Joanne Harris - Five Quarters of the Orange

It was noon when I returned to the house, and Cassis and Reinette should have returned from school, but as yet there was no sign of either of them. I cleaned the mushrooms and put them in a jar of olive oil to marinate with some thyme and rosemary. I could hear Mother’s deep, druggy breathing from behind her bedroom door.

Twelve thirty came and went. They should have been back by now. Tomas usually came by two at the latest. I began to feel a tiny spike of excitement pricking at my belly. I went into our bedroom and looked at myself in Reinette’s mirror. My hair had begun to grow out, but was still short as a boy’s at the back. I put on my straw hat, though it was long past high summer, and thought I looked better.

One o’clock. They were an hour late. I imagined them in the detention hall with the sun slanting through the high windows and the smell of floor polish and old books in their nostrils. Cassis would be sullen, Reinette sniffling furtively. I smiled. I took Reinette’s precious lipstick from the hiding place beneath her mattress and smeared some on to my mouth. I looked at myself critically. Then I applied the same color to my eyelids and repeated the procedure. I looked different, I thought approvingly. Almost pretty. Not pretty like Reinette or her actress pictures, but today that didn’t matter. Today Reinette wasn’t there.

At one thirty I made my way to the river and to our usual meeting place. I watched for him from the Lookout Post, half-expecting him not to turn up-such good fortune seemed to belong to another person, not to me at all-and smelling the warm sappy scent of the crisp red leaves from the branches all around. Another week and the Lookout Post would be useless for the next six months, the tree house bare as a house on a hill, but today there was still enough foliage to hide me from view. Delicious tremors went through me, as if someone were playing a delicate bone xylophone just above my pelvis, and my head rang with an indescribable light feeling. Today anything was possible, I told myself giddily. Anything at all.

Twenty minutes later I heard the sound of a motorbike on the road and I leaped from the tree toward the river as quickly as I could. The sensation of giddiness was stronger now so that I felt strangely disoriented, walking on ground that was was barely there. A feeling of power almost as great as my joy cascaded over me. For today, Tomas was my secret, my possession. What we said to each other would be ours alone. What I said to him… He was stopping by the verge, one quick glance behind to see if anyone had seen him, then dragging the bike down into the tamarisks by the long sandbank. I watched, oddly reluctant to show myself now that the moment had come, suddenly shy of our aloneness, our new intimacy. I waited for him to take off his uniform jacket and hide it in the undergrowth. Then he looked around. He was carrying a parcel wrapped with string, and there was a cigarette at the corner of his mouth.

“The others aren’t here.” I tried to make my voice adult to match his gaze, suddenly conscious of the lipstick on my mouth and eyes, wondering whether he would comment. If he laughed, I thought fiercely, if he laughed…But Tomas simply smiled.

“Fine,” he said casually. “Just you and me, then.”

As I said, it was a perfect day. It’s difficult from the distance of fifty-five years to explain the tremulous joy of those few hours; at nine one is so raw that a single word is sometimes enough to draw blood, and I was more sensitive than most, almost expecting him to spoil everything… I never asked myself whether I loved him. It was irrelevant to the moment. Impossible to equate what I felt-that aching, desperate joy-with the language of Reinette’s favorite movies. And yet that was what it was. My own confusion, my loneliness, the strangeness with my mother, the separation from my sister and brother, had formed a kind of hunger, a mouth opening instinctively to any scrap of kindness, even from a German, a cheery extortionist who cared for nothing but keeping his information channels open.

I tell myself now that that was all he wanted. Even so, some part of me denies it. That wasn’t all it was. There was more to it than that. He took pleasure in meeting me, in talking to me. Why else would he have stayed so long? I remember every word, every gesture, every intonation. He talked about his home in Germany, of Bierwurst and Schnitzel , of the Black Forest and the streets of old Hamburg and the Rhineland, of Feuerzangenbohle with a burning orange studded with cloves in a bowl of steaming punch, and Keks and Strüdel and Backenoff and Frikadelle with mustard and the apples which used to grow in his grandfather’s garden before the war, and I talked about Mother and her pills and her strangeness and the orange bag and the cray pots and the broken clock with the cracked face, and how when I got my wish I would wish for this day to go on forever and ever…

He looked at me then, an oddly adult look passing between us, like some variant of Cassis’s staring-out game. This time I was the first to look away.

“I’m sorry,” I muttered.

“It’s okay,” he told me, and somehow it was. We picked some more mushrooms and some wild thyme-so much more strongly scented than the cultivated, with its tiny purple flowers-and some late strawberries under a stump. As he climbed over a deadfall of birches I touched his back fleetingly-a pretense of steadying myself-and felt the warmth of his skin seared into my palm for hours after that, like a brand. And then we sat by the river and watched the red disk of the sun go behind the trees and for a moment I was sure I saw something, black against the black water, something half visible in the center of a great Vof ripples, a mouth, an eye, the oil-slick curve of a rolling flank, a double row of fangs whiskered with ancient fishhooks… Something of awesome, unbelievable proportions that vanished the moment I tried to give it a name, leaving nothing but ripples and a churning of troubled water where it might have been…

I leaped to my feet, heart hammering wildly. “Tomas! Did you see that?”

Tomas looked up at me lazily, a cigarette stub between his teeth. “Floating log,” he told me laconically. “Log in the current. Seen them all the time.”

“It wasn’t!” My voice was high and trembling with excitement. “I saw it, Tomas! It was her , it was her , Old Mother, Old Moth-” With a sudden, lurching burst of speed, I began to run toward the Lookout Post to fetch my fishing rod.

Tomas gave a chuckle. “You’ll never make it,” he said. “Even if it was the old pike, and believe me, Backfisch , no pike ever grows to be that big.”

“It was Old Mother,” I insisted stubbornly. “It was. It was. Three meters long, Paul says, and black as pitch. It couldn’t have been anything else. It was her.”

Tomas smiled.

I met his bright, challenging gaze for a second or two and then dropped it, abashed.

“It was,” I repeated, half under my breath. “It was. I know it was.”

Well, I often wondered about that. Maybe it was just a floating log, as Tomas said. Certainly when I finally caught her Old Mother was nothing like three meters in length, though she was certainly the biggest pike any of us had ever seen. Pikes don’t ever grow as long as that, I tell myself, and what I saw-or thought I saw-on the river that day was easily as big as one of the crocodiles that Johnny Weissmuller used to wrestle with at the Palais-Doré.

But that’s an adult reasoning. In those days there were no such barriers to belief as logic or realism. We saw what we saw, and sometimes if what we saw made adults laugh, who was to say where the truth lay? In my heart I know I saw a monster that day, something as old and cunning as the river itself, something no one could ever catch. She took Jeannette Gaudin. She took Tomas Leibniz. She almost took me.