Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [44]
A rough male voice awoke him.
“Oi! D’yer want them strorbries weighed, or what?”
Clem dragged his gaze away from the girl.
“Sorry,” he said, and stacked his load onto the scales.
He stood aside while Goz collected the tickets.
“What d’yer reckon? Do another six?”
“Yeah,” Clem said. “Might as well. I’ll get em.”
He went to the pile of emptied punnets. He was closer to the girl now. He watched her lift filled ones; his own were on top. She carried them to the trailer, hoisted them up, then paused, reaching out. When she turned around, she was holding a perfect strawberry delicately in her fingertips. It was Clem’s dog’s heart. She turned it, examining it. She raised it toward her mouth.
“You aren’t gorna eat that, are yer?”
He was more surprised that he’d spoken than she seemed to be.
“Pardon me?”
Her face was too small. No, it wasn’t that. It was that her eyes were so big. And dark, but full of light under rather heavy black eyebrows. Her mouth was wide. Below the full lips, her chin was a soft little triangle. She looked Spanish, Clem thought, not really knowing what that meant; perhaps that he’d seen her in a painting projected onto Jiffy’s wall.
He had to say something. “You’ll get told off.”
She stared at him without expression. Or maybe a smile refusing to be seen.
“I really don’t think so,” she said. A posh voice. Mocking him?
Clem glanced to his left. The foreman was walking in their direction, his face red and slick with sweat beneath his flat cap.
“Clem,” Goz said. A warning. But Clem couldn’t stop looking at the girl. She put the strawberry into her mouth, its plump tip first, and bit it in half. She closed her huge eyes.
“Mmmn. God!” Mumbling it.
A thin rivulet of juice ran from the left corner of her mouth onto her chin. She turned her head and wiped it away on the shoulder of her shirt. She looked at Clem, swallowing.
“You think you’ve got sick of them, but every now and again you get one that’s too luscious to resist, don’t you?”
It seemed to Clem that the world had gone entirely dark for an instant, but he hadn’t blinked.
“Yrrng,” he said, then cleared his throat. “Yeah. I picked that one.”
“Thank you,” she said, apparently seriously.
The foreman came alongside the trailer. He glowered at Clem, then saw the girl. He touched the greasy peak of his cap with two fingers.
“Orright, Miss Mortimer? The work suit you, do ut?”
She waved the remainder of the strawberry at him: a gesture that might have meant anything. The coral-pink flesh of the fruit was neatly grooved by her teeth.
The two boys walked down their rows to where they’d left their marker, three lines of brown earth scraped in the straw. They bent and rummaged, saying nothing to each other. A quarter of an hour later, Goz was a good five yards ahead of Clem. He straightened and carried his full basket back down the row. It was his second; Clem was still on his first.
“Yer mind’s not on the job, comrade. I’m not gorn halvsies if you don’t pull yer finger out.”
Clem looked up. With his back to the sun, Goz was a glowing silhouette.
“Christ, Goz. What a bit of stuff! You see the chest on her?”
Goz leaned down. Blinding light streamed over his shoulder.
“She Mortimer, you Ackroyd. She Montague, you Capulet. Or is it the other way round? I never can remember.”
“What the hell’re you on about?”
Goz punted Clem’s half-empty punnet with his toe. “Do the work, comrade. Me mum’s gonna have the tea on the table in an hour whether I’m there or not. And I’m bleddy starving.”
When they joined the line for the cashing up, the girl had gone.
The next day, Friday, she wasn’t there. Clem and Goz made five shillings in an hour and a half.
SATURDAYS AND SUNDAYS were the busiest days for picking. Whole families went: mothers with toddlers perched in wickerwork child seats behind the saddles of their bikes, men with boys on their crossbars and lunch