Sam Thompson - Communion Town

Later, as I was unpacking in the guest room, the younger of the girls wandered in behind me. Turning, I found her gazing thoughtfully at my guitar; I wasn’t sure whether she had noticed I was here. Peering past me into my suitcase, she mentioned that her father wanted to see me in his study. I didn’t know where that was, but before I could formulate the question she ran a fingernail across the strings of the guitar and walked out.

‘Come in and close it,’ her father said, when at length I knocked on the right door.

He had a tall man’s stoop, and inclined his head as though to favour a slight deafness. He looked healthy and weatherbeaten in his open-necked shirt. His dark grey hair was receding but he wore it long at the back. I thought for a second that he was going to make some violent physical movement, but instead he pointed at a chair, and glared at his bookshelves as I sat down. The window behind him was open to the sunlight, tinted by the lemon trees in the garden, but the room was in shadow. Warm air drifted in, bringing faint melodies from the workers in the groves, and carrying unfamiliar pollens. A sneeze was gathering in my sinuses. He seated himself behind the desk.

‘We might as well,’ he said, ‘speak man to man.’ He gave a stony, protracted stare to the wall behind my head, challenging me to derive any ironies I wished from the statement, and let the silence swell. My eyes itched and my nose was starting to drip, but I cleared my throat to speak.

‘Quite clearly,’ he said, ‘all this is calculated to infuriate me.’ His diction was crisp. ‘I shan’t rise to it. As usual she’s determined to prove something or other. Let her do as she likes, and see the outcome.’

He tapped the desktop with a thick fingertip.

‘But you listen to me. If I should learn that you have in any way — taken advantage …’

His voice trailed off. He stared at me a while longer.

‘Do I make myself quite clear?’

I nodded, not knowing what I was agreeing to.

‘Don’t think,’ he said at last, ‘that I can’t find you. Wherever you go.’

I found myself thanking him, sniffing, wiping my nose, stammering assurances, as I made for the door. He had already turned his attention to some papers on his desk, and did not look up.

The next morning she took me out early to see the estate. We tramped down into the valley under a filmy sky, our breath clouding and our feet sending stones ahead of us along the hard track. She was cursing in exasperation with her father.

‘He can’t help himself, can he?’ she said. ‘It’s all about him, every time.’

In the groves the trunks looked like bodies frozen in motion. In the midst of struggling to escape, they had metamorphosed, and now they signalled their acceptance of the new life by sprouting silvery leaves and hard purple-black fruit. We passed gangs of workers as we descended the slope. In harvest time, she told me, her father employed more than a hundred labourers. They travelled down from the city for a few weeks’ work and received board and lodging in barns on the estate.

‘They’ve been out here since before dawn,’ she said.

We paused to watch one of the gangs at work. They wore overalls, rubber boots and headscarves. Their greasepaint was utilitarian, as if someone had slapped a brushful of whitewash across each face. The inbuilt tunes jingling away in their breasts sounded distant but clear through the acres of trees. They had laid nets and groundsheets, and were dragging at the lower branches with rakes to dislodge the olives. Others had climbed ladders into the upper branches, and balanced there, scraping the fruit down with their hands.

I rubbed my itching eyes and blew my nose. We continued into the floor of the valley, circling back towards the trail.

‘They’ll get a month’s work, then they’re packed back to the city or on to the next temporary contract,’ she said scornfully. ‘Sixty or seventy hours a week at less than minimum wage, no rights, no security. And if you listen to him you’d think he was doing them a favour.’

We were halfway back to the villa when the sound of an engine made us turn. A motorised buggy, splattered with dried mud, was coming up the track, pulling a short trailer covered with a tarpaulin. It rattled to a stop beside us and a young man swung himself from the seat. She made a kind of squeak, a sound I hadn’t heard from her before, and threw herself into his arms. He lifted her easily off her feet. ‘Hey hey,’ he said.

She turned to me happily. ‘This is Leo,’ she said. ‘We grew up together — you know, I’ve told you.’

I didn’t remember that, but I nodded.

He leant over and caught my hand. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you,’ he said. His face was fleshily handsome between a chestnut tousle and a grubby red kerchief knotted around his throat. He wore knee-high boots and jodhpurs stained with grass and mud. A stubby leather truncheon dangled from his belt.

‘We go all the way back,’ she was saying. ‘Leo’s family has the next estate. The pair of us were always planning to run away together.’

‘True. Nearly made it right across the valley, that time, eh?’

‘Yes, till you made me come home, sissy!’

Leo gave a chivalrous shrug. The silence stretched. I got the feeling they might forget I was there, and exchange something too private.

‘I didn’t know you were home,’ she said at last.

‘Back for the harvest.’ He nodded. ‘Here, take a look.’

He beckoned us over to his trailer and lifted the tarpaulin to show what was underneath. On the ridged metal bed lay three of the workers from the groves. Their limbs were cramped and bent, as rigid as wood, and their fingers had twisted into arthritic claws. Two were quite motionless but the third shivered feverishly. Disconnected plinks, clonks and twangs sounded from their thoraxes. Under their crusts of white paint, the three faces were paralysed in expressions of bewilderment.

‘Oh, dear,’ she said.

‘Mm hm.’

‘What happened?’

‘Nothing out of the ordinary. They get worse every season. Can’t take care of themselves. They want to lay around in the Liberties half the year, then, come harvest time, ride the bus down and work fourteen straight hours. No surprise some of them fall apart. Don’t have the gumption, and so we end up with this. Eh?’

He looked down at the quivering labourer, whose open eye held, perhaps, a fleck of comprehension.

‘Don’t you worry,’ Leo said. ‘These fellers are going to be fine. I’ll take them up to the sheds, have a tinker, give them a beaker of protein porridge and they’ll be well set up. You love that stirabout, eh? I do believe it’s the reason you come.’

He grinned at the figures. Then he turned to me, becoming more formal, and gripped my hand again.

‘I’m delighted for you. Make sure and take good care of her.’ He winked. ‘Or else I’ll want to know about it! Now I’d best get these up the hill.’

He climbed on the buggy and gunned the engine, then turned to us.

‘Listen, why don’t you two ride on with me up to the sheds? It’ll take you closer to the house. And, tell you what’ — he nodded to me — ‘while we’re there I’ll find you something for those allergies.’

There was just room for all three of us, if she perched on the seat behind Leo while I sat in the trailer, holding tight to the sides. We bounced up the track.

Later that day, as we walked through the town, we found a crowd gathering in the central plaza around a makeshift wooden platform. At the platform’s corners stood poles decorated with strings of flowers and swags of coloured cloth, and just behind it a striped tent had been erected on the back of a battered flatbed truck. As we watched, a man emerged from this ragged tiring-house and stepped directly on to the boards.