Frown lines and empty baskets

I think it’s true that smell is the strongest trigger of nostalgia. Just cut grass and a hint of petrol reminds me far more of my father than a photo ever could. Twenty years after his death, it's still smell that reminds me most vividly of what it was to be a child at Pickford Farm.

Mother always smelt of apples back then. Fresh green apples that had just been bitten into. She’d bring them in from our tiny garden, folded into her dress like a litter of puppies, then ease them onto the kitchen table so as not to bruise them. They’d always go rotten before we made a dent in the pile. She much preferred the maternal picture she presented in those moments than the realities of making a pie. Daddy used to laugh at her. She was still beautiful then, their life together still new.

The apples would sit in the wicker basket she bought especially for that purpose and I would watch them go through their various stages of decomposition. Browning first, then wrinkled until the final slushy blackness that meant the end. It’d be me that took the basket out and poured the contents in the ditch at the side of our garden. Without a hint of melancholy.

You tricked me you temptress! Daddy would say to Mother, delighted as she threw back her head and laughed. I’d laugh too, my chubby arms hanging around her elegant neck.

I was still the only child then. Daddy would carry me on his shoulders as he loaded up the lorry and feed me bits of tea and biscuits that his employers brought out to give him a break.

Then Rupert was born. Lovely little Rupert with his ebony ringlets and serious blue eyes. Daddy had to work more hours and it was no longer amusing to get home to a messy house and a table full of nothing but apples.
I don’t even like the bloody things, he’d say and Mother would tut.

Rupert and I conspired to tire mother out the way kids do. She grew old quickly. A frown developed and became permanent. The tone of her voice changed. My parents no longer exchanged knowing looks.

One day, with my head full of fairytales and love stories from school, I asked Mother if Daddy was her soul mate. I giggled as I said it, hoping to hear the story of my mother and father’s romance now I was big enough to understand it. But as my mother answered, I heard her voice change.

It seems to me now that that was the very moment her voice lost it’s soft edges. I gazed up at her while it happened. The amusement that used to bubble over in her throat and her eyes when she spoke just ran dry, never to be heard from again.
Daddy is my husband and the father of my two children she said to me, as if I was a stranger, and I smiled back at her in the same way. Older than my six years suddenly, and as changed as she was. I didn’t join in with the oohing and ahhing about romance at school anymore. I thinking it babyish, like believing in Santa.

The wicker basket Mother bought especially for apples was always empty by then. Eventually it got filled up with bills and receipts, invoices for Daddy’s work. Apples fell from the tree’s branches and rotted on the floor and when Daddy died, Mother sold the land straight away. Developers soon got rid of our little house and the apple tree, put up a new red brick estate in their place.

In a sentimental moment I made an apple pie for the funeral. I used the greenest apples I could find, thinking of mother as I peeled them and sliced them, happy and beautiful. A young wife. I was careful not to add too much sugar to ruin the taste.

But there was no moment of recognition when smiling I offered mother a piece. Rupert took one bite and said it wasn’t sweet enough. The pie sat uneaten after the last guests had left.

I took it home with me and fed it to my children, covered it in sugary custard so they wouldn't complain like their uncle. And as I looked at their small faces, I wondered what would happen in the future to change the way they remembered this day. I vowed to keep bringing the apples in and laying them on the table, to keep a sight of myself.