‘Oh yeah! I lost a tooth.’ She wiped her mouth and continued: ‘The day after I got an apple for pudding, a toffee apple, you know. Even though my mouth was really sore.’

‘Could you eat it?’

‘I licked it.’

Carral took another bite of her Honeygold apple. Her teeth met resistance in the flesh, and I heard them push further in.

‘There’s a worm that eats apple cores, and sometimes drowns in fruit juice,’ I said while I crumpled up the empty apple bag. A whiff of apple rose from the bag and spread through the room, and I imagined that the smell seeped into the concrete walls and boards, into the kitchen chairs and the cutting board.

‘So far I’m good,’ she answered and smirked with apple juice bubbling between her teeth.

When she chewed I could hear the sound of the fruit’s flesh dissolving into foam.

I didn’t know then that the hiss and bubble from her mouth would soon be heard in other places, in ways I didn’t yet understand. An apple is never just an apple. Carral peeled a Honeygold, and long round coils of peel curled and fell on the kitchen table. I took a bite of a Bloody Ploughman. Even the flesh was red.

‘Bloody,’ Carral said.

‘Nice colour,’ I answered.

‘It looks sinful. I bet that was the apple Eve ate, you know, in the Bible, the forbidden fruit.’

‘Might be. But I’ve eaten some too now. Does that mean you have to kick me out of your house?’

I held the half-eaten apple out to her. She burst out laughing and pointed out at the factory: ‘Does this look like Paradise or what?’

It was evening. Carral chitchatted and leafed through a glossy magazine while chewing on her thumb nail. The apples rubbed gently against each other in the cupboard and in the bowl. The glass shards in the chandelier clinked. In my biology compendium I read a chapter on extinct sea creatures. The TV was muted and flickered behind my back, reflected on the railing. And all the while I could hear this hiss and bubble that I still didn’t understand, as if we were far down on a quiet seabed and listening to wind howling on the surface.

When Carral went to bed, I heard fabric against skin and fabric against fabric as she undressed behind the wall on her mezzanine. She’d left her thick book on the kitchen table. It had a faint fruity smell.

‘Good night,’ I said.

And night came and went. Next morning it was raining, and I woke up to the drumbeat of raindrops on the roof, the pattering noise never quite keeping a rhythm. Through the drumming something else could be heard: apple skin against wood, rolling through the kitchen, back and forth, like eggs ready to hatch.

The Fruitpearls

The Fruitpearls