and the part in her hair, the wave at her crown.

  The rainy fog is blinding so that I can’t see very far in front of me, and I can never see beneath the water in the river. But I can just make out that lump ahead of me. I get closer. It’s not a package, it’s not tied up. It looks like a piece of tarp, which means there might be something underneath it. I pulse my fingers in my pocket, they reach for the knife that I keep there. Mathilde won’t carry one, but I do.

  I get closer to the tarp. I snatch the knife out of my pocket, I hold it out in front of me. I look behind me, I can see a few feet back, but that’s all. The rain pounds behind and pounds ahead. The rain is a heartbeat. The pulse of the earth. Without the rain, that would be the last sign, I think. The world’s last, great breath. A flood shows it’s still breathing. A drought sucks the life out of everything and swallows it.

  I wave the knife. I hear myself calling out your name, but I don’t know why. The lump doesn’t move. But would I see it? Would I hear it, if it did?

  I rub my eyes. My whole face is wet.

  It moves. A shiver. I stop. I turn around, but there is nothing, just the wind. It’s late enough in the morning that there is a glint of light in the sky, but it is buried under this rain. I hear your name again from my mouth. I’m approaching it. A few steps, and I’ll be able to touch it. I call out to it, Hey, I say, Hey, hey, hey. My voice is a small crack of noise. It doesn’t move.

  I tell myself, Mathilde wouldn’t think I was afraid, even if she was. I have to be brave for the both of us. She’d expect me to sneak up on it; to slip inside the rain and let it hide me. But I only stand in it, and let it wash over me.

  I’m upon it. It’s a large tarp, and I breathe out, relieved. I open my mouth to let my fear out, but it doesn’t go anywhere. I know what I have to do. I put the knife back in my pocket. My hands are vibrating nervously, so I shake them, smacking them together, press them into each other, to still them. I bellow a name, your name, as I pull back the tarp to reveal what’s underneath.

  It’s a man. He must have been here for days. His cheeks are hollows, and his mouth is an open question. I know he is a man, because he has a face, and a body, and he wears clothes. But he is also not a man, because he is a body. He is the parts of a man. But the man is gone. I prod him with my shoe. I have to make sure my eyes aren’t deceiving me. I have to make sure because we’ve seen bodies like this before that turn out to be people. People who are alive and resent being found. I have to be sure because those people remember your face, and they will follow you. And they look for you, and they’ll smell you, and they’ll find your food and take it, and they’ll find you and take you.

  He’s cold, and has been for a while. I had to find him first before he found me, and came up behind me. I have to make sure because he’s lying sprawled over a bicycle, the likes of which I’ve never seen up here. He must have covered himself in the tarp and laid here. He must have known.

  I don’t look in his pockets, but I could do. People do that. I see the wheel and the spokes underneath him and it is something, after all.

  He’s heavy, and it takes me a long while to pull his weight off. The bicycle is still intact. I heave it upright and press down on the pedal and it zings round. It click clicks, and so the chain isn’t broken. I cover him back over with the tarp. I did try to be kind to him. He wasn’t a man anyway, he was just the body, and the man was gone.

  I adjust the seat, and the whole frame creaks. I steady myself. I put my feet on the pedals and my legs remember how it works, and my torso. It balances and I push, and even through the rain, the bike zings and clicks and whirs and I move forward. The rain rushes past me, and I feel for the first time in a
long time outside of myself. The tarp is far behind me, and I don’t look back. It’s nothing, it’s really nothing. I’m a child that can rush and sprint and jolt through the days, its hours, through the dark. I laugh, because I am cycling, and I am new. And maybe today, I have something that is my marker. I have a bike, I cycle just as I did once before, and I recognise it.

  I don’t think about why I called your name, bellowed it, before knowing what I would find. I don’t think about why I said it like that, desperately afraid: George, George, George.

  The rain slips around my hair and down my back and covers me. When I get to the factory I park my bike outside. I notice that it is blue, and plain, and rusted.

  Ruby sees it, as she arrives at work just behind me. ‘A bicycle!’ she says.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘We bought a bicycle.’

  She laughs. ‘Fancy, fancy Londoners. Look at that,’ she says. ‘Wow.’

  My heart drops for a short moment, when I think that man might have had taste and money and southern roots once, when he bought this bicycle. He was a man once, and he had a bicycle. He was the man with the bicycle.

  I always tell myself I’m not afraid, because Mathilde wouldn’t want me to be. I repeat it to myself, like a mantra, and it becomes true. I’m not afraid when I arrive home at the end of the day. I’m not afraid because I don’t tell Mathilde about what I saw or what I found. I don’t tell her, because then it doesn’t exist. I replace the bicycle on my way home, dump it by the river, for someone else to find. Even though he had probably stolen it too, I couldn’t think of it. I find I am less afraid once I’ve left the bicycle, once I am just as before.

  Mathilde is not afraid, because she looks to me for reassurance. I walk that path by the river every day. And I think of her and our boy, and I can do it, I can make it all the way. I walk the path for them.

  3

  I went into the chicken coop this morning to do the usual clear out and found the last of the chickens dead. We bought her when we arrived here, only weeks ago, but they said it was all they had left and they’d stopped living out the day. She stopped laying a few days ago, but I hoped it was just a spell. I know she was just a squawking thing, but I gave her a name. I know she didn’t have the brain capacity to understand it which makes me question why I thought of it at all.

  I pick her up and bring her into the house, not knowing what to do with her. I think about burying her (and for who? For what?), but then realise this would be a romanticised notion of the highest order. It’s a stupid thing to be so sentimental about with the rain crashing down and little growing, when what is left costs all you have. But I am. I’d like to believe that’s human spirit (not cowardice) to remember something worth being kind about. Still, after wrapping her in brown paper and putting her in the old warm fridge, I lay her on the countertop and pluck her feathers out handfuls at a time, and gut her, and boil every ounce of her. Later, I roast her over the fire in the kitchen.

  My grandmother used to be a vegetarian. She used to labour over paneer and leave bowls of whey on the countertop. I think about it a lot, this choice. I look at the bird, its decapitated head on the side I will boil in a pan for stock. She will last us days. I don’t feel sorry for it. I try to imagine if things were different, if I would.

  My small life has mainly comprised of eating, the conquests of finding things and doing without. I don’t think I’ll eat any of that stuff again so I can’t regret the beef and duck and lamb, because just to have tried it changes things. I still think about that meat, and my grandmother. These things are connected because I think about them often and they are both impossible.

  I take the roast chicken off the spit when it’s ready and Mathilde sniffs it out straight away (nose like a bloodhound). I say this to her, and she shrugs. ‘Have you ever seen a bloodhound? Do you know what one is?’

  ‘It’s a dog,’ I say, but she looks at me like she’s not sure, like she doesn’t remember. She picks at the chicken, though I haven’t served it up yet. ‘Don’t see many dogs around,’ she says, and I try and think of all the dogs I’ve seen recently, but they do not include a bloodhound, and I may not have always seen them with my eyes but just inside my head. That makes them no less real. I know that they are there.

  We say goodbye to our landlady in the morning and take our leftover chicken with us to work. We separate it out onto plates and into the fridge before we start work for the day. Mrs Campbell comes in, admonishing us, telling us she pays us too much, but looking at the chicken, getting an eyeful of it, before she snaps and calls us girls (even though we left girlhood many years before). We sit down at our stations. We click-clack like that for hours, sewing everything from bed linens to coats – never asking who they go to eventually – until lunchtime, rhythmically moving the pedal of the machine with our feet, varying the pressure, and pushing fabric along the bobbing needle. Sometimes we get to finish things off by hand, and there’s a quietness to that I enjoy, but more often, like today, it all needs to be churned out quickly. ‘I’m not sure about the chicken,’ Mathilde says at lunch, fingering her lump of meat.

  ‘She was old,’ I say, but I don’t want to tell her how old, how cheaply I bought her for us at the market.

  I’m grateful for Mathilde for coming with me here, though you might not understand that. I don’t think it would be the same without her.

  She was the only one who listened to the music I played at those parties. She was the only one who saw me there. After all that fell through she said the memory of my playing the piano made her sad and my fingers must be restless, so she taught me how to sew. I tell her it is silent torture, but it’s better than nothing. I like the tunelessness of it. ‘I say it’s a good thing. Roast chicken is better than the two eggs we’d have got from her a year, or whatever it was. Bafflingly inefficient,’ I say.

  ‘I don’t know, maybe we need the company.’

  ‘It’s an improvement on the kind we used to keep.’

  I laugh. I would say your name but it horrifies me. I’m trying to forget that too. It’s only six letters, small and unappealing, so I might be able to do it. But it’s everywhere and in everything. I think about how the rain has washed out crops, countries and people, but it won’t make a mark on you.

  I poke the chicken on my plate. Mathilde follows my eyes to the meat and raises her eyebrows. She sighs, ‘A few eggs might have been nice.’

  I clatter my fork to the table in a deliberate gesture. ‘What did we need them for anyway, it’s not like we’re going to make a bloody meringue.’ I try to remember if I’ve ever eaten a meringue, or remember what it is. It was the kind of English thing that held a lot of promise when we first moved to London, but once you had it at an awkward schoolmate’s birthday party, stood in the corner with a plastic fork clacking about your teeth, you realised it wasn’t worth the effort.

  ‘You’re just being short-sighted,’ she says.

  ‘Oh and you have a big long-term plan do you?’ I say, a teasing lilt to my voice. ‘You know as well as I do that it’s better we enjoy the chicken while we can. Because in five years, poof,’ I make an exploding sign with my hands, ‘We could all be under water.’ I raise my eyebrows pointedly. ‘Or underground.’

  ‘You don’t mean that,’ she says. ‘You don’t know. What about Hugo?’

  We all think of it. Sometimes I wonder if I’d give all this up, just to have my hands occupied again, just to hear the piano play. Playing at Gloria’s house was the only work I could get with my music, the only way I could ever make money from it, and that had been enough. That’s all I wanted, then. It was enough to be in my mouldy Kilburn flat, water streaming in from the ceiling, the corners of every room black and my feet permanently cold, because I knew most evenings I’d scramble up to Hampstead, and I’d get to play that Steinway I had no other chance of playing. After a while, it wasn’t just the piano, it was seeing her face, as lost as my own, night after night.

  If I could show you her face, I would: my l
ovely Mathilde. I’d put it next to the memory of her face as I watched her from my piano and you’d see how it’s changed. You’d see what got away from you; you’d know in an instant. But then, maybe you do know. I’m not sure it matters either way.

  What I don’t tell her is how I regret the death of that one chicken, because of the hope, not the eggs. Because of the noise she made and the sound of life; the squawking and chattering that covered up the sound of you saying my name, Jaminder, and drawing it out, Jamiiiiiiinder, that I hear and see in my head all through the night and all through the day.

  4

  When we take a break from our machines we pick at our oatmeal with teaspoons. I stretch my fingers out, and look at the older women with arthritis. I won’t be here long enough to let that happen. But I imagine they all told themselves that at one point, and I remember how I’d told myself that in London, over and over again, before the blackout, as I stood at the traffic lights on Kilburn High Road when the rain had got into my shoes. Moments like that lasted longer than I thought.

  Mathilde takes large spoonfuls into her mouth, gleeful. I can taste the absence of sugar. It has a flavour.

  It’s Ruby’s birthday today. We brought her wildflowers we found in the nearby fields. They might even be weeds but to us they are beautiful. Ruby’s the one with two children but no husband. Ruby told us she was named after her birthstone, and I find this an oddly superstitious thing to be named after – meaningless, and comforting. I’ve never seen a ruby but I know they are red. I imagine them to be a red as dark as blood, but I can’t be sure.

  Ruby gets extra food for her children because she has two. Even though he is absent, she talks about her husband, enough for us to know his name, which is Charles. Was Charles.

  ‘My boys love the oatmeal,’ she tells us, though she isn’t eating any, and we feel no obligation of politeness to wait for her. ‘You wouldn’t think it, but they do.’