The Apple Record by Kava Palava

25 January 2021  { General Fiction }


The room was everything you were told it shouldn’t be, full of distracting glimpses into her counsellor’s long and personal life. Not one or two ‘pieces’ placed with clinical precision in immaculate neutral setting, like the rooms in the adverts, but toys, throws and ornaments everywhere you looked, on the mantlepiece and deep window-sill. Not the dog eared leaflets and alleged 'Art' of the drop-in centres where she worked, but the cheerful abundance of grandma’s house. She liked it; it was colourful, inviting, alive. She drank her tea

“What mug do you want? You have to choose!”

and thought about the drive, turning left on the ring road, not her usual route east. At the lorries, the merging lanes, her grip tightened, her chest sunk, and everything clenched as panic nudged her, seeing the collision she couldn’t prevent. It wasn’t a good state, not for driving and not for her.

“Where’ve you gone?”

“The drive here, I got a bit freaked out. Since, you know…

“The crash?”

Separately, they considered the elephant in the room.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No, I think I might book a driving lesson, to see how they’d handle it.

And I want to talk about”

I gestured with one hand, eyeing my familiar mental burdens: bingeing and my sister and why I’m not breaking up with M. I must have wondered off because she startled me:

“Pick that up”

“What?”

“That one” – she pointed to a round wooden ball, dark wood, about eight inches diameter. I reached out with both hands, self-consciously careful and lifted it off the table.

There were three concentric circles at the top, maybe a lid? Was it for crematorium ashes? Was someone inside? How morbid was that?

“It’s heavy” I said, “Is it a bowling ball?”

“That’s you.”

I looked up, and met her eyes, locked on mine. Although our sofas could easily sit three adults and the coffee table could hold a coffin (stop thinking about death), I felt nervous at the force of her attention, commanding me.

“Because I’m heavy?”

I tried for a joke, but it failed while the words were in my mouth. She was serious.

“You are substantial, you’re not a cardboard cut-out. You have to accept your own shape; you can’t keep bending yourself into whatever people want you to be.”

I felt the smooth, solid wood that someone had carved, sanded, varnished, held. I rolled it from one palm to another. I felt sober with the weight of responsibility, of purpose. and understood why my tutor had recommended her. I didn’t know what shape I was, but I wasn’t flimsy.

 

THE APPLE RECORD

Sometimes, after a session, a forgotten image would surface, caught in her mind like sweetcorn between your teeth. There were two ways to the library, left along to the traffic lights, cross over, walk past Abe Silver’s chemist shop and the bus: or right to the pedestrian crossing by the Co-op and past the parade of shops (the bakers, a boutique and the ‘other’ sweetshop) and along the backs of houses to the back of the library. This was the new building, with brown cladding and wide wooden steps that floated so you could see the speckled marble floor as you walked upstairs. There was a lot of glass.

The old library was a big house with stone steps at the front and a bowling green at the side. There was a polished wooden counter that at first she couldn’t reach. The new library had things especially for children, tables and posters and competitions. The old library assumed you had someone to bring you. One day she discovered her junior library card (blue, with her name written in fountain pen) could fit around the corner of a page. There were more books in the new library, but she missed the old one, with the lofty nostalgia of one who was going up to Junior Three next year. That was where Miffy lived. Miffy was a rabbit in a book: she explained to the sister who nobly agreed to see if it was in (she couldn’t possibly take her, but she would ask. Allegedly.) “It’s a rabbit, white, with a cross nose, and a yellow dress”, she had been quite clear, but Iris hadn’t understood.

Iris thought herself far too important to pay attention to a four-year-old, especially one who already had quite enough attention, to her mind, with her glossy curls and eyelashes that swept her cherubic cheeks. Iris had freckles and a long-suffering air, which she would carry with her into old age, a martyrdom she kept fresh with a sword she held tightly, never realising it was double edged and her wounds therefore self-inflicted. That was Iris.

As the youngest, Dolores was meant to catch up with her elder siblings, in a race she could never win, given their head start. They were "sharp" which meant scathing and eye rolling to anyone who didn’t understand their private jokes. But to Dolores' mind, they could be rather slow on the uptake sometimes. Perhaps that’s why they were so keen to establish any superiority they could. Even over a toddler.

The kinder one sometimes played her records and once asked what she wanted to hear: “The apple record” she said, pointing at the halved Granny Smith on the label in the middle of the black disc. It was indeed an apple record, that being the imprint of The Beatles, but no, she had to read the tiny print she was too far away to see (not being allowed to get that close).

Really, they weren’t very welcoming. They’d formed two halves and she, a fifth was an odd part on the equation. Her parents, rather helplessly, grouped her with her brother, but he was having none of it. He didn’t even leave home until well into his 30s, and that resulted in an absence of over eight years, broken only when he returned for their father’s funeral. He stood at the back of the church but was quickly embraced by their mother, who adored the attention. At the wake, Dolores found herself making tea. Surely someone else could do that. But no, it was her role, another responsibility for a sensible girl.

He brother had observed to a third party that she’d had it tough, being the only one living nearby. That same third party encouraged her to be generous, but she was tired out from registering the death and writing the eulogy and managing everyone else’s feelings. Who was generous to her? She wanted him to apologise, but instead he was handed the carving knife to hack at the fatted calf she’d raised with such care.


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