Spoiled fruit

He had a grandstand view of her descent from across the road. It was quiet at that time, and he was sure that there was nobody else who might have seen.

She had been walking along distractedly, swinging her shopping not so much from frivolity as fatigue, when her foot connected with the raised edge of a shattered paving slab. From the moment she began to head towards the ground, to when she finally came to rest, he counted from one to twenty quickly in his head. It was a nervous tic he'd carried over from his childhood into adult life: when he saw or was involved in some stressful event, he began counting to himself. He always tried to do so at the same speed as he might speak quickly; that goal was sometimes a distraction, though, as it sometimes caused his lips to move in sympathy, and when he felt them twitch he had to cease his enumerations.

She took so long to fall because she was so big. Not tall, but round and heavy, so not only did it take a lot to unseat her, and a long time for the shock to reach as far as the top of her frame, but once she headed for the pavement her very bulk kept her moving. And so she had tripped over the broken pavement, taken a few wobbly, fat steps, and finally let her confused legs give way, and she seemed to be heading with finality towards the ground, when her body rolled itself quickly into a ball round her ample stomach. Bits of her seemed to be trying to evade the impact by folding upwards into other bits. Shaped like that she was able to roll as she struck the floor, almost turning the accident into a balletic manoeuvre. She ended up sat on her behind, having completed a full forward-roll; extremities bruised, and surprise (and a little shock) on her squashy, expressive face.

The two bags she had been carrying were now half-empty. One, a weak blue-striped plastic bag, had torn and disgorged some of the fruit from its inside. Hard, unripe oranges rolled around, nosing up against the wall of the terrace's gardens, or settling comfortably in other divots in the pavement or against the kerb they had just fallen off; a half-dozen pears had aged some ten days in their short trip to the floor, ripening, bruising and then turning to mush in a bounce or two. The other bag was made from canvas and had some sort of charity logo on it; it was undamaged, but during the woman's acrobatics it had tried to follow her and tipped out some of the heavier objects inside. Two tins of pulses had each sustained a slight dent, but the kilogramme of flour was still entire, safe in its paper wrapping.

Barely had the whole performance come to an end when he was already striding across the quiet road to pick her up. He could see her gasping for air, eyes wide; she couldn't have been more surprised had he just landed her in a fishing-boat. Wiry and teenage, he was able to reach her within two of her panicked breaths. This was a social situation with which he was comfortable: there was a formula, and he began to follow it to the letter. As he reached her he asked "Are you OK?" He could see—he hoped—that nothing was broken, and she hadn't hit her head, so he offered her an arm. Shyly, though: he looked away from her as he did so, unwilling to meet her eyes.

She grabbed onto him clumsily and he tensed himself as they both began to rise. She folder her legs beneath her and suddenly, spare arm wheeling, jacked her body up, pulling down sharply on his elbow as she did and almost overbalancing them both. But he steadied himself quickly, shifting his feet, and they both managed to lean on each other as far as uprightness. He could smell her as they rose: someone she knew smoked, not her, as the smell of cigarettes lay nauseatingly under the tang of her own sweat, which was itself tinged with panic. The rough twill of her overcoat rubbed against his thinner clothes, and this texture against texture set his teeth on edge.

Finally, straining at the effort of getting up so slowly, they found themselves vertical. She disengaged from him and, swaying as she turned at the hips, batted dirt and dust, both real and imaginary, off her clothes.

"Thank you," she puffed, turning to look at his downcast eyes (which in turn looked at nothing in particular), and started to move towards the food that was still littering the pavement.

"You lean on the wall. I'll sort it."

He entwined his thin fingers around the two tins, holding them both in one hand, and then took the bag flour in his other hand; the woman held her better bag out for him to drop it all in, thanking him again, but he just nodded. He went for the oranges next, carrying them in multiples and feeling them push against each other in their tough skin.

As she held the other bag out for these he hesitated and said: "It's split."

She looked down and saw her own feet through the gaping hole in one corner, and barked a short laugh. "Oh, yes, you're right! Well, put them in here, then," she said, cat's-cradling between the two bags and managing—just—to bury the broken one in the other and open that one wide, without losing a grip on it. He dropped the fruit in one by one, trying to avoid the hard seams of the tins that might split their skin, and heard them plop against the canvas or the flour bag.

Next he tried to salvage some of the pears, and decided that he would save whichever would leave his fingers dry. As he was gingerly plucking the whole fruit from the burst, a youngish man—older than himself, about as skinny, but hard in straight denim and leather lines—danced past between him, the woman and all the fruit. He trod in the mush of two or three pears, flattening one that might have been rescued, glanced down at his shoes, then carried on up towards the church.

"Watch out!" he snapped at the interloper, not loudly but it carried. The man turned round and sniffed at them both, feigning uninterest in what, for him, might as well have been street theatre.

The woman had returned to leaning on the wall, rubbing her hip where a bruise might have been forming. "Ignorant," she said, shaking her head. The movement made her voice all the more jittery; she was clearly feeling the impact now, he thought, and hastened with his task. "Not like you, love," she continued, and from her voice he knew she was looking at him again. "You're a good boy, do you know that? I hope your mother knows what a good boy you are."

He glowed; almost smiling; mumbled something about how he was only doing what was right.

"Ah, it's knowing what that is that counts," she declared, and that set her off on a rambling speech that he tried not to listen to. He was still hunting round for any remaining lost pears and didn't want to be distracted. Apparently, though, not everyone these days was like him, especially not her two sons, although her daughter at least helped out round the house. It was a crying shame, he learned as he was rooting under the back bumper of a car for a miraculously preserved pear, which she said he shouldn't bother with as he'd got most of them, and that would do her fine. As he straightened and returned all the fruit he was carrying to her bag she said once again what a good boy he was, and once again he could feel the blush dawning on his cheeks and he just bowed slightly in response, an oddly theatrical and antiquated little gesture that he meant to be less notable than it was. So he mumbled a bit more to cover up his discomfort, and she eventually smiled and complimented him some more.

"Do you need help home?" he asked flatly. "I'm just parked up on the superstore car-park if you're still feeling shaky."

"Oh, no," she said, "I'll be just fine now." She dusted herself down one more time as if to prove it. "I've only got to go up to the end of the road anyway. Thank you so much again!" She turned and left him, limping a little as she walked, looking more carefully at the pavement than before.

"No problem," he called after her. He stood where he was for a half a minute, as her bulk waned into the distance, and then abruptly turned to walk back to the car.

In comparison to the activity on the pavement, his drive home was uneventful. The hand-me-down engine held out all the way, and no warning lights cried or mewed at him. The traffic, once he had left the suburbs, was thin enough that he was only overtaken once. He never broke the speed limit, not even on the motorway, as his mother frequently told him the story about his uncle, who was struck by a van as it took corner too quickly. If it hadn't have been speeding, she'd said, poor Uncle Mick might have stood a chance, and that always stuck with him when he was on his own in the car. He could play the whole story—all the details she'd mentioned over the course of the telling and re-telling—in his head, like a radio station, and did so now. It kept him calm and considerate through the estates and along the lane that went under and past the bypass. When he finally turned into the drive he had almost forgotten the woman he'd helped, and forgotten her praises. He remembered it all again, in a flash, and for a third time his cheeks turned red.

The house was still empty—his parents were out, his sister was out, and one of them must have taken the terrier Harry-Jarry as the leash was not on its hook—so he let himself in and made a cup of tea. He got a tub of biscuits out of a cupboard and took them through to the lounge to watch the television. He switched it on and clicked through a few of the channels until he found a western, which he'd seen before. It had been fun, though: not Dirty Harry or anything, but one of the really good ones. He could remember the title, and all the main actors, although last time he'd had to go off to do the washing-up before the credits finished, so he had never got to the producer and director. As guns blazed and women in red, flouncy dresses pouted and men with stubbly beards did the decent thing, he began to stare a little glassy-eyed at the happenings on screen, relaxing a little and just soaking it in.

He found himself working his way through the day's schedule, starting from the top. There were the library books, and dropping those parcels off for his mum at the post office. Then there was the hardware shop for a new kettle, and of course the supermarket for the weekly shop. After that... after that he'd been busy helping that woman, and then had come home.

Mentally ticking these items off one by one, he suddenly remembered that he still had to empty the car boot; he jumped up and headed outside. There was bits and pieces of shopping: the kettle, and something else from the hardware shop that he could barely remember getting: rubbish really, he'd never use it. Then there was fruit and vegetables, along with some pasta, bread and tins, and some once-frozen food that was now just cool and a little dewy in its packaging. He pulled all of this out in its four big bags, bending from the base of his spine and feeling a twinge of discontent there as he did so. Then, finally, nestling behind the back seats of the car, were his tools. He hefted a lump-hammer in one hand and a crowbar the length of his arm in the other. The business ends of both were tainted with grubby grey powder and a little dirt.

That slab had been difficult to deal with, he remembered with a grimace. He had had to hammer the crowbar into the gap between the stones, and that counted, he was sure, as very poor treatment of his tools. Not only that, but he was just fortunate between the messing and the banging and the noise that he hadn't been caught this time. Still, it had all been worth it. After all, she had told him so herself: he had been such a good boy.