The Devil's Larder

47

WE WERE brought up not to eat the cores. To do so was considered greedy, messy, ill-mannered and, we were assured, immensely dangerous. Vitalized by our digestive juices and the dark, the pips would swell and strike. An apple tree would spring up and flourish in the warm loams of our intestines ‘like a baby’, until its roots and branches spread and burst out of our sides. Our skins and clothes would tear apart. ‘Then you’ll be sorry,’ mother said.

The only cure, if any pips were to be defiantly swallowed by any of her girls, was a dose of weedkiller and, possibly, if that did not prevent germination, a painful operation with a pair of secateurs. ‘It’s not a story I’ve made up,’ she said. ‘Go down to the orchard and you’ll see how true it is. Look for the faces and the hands of the boys and girls who’ve swallowed cores. They’ve turned into bark.’

I hated orchards then, and apples too. I did not want to end up like the children I’d discovered in the bark, hard and sinewy, distorted by pain, with ants and beetles crawling on their eyes and nothing to protect them from the night.

These days I have recovered from my mother’s house. I always chew the cores. I do not spit the pips into my palm. Indeed, as I grow older, the thought of something new and green, striking life inside me, growing ‘like a baby’, is not a nightmare any more. I rather think that orchards are a better resting place than cemeteries or crematoria. I’d sooner finish as a piece of bark than ash or bone.

I used to tell my only son, ‘Eat the cores. They’re the healthiest bit.’ He did as he was told. Frightened, I suppose, of being ill. But he’s defiant now, I find. Today we drove my grandchildren to school. They had their breakfasts on the hoof. An apple each. I watched them chewing up against the cores like hamsters. I did not dare speak. My son rolled down the windows of the car. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘See how far they’ll go.’ A family ritual, I am sure. They waited till we reached the open land, between the fast road and the shops. And then the cores went out, flung fast and wide.

‘There’ll be an orchard there before you know it,’ their father said. ‘Those pips are apple trees.’