The contingent apple

Download audio file read by Glyn Moody.

Somebody gives me a fruit, an apple, say; I take it.  I look at it: I notice that it is a very special apple, because it has taken a unique and extraordinary journey to reach to me.  A journey so extraordinary, in fact, that the chances of it occurring were one in a billion.

First, it had to be selected from those on offer before I received it.  Before that, perhaps, it was among several chosen from the stock of the local greengrocers.  The greengrocers in turn had first to include it in their selection from the wholesalers at New Covent Garden, who had previously bought it among many others from the importers - assuming it is foreign - who earlier had included it in a batch from some country's national apple growers association.  Earlier still, that same apple had somehow managed to be chosen by that same association's buyer among lots sold by local apple growers; to reach that lot, the apple first, by some miracle, had been picked at the right time and at the right place.  Out of the billions of apples that I could have taken, is it not marvellous that this particular apple made it through against all the odds?

The answer, of course, is no, because I never specified months before that I wanted to receive that apple and no other; in fact more or less any apple would have done, making its appearance in my hand rather unextraordinary.  

Thus speaks the pedant; and yet it is rather wonderful to imagine all those foods I have eaten, all those clothes I have worn, all those books I have read, coming from plants and animals and trees which existed long before I knew I wanted them, almost as if they knew before I did.  The same goes for people: all my friends were apparently preparing themselves to be the right person at the right moment.

This logic carries us further.  For it implies that everything I shall want, everyone I shall meet, is already in preparation: the fig I shall eat next year is already growing on the tree; friends-to-be are at this moment living, carefully developing their personalities and manoeuvring themselves into suitable situations so that we shall meet and shall hit it off.  At least so it will appear in retrospect; and so it must appear to any gods watching the curious confluences of people and of things.  Able to see where everything comes from and where everything is going, to them the world must look like a huge, carefully orchestrated courtship ritual with objects and people marrying up despite the most extreme of obstacles.

Viewed in this way, we can imagine lines flowing back from the future, like threads ending in our hands; as each second advances, we pull in the cords a little.  When the string runs out, a something or somebody appears in our life, and we in theirs: for they, too, have been pulling on the cord, reeling us in across space and time through the nexus to come.

And so, as I contemplate the apple, I can imagine that one day, at the appropriate moment, there will be another apple that somebody will hand me, another miracle at the end of its journey towards me.  And with this knowledge, I eat.

(1989)

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8.8.88

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'Now, who can tell me today's date?'  I remember the teacher standing in front of the class; a female teacher, so perhaps it was Miss Pinkney or Mrs Sutcliffe - but not Miss Grogden or Mrs Day.  I am at the back of the class to the right, next to Angela - but this may have been the following year.  I half remember sitting next to my best friend, Neil Campion, at some stage, which must have been around this time, towards the end of my infant schooldays.  Perhaps he sat in front of me.  I suppose I should be amazed at how easily I lost touch with him.  I never saw him again, though I do remember being told how his brother - who had a withered left arm with a rather disturbing hook-like device he clipped over it - was killed a couple of years later when he rode his motorbike into an unlit skip late at night.  Apparently his girlfriend riding pillion was also killed, but none of this touched me in the slightest.

'And what is special about today's date?'  Our double desk - whoever it was that shared with me - consisted of a top with a kind of rectangular cavity underneath.  In it we would keep all our text and exercise books, along with pencils and rubbers and set squares and the like.  I remember that I arranged mine in two neat ziggurat forms, one in each corner.

'And when will be the next time that that happens?'  Outside, in the sunlight, lay the grass playing area bounded by a high wire netting fence.  At the far end this gave on to the forbidden sports fields of the secondary modern school next door.  I never knew anything about this place, except that it was where most of those at my primary school ended up.  It never occurred to me to wonder whether I too would go there.  Not that I assumed I would automatically go to a grammar school, because I would not have recognised the concept; it was more that I spent my childhood in a strange kind of volitional and experiential haze.

'Yes, Glyn?'  But I did know what the date was, what was special about it, and when it would happen again.  The answer seemed obvious, and that I should know it, natural.  Like my desk, like the sunshine that poured in through the high windows, like the steady progress through the junior school towards the 11+ exam and beyond, everything in my world seemed perfectly ordered and perfectly right.  My schooldays were hardly the happiest of my life, but they were totally stress-free, insouciant, and frictionless.  I scarcely felt them pass at all.  Time flew by in standing still.

Thus it is that I have few memories from that time, just the odd, flickering image from each year.  But the question that opened that June morning has remained with me ever since.  Eleven years, one month and one day after hearing it, I wrote on my 1977 desktop diary for 7 July: '(remember 6.6.66?)'.  And I did.

And I do today.  The anniversaries are moments of punctuation which come round with a quirky regularity, as if governed by sunspot activity.  Like strange, temporal vortices, they exert a complex force.  All my life, I know, they will give me pause for thought: thought for what was on these dates in the past; and thought for what might be in the future.

(1988)

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