by Rebecca Ley
I was always leaning for her like that, even after all they’d drawn out of us, all the fear of ourselves they’d entrenched in us. She told me it wasn’t right, but all that meant was it wasn’t right for her. She couldn’t understand the other side of it, and after all that time in London, I didn’t either, not for a long time.
After Hugo, I had to re-learn myself. I had to look at myself, through the punctured hole of the tin. I had to accept it, and the limitations of getting older in this world, and what this life that we’d chosen, and not chosen, meant. I had to learn to put the tin back under the floorboard. I had to learn to live a life of half-formed ideas. Hugo was the one thing that was ever fully formed.
As I walk the road south I imagine that I am walking home. I imagine walking all the way to Kenya in my mind and imagine the weather getting warmer and warmer until the sky clears and it is blue like the colour of the sea in Mombasa and the smell is the smell of warm air, and I am home again. I wonder what this memory will mean to Hugo, if anything, and what his home is. When everyone else wants to go home again, where does he want to go? To the dreary town in a country none of his family has ever known surrounded by strangers? Is it the roads that we travelled upon and the buildings we sheltered in and the people we met? If he grows old, I wonder if he will ever tell someone that he wants to go home again; I wonder if he will tell them that the road is calling him again and that is where he wants to go. I also wonder that after these days, if I return with medicine or without, if he will have already passed, if he will already be home, and if so, if I could reach out a hand and follow him towards the light; if that is the only way to ever really go home again.
The night is drawing in, and I look for somewhere to shelter. I’ve made it to the next village and there is a church, as there is in most, but little else. Everyone will have left here, and I don’t expect to see many people. I think of Mathilde and Hugo, and they seem far away. As far away as London, in my mind. Distance in the dark means the same if they are three miles away or three hundred. Without electricity, they are as apart from me as if they no longer exist.
I settle myself in the doorway of the church, a place familiar to me now. It’s warmer here, but still cold. I feel colder as I look out upon the graves and remember Mathilde telling me about her desire for blackberries to grow over her when she died; this image she had in her mind of regrowth and the taking over of nature. I can’t imagine a thing like that, where we are, where all we have is rain and wind.
Did you know that oats are pollinated by the wind, in the way that fruit is not? I’m sure you know, after looking after your bees, I’m sure you know more than most. The way you clung onto them, when they were totally useless, the way you used them to look as though you were trying, when really you just cared about your own skin. That’s why honey is blood. That’s why I’d never taste it again even if I could.
I’m sure you could never imagine a place without fruit or vegetables, a place where there is only oats because there is only wind, and there is little sun. A place of hopelessness. A place like this.
I’m sure you could never imagine a place where nature is taking hold again, in its own way, and we have no place left in it. Perhaps we’re being pushed out, and we never really belonged to it, and we certainly never owned it, not in the way you believed. There’s a kind of hysterical irony to the work you did: in ruining nature completely, having made a mess of it, you returned to it, you asked it questions, you sought guidance from it.
I don’t think you understood it, I don’t think you were humble enough to understand – and maybe I’m not either, but Mathilde is, with her blackberries – that all this will go on without you. It will go on without all of us. And maybe that’s a shame for us, that our pocket of time on this earth was wasted and if viewed from faraway said something awful about human nature. But I don’t think it’s necessarily a shame for the earth itself. I think it could find a way to carry on without our disturbance. I think it would quietly thrive.
I think no amount of arrogance you have could stop certain things from being true: that you are not as powerful as nature. And that’s one thing you didn’t win, after all. You never held the world in your hands.
Even if for a moment you believed you did.
I wonder if Father Anthony is right, and there is more after this life. I can’t imagine it. I imagine this is the end of our world, with Hugo sick and wrapped up in bed and Mathilde standing over him and her telling me she loves me in her mind, in the same way that I talk to you. That wouldn’t be such a bad end of the world, would it? That it ends, with my body shivering in the doorway of an abandoned village and my mind elsewhere, my mind with my family and surrounded by them and loved by them. My mind remembering a time when I could pick up my phone and call them. Now I can’t so I call them in my mind, which might be more sentimental than if I actually had a phone and could send them a careless note.
I think of this end, but I think of what I must do, too. I surely must rise again, tomorrow. I must make my way back.
I wonder if I’ll ever eat again, I wonder what I might taste. I think of the rose-sherbet milkshakes we had as children, the ones with the kulfi, the ones so bright pink they burnt your eyes. I think of my grandparents’ hands, passing me a towering glass with a long straw and a tall spoon, glinting out the top of it. I am a child again and they are handing me a milkshake, and I can taste it. I open my mouth, and I can taste it. Then I close my mouth and lay my hands next to me on the hard, stone floor of the church’s porch. I know that dream is just a dream, but it reminds me that somewhere, I had another home.
Those days are cold and fruitless. When I make my way back, I walk as many have before me: empty-handed and hollow. I still make it, the soles of my shoes rotting, and my hands worn and cracked. I walk up towards the town and imagine my return, even as I am returning: Mathilde’s face next to mine, and Hugo’s milky breath. I have no sense of time passing, have lost count of the days. I only know that they are waiting for me, and I never lose sight of that.
As I trudge back towards the town, I remember walking home before, time and again, back to our flat in Kilburn, after my grandparents had left me. I walked back in the darkness and felt a sense of the new world. I thought of my life as before and after; but not after the blackout, after them. I walked home down the High Road and thought of their oval fingernails, somewhere, maybe still on their fingers. I thought of the feeling of home I had lost, and how we all sat, afterwards, flicking on and off light switches and kettles. The piano still played, you didn’t need electricity for that, but it didn’t quite work without them. In the end, it became part of the way I survived: burning it piece by piece, including the keys, each black and white bar reduced to ash. London was filled with smog, and there were days where you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.
None of that mattered as much as how we’d all lost someone, and how mundane that became. Mathilde would ask me how I survived after that, without anyone. But there was always someone. There was always something leftover.
I carry on through the town, the streets quiet because of the rain and the dark. I walk up to our doorway and for a moment remember my hunger: I grasp at my stomach as my limbs shake. I pull myself up and through the door, my hands wobbling on the handle. I climb the stairs past Mrs Donald’s flat as though I’m eighteen and have eaten a full, heaving plate of food, and I don’t stop for a moment before pushing open our own door, and stepping towards the living room.
Hugo sits there, just as I’d imagined. Leaning towards the fire, his fairy tale book in his hands, quietly turning the pages. He’s reading to himself, and nodding his head, and I can tell the fever has left him.
I hear a clatter of plates in the kitchen, and Mathilde’s soft hum, and I stop for a moment, holding onto this sound. I wait, before they turn around and see me. I imagine Hugo saying my name, and Mathilde’s soft hand on my shoulder. I pray to the ordinary, I tell myself I’ll never want for anything.
Epilogue
I found a lemon yesterday. I wanted to show it to you. I sewed it back up together from each bit that I peeled and tore, and it looked quite good like that; it looked like a whole piece of fruit again. But then Mathilde came in and laughed at me. She did that to keep the shock of seeing a lemon off her face, I could tell. We thought everything had gone, everything but this. Everything but the leftovers.
‘Fruit art?’ she said, but I didn’t think it was art.
I wanted to tell you, as I sewed the lemon back up, that I forgive you for spoiling my life. And as I sewed it, I thought of all the fruit you had taken, and all the things you had thrown away, when there was nothing. I thought it perfectly expressed your meanness, in the way that the far worse things you’d done could not.
I lifted the lemon up and thought about how its skin was happier than you have ever been and brighter, and how if you saw it, all you’d see is the broken peel and not the other, luminous side of it.
The yellow of the skin is how you haven’t spoiled my life, one bit, and the white of the inside pith is all the good days that have gone and I can think of, that no one can touch. It is the lesson that if someone ever took something from me in the way that you did, I’d leave.
I didn’t think it was art. I thought what would have been art would be the way that you looked at it, if you could see it. How I’d done it, how I’d made something. How we’d made something, out of nothing, all three of us. How we’d done it.
That would be the art: the look on your face, if only you could see it.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Kay, Ceris, Bob and everyone at Sandstone Press for making this book a reality. Thanks to David and Philippa at DGA for taking me on and having faith in my writing. Thanks to Jonathan at City University for showing me how to write a novel and giving me the confidence to finish it.
Thanks to Fiona, my first and faithful reader. To Kate, Freya, Maddie, Caroline, Lauren, Sarah and Van; fine readers and friends, who saw me through countless drafts. Thanks to Amrit for the stories of Kenya, and Krina for the mangoes. To all my friends, who supported me in countless ways.
Thanks to Emma, mi media naranja; Matt, Rachel and Les, for reading and encouragement. Thanks to my parents for a lifetime of support. To Mum for a home full of books, for seeing the writing on the wall and teaching me how to persevere. Thanks to Dad for telling me to do what I love and for taking it seriously – I wouldn’t have got here without that.
Thanks to Theo, for advice on plot, politics and peaches; without you this book could not have been written.
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