took one of the raspberries out of her punnet. ‘Tastes fine. Maybe you just got a bad one.’
They carried on picking, the heat close around them.
‘Where did Sas go?’
‘Redcurrants.’
Vicky, bored, had stopped picking and was now just trailing after Ruth. ‘Redcurrants?’
‘Said she’d never picked redcurrants before.’
‘What d’you do with redcurrants?’
Ruth continued to make her way up the row, too intent on picking to respond to this.
Behind her, Vicky said, ‘Matt was meant to phone at twelve today. He’s been on holiday and he said he’d phone when his plane landed, but he never did. No message—nothing. I’m meant to be going to a party with him this weekend.’
She looked up instinctively as a plane went overhead, nosing down towards Gatwick. ‘I can’t believe you and Sas didn’t meet anybody in France—like, anybody at all.’
Ruth had stopped picking and was staring at something in the distance, her shoulders so taut with concentration that Vicky had one of her brief, habitual anxiety attacks that their GP at Park Surgery refused to prescribe her Diazepam for.
It was the plane—the plane that flew over just then; it had crashed. She just knew it. Any minute now there’d be smoke and debris and the field would be full of soft, torn, bloodied body parts. Any minute now the silence would end and she’d see freshly twisted wreckage and freshly dead people. What if Matt’s flight had been delayed? What if Matt was on that plane?
The two blues she took out of her pocket now and put into her mouth had, until recently, belonged to her mother, Sylvia, whose anxiety attacks their GP at Park Surgery had been happy to prescribe Diazepam for.
She’d been taking Sylvia’s prescription Diazepam since she was fifteen—when the burglary nightmares first started. It was the same every night—she’d wake up around two, convinced she heard someone crossing the gravel drive, walking up the side of the house and letting themselves in through the patio doors. She’d lie in bed flushed with fear and barely breathing, listening to the intruder’s footsteps on the stairs, and waiting for her bedroom door handle to start turning. That’s when she’d take the Valium, put on her i-pod, and curl up under the duvet—whatever the weather.
‘What is it?’ she tried not to scream.
Ruth, distracted, said, ‘Does that look like Mr Sutton to you?’
‘Mr Sutton?’ Vicky’s eyes grazed the fields spread out around them, still looking for smoke, still sniffing the air for blood.
‘Over there.’ Ruth pointed.
Vicky felt herself start to calm down. The sky was clear—no smoke. The plane that had gone overhead had landed safely.
‘I’m sure that’s him.’
Vicky looked. Ruth was right. In the next field was their Art teacher, Mr Sutton—whose home address they’d taken from confidential staff files so they could send an anonymous Valentine’s card.
Mr Sutton was the youngest male member of staff at Burwood Girls’, and taught art under an overwhelming barrage of oestrogen that manifested itself in the various totemic gifts he was recipient of—from an envelope full of pubic hair to a photograph of a pair of bare breasts.
‘What’s he doing here?’
‘Picking fruit—like everybody else.’
‘Shit—look at me.’
‘He’s two fields away, Vick.’
‘Yeah, but we can see him. So are we going over—saying hello?’
Ruth was blushing. Confident—and often caustically funny—with family and close friends, she was pathologically shy with most other people.
‘Come on—you know you’ve got a thing about him.’
‘I know, but—’
‘And we haven’t seen him for ages.’
Ruth shrugged and turned away. ‘Wait—he’s with someone.’
‘Who?’
‘He’s talking to someone.’
As Vicky continued to stare, the gradient of the field, which sloped gently downwards, seemed suddenly much steeper. The next minute she grabbed hold instinctively of one of the raspberry canes as the entire field lurched out from under her feet.
She’d never had such an intense or sudden attack of vertigo before.
‘Vick?’ Ruth said, turning to her, worried. ‘What happened? You looked like you were about to black out.’
‘Vertigo—I just took some Valium.’
‘What colour?’
‘Blue.’
‘How many?’
‘Two—like, 20mg or something. Don’t look at me like that.’ Vicky broke off. ‘It’s Saskia!’
‘What?’
‘The person Mr Sutton’s talking to—it’s Saskia.’
Still high, Saskia drifted down between the rows of netted redcurrant bushes able to feel every crevice and ridge beneath the thin soles of the sandals she’d bought at a market in the south of France. Mel and Tony were pre-divorce friends of her father’s. Richard Greaves had known Mel since university and the Greaves stayed in their villa at St Julien most Julys. During the first week, before Ruth arrived, Mel drove Saskia to the local market—a girls only trip—and for a whole two hours she’d tried to be Saskia’s mother, then she got bored with the idea and moved onto something else. Before she got bored she bought Saskia the sandals she was now wearing—had worn all summer, in fact—and a bracelet made of bottle tops that African immigrants were selling on blankets, which Ruth had admired when they picked her up from the airport in Montpellier. Saskia had been so pleased to see her she’d almost given it to her before changing her mind and deciding to keep it.
A plane passed overhead. She watched its shadow move solidly over the ground and redcurrant bushes, her eyes following it as it ran over the rows—until she saw Mr Sutton. Was that Mr Sutton from school—picking redcurrants just like her, approximately five rows away? She wasn’t convinced it was. Saskia believed in UFOs; she believed in ghosts, parallel universes and monsters like the Yeti that evolution had stranded, and sometimes she got confused and saw things out of the corner of her eye that never quite materialised when she really concentrated.
No—Mr Sutton was definitely there. He was waving at her.
Saskia
