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I was an apricot. So was Anna. And my Mum, she was a big squishy grapefruit, because sometimes she had pips on the spoon in your mouth, but with sugar, she was sweet enough. My Dad, he was a crunchy red apple, one that had thick skin, so that you had to bite down hard, and wait, wait as your teeth clamped, for the pop of the skin and the spurt of juice down your chin. My brother was a banana. Keep him around too long and things got sickly sweet with all those girls he kept bringing home. And I just bet that when he was my age he was woody like an unripe one, furry on the tongue, and left you wanting a drink of water.
Yes, apricots, Anna and me. Two velvety apricots, that smelt sweet if you put your nose above the bowl. But leave us too long and we went and got brown splodges.
Anna and I we had fruit names for everyone on Fox Street. Don't know why. It seems silly to think of it now, but at the time, it seemed natural. Not even a game. As though the world was one big fruit salad.
The neighbours were fruit too. There were the spinster sisters up the road, Freda and Edna Wright. They hung large pink bloomers on their washing line on Mondays, and we thought they were probably melons, the ones with the pink insides, that go off in the sun, and look nice, but taste bitter.
There was the woman at number thirty who'd lost her husband. We'd seen him being taken out in a body bag early one morning. She was a passion fruit. Shrivelled. But she was a nice woman, who used to talk to us and ask us in for Earl Grey tea and ginger cake because she was lonely. Passion fruit. To us she was old. But then, us apricots, we were only eight, nine at the most. To us everyone looked either old or like a teacher.
There were lots of neighbours we didn't know well enough give them a personalised piece of fruit as their name. So they all became a bunch of grapes, to us. They were fine, but like now, what you saw never quite matched up to the reality. Tasteless. Pippy. Pippy Spit, right across the street, that's what Anna and I used to do with a bunch of grapes for pudding. Pippy Spits across Fox Street.
The man next door was a pineapple. He was a pineapple because we weren't sure about him, even then. And he was, like pineapples in a bowl of fruit, the only one. Living on his own, and usually those men had mothers to care for but not the pineapple. I cant remember his name.
It was sad to see the way the melons reacted to the pineapple. Prink and preen, as my Mum the grapefruit, used to say. They would go red, these melons, with their wrinkled skin and pink insides, cling together like their second cousins in the supermarket that had lain together too long and flattened, and the pineapple would bristle, stand taller, thrust out its prickles and flaunt its spiky leaves. We saw that.
We also saw the pineapple and the passion fruit one day. She must have asked him in for Earl Grey tea instead of us apricots, because the curtains were half drawn, and I remember my mother (the grapefruit) saying that pineapples don't need too much sunlight or they over-ripen. There were lots of grapes walking up and down the street, singly and in pairs, just like when you cut them off the bunch, and they come off together. Grapes, walking past the window where the pineapple was drinking passion fruit's tea.
Mum had said to us apricots not to go too close to the pineapple, but I think she was missing the boat, This wasn't a pineapple that liked plump apricots, it was a pineapple that had designs. With its sharp shiny leaves and stump for standing on. Designs.
We were sitting on the kerb, with boring grapes, playing Pippy Spit across the street, and out come the melons. Wrinkled, and clutching at each other like baby monkeys. They go and knock on the pineapple's door. Simpering. Us apricots watched, and couldn't bear it when they knocked the third time, and their melony faces had begun to look squashed and old. So we told them...said we'd seen the pineapple going over to the passion fruit's earlier. Of course, the melons, apricots and a few more passing grapes looked over at the passion fruit's house. It was afternoon. It was quite a nice day. Nice enough for Pippy Spit anyway.
And the bedroom curtains were drawn.
The melons set up a quiet howling, and went to go home. The grapefruit heard the noise, thought it was us apricots and came out, followed quickly by the crunchy red apple that spurts on your chin. Even the banana, who usually watched the football on a Saturday, came out into the street with a can of lager.
A whole fruit salad in Fox Street, gazing in awe up at the passion fruit's window, and wondering.
Wondering.
Exactly how does a pineapple make love?
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