Sweet Fruit, Sour Land

by Rebecca Ley

Part 4

  Jaminder

  Piano Lessons

  1

  We sit and eat oatmeal on our break at work. Mrs Campbell makes her usual comment about eating up and the devil making work for idle thumbs. We always laugh at the idea of the devil. But is that what the devil would do? I think he’d rather make work for people who are hungry.

  We’re mourning the last crop of potatoes. They were black and soft and oozing and I can’t explain how horrifying a sight it was. It’s as disturbing as if the potatoes were actually people’s faces, all caved in and ulcered like that. They had to be discarded. We have oatmeal, the church has oatmeal, but other than that we have to scavenge for leaves surrounding the town. Our skin has become dry and red, and we’re as lethargic as if we haven’t slept in days. Mathilde insists we still crush down the nettles and chew on them, despite the fact they go no way towards making us full.

  I pretend I am grateful for the oatmeal, but in my head all I can think about is the long smooth paper of a cigarette, pre-rolled and perfect, ready to light up and wash all my hunger away. I know those cigarettes end up making your lungs look like those potatoes – blackened and suffering – but even with this knowledge I’d still rather have one. Even with the knowledge of those last potatoes I still think about stuffing that mouldy mess in my mouth.

  Mrs Campbell is especially positive today because she’s worried. Maybe she’s only worried about her own plate, and its lack of starch or chicken or plump ripe vegetables, but she’s projecting a look of complete joy, to protect us. Ruby and Mathilde are grateful for the attempt, but I see straight through it. I think about the fat that coats her body and wonder where she got it and think about frying it on a griddle pan with onions and butter. I would happily sauté her.

  She walks past us, her tread light and springing. She’s wound around her fairly sizeable neck a thick woolly tartan scarf, made from that new squeaky yarn that tries to imitate the real stuff. She has looms too, and one day we might sit at them.

  She strokes the scarf as she walks past us. She tells us it’s her family tartan and she points to the colours and the different fuzzy stripes and we smile and nod. We don’t challenge her on it, because there’s no way we’d ever know if it was true or not, if her family tartan is five hundred years old or if she manufactured that pattern yesterday.

  We let her have this little imaginary triumph of the tartan. We all need something. I try and imagine what the colours on my scarf would be like if I had a family tartan. I imagine they’re wonderful.

  ‘That’ll keep the wolf from the door,’ Mrs Campbell says, pointing at our oatmeal. We know she must eat more than oatmeal because of the way the skin on her fingers strains and folds about her rings. We think she collects things whenever she gets a delivery from one of those rarely seen trucks. If you have enough money, there’s always a way, even up here. Even now, with the price of oatmeal shooting up, she must know she’ll be fine. In the way that we don’t.

  But she runs the town. I have to remind myself where we’d be without her little factory.

  ‘Are you worried?’ I say to Ruby, scraping the inside of my bowl and praying it will miraculously fill up again in a steaming peat of oats.

  ‘We’ve been through worse than this,’ she shrugs. But I imagine in another time her face would’ve been fuller and her shoulders rounder, her eyes brighter. In London, she might have looked a little different. She might have been pretty, once.

  I wonder what she’d think if I showed her an image of myself and Mathilde, from before we left, almost five and a half years ago. In another world, another time, five years would be nothing. But I look at us now and think we could have aged fifteen from the lines on our skin, our fatigue. People used to say: you are what you eat. I fear we are becoming nothing. What I wouldn’t give to see a gleaming, plump, shining red pepper; slotting a knife through its core and eating it raw, feeling my face flush with its redness and my eyes brighten. What I wouldn’t give for that.

  ‘Have you?’ I say. I want to ask her if she is lying to me. I want to ask her: Is the wolf really away from the door.

  Because I can hear it, scratching, its paws matted and clinging to the wood, scraping indentations along its edges. I can see the wolf even though I am nowhere near a door.

  I can see the thick saliva on its teeth and smell its breath hot and stinging on my face. I can feel its coarse coat as I push away the hunk of its shoulders.

  Our whole lives are a way to placate us, slowly, with these meagre habits. And we placate each other. We tell each other when to eat our paltry rations and what to wash it down with. We tell each other to keep stitching. We tell each other to chew on nettles and (imagine you could get some!) mint leaves. We tell each other to imagine chewing on mint leaves and smoking cigarettes, and sometimes we laugh, making the motions with our hands and then we tell each other how full we are. I couldn’t eat another bite, I say, even as I am biting the air in my stupid pretend way and Mathilde laughs at me.

  I think: that second she is laughing she is not thinking about being hungry, so I might have done my job for today.

  The truth is, I am always thinking about it. It’s such a basic thing, pushing at you. Pushing the line between the real and the wolves dancing about in your mind. But then I think, real wolves don’t exist. Because if they did exist, if there were any left, by God I’d eat them.

  People start sighing at the end of the day. That’s when we get weak and tired and there is no way to satiate us, not with a joke or anecdote or that eternal oatmeal. We wander the streets and the fields and pick out anything that might be edible. There are still some vegetables, but not many. We gather nettles and crush them down, boiling them, squeezing them in our mouths in the hope of something. There is talk of people moving further, in search of supplies. But the journey alone might kill them. Father Anthony says he has called for emergency aid. We know this imaginary aid is supposed to come from London, but that is all we know.

  We have enough, just, to live on. We always give more to Hugo than we give to ourselves, but we have enough. Once a day we feel that we are full; a new kind of full that we are used to. There is always the hope for more, and that is a feeling that we can bite on and feel stuck in our teeth: that the next crop of potatoes will be all right, that some unknown animals might wander close to the village. We might eat well again.

  We lie together in our bed at night after Hugo’s bath and he smiles between us. He is always happiest after bath time. After we’ve taken him to the old pink tub and warmed up the water over the fireplace, and poured it in, slowly. We’re careful to save the rainwater in our storage tank for this, after what we need for cooking and drinking. He plays with the taps as we sit and watch him, like they’re a toy. We realise he doesn’t know what they’re for, what they were once for. But he likes them all the same. He splashes the thin amount of water all around him and giggles. We wrap him in a towel and he becomes dopey after that, a satisfied tiredness that is pleasing.

  We wait and watch him fall asleep while we talk over the top of him, in a whisper, our feet covered in stitched-up socks, not a draughty hole in sight, pushed towards the cinders in the fireplace, wiggling them above the heat.

  We find new ways to entertain him. Now he is at school every day and is taught and shown new things, he has also become more restless, and craves more stimulation. It is not enough that we read him the same book, over and over again, or that we tell him that is all we have, that’s the best we can do. ‘But Jacob has a puzzle,’ he says, ‘and none of the pieces are missing. And he puts it together. Why don’t we have a puzzle?’

  Never one to be bettered, I’ve made him a puzzle out of the sheet of maths questions Father Anthony gave me. I shape them carefully with a knife and get him to bring home a couple of pencils that won’t be missed from school. I draw an image on the paper and then cut it. I think it’s a pathetic looking thing and wouldn’t fool anyone, but he wouldn’t know any better and it certainly seems to fool
him.

  I lay it on the floorboards by the fire. I mix the pieces up. He’s pleased. It entertains him for a long time, and Mathilde laughs at him. At first she says, ‘You shouldn’t be envious of what other people have,’ and then she relents, watching him so content with such a silly thing.

  ‘Maybe jealousy is what gives way to innovation,’ I say.

  She pats my shoulder. ‘It’s a puzzle. You didn’t re-invent the internet.’ She stops herself as soon as she’s said it and watches my face. She’s taught herself not to think of these things, but it’s all wound up in our collective consciousness. You just don’t forget a thing like that.

  ‘What’s internet?’ Hugo says and she looks down at him, frowning, watching him crouching over his pieces of paper, distracted.

  ‘It’s nothing to worry about,’ she says.

  I try to distract him from this thought and reach over, fumbling, trying to hand him the next piece of the wonky puzzle that won’t fit. But my hand slips and one of the pieces falls from the pile and down the floor-board.

  Hugo wails as he sees me do it. ‘No, Mummy, you threw the piece away! It’s disappeared down the floor.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ I scramble about and try and stick my nails down the sides. I can see it, taunting me, lying on its side, stuck. I can’t reach it and lament the price I’ve paid for trying to make something. I won’t hear the end of this until he’s twenty-five years old.

  ‘Maman,’ he cries to Mathilde, ‘Mummy’s lost a piece, it’s ruined.’ He hits his hand across his head to indicate that I am a fool.

  ‘Let’s get it then,’ she says, and bends down next to me, pushing her own fingernails down the edges of the floorboard. She pushes too hard and her finger slips through. The floorboard is loose, not fixed to the rest.

  ‘Ha!’ she says, in triumph, and pries the floorboard up, retrieving the lost piece.

  ‘Well done,’ Hugo says, looking at me, pointedly.

  ‘Better now,’ I say. I ruffle his hair, trying to assert my perceived authority at puzzle making again.

  ‘Jams,’ Mathilde says, her hand still down the floor, her hair falling over her face. I can sense she’s agitated.

  ‘What is it? Dead rat?’ I think: how dead? Edible dead, or dead-dead?

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ she says.

  ‘Mon dieu,’ I say, mockingly, and she ignores me. Hugo laughs. I almost start with the haw-hee-haws but then she reaches her hand up and replaces the floorboard, pressing it with her foot. As she stands up and her hand is lowered, I see what is placed within it.

  I scream. Hugo screams, at my screaming. I crush her hand with mine, trying to grab at it. She laughs.

  ‘Pineapple!’ I yell, even though she is close enough to hear me. ‘Tinned pineapple!’

  We hug each other and Hugo jumps up to us and hugs our legs. He jumps about us in the excitement, his hair flapping like a bird, even though he doesn’t know what it’s for.

  ‘Was that all there was?’ And I grapple at the floorboard, pulling it back up, to reveal only dust underneath.

  ‘Amazing,’ Mathilde says, ‘That’s it. Someone must have hidden it, from before.’

  ‘What is it?’ Hugo says, reaching up to it, Mathilde holding it just out of reach.

  ‘It’s fruit,’ she says. ‘It’s sweet.’

  We sit by the table and I stick a knife in the can. I heave away at it, sawing, while Hugo waits patiently. I put a bowl out. I try not to cut my fingers. I pull back the lid as far as it will go. I slop the pineapple and the syrup from the can. Mathilde pushes the bowl towards me. I put my hand in the syrup and pass a piece to Hugo. He puts it in his mouth and his lips pucker and his eyes water from the sweetness. He closes them.

  ‘It’s nice,’ he says, and reaches for more. ‘Where did it come from?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ Mathilde says.

  ‘Is there more?’ he says.

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘Don’t eat it all at once. That’s the lot.’

  ‘When will we have it again?’ He says, pausing from shovelling the disintegrating pieces into his mouth.

  ‘Maybe we won’t,’ she says. ‘Maybe someday, later.’

  I pick up a piece from the bowl and eat it, slowly. I think of all the pineapples Mama Boga had. And the mangoes. Her knock on our door and all the different kinds of fruit. I can see her face clearly, ripe and round just like the mango. I think of the intricate shape of the pineapple, its geometric pattern and the pride in its plumage, its beauty. And the things we did to it in London, picking it apart and putting it in cans. For what? Did we do it for days like this? Did we do it just in case? Knowing that it would keep, knowing one day that it might be found? Or did we do it to reduce it to anything other than a pineapple and anything other than what Mama Boga carried in her basket. To make us think of anything other than the red earth and the hot sun.

  Even in the syrup, in the tin like that, it is just as I remembered. It is everything. Mathilde rests her chin in her hand. She watches us.

  ‘Aren’t you going to have any?’ I say. ‘It’s a miracle.’ I waggle my hand in front of her to indicate the theatricality of this blessing.

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘Miracles don’t come in tins.’

  I raise my eyebrows at her, syrup dripping down my chin. I don’t wipe it away. ‘They do now.’

  When Hugo has fallen asleep and stopped complaining of his stomach ache I talk to Mathilde about all the things we ate in Kenya when I was a child. I talk of the plants and the smell of things and the carrots that were purple and the visits we took to the coast, and my grandfather and his suit. She doesn’t say a word until I’m finished, until I’m giddy with it, and pleased for remembering such a thing, and knowing it was there.

  When I’m done, she blinks, slowly, and looks down at Hugo, and strokes his hair. ‘Do you ever wonder if you remember it right? I mean really, as it was?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ I say, indignant. I prod my temple. ‘It’s burned right in.’

  ‘What about the bad stuff?’ she says, ‘What about the things that made you sad?’

  I want to tell her nothing made me sad in Kenya; it was only England that did that. It was only when we arrived, my grandfather suited and booted, and we walked down the Kilburn High Road and it rained, endlessly, and no one else wore a suit, that we thought life was a disappointment. We’d never thought that before.

  That is my remembering of it: my grandfather’s heart being tested all over London. Coming home, telling me that someone asked him if he was a Muslim and shouldn’t he go home. He pointed to his turban. Are they stupid, he said. I nodded. I told him how stupid they were. He made light of it but it hurt him, even if he didn’t let it touch his pride.

  His innate Britishness never stood up to the West London kind of Britishness he’d fallen into, and that was the thing that made me sad. He was more English than all his cousins who’d been born there, all the people that had that blue passport. He told them so; he told them how to make the right tea, and he taught them the rules of cricket, and he sat with me, night after night, and made me play that damn piano, because if I couldn’t be as English as he was I had to be something.

  ‘You don’t want to be like some people here,’ he said, tapping that old out of tune thing he’d bought in town for nothing but still couldn’t afford. He was my metronome. ‘You don’t want to ride the train to sit at a computer and be a little desk monkey and ride home again. You have to decide to be good at something. And then you lean into it. That’s what being good at something is all about. It’s just about letting yourself be good.’

  But it was about more than that. It was about late nights practicing Brahms and it was about his fingers tapping my knee. It was his face screeching into discontent when I missed a note and it was him shaking his head at my grandmother – not saying a word – when she asked us how long this would go on for.

  It was only London that confused us, only London that messed us up. It was only
that city that made me believe in not belonging somewhere, until you’re there long enough that you have no choice. You end up leaning into it.

  Now I’m older, can’t I think of it another way? Can’t I think that that’s what my family went through with Kenya, which was a silken golden thread of paradise but also a gated enclosure. It was a segregated paradise where we were lucky enough to belong to the middle class. It was also refusing to eat our maid’s food until she learnt how to make roti.

  London wasn’t always a place I despised. There are so many ways to remember the same thing. It was also a place where my grandfather came back from Kingsbury with a box of Alfonso mangoes which my grandmother peeled softly in her palm. Where we slipped the fragrant pieces from our fingers to our mouths and remembered something beautiful. Where I took the pieces to school in a Tupperware my grandmother prepared for me and I gave it to my friends to try. It’s the best mango you’ll ever have, I said, it’s not like anything else. They’d roll their eyes at me but then they’d agree, it wasn’t. They asked me every year when the mango season was, until it stopped coming. London was almost the real thing.

  ‘Kenya was heaven,’ I say, ‘I’ll remember it forever. If I remember nothing else, I’ll remember the smell and taste of it forever.’

  ‘I can’t bear remembering,’ Mathilde says, ‘It breaks my heart, Jams. I can’t think of it, any of it, it’s so pointless to talk about. I won’t wish for it.’

  I shake my head. ‘Isn’t that all there is? The memory of it. That’s all we have left. It’s like believing in God, or something. You have to hold onto it, even when there’s nothing there.’ I say it, even though I’m not sure I believe it, not sure either of us believe in God, or believe in anything we can hold onto. I say it anyway, ‘That’s all there is.’

  ‘Not for him,’ she says. ‘There’s nothing like that for him.’

  I watch his back and its rising and falling. I wish I could give him my memories. I wish I could give him something.