Vivipary

When Adam found the house –

because of course it was he who found it, this place somewhere between Peasmarsh and Shalford, with its red brick, white window shutters, and rose-lined driveway –

when Adam found the house, he’d already moved to work remotely, but half the time I was still at the office in the City. We rented a small flat above a Chinese, and sometimes there were mice in the kitchen. On Thursdays we ordered pizza, on Fridays met work colleagues at whichever bar happened to be doing Happy Hour. Saturdays were for hangovers and greasy fry-ups. Every other Sunday was date night. Adam was good at those.

We took the train down to Guildford and the estate agent met us there in her yellow Mini. It had been raining for a week, and the car windows were steamed up – I couldn’t see where we were going. Her and Adam were sat in the front, and she was telling him about a newly opened coffee shop next to the Cricket Club on the Green, and how the bus only ran once an hour and not at all on Sundays, so we’d need to get a car to go to the shops.

Could go on day trips to Portsmouth, he said, later, when he’d already made up his mind and was making good on bending mine. Could get chickens and eat our own free-range eggs. Could grow tomatoes in the garden.

The roads were lined with tall, bright green hedges, branches sagging under the weight of water. When we got to the house, her high heels sunk into the muddy driveway, leaving behind two rows of narrow holes in the ground, like earthworms do.

I didn’t want to know why the previous owner was selling it. With a place like that it was either they were dead, or too old to take care of themselves. The bulk of the furniture was still there. I tried not to imagine some poor old biddy kicking it in one of the chairs, maybe with the fire still on, maybe in the height of summer - and how long would it have taken for anyone to find her.

Adam asked, of course, to check if there wasn’t some problem with the house, like damp or mould, but agreed not to tell me.

Later that night, as we lay in our bed back in London, Adam held my hand and gesticulated widely at the ceiling with the other. Drawing up imaginary plans for where he’d put the shed, the planters, and how lucky it was the garden ended at the River Wey so he could fish right from there. Adam had never been fishing before, and I had never grown tomatoes, but he was certain we could do it. Just a bit of effort, he said. Just a bit of learning.

And so we bought the house, and he got as far as buying a car for our Portsmouth daytrips, a rod to fish with, and a coop for the chickens.

*

Carol makes tea and leaves mine on the counter as she does every day.

She’s finally stopped insisting I call her mame. Carol is just fine, suddenly. It’s a hot, clammy September morning. She shuffles through the kitchen in her pink slippers and matching bathrobe.

She is thin as she goes out to the garden. Her hair is dull in the grey rising sun. It must rain soon - the sky hangs low, the birds swoop down to the surface of the river – but she goes to water the plants.

As every day, I remake my tea. One of the kitchen floor boards has been creaking since we moved in. Adam was meant to fix it but he never got around to it, and now Adam is gone, and I have too big a house, too big a mortgage, and a creaking floor.

“Look at this for me, would you?” Carol comes into the kitchen, holds a tomato out. There are green, spindly things sprouting from inside of it. Some haven’t yet broken through the skin and push up it like worms, all tangled together. “They’re all like that. All the ones I wanted to pick today.”

I slice it open. The flesh gives easily. The juice spills onto the breadboard and smells of summer and iron. Tender white stems swell from within each seed.

“It should still be perfectly edible.” Carol is hesitant, but picks up the half closer to her, scoops away the sprouts and bites into the fruit. “Tastes just fine. Maybe put them in a salad. Those health people pay crazy money for sprouts, and there you go. Free from the garden.”

She forgot to wipe her slippers as she came back in and there is a trail of small, muddy footprints across the floor now, very unlike her this, such an oversight. They look like half-moons. Carol walks on her toes, with the soles of her feet arched up into the air, tendons tight. Years of nothing but high-heeled shoes will do that to you, she says. When you’re old the calves just don’t stretch like they used to.

She’s not old, but maybe it’s easier, to think this way. Maybe it would be worse to remind her of the years ahead.

The rain starts as she cuts the seeds out of the tomato and eats the red, ripe flesh.

“Would you look at that.” There is a drop of juice running down her chin, and she wipes it off with a piece of tissue from the pocket of her dressing gown. “Should of waited, shouldn’t I. Oh well, no harm to them.”

It’s coming down hard. I step out to the garden and the rain. The drops are heavy. They soak into the ground, into me, with the smell of it like decay but the rain is warm. My feet are bare and my toes sink into the earth.

On the other side of the riverbank, where there is nothing but a forest, stands a pheasant, and it’s looking at me. The emerald of its head changes to blue when it moves, but the red-ringed eye stays on me. It tilts its neck to the side. They do this, every time, to assess the threat, and it will run off again soon, dart back into the bushes, but for now it's standing still, and so am I, and we are watching each other. The chestnut of its plumage turns darker with the rain. It stretches one wide, white-lined wing far back and blinks.

“You’ll catch your death out there.”

Carol is frowning at me but there is no bite in the words, and no meaning either. She’s saying them out of habit even though I’m not the person she used to say them to. When I look back across the river the pheasant is gone.

“Look at you. Your shirt is all soaked through. You’re thirty for God’s sake, not five. Playing in the rain like that. Just wipe your feet before you come back in.”

I don’t mention the footprints she left across the kitchen, or how it’s my own floor, and my own kitchen, and my own dirt, and I can introduce them all to each other as I see fit.

She’s looking at me from the doorway, turning her head to the side just a fraction. There is something of a pheasant in her, with redness in water-tinged eyes, with the way she watches, always watches, as if waiting for the next coming attack. If I did, I wonder, attack her, would she run away or stay rooted to the spot.

The water soaked through me. The shirt I’m wearing, a white, long sleeved, cotton thing that Adam used to sleep in, is clinging to my skin. My bra is showing through the wet fabric, green and older than I would care to admit. Where the pheasant stood the grass is the colour of autumn, of hay, of things burnt and forgotten.

*

We planted the garden before we unpacked.

Adam laid it all out. Hoed the ground. Built a fence around the coop so the chickens wouldn’t peck the seeds out or go falling into the river.

He had bought the plants ready, tall and healthy with shiny plump leaves. Two weeks before the first ripe, they said at the garden centre. Just need to take root.

The sun was high and warmed the back of my neck. Adam brought out the radio and played soft piano music. Whistled along. A boat passed by on the River, the man steering it lifted his hat in greeting but said nothing. He moved on slowly, the engine puttering with the effort of dragging 20 tonnes of metal up against the current.

The roots separated like brushing tangled hair. They had to be loosened up before being let into the ground, to ease the acclimation – at least that’s what I’d read. Adam wore a bucket hat and lathered his skin with sunblock. He always burnt easily. There were freckles and moles all over him, down his shoulders and back. Sometimes I traced them with my fingers, connect-the-dot on an expanse of skin. Sometimes with my tongue.

The forest on the other side of the River was, is, nobody’s. Well, the National Trust claimed it, I think. Left it to grow wild. The estate agent said in the spring the local farmers used it to graze cattle. A footpath led through it, straight to the village. The other way to Guildford.

One more row, you think? Adam asked, voice strained with exertion. One more row and then lunch? We should go into town (village, I thought, a town is more than one patch of green and a pub and a corner shop), Eloise mentioned a bakery. I could go for a French stick. Get some cheese, a bottle of red, have a picnic on the bank?

I said something back, like: if you wanted to emulate that kind of lifestyle we should have moved to Marseille. Or maybe something less witty, more grumpy and tired.

*

The tomatoes don’t grow right after that first one. Carol takes them off the vine still green and leaves them in the sun to ripen indoors, but as they start to blush the seeds sprout and ruin the fruit.

Three days after the first one. Raining still. There is no consensus on eating tomato sprouts, on whether they’re toxic or not. Carol is reading about it on the sofa, slippers propped up on the edge of the coffee table, mug of something steaming in hand.

“Can you believe this,” she says to me, outrage in her voice too strong for the topic, “how can nobody know? It’s simple, either you eat the thing and it kills you, or you eat the thing and it doesn’t. I swear, what are these people being paid for, what are they called, the food scientists. Dietitians? That doesn’t sound right. Do dietitians tell you if something is poisonous?”

Botanists, I think, probably. Toxicologists.

“It’s like a swing, on the Google. Yes, no, yes, no. Left, right, left, right.”

Three days since the first one, a kitchen full of bad tomatoes, and her, all in pink, cooped up in the house because the rain won’t cease, stuck onto the topic like a leech to skin.

The telly is on, the sound low enough to be background only. A yoghurt advert is playing. A woman smiles like she’d won a million dollars as the spoon breaches her mouth. It’s full of white going in, clean going out. She looks satiated, post-orgasmic.

“I didn’t know that tomatoes are from the nightshade family, did you? Funny how nature works like that. So they’re probably poisonous, right? The sprouts?”

Another ad comes on. Carol switches her legs around, left ankle over right, the foot swinging up and down rapidly. The rain is barely that now, the drops fine and sharp and not much more than a mist but they cover the window completely. The driveway is a mess of moulding leaves and mud.

I finish my tea, put the mug down by Carol’s feet. The last swallow is always the most bitter, where the whiskey congeals together with the tannins. She looks up from her screen when I stand up. The house smells like damp.

My socks get soaked through the moment I step outside. The shears are in the shed, hanging on the wall.

I’m on my knees in the wet dirt. The tomato vines give in. They cut jaggedly with lengths of fibre ripping along the stems and curling on themselves like ribbons. I cut them right at the ground, each one wrapped around a supporting metal shaft, but they fold into my arms easily, as if with relief.

Adam wanted to pickle them, to make salsa, to have sauces he felt were truly made by him from start to finish, from seed to plate. A simple life, he called it, like the only reason we could afford all this wasn’t his start in a wealthy family and a career where commission was more than some people had to feed themselves all year. And mine, on top of that.

The plants faint into me one by one. They surrender from the beams. Only then, when all of them are down, I see that the roots are rotten. Worms come up from the wet ground. They’re bruised-skin purple, overfed and sluggish. It’s all tangled together, the mush of pulp and fibre. I rip out the one closest to me. It comes out with no resistance, though tangled and knotted as it is. The second one worse, splattered with red like rust and thick, finger-like, the skin hard and bark-like.

I pile the roots together, away from the vines. They grasp around my wrists. The fruits ripening amongst the leaves are leathery. Soft and blackened where they blossomed. The skin bursts when I touch my fingers to it, opens like a mouth and the seeds come out and the juice, water tinged with red and chunks of flesh, and I turn away from it, to the ground, fingers at my throat still covered with it when the tea I had for breakfast, the whiskey, it all comes back up.

It’s bitter and muddled, the taste. The ground cool underneath my forehead. My hand sticky where the rotten tomato coats it. The wetness from the ground is travelling up my trousers, from where my knees are sinking into the mud. I smell iron, the mustiness of earth, the clean sharpness of rain.

*

That night I dream that Carol poisons the tea with a plant she grew in my garden, one which she spliced herself from chicory and lavender, and in the dream she is herself, and then she is Adam, and he drinks the tea instead even as I tell him not to.