The pickers who aren’t students sort of stand out. Gwyn’s one. She’s playing draughts with Marion and Linda and, apart from a “Hi” and a fake smile when I came in, she’s ignored me. Cheers very much, Gwyn. Marion’s a bit simple and her sister Linda fusses all mummishly and finishes her sentences for her. Picking fruit at Black Elm Farm’s their annual holiday, sort of. There’s a couple, Stuart and Gina, who have their own tent, tucked away in a dip. They’re late twenties, look like folk singers, with earrings, and hair in pony-tails, and actually they areamateur folk singers, and busk in market towns. Gina’s taking me and Debby food shopping to the Spar at Eastchurch after I’ve been paid. They act as go-betweens to the other pickers and Mr. Harty, Debby told me. Last, there’s a kid called Alan Wall, who sleeps in a tiny caravan parked round the side of the farmhouse. I saw him hanging out washing to dry when I was having a look around. He can’t be more than a year or two older than me, but his scrawny body’s tough as cables and he’s tanned like tea. Debby told me he’s a gypsy, or a traveler, as you’re s’posed to say these days, and that Mr. Harty hires someone from his family every year, but Debby didn’t know if it’s a tradition or debt or superstition, or what.
COMING BACK FROM the toilet, I see a narrow canyon between the farmhouse and a shed. Someone’s waiting. A match strikes. “Fancy meeting you here,” says Gary. “Care for another smoke?”
Yes, Gary’s good-looking, but he’s at least a bit drunk, and I’ve known him all of two hours. “I’ll get back to the common room, thanks.”
“Nah, you’ll share a smoke with me. Go on, Hol, everyone’s got to die of something.” He’s already stuck his box of Silk Cuts in my face with one stuck out for me to take with my lips. I can’t refuse without making it into a big issue so I use my fingers and say, “Thanks.”
“Here’s a light … So tell me. Your boyfriend in Southend must be missing you something rotten.”
I think of Vinny and heave out a “Christ, no,” think, You idiot, Sykes, and add, “Kind of, yeah, he is, actually.”
“Glad that’s sorted.” In the glow of his fag, Gary grins dead slinkily. “Let’s go for a stroll and see the stars. Tell me about Mr. Christ-no-sort-of-yeah.”
I really don’t want Gary’s fingers inside my bra or anywhere else, but how do I tell him to piss off without bruising his pride?
“Shyness is cute,” says Gary, “but it stops you living. C’mon, I’ve got alcohol, nicotine … anything else you might need.”
Christ, if guys could be girls being hit on by guys, just for one night, lines as cheesy as that’d go extinct. “Look, Gary, now’s not a good time.” I try to walk around him to get back to the farmyard.
“You’ve been eyeing me up.” His arm comes down like a carpark barrier, pressing against my stomach. I smell his aftershave, his beer, and his horniness, sort of. “All night. Now’s your chance.”
If I tell him to feck right off, he’ll probably turn all the pickers against me. If I go nuclear and call for help it’ll be his version against the Hysterical New Girl’s, and how old is she again, and do her parents really know she’s here anyway?
“Polish your mating rituals, Octopus Boy,” says a Welsh voice. Me and Gary both jump a mile. It’s Gwyn. “Your seductions look very like muggings to me.”
“We were—we were—we were just talking.” Gary’s already scuttling away to the common room. “That’s all.”
“Annoying but harmless.” Gwyn watches him go. “Like mouth ulcers. He’s propositioned every female on the farm except Sheba.”
Being rescued’s humiliating and what comes out is a grumpy “I can look after myself.”
Gwyn says, a bit too sincerely, “Oh, I don’t doubt that.”
Is she taking the piss? “I could’ve handled him.”
“You don’t half remind me of me, Holly.”
How do you answer that? “Up the Junction” by Squeeze booms from the ghetto-blaster. Gwyn stoops. “Look, Octopus Boy dropped his ciggies.” She lobs them my way and I catch the box. “Hand them back or keep them as compensation for harassment. Your call.”
I imagine Gary’s version of this. “He’ll hate me now.”
“He’ll be scared shitless you’ll tell everyone what a horse’s arse he made of himself. Rejection makes lads like our Gaz feel four feet tall and two inches long, full size. Anyhow, I came to say I borrowed a sleeping bag off Mrs. Harty for you. God only knows how many previous owners it’s had, but it’s been washed so the stains aren’t sticky at least, and the barn can get chilly at night. I’m turning in, so if I’m asleep before you, sweet dreams. The hooter goes at five-thirty.”
July 2
MY PERIOD’S ONLY A FEW DAYS LATE, so I don’t see how I can be pregnant, so what’s this belly doing, or this blue-veined third boob pushing out below my normal two, which Vinny named Dolly and Parton? Mam is not taking the news well and doesn’t believe that I don’t know who the father is: “Well, someoneput the baby inside you! We both know you’re not the Virgin Mary, don’t we?” But I really don’t know. Vinny’s the chief suspect, but am I quite sure nothing happened with Ed Brubeck in the church? Or Gary at Black Elm Farm, or even Alan Wall the gypsy? When you know your memory’s been monkeyed around with once, how can you ever be sure of any memory again? Smoky Joe’s old moo glares over her copy of the Financial Times:“Ask the baby. Itought to know.”
Everyone starts chanting, “Ask the baby! Ask the baby!”and I try to say I can’t, it hasn’t been born yet, but it’s like my mouth’s stitched up, and when I look at my belly it’s grown. Now it’s a sort of massive skin tent that I’m attached to. The baby’s lit red inside, like when you shine a torch through your hand, and it’s as big as a naked grown-up. I’m afraid of it.
“Ask it, then,” hisses Mam.
So I ask it, “Who’s your dad?”
We wait. It swivels its head my way and speaks in a badly synched-up voice from a hot place: When Sibelius is smashed into little pieces, at three on the Day of the Star of Riga, you’ll know I’m near …
· · ·
… and the dream caves in. Relief, a sleeping bag, brothy darkness, I’m not pregnant, and a Welsh voice is whispering, “It’s okay, Holly, you were dreaming, girl.”
Our plywood partition, in a barn, on a farm; what was her name? Gwyn. I whisper back, “Sorry if I woke you.”
“I’m a light sleeper. Sounded nasty. Your dream.”
“Yeah … Nah, just stupid. What time is it?”
The light on her watch is mucky gold. “Five-and-twenty to five.”
Most of the night’s gone. Is it worth trying to go back to sleep?
A big fat zoo of snorers is snoring in all different rhythms.
I feel a stab of homesickness for my room at home, but I stab my homesickness back. Remember the slap.
“You know, Holly,” Gwyn’s whisper rustles the sheets of the dark, “it’s tougher than you think out there.”
That’s a weird thing to say and a weird time to say it. “If that lot can do it,” I mean the students, “I bloody know I can.”
“Not fruit picking. The running-away-from-home deal.”
Quick, deny it. “What makes you think I’ve run away?”
Gwyn ignores this, like a goalie ignoring a shot going a mile wide. “Unless you know for a fact, a fact, that going back’ll get you …” she sort of sighs, “… damaged, I’d say go back. When the summer’s gone, and your money’s gone too, and Mr. Richard Gere hasn’t pulled up on his Harley-Davidson and said, ‘Hop on,’ and you’re fighting for a place by the bins behind McDonald’s at closing time, then, whatever Gabriel Harty says to the contrary, you willthink of Black Elm Farm as a five-star hotel. You make a list, see. It’s called ‘All the Things I’ll Never, Ever Do to Get By.’ The list stays exactly the same, but its name changes to ‘All the Things I’ve Had to Do to Get By.’ ”
I keep my voice calm. “I’m not running away.”