How I Live Now

20

Now you might have gleaned from some of the hints dropped so far that food was not my best subject. So it was kind of ironic that the part of the army I got enlisted into was the one trying to provide it for everyone.

There was the whole milk operation, starring Piper and Jet the Wonder Dog, and the part that came after milking was complicated by having to heat and sterilize the milk since there were no fridges to keep it cold and that turned out to be so hard that eventually they gave up and just served it the old-fashioned way straight from the cow. Everyone worried about uncontaminated containers but the best solution turned out to be making people Bring a Bottle, then at least the army knew the milk was OK when it left them and if it poisoned anyone later it wasn’t their fault.

There were a couple of local guys who knew all about butchering so they were the lucky ones who got to kill and divvy up the cows which was a lot bloodier than you might want to find yourself thinking about on a dark and stormy night. They were popular though, and suddenly had whole bunches of friends they’d never noticed before queuing around the block clutching barbecue tongs.

Chickens were having their necks wrung all over the place especially if they didn’t keep churning out eggs, and it was pretty surprising to me how many of the older folks seemed to be right at home strangling a chicken. Piper said it was because of the Last War and rationing and everyone keeping chickens and I was pleased to hear that some of the skills I was picking up would stand me in good stead in Later Life, assuming I had one.

And finally, anyone who was healthy enough and willing enough to pick crops was hauled in to help and that was where I came in.

My first job was picking apples, which was somewhat more useful than hanging around on the outskirts of the Piper Appreciation Society. I got a lot of doubtful looks at first about whether I was strong enough to work so hard but these days determination was nine-tenths of the law and also as time went on there were a lot more thin people around and I didn’t stand out so much.

I worked with eight other army people including three soldiers and their wives and two other civilians. We started early in the morning and worked until it started to get dark and after only a few hours we drifted into cliques like we were all back in school.

My partner was a local woman called Elena who was from Liverpool originally so I didn’t understand most of what she said for the first few days and vice versa. Eventually we started chatting about this and that and soon the stories started coming out and I heard all about how she and her husband Daniel met and what were their favorite movies and how often they had sex and though she was a lot older than me and we barely spoke the same language she turned out to be the kind of person you could talk to about pretty much anything without worrying that she’d report you to the Pope.

She wanted to know all about my American and English families even though she’d never met any of them except Piper, and how I’d ended up picking apples in the middle of a foreign country not to mention the middle of a foreign war. Sometimes I thought I might implode if I didn’t talk to another human being about the events of my new life, especially the parts someone my age wouldn’t be allowed to see in the movies. But every time I was just on the verge of pouring it all out to Elena I changed my mind at the last minute just in case.

Luckily it seemed riveting enough to her that I was American and had been sent over by my Evil Stepmother which got her all clucking and tutting and all I had to do was look kind of tragic and say nothing at all for a few minutes and suddenly I had a new best friend enlisting the whole bunch of apple pickers into hating Davina on faith, which cheered me up for ages.

When we started work they gave us big boxes to pack the fruit in and the basic trick was not to throw the apples in or they would bruise and rot and ruin the rest of them in the box which suddenly made sense of the One Bad Apple expression my teachers used to trot out all the time, or Two if you counted Leah.

We had baskets, and ladders you had to move whenever you ran out of apples close enough to reach, and when the baskets were either full or unbearably heavy you passed them down to one of the others and they unpacked the fruit carefully and passed back empty baskets. It didn’t seem to matter whether I was picking or packing because both jobs were equally tiring, and the first few days I had to lie on the ground for twenty minutes at a time to keep from passing out from exhaustion and the pain in my arms. Elena was nice about it and just kept working around me.

It was such hard work that at first I thought I wouldn’t be able to stand it, what with every muscle in my body aching and me hardly able to climb into the truck or get out of bed the next day. But I did it because pushing myself farther and farther past what was possible made me feel calm, which is hard to explain but something I was good at.

One of the guys who worked with us was a few years older than me and I didn’t like him much but unfortunately the feeling wasn’t mutual. He was called Joe and he started hanging around trying to get my attention by telling stupid jokes while we worked and asking totally duh questions like What’s it like being a Yank? Elena felt sorry for Joe due to him not being the sharpest knife in the rack, especially when it came to picking up rejection vibes, but it was easier to feel sorry for him if you weren’t being eyed up like prey.

Maybe he’s lonely, she said, and I just looked at her wondering if she expected me to open a Home for the Socially Challenged or what. Then she started giggling and I had the feeling we were thinking the same thing, namely, some people are lonely for all the right reasons.

After that we both pretty much ignored him.

Most of the workers except Piper, Jet, a few others and me lived at Meadow Brook so we were picked up every morning at seven and taken home at seven every evening and every night we fell asleep in the truck and just about managed to wake up for some food and climb into bed and that was our day.

It took a lot of getting used to but after the first week we compared muscles and I told Piper all about Elena and it almost made up for the fact that when we had a day off neither of us got out of bed at all. Even Jet didn’t seem interested in moving out from under the bed except when we called him for food.

The plums turned ripe at about the same time as the apples and sometimes we moved from one to the other just to vary the routine but it was simpler to strip a tree of apples because they were easier to handle and you didn’t have to move the ladder so often and when the plums fell off the trees they rotted and attracted thousands of wasps so Elena and I stuck with apples when we could.

Elena was what you might call a Big Girl and you could tell she wanted to ask me about being so thin but being English she would rather have sawed her own legs off at the knees. I caught her looking pretty puzzled a few times when she saw me nibbling at bits of lunch when everyone else was wolfing down anything in sight and I could tell, war or no war, she was thinking If Only I Had Her Self-Control.

I found out she’d been trying to have a baby for seven years and was smack in the middle of some special last-ditch treatment when the war broke out and she couldn’t get any more treatment now and was forty-three and didn’t know when she’d ever get another chance.

I told her she should borrow Alby for a few days if she wanted to appreciate how great it was to be childless but when I looked at her she was just managing to smile and her eyes were kind of bleak and I wished I hadn’t said anything at all.

After about ten days of picking some of us moved over to broad beans and that was worse because you were always bent over with a whole new set of aching muscles but at least the beans tasted nice when you got them home and cooked them. It was getting to a point where there wasn’t much around that tasted like anything you’d want to eat and even I had to say I could do with a nice piece of toast which made Elena laugh.

One night we were driving home through the usual checkpoints and Piper and I were asleep and Joe, who sometimes came with us to stay with his parents in the village, suddenly took it into his head to stand up and get show-offy, and I guess thinking war was some kind of open discussion forum where everyone was really interested in your opinion, started shouting a whole bunch of obscenities at one of the checkpoint guards and when Major McEvoy told him to sit down in a really icy army tone of voice he ignored him and kept shouting stuff about Johnny Foreigner being an Effing Bastard and worse.

And then in an almost lazy kind of way the checkpoint guy who’d been looking at him raised his gun and pulled the trigger and there was a loud crack and part of Joe’s face exploded and there was blood everywhere and he fell over out of the truck into the road.

Piper watched the whole thing without moving a muscle but the shock of it made me retch and I had to turn away over the side of the truck. Someone else was screaming and when I turned back the whole world seemed to have slowed down and grown quiet and from inside the silence I watched the guard go right back to chatting with his friend and saw Major McEvoy’s head roll back for a moment and his eyes close and a look of despair crumple up his face and in that split second I wondered whether he was really that attached to the kid and then it was with horror that I looked down and saw that Joe was still alive, gurgling and trying to move the arm that wasn’t caught under his body and when I looked back at Major M I realized he was doing what he felt was his duty as a member of the armed forces defending a British national and still in slow motion he was climbing out of the truck and his plan must have been to get Joe on his feet somehow and then to safety when I heard about a hundred shots from a machine gun and the momentum of the blasts hurled Major M backward across the road away from Joe with blood welling up in holes all over him and this time you could see Joe’s condition was 100% dead with brains splattered everywhere and our driver didn’t wait around to see what might happen next but just stepped on the gas and as we drove away I thought I felt tears on my face but when I put my hand up to wipe them it turned out to be blood and nobody made a single sound but just sat there shell-shocked and all I could think about was poor Major M lying there in the dust though I guess he was much too dead to notice.

There never were seven more silent human beings in the back of a truck, we were too stunned even to cry or speak. When we reached Reston Bridge our driver, who I knew was a close friend of the Major’s, got out of the truck and stood there for a minute trying to get up the courage to go inside and tell Mrs. M what happened, but first he turned to us and said in a voice that sounded broken and full of rage, In case anyone needed reminding This is a War.

And the way he said those words made me feel like I was falling.