Sweet Fruit, Sour Land

by Rebecca Ley

  ‘It’s an admirable sentiment.’

  ‘Life hasn’t been like that. None of this is like that. And we’re scared all the time. We wake up with pain in our shoulders and hands. We work for something but we don’t know what it is. We’re afraid for our children. It’s not what my grandparents wanted for me. It’s not what they imagined for me.’

  ‘There is much to be gained from a humble life, Jaminder. People thought they couldn’t live without electricity, but there is much to live for.’

  ‘It’s not the electricity. It’s knowing that we are afraid, but we’re lucky. There are so many more people who aren’t.’ How will we ever be free from that thought?

  ‘Your grandparents were smart people. You found us here, from nowhere. Where were you planning to walk to with your son? The end of the world? But you found us here.’

  I look at him, and he is still looking at the man on the cross.

  ‘There is always hope. There is always innovation. The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones, Jaminder. There are many freedoms that lie ahead.’

  ‘I can’t see them,’ I say. ‘I can’t see that they are there.’

  ‘Sous les pavés, la plage,’ he says, ‘You may not always see it, but it doesn’t mean that it isn’t there. That there isn’t an escape. There will be a new form of energy. The lights will turn back on.’

  ‘French?’ I say, frowning at him.

  ‘I was an educated man once,’ he says, resigned.

  I stand up, and move away from the pew. I look down at him, and understand that he is a world in and of himself; that he had a past life, just like the rest of us. That he wishes for a future, too. ‘I’m leaving,’ I say. ‘I want to go and find help. I can’t stay here, with the food the way it is.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he says.

  ‘I just wanted to play the piano one last time. That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘The piano? What do you mean?’

  ‘I just want to play it one more time. Hear the music. You’ll grant me that last blessing, won’t you?’

  He gets up and stands next to me. He rests a hand on my shoulder. ‘There’s no piano here, Jaminder. It broke my heart, but we burnt it, two winters ago. It was so cold.’ His brow furrows, he doesn’t release his hand. ‘I didn’t take it lightly. It broke my heart.’

  I look to the corner where the piano was always sitting, where the piano always waited for me. Every church has a piano. And I can hear the notes, can’t I? I hear the music, in my mind, without even touching the keys, I can hear it.

  ‘But I played it,’ I say to him, my voice as small as a child.

  He looks at me, his face contorts. I want to step away from him and his pity. ‘When did you last eat, Jaminder?’

  I look again, and in the dark, imagine that he is right. I imagine that there never was a piano. Not in the solid, man-made, structural way that we once knew, not in the physical sense. I imagine it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

  ‘There are still so many things to be grateful for,’ he says. ‘There is still so much that grants us freedom.’

  I walk up the aisle. I hear the notes before I reach it, before I sit down in front of it, before I put my feet to the pedals, before I press my fingers to the keys. I hear its melancholy tune. I hear the notes before I sit down, before I begin. I feel the song in my stomach.

  I look above the piano, and up to the hanging Jesus. ‘Funny,’ I say, ‘that God never had a daughter.’

  3

  Mathilde is sitting by Hugo, sewing. She reminds me of the way she used to look in London, and it warms me.

  ‘You’ve told Father?’ she says, looking up from her stitching, pins in her mouth.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We should be going together.’

  ‘No, you have to stay with him,’ I say. ‘This time, you have to stay.’

  She continues to sew, rhythmically, and doesn’t look up. I go over to where Hugo is lying in bed. He opens his eyes, slowly. I feel his forehead. He is still warm, but he has more colour now.

  ‘Mummy,’ he says, stirring. ‘When will I be better?’

  ‘Soon,’ I say. ‘So soon. I’m going to get help and then I’ll come back for you. I’ll be back soon.’

  ‘Don’t leave.’ He coughs, and I prepare the bucket for him to be sick. But he isn’t, and he lies back down.

  ‘Maman is here. She’ll be here with you.’

  ‘If you go to the next town south and back again it should only take three days,’ Mathilde says. ‘In three days you’ll be back, with medicine.’

  ‘If they have some.’

  ‘They will. They did, not so long ago.’ Mathilde looks at me, sternly. Since Dengue, since not knowing what anything is, a day is an eternity. Three days like this is torture. ‘Maybe you don’t have to leave, if Hugo gets better, if he gets better today.’

  I stand over him, and his pale face. His tiny arms, a shadow of himself. ‘I have to. I have to do something.’

  We know what it means, to go back. Even a few miles south is a return. We don’t ever say it, but it is a sacrifice. It means sacrificing our own safety, our own invisibility, for his.

  She stops sewing. ‘Why should you be the one to go? I should do it, it should be me.’

  I am the one who is not afraid. Out of the two of us, I am always the one that has to be brave. ‘I’ve done it before.’

  ‘We had each other.’ She puts her hands in front of her.

  ‘I won’t be gone for long.’

  ‘The weather is getting worse, isn’t it?’ She looks out the window, she looks at my wet feet. ‘It’ll be colder soon. You’ll have to rest, regularly. You’ll have to stop. You’ll have to keep warm, and stay safe.’

  She offers these words of care as a way to protect herself. I don’t want to say it, but she wouldn’t be safe on her own. Even now, after these years. I am stronger than her. She’s aware of it too, because I’ve allowed it. ‘I know,’ I say. ‘I’ll leave today. Before it’s dark.’

  She puts her sewing down and comes to stand beside me. We both look down at Hugo. I lean down to kiss his forehead.

  I turn to Mathilde. She holds my face in her hands and kisses me square on the mouth. ‘Ours has been a kind of love story hasn’t it? The same as anyone else’s.’

  ‘In a sense,’ I say. ‘I think about when we first met all the time.’ I think about London all the time.

  ‘It’s wretched,’ she says. ‘The lot of them are wretched.’

  ‘Do you think Mrs P meant well? Do you think they knew what they were doing?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘It was a privilege of theirs to be able to rationalise it.’

  ‘And a privilege of ours to leave it behind.’

  ‘We’ve looked after each other. I loved you from the moment I saw you, and I don’t think anyone could ever understand that.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I say, ‘You don’t have to say it.’

  ‘I do,’ she says, her face pleading. ‘I don’t know what this life would have been like without you. Without my dear friend.’

  I want to tear my face away, feeling a lump forming in my throat like I’ve swallowed something dark and heavy. ‘What about the last box?’ I say, my voice croaking out. ‘Like the boxes that make up Mrs Darling’s mind, one within the other. Did I ever get the innermost box?’

  Her face crumples and her mouth opens, but she doesn’t know what to say.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I say, relenting. ‘I don’t suppose anyone ever gets that.’

  ‘You’re everything,’ she says, ‘even so.’

  I look down, her hands still holding my face. ‘We’re his parents,’ I say. ‘We’ll always love each other.’ She stays like that for a time, before resting her head on my shoulder. She grabs onto me, and her face is angled so she can look at Hugo, over me.

  I smell her hair, the whole world of it. I lean into it, I place it in my memory. I tell myself I’ll come back for it.
/>   ‘You’re the other half of my orange,’ she says.

  I wonder if either of us can remember the taste of oranges.

  I pack my rucksack. I kiss my son goodbye. His cold sweat stays on my lips and is caught by the wind as I leave the house. I pull my hood up to shield myself from the sky. My shoes suck into the earth beneath my feet, and I pull them back out. I hold a compass tightly in my hand, but I know the way, even in the dark.

  We knew the way in the dark before. I waited for her outside that hotel, but as the minutes passed and she never appeared, I had to go back for her. I knew there was only one way out. She never questioned me for it and that made me love her more.

  I left the car running before I mounted that staircase, and the quiet electric sound whirred behind me. I got there just before anyone else did. I got there just in time. I put my foot down on the pedal of a car that was fully charged and I drove us out of the city and down the empty roads. She never asked to go back to the park for her bag of possessions she’d hidden there, but she remembers them often. Even if she doesn’t say it out loud, when she has a quiet day I know she thinks of her mother and that recipe for tarte tatin hidden under decking.

  We reached what once was a city in the middle country. I knocked on a door of long distant relatives I remembered visiting with my grandfather, but they weren’t there. We kept going. We weren’t stopped for miles and as soon as we were it was too far away, and the lines of communication hadn’t got to that point yet. They didn’t know what I’d done. And as soon as they didn’t know, I felt that I was free of it and could start again.

  We took sanctuary in any religious establishment that was left (and that was few), because they would house us. As we got closer to the border the car began to sing. We listened to the noise and knew it was a whirring which meant there wasn’t much time. We left the car in England, and it is somewhere there still, I imagine. We had no money or means to keep it with us. We crossed the border as though it were imaginary, but it meant a lot to us then, and means a lot still. We can never cross back.

  We held onto each other like children. Mathilde had this idea that we were, in a sense, and she called out my name in her sleep and not her mother’s or her grandmother’s, or her own. I started to tell her about what was before and took delight in remembering with her as a witness, a stranger to it all.

  Where at first I was terrified by the thing occupying space inside of me, I now became curious. It was a relief to let go of my body after all these years and give it over to someone else, however small. I gladly took the extra food from Mathilde, and made sure I rested when I needed to, and stopped along the road in a place that was safe. I began to take care of myself in a way I hadn’t before, and I would sit and tell Mathilde about it at night, our arms outstretched beneath our heads, rolled towards each other. I compared my swollen fingers with hers, and the hard mound of my belly with her flat expanse that stretched over muscle and bone. Look, I said, I’m something else now. I told her I was ripe like an orange, I was plump like an apple, I was fruit and was the taste of fruit and I would grow where nothing else would grow. I said it jokingly, but she believed me. She said it was more amazing than all the fruit she had ever tasted, if she could still remember a thing like that, months later.

  She rubbed my belly and pressed an ear to it. It sounds like the sea, she said, and I wondered if for her that was just another thing to be afraid of.

  But the fear of death – not just of my own, but of all living things – was replaced slowly by anticipation. It was replaced by the feeling of something small bobbing to the surface, something I didn’t recognise. It was a hopeful acknowledgment that my body was doing something that I hadn’t told it to do, something it knew beyond any understanding I had for it. It carried on without me, as surely as the sun always appeared in the morning, however hidden and small, and left us at night, as we lit candles round the altars of churches and temples, and wherever else we slept.

  I gave myself over to it, that feeling, and it spilled over to Mathilde, too. So much so that she would sit behind me, legs around my legs, and brush my hair with an old hairbrush she found, one with soft white bristles and a silver frame that had rubbed away to black. She took care of me as I swelled up like a sponge reaching water. I was never afraid. I welcomed the kindness of strangers. I didn’t fear them. Not until Hugo was born.

  When we left, we left everything behind. We were wiped clean. We took a vow of poverty. We went without fruit and meat. We went without one kind of love – the intimacy of a body, the weight of a person – but not all kinds. It was the price we paid for freedom, so we didn’t mind. It didn’t worry us so much, then, because we always just had enough. We always had each other.

  Near the end, we had to stop walking. I was too big and could barely sleep with the weight of it pressing on me. That’s how I knew it was coming long before it started. Even as we sat eating cabbages and beetroot from allotments we passed, counting the weeks between us now and us then, we still couldn’t pinpoint exactly when it was supposed to be ready, when it would arrive. But I knew when I was ready, when the expectation turned to irritation, my whole body willing it out of me.

  Somewhere between deciding to keep it and him appearing in front of me fully formed, the miracle of it made me greedy. The wonder of it made me possessive, and I wrapped my hands around my own stomach and felt him shift, the same way any human shifted, and I knew that Mathilde had been right after all, that there were still some miracles in this world yet, things that didn’t wait for you before they appeared.

  I wanted to ask it: What are you ready for? Do you really want to see all this? But it did, somehow. We were in one of the last places then, a mosque, and they let us in and helped us, because they said we are all people here. They told us they could help us, because we are all people.

  One of the women there said she had helped women many times before, and when she saw us, she cried in that way you do when you haven’t seen someone for a long time. She kept saying over and over, imagine if you had been left out there, imagine if you had been out there.

  I can’t remember who was around me or stood beside me. I remember that I had cushions piled behind my back which made me feel worse and I remember the woman saying she could stretch her fingers over the opening of the head and it was ready. It was Mathilde, though, who reached her hands up inside of me and helped him out, and she said later that that is when she felt like a mother. She handed him to me and her hands were bloody. She told me it was a boy and I laughed. One good one, I said. She laughed back.

  The placenta followed. We ate it later for nutrition.

  I tore, and Mathilde sewed me up, the woman at her shoulder, watching. We stayed in the mosque for days, waiting for him to latch, and they gave me everything they had. It took me a long time to heal.

  Mathilde’s hands were bloody when she gave me my son, and that is what made her feel like he was our son, the way she brought him to life.

  In the days that followed it became her time to give herself over to him. She sat with me, as we coaxed him to the nipple, taught him what he already instinctively knew. She was the one that looked after him all through the night, his face a scrunch of shock and displacement. She swaddled him best and soothed him best, and then it was her turn to be unafraid.

  She told me that the baby had a serious face, like a writer. She told me about a French writer that she knew once, who wrote about misery and hope. He wrote about the people and he wrote about change. He was someone who made a difference. We decided we had that wish for him, for our son. We named him Hugo.

  He was a happy baby. He smiled, and he learnt it from no one. We realised some things were innate and couldn’t be taught, and that made us love people all over again. With every movement we realised something about humans that we never knew, and we always thought we knew everything. He moved and he crawled and he walked, and even though we took him from town to town to try and get further away, to try and find work, it never s
eemed alien to him. He never complained. When he learnt to speak, he said all the good words. He never knew a drop of French or any other language but English and he’d never know any different and he’d never mind. He pushed us, and was curious, and he pushes us still, the way he reminds us that it’s normal to want something different, to want more, to ask questions. It’s normal to want to know the answer. That is innate, too.

  The further north of the border we got, the closer we came to using our real names again. By the time Hugo could speak, we were far enough away, we were safe. We didn’t have to hide. He pushed us when we needed to be pushed, and he showed us grace, when there was none to be found.

  Of all the hardest things to lose in the world, amongst all the food turned to dust, all the people you loved a memory, all the landscape you knew as well as your own body turned to mulch, hope was the hardest to lose of all. The loss of hope was always fatal, in one way or another. Gloria knew that.

  Hugo gave us a shell to hide under. Staying quiet was a way to protect him, and out of the things that can be learnt, he learnt that from us. But he also made all the rest of it a mist. Our past lives were background noise and he was clear as a bell. He unravelled us, and the feelings that had been squashed down by the world we lived in, like the tin of pineapple under the floor. We pierced it open with a hiss of air. But there are some things that are irretrievable. The time alone taught us that too. I always wanted more from the world and more from Mathilde than she had to offer. But we could never find the voices to explain it to each other, because those had been taken from us too.

  I sat with her once, when Hugo was small, after I’d reached out to her by the neck and pulled her face close to mine. Stop, Jaminder, she said, you’re hurting me. Well, you’re hurting me, I said to her, over and over, her eyes scanning my face like words on a page, like watching the world outside from a moving train, unable to find a stationary object to focus on.