Blenheim Orchard

by Tim Pears

  Ezra saw and felt Kuuzik’s eyes looking into his own. He felt undefended; that he’d been identified by a rare individual as an equal. Klaus saw through Ezra’s eyes, past the hiding places where we conceal our fear and desire and discontent, to where he could see another dynamic and greedy man asleep inside Ezra Pepin, capable of incredible things.

  ‘Yes,’ Ezra said. ‘Oh, yes. We really can.’

  It was lunchtime, in the squat on Islip Road. Blaise unwrapped butter and cheese and bread, unbagged the fruit, and placed them on the newspaper beside her. There was no furniture. She sat cross-legged on the wooden floor. An indoor picnic. Zack filled two enamel mugs with water in the kitchen, and brought them back. Blaise was glad that neither Jed nor Bobby was here; she didn’t know where they were, and Zack didn’t say. Maybe they’d moved on somewhere else and left him here, alone. The sun poured through the dusty French windows on to the floorboards.

  Blaise had had to get out. She’d lain in bed all morning with the curtains closed. Her brain wouldn’t work any more. It was like a swamp bubbling inside her skull, stupefied. Was she going to change into her future adult self, or did that adult self already exist inside her? The question oozed around her head, into consciousness and out of it and in again.

  When, finally, she’d stirred, Blaise had found herself in front of the bathroom mirror: it was a place where her face altered from one day to the next. Her cranium was changing shape. Her jaw was flatter than it used to be; her eyes had lost their symmetry. Pressing through hair, Blaise ran her fingers over bone on the top of her head, expecting to find some horrific knob or ridge that would give away the havoc being wrought inside. Tumour, probably. Haemorrhage, perhaps. She’d looked the words up in the family medical encyclopaedia. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, quite possibly. She gazed at dark crescents beneath eyes that looked reproachfully back at her. It was odd. She studied her reflection yet what Blaise felt, above all, was unknown; unseen. She was fourteen. She wondered whether she was a shell, coming close to cracking.

  Zack put the mugs of water down next to Blaise, on the other side from the food, and sat cross-legged himself, facing her. As if he’d underestimated how long his legs were, their bent knees touched, and each shrank a fraction back from the other. He was wearing cut-off jeans, Blaise blue shorts. Zack cut the white bread with an unserrated carving knife: the blade hacked bluntly through the crust, splitting it. He tried again, with a thicker slice, and was more successful. His big, soil-lined hands, with their long fingers, had a certain autonomous competence about them, as if, even without orders from Zack’s brain, there were many things they could do on their own.

  It was too hot. Was every single window in the house closed? That was what it felt like. The air was stifling. Zack ought to open the French windows. Blaise realised she had too many clothes on, having thrown a cardigan over her blouse before she’d gauged the day. Her skin prickled. Her face felt red, and ugly. There was a sudden throb in her thigh: the mobile in her cardigan pocket. She ignored it, hoping its alert was not evident to Zack. She didn’t want to have to justify not answering it. It was probably Akhmed.

  With the big carving knife, Zack spread butter on the slices of bread. Smoothly, patiently. There was nothing to betray any expectation he might have that she should do anything to help. Well, perhaps there was only the one knife: he used it to cut cheese, too. He laid strips of cheese on each slice of buttered bread, then he put the knife down, and rested his hands in his lap.

  Blaise stared at her knees; at the millimetres between her knees and his. When she looked up at Zack, he was smiling at her. He seemed to have been waiting for her eyes, just as she’d been convinced he had. She liked the way Zack, his blond moustache crinkling, smiled: it was as if he knew what Blaise was thinking, and thought the same thing. Unless, she admitted, his smile didn’t mean that at all. Maybe it meant he was too shy to say or do anything more. Even though he was almost ten years older than her.

  Blaise didn’t know what Zack’s smile meant. She wanted him to do something that might reveal what its meaning had been, so that in retrospect she could understand. In psychic response, he reached out his right hand, and placed it on her left knee. Blaise felt a quiver of warmth surge up her thigh.

  Zack’s smile appeared sad. He shook his head, slowly. ‘You’re thirteen,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ Blaise told him quickly. ‘Fourteen.’

  She knew he was going to pull his hand away. She put her left hand on top of his hand.

  Zack’s smile began to mean something else now. It was wry; rueful. ‘It’s dangerous,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘What do you mean?’ She knew what he meant. But until he explained, she could pretend that she didn’t.

  Zack took her hand, and held it. In doing so, he’d lifted his hand from her knee, but Blaise didn’t mind. His fingers were interlaced with hers, the pads of each of their fingers on the back of the other’s hand, Zack’s thumb massaging her palm. The whole surface of her hand was alive with feeling; it was covered by tiny spots that tingled with pleasure. Maybe this was why Zack had been smiling: he’d known he had the power to activate these pleasure spots with his touch.

  With his free hand Zack took a piece of bread and cheese. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s eat.’

  Copying Zack, Blaise folded over a slice of bread to make a sandwich. They chewed mouthfuls of food slowly, holding hands. Blaise stroked Zack’s skin. He kneaded her flesh. Blaise drank water from one of the enamel mugs. She watched her fingers roam over the soily knuckles and squeeze the veined back of Zack’s large hand. She was starving, but she didn’t want to eat any more, but she was so hungry, but … She lifted Zack’s hand to her mouth, took his middle finger and bit into it. Zack let out a gasp, but he didn’t pull his finger away. She grasped the finger in her fist and fed it into her mouth. She took it all. Sucking it, she knew that this was what she was hungry for.

  Blaise braved a glance at Zack. He wasn’t smiling any more. He looked hot, and scared, and his eyes seemed bigger than they had moments before. The pupils were dilated. As she licked his finger, it seemed to Blaise as if the taste and the sensation could feed her as well as any food. Zack slid his finger out of her mouth, and pulled his hand from her grip. Blaise blanched with disappointment. Zack reached around the back of her head and pulled her towards him.

  Zack’s lips and mouth were slippery, his tongue fell upon hers and somehow she knew what to do with it now. Her eyes were closed. Their tongues connived in urgent slithering conversation. There were colours on the inside of her eyelids. Purple, red, liquid colours melding, not just in her eyes but all over her body, indigo and crimson warm and melting from her mouth down through her torso.

  It took Blaise some moments to realise that Zack had withdrawn. She opened her eyes. He was sitting back, breathing hard. He looked confused, like a soldier given an inexplicable order. He began to shake his head. ‘No,’ he muttered, and looked at her. ‘No, Blaise,’ he said. ‘You’re too much, girl. We can’t do this.’ He shuffled back some inches across the wooden floorboards. ‘You’re too much.’

  When Ezra cycled home that evening, he resolved not to mention to Sheena his meeting with the new Chief Executive. Twelve years he’d been working for Isis Water, cruising with his colleagues as before their eyes their product became a profitable necessity in the lives of consumers. All over the country people were paying hard-earned money to drink water from a bottle instead of out of the tap. Oh, sure, Isis Water had to battle for its market share but Ezra Pepin and his colleagues had found their prestige growing and their incomes rising with little effort.

  And now, just as, finally, he was returning from this illusory world to his real life, a bright unexpected prospect seemed to have opened up before him. The timing of it bamboozled him. His destiny was being toyed with.

  Fridays were Ezra’s evenings to cook, and the family ate together, to be joined, today, by Jack Carlyle, who when Ezra came home was teaching L
ouie to play chess.

  ‘No, the knight eats them on this level,’ he was patiently explaining. ‘The bishop stabs them.’ The boys lay on their stomachs, knees bent behind them, bare feet swaying in the air.

  ‘Where’s Hector?’ Ezra demanded, surprised that it was Jack and not Louie’s brother who was initiating him into the virtual violence.

  ‘Upstairs,’ said Jack, his voice crackling, the tremors of a boy’s voice in the process of breaking. ‘I suppose.’

  Ezra welcomed Friday evenings. It was where the weekend began, and he’d almost always managed to protect it from the encroachment of work. It struck him now how much more demanding life would be in a team with Klaus Kuuzik, and for the first time that day he didn’t feel regretful that he’d not be able to join it.

  ‘Help!’

  Panic zipped through Ezra’s body, a surge of electric adrenaline.

  ‘Help, Daddy!’

  He was at the stairs in two strides. It was Blaise’s voice. Using the banister for extra leverage and momentum, Ezra took the stairs three at a time, and reached the top. Blaise was sitting on the landing. With her right arm she held Hector in a head-lock. Any sign of sweat or struggle was long gone: they appeared both to be waiting for something.

  Blaise looked up at her father. ‘Help me, Daddy,’ she pleaded.

  It was definitely Hector in that arm-lock, Ezra confirmed, although all he could see was the brown hair on the top of Hector’s head.

  ‘Come on, Daddy. Please!’ Blaise appeared genuinely afraid, Ezra could see it in her eyes. He tried hard to figure it out. Was there some kind of ventriloquism going on? Was Hector using Blaise’s mouth, her voice, to communicate?

  ‘What are you doing?’ Ezra asked his daughter.

  She looked distressed. ‘If I let him go,’ she said, ‘he’ll punch me.’

  Hector tried suddenly to wriggle and heave his way loose. A long grunt broke free from his lips. Blaise held her grip tight. It looked like a game, a variation of a bucking bronco. It wound down, and they were still again.

  ‘Hector wouldn’t admit there’s no such thing as life after death,’ Blaise said.

  Ezra tried to understand how such a dispute might have led to the crisis displayed before him. I’m only about four hundred years too late, he thought. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I told him that when he admits it,’ Blaise said, ‘I’d let him go.’

  ‘Do you have any idea how ridiculous that sounds?’

  ‘But he only said there was,’ Blaise explained, indignant, ‘to annoy me.’

  Hector was kneeling, his forehead almost touching the landing carpet; being forced to pray for the heresy of insisting there was an afterlife.

  ‘I was only joking,’ Blaise told her father. ‘But then he got all furious. If I let him go he’ll kick me, I know he will. Help, Daddy.’

  ‘No, he won’t,’ Ezra said. ‘Will you, Hec? Let him go.’

  Frowning, Blaise relaxed her grip. Hector shuffled backwards, and pulled himself slowly loose. He climbed to his feet.

  ‘Why do this?’ Ezra asked. ‘Does it have any part in normal human discourse, do you think?’

  Blaise shrugged. Hector stared at the carpet. He’d grown accustomed to its sight, did not wish to relinquish it.

  ‘Do you have any idea how long you two will be brother and sister? Always.’

  ‘He knows I love him, really,’ Blaise said. ‘Don’t you, Hec?’

  Hector made no reply. He walked slowly past them, and stepped downstairs.

  Ezra slipped free from his working clothes. He worried whether it might be possible for his daughter to have some renegade trace of psychosis in her personality. But as he showered he let such idle anxiety be rinsed away. He pulled on shorts and Hawaiian shirt and, feeling oddly energised by the confusions of his day, trotted down the stairs. Louie was now a spectator, watching Hector and Jack do digital battle. Blaise lay on the sofa, browsing through a large photographic book.

  ‘Hey,’ Ezra said. ‘Life is good, kids.’

  ‘No,’ said Louie. ‘Life not good, Daddy. Cos there is dying.’

  ‘Well, yeh, okay,’ Ezra conceded. ‘There is that, Peanut. But I mean, apart from death, life is great, isn’t it? Now, who wants to help Dad rustle up some supper?’

  It was a question that brought no response, but Ezra was in no mood to care. His custom on Fridays was to conjure a meal from whatever he found in the fridge and the cupboards, before the weekly internet order from Tesco was delivered on Saturday morning. It was a challenge that was half a culinary and half a survivalist test – either of which, Sheena reckoned, would have strained a more competent cook than her husband.

  Ezra found enough vegetables to fill a roasting pan so he whacked the oven up high, and set to peeling parsnips, potatoes, carrots, peppers and garlic. There was no cheese in the fridge but there were eight eggs and a little bacon, so he whisked an omelette, and there were plenty of salad ingredients. And in the freezer he found a couple of packets of half-baked baguettes, so he crushed some cloves of garlic: he was mashing them with butter, garlic bread being always popular in their house, when Sheena came in.

  ‘Hi, Ez,’ she said, and leaned forward to kiss him. Her hands were full with bags and his were messy with food, so that their only contact was with their lips. Yet there they met each other, briefly, with a true and fond acknowledgement. She smelled of perspiring skin and damp hair. How natural, Ezra thought, this marital affection; how absurd that for years they’d trudged along without it.

  ‘Are there any beers in the fridge?’ Sheena asked. ‘I’m thirsty.’

  ‘I think so. Stick some more in anyway.’

  ‘This heat. We had to send Stella to Gills for another fan. What are you making?’

  ‘Spaghetti Bolognese.’

  ‘Surely we don’t have any beef?’

  ‘I’m making a vegetarian version.’

  ‘But then it’s not … wait a minute, there aren’t any tomatoes left, are there?’

  ‘That’s nothing. There’s no spaghetti either.’

  ‘Oh, Ez,’ Sheena sighed, with a certain rediscovered tolerance for his humour where for so long there’d been only irritation. ‘How was your day, anyway?’

  ‘My day? You don’t want to …’ Ezra hesitated. ‘Well, actually,’ he said, ‘it was remarkable. The new CEO of the company, Herr Kuuzik, asked me in for a meeting.’

  Sheena was clinking bottles of Pilsner in and out of the fridge. ‘You want one?’

  ‘I’ll stick with wine, thanks. And he wants me to join a hand-picked team.’

  ‘Oh. Team of what? Can you pass that opener?’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure exactly,’ Ezra admitted. ‘He’s an extraordinary man, darling, and he seems to want me with him.’

  ‘Right. Big man in a small world.’ She flipped the top off the bottle, which bounced on the tiled floor. ‘Who can’t have you. Was he disappointed?’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Brazil, of course.’

  ‘I didn’t tell him.’

  ‘You didn’t. Why not? You want a sip?’

  ‘Because I’ll give a month’s notice, a month before we go right?’

  ‘I said a sip! Not a glug! Yes, of course, you’re right. I suppose they’d fire you if you told them too early. “You have fifteen minutes to vacate your office and leave the building. Security!” ’

  Ezra wanted to disagree. ‘It’s possible,’ he said. Such things happened, but he was sure they wouldn’t do that to him.

  ‘I’m going to drink what little’s left of this through there.’

  ‘But don’t you think … ?’ Ezra began.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I mean, it’s a compliment, isn’t it?’

  ‘Who needs it? I mean, sure.’ Sheena kissed him again. ‘But I’d expect nothing less for you, sweetheart. How long’s it going to be?’

  ‘Oh, about ten minutes,’ Ezra said.

  ‘I’ll be back to lay the table.’<
br />
  ‘No, no, I’ll do it,’ Ezra said. ‘Go on. I’ll give you all a shout when everything’s ready.’

  12

  The Path of Resistance

  Saturday 12 July

  Ezra lay on the sofa. It was seven-fifteen, and three mugs of strong coffee had gone the way of two bowls of cereal. His eyes ached. Caffeine was making his blood course gleefully around his veins; it seemed to be trying to whip up enthusiasm for some vascular sport. His head throbbed. He wondered what he’d done to deserve insomnia, this most self-punishing of afflictions. He tracked a pocket of wind along his colon until, with an agreeable report, it left his body.

  It had been too long, he thought, since he’d seen his father. A neglectful son. If their grandfather were to die while they were in Brazil, he wondered, would the children remember him? For the Achia, Ezra recalled, the break between life and death was total: those who died were buried with proper ceremony and would depart freely on a journey to the Invisible Forest. They could then be forgotten with good grace. To forget the dead was the way it should be.

  There were those, however, who went hunting and never returned; who, out in the forest, had died alone. Unable to leave this realm with due ceremony, the spirit of a dead person remained in limbo and, in his or her loneliness, would try to lure relatives, especially children, to join them. How to forget such a dangerous spirit? That was the challenge.

  Funeral rites were enacted which included special chants, and the consumption of certain plants, designed not to commemorate the deceased but to wipe out all memory of him. Memories in the minds of the living were the very substance that kept a dead person in limbo: by fading from their thoughts, the ghost would be able to complete the process of departure. When trapped in limbo, however, a dead spirit would try to trigger unhealthy excitations – memories – in the minds of the living, in a vicious circle of unwanted attachment.

  The aim of the Achia’s funeral rites was a collective amnesia that wiped out earlier generations. Just as the dead were given no tombs in their own names, so they were allowed no memorials in the minds of those who survived them.