Sweet Fruit, Sour Land

by Rebecca Ley

  I followed him up the stairs. He took a key out of his pocket. I watched it. He unlocked the door, slowly, and looked over his shoulder to check I was still there. We both entered the cramped room, amongst the yellowed creatures. I hadn’t noticed the first time, but there was a wall of birds: suspended in the bubbled liquid, feathers textured and bright, wings askew, eyes bright and dewy. Several species and variations, things I’d never seen. I wasn’t grateful to see them then, because they still weren’t real to me. Perhaps I would’ve been overwhelmed if I’d seen them as they were meant to be seen: in amongst the leaves of a tree or high in the sky, a fleeting blurred moment of aviation, a jolly soaring. They could’ve been anything here. He couldn’t bottle up what they truly were; he couldn’t fit that into a jar. I wanted to set them free, I imagined that I could.

  ‘This is my little paradise,’ George said, fingering the lids of the jars. ‘This little collection. The answer is always in nature, don’t you think?’

  He looked at me, waiting for a response. That’s when I heard it: a soft, solid, electric purring. Unmistakably foreign in the new stillness of the house. I swallowed, I pretended I hadn’t heard it. I pretended I wasn’t watching an electric car in my mind’s eye that was theirs; that I couldn’t see myself being dragged into it, being bundled across the whole of London, hidden.

  It wouldn’t be long then. I listened for the click of solid doors, I listened for footsteps. My heart caught in my chest. For once I wished it wasn’t there at all. I wished I couldn’t feel anything. I wished I could wash it all away.

  I watched the key on a shelf by the door. If I could just get to it, with his back turned, I could lock him in. I could get out.

  ‘You can’t bring the world back to how it once was,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he said, and shrugged. ‘But you can try. Isn’t there some honour in that?’

  I looked around at the insects suspended in their liquids. I didn’t say anything.

  ‘We have so much to learn from them.’ He gestured to the creatures with the dead eyes. He smiled at me. He was pleased with this idea of preserving nature, of finding something in it. But he’d found the value in it too late.

  I listened out for that electric noise, for the door to go. He must have been waiting to give the signal. And if he was the one to give it, I just needed more time.

  ‘Is it working?’ I said. ‘Are you happy about it all?’

  ‘I suppose it wouldn’t affect things to tell you my anxiety about it,’ he said, taking a step towards me. ‘To tell you what worries me.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It’s harder than I thought.’

  He put a hand on my shoulder as though he was confiding in me. ‘I just wanted a way for us to thrive, in our own small way.’ He rubbed his forehead, he squeezed my shoulder. ‘I’ve always helped Auntie to find the best solution, to do what’s right. But it never seems enough for anyone. No matter what we’ve gained, it’s never enough. I suppose it took me a while to realise what it was I really missed, what I wanted back.’

  ‘What was that?’ I said, feeling a small burn in my shoulder. Trying not to breathe in his breath that was so close to mine.

  ‘We had tradition once, didn’t we? It all means nothing now. Once, my ancestor sat on the throne. Chosen by God. It’s all been stripped away.’ His eyes glazed over. I wanted to ask him who it was, I wanted to imagine a King or a Queen that looked like him. I wanted to ask him if any of it was true or if it was only what he imagined he deserved. I said the name of a monarch and he smiled at me. ‘Maybe you understand me a little better, now.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He nodded. ‘Can you even imagine how hard it is to do the jobs we do, without all that? Without relying on processes and traditions and order? Without technology, without anything,’ he raised his hand in a sweeping motion, ‘Obliterated. Do you remember the internet?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘It enabled us to do things that would be inconceivable now. It enabled us to live like Gods of our little world.’ He released my shoulder. He smiled at me, ‘If only you’d seen it. Everything is more difficult now without it. We need something good to hope for. We need those supplies to feel like civilised people. We need those supplies to save our spot on the world. Nostalgia is the real killer, isn’t it? Remembering is what brings the fog rolling in in the afternoon, is what brings the black dog.’

  I listened again: there it was. The sound of the front door going. I opened my mouth, afraid. ‘But what about the others, what about them?’ I stepped away from him. My back hit a shelf behind me and the jars wobbled. My hands searched behind me. Something. Anything. A knife. A heavy container. ‘We’re still human don’t you see? I’m still a person, too. I had a life once, too.’

  I could hear the tread of feet on steps. I could hear the crack of floorboards. The creak of a shoe. I knew the house well enough to know. I knew the sound of a human.

  ‘I’m trying to save people like you, I always have. I’ve always wanted to do what’s best for people like you.’ He stepped towards me, and my eyes widened. ‘There’s no going back now.’

  I looked at him and nodded. ‘Les carottes sont cuites,’ I said.

  His face was pleased and rose up in a smile. He opened his mouth to say something, but out came only a gurgle. A bubbling, gurgle noise, as though he was the one contained in a jar.

  Jaminder’s breath came heavy and thick behind him. He dropped to his knees and flapped at his neck. A long, sharp serving fork protruded from it, stately and polished silver. His eyes widened in horror. He pulled it out, but it only made things worse. She’d known then, she’d made sure. It had got him in the right place.

  ‘We have to go,’ she said, calmly.

  ‘You came back,’ I said.

  His hands still grasping, I stepped over him. My foot slipped on a pool of blood, my hands tried not to touch the splattered walls. I regained my balance. With his body behind me, it was as though he wasn’t there.

  ‘We have to go,’ she said again.

  I took the key from where he had placed it on one of the shelves, next to the jars of insects. We stepped out of the room and I closed the door behind me. I locked it, and put the key in my pocket.

  Part 8

  Jaminder

  Another Home

  1

  We wait by Hugo’s side. There are two of us, so we never leave him on his own. On the third day of his fever, he starts to take a little food. We give him everything we can. Mrs Donald brings us her oatmeal, but even this supply is dwindling. We still go to work, and do our hours, one by one, for the money for what little food we can buy. And at night, we sit next to him, and it is on these nights that we wonder, and apologise to each other and try and think of an answer. It is on these nights that I think of you, George, and talk to you in my head.

  I ask you what you would think of your son if you could see him. I ask you if he is your son at all, if you feel that he is, if you feel anything. I ask you if you’re still alive. I ask you if you feel that you are dead, if you can hear me. I describe to you what it felt like to push that fork into your throat and twist it, and see the blood oozing from it. I ask you if you felt pain.

  I do not ask for forgiveness. I tell you I am not sorry.

  We don’t talk about you. We don’t talk about you being dead or alive. The likelihood is that you are dead. But the word ‘dead’ does not describe the things that you are now and the things that you are not. ‘Dead’ does not describe the person that you once were and the things that you did. ‘Dead’ does not describe how you fooled me and fooled us all; how you took us for yourself. ‘Dead’ does not explain the taste of your breath in my mouth and the way I tried to push the texture of your face away with my hand. ‘Dead’ does not describe the insignificance you attributed to me. ‘Dead’ does not describe how you are everywhere and in everything.

  Nor does it explain my fear, my unrivalled terror, as I look at Hugo and wonder which
parts of you might linger there. These parts, we hope, are washed away by myself and Mathilde.

  Dead is not one thing or another, dead can be quantified, I think: and so you are more dead to Hugo than you are to us, because he’s never known you, and never will; but we remember you, we still think of you, and so you are less dead to us. And that is maybe how you’re not dead, after all.

  Maybe this thought should horrify me, and maybe I should be worried about the place where you exist in my mind, in that gap between the imaginary and the real. But if you exist there, then maybe other corners of existence are alive there, too. Maybe Kenya exists there, and our back garden with cacti and palm trees. Maybe my grandmother exists there, icing my birthday cake. Maybe the heat exists, and my grandfather, sitting on the veranda with his newspaper in the sunshine with his suit on. Maybe my Canadian friend, Alice, exists there with her blonde hair. Maybe my grandfather is taking us to school there, when the bus broke down, and I am turning around in my seat to look at my friends and smile at them, and tell them I am proud of him. Maybe the ugali exists there, and the chicken curry, and the bananas, the ones that tasted nothing like bananas we had in England.

  If your body pressed upon me has given me hatred, your existence in my mind has also given me hope. For if hate can be as strong as that, other feelings can be too.

  I didn’t get to choose what was important to me, or why, but hatred was. After you, and your death, it became so obvious how you don’t get to choose anything in this life, even the things you want to choose, and could choose, but decide against for reasons that are not your own. It has nothing to do with being right. Hatred opens a gap in you that is infinite. It makes you want to do terrible things you’ve never even thought of. I wanted to pull your hair from their roots and break your neck, I wanted to smash your windows and steal your life from you. I wanted to be hated. I wanted you to know. But I didn’t, of course, and instead I stood behind you as I did it, and you never turned around, you never saw the look on my face. I left that night as cowardly as I’ve lived the rest of my life.

  Hatred is possession. When you have been offered nothing else to possess you can possess that feeling for as long as you like, as much as you like. You can own hatred and you can be proud of it. We had so very little; it was the one thing I could hold onto.

  But it wouldn’t be true to explain to you that all you gave me was hatred. Because Mathilde convinced me, in that way that she does, her long dark hair around her shoulders and her hands always grasping and loving, that there was something else to be had, even when we couldn’t see it. We fled, and still I couldn’t see it. My belly swelled, and still I couldn’t see it. My body seized with pain and collapsed with the weight of itself, crushing itself out of itself and still I couldn’t see it. We took him for our own and only then, when Mathilde held him, and placed him onto my body, could I see this other thing, this other thing you gave me that was so different from hate.

  Perhaps knowing you will never understand it is why I talk to you at night. Perhaps knowing that kindness is as foreign as chocolate to you is the reason I try to explain it: that love in your terms is something wildly different and painstaking and debilitating and selfish as compared with how we love. Family is something you never understood, and that’s why you ripped Gwendolyn from Gloria, and the women went where they went, and why you thought a policy to increase the population was admirable, and why you misunderstood the fundamental nature of all humans; why you will never understand that family is not something that you can force people into or buy. Why you will never understand how we need our little packs, and our groups, how they are essential to survival; and how family is something that is born from love.

  I talk to you to tell you that you gave me Hugo but he is not yours. He is not your family and never has been, never will be. Mathilde and Hugo are my family. And the families we had before still belong to us too. I think about my grandparents as taking up a box in my mind, like the boxes in Mrs Darling’s mind from the book we read to Hugo, one laid within another like Russian dolls. I see it in Mathilde’s mind too: that box where she keeps her grandmother, and goes to her. The way she lifts the lid on her, and remembers her, and looks after her there.

  You didn’t trick me into having a family, you see; I made a family for myself. And if I hadn’t wanted one, I wouldn’t have had one, because family is also a choice. Of the so few choices we have in this world, in this life, how we love our family and how we make our family is a choice we can have.

  When people say blood is thicker than water, what does that mean, do people ever wonder about it? How water is the thickest, most life-giving, deepest, heaviest of all things? How much water is in blood? I bet it’s a lot but not enough to explain how much that phrase misses the point.

  I wasn’t sure about a child. And you know that, everyone did. Mathilde wasn’t sure about it either. Could you blame us? What did having children mean when there was nothing to give them?

  Maybe we were just selfish. It was something we could do on our own, having Hugo. It was something we could control, in a small way. Just in the way Gloria had taken control.

  We hoped for more for Hugo. We wanted so much more for him. Sitting by his side through these nights, I wonder what more I could give for him to be all right. I wonder if this is what the future looks like, after all. There is only this. This world is what we’ve given to him. This is all that’s left. And I am sorry for it. And if his future is lost, and therefore ours too, what legacy have we left, other than this muddy chalk earth and the grey smudge of the sky, and this oatmeal, this incessant, relentless oatmeal.

  ‘I prayed for him,’ Mathilde says, her pale face illuminated by the fire, as we sit by the end of our bed. ‘I prayed for us, too, that we’d be all right. Can you imagine that? I prayed.’

  I’m surprised. She reaches out her hand for mine and I let her take it.

  ‘Have you prayed too?’ she says, squeezing it.

  ‘Sometimes,’ I say. ‘I’m not sure if that’ll improve our chances.’

  She laughs. ‘Maybe not. But do you remember? On our way up here, when we first left? When you told me about your family for the first time? You told me religion was important to them, that it mattered. It could matter to us too.’

  ‘It’s not the same,’ I say. ‘Not now.’

  Mathilde nods her head. ‘Do you think we’ll ever see Gloria again?’

  I look down. I want to let go of her hand. ‘No, I don’t think we’ll ever see her again.’

  ‘Don’t you think,’ she says, looking up at Hugo asleep, ‘We’re all just orphans? We’re a nation of orphans? Like in the fairy tales.’

  ‘We’re too old to be orphans.’

  ‘But we weren’t, once. We’re all so alone, all of us. When the blackout came, and the floods, the heat. The rationing. All it did was make us so alone.’

  ‘He’s getting better,’ I say, ‘He’s really getting better.’

  ‘Until you, all I ever felt was alone. After my mother, there was just you, and then Hugo. I know you felt the same.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I was lonely. It’s easier like that.’

  She grasps my hand again. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘He’s getting better,’ I say again, and the repetition of it makes me want to scream, the futility of my own words. I slept next to my grandmother once, when I was ill and had a fever. But it was warm in our house, and there was so much of everything, no one thought about it for a minute.

  Mathilde shuffles towards me, and puts her arms around me. She lays her head on my chest and her head rocks back and forth. She’s shivering, even though we’re near the embers of the fire. She muffles the sound of her voice by pushing her face into my clothes. But I know she wants to scream, I know she is afraid.

  ‘We’re all orphans,’ she says again, and there is wetness pooling around her mouth, and it is open, like a question, a desperate, confused question. ‘All those women that we never saw. The women like
Gwendolyn. All those women sent away, they’re orphans too. They’re all alone too.’

  I stroke her back and try to quieten her, but Hugo sleeps soundly. It is torturous, that we are the ones left with these images, that we are the ones who struggle with it. And you are the one who built it, you are the one who helped build the way of things, and the image of it never burned in your mind, and it never mattered to you at all.

  2

  Father Anthony is sitting at the back of his own church, as though he is part of the congregation. But there is no congregation. He is the only one here.

  ‘Father,’ I say.

  He’s looking up at that ill, stricken Jesus. I wonder what he is saying. He turns around, to look at me.

  ‘Jaminder,’ he says. ‘How is Hugo?’

  ‘The same.’

  He turns away from me and slumps forward. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I’ve been praying for him.’

  He doesn’t get up or come towards me. He has lit a few candles inside but not enough to read a passage from a book or see very far in front of him. I walk towards him and sit beside him in the pew. ‘Mathilde is with him now,’ I say.

  He nods, but doesn’t look at me. ‘I’m sorry for the way I spoke to you when you were last here. I’m sorry you thought I had more to give you.’ He wrings his hands together in his lap.

  ‘Why do you tell people you have something? Why do you lie to the people here?’

  He looks at me, surprised. ‘It’s not a lie,’ he says. ‘I used to have things. We used to be sent aid.’

  ‘They think they’ll be saved by you. They stay because of you.’

  ‘Is that a terrible thing? That I give them hope?’

  ‘It is when it’s a lie.’ I look up to that Jesus again.

  ‘It’s not a lie, Jaminder.’

  ‘Sikhs believe that people are equal. That we are all equal. Our Jesus is just a mere mortal, he is not a God. And we were told it didn’t matter what gender, race, class or sexuality you were, because all humans are the same.’