Forbidden Fruit (26 page)

I had seen enough fights for one day and I wanted a wash, a big drink with lots of ice, and total silence. Now Sarah had included me in her denunciation, it was my fight, too, so I stepped in beside the girls.

‘You are going away,’ I ordered. ‘While you are going away,
now,
you might consider that without the Mouse Police I would have to use poison on the rats, which is cruel, and might endanger the organic status of your spelt bread. And secondly, without the labour of animals, the farmers would have to use machines in
order to grow your vegetables, which would greatly increase their use of scarce and polluting fossil fuels. Off you go.’ She started to retort and I held up a hand, moving very close to her and speaking into her beautiful, impassioned face. ‘No, no, shut up, I don’t want to hear it. Go now, and avoid arrest. Stay one more moment and I call the cops.’

‘Come on, Sarah,’ urged the large, bearded bass. ‘I’m melting out here. Come and get a nice cold glass of perspective and soda.’

He winked at me as he went past, holding Sarah’s arm, and there was a discreet mutter of applause as the choir filed past on their way, I assumed, to Rowan’s apartment.

Serena had not twitched an ear. The girls huffed out their breath, exchanged a congratulatory high-five, and tore up more cabbage.

Time passed. I was so heated and grimy. Daniel replaced me, all cool and damp. I went upstairs to get my wash and change my clothes. I showered lavishly and scrubbed my hair. I greeted the affronted Horatio and fed him. I sat down for a moment, just until I cooled off enough to dress again, and must have fallen asleep. An indeterminate time later, I woke. Daniel was kissing me and it was beginning to get dark.

‘What happened to Serena?’ I asked urgently.

‘A very crestfallen and apologetic Mr Pahlevi reclaimed her. He admits now that Meroe is not a black witch and he says he is sorry. And he understands why we borrowed Serena and promises that he will not mistreat her. He even collected up all those strewn buckets. He had a black eye but assures me that the other bloke looked like he’d been run over by a truck. It’s Thursday dinner. Want to go?’

Usually I missed Thursday dinner, where all the tenants gathered for a meal and to discuss the week’s doings and iron out
any problems before they festered. But tonight I was rested, clean and cool. What’s more, it was Mrs Dawson’s turn to provide, and she always had dinner catered by Le Gourmet. Not to be missed. I donned a loose purple gown, made of silk which Jon had brought me from Jogjakarta and constructed by Therese in return for some accounting advice. Daniel put on a pair of brief denim shorts and an Amnesty T-shirt, in which he looked edible.

We dine in the garden if the weather is clement, but this howling north wind was not even within a hundred k’s of clement. So we descended to the vault. This was the girls’ name for the basement of the old apartment house, where meals had been prepared when the place was serviced, meaning that you had your meals in the in-house restaurant or they could be delivered to your apartment by dumb waiter. Those were civilised days. I would love to be able to order a meal and have it delivered to my rooms, all hot, without having to work out how much to tip room service. I suppose the nearest equivalent is pizza delivery. It isn’t the same, however.

We floated down into the vault to find that both Goss and Kylie were there, along with Jon and Kepler, Mistress Dread, Therese and Trudi, and Rowan was sitting next to Jason. Professor Dion and Mrs Dawson were there, in fact everyone except the holidaying Hollidays. Even Mrs Pemberthy wasn’t going to miss a meal from such a famous restaurant. Despite having to put up with our company. Only Meroe was missing, still attending on our birth. The first course—a delicate cold watercress soup—was already on the table as we sat down.

‘Why’s it green?’ asked Goss, sotto voce.

‘ ’Cos it’s watercress,’ confided Kylie. ‘Almost no calories if you don’t eat the cream.’

‘And not a lot if you do,’ observed Mrs Dawson. She was wearing a charming trouser-and-shirt ensemble in ivory linen, on
which I just knew she wasn’t going to spill green soup. Around her neck she had wound a strand of pigeons’-egg-sized amber beads which went down below the table and must have belonged to a flapper ancestor. I could see Mrs Dawson in 1920s clothes, knees rouged, stockings rolled down, doing an energetic Charleston. Meanwhile the soup was excellent.

On being reassured that it was not made with chicken stock, Rowan sipped dubiously. Then he cheered up, as did Jason. Rowan seemed very conservative about food, except muffins. Even Mrs Pemberthy was drinking the soup without complaint. This could not last.

The next course consisted of several compounded salads, cold vegetables and cold meat. Even though the temperature in the vault was quite acceptable, even to me, one did not feel like eating hot dishes on such a night. Mrs P complained that the cold made her teeth ache. I knew this for a fib, for china teeth do not ache. Or if they do you can put them in their glass of water to ache all by themselves. Jason and Rowan were talking about Bunny.

‘But he likes to chill, see, same as me; we both stretch out on the sofa and watch Ainsley Harriott DVDs. He’s happy with me,’ Jason was arguing, which did not impede his colossal absorption of cold chicken, of which he is very fond.

‘Wouldn’t he be happier in the woods with his little bunny friends?’ said Rowan.

‘What, in Holland?’ scoffed Jason. ‘He’s a Dutch rabbit. Someone here would shoot him or he’d get carchesi … calesi … you know, that rabbit disease. I figure, we brought him here, so we have to make him happy. Besides, when he’s unhappy he scratches my ankles. I notice.’

This struck me as sound philosophy. We caused Bunny to be born. Therefore he was our responsibility. Something which could have been gainfully learnt by Jason’s alcoholic mother and
his absconding father. Or my hippie-dippies who nearly let me starve to death because Father wanted to feed me soy milk. There weren’t a lot of people around who were taking responsibility.

I ate some superb rare roast beef, bitter rocket and mayonnaise which had never seen a jar, and tried to adjust my mood. After all, we had rescued Brigid and her baby. I ordered myself to cheer up and poured a glass of wine.

Mrs Dawson was saying something about Rowan’s father when the boy burst out, ‘Don’t talk about him!’ and she was momentarily surprised. Then she leant across the Professor and patted his arm.

‘My dear,’ she said, ‘my father was a pig, just like him. I hated him until he had the good taste to die before my first child was born. I loathed the man. You are not at all like him.’

‘I’m not?’ quavered Rowan.

‘Not at all. We don’t have to grow into copies of our parents, you know. I was very fond of my mother, she was a good woman and a good wife but I never heard a peep out of her through that whole marriage. I was not going to have the same life as she had.’

‘Me neither,’ I put in. ‘My parents were complete nut cases.’

‘And mine were mostly missing,’ said the Professor sadly. ‘Working very hard.’

‘My parents were wonderful,’ said Mrs Pemberthy combatively. ‘Of course, I didn’t see much of them, my sister and I had a nurse. Then a housekeeper, of course. Then I married Mr P.’ And the less said about that the better.

Daniel put in, sounding a little shocked, ‘I am very fond of my parents, but they are in Israel and I am here and we are happier like that.’

‘You know what I think of my father,’ began Kylie.

‘And mine is worse,’ Goss chimed in. They both took more pilaf, defiantly.

Rowan was looking puzzled but had relaxed. The conversation veered off to the weather. I ate a rough country terrine made of truffled pork with thyme and forgot about talking. Except to ask for more toast. Daniel poured us both a glass of a severe, flinty red. It went very well with the rich terrine and the even lusher chicken liver pâté with which I followed it. We had found that these meals worked best when everyone could just eat what they fancied, so they tended to go, one soup for an entree, a large number of dishes for the main course, one dessert, cheese, fruit and coffee. This catered for both the bird-like nibblers and the heroic trenchermen, like Jason.

‘We haven’t heard any singing lately,’ said the Professor to Rowan. ‘Are you planning any more concerts?’

‘Carol rehearsals are over,’ said Rowan. ‘But tomorrow we start on the Vaughan Williams, so you should be able to hear us.’

‘Noise!’ objected Mrs Pemberthy.

‘You can always shut your window, my dear,’ advised Mrs Dawson, something I would never have dared to say. Then again, I wouldn’t have called Mrs P ‘dear’ for any price. ‘Much the best thing anyway, in this very disagreeable weather.’

‘I like it,’ said Mistress Dread, resplendent in corset and fishnets, for she was going out directly after dinner to her select dungeon. ‘Better than listening to, for instance, a horrible little dog yapping.’

‘This meat’s real good,’ said Jason hurriedly. He liked Mistress Dread and didn’t want Mrs P to make another of her endless complaints about her. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s pork,’ I told him.

‘I thought it was. Much more like that protein tofu stuff. I don’t know why Sarah said it was like beef.’

‘Probably hasn’t tasted either,’ I said.

Jason agreed that this could be true and we finished the
meal with, in my case, a glass of orange flower muscat and some parmesan and quince paste.

I went up to bed, Daniel went off to spell Meroe at the hospital, and peace, unusually, reigned in Insula …

Until four o’clock in the morning, when the alarm went. And the phone, at the same time. I groped and stumbled. Horatio removed his tail from danger with a fine angry whisk. I grabbed up the phone and listened.

‘Born!’ exulted Daniel.

‘Really? How’s Brigid?’ I blurred.

‘They’ve got her on a drip, she’s exhausted and malnourished, lost a lot of blood. The baby is fine. All is well.’

‘Wonderful,’ I said, waking up a little, but only a little.

‘I’m staying around to make sure there’s no trouble with parents,’ he told me. ‘See you later.’

‘Fine,’ I said, put the phone down, and went to wash, brush my teeth, and drink coffee. No one should give me news of any sort, especially good news, at four in the morning. I just don’t have the wherewithal to react. I did the morning things and allowed myself an extra cup of the divine fluid. The baby was born, Brigid was being cared for. That was good news. I should be very pleased about it sometime soon.

Jason was already in the bakery, frowning at a recipe book while mixers rumbled. Like Winnie-the-Pooh, long words bother him. I did not offer to help. He would ask if it was important.

Just as the bakery coffee pot was coming to the boil, I noticed a large figure wearing a monk’s robe sitting in my chair. It was the bass with the white hair and beard. I was about to ask when he gave me a carefully lettered piece of cardboard with one hand and held his finger to his lips with the other. I read it without commenting aloud.

Hello. My name is Rupert. I am making a soneme, a soundscape, of your bakery. Your apprentice let me in. Kepler said you wouldn’t mind. I won’t get in the way. Just go on as usual. The process will take a couple of hours. Thank you.

I shrugged. Rupert grinned. Jason left the book with a last puzzled shake of the head and stood to attention.

‘Cap’n on deck!’

‘How goes the ship?’ I asked.

‘Had to buy some bread for the Soup Run, sir. Drafted out today’s muffins. Broke the eggs for the challah.’

Jason is very proud of his skill in breaking eggs with one hand. A skill I never mastered, by the way. Challah. It must be Friday. The week had rather run away with me.

‘Carry on, Midshipman,’ I said, waving a Picardian hand.

After a while—the bakery really is very busy—we forgot about Rupert. He had a rare quality of repose. I suppose it comes from spending his whole life listening. When Jason returned from his breakfast and Goss opened the shop, he drew a deep breath. Horatio obliged with a delicate mew. Rupert switched off all his apparatus and then laughed aloud.

‘That was so interesting!’ he exclaimed in his deep, curiously precise voice.

‘Rupert?’ I asked with extreme scepticism.

‘I have always admired Prince Rupert,’ he said, uneasily.

‘You’re a freegan, aren’t you?’ I accused. He smiled. He had the most beautiful sapphire blue eyes.

‘Used to be. Getting too old to sleep on floors and eat out of bins. But it was fun,’ he said reminiscently. ‘They really are the only free people. But beds are nice. And money. And work, too. I’m a sound man. You can tell, can’t you?’

‘No shit,’ said Jason, packing little muffins into their flat boxes.

‘Sound is never appreciated. Objected to, if it increases into noise. Silence is becoming increasingly rare, especially inside people’s heads. Music, news, information is being continuously fed into their mistreated ears. God knows how many will have any hearing by the time they are thirty-five. Also, the microwaves from mobile phones are cooking their brains.’

‘What is a soneme?’ I asked.

‘It’s a sound picture. I take the ordinary noises of industry—in this case, the mixers rumbling, the hiss of steam escaping from the loaves, the clang of the oven door—and mix it with the human sounds, speech, the mew of a cat, footsteps, hinges creaking. Even the brush of overall material on flesh and the little, little noise of rising bread.’

‘I’ve heard that one,’ I told him. ‘A small noise, indeed.’

‘You can buy endless sonemes of running rivers and gentle streams and birdsong,’ he said, smoothing his short white beard. ‘But I can make a symphony out of ordinary sounds—morning in the city, cars hooting, people walking past—and they are both illuminating and comforting. At the moment mine sell best to prisoners. Stay-at-home parents. They are played to people in comas. Anyone who misses the everyday world.’

‘And someone pays you for them?’ asked Jason scornfully.

Rupert grinned at him. ‘Just as someone pays Kepler for his panorama of Insula.’

‘Fair call,’ I said. ‘Have a cup of coffee and a muffin. What are today’s muffins, Jason?’