FICTION
SYDNEY SMITH
STRANGE FRUIT
1
Tom says, ‘Do you remember?’ I stand to walk away but he takes my hand in that way (don’t leave me alone with this) and I have to listen.
‘It was late September and it’d been raining off and on all day. The cars sizzled on the road, and the air smelled bitter. But when we got out of school the sky was blue. I saw you in the crowd pouring down the steps − you were wearing a tartan skirt. I left my friends and ran to meet you at the greengrocer’s to walk you home. I bought us apples and we ate them on the way.’
‘Not apples. Fruit was seasonal then.’
‘We walked along Riddiford Street and turned at the library on the corner. We talked about the sign that said Please Be Quiet and how you couldn’t walk on the floor without squeaking.’
‘Do you remember?’ he asks.
I remember the greengrocer’s shop with the boxes of fruit and vegetables standing on the footpath, the library with its oppressive hush. The route is familiar and the day, I know, is not. I twist my hand to free it. He grips and strokes it to reassure me. Only it doesn’t. I have to stop him this time. I can’t go through this again.
‘We walked up Constable Street. It got steeper and steeper, and the gardens got wider for a bit, and narrowed again. We turned −’
‘Tom, I don’t want to go on. Can’t you see I hate it when you do this?’
‘We turned into Owen Street and raced the rest of the way to our place.’
I’m twisting and jerking my hand now. The colour has fled from his knuckles but I can’t break his grip.
‘I pushed the side gate. It didn’t budge. I put my hand through the hole and said, ‘There’s a padlock.’ I climbed over the gate, and when I got to the top, I reached down to help you get over.’
I stop struggling. ‘No, you didn’t. I’m the climber in the family. Dad says I was climbing out of my cot before I could even walk.’
‘That’s just a detail.’
‘If you’re the chronicler, you have to get it right.’
‘We climbed over the gate. It was dark on the other side and icy-cold. The path was green with moss. We hurried down the side to the toilet and I found the key behind a flake of plaster.’
No, Dad didn’t hide the key until after. I can’t say it aloud.
‘I was climbing the steps to unlock the back door when I saw something.’
I try to escape. He leans on my shoulder, resting his forehead against my temple, his voice soft and sympathetic, as if consoling a grieving child. I have read of torturers who pretend to sympathise with their victims.
‘I recognised it, then I didn’t. I jumped down and walked into the backyard to get a closer look. Remember the apple trees? Remember how the fruit used to fall while it was still hard and green? I used to bring my friends over and we’d have apple wars. Remember that? Well, I thought this was a strange new fruit. It was enormously long and wore a red-spotted white dress. A shoe lay on the grass beneath it.’
I’m frozen now. It’s like one of those fairy tales where I’ve been led underground where the worms eat. I can’t turn around because black soil blocks me and the only way is forward.
‘I was staring at it and you were standing behind me, clutching my jacket and shaking, and I’m trying to figure out what it is. And then I know. I grab you and push you down the side path and over the gate. We run to the Parbhus’ and I tell Mr Parbhu’s son-in-law what I saw. Your face is white. Mrs Parbhu takes you on her knee and rocks you and sings to you, but you sit there like a stone.
‘Do you remember?’ Tom asks. He frees my hand at last.
No matter how many times he tells this story, I don’t remember.
It ought to be easy to give Tom what he wants. All it takes is one little lie, then he’ll stop telling that awful story. It wouldn’t even be a full lie, only a partial lie, because I remember so many of the things he describes. I even remember that dress because I hated it so much. Our mother only wore it for special occasions. But I can’t lie about the part I don’t remember. I want to hate him for torturing me − torturing us both because, at the end, when I tell him the truth, he cries with those wrenching sobs men use, that hook into your heart and tear it. I want to spread my hand on his head and give him the gift of amnesia. But he’s the family chronicler, he can’t forget. He wants me to remember and I can’t. I can’t even lie about it.
2
We live in Australia now. The three of us came over together from New Zealand, Tom, Dad and I, in 1982. I thought life here would be different. Tom was the head of the family now. It was his decision to come. Dad, who used to be tall and straight as a lighthouse, walked now with a stoop and his hair was white. I thought we could forget the past and the urge to escape. I thought we could get normal jobs, embark on normal lives, Tom and I could develop careers. We might even travel through Europe, he with his friends, I with mine. Then Tom got a job as a brickie’s labourer. My hopes died. Dad used to get jobs like that, the kind that are easy to walk out of.
Years before, after the inquest, Dad sold the house and moved us north to Auckland, a widespread city with many boltholes for people like us. Later, after all the hiding places had been found and used, we travelled south, far south to the foot of the South Island, to Invercargill, as though Antarctic cold would throw a cloak of invisibility over us. I have a picture in my mind of Dad carrying the suitcases out to the car. I am perched on the roof, looking down on Tom who tries to coax me down. I remember the look Dad always wore in those days, as though he walked up a slope toward milky sky and seagulls wheeling and calling, that long-range look directed up and up while below, the water boomed on black rocks. I used to think he would miss his step and fall. I thought Tom and I would tumble down with him, as though a rope, not loss, tied us together.
So, in 1982, we flew across the Tasman Sea to Sydney and lived together the way we did before, like fugitives. We left our belongings in boxes on the floor for a quick getaway. We moved house every twelve months − we couldn’t get shorter leases. We lived in Sydney for a few years, then hopped to Broome to Perth to Wagga Wagga. Each time the lease came due, Tom said, ‘The vibes are wrong here.’
Tom never had that long-range look of Dad’s. With him it was more like determination to burrow our way out of the earth we had got stuck in. Only we burrowed deeper.
I said to him, in a soft voice, so Dad in the kitchen wouldn’t hear, ‘Why do we have to leave? Don’t tell me about vibes. We don’t have to leave.’
‘It isn’t the right place for us,’ he said.
I saw us using up all the hiding places in Australia and moving to another continent, and on across the world. I felt the world was shrinking and that, one day, because of what we had done, it would close around us like clingfilm.
After ten years in Australia, I couldn’t stand it any more. I didn’t want babies, a husband, a home of my own, the things other women longed for. I wanted a sunny existence in one spot, free of the dark pull of death. Pete looked like the one to give it to me. He watched fix-it-yourself shows on TV and put the tips into action every weekend around the house. He had a grey feather duster of a terrier that followed him everywhere. I asked him once and he said he didn’t know anyone who had died. I thought you couldn’t get further away than that.
I told Tom, ‘Pete’s asked me to move in with him. I’m going this Saturday.’
‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Why?’
Dad said, ‘Stop plaguing your sister, Tom.’
‘I’m not plaguing her. I just want to know why.’
I couldn’t answer him. I was scared he would talk me out of it.
Tom visited us every evening, slipping like a ghost through the back door. About once a week, he told Pete, ‘Our mother committed suicide.’ Just the bald fact. He didn’t tell the elaborate story he told me because he hadn’t started that yet.
Pete made a sympathetic noise the first few times. He talked to me about Tom’s mother (‘Terrible thing to do to a little kid’) as if she was a different person to my mother. After that, he blanked his face, and when Tom had gone, he said, ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but your brother has a screw loose.’
After six months, I gave in and moved back with Tom and Dad. It was a relief, though I didn’t admit it to Tom. Pete felt like an alien.
The story of our mother’s death had always been there, hidden among the many stories Tom told about our family. He used to tell it because he was the family chronicler, just as I was the family climber. He said these stories were our life, that without them, our family would lose all its colour, its memory, everything that saved us from anonymity − the unmarked grave, he called it.
Then something changed when he turned forty. This was a few months before the anniversary of her death. He told me one day, ‘I’m not sure it really happened.’
‘You know it happened. There was an inquest. The verdict was suicide.’
He looked troubled.
I said, ‘You have the story. You tell the story.’
He looked straight into my eyes and said, ‘How can I be sure when you don’t tell it too?’
So Tom tells me the story when Dad’s in bed or when we’re walking in the park, or before a movie, when he has the tickets in his pocket. ‘It was September and it’d been raining off and on all day.’ I’ve tried running away: he runs after me. He’s cornered me in the laundry room when I was loading the washing machine. He’s knelt astride me on my bed and strapped me down with the sheet.
‘I’ll scream for Dad,’ I hiss at him. ‘I will. I really will.’
‘It was September and it’d been raining all day.’
Most of the time, though, he takes my hand and leads me to the cliff, I step off and watch, frozen, as the rocks below rush up to smash me.
3
On the thirtieth anniversary of her death we take a trip to New Zealand to visit her grave. We don’t invite Dad, telling him we’re going to Queensland for a few days to check out work opportunities and the rental market. It’s a stupid story because we now have to come back with a healthy tan, something Wellington, New Zealand, can’t supply in frosty September. Tom says, ‘I don’t see why. We’re supposed to be looking for a new place to live, not lounging on the beach, getting skin cancer.’ It’s his idea, of course. I want the past to stay there. He says, ‘It doesn’t stay there, don’t you realise? It won’t until we’ve taken it out and packed it away properly.’ I have agreed to go because he says after this, he will never again tell the story of how we found our mother’s body. On the plane, I keep hoping engine trouble will come along and make us turn back.
We stay in a hotel: faded carpets, creaking floorboards, a brisk woman in a purple smock who cleans our room each morning.
‘Remember your promise,’ I say as we walk down the hall to the stairs.
He draws an invisible zip across his lips. Whatever that means.
We take a taxi to the grave on a day of heavy black clouds that threaten to shroud us. There’s just a grey marble plaque in an emerald lawn paved with plaques; her body was cremated. Jossalyn Atkinson 1933 − The date of her death has been chiselled out by vandals. Tom takes a permanent marker pen from his pocket, kneels and draws the date over the chisel marks: 1973. The storm begins with fat drops. We stand and watch the penned date grow brilliantly distinct under the rain. At this moment, I’m glad we came. I see now it was shameful to neglect her grave.
We spend a couple of days looking up old haunts: Newtown Primary School, the place where the Rivoli picture theatre stood before they pulled it down, the site of the Wellington Public Library, which Tom says was the finest library in the southern hemisphere. He and Dad used to go there to commune with books the way other fathers and sons went to watch rugby. But the library was demolished and an ugly new one erected. It’s odd how much we remember: we were only children when we left. Reminiscing like this is pleasant. Away from the graveyard, Wellington feels like any city.
We’re dawdling outside the greengrocer’s on Riddiford Street, buying oranges. Tom takes my hand. Though his hold is gentle, its meaning jolts me like electricity. He hooks his other hand around my neck, he grasps my shoulder, my arm, to get a purchase while I shove and kick and people stare. Then he’s pulling me past the old shops of our childhood. We turn at the library and into Constable Street. I hang onto fences, lampposts. I break loose a letterbox, spilling letters in a puddle. I’m sobbing now.
‘Please, Tom, I can’t do this.’
He keeps pulling. We round the corner into Owen Street. I dig my heels into the footpath, I scratch at his fingers, his wrist. He whips around and shakes me once, a short, hard jerk. His teeth are bared with tenacity and anger. Then he’s towing me again. I trip over a crack and fall on my free hand and knees. He keeps pulling, the force of it twisting me off balance. I scrape along the ground on the seat of my jeans.
‘Tom.’ I cry out. ‘Tom, let me stand up.’
He pauses − starts tugging before I’m even upright. I stumble forward and throw out my hand in case I fall again.
He stops. I’m dazed and puzzled until I see the house where she died. Cobweb curtains droop at the windows. The white weatherboards, grey with dust and neglect, are coming loose in places. The grass has grown too tall for itself and toppled over in waves. It looks as though nobody has lived there since we moved out thirty years ago.
Letting go my wrist, Tom follows the path to the side gate whose aqua paint has crackled and flaked in long strips.
‘Tom. Don’t.’
He waves to shush me.
‘Don’t go in there.’
He pushes the gate: locked. Over he goes, the slats wobbling under his weight. I’m free to escape now. Instead, I hurry after him. On the other side, he’s waiting for me, the whites of his eyes glinting in the gloom. My hand steals into his.
The concrete path, broken into triangles, is still bright green with moss, and the air is graveyard cold. The wooden steps still climb to the back door, dipping in the middle where the traffic of feet has worn them thin. A memory opens in my mind of sitting there, sobbing in the rain because she wouldn’t let me come inside. She’d pushed furniture against the doors and windows.
‘Mummy, open the door. I’m wet, Mummy, let me in.’
Her voice came dark and stealthy through the panel. ‘Who are you?’
Tom tugs at my wrist and I look to where he points. I see the gnarled apple trees with red buds sprouting here and there on the branches. The path is a shallow groove between two spreads of lawn, now lushly overgrown with grass and combed away from the parting.
‘That’s the tree,’ he whispers, pointing at the grey skeleton standing next to the seat at the end of the garden.
‘No, it was the one behind the shed.’
‘You can’t see that tree from the steps.’
I check and he’s right. But I know it’s not that one, it can’t be that one. Mum fed me melon while sitting on that seat. She told me, ‘I used to eat melon with my mother, too.’ Together we collected the seeds in a pudding bowl and tucked them into cotton wool on saucers. ‘Now we dampen them,’ she said, and swirled the dishes under the dripping tap.
‘See?’ he whispers. ‘She’s walking over there.’
The wind turns the grass, a cloud crosses the sun, shiny footsteps walk across the overgrown lawn. Chilled, I huddle against him.
He takes me to the tree. There’s no bit of frayed rope to tell of the end of despair, no forlorn shoe lying in the grass. He takes a blood-red ribbon out of his pocket and ties it to a branch, reaching up as high as he can. Is it that one? He’s tall, it might be that one. The ends flutter.
‘Mr Parbhu’s son-in-law cut her down with his machete,’ he whispers.
‘How do you know?’
‘I came back with him after he called the police.’
He hasn’t told me this bit before. It sounds right − Mr Parbhu’s son-in-law used to slash the stalks off lettuce heads with a machete. And it also sounds wrong − how could he hold her up and cut her down at the same time? Unless he let her fall.
Tom asks, ‘Do you remember now?’
The backyard shimmers and I think for a moment I’m there on that day thirty years ago. Then I know it’s only the wind.
‘Of course I don’t. You promised me you wouldn’t do this, you promised you wouldn’t try to make me remember. I hate you for this.’
Blinded by water in my eyes, I trip over a paving stone, bang my knee against the stone seat, collide with the tree, which pokes its spiky fingers into my face and hair. Tom stuffs his stout cotton hanky into my hand.
‘Do you remember, Joss?’ he asks. ‘You have to remember now.’
I shake my head. I can’t speak, the muscles have tightened around my throat. I grope for his jacket and can’t find it. I can’t see. I can’t hear anything except the wind, its unearthly voice. I’m afraid that she’s here, that the wind will stir her body and it will touch me and claim me after all these years of forgetting.
Tom takes my hand. He puts it inside his jacket, against his warm, beating heart. I throw my arm around his neck and hang on for life.
SYDNEY SMITH is a past winner of The Age Short Story competition. Her short fiction has been published in Australia, Britain, and North America. She is the former fiction editor of Crime Factory, a magazine devoted to crime fiction and nonfiction.
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