Page 10 of Sad Girl Hours

Chapter Ten

Nell

I reach forward for a particularly perfect-looking apple, popping it off and putting it into my bag. “Ooh, this one looks good. It’s basically the Platonic ideal of an apple.”

Saffron glances over her shoulder. “Are you sure we’re allowed to pick them?”

“Well…” I pause. “No one’s said we can , but also no one’s said we can’t .”

She looks straight at me, unblinking. “So, no.”

I offer up a smile that I hope says, Sure, I may be trying to tempt you into mild criminal activity, but I’m being so cute about it.

“Look.” I point down at different places on the grass.

“There are more apples than they can use – they’re all over the ground, just going off.

If we don’t pick them, they’ll fall off and ferment, and then the chickens will get drunk.

Do you not care about the poultry alcoholism crisis, Saffron?

Because I do. I consider it my duty to pick these apples. ”

Saffron lets out a laugh that sounds like summer. “You do make a compelling argument. Somehow.”

“So…” I lift my hand towards a branch and leave it hovering there.

She sighs. “So.” She reaches past me, hand brushing mine as she picks an apple off the tree.

“Excellent,” I say. “I promise our apple-based goods will taste all the sweeter knowing that you picked them for a good cause.”

“I swear,” Saffron says, “you could convince anyone to do anything. It’s a good job you have minimal evil inclinations.”

“Minimal. Not zero but minimal.”

“My word choice was not unintentional. Hey.” She turns back round to face me, both to address me fully and to place a few more apples into my bag. “Speaking of word choice, are our exploits inspiring you to write poetry yet?”

“Oh, definitely,” I say, though I don’t feel fully certain what my angle for the first poem will be – I’m hoping when I start writing I’ll feel differently. “The muse has well and truly struck.”

“Great!” Saffron says. “I’m glad.”

“And you?” I ask. “Is this helping you? Do you feel full of the joys of autumn yet?”

She waits a beat. “Maybe not full . But it is beautiful. I’ve met a charming black cat, we’re picking apples and the trees – I will admit – are at their prettiest at the minute.

Summer has most other things beat, but there’s something about the leaves changing that just… ” She trails off. “I don’t know.”

“ And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves …” I quote. “Virginia. Woolf,” I add when she looks confused.

“You and Virginia on first-name terms then?”

“Oh, me and V go way back.”

“It’s beautiful,” she concedes. “I guess it does always come back to this.”

“To?”

She gestures around. “Trees with falling leaves. Apples waiting to either be picked or to fall.”

A poem begins to form in my head. “Excuse me,” I mutter, dropping to the ground, using the tree as a back rest, extracting my notebook and pen from my bag and beginning to furiously scrawl the words on to a blank page.

Isaac Newton claimed to have discovered proof of gravity when an apple fell beside him.

In this orchard, I discovered proof of something else, apples rosy beneath my feet, sweet juice dripping off my chin.

There’s a ripening that happens,

the earth a stone fruit

deepening into a blush as it tilts on its axis,

an occurrence as inevitable and welcome

as the apple falling next to Newton’s feet

when a hearty wind blows on an October day.

Saffron crouches down and reads the words over my shoulder. “What’s this?”

“The start of a poem. It’s probably nothing but we’ll see.”

“Well, I love it,” she declares. “I feel honoured to be watching a master at work like this.”

I scoff, snapping my notebook closed. “Shut up.”

“No, I mean it.” There’s an impish tone underlying her voice. “I’ve never been witness to a bard at work like this. I feel as if I’m peeking behind the curtain of a previously unentered world.”

“And I mean it,” I repeat. “ Shut up .” But I’m laughing as I say it, turning to face her.

Her cheeks are round as she smiles, the freckles scattered across her rosy cheeks a little scrunched. There’s a generosity in her gaze, in her general person, that’s really rare. That’s why I’m doing this. She deserves a little generosity back.

I break away from her, clearing my throat and moving to stand up, stumbling in the long grass. “Come on. We should finish picking our apples so we can get to our next activity.”

“We have another activity?” Saffron also gets up, far more elegantly than I did.

“We do. And the quicker we pick the finest apples that Sizergh has to offer, the quicker we can get to it.”

Saffron sighs, saying airily, “Fine.”

We move through the orchard, collecting an excellent variety of apples, splitting the load between both our bags, Saffron filming clips of the whole endeavour.

When we reach the far end where the chickens have gathered just outside their pen, pecking at the ground, I peer into my bag, looking at all the apples we’ve gathered with glee.

“We’ve collected an excellent abundance of pommes here, Saffron.” I do a little goblin dance. “We’re going to be able to get our Snow White on, hard .”

“Snow White made a gooseberry pie in the film,” Saffron says offhand. “If we were to do what Snow White did with an apple, we’d be lying in a glass coffin in the woods waiting for a necrophiliac prince to come and rescue us.”

I slap my knee. “Damn it.”

“What?”

“I can’t believe you guessed our next activity.”

Saffron laughs. “I’m so sorry for ruining the surprise. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me.”

“It’ll take time but I’m sure we’ll get there. You a Disney nerd then? Gooseberry pie is a pretty deep cut.”

“I’m not a Disney Adult or anything,” she says (thank the Lord).

“But I did watch a lot of Disney movies as a kid. I was a bit in love with Belle from Beauty and the Beast . I used to get furious that she chose to marry Prince Adam, supposedly because he was ugly in human form, but in retrospect probably because she wasn’t marrying me . ”

“That’s so cute,” I say. “I can just imagine a tiny baby gay Saffron flying into a fit of rage because the beautiful princess was choosing to marry a gross man.”

“It was very dramatic. Not quite as bad as my obsession with Miss Honey from Matilda , but still.”

“Love Matilda .” I nod. “I read that book so many times as a kid.”

“It was my comfort film,” Saffron says. “I used to pretend I was Matilda all the time and dream that one day I’d live happily ever after with Miss Honey.”

That thing, the shadow, passes over Saffron’s face for a moment in the silence, before she shakes her head a little and smiles.

“What about you? Any funny stories of child you being queerer than you realised?”

“Oh…” I don’t know what to say.

I guess I always feel like a little bit of a fraud.

I know I’m queer in some sense. I make jokes about it with the others all the time when we all get going – Jenna’s our only token straight in the group, Casper being aggressively bisexual and Vivvie pan.

I have a vague, innate sense that when I do have a partner in the future they will probably be a woman, but shouldn’t I know more than this?

Shouldn’t I have an endless string of gay awakening moments like Saffron?

“Um, not really?” I shrug, desperately scanning my brain for something to say.

“Oh, wait! There was my friend Anya in primary school. She was new in Year Two, and we used to spend hours together hiding out and reading and talking about everything. But her parents moved a lot, and I remember in Year Four she told me she was moving to the Isle of Man and I was inconsolable for the rest of the day. Looking back, the amount I loved her was probably not straight behaviour. And nor was the fact that I asked my dads for a canoe for Christmas so that I could paddle over and be with her again.”

“That’s so sad.” Saffron laughs while pulling a sad face. “Poor tragic Nell and Anya, separated by circumstance—”

“And the Irish Sea,” I add sadly, getting on my tiptoes to try to pick a very round-looking pippin.

“I always love things like that,” Saffron says, reaching up with ease to pull the branch lower for me with the arm that’s not holding the camera and filming us. “It’s so funny that—”

“EXCUSE ME!” a voice calls out, loud and clear in the quiet of the orchard.

We freeze for a moment before I glance round, spotting someone in a National Trust branded fleece heading towards us with a mutinous expression.

I turn to Saffron. “Run?”

She nods. “Run.”

Apple-stuffed bags banging up and down on our sides, we flee the orchard past the chickens, through the thatch of evergreen boughs, out into the rockery and back up into the courtyard.

I tug Saffron’s hand and pull her back round one of the grey brick walls. “Do you think we’re good?”

Her chest rises and falls (but much more steadily than mine, probably thanks to her Athletics Club and my general aversion to any activity that can’t be described as ‘sedentary’ or ‘stomping around woods’) as she answers.

“I think we’re good. What would the penalty for apple thievery be, do you think?”