Sweet Fruit, Sour Land

by Rebecca Ley

  She smiled. ‘You have a nice way about you, Mathilde. And I’m sorry about it. I’m sorry about this mess.’

  Before we left, I went to use the toilet in the back. I rinsed my mouth out and washed my hands and face, trying to make sure the smell of alcohol had left me before I returned to George’s. I unlocked the bathroom door and stepped out into the small corridor behind the bar. Jaminder was waiting for me and I stepped aside to let her pass me to the toilet. She frowned, as though deciding something, and then stepped towards me and pushed me against the wall with a soft movement. She put her mouth on mine, and I felt her hot breath, and the smell of the dense spirit, and she moved her mouth with mine, and I didn’t stop her. She put a hand up the back of my neck and through my hair, touching it carefully, avoiding the wound, and pressed her body on mine. My arms lay still beside me, and after a few seconds, I opened my eyes and she pulled away. She sighed, a sticky, dense sigh, and I looked at her, my face pleading.

  ‘Please, Jaminder, I don’t know what to do, I’m so afraid,’ I reached my hands up to my face, and she grasped me in a solid hug, so that my head rested on her shoulder and she could squeeze me tightly.

  ‘Oh God, oh Mathilde, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I only…this place is desperate, that’s all. After a while, it just gets to you.’ She stopped talking and stroked my hair, and although I didn’t want her breath on mine, I was glad of the weight of her body and the way she held me, and how it washed everything else away.

  When I returned home, just as I had left it, I picked up the phone again to call my grandmother.

  ‘When will you come back to the shop?’ she asked.

  ‘Soon.’

  ‘Will you come back for dinner tonight?’

  ‘Not tonight, but tomorrow.’

  ‘Things are going well then, with the MP?’

  ‘Things are going on.’

  She huffed and clattered things in the background. ‘Well that makes me happy. I like to know you’re taken care of, you’re safe.’

  ‘Yes, grandmother.’

  ‘I know Margot would be pleased for it. Ça me plait.’

  ‘Yes.’ I said. I covered my mouth so she wouldn’t hear the ragged noise of my breath over the receiver. My eyes widened and I stared at the drawer. I felt I was even deceiving myself.

  ‘Elle me manque,’ I said. That’s all I could say. ‘Elle manque à tout le monde.’ She’s missing, I miss her, she is missed. She misses it all.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘Me too.’ And then in a mumbled, tight voice, she whispered, ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité, laïcité,’ as though to remind herself, as though to remind me.

  But I’d forgotten that piece of nationalism, and it had died many years before.

  Part 6

  Jaminder

  The Wolf, The Door

  1

  The oatmeal is not enough. We have stood, all of us, in Mrs Campbell’s office and asked her for help. We watched her frame and the waggle of her hips, the fullness of her waist. We watched as she said she had nothing to give. That our wages are enough, that we aren’t dying – in an exasperated tone – and we need only sit tight.

  But I am sitting tight. We all are. And it is achieving nothing. We are sitting tight as even our children are starting to complain about their hunger. Even they, who receive all we can afford, at the expense of our own food, because the price of oatmeal is too much for a whole family. Even they find their stomachs pierced.

  The idea of Hugo experiencing hunger as great as the wolf scratching around in my mind is enough for me to beg Mathilde, to beg Ruby. We have to do something, I say, imploring, what can we do. Ruby says it might be fruitless, but we can search, we can try.

  Yes, I say, and I say it to God, help me, and I say it to you: You can’t be right about this. We have to win this one.

  I go days only eating nettles, and a spoonful of Hugo’s oatmeal. I feel the walls will start talking to me and I will let them. I have days when my head turns to black. And still I play the piano, as often as I can. And still I stitch and stitch and stitch.

  Ruby tells us one morning at work: okay, let’s go. I look at her hands resting on her hips and I can see she’s punctured an extra hole in her belt, wonky, not in line with the others, just so her jeans will stay up.

  We travel with Ruby in search of food. We leave Hugo with Mrs Donald and tell him we will be back. He asks one of us to stay but we decided: we have to go together or not at all.

  Ruby says there is a town five miles away. She lends us boots that she has and warmer clothes. She doesn’t need to ask if we need them. Ruby says she’s done it before and it helped, one winter years ago. She found a few things, and with more people, there might be more to find. We’ve been through towns like this before and know the state we might find it in. These towns in Scotland were left, mostly, as soon as it was clear there was nothing to stay for. We might be one of the only villages this far north but we can’t be sure. We know people stayed because of Father Anthony, because he had something to give them. We stayed because we knew this was one of the last factory towns where we had skills to offer, where London was far from consciousness.

  We’ve seen dereliction in London, of course, but this is different.

  Our feet are covered properly, for the first time in a long time. We wrap our heads to shield us from the rain and walk on with our rucksacks that we pulled out from the cupboard, unused since we arrived. There’s a road that is tarmacked and we stick to it. I hold a knife in my pocket. After a mile there is very little light. Even in the bright of day there is no bright. We sing songs together to pass the time, instead of talking about what we might find. We sing old songs from tapes and the radio. Sometimes we remember the same song and we laugh, all of us singing it in unison. This time we’ve all hit on the same one: she was a singer who wore high heels and sequinned outfits.

  ‘Can you imagine it?’ Ruby laughed. ‘I wonder what she’s doing now.’

  No one answers her because there is no answer.

  We walk on, humming something different. Mathilde stops and puts her hand in front of her face. ‘What’s that up there?’ I think she is pointing to a large oak tree, split through the middle, presumably struck by lightning, but it is a large expansive thing and could be anything.

  ‘We need to leave enough time,’ Ruby says. ‘Remember. Enough time to make it back before it’s dark.’

  We walk towards it, in a line of three. I grasp the knife in my pocket.

  ‘There might be people in there,’ I say. ‘That would be a place wouldn’t it, for people to be.’

  I look at Mathilde and she knows what I am thinking of. It took us a long time to get this far north, and the further north, the worse it was. We found so many things we didn’t want to find.

  ‘We should go around it, then,’ she says. ‘Let’s go around it.’

  We walk into a field to the side of the road, waist high in grass and thrashing about in front of us.

  ‘Is this superstitious?’ Ruby says, looking at the tarmac road, and the tree we can see perfectly now, looming over us.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s not.’

  We walk like this for a while, quietly, hidden by the grass, waiting to get back onto the road. When the tree is far behind us we veer back towards it. I look back at it, and see something move. My hands wobble and I scream, ‘There!’ and grasp onto Mathilde’s arm. She grasps back, and looks at where I’m pointing. She squints and I blink several times.

  ‘I don’t see anything. There’s nothing there, Jams.’

  I blink again and see that she’s right.

  She strokes my hair. ‘When did you last eat anything?’

  When our feet are firmly on the potholed road, I think about singing again. I think of a song we all might know, and I imagine the singer in my head. I open my mouth to let out a note and then stop.

  A shape moves in front of us. It moves, slowly, onto the road. We stop. But it’s heard our feet. It stops. It t
urns its head towards us. We breathe, mouths open.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ Mathilde whispers.

  It doesn’t move.

  ‘Deer. Can you see it?’ I think I’m imagining it.

  ‘Red deer,’ Ruby says. ‘It’s a red deer.’

  It’s beautiful. Its antlers are curved and arching, half the size of its body. Its face is stern and scruffed. It doesn’t look scared, it is unmoved by us. It knows this land better than we do. It’s been here longer. We should be afraid of it.

  It has long hair around its muzzle and spots on its back. I wonder that its head doesn’t fall with the weight of its antlers. It’s not a thing I’ve seen before. I thought they were made up for Christmas.

  ‘What do we do?’ I say, and I grasp at my knife, my fingers slipping about in my pocket.

  ‘We kill it,’ Mathilde says.

  ‘With what?’

  Ruby steps forward. She walks slowly, approaching it. I see she’s holding something in her hand, ‘Ruby,’ I say, quietly. But it’s no use.

  She holds the knife by her side. The deer sees her. It flicks its head, but doesn’t move. She makes a decision because there is no time. She runs at it, she screams, her hand is up, knife above her. It reacts, in a second, its long legs scuttle. In a movement, it is gone.

  There is nothing before us but long grass and the shape of Ruby, screaming furiously, hitting her knees.

  ‘How are you still alive?’ She screams in front of her, at nothing. ‘How are you still here?’

  I look back at the oak tree, and it looks like nothing now, having passed it. It looks like nothing to be afraid of at all.

  We make it into the town a couple of hours later, following the dim light from the clouds and the long road that soon turns to rubble. Out of nothing, buildings appear. Some are half-formed, from where they have burnt down, from where people burnt them. Others stand, exactly as they were. We walk down the main street, and Ruby guides us. We look out for other people, but there are none. There are still shopfronts; pharmacies with the green cross extending from the awning. There are still displays with bottles inside. ‘We’ll come back for those,’ Ruby says.

  We’re making our way towards the supermarket, to see if anything has been left from years before. There are houses too, just off this main road. We enter a few, the ones in the best condition, to see if anything is in their cupboards. We swing open the doors, and dust and dirt covers everything. But you can see what’s there, underneath. A paisley sofa and a rug, a cabinet with china. We go into the kitchen, and there’s a table there, with three places set: plates, knives, forks, spoons, cups. And a tablecloth. I pick up a fork and examine it.

  ‘They must have left in a hurry,’ I say.

  ‘Didn’t they all?’ Ruby says.

  Yes, it happened like that up here, just like London. One night, people were at their tables having dinner. There was little power left. Then all their lights went out.

  I wince, thinking that Hugo has seen all of this. He has seen so many towns like this, all his life, and this is all he knows. He asks us what happened, and Mathilde won’t say a word. She doesn’t know what to say. She feels guilty for taking him away. All I can say is: We broke it. We were given the world and we took everything, and then one day, there was nothing left of it.

  ‘I found something,’ Mathilde says, and her arm is reaching far underneath the counters, she is lying on the floor, stretching around. She retracts her arm and it is covered in dirt, but she doesn’t seem to notice. ‘It must have rolled underneath,’ she says, ‘Peas.’

  She hands the tin to me and I look at it. The whole house smells, so I don’t notice it so much at first, but then I see the piercing.

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘It must have punctured when it fell. It’s spoiled inside.’ I hold the can up to her face and she contorts.

  ‘That’s vile,’ she says, and takes the can from my hand and rolls it back under the counter. ‘For someone else to find.’

  The cupboards are empty, and it’s clear that people have been here before. The beds upstairs are overturned; objects have been removed from drawers and litter the floor. I walk along the corridor and cough in the dust. I turn to one room and open the door. A small bed is in the corner, mattress taken away, springs broken. To the side of it is a rocking horse. It’s small and wooden, and the horse still has hair. I touch it, its thick wiry strands. My hand is covered in dust. I wipe it against my jeans. I push the horse’s head and it moves. It rocks, slowly, back and forth. I wish we could take it back with us. I wish Hugo could see it. But it’s solid and heavy and we’d never be able to make the trip back.

  I think of this tiny child and wonder where it is now. Or where it is not.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Ruby says, from downstairs. ‘We can’t hang around. There’s nothing here.’

  We leave the house, deflated. ‘It’s all been gone over a hundred times before,’ Mathilde says. ‘I don’t think there’s anything here.’

  Her face is drawn and her hands muddied, and as she brings them to her face to rub her eyes I stop her. I spit on my sleeve and wipe them for her. I try to clean them as best I can. ‘Be careful,’ I say, ‘Who knows what you’ll catch here.’ When you catch something, you can’t un-catch it.

  We make our way down towards the supermarket. I look at the staircases of buildings through the windows that have collapsed in on themselves, roofs that have been torn down. But there are still pictures in their frames on the wall, serving no useful purpose. I look at them, anyway. There are sunscapes and pictures of other worlds. Pictures of worlds that might still exist somewhere, but we can’t be sure.

  The supermarket stands largely intact. The sliding doors have been wedged open and the glass is broken. We slip through and it is dark inside. Ruby has brought a lamp with her and she lights it. ‘I’m low on matches,’ she says. ‘If you see any, shout.’

  We follow her, with the lamp, going through each aisle of the supermarket. It is mostly food that has spoiled and disintegrated. Stained and sticky surfaces and old fridges, empty and warm. There’s a stand of school supplies with paper and sticks of glue. I put them into my rucksack. The shelves have been cleared, completely, and with Ruby’s lamp we stick our hands underneath them and behind anything we can find. We climb up on top of them, we rattle the old rusty trolleys and look underneath the tills, that once were lit and beeping. We go through the back of the supermarket to the old warehouse, through the bakery. There is wrapping and machinery and parts, but nothing to eat. There is nothing, nothing, nothing.

  ‘Christ!’ Ruby says, ‘Last time there was a lot of stuff we could carry back. I had no idea it had been got at like this. Who would even come here?’

  We go through the offices and check the cupboards and the units, but it has all been toppled over, it has all been searched. There is a computer there, huge and imposing. Mathilde goes over to it, and sits down in the chair in front of it.

  ‘I barely remember this stuff.’ She taps the keyboard and it crunches with the weight of the dust. She taps the screen with her fingers and presses the buttons. ‘Just in case.’ She laughs and looks at me.

  ‘I suppose I was a bit older than you were,’ I say. ‘When everything went down. The blackout.’

  ‘Did you use it then? Do you remember the internet?’

  ‘Of course,’ I say. ‘People lived their lives on there, that was all people were.’

  ‘How about now?’ Ruby says, smiling, moving old paperwork aside to lean on one of the desks.

  ‘Now? I don’t know. Maybe we’re invisible? Maybe we don’t exist?’

  We laugh, under the light of the lamp, in the dark, dingy office. We laugh because that’s exactly what we’ve hoped for all these years. That’s exactly what we’ve wanted.

  2

  We make our way back before dark and our rucksacks are heavy with odd things we’ve picked up: crockery, books, lotions left in the pharmacy – but no food.

  ‘This has happened before,
’ Ruby says. ‘But we’re lucky, because we have oatmeal, and as long as we can produce that we’ll be fine. And we’re working on the rest. Father is always working on the rest.’

  We nod and don’t question it. We’ve been through so many towns that have hoped for more and had very little, but they always had some small way to survive, they’d always found some part of their village to draw on, and gain something from. We had faith we’d be able to stay a little while, unnoticed, but we didn’t count on being this hungry.

  We hug Ruby goodbye as we return to the village, and we walk back towards our flat. I look at Mathilde’s face. ‘We’ll need a wash tonight.’

  ‘We’ve got some water collected, we should have enough for a bath.’

  It’s a treat, and I look forward to filling the old tub with water warmed on the fire at the end of a long week. I look forward to Hugo turning the taps on and playing with them and pretending water is spilling out from them.

  ‘I’ve missed him today,’ I say. ‘So stupid, isn’t it? How you can miss him after only a day?’

  Mathilde takes my hand in her own. ‘Oh, Jams. I know what you mean. We got so lucky with him.’ She strokes my hand with her fingers.

  ‘We got lucky with each other, too,’ I say. ‘I don’t know where I’d be without you now. Without my strange friend.’

  We climb the stairs to Mrs Donald’s flat above us. We knock on the door and there’s no answer. We knock again. Mathilde looks at me. We wait. There’s a scrambling sound from indoors and then footsteps. The door swings open and Mrs Donald is behind it, red and flushed. Her cheeks are shining with sweat, which is strange in this cold weather.

  ‘Everything okay?’ Mathilde says, and moves forward to enter the flat.

  Mrs Donald shakes her head. Her glistening cheeks wobble.

  ‘What is it?’ I say. Every molecule in my body stops with that beat. That horrible, sickening beat of silence.