Blenheim Orchard

by Tim Pears

  In the almost dark Sheena Pepin lay on her curled side, beneath the white cotton sheet, in a state of perfect happy rest. Even though she’d given Ezra sex and been to the bathroom, put on pyjamas, drunk the tea that Ezra had brought her and eaten toast, she’d still been able to slip back into this dozy bliss. Her limbs were heavy, too heavy to lift, though as long as she let them rest on the mattress she had, rather, a sensation of weightlessness. It was as if the bed were floating in space. Exactly the right height of pillows was under her head; no neck or shoulder muscle ached. Sheena lay in a foetal position, and she had only to scrunch up a little tighter, or stretch out minutely, and her body’s pleasure became magically exaggerated; the whole of her skin luxuriated in warm-blooded languor.

  Dozing on a Thursday morning. It seemed to Sheena that she was nothing but a fraud. The drive which, in her opinion, set her apart from others was a sham; left to her own devices she’d like nothing better than to languish here till noon. Today and every other day. Nothing but a lazy sensualist, heedless of her burdens and her duties.

  Tonight, Sheena knew, she and Blaise should go to bed as early as Louie, since they had to be up well before dawn tomorrow. Maybe that foreknowledge contributed to her stupor now. She reached out a reluctant arm, pressed the button on her clock to illuminate its digital figures. Seven forty-five. It really was time to get up. Then, as if to mock the disparity between such resolution and her true desire, she felt a familiar body crawl into bed behind her. Sheena rolled over. He nestled against her.

  ‘Mummy?’

  ‘Yes, Hector?’

  ‘Nothing.’ He buried his head in her arm.

  ‘What is it, Hec?’

  After a while Hector said, ‘I don’t think Ed likes me.’

  ‘Ed?’ Sheena inhaled the dry smell of Hector’s hair. ‘Ed Carlyle?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s the problem, sweetheart? Does it matter if your friend’s brother likes you or not?’

  ‘I like him.’

  Sheena caressed the back of Hector’s neck. ‘What does Jack say?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I love you,’ she whispered. She kissed his forehead, squeezed his bony body to her. ‘Everybody loves you, Hec. Come on. Time to get up, both of us.’

  The dishwasher bothered Ezra Pepin. The way you had to rinse bowls before you put them in, otherwise they’d come out with flecks of cereal stuck fast. If you rinsed them under the tap for a further two seconds they’d be clean anyway. But Sheena claimed that when Ezra washed up by hand he failed to rinse properly: you could taste the washing-up liquid.

  It was probably his fault, Ezra reflected: no doubt he’d bought a cheap, special-offer model, when everyone knew the thing to do was to consult a consumer magazine and purchase what they recommended, some exorbitant Bosch or Siemens that did the damn job properly and didn’t annoy you every day with its ineptitude.

  ‘Daddy,’ Blaise wailed as she came into the kitchen. ‘Have you seen my jacket?’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘You know. The brown denim one.’

  Ezra dried his hands on a tea towel. ‘No idea, darling.’

  Blaise groaned. The upper half of her body crumpled. It was fortunate her legs remained firm.

  ‘Ask Mum.’ It occurred to Ezra that he’d read somewhere that women tended to possess a sense of where each family member’s possessions were around the house, refiguring the shifting map from moment to moment. ‘She’s meant to know that kind of –’

  ‘She said to ask you.’

  Ezra frowned. ‘When did you last wear it?’

  ‘When I came home from school.’

  ‘What did you do when you came home from school?’

  Blaise stared at the kitchen tiles, then up at her father. ‘Played football with Lou.’

  ‘I did win!’ was proclaimed from the table.

  Ezra nodded. ‘You left it outside. It’s draped over the low branch of the apple tree.’

  Blaise confirmed the claim with her own eyes and, half-smiling, said to her father, ‘Well done, Daddy.’

  ‘It’s a gift,’ he said.

  Some had been up for hours; others dashed pell-mell downstairs, half-dressed, hair askew. It didn’t matter: all five members of the Pepin family endeavoured to leave the house at the same moment. The hallway was the location for a rugby scrum in which no one could find the ball. Hector trudged towards the door weighed down by a bulging rucksack.

  ‘You’ll need remedial osteopathy by the time you’re a teenager,’ Ezra lamented. ‘Do you not have a locker?’

  ‘They’re not cool,’ Hector said. He shrugged, perhaps to indicate to his father that hauling all his textbooks to and from school didn’t make much sense to him either; this happened just to be the way things were.

  Sheena was tying the laces of Louie’s new trainers, cursing Ezra for not having bought ones with Velcro straps.

  ‘What about Blaise?’ Ezra asked. ‘She never seems to bring anything home.’

  ‘She’s not so punctilious about her homework,’ Sheena said. ‘You got Lou’s bike helmet? And she doesn’t care what other people say is cool. Do you, Bee?’

  ‘Depends who’s saying it,’ Blaise said. ‘I’m off.’

  ‘You see, boy?’ Ezra said. He attached bicycle clips to his ankles. ‘Who cares what’s cool?’

  Hector looked crossly at the carpet. ‘People don’t bother her,’ he said, before stumbling out of the door in his sister’s footsteps, closely followed by the rest of his family, who, apart from Peanut Louie in the child-seat on the back of his father’s bicycle, dispersed in a multiplicity of directions.

  2

  The Dustbin-lid Hunt

  Friday 20 June

  Overhead lighting along the low ceiling. The windowless corridor appeared overexposed. There was a throbbing, a dull pulsation behind his eyes. Ezra leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and clasping his hands as if in prayer. He gazed at his black brogues on the grey dusty floor. The intricately patterned perforations and decorative stitching impressed him. It must have been done by an automaton, he realised. Although when he thought about it he seemed to remember seeing the word hand-stitched somewhere – and considering the price he’d paid for them, at that shoe shop next to Walters in Turl Street, it was possible. It was likely.

  It occurred to Ezra Pepin, as he stared at the zigzag edge of a seam, that the idea of a machine doing such laborious work was preferable to a human being. But then he corrected himself: it was terrible, actually, that shoemakers around the world, skilled artisans, had been and were continuing to be made redundant by automation. It was tragic. Although, on the other hand, the truth was that he didn’t really feel comfortable with the notion that a faraway cobbler, knuckles arthritic and swollen, was losing his sight in a squalid factory just so that an Englishman could wear these beautiful leather shoes.

  Ezra studied the left brogue. At the front a host of tiny perforations swirled around a triangle of larger ones. He pictured the awl of a machine dancing across flat cuts of leather as it punched the holes. He could visualise the dance clearly, and hear it, too: in his mind a staccato rhythm became alloyed with melody. There was something sublime, Ezra figured, in this mechanical choreography, these ballet-dancing needles. Yes, indeed. A mechanical sublime.

  All of a sudden his shoes were cast into shade.

  ‘Mr Pepin? Would you come this way, please.’

  He looked up. A uniformed policewoman was standing in front of him. She’d made an unsmiling request. She was a little older than the others. Close-cropped hair, faintly Asiatic eyes and cheekbones; a little racial colour. Satisfied she’d got his attention, she turned and walked away. A hefty, solemn, authoritative figure. Ezra followed her around a corner, along another corridor, to a door through whose small window she invited him to peer.

  ‘Is this your daughter?’

  The glass in the door was grubby, as if too many people had leaned too close in order to
look through. Smeared with grease from the skin of their foreheads. More likely, though, when you thought about it, was that the smudges were on the other side, incarcerated sinners pressing their noses to the glass, praying for help. Or maybe, receiving no answer, they’d spat at the glass in protest. It was interesting, really quite intriguing. It surely revealed, whatever else, something about cutbacks among cleaners in municipal employment.

  ‘Mr Pepin?’

  Actually, Ezra spotted when he looked closer, there was something inside the glass: strips of wire were embedded within it. To strengthen it, presumably. Or make it shatterproof? So there could be no splinters with which suspects could inflict harm upon themselves? Both, perhaps.

  ‘Mr Pepin. I said, Is that your daughter?’

  Ezra’s perspective altered abruptly, as if someone else had wrenched the focus of his vision. Hunched on the seat of a moulded plastic chair, a chubby girl hugged her folded legs. Her face was hidden between her knees. She looked too small, Ezra thought, to be thirteen, almost fourteen years old; had curled up tight and created an optical illusion, that of a much younger self. The ground beneath his leather shoes began to move, as if St Aldate’s police station had been built too close to the river.

  ‘Mr Pepin?’

  Ezra pressed a steadying hand against the door surround. ‘What?’

  ‘Is that your daughter?’

  ‘My daughter?’ He gazed at the coiled form. ‘Yes. There she is. That’s her.’ He took a deep breath.

  ‘She wouldn’t tell us her name.’

  ‘Why not? I mean, she wouldn’t?’

  ‘Refused to say a single word. Even to make a request.’

  Ezra gazed at his girl. Her feet, her muddy Doc Martens, up off the ground, gathered against her haunches, as if there’d been something dangerous scuttling across the floor. ‘A request? What for?’

  ‘A lawyer? A phone call?’ He registered the slight shrug of the policewoman’s shoulders beside him. ‘A glass of water.’

  Her head was close to Ezra’s, as they each gazed through the rectangle of glass. He detected a sourness in her breath. I must act well now, he told himself. I have nothing but humility, and contrition, to offer. Perhaps this woman has authority to let Blaise go.

  Ezra stared through the greasy window at his daughter. Behind him, indistinct voices murmured along the corridor. A throb in his forehead; and tiny pieces of grit behind his eyelids. There was nowhere to hide. Light shone everywhere.

  He’d barely got in to work an hour earlier that Friday morning, having seen Hector off to Cherwell with Jack Carlyle and cycled Louie to the Montessori Nursery in Wolvercote, when his mobile rang. He saw the number, then heard the open-air ambience of a crowd.

  ‘Minty? What’s up?’

  ‘I’m outside the Wasteland, Ezra.’

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘I can’t see. They’re keeping us on this side of the bridge.’

  ‘Can’t you tell whether work’s started?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s all quiet over there. But Ezra, it’s Blaise. There’s been an accident. An ambulance arrived, siren wailing.’

  ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘No, no. Blaise is all right. She was taken away in a police car. Right in front of me.’

  ‘A police car?’

  ‘That’s all I know.’

  ‘Family crisis,’ Ezra told Chrissie Barwell, snapping his bicycle clips back around his ankles. ‘Cover for me, can you? I’ll call you.’

  He pedalled his hybrid bike along Oxpens Road directly towards St Aldate’s police station, Louie’s child-seat rattling behind him. It seemed plausible that he might reach there before the car, waylay the arresting officers, relieve them of their underage nuisance before they began a hard-to-rewind process of paperwork. He cycled fast past the College of Further Education and the ice-rink, that marooned galleon beached on the grass.

  ‘I’ll look into it, sir,’ the male officer at the otherwise empty Reception told him through a glass partition. ‘Take a seat, please.’

  Ezra realised it was quite possible that they weren’t even bringing Blaise to this station. ‘I just want to know –’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’ll look into it. Please take a seat.’

  Ezra Pepin sat down. He got up again, went to the door, stared at the indifferent traffic crawling in and out of the centre of Oxford over Folly Bridge. He regretted having put on a vest this hot morning: he could feel it stuck to his back. He watched policemen and women entering and exiting the station through a gate to the side, by car and bike, on foot. The older generation of policemen – his age, in other words – were hulks. Young ones tended to be shorter and slighter than their senior colleagues, in some strange policing reversal of the general trend.

  ‘If I was dictator for a day,’ Sheena had once declared to Ezra, soon after they met, ‘the first thing I’d abolish would be uniforms.’ Odd, specific moments embedded in one’s memory.

  He returned to the bench running around two walls of the Reception area, gazed at a poster that asked whether he was making life too easy for criminals. Probably, Ezra admitted. He was dumb enough. How stupid could a man be? It had not occurred to him that Blaise might be arrested. Sheena, sure, many times, though she’d never been so much as cautioned. Or maybe it had occurred to him, if he were honest, a possibility bobbing into consciousness that, because it was unwelcome, he’d shunted off to a margin of his mind. He’d have to have it out with Sheena; he’d give her what for, that’s what he’d do.

  Silence. Had planes vacated the sky? Voices were hushed, banging doors muffled. All was quiet. Had cars stopped whining past? Blaise listened hard. She could hear something: blood pummelling her ears. Her heartbeat walloping her ribs.

  She stared through her knees, between her feet, at a spot on the dirty floor. She could make out fluff, a human hair, the texture of the hard ground, but she kept on gazing until such details ceased to make sense. There was something wrong with the light. Sunlight shone through the small window. On this spot upon which she focused, sunshine met evidence of the malfunctioning ceiling bulb. Flickering in the dust and grit: a painting whose colours were alive. Blaise gawped at shimmering fluctuations of white and yellow light, and it was as if there were a place in her brain to which the image was filtered directly. A kind of correspondence was set up between the vision and nerve cells in her grey matter, and there they played together, like musical notes of yellow, like sparkling tastes of light, her anxiety dissipating as she gawked, blank-brained, mesmerised.

  ‘Would you come through, sir?’

  The Reception officer buzzed open the door, and met Ezra on the other side. ‘Take a seat there, please. Someone will be with you in a moment.’

  Over there was the desk sergeant; activity familiar from TV. Once you got through the door from the municipal Reception you were admitted to, implicated in, a recognisably forbidding process. Here were the police, plain-clothed and uniformed. And two or three shifty-looking individuals: suspects. Undercover detectives, maybe. Lawyers, even. Ezra had no idea who they were. He felt bereft of knowledge and power, aware on his daughter’s behalf of the fundamental threat that made even the most innocent among us guilty in the presence of police: the threat of incarceration. She was in custody, he had to get her out. But how? He had no authority here. Of course: he should get a lawyer. He should ring Dan, one of his tennis quartet, a solicitor.

  He had gazed down at his shoes, and become lost in thought. A shadow had come over him. Ezra had looked up. A uniformed policewoman, Asiatic, with bruised eyes, was standing in front of him. ‘Mr Pepin? Would you come this way, please.’

  And now here he was, peering through the grilled window at Blaise, hunched up on a plastic chair. ‘She’s refused to say a word.’ The policewoman’s head was close to Ezra’s. Her breath smelled old.

  ‘I’m sure,’ Ezra said, ‘whatever she’s done –’

  ‘She attacked a security guard.’

  ‘Attack? That’s
not possible. My daughter wouldn’t –’

  ‘She hit him in the face.’

  ‘No. I’m sorry,’ Ezra said, shaking his head vigorously. ‘I believe someone must have made a mistake.’

  Ezra turned aside from the window. He found the policewoman waiting, and he glanced away from her interrogative gaze, off down the empty corridor. It was as if whatever nonsensical act Blaise was accused of was merely a set-up, a deceipt, to ensnare her father. Ezra was actually the one under suspicion here. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.

  ‘Might school,’ the policewoman said, ‘not be a more appropriate place for a girl than a violent political protest?’

  ‘Yes, yes. Thank you, officer,’ Ezra said. It was intolerably hot in here. ‘I appreciate your advice. Shall I take my daughter home now?’

  The policewoman studied Ezra’s face, as if she were remembering a mugshot from some previous, unprosecuted crime. ‘This is an extremely serious matter, Mr Pepin.’

  ‘Of course it is.’ He mustn’t argue. He needed to agree, to keep calm.

  ‘We’ve heard from the security guard in question. His express wish, apparently, is that no charge is brought. He says it was an accident.’

  Ezra bit his lip to keep from smiling. ‘I’m sure it was.’

  ‘His colleagues are prepared to support him by claiming to have seen nothing. And we assume that your daughter’s comrades will prove to be similarly blind.’

  ‘No doubt it was a minor –’

  ‘He’s up at A and E now. She broke the man’s nose.’

  Ezra shook his head.

  ‘Fractured his left cheekbone.’

  Ezra was unable to match the words to imaginable action. Blaise break someone’s nose? The words described some cartoonish parallel to reality. ‘I’m sorry …’

  ‘Be grateful she’s your daughter, that’s all, not your son. And there’s a man out there with an outdated sense of shame.’

  Ezra sensed the unwavering gaze upon him. He struggled, failed, to meet it and hold it for more than a testing moment. ‘I am,’ he said quietly.