Blenheim Orchard Read online

  ‘Pakani fled into the forest, its night-time dangers apparently less forbidding than those posed in the village were he to stay.

  ‘I found Tikangi, his wife, close to her hut. She was squatting on a bed of ferns, beside a crackling fire. Three or four people crouched around her in silence. Her brother, Patawi, knelt back on his heels, knees planted apart, in front of and facing away from her: Tikangi grasped hold of her brother’s shoulders, which offered her the stability she needed in order to be able to undulate her belly backwards and forwards with her contractions.

  ‘I didn’t know how long this scene had been going on. But all of a sudden a tiny figure appeared on the ferns. The child had fallen. Tikangi hadn’t uttered a sound.

  ‘One of the others around her picked up the baby, but neither he nor anyone else said a word. Nor did they smile. I would say they almost, I don’t know, Hector, ignored this baby that had come among them. It was very strange, and it would take me the rest of my time there to understand that their silence was very deliberate. For the helpless newborn baby (a girl, who would be called Kabuchi) was in grave danger, and they – her grandmother, two uncles, and two guardians whom we might call her godparents – were responsible for protecting her.’

  ‘Protecting her from what, Daddy?’ Hector whispered, in a sleepy but attentive voice.

  ‘The baby was in danger from the dead,’ Ezra said. ‘From the souls of those Indians who had died cut off from the tribe, out hunting. Their bodies had never been found, so they were not sent to the Invisible Forest with proper ritual and company. They hovered outside the village at night, on the lookout for someone to take with them on their journey. They could smother the weakest among the living, and they needed no more than a word, laughter, a mother’s gasp in labour, to know: if one of the dead found out that a girl had just been born, she would be as good as dead.’

  Hector’s head seemed to sink a little into his pillow.

  ‘The baby’s godfather cut the umbilical cord with a bamboo splinter and tied it. He then bathed the baby with cold water from a bamboo and beeswax container, washing away the blood. When the trembling baby was clean the godmother took her, held her in the crook of her arm, and massaged warmth back into her body.

  ‘She administered a forceful massage to the baby’s head, her palm pressed on and around her skull. After a while she passed the baby to the grandmother, who continued to massage her head. I, clothed, shivered in the night, but the naked Indians paid the cold no heed, concentrating their solemn attention on the baby.

  ‘Tikangi, meanwhile, had delivered the placenta.’

  ‘It’s so messy, Daddy,’ Hector said in a sleepy voice. ‘All that blood and stuff.’

  ‘One of her brothers gathered the ferns on which the afterbirth had fallen and took the bundle away to be buried.

  ‘The grandmother passed Kabuchi to her uncle. He massaged for a while and then, to my surprise and embarrassment, passed her to me.’

  ‘What did you do, Daddy?’ Hector asked, yawning.

  ‘How could I refuse? Your Dad – a young Oxford graduate student, brought up in a country town in the south of England – took the newborn baby in his hesitant fingers and massaged her tiny head. When the time felt right, I passed her to the person closest to me, her godmother. She then passed Kabuchi back to Tikangi, who put her baby in her sling and walked slowly back to her hut. The other Indians separated without a word and went each to their own huts.’

  Ezra stopped speaking. He could see that Hector’s eyes were closed. His boy was slipping into sleep.

  ‘Soon,’ Ezra whispered, ‘everyone was asleep. Campfires crackled, the wind blew in the trees. Out in the jungle jaguars prowled; the white men – woodcutters, clearance farmers, road-builders – toiled without respite; and the restless spirits of the dead remained each alone. The tribe had a new member.’

  Ezra Pepin kissed his son on his dry forehead, and retired to his and Sheena’s bedroom. What seemed like a long, long time ago he’d woken with her absent, and now the day was finally ending, but she was gone again. He pulled the duvet over his shoulders, lay on his right side, and waited for sleep.

  Some yards away, Blaise was curled up in a foetal position. She’d slept this afternoon; had only been pretending to be asleep just now. Trying to make sense of the day, her mind kept returning to the moment she ran from under the vehicle, yelling, and flew towards the men.

  Blaise had been crouching beneath a huge-wheeled yellow digger. More than half of the others had clamped themselves to machinery. No one had got a lock to her: she clasped a connecting rod above her head to which she was not otherwise attached. The security goons were picking up any floppy bodies they could and hauling them away.

  Blaise could see her mother. Or rather she saw her feet, sticking out from the undercarriage of an enormous dump truck, just in front of one of its huge vulcanised wheels, whose scale rendered Sheena’s feet doll-like. Mad, Blaise thought. They might not even notice her under there, and drive the vehicle off, crushing her mother like a toy. Blaise’s mother was brave and insane: she had no idea what danger she’d put herself in. She always assumed she and everyone else would get out of any trouble.

  The foreground of Blaise’s frame of vision was breached abruptly, by a heavy-set security guard dragging something. A body. It was Bobby, being pulled by his dreadlocks. His hands were tied behind his back.

  ‘Come on, mop ‘ead,’ the guard grunted as he pulled Bobby, who alternated between floppiness of his limbs and – snorting with pain as the roots of his hair were tugged from his scalp – kicking his heels into the ground, and quickstepping backwards. Which only made the security guard’s job easier, so that after a few shuffling feet Bobby once more went limp, and then grimaced with the resultant pain. The guard didn’t appear to mind which way Bobby wanted to travel. ‘Fuckin’ moppet I’ve got,’ he called to his colleagues.

  Bobby gasped. A white-toothed rictus distressed his painted face. His eyes squinted shut.

  ‘We can turn ‘im upside down and mop the cabin.’ Guttural laughter in the trees.

  Blaise wasn’t sure whether the heat that flared through her own head, threading capillaries of blood across her eyes, was her rage or Bobby’s pain echoed in her scalp. Her fingers scrabbled in amongst the undercarriage above her head. Blind they found a box, and lifted its lid, and withdrew a heavy metal tool. She broke from beneath the digger, and ate up the ground. ‘No!’ she shouted, grasping the solid monkey wrench in both tight hands. She drew it back behind her shoulder, and as she swung it the security guard looked her way. Alerted by her yell, he turned and dipped his bigboned face towards her.

  The heavy end of the wrench connected with a thud: soft on his flesh and hard on bone. Then everything stopped. The man lay down, groaning. Blood oozed from between fingers held over his face. Blaise stopped, the wrench fell from her hands. There was no more aggression after that: the shouting ceased, the chaos in the clearing stilled. Everyone acted warily, properly, the act of violence bringing about a strange decorum. Blaise let herself be led away. An ambulance came; police cars.

  His face twisting towards her, into the flailing arc of the head of the heavy spanner.

  3

  Fudge Making

  Saturday 21 June

  When Sheena woke she knew it was late, from the silence in the house and from the sun that sudden dazzled as she drew the curtains open. Her head was silted with the memory of beer; her tongue, the walls of her mouth, were coated with resin from spliffs she’d shared. Eleven fifteen, the clock confirmed. The night came back to her, sat around the camp fire outside the Wasteland: no one said anything for hours, drunk and doped into a beaten silence. Guitars strummed, a drum beat, more defiant drone than song, the trancelike summons of a rite. Mole beside her, hours floating by.

  She shook her head away from the clock, brusquely, as if chronology were something it offered but which Sheena chose to refuse, along with all futile regret for the night before.
r />   By the time she had let a long hot shower purge and rinse and vivify her, and come back into the bedroom with white towels wrapped around her body and her hair, Sheena could accept sounds from outside, and was able now to look out of the window without the sunlight assaulting her: Ezra had cat’s cradled washing line to and fro across their modest lawn; he was hanging up a second or a third load, pegging clothes of wondrously assorted size. Beyond, white sheets hung, still in the breezeless morning. Blaise was chasing Louie in amongst them, floundering after him. Her little brother then took his turn to pursue Blaise, shooting at her with a clothes peg gun; the report it produced from his lips reached Sheena’s ears. Blaise ducked behind linen as he popped her, and died dramatically, clutching a sheet in front of her, her weight pulling it from the line as she fell. In unconscious homage, it struck Sheena, to some Czech or Polish film Ezra had once taken her to. Its climax a similar scene, with the blood of the hero betraying his mortally wounded presence as it spread across a hanging sheet. What a shame, Sheena could remember thinking, that the film was in black and white. How much better it would have worked in colour, the blood red on white.

  As she dried her hair Sheena wondered to what extent Ezra was and would be making the same mistake with all his children that he’d made with her: that evangelism with which he’d shared his favourite films, books, music. ‘Listen to this tape, babe,’ making her sit down in his room under the eaves in the old flat on Walton Street. ‘I didn’t know I still had it.’ And it could be anything, that was the joke; Ezra lacked a systematic approach to music, culture, life in general. It could be Patti Smith, Roland Kirk, Joseph Haydn. Rumillajta, Philip Glass, Mercedes Sosa. Some indigenous tribal music.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ezra would protest, ‘if I lack a classificatory gene. The unifying factor, darling, is that of beauty, not genre.’

  The unifying factor, Sheena regretted, was each item’s random arrival at a particular ripe moment in Ezra’s life such as to place it within his subjective canon. ‘Come with me, I’m going to show you something,’ he’d said once, dragging her through the middle of Oxford to the back entrance to Christ Church and into the picture gallery. Striding past fine but apparently irrelevant paintings to a small sculpture on a shelf at the end. Dancer, by Henri Gaudier-Brezska. ‘Will you just look at the energy in this figure?’ Ezra said, shaking his head in wonder. ‘Can’t you feel it?’

  ‘Actually, no,’ Sheena didn’t quite muster the honesty to say. ‘Fantastic, sweetheart,’ she probably did concur, and he’d have nodded. Relieved. Glad. Justified.

  And the films. She moved in with him, above a shop across the road from the best cinema in Oxford, which had converted its one screen to two that just enough students, in those early days of video, still patronised to keep open. There were early-afternoon showings of classics when the two of them had the small auditorium all to themselves: sprawled like movie producers in a studio screening room, calling up to the projectionist to ‘start the film, boy’, a private joke Sheena enjoyed more than the soporific Pasolini, Bergman, Tarkovsky that so transfixed Ezra he rarely noticed her dozing.

  Of course, Sheena conceded now as she dressed, the truth was that Ezra was her cultural mentor, the male lover who opened her eyes to an aesthetic realm. Her medical Yorkshire parents who took the family to a Christmas choral service, sent their children to piano lessons and visited the Playhouse maybe twice a year, were, Sheena understood, irredeemably provincial. Ezra’s maddening advocacy might have put her off his particular choices, but he made her aware of a feast available.

  Sheena came to perceive culture less like Ezra in terms of time, as a historical procession bearing gifts to the present, than of geography: she a British beneficiary of multicultural appetites. So that when she ventured laterally from Ezra’s narrow inroads and discovered her own tastes, for kitsch Spanish films, for cajun and salsa, for thrillers with female detectives, honesty obliged Sheena to acknowledge Ezra’s influence – one which he then strenuously denied.

  As he pegged the washing to the line, Ezra Pepin screwed up his eyes against the sun, pleased with how much housework he’d accomplished already, while his wife slept on. He wasn’t sure what time she came home, but it must have been late. She’d slid into bed without waking Ezra some time after sleep had eventually admitted him, and a couple of hours later he’d woken and lain there, watching her, the thin duvet thrown back from her warm body curled away from him. Now he kept hoping that she’d not appear until he’d finished just one more task. Pictured his naked wife slumbering on, gaining replenishment.

  Sheena was a year younger than Ezra, three or four inches shorter. Her figure was barely changed from that of the woman he’d met at twenty-four, and if her white flesh was a little looser when he massaged it, and settled a little lower on her hips, this remained less present decline than presentiment of a distant future.

  There was a full-length mirror in their bedroom in which after a shower Sheena would give her nude body frank appraisal.

  ‘You’re looking gorgeous, darling.’ Ezra would lob some honest compliment her way. ‘I mean, my God, your breasts.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sheena would reply without vanity. ‘Because I swam so much as a girl, I told you, built up my pecs. That’s why they’ve stayed this firm.’

  ‘I’m sincerely grateful to Leeds municipal swimming pools.’

  ‘After breast-feeding three children, you should be. You should see some of the women at Esporta.’

  ‘I don’t need to hear about your drooping friends, honestly.’

  ‘No, I mean the ones who’ve had implants. When we lie on the floor at the end of a class. Wind-down time.’ Sheena let out a squawk of laughter. ‘Their boobs pointing at the ceiling.’

  Sheena weighed herself on the bathroom scales once a day, but it was the visual rather than numerical evidence, as she twisted and gazed over her shoulder at the reflection of her arse and thighs, that would prompt her to lay off butter, chocolate, cream for a week or two. Count the laps when she went swimming with Hector. That was all it took, until she’d nod at the reflection of what as far as Ezra could see was the same athletic body he was already wedded to a fortnight earlier; he assumed the variations were merely cyclical.

  ‘Good grief, you’re in fine shape, woman,’ Ezra would declare, unable to refuse the temptation of squeezing his wife’s bottom as he passed.

  ‘I’m just lucky,’ Sheena shrugged modestly, and she meant it. She took little personal credit for her good fortune. She had jet black hair, odd strands of which Ezra would occasionally notice before she did had turned white overnight; they, too, seemed not so much evidence of what was happening now as discreet intimations of what would eventually come. He’d seen one this morning as he lay beside her. In the next day or two Sheena would spot it too and tug it out with a matter-of-fact grimace, less out of vanity than of irritation.

  Sheena’s lustrous black hair was anomalous above blue eyes, pale skin, a snub nose and thin, mobile lips. Inky and gothic, it was like none of her relations’ since a great-grandmother who possessed either Jewish, Spanish, gypsy or Indian blood, depending upon which aunt or uncle in her extensive family had been whispering their prejudices into her ear. Sheena was proud of her hair, whatever genes had bequeathed it, and she kept it long and wore it in any of many styles according to her mood of the morning and how much of a hurry she was in: plaited, pony-tailed, braided, bee-hived. Tied up, tied round, tied back. Pinned, plumed, her black tresses pliant but distinctive, the ever changing, always striking feature around her plain and open English face.

  As for Sheena’s clothes, Ezra thought as he pegged up the last of them on the washing-line, he wasn’t sure she’d ever changed her style. She wore either blue jeans or stretchy sports apparel, with pale-brown working boots. Layers above: T-shirts, tracksuit tops, armless fleeces, cardigans. The no-nonsense working clothes of a woman with no need to impress anyone; a small-business employer and mother who rolled up her sleeves and mucked in with wh
atever needed doing. Maybe the colours had changed, Ezra conceded. Maybe the fabrics had evolved.

  On special occasions, notably those social functions connected with Ezra’s work to which partners were invited and, with each modest promotion, increasingly expected to come, Sheena put on what she referred to as fancy dress. It was true that she drew upon herself Saratoga’s finer lingerie, sheer hosiery, flowing dresses from Whistles or Jigsaw, high heels and jewellery, with more girlish pantomime than sensual womanly relish. And when they got home after such evenings it never occurred to Sheena to dally and vamp over a nightcap with her husband, to seduce him as the elegant woman of the night such attire allowed her to be; she simply discarded it on her way to bed, while Ezra paid the babysitter and locked up. Shoes on the landing. Jewellery beside the basin. Tights and panties on the bathroom floor. It wasn’t a trail laid for a hunter to follow, and Ezra had to move fast if he wanted her to let him undress her. Her dress draped across a chair, bra on the carpet, and Sheena tucked up naked in bed, where she may or may not feel like sex, her mood in the matter having little to do with the clothes she’d worn or the evening out. If she lacked the appetite for it, Ezra had learned there was little point in hoping to coax it from her; while if she was desirous, then he could take as much pleasure as he wished in doing her bidding.

  Sheena pulled on a pair of blue jeans and a white T-shirt and went downstairs. Sunshine poured into the house: summer began when you could walk barefoot on the kitchen tiles without the stone chilling your soles. Flies buzzed against the window panes behind the sink. Hector had the Oxford Times opened and spread out across the kitchen table in front of him: stooped and squinting through his glasses at the broadsheet, he looked like a small old man. Sheena leaned in between Hector’s bent spine and the back of his chair and hugged him, looping one arm under, the other over, his shoulders. His floppy brown hair smelled dry and musty as she nuzzled it. She raised herself up, stroking his face with her rising hand and tousling his hair with the other. Hector ducked and bobbed away.