Life: An Exploded Diagram (12 page)

C
LEM AND GOZ
wheeled into the field and dismounted. They eyed the other bikes leaned against the hedge.

“Shite,” Clem said. “There’s hundreds here. All the good pickun’ll be gone.”

“Nah. We’ll be all right, comrade.”

They marched over the hot hard earth to the weighing tables and took six empty punnets apiece from the stack. There was a queue of pickers waiting to have their fruit weighed. Cushie Luckett was one of them.

“Orright, Grammargogs?”

“Orright, Cushie. Good pickun?”

Cushie shrugged. “That ent bad. I’re made twelve shillun already.”

Goz grinned at him. “I thought you had a proper job, Cushie. Whassup, the abattoir run out of pigs?”

“I’m orf sick,” Cushie said. “And you hent seen me, Gosling.”

“As far as I’m concerned,” Goz said solemnly, “you have always been entirely invisible.”

They made their way across the top of the field to where Mortimer’s watchful foreman stood. He looked up and raised an arm.

“Over here, you boys!”

“Hardly a necessary instruction,” Goz murmured.

“Right, you boys. Set you onter the bottom of these two rows here.”

The foreman had a hand-rolled cigarette attached to his lower lip by some magical adhesive. It bobbled as he spoke but did not fall.

“How many baskets you got there? Twelve? I shunt think yer’d be needin aller them.”

“Oh,” Goz said, all disappointment. “Why? What time are you knocking off?”

“Six, sharp.”

Goz had a watch on his wrist and he looked at it. “That’s a good hour and a half away. I reckon we’ll need another dozen, don’t you, Clem?”

“At least.”

“Hah bleddy hah,” the foreman said. “We’ll see. Now, you go all the way down the bottom of the row afore you start. And lissun —”

“Clean the plants,” Goz said.

“Clean the plants.” The foreman frowned, puzzled to find himself an echo. “You get all that fruit orf, other than the green uns, ’cos I’ll be along behind to check up. And dunt you even think about slippun stones into them baskets. Orf you go, then.”

Clem and Goz had picked strawberries every summer since they were toddlers. They considered themselves experts. Pickers were either kneelers or stoopers, depending on their age. Older pickers, mindful of their backs, shuffled along the rows on their knees, like sinful pilgrims. It took two kneelers to work a row, because in that position you couldn’t see the fruit on the other side of the plants. And you were likely to miss the pick of the crop: the small, firm, and intensely sweet berries that lurked under the straw between the rows. You would most likely feel the sad squelch of them under you before you found them, and go home with stubborn gritty stains on your knees.

Clem and Goz were stoopers. They straddled a row apiece, easing the straw aside with their feet as they moved up, uncovering the fruits that had snuck out into the sun. Their hands busily riffled the dark green leaves. Their fingers automatically assessed plumpness and ripeness, passed quickly over the hard dimples of whitish berries, recoiled from the gray fur on those that had gone to rot. Perfect strawberries pulled away from their stalks with a crisp little pop.

The late sun scorched their backs. Not quite impervious to temptation, they gobbled only one strawberry every ten minutes or so, choosing it according to some selection process they could not have explained. A quickening of aroma, perhaps, or a perfection of shape in the hand. Slipping them quickly into their mouths without looking up. Most of the other workers were women accompanied by small children, whose mouths were smeared with juice like clumsy lipstick. Gossip and low laughter drifted on the warm air. There was a scattering of younger pickers, too; like Clem and Goz, they’d changed hurriedly out of their school uniforms and pedaled the mile and a half from Borstead. Twenty yards ahead of the boys, Doreen Riley’s ample backside was aimed right at them. Goz caught Clem gazing at it.

“Ah, c’mon. You can’t be that desperate.”

“Wanna bet?”

Goz grinned. “It’s the heat.”

They went into one of their little routines, doing
Goon Show
voices from the wireless.

Clem:
“It’s the heat!”

Goz:
“The heat, by God! The drums! The flies! The native women!”

Clem:
“It’s enough to drive a white man crazy, I tell you!”

Goz:
“Steady, old chap. Steady. Remember, you’re British. Think of the queen.”

A punnet held four pounds of fruit. Six punnets earned you two shillings. Not in hard coin, though. At the weighing table, so long as you made the weight, or exceeded it, the cashier tore four tickets from a thick reel. Each was printed
MORTIMER ESTATES LTD
and
6d.
At the end of the day’s picking, you queued again to have these sixpenny tickets exchanged for cash that was brought in brown bags from the estate office late in the afternoon. It was a system based on distrust; one wouldn’t want a load of money sitting all day in a field full of quick-fingered casual workers. It had the added advantage of keeping them there until the end of the day.

In less than an hour, Clem and Goz had filled their twelve punnets. Forty-eight pounds of fruit. Goz straightened up, wiping his face on his sleeve. Gold straw dust glittered on the damp hairs of his forearm.

“Are we done?”

“Yep, reckon so. Look at this un.”

Clem held up his pick of the day: a big, glossy, flawlessly scarlet berry. It was too good to eat.

“Boo’iful,” Goz said. “The size of a dog’s heart.”

They headed up toward the head of the field.

“Not if it was a Pekingese,” Clem said.

“Nor a Jack Russell. I was thinking more like a Labrador.”

“Norfolk lurcher.”

“Speak for yerself,” Goz said.

They shuffled forward in the queue, pushing their punnets with their feet. The weighed strawberries were being loaded onto a trailer. One of the loaders was a girl neither of them had seen before. She had very dark hair that swung against her face and neck as she moved. She wore an old blue-checked shirt that was too big for her — a man’s shirt — its tails bunched into a knot at her waist. When she stooped to lift, you could see down into it, where white crescents could be glimpsed. Her jeans stopped at the calves of her slender legs. They were unlike the slack, cheap denims that the boys wore; they fit her. Clem could not help noticing the seam that curved down from her waistline and vanished under her bum. She was not used to the work. Her mouth was set in a pout, and she seemed to have some invisible barrier surrounding her, defying contact.

A rough male voice awoke him.

“Oi! D’yer want them strorbries weighed, or what?”

Clem dragged his gaze away from the girl.

“Sorry,” he said, and stacked his load onto the scales.

He stood aside while Goz collected the tickets.

“What d’yer reckon? Do another six?”

“Yeah,” Clem said. “Might as well. I’ll get em.”

He went to the pile of emptied punnets. He was closer to the girl now. He watched her lift filled ones; his own were on top. She carried them to the trailer, hoisted them up, then paused, reaching out. When she turned around, she was holding a perfect strawberry delicately in her fingertips. It was Clem’s dog’s heart. She turned it, examining it. She raised it toward her mouth.

“You aren’t gorna eat that, are yer?”

He was more surprised that he’d spoken than she seemed to be.

“Pardon me?”

Her face was too small. No, it wasn’t that. It was that her eyes were so big. And dark, but full of light under rather heavy black eyebrows. Her mouth was wide. Below the full lips, her chin was a soft little triangle. She looked Spanish, Clem thought, not really knowing what that meant; perhaps that he’d seen her in a painting projected onto Jiffy’s wall.

He had to say something. “You’ll get told off.”

She stared at him without expression. Or maybe a smile refusing to be seen.

“I really don’t think so,” she said. A posh voice. Mocking him?

Clem glanced to his left. The foreman was walking in their direction, his face red and slick with sweat beneath his flat cap.

“Clem,” Goz said. A warning. But Clem couldn’t stop looking at the girl. She put the strawberry into her mouth, its plump tip first, and bit it in half. She closed her huge eyes.

“Mmmn. God!” Mumbling it.

A thin rivulet of juice ran from the left corner of her mouth onto her chin. She turned her head and wiped it away on the shoulder of her shirt. She looked at Clem, swallowing.

“You think you’ve got sick of them, but every now and again you get one that’s too luscious to resist, don’t you?”

It seemed to Clem that the world had gone entirely dark for an instant, but he hadn’t blinked.

“Yrrng,” he said, then cleared his throat. “Yeah. I picked that one.”

“Thank you,” she said, apparently seriously.

The foreman came alongside the trailer. He glowered at Clem, then saw the girl. He touched the greasy peak of his cap with two fingers.

“Orright, Miss Mortimer? The work suit you, do ut?”

She waved the remainder of the strawberry at him: a gesture that might have meant anything. The coral-pink flesh of the fruit was neatly grooved by her teeth.

The two boys walked down their rows to where they’d left their marker, three lines of brown earth scraped in the straw. They bent and rummaged, saying nothing to each other. A quarter of an hour later, Goz was a good five yards ahead of Clem. He straightened and carried his full basket back down the row. It was his second; Clem was still on his first.

“Yer mind’s not on the job, comrade. I’m not gorn halvsies if you don’t pull yer finger out.”

Clem looked up. With his back to the sun, Goz was a glowing silhouette.

“Christ, Goz. What a bit of stuff! You see the chest on her?”

Goz leaned down. Blinding light streamed over his shoulder.

“She Mortimer, you Ackroyd. She Montague, you Capulet. Or is it the other way round? I never can remember.”

“What the hell’re you on about?”

Goz punted Clem’s half-empty punnet with his toe. “Do the work, comrade. Me mum’s gonna have the tea on the table in an hour whether I’m there or not. And I’m bleddy starving.”

When they joined the line for the cashing up, the girl had gone.

The next day, Friday, she wasn’t there. Clem and Goz made five shillings in an hour and a half.

S
ATURDAYS AND SUNDAYS
were the busiest days for picking. Whole families went: mothers with toddlers perched in wickerwork child seats behind the saddles of their bikes, men with boys on their crossbars and lunch bags over their shoulders. Clem and Goz stood up on their pedals, overtaking at high speed.

The picking had moved to an adjacent, much larger, field. There were two weighing stations. Mortimer’s men were stretching a tarpaulin over a three-sided shelter made of hay bales. Even at this early hour, the day was very hot, and the filled punnets of strawberries would need shade. The two boys pushed their bikes over the baking ground to the far side of the field, where a line of ash trees separated it from a shimmering expanse of ripening wheat.

“There,” Goz said, gesturing with his head.

One ash had lost its grip on the earth and slumped against its neighbor. In their conjoined shadows, a few of last season’s bales had been overlooked. The boys parked their bikes there and stuffed their rucksacks into the spilled hay.

At dinnertime they returned to this den, away from the noisy mob, shuffling themselves into the narrowing shade. They unwrapped their sandwiches with reddened fingers.

“Wanna swap one?”

“Dunno,” Goz said. “Wotcher got?”

“Cheese and piccalilli.”

“Cawd, no. Dunno how you eat that stuff. It’s like yellow sick.”

“Thank you very much, Gosling. I’ll enjoy them all the more for that.”

“My pleasure.”

They drank over-sweet orange squash from a flip-top Corona bottle. It was as warm as blood, despite their precautions. Goz had a packet of ten Bristol cigarettes. They smoked, sighing pleasure. A segment of time passed.

A voice that was neither of their own said, “Give us a drag on that.”

They squinted up. She was wearing the same knotted shirt and short blue jeans as before, stained now, and a misshapen, big-brimmed straw hat that webbed her face with shadow.

Goz reacted first. He held up his ciggie, and she reached down and took it from his fingers. She took a theatrical pull on it, then stepped forward, pushed the boys’ legs apart with one of her own, and flopped onto the ground between them, her back against the broken bale. She took another drag, with her eyes closed.

“I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “Daddy doesn’t know I smoke.”

Clem and Goz leaned forward and goggled at each other
(Daddy?)
and then, as one, took a peek down her shirt.

Goz found his voice. “Your dad? That’d be the Lord High Mortimer, would it?”

She laughed, snortling smoke. “God, is that really what they call him?”

She opened her eyes and looked at them in turn. There was a little slick of perspiration in the hollow where her throat met her chest. She smelled of sweat and strawberries and something like vanilla ice cream.

“Some do,” Goz said. “We don’t. We’re Communists. We’re making plans for the revolution.”

“Are you? Are you really? Is that why you’re down here away from all the other workers?”

“Yeah. People talk. You can’t trust anybody. There are informers everywhere. Walls have ears.”

“So do corn,” Clem said, and instantly regretted it.

“That was feeble, Ackroyd,” Goz said.

She turned to Clem.

God, her eyes.

“Ackroyd? Any relation to George Ackroyd?”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “He’s my old man.”

She studied him. He trembled with the effort of holding her gaze.

“Yes,” she said. “You look like him, come to think of it. I like George. He’s nice. Daddy thinks the world of him.”

“Yeah, well,” Clem said, thinking, She knows my dad? He knew she
existed
?

“So what’s your first name, son of George?”

“Clem. My ugly mate is Goz.”

The girl stubbed the cigarette out, carefully, on a patch of bare soil and pushed herself forward onto her knees. She looked around the field, then stood up.

“Okay,” she said. “Thanks for the smoke. I’ll see you later, alligator.”

“Hang on,” Clem said. “What’s your name, then?”

“Frankie.”

“Frankie?”

“Short for Françoise.” She pronounced it ironically, with an exaggerated Norfolk accent:
Fraarnswaars.

“Cawd strewth,” Clem murmured, watching her walk away.

“Dear, oh, bleddy dear,” Goz said sorrowfully.

At three o’clock, Clem straightened up and faked a groan.

“ ’S no good. I gotta find somewhere for a leak.”

Goz didn’t lift his head. “Don’t let me stand in your way.”

Clem hurried for the hedge, stepping over rows, then glanced back, turned right, and walked casually up the field.

She was not among the throng at either of the weighing stations. A tractor was pulling a laden trailer out of the field. Was that her riding on the back of it? No, just a boy in a blue shirt. Clem stood, indecisive and achingly disappointed. She’d gone. Like a drunk surfacing from a stupor, he realized that he was being looked at and that he knew most of the faces around him. Half the Millfields estate was here today. God, what was he thinking of?

“Orright, young Clem? Lost someone, hev yer?”

That nosy cow Mrs. Parsons from Chaucer.

“No, I . . . No. I was just . . .”

He retreated hastily.

Halfway back, he looked over to where their camp was and saw — could it be? — a soft flash of blue. Just beyond the trees. Two brushstrokes of blue and one of black where the leaf shadow edged into the green-gold haze of wheat. Yes. His breath failed briefly. He made his legs move, made himself take care where he set his feet, crossing the rows. When he next looked up, the vision had gone. Dismay made him gasp and swear. And hurry. He stumbled up and through the gap between two of the ash trees. Their dense shade was like a moment of night, and his eyes were baffled for an instant. But then, there she was, sitting cross-legged but leaning back on her hands, on the narrow berm of dandelion-freckled and daisy-splashed grass beyond the tree line. The straw hat was on the ground beside her left knee. Her head was lifted away from him, and her eyes were closed. She was smiling. She seemed to be listening to the frantic debate being conducted by a parliament of greenfinches in the branches overhead.

He would remember all these things long after they’d been blown away. Scraps of talk, sound, would drift back like flakes of burned paper on a spiraling wind:

“You took your time.”

“I thought you’d gone. . . .”

The chirrupy hissing of grasshoppers.

“Yeah. A levels. Art, English, history. . . .”

Her comical grimace. “Brainy with it, then?”

A noisy exodus of skirling birds.

“. . . I dunno. Art school, probably.”

“Dirty devil. So you can look at girls sitting there in the nude? I don’t know how they can do it. . . .”

A whisper through the grain.

“No, not that. I want . . .”

“Are you any good at kissing?”

An intense silence, everything stilled, at the moment she took hold of his collar and pulled his face down.

The panicky thrill throughout his body with her mouth on his. Not knowing what to do with his hands, so keeping them pressed into the grass. Something, an ant perhaps, crawling on the stretched skin between his thumb and forefinger. Awkward twisting of his shoulders. Tongue? Hers doing it. Slithering into his mouth. Hot breath tasting of cigarette and strawberry juice and something else. Coarse distant laughter, like a pheasant’s call, coming from somewhere. Squirming to keep the hard thing in his jeans from touching her leg. Wanting the aching moment to go on and on and on, because he had no idea what she might expect him to do next.

And then a snappy rasp from behind them: Goz, with his back against a tree, lighting a ciggie.

“Funny sort of a widdle, comrade,” he said.

Clem pulled away from her, gasping, lost.