Nothing annoys me more than apple season in the city.
Our flat is smaller than most school classrooms, and three floors up. The concept of owning an apple tree is beyond us. Imagine the luxury. All that free food. How many pies, strudels and turnovers sourced from your own land you could wolf down in dark evenings. The thought of all that gluttony makes me sick. Like the residents with apple trees are laughing at those who reside on the higher levels.
But the worst part of apple season is the waste. At harvest time the branches creak with fruit, and the ground below is a Cox and Braeburn minefield. The tree owners look out over this abundance of apples, and they cannot cope.
So what do they do? They leave them in the streets.
By the end of September every house with a garden has put a box rammed with apples on the public pavement. Friendly signs with crude smiley faces tell you these are ‘free for a good home’ and to ‘help yourself.’ These people have so much food they cannot even guzzle their whole share. They have to rub their wealth in our faces.
My husband disagreed. He saw this gesture as the perfect way to build a community, and ensure everyone got a share of the apples. I told him time and time again to leave them alone. These are street apples. This is where dogs go to the toilet. This is where the cars spew out poison all day long.
But no. Harvest season arrived, and we had to collect a sack of street apples. They had to sit on the kitchen table in the space where a vase of flowers might go.
He had not chosen well. In the sack hid two dozen green monstrosities with blotchy marks on their skin, and twisted dead stalks. Cooking apples that will either waste energy and sugar boiling to gloop on the hob, or turn brown and soggy in their unloved home.
That night I lay under the covers, fists clenched. My husband snored, no doubt dreaming of apples.
The cracking noise was like ice breaking under footsteps.
A crowbar hid under our bed for this very occasion. Drastic, but this was the city after all. I opened the bedroom door, and crept round to the kitchen, the cool metal reassuring in my hands. One of us had left the light on.
Chunks of shattered apple dotted the table. What had been inside them walked on thin legs like a spider, but waved around claws that snapped with a crab’s efficiency. Most had already managed to scramble up the walls or onto the linoleum. Three scuttled across the floor, heading towards the soft flesh of my exposed toes.
I thought of the families in their garden homes, their tree now bereft of produce. All of them digging into bowls of steaming apple pie, reaching for the jug of custard to make their meal even sweeter.
Line: A crowbar hid under our bed for this very occasion.
