Strange
Fruit
Evie could see the trees
from the bridge that carried the East Park Road traffic over Willow Brook. She would stand on the bridge or else at the
railings fencing off the bit of waste ground on the side of the brook between
the road and the wall of the garden where the trees were, the apple trees.
There were two of them
and even on a still day their branches seemed to beckon her. In winter they poked up above the wall:
witches’ fingers, arthritic, knobbled, cauldron black. Silvered by frost some mornings, sporting a
fine shading of snow on others, they always beguiled. “Come near.
Come here,” they seemed to tell her.
In the spring a swelling of buds, and then the bursting blossom turned
the next two weeks into one long Saturday with a wedding every hour. When the confetti cleared, swept up by some
housewife wind, Evie would watch for the arrival of the little apples and then
watch the more as the fruit swelled slowly to ripeness.
“Come near. Come here,”
the trees teased.
“I can’t,” Evie’s
thoughts would answer them. “I’m too
little.”
Time passed, the seasons
flowed brook-like and Evie also took to growing. The summer she turned ten she reckoned she
was ready to follow the siren calls. But
there were obstacles.
The railings were the least
of these because someone, sometime, had bent one of the spiked metal bars to
make a space she could squeeze through – and she could, she already had. But the waste ground the railings were meant
to guard was the same size as the plot occupied by the flour warehouse next to
it and she would be in plain view for some of the time as she made her way to
the garden wall. In winter it appeared a
dank, dying place: the grass and dock all weather weary and foul with
soot. There were potholes filled with water,
dog muck everywhere and, once or twice, Evie had watched fat grey rats come out
of the brook, scuttle up the brickwork securing the bank, and race over to the
warehouse wall. In summer the place
became a jungle lush with deep stands of nettles as high as Evie herself, and
she knew they were stingers. She’d seen
kids come out onto the road rubbing themselves with dock leaves, legs and arms aglow,
white blisters already rising. But the
nettles would serve to hide her as she made her run, at least for part of the
way, and she had a plan to keep from being stung.
The back wall of the
garden in which the two trees stood was not impossibly high, but it had a
topping of broken glass set in cement that sat there like so much wicked icing
on the thin slab of red brick cake.
Again, Evie thought she could manage the wall and the glass. Again, she had a plan. What she didn’t have a
plan for was the boy.
She had not known about
the boy until one spring day the year before when she saw him in the garden for
the first time. The trees and bushes were showing green, but their foliage could
not quite conceal the sickly face that watched her. Embarrassed but above all confused, she
waved. The boy did not return her
greeting and he seemed always to be there after that.
Evie thought he might be
about her own age. She thought as well
he could be an Only like her because she never saw him with any other
kids. When he wasn’t on his own in the
garden, he was with an old man, his grandfather perhaps. So there again they were similar. She was an Only living with her Nan. He was an Only living with his granddad. But for the apples they might have been
friends. If they’d been friends the boy
would probably have given her the apples she was set on thieving.
August and already kids
had been at the trees. Evie had stood
and watched one lot having a go. She
heard the boy shout for the old man the minute the first kid got up on the wall
and then she saw the pot of hot tea emptied over him and his two pals after he
jumped back down. They thought they’d
been crafty, these lads, putting on gumboots and paddling upstream in the brook
so as to come out of the water at the foot of the wall. Well, they went back into the water a lot
quicker than they’d come out of it, one of them falling full length. He stood up wet and wailing about what his
mam would do to him for getting soaked.
The lad who had been up on the wall wailed about how his school blazer had
snagged on the glass so that he couldn’t get it down without the cloth
tearing. His mam would do for him if he
went home without it.
Evie decided to try for
her share of the apples half-way through the August Bank Holiday fortnight when
it seemed like the entire town, including the boy and his grandpa, had gone
away on holiday. She wore her corduroy
trousers and a thick sweater, as well as a pair of gloves, for the weather
denied the season. She had with her a
bag for the apples and two sacks she’d begged from a greengrocer. One of these had holes cut in it: two small
ones so she could see, two larger ones for her arms. Wearing this would get her through the
nettles. The other sack was for the
glass that topped the wall.
Evie’s heart raced as
she stood outside the railings. A wind
blew, the nettles shimmied, derisively, she thought, but the apple trees, their
branches heavy with fruit, called to her more urgently than ever. She eased through the gap in the
railings.
Not wanting to be seen
from the road, she went down the bank and then a little way underneath the
bridge meaning to put on the first of her sacks, but then she felt the need to
wee and so, stuffing them and her bag behind a stanchion, undid her trousers,
tugged them down with her panties and squatted on a big flat stone close by the
chuckling water.
She did these things
unaware the boy watched her, his face whitening with excitement at the twin
moons her buttocks made in the darkness beneath the bridge. He watched as she righted her clothing again
and as she struggled into the sack. He
watched her come swiftly through the nettles.
Moving along his side of the wall, he watched the second sack come up on
to the top of it and then Evie’s gloved hands as they sought for purchase so
she might begin her climb. He watched
her head appear and then her shoulders.
He watched as she got her elbows up onto the sacking and swung a leg
over to straddle the top of the wall.
Evie stopped there, her mind fixed on scanning the ground immediately
below her before jumping down into the garden.
When the boy showed himself, she rocked backwards, all but falling onto
the glass beyond the edge of her sacking saddle.
“If you want an apple,
you can have this one,” the boy shouted.
He had a high-pitched squeak of a voice that, even in her present
predicament, struck Evie as funny. But
the apple he let fly at her with wasn’t funny.
An early falling, it might as well have been a rock. He couldn’t throw though, this boy, and the
apple went well wide. Still, Evie was
off the wall before he could find another and she tugged the sack she had been
sitting on down after her, yanking some of the glass out of the concrete like
loose teeth. The apple the boy had
thrown lay on the ground not six inches from where she stood and, determined to
have something to show for her daring, Evie picked it up.
“I know you,” the boy
shouted. He must have climbed up on
something – Evie had seen an upturned bucket like the one her Nan used to force
the rhubarb in their bit of a garden - because his head and shoulders were
above that part of the wall she had just abandoned. She ignored him and began the trip back
through the nettles to the railings, the road and freedom.
“You live round here,”
the boy kept on. “My father’ll have the
police on you.”
Evie stopped, turned and
yelled, “That old bloke’s your dad? You
must be joking!”
“He’s not old. He isn’t.
It’s just – well, he was in the war.”
“What war was that
then? The Boer War?” Evie was laughing.
The boy fell silent, but
for no more than a moment, after which he threw something at Evie more hurtful
than any apple. “I saw what you did under the bridge. I saw your bum and your widdle and - and
everything!” He began to chant, “ I saw
England, I saw France, I saw your dirty underpants.”
At this, Evie let fly
herself and being a much better aim than the boy, returned the apple he had
thrown at her with such force and accuracy he did not know what hit him, or
even where what hit him might have come from.
Evie knew. Evie threw. Evie saw
the apple catch him smack on the mouth, knocking him down like a ninepin. And then she ran, imagining all the way home
how it would be when the old man who might or might not be his father found him
among the other fallings in the dirt.
He’d have a split lip that boy; more likely than not a tooth or two
missing as well, and in his mouth would be the taste of blood - and apples.
Born in Leicester, England, Clive Collins has spent the greater part of his life working as a teacher in Ireland, Sierra Leone, and Japan. He is the author of two novels, The Foreign Husband (Marion Boyars) and Sachiko’s Wedding (Marion Boyars/ Penguin Books). Misunderstandings, a collection of short stories, was joint-winner of the Macmillan Silver PEN Award in 1994. He was a short-listed finalist in the 2009 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. More recently his work has appeared in online journals such as Penny, Cecile’s Writers, and terrain.org. Carried Away & Other Stories is forthcoming from Red Bird Chapbooks
Tags:
Short Fiction