Fruit of the Lemon

by Andrea Levy

Genres: Family Life; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

The third and most ambitious novel from this unique and acclaimed writer, FRUIT OF THE LEMON establishes Andrea Levy alongside Arundhati Roy and Meera Syal in the first rank of British fiction.

Faith Jackson fixes herself up with a great job in TV and the perfect flatshare. But neither is that perfect - and nor are her relations with her overbearing, though always loving family. Furious and perplexed when her parents announce their intention to retire back home to Jamaica, Faith makes her own journey there, where she is immediately welcomed by her Aunt Coral, keeper of a rich cargo of family history. Through the weave of her aunt's storytelling a cast of characters unfolds stretching back to Cuba and Panama, Harlem and Scotland, a story that passes through London and sweeps through continents.

(P) 2022 Headline Publishing Group Ltd

Release date: January 23, 2007

Publisher: Picador

Print pages: 352

Sample

My mum was the greatest gatherer. She’d come back from the shops with the groceries inside her brown plastic shopping trolley whilst balancing two, sometimes three, empty boxes on the top of it. My dad and she would discuss the merits and weaknesses of each box brought into the house. ‘You see, Wade, what took my eye is that it has a strong bottom that sort of interlocks.’ Or, ‘But, Mildred, I don’t think we can have a use for a box six feet long and only eight inches wide.’ My dad would store any new boxes in the small cellar of the house with mathematical precision – boxes in boxes all standing on black plastic sheeting to keep out the damp.

It started when we moved from our old council flat to the house in Crouch End. My parents had to ‘pay good money’ to rent boxes from the removal company to place in all our ‘nick-nacks and paddy-wacks’.

‘Crooks,’ my mum had said as she and my dad watched the brick-shit-house removers in dirty jeans take back all the boxes when we had finished with them.

Just after that the first box came. It contained the new television. My brother and me watched Dr Who in glorious living colour as my parents cooed over the box. The next one was oblong and had ‘Hoover’ written on the side. ‘You never know when a box will come in handy,’ my parents would say. ‘You just never know.’

The day I moved out of home Dad struggled into my room with several of his very finest ‘double-strength even got a top’ boxes. ‘I’ve got bags,’ I said, showing him a suitcase and piles of well-used, screwed-up plastic carrier bags. He looked at me like I was no child of his.

‘Bags,’ he spat, ‘things get mash up in bags, Faith. Bags break. They not strong. You need a box.’ He then banged the bottom of the sturdiest one. ‘Strong,’ he added, as he picked up a plastic bag from the bed, unravelled it and punched his fist straight through the bottom. He then sucked his teeth. Point made, no more words necessary. I took two of the boxes and he left a happy man.

I thought I’d have hardly anything to put in them. At that time I was leaving behind my childhood. Leaving behind my student days. I had lived at home all through my art college life. The grant authority had ummed and ahhed for months before they decided my parents didn’t live far enough away from the college to warrant them giving me independent status. And for four years I had had to juggle late-night parties, sit-ins and randy boyfriends, with 1940s Caribbean strictures. ‘Faith, you see you in by eleven – Faith, you can bring a nice girl back with you if she’s clean – Faith, I don’t want you messing around, you have plenty time for fun when you’re older.’

All I had to take were my duvet; my alarm clock with the bells on top and a clanger that whizzed so fast that I cut my finger every time I turned it off; several assorted empty tins that looked pretty and were given to me as presents so throwing them out as useless junk felt like betrayal; various bottles of hair oil called things like ‘Sta-soft-fro-curl!’ or ‘Afro-sheen-curl’ that I never used but thought I might; a record player and a pile of dusty dog-eared records ranging from The Sound of Music and Oliver to Tamla Motown’s Greatest Hits in many volumes.

The boxes soon filled up and I had to ask my dad for some more. He looked at me and sucked his teeth then started to moan that I was ‘taking all the good boxes’.

‘You offered!’ I shouted, then added, ‘What do you need them for anyway?’ At which my dad did the strangest thing. He blushed. Then silently gave me three more boxes. But as I left the cellar he said, ‘Don’t come askin’ me for any more.’

I was moving into a short-life, shared house with friends – two men and a woman. I had thought I was reassuring my mum when I lied a little and said my new flatmate was a young woman. But instead she had said, ‘A woman. Be careful of living with women.’ I had then looked at her and smiled. I had tipped my head to one side and explained to her that ‘nowadays, Mum, women have different relationships with each other. Nowadays’, I’d elaborated, ‘women support one another – they are sisters.’ To which my mum had butted in saying that the worst women she had ever lived with were her sisters and that if women started behaving like sisters then God help the world. She then looked to the portrait of Jesus on the wall and apologised, ‘Excuse me, Lord’. And went on telling me about the handfuls of hair she used to find in the bedroom she shared with her sisters in Jamaica, pulled out of a head during one of the many sisterly fights. And how her big sister Coral once punched her so hard that the sweet she was sucking got stuck in her throat. Her mother, apparently, had to grab her by her feet, turn her upside down and slap her on the back until the sweet popped out.

‘Be careful of living with women and thank God you only have a brother,’ she’d finally ended.

My brother Carl said, ‘So you moving in with a bird, then?’ as he helped me carry my boxes to the back of his van.

‘No, a woman actually,’ I said pointedly.

‘Wos a matter with calling her a bird?’

‘Birds,’ I said, ‘have wings. They fly. They sit in trees and tweet. Women don’t.’

‘Bird not good enough for you an’ all your women’s libber friends now? So what do you birds call blokes then?’ my big brother asked with a broad goading grin.

I did not respond. Not immediately. Because when we were young Carl came home one day and insisted that from that day on he wanted to be called by his middle name, Trevor. They used to tease him at school. Carl was an unusual name in the schools of North London. There were no other Carls and boys used to walk behind him in the street shouting his name or calling him Carol, among other things. So Carl became Trevor and from that day he would answer to nothing else. It took Mum, Dad and me months to remember. Months of calling out, ‘Carl, dinner’s ready,’ only to hear him say, ‘I don’t know who you mean, my name is Trevor.’ But eventually we all got it.

Then Trevor left school and started work driving a delivery van for a textile company. After two weeks he decided that Trevor no longer suited his image. He wanted to be called Carl again. Carl, he decided, had a certain Superfly, Shaft, don’t-mess-with-me-I’m-a-black-man message. He deployed the same tactics: ‘Trevor, who’s Trevor? Never heard of him.’ Until he was once again Carl.

So I didn’t have to say anything about birds. I just smiled and said that we call blokes Trevor and he shut up.

My dad stood by the door to watch me take the last bits of my belongings out of the house. He had hedge clippers in his hand and he stood in front of the perfect clipped privet hedge in the garden, pretending to cut at stray leaves, like a barber clipping over the top of a well-cut head of hair. Then my mum came out wearing pink rubber gloves and carrying a duster and a can of Mr Sheen which she sprayed onto the front door and began to wipe at vigorously. They needed something to do as they watched me leave.

It wasn’t how they would have liked their only daughter to go. They would have preferred to see me swathed from head to toe in white lace, with hand-stitched-on pearls and sequins. Standing in between my bridesmaids – one my age and two little ones – dressed in lemon-yellow satin with white lace trim. Our skirts ballooning out in the sun as I stood with my back to them ready to throw my bouquet into the cheering, laughing crowd. My new husband – a Christian with family from Jamaica or one of the ‘small islands’ – watching on in a dark suit with wine-coloured cummerbund and a frilly shirt. Then the two of us moving happily down the human arch of men standing holding paintbrushes aloft like swords.

‘Marry a decorator like your dad and you’ll never have to worry about paint,’ Mum had always advised. Every year she steeped several bags of dry fruit in rum ready to make a wedding cake at a moment’s notice. And every year she looked at me accusingly as she tipped out the jar of alcoholic sultanas and currants and made another Christmas cake instead.

‘Ah Faith, what can we do with you? You just go your own sweet way,’ my parents had both decided a long time before. ‘Your own sweet way.’

‘How did you get in?’ I said, struggling to get up.

He held out a key in front of him as he grinned and said, ‘I found this in the door.’ He was looking around, ‘You must be careful, anyone could have come in. It was lucky it was me.’ He gave a strained chuckle. ‘Could have been a burglar or anyone. You’re lucky it was me and not some madman. Ha ha.’ His mouth laughed but his eyes stayed their what-time-d’you-call-this stern. ‘You must remember to take it out of the lock, Faith.’

I took the key from him muttering something about being grateful and forgetful and promising to be good, as I scanned the room for anything that would shock him. The ashtray on the coffee table was not only full but choked with roaches – the cardboard remains of several joints rolled the night before and smoked in quick succession in the hope of getting some small ‘buzz’ out of Mick’s homegrown, but which instead sent us all to bed with rasping throats and headaches. But my dad was too busy looking at the dark green walls to notice.

‘You like this colour?’ he asked, his top lip curling.

‘It was here when we came,’ I told him. He nodded then looked round at the double doors that divided the front room. He ran his finger down the mottled pink paintwork. He frowned. ‘You wan’ me paint it for you? I could bring a few of the boys and we could . . .’

‘No thanks, Dad,’ I interrupted, ‘we’ll do it ourselves.’

‘Suit yourself,’ he said, looking up at the cracked ceiling. He knocked one of the walls with his knuckles and looked surprised. ‘Umm, quite solid.’

‘What are you doing here anyway?’ I wanted to know.

‘Well, I thought I give you a little surprise. I was just having a walk. We finish early today, so I thought I’ll just go for a walk. And I find myself passing here.’

My dad liked to walk. He would set off from our house in Crouch End returning several hours later with tales of the lovely boat he saw on the River Thames. ‘Thought I’d give you a little surprise.’ He smiled. ‘You goin’ to show me round?’

I tried to stay looking pleased but I knew I was being spied on. I could hear my mum: ‘Go on Wade, go up and see what she up to. You could say you just passing. You always just passing. Just go and see nah.’

My dad stood in my new front room ready to report back, ‘Mildred, the walls are green and the doors are pink – the child gone mad!’ But worse he would soon be reporting, ‘But wait, Mildred, you tellin’ me she told you her flatmate called Marion?’ He would soon be anxiously saying, ‘Cha. Mildred, the child is sharing a house with grown men. Is there nothing we can do?’

Marion was my friend. We had met on the foundation year at art school in London. At the time I was being followed round by a boy who was pale, skinny and underdeveloped and whose name I can’t remember, but who had a crush on me. I knew the only reason he fancied me was the thought of the look on his parents’ faces if he took a black girl home to meet them. He liked to think of himself as a rebel and I was the only black girl on the course. He fancied me and Marion fancied him, for some reason. So she would turn up wherever we were saying, ‘Oh hello, I didn’t know you were going to be here.’ Marion was completely undeterred by the boy’s lack of interest in her. When he would say, ‘Not you again,’ she would smile and offer to buy him a drink. I began to admire Marion. She was like a boxer – punched and staggering but still coming back for more. After a while we became friends. Even after she left art college saying it was too boring and took up her place at the University in Norwich which was saved for her by three A’s from school A levels. We used to meet in the holidays and spend days in Marion’s parents’ house, discussing the strange habits of the middle-class people we met and drinking Coca-Cola with ice cream.

Marion collected old boyfriends. She had lots of them who all remained friendly with her. ‘They’re just so relieved they’re not still going out with me,’ she would say wistfully. Mick was one of them. He had found the house and needed people to share it with him. It was a house that was waiting to be converted into flats by the council. But there was time between buying the house and ‘doing it up’. So they let it out to Mick for six months. Mick felt sure it would be empty for longer than that. ‘They’ll need loads of money to do this place up – it’ll take them years. No sweat,’ he told everyone. His friend Simon had put down for one of the four bedrooms and Marion and me talked our way into the other two. We had a meeting in a pub before we moved in and giggled our way through several halves of lager until we’d convinced ourselves that we could all be happy together.

My dad started to look at the mantelpiece in the room, not touching anything but straining his neck round to read a moving-in card Simon had been sent by his mother. He then looked at the wooden floor, tapping a floorboard with the heel of his shoe. He was about to turn his attention to the coffee table when I said, ‘Well, come on then, I’ll show you round and then we can have a cup of tea.’

‘I not stopping long,’ Dad smiled. ‘I have to see a man about some bathroom tiles.’

Dad followed me through the house.

‘How’s Mum?’ I asked.

‘Oh busy, busy, busy.’

‘And Carl?’

‘Oh, you know, you know.’ It occurred to me then that I had never really spent any time alone with my dad. He was just part of Mum. Mum did all the talking and Dad looked absent-minded until called upon to say, ‘You heard your mother nah.’

‘This is the kitchen.’ Dad stood still in the doorway, moving only his head to look around. Then he saw the sink and walked slowly towards it. There was washing-up piled on the draining board. ‘I’m going to do it,’ Mick had said the night before, ‘I know it’s my turn, it’s just that I’ll have to buy a plunger for the sink. The water won’t go down.’ The sink was blocked with something mysterious and was full of fetid brown water with grey scum floating on the top. Mick had pulled a face and stuck his hand down into the water and wiggled his finger in the plughole. And Simon had untwisted a wire coat hanger and stuffed it down the hole. When he pulled it up again it had a squelching potato skewered to it. We had all clapped and Simon had taken a small bow but the water level remained the same. ‘We need a plunger,’ Mick decided.

‘You need a plunger,’ Dad told me. He looked around the sink and then at me. ‘You have one?’

‘No – but we’re getting one today,’ I told him and quickly changed the subject. ‘Come and look at the garden.’ Dad had trouble turning his head away from the sink – every time he went to move towards me his head would snap back onto the trouble spot, trying to find a new solution. ‘Or caustic soda,’ he added.

The moment I opened the double door and stepped in the garden I regretted it. The garden was a mass of uncultivated, uncared-for weeds. Apart, that is, from the extremely neat, lovingly tended row of Mick’s home-grown marijuana plants which were swaying gently in their pots.

‘Actually there’s nothing much to see out here,’ I said, as Dad began to peer out over my shoulder. ‘It’s a lovely house, isn’t it?’ I said, shutting the garden door. Dad turned round too quickly and tripped over his own foot. ‘Georgian, you know, beautiful, bit run-down but nice.’ He straightened his jacket and stared back at the spot where he’d stumbled. ‘Oh yes, they all lovely,’ he said, then added, ‘from the outside.’

I showed him my bedroom next. I was sure about my room. I knew it was clean and tidy with the bed well made. Because I loved it. I was so proud of the beautiful room with its large wooden shuttered windows that ran from floor to ceiling and looked out onto wrought-iron railings and the street. The walls were white and the sun came in through the window for most of the day and shone on the bright pink duvet cover on my bed. I had spent days stripping the fireplace, taking off the hardboard that covered it. Revealing the black cast-iron insert and scrubbing down the grey marble surround.

‘You could cover that up, Faith,’ my dad said, pointing to the fireplace. ‘Stop the draughts getting down. Bit of hardboard.’ He walked across to it and put his hand up the chimney. ‘Feel the draught. You should cover that up.’ I nodded. He leant down and looked into the grate. ‘Old-fashioned things,’ he concluded. Then he got up, brushing his hands together and muttering.

In Marion’s room Dad said, ‘What’s that on the bed?’ Her bed was a mattress on the floor. ‘Is it some sort of rope?’

‘No, it’s . . .’ I hesitated. ‘It’s the sheet, Dad.’ Marion’s bed was so dishevelled, the bottom sheet was so twisted that it looked like a curl of grey rope running down the centre of it. As Dad went in closer to have a better look I saw two flaccid condoms near her pillow. I quickly took a jumper that was lying on a chair and threw it across the room so it arrived before my dad and landed gracefully over the contraceptives. I smiled when he looked at me. ‘Would you like a cup of tea now?’ I asked.

Dad was as compliant as a dog as I led him back to the living room. He looked puzzled as he settled himself down onto the settee. ‘But Faith,’ he said, ‘this is a big house. You tellin’ me it’s just you two girls in it?’

I went into one of my elaborate lies. I had become skilled in these from years of answering the ‘who, why and where were you last night’ questions. I told him that we two women were going to have the house to ourselves but that in the end it was so big that we would not have been able to heat it properly because it would be too expensive for just the two of us. I stopped.

Usually any form of financial prudence would make my dad nod with approval but he stayed as blank as a professional poker player. ‘So . . .’ I was using my hands too much, waving them around like a liar. ‘So it was Marion’s idea, not mine, to get in these two . . .’ I fumbled for the right word. Men sounded too sexual. ‘Boys.’ I paused for a reaction. Dad continued to look at me, his eyelids heavy and tired. ‘Not boyfriends or anything,’ I added quickly. He looked smaller. He used to take up so much space in my childhood. Any room could be filled by his broad shoulders and rumbling voice. But his head looked small and wizened like the clay shrunken head ornament my parents kept on the wall at home – the one that I was always too scared to touch. Then I realised Dad was slowly sinking further and further into the settee. His knees were getting gradually nearer to his chin. Mick’s sofa did that to people. Unless, like Mick, you always lay on it in a reclining position. Dad began to notice and started fumbling around like someone trying to get free of quicksand.

‘I can show you their rooms if you’d like?’ I asked, going over to him. I held out my hand for him to grab before he disappeared completely into the upholstery. ‘It’s a bit old,’ I explained. He waved my hand away, wordlessly twisted himself round and levered himself off the piece of furniture like a toddler. He straightened his jacket as he got up then looked back at the settee.

Dad had only said, ‘What a lot of stairs,’ by the time I opened the door to Simon’s room. My smile was beginning to ache around the back of my ears.

Simon’s room was public-school immaculate. Ready for inspection by the housemaster at any time. His shoes were in a neat row with the toes all just sticking out from under the bed.

‘A musician,’ my dad said in a tone that implied drug taking weirdo.

‘No, a solicitor actually, Dad.’

He looked round the room again. ‘Doesn’t look like a solicitor’s room.’ I wondered what a solicitor’s bedroom should look like. But Dad was right, Simon’s room had nothing of the law about it. There was an electric piano, two guitars on stands, a wall of LPs, two huge Tannoy speakers, a ‘NASA control’ of stereo equipment and a bed. Simon was a reluctant solicitor. He worked a few days at a law centre but laughed if you asked him for his legal opinion on anything. He spent his evenings locked away in his room playing his musical instruments into a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Then he made us all listen, ‘without laughing’, to the tinkling tunes.

I was tired and thankful that my dad shook his head when I said, ‘You don’t want to see the other bedroom, do you?’ I’d remembered Mick screaming that morning as he stepped out of bed onto a slug that had crawled in through the garden into his basement room and I was scared what I might find. Mick was a teacher at a run-down Further Education college and his bedroom was a dark, damp pit. We had all stared open-mouthed at Mick as he decided that that was the bedroom he wanted by choice. ‘It’s near the kitchen and the bog, so it’s handy for a piss and a pint of water in the night,’ was his reasoning. Passers-by would look down into his room from the street. ‘Oh look, Jeremy, this one’s really in a state,’ someone had said once. And as Jeremy looked, Mick had showed him the two naked cheeks of his bottom.

My dad refused a cup of tea but guzzled down a glass of water like a man who’d just crawled through a desert. He wiped his hand across his face then looking straight at me said, ‘Faith, you see you always covered up.’ I only managed a feeble ‘What?’ before he carried on. ‘You must wear plenty of clothes all the time. Don’t go round the place half-naked. You hear me? There are men in this house. I was a young man once and I know. So you must keep your door shut and always make sure you have on plenty of clothes that’s buttoned up.’

I was about to respond to the stricture as I always had in the past. My hands began to make their movement onto my hips. My breath came fast and deep. I was about to shout that it was my life, that I could do what I want. That they shouldn’t interfere. That they should just leave me alone. When I realised I was in my own house now. And that what I really wanted to do was laugh.

So I nodded and I think I even said, ‘Yes. Thank you.’ Which made Dad look at his shoes, embarrassed, and mumble, ‘Well, good, good, Faith. Yes, good girl, yes. I know you a sensible girl, Faith. Good.’

When he stood up to go I was overcome by excited relief which had me saying things like, ‘Come back any time . . . bring Mum . . . bring Carl . . .’ I skipped to the door as my dad followed me through the hall, feeling the wall every so often with his hand, once more engrossed in the decorations.

I opened the front door and Simon stood, key poised, in front of my dad looking startled and so terrified that he gave a little scream. ‘Oh sorry,’ Simon said, beginning to laugh. He held his chest and blew out a breath, ‘I thought you were a burglar – sorry.’ He laughed again, ‘You gave me a fright.’ He held out his hand for my dad to shake. ‘Simon,’ he stated. Mick was behind him holding up a black rubber sink plunger in the air.

‘This is my dad,’ I explained.

Mick pushed through the door saying, ‘We’ve worked that one out.’ Simon smiled at Dad, ‘It’s nice to meet you, Mr Jackson,’ and Mick said, ‘Hello.’ Dad had to duck out of the way of the sink plunger as Mick waved it about explaining, ‘I’m going to fix that sink if it’s the last thing I do.’

‘Are you just leaving?’ Simon said, looking first at me then Dad. I nodded but Dad just stared, expressionless, at the two men, looking them slowly up and down as they walked on through the hall. ‘Bye. Nice to meet you,’ Simon waved as they disappeared down the stairs.

I held the front door open and my dad stepped out but then stepped back in and asked, ‘Faith – your friends, any of them your own kind?’

I wasn’t sure what he meant.

‘What? From college?’ I asked.

‘No, no, I mean any of them . . . any of them . . .’ He looked around himself to see if anyone was listening then whispered, ‘Coloured?’

And I said without thinking, ‘No. Why?’

‘Oh nothing . . . I just wondered . . . I don’t suppose you meet . . . with college and everything . . . I don’t suppose.’ He trailed off without finishing. I didn’t ask him to explain. I didn’t ask him to finish what he was saying. I didn’t want him to. He took a breath then tapped the lock on the door. ‘Remember to take out your key next time, Faith.’ He smiled with a simultaneous frown. I watched him walk down the street, his stooped back getting gradually smaller. I lifted up my hand and as if he knew, in that second he turned round and we waved.

I smiled at the guard on the gate and wondered if he was wondering whether I was someone famous. I flashed my temporary pass like so many celebrities would be doing that day. Security gates are a great leveller.

I had got no sleep the night before and by the time Simon had woken me with a mug of tea and a piece of rather high-baked toast at six-thirty in the morning, I had worked out twenty-four different permutations of outfit I could wear that day. There was a sign pinned to the back of the front door that said, ‘Good luck Faith’, in large green letters and scribbled in blue at. . .