Chapter thirteen #3
I had family anecdotes, but they were much darker: like, the Christmas Mum and I found out Dad had remarried because his new wife sent us an M the little kids – leafers, we called them - went through the wooden trays and picked out any extra bits later before the farmer weighed up for the day.
I could tell she’d never done it before.
I was in charge of the section, and the women next to her were taking the mickey, nudging each other.
She was picking each berry individually, trying to drop them perfect into her basket.
She’d already got sunburned, and I could see her skin getting pinker and pinker while the others whispered, making fun.
Posh girl. Useless. Slow. Sneaky hissing noises, you couldn’t make out what they were saying, but you couldn’t ignore it.
I remember stepping into the space next to her, and feeling the hot air on my face, heavy with sweat and fruit and the smell of that greasy sun cream that didn’t really do much back then.
I guessed it was her smelling of sun cream; I wouldn’t even know where you’d buy it round here.
The regulars knew where to stand, so as not to get too hot, but she didn’t, and they hadn’t warned her.
I said something like, Did no one give you a demonstration?
As if it wasn’t her fault, more for the benefit of the pickers next to her, really, so they’d know I was on to them.
Brenda Prosser was chopsy, but my dad was a farm manager, so they didn’t dare get on my wrong side, not if they wanted more work.
And I showed her, stripping several branches fast as possible while I pretended to teach her the technique, so she’d at least have something to weigh in her basket at the end of the day.
I’d done it a million times before, but my hands didn’t feel like mine; it was such an odd feeling, knowing her green eyes were watching my hands, trying to commit my movements to her memory. Me, to her memory.
I picked quickly – strip and drop, strip and drop - until I heard the whispers starting again, then I stopped.
Bring a hat tomorrow, I said to her, all brisk. Or a scarf? Gets hot, standing in one place for ages.
I didn’t tell her it was partly for the sun, and partly to stop Brenda pointing her out to everyone – she was so easy to spot, ‘that lanky girl with the ginger hair’. Those women could be brutal, the way they gossiped.
She found me later, when we’d stopped for the mid-afternoon break. She thanked me for taking pity on her, as she put it. My mother has fruit trees in the garden, she said, I thought I knew what I was doing. What an idiot.
I liked the way she could laugh at herself, didn’t mind being given instruction.
I introduced myself, and she said, I’m Nessy, it’s a nickname.
We chatted a little, about the crop that year, about the farm, and I watched her after we went back to work; she was quick as anyone by the end of that day.
She’d got her own technique going, a little sway to her arms, precise, sweeping movements, no energy wasted, like a dance.
When she carried her basket up to the top of the row to be weighed, it was nearly full.
She handed it to me with a straight face, then gave me a quick, secret smile, and my heart did a loop around my chest, like a house martin circling.
I didn’t know how to react, so I turned away, pretending to weigh someone’s basket.
It was a responsibility, being put in charge of the weighing, and this was the first summer I’d been allowed to do it.
When I turned back, she was down by the gate on her bicycle, one foot on the pedal, one foot pushing to get the speed up.
It looked like her brother’s bike, or her dad’s, too big really, but it didn’t seem to bother her.
She did one, two, three little boosts, then gave one final push and threw her bare leg over the crossbar – a flash of pale thigh and green skirt that got a few whistles from the lads down the tractors and trailers, waiting to take the workers back to the housing estate.
At home, that night, I had no appetite. My sisters and my mum were making jam – we all smuggled a bit of fruit home, perks of the job – and my little sister, Mary, asked if I’d got sunstroke I was that quiet.
I was just staring at the copper jam pan on the stove, thinking that it was the exact colour of Nessy’s hair.
I couldn’t drop off to sleep that night, wondering if she’d be back for a second day, or if her mother would see her sunburn and keep her home. But she was there the next morning, this time in yellow shorts, her face lobster-red under a straw hat. When she saw me, she pointed at her hat and smiled.
That was because of me. Something I’d suggested.
I felt as if I was falling into a cool dark pit when she smiled through the rows of green blackcurrant leaves.
She was other-worldly, glowing pale like the painting over the fireplace in the town library, a copy of a Rossetti, I learned later: pearly, full-moon skin and copper-pan hair surrounded by leaves.
She’d brought a transistor radio with her, and she asked Brenda Prosser if she’d like to choose what station they listened to.
I kept half an ear on her chat all day: Did Brenda like Elvis?
Was Brenda watching Coronation Street? Oh, how interesting, really?
Would you give me the recipe? I could tell she was smart.
If you got Brenda, the rest would follow like sheep.
We chatted again while we ate our sandwiches at lunch; one of those circling conversations where you try to find connections, and if she was doing the same to me as she’d been doing to Brenda, I didn’t care.
She came to find me at the end of the week, and asked if she could buy me a drink, as thanks for helping her stick it out, as she put it.
I said yes. We went to the Feathers – the kind of place the grammar-school set went to, not somewhere me and my mates would go – and we sat in the beer garden with a lemonade.
I knew Fred Pugh wouldn’t serve us, so I didn’t try.
Nessy told me she was in the sixth form: Eng.
Lit, French, Latin. Proper brainbox topics.
She said she was saving up to go to university the following year, and needed some pocket money because her parents were a bit tight like that.
They wouldn’t let her work in a shop, so she’d found her own holiday job.
‘And there was nothing they could say then!’ She sounded triumphant.
I didn’t tell her I’d been working since I was old enough to deliver a paper.
It only seemed fair to buy her a drink in return, and I was glad we were on the lemonade.
We spun that lemonade out for ages, talking and talking.
Talking, about anything really, so the conversation wouldn’t stop and the other could say, ‘Well, I’d better be going’.
I remember the house martins wheeling over the beer garden; I pointed them out to her, and said I envied them, that they could fly across the world yet still find their way back home, and she said she’d never thought of it like that.
I moved on to raspberries when the blackcurrants were over. So did Nessy.
It’s not one day I’d like to go back to.
I’d go back to that whole summer. Seven weeks of sticky berry juice under my fingernails, and hot sun on my head, and the mossy scent of green leaves crushed by rubber plimsolls, and the Beatles and Cliff crackling in the packing-up shed, and her beautiful voice, talking and talking, and my heart drinking up every word like cold lemonade.