Sally was sitting in the hayloft hatch, reading. Liss’s house was full of books. Lying around everywhere. Open and face down with broken spines, or with a pencil between the pages, the jacket folded or simply a dry leaf as a bookmark. Not just in the house. In the kitchen, on cupboards and windowsills, in her bike basket and, of course, in the bathroom. Sally had once even found one hanging over a bar in the henhouse when she’d gone to fetch the eggs. An abandoned adventure novel, gathering dust. It was hard to establish what Liss liked; apparently, she read pretty much anything, indiscriminately. Children’s books and science fiction, specialist books on machinery or arduous-looking novels. Sally wasn’t sure if it was cool or weird. In her family, nobody read. Apart from the newspaper on the iPad or whatever. But here there were so many books, and there was so much time that the books probably came to you of their own accord. Maybe it was because the days here seemed so indeterminately uniform, and because it felt as though she’d been here for a very long time and not just about two weeks.
She was sitting in the hayloft hatch, and the sun was shining on her legs. She liked sitting so high above the farm. The first time Liss had seen her sitting up there, her eyes had rested on her for longer than usual, but she hadn’t said anything. No: get down from there it’s far too high you’ll fall are you mad that’s dangerous get down from there get down from there right now get down. Yet she herself had felt a little queasy when she’d discovered the narrow wooden door and opened it for the first time. It was so funny that a door could lead into nothing. Simply into thin air, eight or ten metres up. That first time, she’d lain flat on her belly and looked down. Then she’d turned onto her back and looked up. Over the door, a beam jutted out a metre or so; set into it was a wooden pulley that you could run a rope over. Later, she’d sat on the boards of the hayloft and slowly slid over to the hatch, until she could hang her legs out, over the brink, one hand still holding the doorframe. Her bare heels touched the warm wall. It took her a while to figure out why that felt so good but then, to her surprise, she realised what it was: freedom. It was a sense of freedom, though she didn’t actually have a clue why. If she fell, she’d be dead. Or paralysed. And that was very much not the plan, even if they always thought it was. She had no desire to be dead. Or broken. It was the exact opposite. She wanted to be clear, pure, exact, perfect, and that was never possible. But sitting up here, on the boundary between falling and safety, that felt free, and good.
She was sitting in the hayloft hatch, and the sun was shining on her legs, and she was reading. The book was called The Outsiders of Uskoken Castle, and at first she’d thought it was a children’s book, but it wasn’t really. She liked the way the story was told. It didn’t seem to need many words at all. The language was as sparse as the landscape in the book. Sally sometimes felt understood when she read about Branko, wanted by nobody. With her, everyone acted like they wanted her, wanted her a lot, but what they really wanted was a mirror image that they could call Sally so they’d be less embarrassed by the fact that they actually only ever looked at themselves and that they’d probably love it best of all if they could only ever fuck themselves so as not to have to get involved with anyone else. Nobody wanted her the way she was, she thought without great emotion, the open book on her legs.
Down below, Liss walked across the yard. She was carrying a couple of wicker baskets, stacked one inside the other, and she vanished into the barn. Sally could hear her below, then she came out again. She was pushing a wheelbarrow with the baskets in it.
‘How do you actually make your money?’ she called down. ‘I mean, how do you earn a living?’
Liss looked up at her. She had to squint against the sun.
‘Blackmail,’ she answered drily after quite a while. ‘And trafficking girls.’
Sally had to laugh. Liss made jokes so rarely that they were always a surprise.
‘I’m going to pick pears,’ she called up. ‘You wanted me to show you some of the varieties. Want to come?’
Sally put the book aside and reached for the rope that she’d attached to the pulley a few days back. Legs around one end of the rope, like in PE. Hands on the other. And then the breathless, magical moment when she slipped off the threshold and hung in the air. Hand over hand, she lowered herself down, slowly revolving on her own axis.
‘I don’t know whether you noticed,’ Liss remarked as she reached the bottom, ‘but there’s a ladder inside that barn.’
Sally grinned and blew on her hands. It seemed that Liss had her humorous days.
They were in the garden before she remembered that there were only apple trees there. But Liss wasn’t stopping. She pushed the barrow round the corner of the machine shed, where the beehives stood, and it was only now that Sally noticed a narrow path there, between the hedge and the back wall of the shed, almost entirely overgrown with elder bushes. The metal wheelbarrow scraped along the plaster. Grooves scored into the pale-grey mortar showed that this wasn’t the first time. Just before the other end of the shed, Liss stopped, reached over the barrow and unhooked a garden gate that Sally could barely have made out in the hedge. Liss pushed the wheelbarrow through and had to duck under the branches. Sally followed her and stopped, almost stunned, in the knee-high grass. She’d thought she knew the village around Liss’s farm quite well by now. She’d never have believed that an orchard of this size could be hidden behind the neighbouring schoolhouse. And this wasn’t just an orchard. It was like a garden in a book. Overgrown. Stinging nettles as tall as a man in the corners. Entirely enclosed by hedges. Full of flowers and weeds. Full of wild, sweet smells.
‘Shit,’ she said reverently.
‘Yes,’ answered Liss briefly.
She used the barrow to plough a path through the tall grass to the first of many pear trees, standing in meticulous rows, which looked strange in this wilderness.
‘Esperens Herrenbirne,’ she said, pointing at the fruit, which didn’t really look like pears at all.
‘Those aren’t pears,’ said Sally as she came closer. ‘Those are large eggs.’
Liss made a face. Sally couldn’t tell whether or not it was a smile.
‘That’s the lovely thing about nature. It doesn’t conform to what we think is right. Even if some people try to force it to grow the way they like it. Belgium. 1831. Have a taste.’
She picked one of the brown-striped, grey-yellow pears from the branch, took a knife from her pocket, cut a piece off and handed it to Sally. It was yellowish, and it felt strangely sweet in her mouth because the grainy flesh melted between her tongue and gums.
Liss took the basket from the wheelbarrow pan, threw it into the grass and halted.
‘Come here,’ she hissed, suddenly urgent. ‘Come and see!’
Sally took a step closer and followed Liss’s gaze. She just caught a glimpse of a small snake vanishing into the grass.
‘No way!’ Sally exclaimed, between shock and fascination. ‘Snakes? You’ve got snakes in your garden?’
‘Slowworms. They’re actually lizards. And they’re not dangerous.’
Then she suddenly laughed.
‘What?’ Sally asked over her shoulder. She was tracking the lizard, cautious but full of curiosity.
‘There’s something symbolic about it,’ Liss said, bone dry once more. ‘I give you a pear off the tree and then a slowworm turns up. I just don’t know what it symbolises.’
Sally didn’t answer. The slowworm had gone. How nuts was that? She’d never seen a garden like this before. The sun set a swarm of midges dancing and shimmering between the trees.
Liss had walked after her and was now standing by a tree that towered over the others. There was low-hanging fruit within reach, but Liss jumped up a little, grabbed a branch and swung herself, pretty skilfully, into the tree, rapidly climbed two or three metres and then plucked a pear from the sunlit crown.
‘Here,’ she said, throwing it to Sally.
It was another of those moments. Sally didn’t know any adults who just climbed trees like that. She knew adults who exercised. But it was all about sport. A serious business. It wasn’t movement to get somewhere. It was movement to be something. Slimmer or faster or better. When really, they were just going round in one big circle.
She’d just picked up the pear when something glinted beside her as it fell, then there was the knife stuck in the ground, not half a metre from her shoes.
As she climbed down, Liss said: ‘Cut it through the middle.’
The fruit was heavy and warm from the sun. Sally bent, pulled the knife out of the ground and wiped it on her bare legs. Then she cut through the pear.
‘Wow,’ she said.
It was like opening up a rare flower. The seeds lay gleaming black-brown in bright-red chambers. Around them, like a bed, was white flesh, surrounded in turn by a rose-red bell. A slender white dash ran down from the stem, dividing it. And it was all inside a thin, warm, reddish-brown shell.
‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ said Sally.
‘A blood pear,’ said Liss, once she was back on the ground. ‘Nobody knows how long they’ve been around. Try.’
Sally cut off a larger piece this time. She wanted to taste the red and the white. It was hard to find a word for the way this pear felt in her mouth – firm yet melting. And she thought the red tasted sweeter and that there was a tiny trace of bitterness in the white, and that together it was a taste that … maybe sunlight would taste like that after a long summer, if it fell through the distant blue of the sky and then the ancient green of tall trees, and landed right on your tongue.
‘Want some?’ she asked, offering Liss half.
She shook her head. ‘I prefer others.’
She walked to another tree, hung with long, very green pears.
‘Those aren’t ripe yet, are they?’
Liss picked one, bit off the stalk and spat it out.
‘Bosc pear. An accidental cross. Discovered in the forest in Apremont, sometime during the French Revolution. Some people call it the Kaiser Alexander pear.’
She held it out to Sally. She bit a piece off. This time the flesh was firm and the taste was tart.
‘I like them when they’re not quite ripe,’ said Liss.
‘How do you know all this?’ asked Sally. She ran her hand over the stinging nettles. Sometimes she liked the burning on her palms. ‘About the forest and the dates and all that stuff.’
Liss took another bite from the pear, then she flung out her arm and hurled the rest over the hedge.
‘I learnt it all by heart.’
She went back to the wheelbarrow to fetch one of the baskets.
‘Or, to be precise, I had to learn it all by heart. Every tree, every pear, every name.’
In passing, she plucked a pear off another tree and threw it to Sally without looking. Sally caught it. It looked like something from an old picture. Sally had never seen a pear like that in any supermarket. Red, glowing flames licked over the sunward side, fading through orange into yellow on the other side. It was a very large, heavy, almost exotically irregular pear.
‘Margarete Marillat.’ Liss was almost singing now, a derisive drone. ‘A French variety. The very latest thing, when I was thirteen. A show fruit. Looks much better than it tastes. And it goes bad quickly.’
Sally leant against the tree beside her. The rough bark on her back felt good, even through her thin T-shirt.
‘Who made you learn that by heart?’ she asked.
‘The previous owner,’ answered Liss, starting to pick the Marillat pears. She threw them carelessly into the basket.
‘Won’t they bruise?’ asked Sally, peeling herself away from the trunk to help.
‘They’ll just get pressed anyway. They don’t even make good schnapps. They’re only good for juicing. But it doesn’t matter with the others either. We don’t eat them. They’re for the mash.’
They worked in silence. The garden was full of the humming of bees and the September light and the scent of the pears.
‘The previous owner was your father, wasn’t he?’
Liss didn’t answer at first. The pears were so big that the basket soon filled, even though they hadn’t brought a ladder. Sally watched Liss as she worked. Quick, but not the way she’d been with the potatoes. Here, she was working furiously and not as evenly. Once the basket was overflowing, Liss heaved it onto the wheelbarrow in one single rapid explosion of strength, without giving Sally a chance to help.
‘He was an arsehole,’ she said, between two hasty breaths. ‘That’s all. If he was a father … nobody needs one like that.’
She walked to the hedge, where there was a ladder that Sally had only just noticed. Liss pulled it out of the bushes and leant it against a trunk, between the branches.
‘Want to go up?’
Sally nodded and climbed the ladder, then positioned herself wide-legged, with one foot on each of two diverging branches, leant her back against the trunk, and found that she could easily reach up into the crown from there. The fruit hung gleaming and beautiful between the leaves. Rhythmically, she threw pear after pear down to Liss. She took a little time before asking what she wanted to know.
‘Did he hit you?’
Pear off the branch. Pear dropping into Liss’s hands.
‘Didn’t have to.’
Pear in the basket.
‘Everything had to be exact. Perfectly exact. Perfectly orderly. I still remember the way he planted the trees. He laid out rectangular batter boards, like for building a house. A tree every five metres longways, a tree every four metres crossways. There were grids like that all over the place, even if you couldn’t see them. On the farm and in the village and in my room once I finally had one, and even after I’d turned sixteen or seventeen or eighteen. Especially then.’
It was good that she was up the tree just then, thought Sally. It was the first time Liss had spoken about herself. She climbed another two branches higher, to get to the highest fruit.
‘Reading was out of order. Listening to music was out of order. Leaving things as they are was right out of order. You can tie trees to a stake to make them grow straight. All his life he thought you could do that to people too.’
The second basket was full now too, but there were still lots of pears in the crown. Liss fetched another. Sally waited, her back against the trunk, her legs stretched, straddling two branches, her face in the sun.
When Liss put the basket in the grass, she asked: ‘When did he die?’
Liss looked up at her.
‘He’s not dead,’ she said, her voice cold. ‘He moved away. Along with his wife, who spent her whole life with him in squares. That’s why I only go into his orchard once a year. Only for the harvest. Because otherwise I feel bad about the pears.’
Sally had picked and thrown down most of the pears. There were only a few on the very outside branches that she couldn’t reach. She climbed down, hung from a branch and let herself drop the rest of the way. She wiped her hands on her shorts. Then she looked at Liss.
‘This is the most beautiful garden I’ve ever seen in all my life. I mean, I understand that it … that you … that it used to be … different. That to you it’s…’ She was hunting for words. Liss said nothing as she bent to pick up a few pears that had fallen in the grass. The right word came to Sally.
‘I can see that the garden used to be a cage to you. But look what it’s turned into!’
She spun in a circle, trying to encompass it all. The weathered fence panels, pressed gently inwards by the wildly overgrown hedges. The parallel grid of trees, with fanned-out crowns, slanted trunks and clouds of leaves that reduced all the right angles to fading memories. The sea of grass, straggly weeds and stinging nettles, through which the light September breeze sent pale-green waves rippling from one end of the orchard to the other.
‘It’s all…’ Again she sought out the right word. ‘It’s all like a wonderful punishment for trying to force growing things into a mould. Don’t you see that?’
Sally had the sudden feeling of having discovered something and desperately wanted Liss to understand it too.
‘By never going into the orchard, letting everything just grow, leaving everything in peace, you’ve made it magical…’
That last word had just slipped out. She hadn’t meant to say it, it sounded so clichéd. But it was said now.
‘You have to take it back,’ she added, because Liss was showing no reaction. ‘It belongs to you now.’
Liss grabbed the handles of the wheelbarrow, where she’d now put the second basket too.
‘Open the gate for me,’ she said.
It was hard to pull the garden gate over the tall weeds. Sally tugged hard on the latch, stumbled backwards and fell into the grass because she’d ripped the screws right out of the rotten wood.
‘You see,’ she laughed, ‘now you can’t even close it again!’
Liss’s features relaxed, and Sally could see a smile playing around the corners of her lips.
‘I’ve never … I’d never seen it like that,’ she said thoughtfully.
Much later, when the baskets of pears had been decanted into sacks, when the sacks had gradually covered the entire trailer floor, and Liss had started the tractor and told Sally to get up, she called out ‘thank you’ without looking at her, over the noise of the diesel engine springing slowly into life.