Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [43]
Clem and Goz were stoopers. They straddled a row apiece, easing the straw aside with their feet as they moved up, uncovering the fruits that had snuck out into the sun. Their hands busily riffled the dark green leaves. Their fingers automatically assessed plumpness and ripeness, passed quickly over the hard dimples of whitish berries, recoiled from the gray fur on those that had gone to rot. Perfect strawberries pulled away from their stalks with a crisp little pop.
The late sun scorched their backs. Not quite impervious to temptation, they gobbled only one strawberry every ten minutes or so, choosing it according to some selection process they could not have explained. A quickening of aroma, perhaps, or a perfection of shape in the hand. Slipping them quickly into their mouths without looking up. Most of the other workers were women accompanied by small children, whose mouths were smeared with juice like clumsy lipstick. Gossip and low laughter drifted on the warm air. There was a scattering of younger pickers, too; like Clem and Goz, they’d changed hurriedly out of their school uniforms and pedaled the mile and a half from Borstead. Twenty yards ahead of the boys, Doreen Riley’s ample backside was aimed right at them. Goz caught Clem gazing at it.
“Ah, c’mon. You can’t be that desperate.”
“Wanna bet?”
Goz grinned. “It’s the heat.”
They went into one of their little routines, doing Goon Show voices from the wireless.
Clem: “It’s the heat!”
Goz: “The heat, by God! The drums! The flies! The native women!”
Clem: “It’s enough to drive a white man crazy, I tell you!”
Goz: “Steady, old chap. Steady. Remember, you’re British. Think of the queen.”
A punnet held four pounds of fruit. Six punnets earned you two shillings. Not in hard coin, though. At the weighing table, so long as you made the weight, or exceeded it, the cashier tore four tickets from a thick reel. Each was printed MORTIMER ESTATES LTD and 6d. At the end of the day’s picking, you queued again to have these sixpenny tickets exchanged for cash that was brought in brown bags from the estate office late in the afternoon. It was a system based on distrust; one wouldn’t want a load of money sitting all day in a field full of quick-fingered casual workers. It had the added advantage of keeping them there until the end of the day.
In less than an hour, Clem and Goz had filled their twelve punnets. Forty-eight pounds of fruit. Goz straightened up, wiping his face on his sleeve. Gold straw dust glittered on the damp hairs of his forearm.
“Are we done?”
“Yep, reckon so. Look at this un.”
Clem held up his pick of the day: a big, glossy, flawlessly scarlet berry. It was too good to eat.
“Boo’iful,” Goz said. “The size of a dog’s heart.”
They headed up toward the head of the field.
“Not if it was a Pekingese,” Clem said.
“Nor a Jack Russell. I was thinking more like a Labrador.”
“Norfolk lurcher.”
“Speak for yerself,” Goz said.
They shuffled forward in the queue, pushing their punnets with their feet. The weighed strawberries were being loaded onto a trailer. One of the loaders was a girl neither of them had seen before. She had very dark hair that swung against her face and neck as she moved. She wore an old blue-checked shirt that was too big for her — a man’s shirt — its tails bunched into a knot at her waist. When she stooped to lift, you could see down into it, where white crescents could be glimpsed. Her jeans stopped at the calves of her slender legs. They were unlike the slack, cheap denims that the boys wore; they fit her. Clem could not help noticing the seam that curved down