Cover

Halftitle

Harvesting

Title

Harvesting

Lisa Harding

For Shell,

with love, gratitude and admiration

This book is dedicated to all those

whose lives have been stolen by traffickers

No one worth possessing
Can be quite possessed;
Lay that on your heart,
My young angry dear;
This truth, this hard and precious stone,
Lay it on your hot cheek,
Let it hide your tear.
Hold it like a crystal
When you are alone
And gaze in the depths of the icy stone.
Long, look long and you will be blessed:
No one worth possessing
Can be quite possessed.

Sara Teasdale, ‘Advice to a Girl’

1. Nico

1

Nico

A cooling breeze creeps up my skirt, tickling my thighs, as I climb to the highest branch of the highest tree in the forest. Puffs of cloud, like God’s breath, float all around. Some of the other fellows are yellowing and balding, but this old man holds on to his crown all year round. He smells of leather and Papa’s pipe. Lying back on his wrinkled bark, blotched with freckles, I scout the sky for shapes. With a slight squinting and blurring, a galloping filly appears just beyond my reach. I swing both legs either side of the branch and ride like the cowboys ride in the films Maria’s dad lets us watch.

‘Would you like a man like that?’ he’d say. ‘A man with bandy legs who spits on the ground?’

Maria would laugh, and I would think: but what about the gun packed so close to his thigh?

When we’re alone, Maria says she dreams of those spitting men.

Luca has climbed up behind me and is shaking the branch I’m clinging to. ‘Hey, don’t be such a dumbass! I could fall.’ He starts to laugh, sounding as cruel as Sergiu. The dog is running round and round the base, making strange grunting sounds.

‘That stupid animal doesn’t know it’s a mutt,’ he says, and throws a baby-green fairy cap in its direction. He should know better. Mama says if they are pulled too soon, you can hear their cries on the wind.

Luca hits the dog on its head, who yelps helplessly, looking towards the sky. It still hasn’t worked out where we go when we climb up the trunk of the tree; as far as it can see we disappear into the clouds. It’s been around as long as I have, which must make it very old in dog years. ‘Senile old nutter,’ Sergiu would say, as he’d give it its tenth whack of the day with his pointed boot. We’ve never given the old hound a name. My brothers all laugh when I suggest it. ‘It’s an animal, a creature, an “it”, and that’s that, silly sis’. Mama reckons the boys were knocked on their heads when they were little, or jostled about too much when they were growing inside her. I think it’s because they came out just like Papa, except for Luca, who is more like Mama and me, although he tries very hard not to be.

‘Where is your little friend today, sis?’ As if he doesn’t know. He follows us to the river most days and hides behind a bush where he thinks we can’t see him.

‘Just who are you talking about, donkey?’ I’ve arranged to meet Maria later at the watering hole, at the same time we meet every day during the summer holidays.

‘Do you think she likes me?’

He’s asking for it now. ‘She doesn’t even know you exist.’

He shakes the branch in a fury so I’m on the edge of falling.

‘Stop, you castrated bull!’

He laughs. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll catch you on the way down.’ The dog’s anxious grunting increases. ‘Stupid yoke,’ he says.

Of the three boys, Luca has the bluest eyes, the thickest hair and the smoothest skin. Although he’s the youngest, he’s also the tallest, with wide shoulders, narrow hips and a taut body. The girls in school giggle when he’s around and wear high colour on their cheeks. Maria’s no different, although I’d never tell him this. ‘Come swimming with us today.’ The words are out of my mouth before I can pull them back. Maybe it’s because I know there are only five more days left before school starts, or maybe it’s because I want the shaking to stop.

‘Ok,’ he says, as if he doesn’t care.

An image of Maria and Luca alone together floats out of nowhere, gaining substance until it’s hard and solid, hitting me in the chest, leaving me breathless.

‘I can see up your skirt,’ he shouts, conceding nothing.

There is a silence, until I realise he has started climbing back down. I let go of the branch I was clinging to and spread my arms wide. Look: no hands! The sky is piebald blue and white, and I am trotting, cantering, galloping along the plains.

I would much rather be one of those men than meet one, as a girl.

‘Are you coming down?’ He’s in a desperate hurry to get to the river.

‘In a minute,’ I shout, as a strange and strong pain hits me in the stomach. It has been happening more often: this clutching feeling, which comes with no warning and leaves me with wet in my eyes. I lean forward and lay the length of my body down, pressing my stomach against the wood, resting my cheek on the rough bark. Waves of swimming lines float in the air.

‘Come on, sis, Maria might think you’re not coming.’

I turn my head so the other cheek is rubbing against the old fellow’s gnarled skin. I press and I breathe. Almost as soon as it arrived it’s gone and I sit back up, swing my legs around and drop down into the centre of the tree, using legs and arms to root and dangle until the last swing lands me on my feet.

‘What took you so long?’

‘Just thinking.’

‘You do too much of that already. Look, sis …’ He holds out the palm of his hand and there’s a giant centipede marching up towards the soft part of his arm.

I won’t give him the satisfaction of hearing me scream. ‘Disgusting.’

‘It’s what the stupid dog is snuffling around at.’ He points at the dog, its nose pressed deep into the earth, digging a frantic hole. ‘There must be some kind of a nest down there.’

‘Those things don’t build nests.’

‘A hive then?’

The dog looks frantic. I don’t want to see. ‘Come on. Maria will be waiting.’

‘Race you.’

Without saying anything, I build up my speed inside, until I take the first step, pushing off the ball of my right foot. I run like the rabbits run when they know they are being hunted. Even though I’m smaller and my sandals are loose around my ankles, I’m still the fastest. ‘Swift as the foam bubbles dissolving on the river,’ Papa says. ‘Like a silver bullet,’ Luca says. The dog loves the speed of these bursts and the squeals that come from me as I push out past my brother. It runs ahead and then circles back, barking madly at the air.

When we arrive at the watering hole Maria is already there, lying on her back in her white dress with the yellow flowers. She has two dresses this summer: the other is light blue and has longer sleeves and hemline. I wish she was wearing that one now. Her legs are bent, feet lined up underneath her knees.

‘Hello you,’ she says. ‘What’s he doing here?’

The veins on Luca’s neck swell, and he starts to back away. ‘Just passing. I’ll leave you two to it.’

Maria rolls onto her elbow and sits upright. ‘Last one in is chicken-hearted,’ she says, as she rips off her dress and wades into the cold, murky water in her bra and pants. I had forgotten about this part. I don’t wear a bra and don’t want Luca to see my naked body, so I run in in my cream cotton dress.

‘What are you doing, you queer duck?’ she says. ‘You’re going to ruin your dress. It’s filthy in here.’ We’ve been warned all summer about the dangers of this polluted river with its tongues of yellow foam lapping against the banks. Plenty of others swim here, and no one I know has been ill, although there have been whisperings about the Tcaci sisters from the next village. Something about them becoming so sick that there was nothing left inside them, that they’d surely be left barren. The water becomes clearer the deeper you go, and anyway, it’s way too hot not to swim.

I stick my head under and push my body down to the silty floor. The silk-like liquid covers my sticky body with cool, the dress billowing around me as I swim low. I kick my legs and open my arms in big circles, holding my breath for sixty-one seconds, hoping they’ll be impressed. When I come back up the other two are splashing each other and Maria is pushing Luca’s head beneath the surface. He’s making a big show of spluttering and waving his arms about, even though he’s one of the strongest swimmers in the school, and Maria knows this. The dog is running up and down along the banks of the river, howling.

‘I was under for sixty-six seconds,’ I shout – hand in the air, clenched fist, victorious – thinking that number sounds more impressive. No one’s listening. I lie on my back and try to float. Although I’m light, the river won’t let me; my legs and feet keep sinking and then the rest of me goes down. Papa says it’s because it has no salt in it, unlike the Black Sea. He says you could lie for hours on your back on the inky, salty water, floating in the night sky. Mama would bite on her cheek as he’d tell me these stories, only letting herself speak later when he was out of earshot. ‘Don’t mind your father, Nico, he has never been to the sea.’

I allow my feet to touch the bottom, which makes a sucking sound when you stand. My toes curl around the mud as I wade against the water, feeling strong as I press it away. The other two are shouting and laughing still. I shouldn’t have told Luca to come. I swim until my arms and legs are burning and my heart’s pounding in my ears, then I climb onto the bank, my wet dress sticking to me like another skin. The dog pushes its head against me, shaking, and I pat it between its eyes.

Maria comes out next and throws herself on the ground beside me. ‘You didn’t tell me you were bringing your brother.’

‘You don’t seem to mind.’

She smiles at me and rolls onto her front. I wish she would put her clothes back on. ‘Are you cold?’ she asks. I’m shaking and there are blue and yellow patches on my legs and arms.

‘I’m fine, but you must be …’

She turns onto her back and stretches her arms long over her head, her toes pointing towards the ground, back arched. I see Luca staring over, and I cross my eyes and touch the tip of my tongue to my nose. He pokes his tongue through his teeth, narrowing it, before he too, touches his nose.

‘Impressive,’ says Maria, deadpan.

‘I bet you can’t do it,’ I say.

‘Nope, and I wouldn’t even bother trying. It’s a Zanesti thing.’

I feel a small shiver of victory.

‘The clouds are moving about fast up there,’ Maria says. We both look up at the shifting shapes in the sky. ‘I’d love to get on an airplane and fly away from here.’ I ask her where she thinks she’d go. She tells me her older sister Alina met a man in the village who said he could get her a job as a waitress in Greece, and she could earn more money in a month than she would working in a factory in Chişinău for a year.

‘You’re too young,’ I tell her.

‘I heard Papa say I will make a good marriage, in time.’ We both lie silently, staring at the clouds as they skitter across the blue. I don’t want her to go away from me. I don’t want her knowing this.

‘What do you wish for, dreamer?’ I’ve never thought beyond this – beyond school terms and holidays and essay prizes and climbing trees and swimming in the river. ‘Are you writing in your notebook every day?’ she asks, looking at me closely. ‘You’re the best in school, everyone says so.’ That’s just because everyone else is so lazy. ‘You’ll win the essay competition again this year.’ I shrug, pretending that I don’t care. ‘You should be a teacher, like Miss Iliescu.’ I like this idea, for then I might not have to marry at all. ‘Ms Smith thought you were the cat’s miaow!’

My heart hurts thinking of her open face, always kind, even when the stupid boys fell asleep in her class, or pulled our ponytails, or wrote filthy notes and flew them as paper airplanes, aiming their pointy noses at the back of the girl’s head in front. ‘You have a bright future, Nicoleta,’ she’d said on her last day, before she returned home to America after volunteering at our school for two whole years. ‘Students like you make doing what I do worthwhile.’ My face tingles recalling these words.

Luca climbs out, his body strong and wet. He goes for a run, to warm up, the dog running alongside him. Maria laughs. ‘That dog is in love,’ she says.

2. Sammy

2

Sammy

Since it happened a year ago – I was a late developer, though I’ve wasted no time making up for lost time – the dog up the street won’t stop humping me, Mother looks like she wants to devour me, Dad looks (and goes) away, Brian and the lads want to do me, and men are craning their necks everywhere I go. The other day a taxi driver sped through a red light and almost caused a massive pile-up, horns honking furiously, as he kept his eyes fastened on me. That would be about right really, that I would be the cause of such commotion. ‘Havoc follows you wherever you go,’ Mother says. She seems to think I’m the reason she is the way she is – she wishes she’d pushed me back inside her the minute I slithered out, and demanded I be turned into a boy who would grow into a big strong man to worship the ground she walks on. Instead, she got this awful girl. Sometimes when I see her sitting on her fat ass, glugging her Chablis or her Sauvignon, or worst of all, her Chardonnay, I get the feeling she might open her greedy gob and suck me in, swallowing me whole. I can imagine Luce calling over and seeing my bony body pushing through her jelly belly, elbows and knees jutting through, my voice coming from far away. Luce would cut her open with a kitchen knife and free me.

I hear the doorbell ring: it is my saviour. Mother answers the door, and I can imagine her laser-beaming Lucy with her yellow eyes, her gaze working upwards from her ankles to beneath the hem of her skirt. ‘Hello, Lucy,’ I hear her say. ‘Samantha is having a strop, locked herself in her bedroom, making an awful racket. I’m at my wits end with that one.’ Even though she’s not one to pray, Luce thanks God or the tooth fairy or whatever entity has decided not to land her in this house.

‘Sam?’ I pretend not to hear her, allowing her to suffer the pleasure of Mother’s company a moment longer. Feel it, Luce? I’m hooked up to Eminem on my mobile, on a loop, over and over: Oh where’s Mama? She’s taking a little nap in the trunk. Eminem is the king. He does it better than any of the nubies out there. Mother hates the racket he makes: ‘Angry little man’. Really, Mother. I imagine her going into the kitchen to light a cigarette and suck on a glass of chilled plonk; she’s waving the cigarette towards the ceiling and the ‘strop’. ‘What did I do to deserve this little hussy?’ she says, all teary and bleary. Luce turns one of her special hate-filled stares on Mother, believing for a moment that maybe she possesses special powers and can turn the monster to stone. Instead, the full force of Mother’s toxic gaze is turned back on her and she withers. Poor ole Luce wants to wee and wants to run. She’s momentarily paralysed, standing at the base of the stairs.

‘Go on home now, and I’ll deal with the trollop later on.’

This is it. Some power she never knew she had pours through her. ‘Where do you think you’re going, missy? I thought I told you to go home.’ Luce hears the voice behind her: a voice that is full of swaying and malice, a voice that is saturated with booze. She gets to the top of the stairs and bangs on my door. ‘It’s me, Lucy.’

Mother is mounting the steps behind her and Luce wills herself not to look back, to hold her nerve, not to give up on her best friend. Louder now, ‘It’s Luce’, and the door opens a crack and my tear-stained face – blotchy, bloated and bright red, for full effect – peers around the gap. My arm pulls her in. Her breath is coming fast and shallow. Just from looking at me she seems as if she might faint. Luce hates to see anyone upset, most of all me. Even though I try not to let it in and I’m old enough to know the score, last night’s shenanigans were bad, even by this house’s standards (although I can’t be sure it really happened the way I think it happened, I was half asleep and I’m prone to nightmares and hyper-imaginings and lying, even to myself). Thing is, I don’t like her coming into my room in the middle of the night to stare, or whatever it is she’s doing, and I told her as much. I told her to fuck off and she said, ‘How dare you speak to your mother like that?’ in that haughty injured tone she has, and then I couldn’t sleep and my airwaves closed down and my head sped up and I lay there, rigid and tumbling inside.

‘Come on, Sam, let’s get out of here,’ Luce says. ‘Dad gave me this … so pizza?’ She holds out twenty quid. ‘Let’s get a movie and some grub.’ She notices that I’m wearing new high, high wedges and a short, black leather mini with a tight T-shirt. A present from Brian. ‘Where are you going dressed like that?’ she says.

‘Maximum exposure,’ I say, winking. She knows this particular one – it’s what I say when she asks me why I roll my uniform so high. ‘Don’t you start anyway, you sound like the aul wan below. Come on, let’s go.’

‘Aren’t you going to put some clothes on? Seriously, it’s not that warm out there.’ Her voice is high.

‘Well,’ I say, ‘I’m hot, hot, hot.’

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