Blackberries in May
We had exactly one week before the tip of the hill, Beriton, our precious little town, would become submerged by water. Many of the surrounding towns below had been deserted. I imagined living rooms with books floating on a foot of water, kitchens pooled in muddy liquid, mugs and mushrooms bobbing on the surface.
On our hill, freckles of light pricked through the giant blackberry bush and I held a purple berry between my thumb and forefinger. It was the size of a plumb. One of the dark drupelets had split between the fissures of my skin and red ink stained the cracks of my finger tips. It was May and I had never known blackberries to come into season this early. If anything, they were not coming into season, they were pre-ejaculating into the hands of mother nature. Their hairs sprouting like teenage moustaches in the heat of puberty. Teenagers are not meant to have moustaches, at least that is what Helen, my mother, told me when she taught me to wax myself at the age of thirteen. It’s possible she meant to say that women are not meant to have moustaches but I remember distinctly that she said teenagers all the same. What did it matter now? Now I was thirty and the earth was a melting pot of wild fires, floods and glistening upper lips, hairless or not. The world was ending and Helen was probably at the cafe opening bottles of beer with her teeth.
I put the blackberry into the plastic container and continued on down the lane. It was her idea, the blackberry picking, it is always her idea, every year. And yet every year she got bored and headed to the cafe without me. It was the only cafe still open, a small shack-type place with bleached posters of the seaside on the outer walls. A spot where they sold sweating bottles of beer and little sandwiches made from soft white bread, the crusts removed upon request. Helen always requested to have the crusts chopped off, insisting she detested working for her food.
The pot hanging on the wedge of my elbow was full of squished berries and purple liquid had begun leaking into the bottom of the clear plastic. This year, I didn’t have to reach the tops of the bushes, nor did I have to pick berries pissed on by dogs and foxes. All the berries had bloomed into a fatness, desperate to be picked. I couldn’t believe people walked past them every day, just letting them hang like that, but then again, there weren’t that many people left in Beriton, and many of those who were still here didn’t like to go outside, fearing that if they saw the sky, the sky would become real. Sometimes I’d forget people were like that. Unwilling to step outside their house and go blackberry picking. Because larvae! Because dog piss! Because the sky! Because DOOM! And unless there was a trend on the internet, what was the point of an action as simple as eating a berry as it burst between your teeth! I put a blackberry into my mouth and tasted pure, berried sugar. It was more juicy, more resplendently flavoured than any berry I’d picked before.
When I got to the cafe, Helen was waving a cigarette around and talking to a topless man about losing her teeth. With the hand that wasn’t holding the cigarette, she pulled at her gum and exposed the giant gap in her mouth from which the teeth had been removed. She explained to him that she’d pulled them out herself, a story that I’d both heard and witnessed multiple times.
‘I wobbled it like a tombstone,’ she said and I wondered when it was that she’d wobbled a tombstone before. It was an activity that she’d most certainly enacted at some point in her life.
‘Ah, my daughter,’ she said, introducing me to the man who now grinned directly at my chest. ‘Not bad looking, is she? All from me, of course. Her father was an ugly cunt.’
The man nodded and continued looking at my chest. Helen used the bottom of her shirt to wipe her sweating forehead and in doing so, exposed her pink bra to the man. His eyes flitted to her chest and then back to mine once her shirt was back over her torso.
‘Forty eight degrees today,’ he said.
‘We know,’ I said, now looking at his chest and the sentence needled below his neck: THE WORLD IS ENDING, LETS FUCK?
‘Nice tattoo’ Helen croaked. She had noticed the tattoo at the same time. I put the blackberries on the glass table in front of her. Like a child, she was easily distracted. I put my hand on her head and asked if she wanted a glass of water while she dug her fingers into the mushy fruit.
‘Yes,’ she barked at me and then to the man, she said, ‘sit down,’ and shoved a handful of blackberries into her dry mouth.
The man grabbed a chair and started explaining his big plan. A year ago, when they mentioned that the flooding would increasingly get worse, he’d built a treehouse in his backgarden that he was now certain would work as a boat. His friends nicknamed him Noah.
‘So next week you get to test it out,’ I said standing by the cafe door.
‘Next week I get to test it out,’ he repeated, more to himself than to me.
I went inside the cafe, leaving the door open behind me. I ordered myself an iced coffee. Behind the counter, Tony welcomed me with his familiar smile and asked how I was holding up.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘How about you? What’s the plan?’
A short decisive drumroll of thunder erupted outside.
‘We’re just gonna stick it out,’ Tony said, looking out the open door at the blazing white heat and the small droplets of hot rain that begun to fall.
I poured water from a jug on the counter into two glasses and followed his gaze. Through the open door I looked at the blackberries stewing in the wet heat. I gazed at Helen, who had flipped her shoes from her feet and was now picking at the dirt from underneath her toenails with purple-stained fingers. The back of the topless man was shaded by the awning of the cafe. And then the man turned to look inside. And as if he had just remembered something, as if he thought he couldn’t be seen, I realised he suddenly looked scared. His face was slapped red with fear.
‘So?’ Tony interrupted me staring at the man. ‘You think you’re gonna stick it out?’
I turned to face Tony, seeing now the same dread spreading across his face too as the rain began to hit harder on the ground.
‘Yes. I think we’ll do the same.’