Forbidden Fruit (12 page)

‘Hospital bus,’ explained Daniel. ‘They cruise the streets looking for the lost and damaged and repair them. People who are too unstable or too scared to go to a public hospital and wait four hours. Has one doctor, several nurses and two heavies, one of whom is Ma’ani’s cousin, Rui.’

Something huge hulked out of the darkness. A true shadow of the original. He was almost as big as Ma’ani. Distinguished from him by his shock of truly astounding peroxide blond hair, in cornrows with dependent beads. I doubted, however, that anyone told Rui that his hairstyle was effeminate. He grinned a watermelon grin.

‘Hey, Daniel!’

‘Hey, Rui,’ replied Daniel.

‘You must be Corinna,’ said the behemoth, engulfing my hand to the elbow. ‘That Ma’ani, he thinks you make the best bread. You looking for someone?’

‘Your nurse,’ said Daniel. ‘Nancy?’

‘Hey, Nance!’ bellowed Rui into the bus. ‘You all right now?’

‘I’m all right,’ said a tired voice. ‘He didn’t draw blood.’

She was cradling a forearm wrapped in bandages. An older woman in a nurse’s uniform, complete down to the white shoes. She was lighting a cigarette and dragging in the smoke gratefully.

‘Crazy bit her,’ explained Rui. ‘I’m out here making sure he don’t come back.’

‘He’d have to be really crazy to come back,’ Sister Nancy told Rui affectionately. ‘They all think we have drugs,’ she told me.
‘This one was high on ice, and that’s a nasty thing. You’re Daniel? I think I’ve seen your missing boy.’

‘When? Where?’

‘Last Saturday night—Sunday morning, actually, about four o’clock. Came out of the shadows. Beaten up. We reduced his broken nose; that’ll heal itself if he doesn’t get it broken again. Bruises and a cut lip, possibly a broken rib. Cut knuckles, too, he fought back. Spotty youth. But I remember him because he was a nice boy,’ she said, absently caressing her bitten arm. ‘He was very worried about the girl who was with him. Very young, very pregnant. Not visibly injured. Distressed. I suggested that he take her to hospital but he wouldn’t, or rather,
she
wouldn’t. Cringed away as though I had suggested an abattoir. Poor little brain-damaged mite. She was crying because she had lost her toy.’

‘Crying for Bunny?’ I asked.

‘Yes, sad, isn’t it? And someone had certainly taken advantage of her. The mentally challenged are so vulnerable to exploitation of all kinds. We see a lot of them. Of course,’ she added with a chuckle, ‘some of them bite back.’

‘What did you do for her?’

‘Had a talk with her. She said something very worrying. She said her mother had placenta praevia. She must have learnt the term like a parrot, poor thing.’

‘Early placenta?’ I guessed.

Sister shook her head, lighting another cigarette.

‘It’s a condition where the placenta detaches early. The baby doesn’t have placental oxygen and it’s still in the birth canal so it can’t breathe. Can lead to a bad outcome.’

‘By which you mean …’ Daniel urged impatiently. She gave him a Look. Nurses specialise in that Look. It suppresses even the most belligerent. Daniel and I were suitably suppressed.

‘The baby dies,’ the nurse said flatly. ‘Then, unless someone
does something fast, the mother bleeds out. It’s bad. She knew what it meant, too, said the boy had looked it up on the internet. Kids. Overinformed and don’t know what to do with the knowledge. I told her to go to hospital, things like that run in families quite often. But she just cried and refused.’

‘So what did you do for them?’ I asked, as Daniel was still suppressed.

‘Gave them vitamins, tonics, tickets for the showers at the rest centre,’ said Nurse Nancy. ‘The water’s hot and it’s a safe environment. They both went along in that direction, at least. They’ll be open,’ she told us. ‘They’re always open. I hope you find them,’ she added, crushing out her cigarette in a little portable ashtray. ‘The good boy and the poor little girl.’

‘We’ll find them,’ Daniel assured her.

Back in the car and Timbo did amazing feats of pub-avoiding until we arrived at a low-key, two-storey brick building partly concealed behind a high hedge.

‘Makes the neighbours feel happier if they can’t see the clients,’ Daniel said. ‘And on a night like this the bushes might be more comfortable to sleep in, at that.’

The reception area was shabby, with worn grey industrial carpet on the floor and chairs upholstered in that sort of coloured plastic that is meant to be cheerful but which chips and cracks and becomes sordid in a week. The grey carpet contrasted beautifully with the ground-in Twisties and a wet, disinfected patch where some biological fluids had been spilt. There was no air conditioning and it was very hot inside. A thin young man hurried up to greet us.

‘Daniel!’ Everyone knew Daniel, it seemed. ‘Looking for someone?’

‘Pete, hi. Spotty boy and pregnant girl, may have appeared half-witted, last Sunday morning.’

‘Oh, yes.’ Pete rubbed a bald spot which seemed to be growing as we spoke. This man ran on nervous energy. ‘Nice boy. They had a shower. I even managed to give the girl some of those free shampoo samples. Got them some fresh clothes. He’d been in a fight. Couldn’t get them a placement together so they left. Trouble was they didn’t have alcohol or drug problems, so I couldn’t send them to the specialist placements, not that there’s a lot of them. They just had nowhere to go.’

‘Any idea where they did go in the end?’ asked Daniel.

‘I directed them to one of the cheap hotels. I got the impression that they had a little money. Here’s the address,’ said Pete, scribbling it down. ‘It’s a bit of a hole, but it’s shelter.’

‘Thanks,’ said Daniel, and we went back to the car.

‘To the hotel?’

Around a few more corners and down a fetid little back alley where the car barely fitted and I hoped we wouldn’t meet anything coming the other way. We stopped outside a crumbling old terrace house called—I swear—the Hotel Splendid. I put my hand on the door and Daniel snatched it away.

‘I’m not taking you there, Jason would kill me,’ my darling said very firmly. ‘You are staying in the car with the doors locked—you hear, Timbo?’

‘I hear,’ said Timbo, swallowing his mouthful of bacon and cheese crisps.

‘Give her a few of your chips, I’ll be back in a moment.’

Daniel took off his loose jacket, put his wallet and keys into my hands, and stalked into the Hotel Splendid as though he was going into action in the Gaza Strip. I wouldn’t have tackled him. He is tall and slim and dark and when he wants to can extend an aura of menace three paces all around him.

‘What’s wrong with this place, Timbo?’ I asked.

‘Filth like you wouldn’t believe, syringes on all the floors,
nappies, dead dudes, it’s gross,’ Timbo replied. ‘Druggies. They steal from each other and beat each other up. And other stuff.’ He shifted uneasily in the car seat. ‘Have a chip?’ he asked.

I took one. I was unable to identify either bacon or cheese in it, but it was salty. The car was cool but the street outside was baking. No refuge, I thought, not even from the weather. No home, no safe place.

The final frightful touch was that someone in the Hotel Splendid was playing those dreadful Christmas carols from a boom box. And so it was to the tune of ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’, crooned by some benighted female, that Daniel came back, scrubbing his hands together. He stopped at the boot, which Timbo opened, and wiped his palms with disinfectant tissues.

‘Not there now,’ he told me as he got in again. ‘According to the loathsome owner, they were there very early Sunday morning and left without staying—now that I can understand. If I wasn’t a pacifist I’d clear out the people in there and torch that place. It’s a public health hazard. And so is the proprietor,’ he said in an undertone. ‘Him I would lay gently on top of the pyre.’

I had never seen him so angry. I put a hand on his arm.

‘Erk?’ I suggested.

‘I might even go so far as to say “euw”,’ he agreed.

‘Home?’

‘Nowhere else I can think of tonight,’ he said, relaxing a little. ‘Home, Timbo, please.’

And we went home and we went to bed. Sunday I was going to read through a lot of messages from one girl to another, for which I felt very unprepared.

This must have been worrying me, for when I woke at four I could not get back to sleep, what with Horatio nestling on most of my pillow and Daniel occupying a lot of my bed. First I looked up St Helier. He was the first saint of Jersey. A hermit and sixth-century
martyr. Apparently he was killed by robbers to whom he preached the Gospel. Stern literary critics, those bandits. His feast day is the sixteenth of July. Still wasn’t sleepy.

So I went out onto the balcony and heard singing: sweet, sweet singing, from the roof, perhaps.

This was a Christmas carol, but I was prepared to make an exception in its case. Medieval English, perhaps, which made it scan awkwardly in modern English. They must be singing it for Jason, donor of the cake and the rest of the glassy cherries. Which was nice of them. They had added some more voices. A very rich, strong tenor was rather dominating the sopranos, which was all to the good. I hoped Jason, with his techno and indie tastes, was enjoying the concert.

Ah. Pique from the husband. Which was what could be expected even now. The night was turning to morning. I went in and got a drink. Ice and lemon and gin. I sat down in the chair next to the indestructible green leafy things Trudi had planted in my big pots.

There was triumph in that cry. She might be embarrassed by a surprise God-given pregnancy but she was not without power. This was the Mary of the Magnificat, where generations would rise up and call her blessed. The Mary who declared: ‘He hath showed strength with his arm : he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the mighty from their seat : he hath exalted the meek and humble. He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he hath sent empty away.’ Just like me to remember the part of Evensong concerned with food.

My drink tasted wonderful. The voices came down from heaven like a cool shower of silver. I couldn’t remember the rest of the story. What would the divinely cuckolded old man do now?

Good man, Joseph! I cheered privately. Somewhere a window went up. I hoped the singers would get a chance to finish the carol before Mrs Pemberthy objected. They did, but it was a narrow squeak.

‘Who’s making all that noise?’ shrieked Mrs Pemberthy, making a lot more noise than the singers. Her strident elderly-parrot-with-indigestion voice jarred on the velvety night and the cool music and I swore.

Then, as the singers were made mute and Mrs P continued to scold, I drank the rest of the drink. There was always someone, I reflected, who wanted to ruin the moment.

‘And Mary she went homeward, All with her heavy load,’ I hummed to myself. Where in this dark city was our little Mary, freighted with her dangerous and very heavy load?

Another window opened.

‘Mrs Pemberthy,’ said Mrs Dawson in her iciest voice, which caused my own cubes to tinkle in my glass out of sympathetic resonance, ‘I was enjoying the music, but I am not enjoying your tirade. Consider them reproved,’ she ordered.

Mrs P is a little afraid of Mrs Dawson. She humphed and slammed her window shut. The concert, however, appeared to be over. I was about to take my glass inside when I saw a strange shadow under the light in Calico Alley. I leant out. Not a human. Four-legged, though. Casting a very odd, long-eared shadow.

I sighed and went in to find some sandals and the keys to the bakery. I hoped that we had some raspberry and rosewater muffins left over. Snuffling at the door of Earthly Delights was Jason’s most fervent fan and muffin gourmet, Serena.

Now every beast that crops in field
Breathe sweetly and adore.

Eleanor Farjeon
‘Our Brother is Born’        

I left Daniel a note. It is never nice to wake up without the person you went to sleep with, especially in his profession. When I opened the outer door of the bakery, the donkey put her head in, allowed me to caress her soft nose, and uttered a short, demanding
whuff!

‘All right,’ I told her. ‘But there aren’t any muffins left. They all went to the Soup Run. You’ll have to make do with bread and rosewater.’

Serena, by her stance, indicated that as long as it had rosewater in it, she would be content. I sliced my one remaining loaf, which had been overlooked in the packing, and sprinkled it with
rosewater and a little sugar. This she accepted out of my hand and munched thoughtfully. Then she backed a little, stamped her foot, and asked for another.

‘All right,’ I said hurriedly, hoping that she wouldn’t bray and wake Mrs Pemberthy again. I cut this slice of bread thicker and poured rosewater onto it. This was sufficient, the animal indicated. That was the right sort of ratio of rosewater to bread. She mumbled my sleeve briefly, blinked her long-lashed eyes, and walked as serenely as her name down Calico Alley into Flinders Lane.