Biggest Apples This Side of the Border

There is a cardboard box of apples sitting in the staff room when Aoife comes into work on Friday. The overhead lights shine against the skins as she approaches with her empty mug in hand. They are green with tinges of red bleeding across them and bigger than a tennis ball. 

“I brought them in,” Denise says from one of the sofas. “I got so many of them this year I thought I’d share them, there’s only so many I can bake with before Gerald gets sick of them.” 

She says the last part with a laugh and Aoife gives her a tight smile in return. “How nice.” 

As other teachers come to stand at the table with her Denise calls out, “Feel free to take as many as you like!” 

Their voices become background noise as Aoife glances over each of them, noticing the odd small bruise here and there against the ripening skin and thinks of Robert. 

They used to collect apples from the trees at the back of her garden together. Her mother always warned her about climbing the trees, that she apparently had an aunt who had fallen from one of them in her youth and as a result was never able to have children. So Robert did most of the climbing, his limbs longer and stronger than hers anyway. She would be the one to stand beneath him with one of her father’s big shirts to catch the apples, her arms straining as she tried to lift the bundle higher as Robert aimed down at her. 

She used to think they were the biggest apples in the world, how they were the size of two of her small fists put together. Biggest Apples This Side of the Border, Robert had written on the cardboard box they carried them in from house to house. We’ll make a mint! he said as they washed them in her kitchen sink and the neighbours must have taken pity on them, Aoife thinks, because more than a few of them had handed change over in exchange for three or four apples. She remembers when the two of them had tried to bite into them, their faces twisting in disgust and her mother had laughed and told them they were cooking apples. Her mother made an apple crumble with some of them so that they could taste them, the sugar going all over their soft cheeks. 

But in the end Robert had fallen hadn’t he, when they were away down South for a week. It took them two days apparently to find him, his parents never thinking that he would have gone to their house, that he could have been lying in the muck with apples all around him. She remembers her parents getting the phone call, how her mother’s voice had shaken as she told Aoife and her sisters in the hotel room and how she had refused to believe it. He wouldn’t do it without me! she had screamed. He wouldn’t! Her father had tried to embrace her in her anger and she remembers how her fists and feet had struck him as he had done so until she was gasping with tears. 

A man came and cut the trees down not long after, their stumps looking like squat headstones from her bedroom window. She never opened her blinds again the whole time she lived there. 

She takes one of the apples into her hand. It fills her palm. “Thanks, Denise.” 

It sits in Aoife’s desk drawer all day until she takes it out to put on the passenger seat of her car after work. As she drives home she tries to find the best place to go. The apple rolls from one side of the seat to the other as she turns down different roads and around streets. She gets to a bridge where dog-walkers and runners take the greenway underneath towards the coast and pulls in just after. The road is less busy here and she checks for passersby underneath, turning the apple over and over between her hands. After a moment she raises her arm.  

She chucks it as far and as hard as she can, and watches it explode into pieces. The crack of impact travelling across years.

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