Uchenna's Apples (3 page)

“Got it mostly done already,” Uchenna said. “But we have to go to the library.” She threw Emer a cunning look that said,
No we don’t, just play along with me.

“You could’ve stopped there on the way home,” Uchenna’s mam said. “Not like you to backtrack, sweet.” Then she rolled her eyes in annoyance at the phone. “The world’s biggest software company,” she said, “you’d think they could afford some hold music that didn’t sound like a broken music box.”

“I just wanted to dump my bag, mam,” Uchenna said. “And there’s some stuff in the back office I needed.”

“Okay,” her mam said. “So what about dinner, girls? If your dad wants to go after all,” she said, glancing at Uchenna.

“Ooh, I don’t know yet…” Uchenna said. “And we should ask Emer’s mom.”

“I think she’ll be okay,” Emer said. “I’ll call.”

Uchenna’s mam suddenly waved at them to be quiet a moment. “Barry? Yes, of course I am. No. No, I can’t.” She made a helpless look, waved at Uchenna again as she and Emer headed out the back door.

The two of them headed back under the carport and into the back yard. It was shaped like a third of a doughnut, with the house being where the hole would have been. Right behind the house was a decking patio with some lawn furniture and an umbrella table, everything still covered up after the recent rain. But away from the deck led a flagstone path across the rear lawn, and at the far side of the lawn, under the curved wall, was a tall, broad-crowned tree. Under the tree was a little two-roomed house with a low peaked bungalow roof just like the one on the main house.

“This is so cool,” Emer said as they made their way back under the branches of the tree, where they shaded the little house’s tiny front porch and scaled-down wooden front door. “I wish I had something like this…”

Uchenna went fishing for the little key she kept hanging on a chain around her neck. She pulled it out and unlocked the front door. There was no question that the “back office” was very cool. When this had been a show house, the little house out in the back had been the development’s main site office, a supplement to the tables that got stacked full of paperwork and brochures up in what was now the house’s living room and kitchen. When Uchenna’s folks had bought the house, her dad had looked at this little temporary building, under the tree, and said, “I wonder…” and had then wound up paying the company a little extra to keep it in place.

She remembered her mam giving him a strange look at the time. “What for, Barry?” she’d said.

“Oh, I don’t know. An office…”

When she’d heard that, her mam had laughed. Because he was a software project leader, Uchenna’s dad already spent so much time up at Microsoft that her mam sometimes teased him about needing to buy a second home up on the corporate campus by the airport. Sure enough, he never spent any time at all in the little shed out in the back, and Uchenna took it over within about a month of them moving in.

Now she and Emer slipped in and Uchenna closed the front door after them. It made a sound only a little more solid than the sound you got from closing one of the kitchen cupboards. The shed’s walls were thin, the ceiling was thin, even the floor bounced a little when you stepped on it: the little sliding windows were single-glazed and their frames were about as heavy as the upstairs shower stall in the house. The blue and green carpet tiles on the floor were peeling away at the corners in places, and the curtains hanging at the windows were made of the kind of cheap thin blue plaid plastic normally used to cover picnic tables. But Uchenna didn’t care. Against the plain white walls of the long room she had everything she needed—an old sofa from the family’s last house, a couple of chests of drawers from her mam and dad’s old bedroom, the old desk from her bedroom back in the first little house in Stillorgan. And there were a lot of things out here she didn’t strictly need, like just about every stuffed toy her folks had ever given her since she was five. She could never bear to get rid of them, and now the forty or fifty members of the Zoo Crew, as Uchenna called them, were piled up at the end of the room in a trainwreck of wildly colored plush and pile. But they just made it all seem that much more homelike to her, emphasizing that this was
her
space. Out here Uchenna could do her schoolwork without feeling like her folks were hanging over her shoulder watching her: and outside she could hear the quiet, or the birds singing, if she didn’t feel like running her CD player. 

Right now, though, Uchenna dropped to her knees in front of one of the chests of drawers and started rummaging through the drawers, one after another. Emer stood over her and looked at what Uchenna was doing with mild bemusement. “Look at all the junk in there…” she said.

“Not junk!” said Uchenna, slamming one drawer shut and opening another. “Artifacts.”

Emer giggled at the fancy vocabulary. Uchenna ignored her, pushing the wildly assorted drawer-contents aside. “Here’s what we need…”

From under a pile of old socks and manga books and plastic jewelry and comics and pens and pencils and plastic-covered childhood diaries she pulled out a plastic shopping bag. “Here,” she said, and handed it to Emer, and went hunting for another.

Emer looked at the bag, then gave Uchenna a puzzled glance. “We could have bought these at the Spar for fifteen cent,” she said.

Uchenna shook her head. “Twenty-five,” she said. “They raised it last month.” She grinned at her friend. “You really weren’t listening in the current events unit yesterday, were you. Anyway, why pay when you’ve got them? We’re recycling. And not just these.”

Emer looked mystified as Uchenna got up off her knees and headed for the door. “What?” she said. And then, “Oh! Wait, I get it—”

Uchenna went out the door and stood peering up into the tree. Emer paused on the doorstep. “You want me to lock this now?”

“Yeah, sure—”

Emer pulled the door closed and came out onto the lawn to join Uchenna. “Anyway, it’s a brilliant idea,” Emer said.

Uchenna grinned. “Yeah, if we can just get some down…”

The tree above them was yet another leftover from past times…but this one was from a time long before the showhouse, before anyone had even thought of Adamstown. Once there had been not just pasture land here, but farmland too. Indeed there were still lots of little once-upon-a-farm fields scattered around the outer edges of the town, tiny hedged-in pieces of property the developers hadn’t been interested in buying and which weren’t big enough for the farmers to sell to anyone else. Some of them still had remnants of old farm buildings in them, broken-down pigsties or cattle sheds, now reduced to piles of gray stone and rubble with ancient trees growing through them. And some of those trees were fruit trees, survivors or escapees from some old orchard that had been located near here. This one, an apple tree, had been left inside the boundary of the development by accident, so the developers had told Uchenna’s dad. Someone had made some kind of surveying error that would have cost too much to fix, so they’d left the tree where it was and built the wall as planned right behind it. But the accident was a happy one as far as Uchenna was concerned. The tree’s droopy branches shaded the little Back Office shed, protecting it from the hottest weather in the summertime. And it looked much better than the other plantings around the development, most of which were brand new, spindly little rowan trees about five feet tall and about as thick as pencils.

Uchenna loved the apple tree because it was old… possibly one of the very few things in Adamstown that were. Well, maybe not
incredibly
old. When a branch on it had gotten cracked last year during a storm, and her dad had gone up on a ladder and sawn it down, Uchenna had seen that the branch had about sixty rings on it. But much more important than the tree’s age—though it was cool that it was older than her dad or mam—were the apples. They were starting to peep out from between the branches now: but they hadn’t yet begun to fall. They were quite big apples already, and they were green.

Standing beside Uchenna, Emer looked up into the branches. “It’s a great idea,” she said, “but someone’s gonna have to climb up there after them, and I know who that’s gonna be.”

“I can climb!” Uchenna said.

“You can
fall
,” Emer said, sounding resigned. “I saw you on the ropes in PE last week. Let me.” She went over around the back side of the Back Office, where the tree trunk rose up out of the space between the wall and the shed, and started to climb up the slightly slanted lower part of the trunk. “How many do you want?”

Uchenna shook her head. “Don’t know. How many do you think it’ll take to keep some horses still long enough to see how their legs go?”

Emer paused at the place where the trunk switched back on itself, choosing which of the next two big branches to climb on. “Hey, I’m no horse expert. You tell me.”

“It’d help if I knew how many there were….”

“Five,” Emer said, struggling up and out of sight. A rain of small branches and loose bark started coming down: Uchenna tried to move away from the tree enough to avoid the junk coming down without losing sight of Emer.

“Two each?” Emer said. Two came thumping down onto the grass under the tree, one of them narrowly missing Uchenna’s head.

“Better make it three,” Uchenna said, thinking about the horses’ legs again. “I’m going to have to draw them, so they’d better stay where they are for a while.”

“Is this something for art class?” Emer said, throwing down another three.

“Ow! No.”

“Then why waste time drawing them?” Emer said. “Just use your phone to take pictures of how their knees go.”

Uchenna shook her head in admiration. “I am not the brilliant one.
You
are!”

The only response was that more apples pelted down onto the grass. Uchenna let out a silent sigh of resignation. Sooner or later she was going to get Emer to agree out loud when someone said something nice about her, but she was probably going to have to trick her friend into it: the self-confidence thing was the only American trait that didn’t seem to have made it across the water with Emer. Everything else was there, including the loudness, which it had taken her a year or so to get under control, but was fortunately still there when needed.

Uchenna took a count of the apples that were on the ground. “Okay,” she said, “maybe just a few more and the bag’ll be full.”

Two more thumped down, and there was a pause. The third one hit Uchenna right on the foot.

“Ow!” She hopped around, picking up the apple and staring up into the leaves, half tempted to throw it back up there. “You did that on purpose!”

Emer’s face looked out from the leaves. “If I’d meant to hit you,” she said, looking annoyed, “no way it’d have taken me
that
long.”

Uchenna had to grin. While Emer hated all the sports their school played, she loved one that almost wasn’t played in Ireland: baseball. Back at her old school in America she’d been a pitcher on the girls’ softball team, and every now and then, when she and Uchenna would play catch in her yard, Emer would demonstrate that when she wanted to hit something, or alternately
not
to hit it, that was exactly what happened. “I guess that one bounced off a branch?” Uchenna said.

“Bloody right.”

Uchenna grinned harder. Emer normally didn’t use even mild swearwords: when one popped out, it was a sign it was time to stop teasing her. “Okay,” Uchenna said. “Looks like enough.”

“Great.”

Emer shinnied down again and stood there brushing herself off while Uchenna bagged the apples. Then the two of them headed back past the house. Even through the door to the kitchen, Uchenna could hear her mam was still on the phone. “Well, when do you think?—Okay— no, that’s fine with me, but if you can’t—”

“Shouldn’t we tell her where we’re going?” Emer whispered as they headed down the driveway.

“Why? She wants me, she’ll call,” Uchenna said. “They haven’t decided what they want to do yet. And it’s not like we can’t be back in ten minutes. Now—which way should we go?”

Emer glanced around. “Follow me,” she said.

It wasn’t that Uchenna couldn’t think of a way to get where they were going. The space beyond the concrete walls at the back of the developed properties was full of little paths worn through the crabgrass, leading to places where the hedgerows of the older fields still traced a maze of lines drawn in thorny greenery across the landscape. Every kid who lived in this part of Adamstown knew at least three or four different ways to leave the house and get around the developments with varying levels of speed or difficulty, and with or without being seen. But personal preference was also an issue, and since Emer knew where she was going, Uchenna was willing to believe she knew the best way to get there. Now Emer led her out of Uchenna’s circle the way they’d come, angled over toward the next circle of houses on the north side, and there took a narrow dirt path just to the right of the house that was nearest the spot where the three circles touched. That path went between the little patch of grass where the boulder with the circle’s name on it stood and the wall of the nearest house, one of the few in the circle that was empty at the moment.

At the end of the path was a gap between the house’s side wall and the wall that defined the edge of the next development along. Emer and Uchenna slipped down between these walls, watching where they walked, because the hard dirt of the path was littered with junk: stomped-on energy drink cans, broken vodka bottles. At the far end of the path Emer paused, waving a hand back at Uchenna for her to wait while Emer stuck her head around the corner and had a look around. Then she glanced back at Uchenna. “It’s okay,” she said. “I don’t see anybody. Come on—”

They headed out into the open space, staying on the path close to the wall that shut away the next part of the Adamstown development on their right. To their left was a wide landscape of green patches of field hemmed in by uneven hedges, with a long line of high-tension towers striding along from north to south about half a mile away. Even at this distance you could hear the whining of the wind in those big wires, a faint noise that fought successfully with the lower, rushing sound of the nearby N7 motorway as the traffic tore along it towards Naas. In the late afternoon sky, the black bird-shapes of rooks wheeled and dipped in the wind, playing with the air and making distant metallic gronking noises.