Bad Fruit, page 4
He’s kind, he praises his dog no matter what it brings him, and he’s a soft touch; every time it returns, he draws a treat out from his pocket. He’d make a good dad. Near Vanbrugh Castle, he lets an elderly couple shuffle in front of him before finding his route again. He wears a forest green T-shirt that clings to the lower nubs of his spine. I want to touch him there.
I give him a profession—architect. I see him at a drawing table crouched over a sketchpad, his fingers stained in charcoal as he translates onto the page joists and beams, the skyscrapers of his mind. He’s on his lunch break. He brings the dog to work.
I glimpse the museum through the trees—it’s time. I step off the main avenue, cross the grass and follow behind him, closing the gap between us—four meters, two, then one. I slip on my headphones, get out my phone, stare at the screen, then crash into his shoulder. In the collision, I touch his back, feel the slight rise of his buttock.
“Sorry, are you all right?”
I rub the side of my head, adjust my rucksack.
“I’m so sorry,” he repeats, “I didn’t see you there.” The dog doubles back and wags its tail.
I pull my headphones out of my ears. “No worries. It’s my fault, I wasn’t paying attention.”
He smiles. I smile back.
Where the path intersects with the main avenue, he follows it down to the playground and I hang a left to the museum. His lips pucker into a whistle. There he goes. My one touch of the day.
* * *
THE EXHILARATION FADES quickly; by the time I’m down the hill, I’m consumed by the flashes and fragments of, I don’t even know what they are—memories?
Splinters of glass.
Milk spreading between toes.
I’ve brought a library book today, The Wonders of Language, my etymology dictionary, and a picnic blanket; I imagined an afternoon of reading in the park, but it’s impossible, the rattled feeling scraping against the brightness of the day. I head to the museum.
The National Maritime Museum is my library, each gallery a borrowable collection of emotions: Battle for Jutland for courage; Atlantic Worlds for justice; Maritime London for a sense of nostalgia. I’ve been here all summer. There was a photography exhibition a few weeks ago called The Great British Seaside that reminded me so keenly of going to the Thames beaches with Julia and Jacob—the freezing licks of the river, the acid sting of vinegar on my fish and chips—I bit the inside of my cheek, blood surprising my mouth.
Today, I know exactly which gallery I need—Nelson’s Nation & Navy on Level 2. The lift is giddy with children on their last few weeks of summer and when the doors slide open at Level 1, they surge forward. A grandmother calls out to one of them, “Slow down, my beauty, slow down,” and I’m absorbed for a moment with pairing woman to child. It’s a girl, five perhaps. She acknowledges her grandmother with a grin but doesn’t stop, racing flat out onto the Great Map, chin up, hair flying behind her. The grandmother smiles at me, as if to say, “What can I do?” I press the Close button three times.
The gallery is empty, a dimly lit secret cupped over the chaos of the children’s areas. Here, among the paintings of naval battles under fired skies, the cool, black steel of cannonballs and mortars, I immerse myself in war to wage it against myself. Pull yourself together, I whisper to shut out the dread stillness that came over my brother and sister when I told them about how Mama scratched Daddy. I press my lips so close to the display cabinet of cutlasses, I can see them moving in the reflection. You can do this. You can get through this summer.
I come back to Nelson’s Navy & Nation for the next few days; my strength, drawn from the relics of naval war, is too fragile for any other place. I sit meters away from Nelson’s Battle of Trafalgar coat, the hole on the left shoulder a shot of courage. Bigger things have happened than fragmented thoughts and Mama’s rages; rigging has been destroyed; ports have been blockaded; control of the Caribbean has been lost, won. If Nelson can get shot in the shoulder, I can do this. I try to forget that the wound was fatal.
On Wednesday afternoon, I go to the toilets, the clean ones in the East Wing that don’t make you grateful for fresh air. At the sink, I get a text from Daddy. It’s a photo of the deck chair Francie used, leaning against the house with the message, “Please put away.” Striped once, the colors have bled into each other and while the navy has lasted, the white is a fungal green. And then the images come to me again.
Splinters of glass.
Milk spreading between toes.
A woman crumpling against a chair.
I retch into the sink, my heart smashing in my chest. The taps are still on, soapsuds swirling around the plughole. Overhead, there’s an announcement about a talk starting. I cover my ears, crawl into a stall, breathe. What’s going on? I don’t remember any of this, no broken glass or spreading milk, no woman crumpling against a chair. I wait for the panic to subside, for the images to fade to black.
* * *
THE SMELL OF browning mince hits me when I get home. Daddy is at the stove; he’s home early making an effort. Red wine, mushrooms, and peppers are out on the counter, there’s even posh cheddar from the supermarket deli counter, still wrapped in wax paper.
“Bolognese.”
As children, we’d have cheered at that announcement after weeks of microwave meals and now he searches my expression for the same reaction. He doesn’t find it. To make it up to him, I sit at the table and chop garlic. It’s quiet with Daddy, just the blade against the cloves, the thud of his spatula separating lumps of mince. I would usually find it restful cooking with him, but I’m reeling today, the silence prickling with all the things I cannot say.
I’m ill, Daddy.
Something’s wrong.
Mama’s car pulls into the drive and his shoulders slope, his jabbing movements growing rapid. I abandon the garlic. He understands. Being in the kitchen is traitorous.
It’s warm, but even in the summer, Mama insists on wearing her silk shirts without rolling up her sleeves. When she cups her hand under my chin, I smell the damp scent of her sweat.
“Did you do the list?”
“All done.”
“Good girl.” She gestures towards the kitchen. “What’s he doing?”
“Making Bolognese.”
She wrinkles her nose.
The wrinkle remains while Daddy serves up. He ladles a generous portion onto a bed of spaghetti. Mama looks at it as if it’s raw.
I eat quickly, shoving enormous forkfuls into my mouth, swallowing without chewing. These situations develop quickly. Food can be thrown, swept into the bin, hurled out of the kitchen door, meals for foxes and mice while we go hungry. The scholarship girls would laugh at how quickly I could clear a plate.
Mama dips two millimeters of her fork into the sauce and lays it on the tip of her tongue. “This has cheese in it.”
Daddy shakes his head furiously. Mama’s always had a sensitive stomach; she has rules about what she can’t bear to eat—milk, butter, cheese. He chews for longer than is wise. “Cheese is on the side.”
Mama inspects the side plate of grated cheese, as if she can determine by looking at it if a single shaving has ended up in her sauce. She turns to me. “Is there cheese in this sauce?”
I shovel into my mouth what will be my last forkful. My stomach growls. “I’m not sure.”
“I can taste it.” She pushes her plate away and folds her arms. “What are you trying to do, Charlie?”
Daddy, also sensing the end of his dinner, puts down his fork.
“You know about my stomach. Isn’t what you’ve done enough?”
“There’s no cheese in the sauce,” he says slowly.
My heart pounds; Daddy isn’t used to dealing with Mama. He hasn’t tracked her facial expressions when she fights with Julia, the twists in her arguments, the jumps in her logic; he would take himself to the mortuary, to the garden, or shut the living-room door and read his journals.
I try to intervene. “Mama, it’s a mistake, maybe a little got in. Let me make you something else …”
But she’s too far gone. Her eyes blaze. “You’re trying to poison me, aren’t you?” she hisses at him. “You and Francie are in this together!” She scrapes her chair back from the table. The sound vibrates through my jaw. “I’ll find out, you know. I’ll find out everything!” She runs into the living room and tears down the towers of medical journals Daddy has spent years building. I watch her rend journals in two and then claw at my father, and think of the word “ransack,” from the Old Norse rannsaka, meaning “to pillage, to plunder” after storming and capturing a town. There is nothing to do but let her fly.
5 / LADY FINGERS
THERE WAS NO LIST THE next morning, just a simple request: “Can you make dinner instead of him?” The press of her thumb into my palm stayed long after the front door shut. If I try my hardest, I can make this better. I have to.
Yesterday, after the fight, I found Daddy sitting on the toilet lid, the last of the evening rays falling on him through the window in the alcove. He was tracing the long scratches, the double crescent of a bite mark, speaking, not to himself exactly, but as if he was talking into a Dictaphone: “Central bruising of soft tissue caused by compression. Inter-canine distance approximately three centimeters. Refer to forensic odontologist.” It occurred to me by the way he analyzed each mark that this wasn’t the first time he’d looked at his body like this. Something had happened to him, before Mama, before he’d found his calling. The identification of his injuries made him feel safe.
He hid his arms when I came in, folded them against his chest. “Let me,” I said, and he gave in, surrendering his cuts and scrapes to me like a child. I knew how to disinfect his wounds, press plasters over the bigger gashes; I’d watched him enough times. He didn’t flinch. This morning, he wore a long-sleeve shirt even though London is gearing up for a heatwave.
I pour over Peranakan cookbooks Mama bought on one of our annual trips to Singapore, trying to find a recipe she’d like. I’ve never made main meals before, only desserts and snacks, so the ingredients are unfamiliar; I have to look up each one. Candlenuts look like oversized hazelnuts but have an oil content so high, you can set them on fire. Asam gelugar is the fruit of a Malaysian rainforest tree, sour, for soups and curries. Buah keluak I remember from the nonya restaurant Mama took me to, a black nut from the mangrove swamps of Indonesia that is deadly without curing. I can’t buy any of these in southeast London.
Luckily, Mama is a magpie, collecting many things from our annual trips to Singapore that she never uses, and when I empty out the cupboards, I find two mainstays of Peranakan cooking—orange shrimp dried to tiny spirals, and an unopened packet of Indonesian belachan, shrimp paste that emits an overpowering, fermented smell.
Don’t overreach. Something simple.
I settle on sambal bendeh, a fiery salad. Mama has been trying to lose weight forever, she’d appreciate the absence of meat, and she loves spice. All I need is okra, chilies, and limes.
I take the bus to Lewisham High Street. Beyond the picture-perfect slopes of the heath, a few minutes from the coffee shops and music conservatoire, the pastel-colored captain’s houses slide into modern newbuilds “inspired by Regency architecture” before dropping away into terraced houses and then the graffitied building of the old telephone exchange. Now, we’re in Lewisham proper, the mash of fried chicken shops, African hair salons, and launderettes. Next to an Indian grocer is a beautiful carved Hindu temple.
I get off the bus and slip among the shoppers with reusable bags under their arms or dragging wheeled shopping baskets. I blend in better here than in Blackheath Girls’ School or Greenwich’s terraced streets, another girl, race indistinct, heading for the market.
Mama calls the market “Parisian” but there are no baguettes, no freshly baked croissants or fine-milled lavender soap, just fake watches, SIM cards, meat rotting in the heat, and fruit and veg at cutthroat prices—£1.50 for a kilo of onions, cabbages for 50p, a huge bunch of carrots for £1. Mama once dragged five kilos of lychee from here on a Saturday afternoon after the market closed. We ate them for days and still didn’t finish the sack before their textured rinds turned wet and bruised.
In a stall outside one of the halal butchers, I buy the okra and chilies from a woman in a hijab. Julia messages me while I’m paying. “Got something for you. Meet me in Gabrielle’s?”
We haven’t spoken since my birthday even though Chrissy only lives in Blackheath. We’re playing a game; I’m punishing her for abandoning me, she’s letting me, and while it seems like I’ve won, the relief her message brings is unsettling. I take my change and drive my heel into the liquid pouring into the drain. It’s blood. Almost indistinguishable from rainwater.
* * *
GABRIELLE’S IS JULIA’S favorite café in the village, ironic because the reason it’s so popular are the shelves of French sourdough, the glazed sausage rolls, the tiny pistachio cakes dripping with rose icing, none of which Julia eats. In this way, Julia and Mama are the same, wanting things not for themselves but because other people do. Finding a table is a Darwinian feat she relishes—she ambushes families at the slightest rustle of a jacket, scans the crowds for that final swallow of coffee. She pushes her sunglasses to the top of her head and glares at a table of fourteen-year-olds who haven’t finished. They leave within seconds. She beckons me over.
“Got one.” She waits for me to congratulate her.
I say nothing. Why should I give everyone what they want?
Julia rolls her eyes and takes out her sketchbook. She’s always sketched, this is one of hundreds of black sketchbooks she’s kept since she was a child: shells; museum objects; the Thames. Since she started medical school, she draws people, what they are on the outside—postures, planes of faces, knuckles—and then what they really are—cartilage, muscle, bone.
She looks strange to me, outlining the triangle of a sacrum, the broad spread of a pelvis; it takes a minute before I understand why—there’s very little skin on display. She’s wearing an oversize chambray shirt, and around her throat she’s wound a thin, leopard-print scarf. She’s still stylish, she’s spent at least five minutes tucking the shirt into her jeans, but where are her crop tops, her skintight T-shirts, her miniskirts?
We chat about neutral subjects—Chrissy, the twins. A man stares at her openly from the pastry counter, how charming, a beautiful girl sketching. Julia lifts her eyes at him, encouragingly. As he approaches, she flips over her pad to display lobes of a brain, the fronded spray of the cerebellum. He spills his coffee. We burst out laughing. Don’t they know? If Julia likes someone, she hides herself completely.
About Mama, Daddy, my birthday, we don’t speak. She jabs at the brown paper bag with her pencil. “Lady fingers?”
“The correct term is ‘okra.’ ”
She snorts. “What’s Daddy ever made with okra? Don’t tell me, she’s got Daddy making Peranakan food.”
I wait a few beats until she realizes it’s me who’s cooking, daring her to ask me what’s changed, what’s happened, but she’s too clever for that. She bends her head and labels her drawing in careful print—sacrum, coccyx, ilium. She pretends to Mama that she’s revising, but she’s not. She does in art what I do with etymology, analyzing breaking things down into comprehensible parts. Only then do we know what to feel.
“Drinks are here.” She snaps her sketchbook shut and peers into my hot chocolate when the waitress sets it down. I wanted it iced but the machine has blown with all the requests for iced coffees. “That’s a whole day’s worth of calories.”
“I don’t care about calories.”
She searches my hairline, my contact-lensed eyes, my makeup, the candy stripe T-shirt I’m wearing, the rucksack I clutch on my lap. I refuse to squirm. “Forgot to give you this last Sunday.” The edge in her voice is gone. She draws out a makeup bag from her tote.
I set the contents out on the table—foundation, powder, concealer.
“They’re your shade. They match your skin tone. Your actual skin tone. I thought I was going to be around to help you try it on this summer but, you know.”
I lift the bottle to the light and then hold it against the skin of my wrist. It’s pale beige, without yellow undertones. I shove it back into the bag. “I don’t need this. I don’t want trouble.”
She reaches across the table so suddenly, I think she might hit me, but instead, she puts her hand over mine and squeezes. “You’re eighteen, Lil. It’s time.”
“Time for what?”
“Time for this to stop. Your face, your eyes, the juice, now the cooking? You’re about to go to Oxford. You need to stand up for yourself.”
I shrug her off, try to sit tall, even though this rough wisdom from my sister makes my eyes sting. “I am. I will.”
She cocks her head to the side, pulls her pendant taut at her neck. “Will you? Or will you not know how?”
I lift my mug to my lips. The chocolate scalds me beautifully.
* * *
MAMA’S KEY IS in the door at six, and I rush to take her bags. While she showers, I pour her a glass of spoilt juice and set it on the table while I finish making dinner (she likes it room temperature). Daddy messages that he’s been called by the coroner. I don’t believe him, but I’m relieved he’s not here; on evenings when he’s away, we eat on trays in front of the TV. We like the same thing, Mama and I—nineties movies with Demi Moore and Julia Roberts, or reality TV (Mama is a huge fan of Kris Kardashian), but recently we’ve discovered true crime—gold-digging, devastatingly handsome psychos who pretend they’re cardiologists. Mama crunches popcorn kernels between her teeth when she can’t take the suspense.
