By Madeleine Jacob
Winner of the ORB’s HT24 Short Fiction Prize, judged by Octavia Bright.
I could hear the thud of apples falling from the tree onto the earth above me. My grandmother reeled off a list of the relatives who’d stayed in that basement before me. My boyfriend said that was the difference between us: I have a tangle of extended family snagging me from all sides, while he has some Australian cousin. This cousin had hidden his pregnant girlfriend in the family flat for two years—a medically miraculous length of time for a pregnancy. I imagined the girl hunched in a cupboard, knees to her chin, growing redder and rounder. I was in a state; we split up soon afterwards.
Nearly all the fruit from the tree was rotting, but my grandparents prize not wasting things very highly. A scene to illustrate: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall licking his tears from his own chin as he drives his pigs to the abattoir on a BBC farm-to-table television programme. After dinner my grandad would roam the garden arresting rogue apples from their resting places. He would put his nose in the back door and heavily imply that I should help him, but I managed to politely ignore his appeals. The following day he would ‘process’ the apples at the kitchen table, doubly armed with a knife and a vegetable peeler. He handled the utensils with the newfound zeal of a lifetime of unfamiliarity—most of his life he had been in exile from the kitchen. ‘I’m cutting out the bad bits,’ he said, every time I walked past his altar. Soft, brown, and slightly pulsating flesh was discarded onto an old newspaper and quietly proffered to the compost heap at the end of the garden.
Every so often I struggle to fall asleep. That summer I only let myself stew for a couple of hours before giving it up and unhitching the window above my bed. It opened out onto a sunken recess belonging to three toads. After finagling my way past the toads I tended to feel het-up. I’d want to move out of the animal kingdom. I’d make my way through the dark garden to the compost heap, where a channel the shape of an adult body was open for me in the new-ploughed earth. I lay in the earth each night and whispered my grievances to the apples.
‘I feel like I could still end up married to my ex and raise angel-haired children with him. They would be twins. I would try to raise them as vegans but after too long not eating butter their golden hair would surely dull.
‘My ex and I got together after watching Slavov Zižek’s film The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. It’s about six hours long. If someone is willing to watch the whole thing with you then you need a heart-to-heart more than you need the diktats of a Slovenian cultural theorist. Zižek says that the fantasy of sex sustains its reality. I think this is true in other parts of life; fantasy and reality are trickster siblings. But was it true for me at that time? I think I made a self-centred interpretation. I think I used it to sweeten the kernel of dissatisfaction and disappointment in my core.’
This concludes what I said to the garden waste.
The compost began to rumble a reply as the sounds of its decomposition became gradually more rapid: it told me that composts aren’t interested in what’s bad or good, in what’s clean or rotten. Flesh in the earth is all the same. The statement sounded profound, but I had learned not to jump to conclusions.
By Rosh Hashanah my grandparents’ apples had been chopped and divided: half in the earth, half in the freezer. I found myself at a friend’s garden party holding a half-eaten apple slice up to the evening sky. We wished for the future; this time the apples seemed to be fragments of tradition between our fingers and thumbs. I wished for peace in the year ahead. It was only when I bit down that I felt the sharp point of an apple seed lodged between my molars, from August’s bounty crop.
MADELEINE JACOB is currently reading English at Hertford College, Oxford. Her writing has appeared in ArtReview, Architecture Today and The Isis Magazine. She is the lead editor of Starch, a literary pamphlet based in Oxford.
Art by Poppy Williams
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