Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

  He dreamed of that supper time, when there was a great cracking and crying of thunder and in the midst of the blast entered a sunbeam seven times brighter than the day. Each of them saw the other as they had never seen before, and every man was struck dumb. Then into the hall came the Holy Grail covered with white samite. They had vowed there and then to seek it, and not to rest until they had obtained a full view of it, and Arthur had sat silent looking out of the window.

  When Perceval awoke, the sun was sinking. He must wash and greet his host. He would speak of the Grail, but not of his reason for seeking it. He had seen the vision of perfect heroism and, for a fleeting moment, the vision of perfect peace. He sought it again, to balance him. He was a warrior who longed to grow herbs.

  My mother woke me with a cup of hot chocolate and a shopping list. I was to go down town for her; she had to write to Pastor Spratt. The snow had worsened, so that my first stop had to be the Army and Navy for a pair of wellingtons. Feeling stouter, I decided to visit Mrs Arkwright at her vermin shop. The bell tinkled and she raised her eyes from the powder she was bagging. It took her almost five minutes to recognise me, then she leaned over the counter and banged me on the shoulder. ‘Hello,’ I said, brushing off the flea powder. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Sick and fed up,’ she started to put on her coat. ‘You’re old enough for a drink in the Cock and Whistle now aren’t you?’ I nodded and she put her sign on the door, and escorted me into the pub. My mother had always told me that the Cock and Whistle was a den of thieves and tax collectors. Now that I saw it for the first time, it wasn’t nearly so exciting. It had a lino floor and a few withered-up old men at the bar. Mrs Arkwright marched me into the snug, and ordered two halves of mild. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I thought you’d buggered off for good.’

  ‘I’m just here for Christmas.’

  She sniffed. ‘Well more fool you. It’s a bloody dust hole this place, dead.’

  ‘Is business bad?’

  ‘Bloody awful. It’s that new-fangled central heating. You can’t have it fitted without a damp course, and it clears all the bugs at the same time. I’ve complained, and I’ve tried to get compensation, but they say it’s progress, and I should concentrate on pet care.’

  ‘Can’t you do that?’

  Mrs Arkwright banged the table. ‘No I bloody can’t, they all want to act posh round here now, don’t want to be seen in no vermin shop. Besides, you know I can’t stand them poodles. I’m not running a flaming poodle parlour.’

  I asked her when all this had started, and why.

  ‘Bathrooms,’ she said darkly. ‘Bathrooms did it.’ It appeared that the council had finally got round to recognising that the houses on the Factory Bottoms were less than desirable. They had made available large sums of money for basic improvements. Every back-to-back terrace had been granted a bathroom.

  ‘After bathrooms they want central heating and poodles,’ Mrs Arkwright thundered on. ‘We all know what central heating does to you. Dry’s up yer natural juices dun’t it?’ She felt very bitter, after the way she’d protected the community for so many years. She’d invested in all the latest pesticides, given advice at ail hours, and worked hard at keeping up to date with foreign imports.

  ‘There’s not a bug anywhere I can’t recognise,’ she told me proudly.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  She glanced at me, then glanced around, then put her finger to her lips. I had to promise not to breathe a word. She had some savings, and she’d saved all her winnings on the bingo. She was going to emigrate.

  I was fascinated. She’d never been further than Blackpool in her life.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Torremolinos.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve had the booklets, and I’ve found one of them villas. I’m going to sell soft toys to tourists. They’ll be glad to buy from someone that speaks English.’ I thought about the cost of buying a villa, the flight, the stock, the money to live on, while she found her feet. She was burbling on about how she’d been learning Spanish for six months out of a book and at a night class in Rishton twice a week.

  ‘Have you got enough money?’ I had to ask.

  ‘Not quite. That’s why I have to burn down me shop.’ She watched me closely, then reminded me I had promised not to say a word. ‘If you give me your address, I’ll send you a copy of the write-up in the paper.’

  She had it all worked out: slow-burning fuse, lots of inflammables. She’d set it for her night class so that she’d be well out of the way. She didn’t want her furniture anyway, and she would buy new clothes. She’d put her documents and valuables in a bank deposit. Still, she wasn’t doing anything till after Christmas.

  ‘I don’t want to drag firemen away from their families.’

  We drank up, and I left her as I had found her, bagging flea powder.

  I bought the mince and the onions and found that Trickett’s snack bar was still in the same place serving the same things. Betty still had the tape round her spectacles, all these years after Mona had dropped her beefburgers on top of them. She didn’t know who I was, and I didn’t want to talk about it. I was beginning to wonder if I’d ever been anywhere. My mother was treating me like she always had; had she noticed my absence? Did she even remember why I’d left? I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had. Some people’s emanations are very strong, some people create themselves afresh outside of their own body. This is not fancy. If a potter has an idea, she makes it into a pot, and it exists beyond her, in its own separate life. She uses a physical substance to display her thoughts. If I use a metaphysical substance to display my thoughts, I might be anywhere at one time, influencing a number of different things, just as the potter and her pottery can exert influence in different places. There’s a chance that I’m not here at all, that all the parts of me, running along all the choices I did and didn’t make, for a moment brush against each other. That I am still an evangelist in the North, as well as the person who ran away. Perhaps for a while these two selves have become confused. I have not gone forward or back in time, but across in time, to something I might have been, playing itself out.

  ‘You’ve spilt your tea,’ said Betty indignantly. So I paid her double and left.

  I didn’t go straight home, I went up on to the hill. No one else was there, with the weather like this. If I still lived there, I’d be indoors too. It’s a visitor’s privilege to be foolish. Right to the top I climbed, where I could watch the circling snow fill up the town till it blotted it out. All the black blotted out. I could have made a very impressive sermon . . . ‘My sins like a cloud hung over me, he blotted them out when he set me free . . .’ that sort of thing. But where was God now, with heaven full of astronauts, and the Lord overthrown? I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don’t think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don’t even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it. I have an idea that one day it might be possible, I thought once it had become possible, and that glimpse has set me wandering, trying to find the balance between earth and sky. If the servants hadn’t rushed in and parted us, I might have been disappointed, might have snatched off the white samite to find a bowl of soup. As it is, I can’t settle, I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me. There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other’s names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name. Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millio
ns of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone. I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man, because they want to be the destroyer and never be destroyed. That is why they are unfit for romantic love. There are exceptions and I hope they are happy.

  The unknownness of my needs frightens me. I do not know how huge they are, or how high they are, I only know that they are not being met. If you want to find out the circumference of an oil drop, you can use lycopodium powder. That’s what I’ll find. A tub of lycopodium powder, and I will sprinkle it on to my needs and find out how large they are. Then when I meet someone I can write up the experiment and show them what they have to take on. Except they might have a growth rate 1 can’t measure, or they might mutate, or even disappear. One thing I am certain of, I do not want to be betrayed, but that’s quite hard to say, casually, at the beginning of a relationship. It’s not a word people use very often, which confuses me, because there are different kinds of infidelity, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it. By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else’s.

  Standing on the side of the hill, just where it slopes into the quarry, it’s possible to see where Melanie used to live. I met her by accident, during the second year that I was away from home; she was pushing a pram. If she had been serene to the point of bovine before, she was now almost vegetable. I kept looking at her, and wondering how we ever had a relationship; yet when she first left me, I thought I had blood poisoning. I couldn’t forget her. Now she seemed to have forgotten everything. It made me want to shake her, to pull off all my clothes in the middle of the street and yell, ‘Remember this body?’ Time is a great deadener; people forget, get bored, grow old, go away. She said that not much had happened between us anyway, historically speaking. But history is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe knot it up a bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing. A cat’s cradle. She said those sorts of feelings were dead, the feelings she once had for me. There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what’s dead. It won’t complain. Then she laughed and said we probably saw what had happened very differently anyway . . . She laughed again, and said that the way I saw it would make a good story, her vision was just the history, the nothing-at-all facts. She said she hoped I hadn’t kept any letters, silly to hang on to things that had no meaning. As though letters and photos made it more real, more dangerous. I told her I didn’t need her letters to remember what had happened. Then she looked vague and started to discuss the weather and the roadworks and the soaring price of baby food.

  She asked me what I was doing, and I longed to say I was sacrificing infants on top of Pendle Hill or dabbling in the white slave trade. Anything to make her angry. Still, in her terms, she was happy. They had stopped eating meat, and she was pregnant again, and so on. She had even started writing to my mother. They had worked together on the town’s first mission for coloured people. My mother had emptied her War Cupboard of tinned pineapple, because she thought that’s what they ate. She had also gone round collecting blankets so that they wouldn’t be cold. When the first coloured pastor came to her house, she had tried to explain to him the significance of parsley sauce. Later she found he had lived most of his life in Hull. Melanie, still waiting for her missionary posting, had dealt with all this as best she could, but she was out of her depth. And so, for the length of the mission, everyone had to eat gammon with pineapple, pineapple upside-down cake, chicken in pineapple sauce, pineapple chunks, pineapple slice. ‘After all,’ said my mother philosophically, ‘oranges are not the only fruit.’

  It was getting dark as I came down the hill, swirls of snow sticking to my face. I thought about the dog and was suddenly very sad; sad for her death, for my death, for all the inevitable dying that comes with change. There’s no choice that doesn’t mean a loss. But the dog was buried in the clean earth, and the things I had buried were exhuming themselves; clammy fears and dangerous thoughts and the shadows I had put away for a more convenient time. I could not put them away forever, there is always a day of reckoning. But not all dark places need light, I have to remember that.

  When I got in, my mother was wearing a pair of headphones and jotting something down on a piece of paper. In front of her was a large radio set. I tapped her on the shoulder.

  ‘You could have given me a heart attack,’ she snapped, switching knobs up and down. ‘I can’t talk now, I’m receiving.’

  ‘Receiving what?’

  ‘My reports.’ And she jammed on her headphones and started scribbling again. It was well over an hour before I could get any sense out of her. We sat together with a bowl of Vesta beef risotto, and I learned how she had gone electronic. Her radiogram had suddenly blown a crystal, which meant no World Service. She had rushed to the shops with her bank book to find an alternative, and seen an advert for a build-it-yourself CB radio. She bought it, and the cheapest pocket transistor to keep her going. It was an extravagance, but the Society had just collapsed, and she needed something to take her mind off it. She said it was very difficult, but she’d done it, just the same, and now she regularly spoke to Christians all over England, as well as listening to the radio. Already, there were plans of a meeting, and a newsletter for electronic believers.

  ‘It’s the Lord’s will,’ she said, ‘so don’t pester me when I’m doing it.’

  Perhaps it was the snow, or the food, or the impossibility of my life that made me hope to go to bed and wake up with the past intact. I seemed to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.

  Sir Perceval stayed on his narrow chair long after his host had left for sleep. Under the burning torch he puzzled over his hands. One hand was curious, sure and firm. His gentle, thoughtful hand. The hand for feeding a dog or strangling a demon. The other hand looked underfed. A stark, questioning, blank, uncomfortable hand. A scared hand but the hand for balancing. Perceval had been angry that night. His journey seemed fruitless, and himself misguided. His host had asked him why he had left, not really wanting to hear, presuming reasons of his own, that the king was mad, or the Round Table ruined. Perceval had stayed silent. He had gone for his own sake, nothing more. He had thought that day of returning. He felt himself being pulled like a bobbin of cotton, so that he was dizzy and wanted to give in to the pull and wake up round familiar things. When he slept that night he dreamed he was a spider hanging a long way down a huge oak. Then a raven came and flew through his thread, so that he dropped to the ground and scuttled away.

  When I woke the next day, the sun was just forcing itself through the snow clouds, against the dusty window. The house felt quiet. Usually, my mother played tapes, and I could hear her singing along, or working out a new harmony. She had started to travel with Pastor Finch and his demon bus, whenever he came to the area. She felt she’d had a lot of experience and would be a help to other distressed parents with demon-possessed children. She’d begun a self-help kit for the spiritually disturbed. What not to do, who to contact, which passages of the Bible to read. And of course, the choir liked to make tapes, to sing the demon away. Most were Pastor Finch’s own compositions. I was glad she had a hobby, but not pleased that my particular sins were listed in the self-help kit. Still, at least she hadn’t stuck in a passport photograph, warning the North-West to lock up their daughters.

  I stayed with them until just after Christmas. Forced to watch endless programmes on the Nativity, and to eat mince pies with Mrs White, who was so nervous she started to hiccough uncontrollably.

  ‘Jack, get the smelling salts,’ ordered my mother, seizing Mrs White’s nose till she went blue. The smelling salts didn’t work, and Mrs White had to be taken to the bus stop on my father’s arm.

  ‘It’s all your fault,’ grumbled my mother. ‘And on Christmas Eve too.’ Then she went back into the living room to take a sip of port and peek at the Christmas presents. Sh
e couldn’t bear not to open her presents, and it was still only eleven o’clock.

  We decided to play Beetle to pass the time.

  ‘You’ve cheated,’ exclaimed my mother, as I fitted the last red leg on my insect. ‘Never trust a sinner.’

  ‘All right, we’ll play again.’ And we did, right up until five minutes to twelve, when my mother leapt up and switched on the radio to hear Big Ben. ‘Get your glass,’ she cried, filling it up with lemonade and a smattering of port. ‘Merry Christmas, praise the Lord, now what have I got?’ And she made a dive for her pile under the tree.

  ‘Look, you’ve pulled the angel down,’ I complained. She stuffed it back upside-down, one hand still tearing off the paper.

  ‘This is from Pastor Spratt,’ she said eagerly. I nodded, wondering what on earth could be that shape and get through customs.

  ‘Oh look,’ she cried.

  It was an elephant’s foot, with a hinged top. She hesitated a moment, then flung back the lid. It was an elephant’s foot Promise Box; two layers of little scrolls, all rolled up, each with a promise from the Word. My mother had tears in her eyes, as she put it carefully on top of the sideboard.

  ‘What’s this from Auntie Maud?’ I asked, picking out a hard, long object.

  ‘Oh it’ll probably be a sword stick, you know what she’s like.’ My mother tapped her head. ‘It’s this I’m interested in, from your father.’