Love and Oranges

Toni

“This isn’t dark. The sky’s barely purple. Real darkness is purple,” says Greta when I tell her I am afraid of the dark.

I am lying on my front, but I roll over onto my back so I can look at the sky through Greta’s eyes. To me it looks dark, nothing more. “I think you see more colours than other people do,” I say.

Greta puts her ear to her shoulder. I can’t see her expression but I know she is smiling. She likes that kind of compliment. “Other people just aren’t looking,” says Greta and now I hear the smile in her voice too. “Give me your little finger. Go on.” I hold it up. “Most of it’s a sort of rusty orange. Pink at the tip, but your nail is white on the edges, purple at the base. A cherry plum purple. You know the sort. All that shadow around your knuckle. There’s blue in there too and when you flex it like that it goes yellow before it goes white.” I hold my hand against the sky and see only my skin against darkness.

“You amaze me.”

“Being color blind is one of my worst fears. Waking up one day to grayscale.”

I sit up because Greta doesn’t usually talk about her fears. I do. I talk about them all the time. Not Greta. “What are the others?” I say, even though I expect I am pushing my luck.

“Other what?”

“Fears.”

“Oh.” Greta looks down at her hands and I wonder what colours she is seeing and whether she will slap me for asking questions she knows I know she doesn’t like to answer.

“You don’t have to-” I say guiltily, but she interrupts.

“Rape. Childbirth. Losing my mind. Losing you.” There is a very long silence which seems to stretch like skin over bones. “You have thought about it, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” I say. This is true. I have thought about leaving my husband for her since the day that I met her. I have thought about it even more since the day that she asked me to.

“So,” says Greta.

Again, we wait. Two sirens speed fast, rising and falling just out of time, the matching sounds jarring. A boy screams in the distance, a happy scream full of adrenaline. Teenagers playing.

“How can I?” I say, eventually.

“How can you not?” says Greta.

“What would people say?” I ask, and I hate myself for saying it because of the person that it makes me.

Greta puts my face in her hands. “We’ll go to a place without people. Just you, me and the kids. It’s good for kids to see the world. It’s good for you to see the world. I’ll find you a corner of the world where all you can see in every direction is sun on water. We’ll swim naked wherever we go and in winter we’ll keep each other warm with our breath. Say yes. You must say yes to that.”

I stand up because if I don’t I will kiss Greta. “They need to go to school,” I say. “They need to be with people their own age.”

Greta stands up too. “Then we’ll move to Manchester, Birmingham. I’d even settle for Leeds - that’s how much I love you.”

“Lola needs to be with her dad.”

“No.”

I turn away from Greta because I am aching in my stomach. If I had not spent so much time around sickness in the last few months I would’ve called a doctor for an ache like that. “He’s dying, Greta. You should see his skin, it’s the colour of limes. That’s how you’d describe it. They’d put this spit blue curtain around him to hide his shrinking limbs from the families of the other dying men. The other night we could see fireworks out the window that were brighter than his face. And he looked at me so sad and I looked back, all anger. Because here I am, wanting this thing that is bigger than the earth, and there he is dying.”

“Bigger than the earth?” says Greta, who is crying.

“He’s dying,” I say again because after all these are the words I am choosing over ‘I love you’. I put my hand to her face and I push the tears to her hairline with my thumb. She takes my hands away from her face and looks at both of them, then at me.

“I ought to go,” she says. She stands up and rearranges her jumper around her hips. She looks forwards like her eyes are meeting a horizon. Then she starts walking away.

“Wait. Couldn’t you wait? Wait for him to be better. Wait for him to die. Either way I’ll come with you then.”

“I promised myself I would never wait for a woman to be ready to leave her husband again,” says Greta, facing away from me towards the swimming pool. I think about drowning.

“Where will you go?” I ask.

“I’ll see you, maybe,” she says, without moving.

I think about water like a weight on my chest, I think about breathing it in, limbs thrashing. “Tell me where you’re going,” I say over and over again, long after she has disappeared behind the swimming pool, long after the sound of teenagers has died, long after the sky has turned purple.

*

“That is how you lose things,” Greta says to me one day when I drop a segment of orange and do not pick it up until I have eaten the rest. There is juice on my chin. We are in her kitchen. We do not go to my kitchen because my kitchen is not my own, and anyway the light in here is always softer. Greta’s hair looks soft. It is longer than it was when I first met her, and it curls over her cheek. Her hair reminds us that we have been doing this a while.

“What’s there to lose?” I say. “There are orchards of oranges around the world. Imagine how that must smell, Greta. Imagine lying in an orchard of oranges and between you and the sky there’s just orange and green and the grass underneath you is stained with juice.”

“There’s always something to lose,” says Greta.

I am still thinking about oranges. “Brazil. China. Spain. We could chase orchards around the world. Where’s the notebook?” Greta is looking out the window and the back of her head looks strangely shaped, with all that light coming at it.

I open drawers until I find it, and write ‘Orchards of Oranges’ in blue biro at the end of a long list. I doodle an orange segment, looking half at the paper and half at the back of Greta.

“There’s no point writing it down,” she says. “We never leave the house.” Greta turns around and her eyes are glassy. She holds up one hand and her wrist looks very small, bone-like.

I go to her and catch it in the air. “Are you unhappy?”

“I think I will be soon,” she says. “Don’t they ever wonder where you are?”

“Lola’s a teenager. I spend far more time wondering where she is than she does wondering where I am. She won’t tell me the names of her friends. She meets them after school and I don’t know what they do together. Sometimes I drive around Lewisham looking for them. I don’t find them.” I think about Lola’s face which is still stuck between childhood and adulthood, bones and puppy fat creating strange shadows.

“I was never that kind of mother.”

“They’d be friends, I think. Your child and mine,” I say. I imagine a teenager I have never seen with my own.

“Not when you have a husband,” says Greta and Ryan’s face is in front of my eyes. Greta comes towards me. She walks slowly and stands very close to me. I can feel her breath on my cheek. She says, “Will you ever leave him, Toni? Will you, though?”

“I -”

“There’s always something to lose,” she repeats. Then Greta scrapes the orange peel off the side and puts it in the bin.

Greta

I walk away from Toni even though she is calling my name. I walk past the swimming pool which is lit up, all bright and white and blue, against the night. A lifeguard in yellow sits high-up, watching bodies, making sure they stay close enough to the surface. There aren’t many people inside: several people swimming lengths, someone getting ready to dive, two women chatting on the steps with their ankles submerged. One touches the other’s thigh and I wonder if they are lovers, then I realise they are giggling at the lifeguard.

I see queerness everywhere these days. I see Toni everywhere.

I keep walking. I don’t know anything other than that I can’t be here anymore.

I go to Kath’s flat, which we used to share, and call her when I am outside. She opens the door in a blue dressing gown, wet hair down the side of her face. I follow her into the kitchen where she makes me tea. The radio is playing, an old love song that I recognise from my childhood, can hum along to but couldn’t name. When the tea is brewed, we go down the hall and sit on her bed.

“So,” she says to me.

The tea is a Jasmine Green, soft and hot in my mouth. “It’s my heart,” I say.

“It always is,” says Kath. She looks tired, tired out by life and tired out by me. She takes moisturiser off the side table and dots it across her skin, then begins to circle it into her cheeks, her forehead, her chin.

“I think I need to go away for a bit.”

“You know what I am going to say Greta,” says Kath. Her face is shining now.

“This one is different. I really thought -”

“They never leave their husbands. Remember that,” says Kath, who also knows that this is true. “Look, you can go away, disappear until you feel better. But remember that you have a teenager here who needs both parents. Me and you. Come back, that’s all I’m asking. I know you find it hard. But come back.” Kath strokes my face. The first time I fell in love after Kath and I had separated, Kath was not this kind. I had disappeared to Scotland for months when our child was only five, and she was angry. A decade on and Kath has given up on me being dependable. All she asks, each time, is that I come back. I nod. I give her a hug. I make her a promise.

We finish our tea and then I turn out the lights. “I’ll wash up the cups on my way out,” I say to Kath as I close the door.

I know the kitchen well enough not to turn the light on. I feel my way through the space, over tiles and to the sink. The water washes over my hands as I scrub.

“Are you going again, Mum?” The voice comes from behind me as the kitchen light, glaring, turns on.

I shake my head, then I sit down. My fifteen year old sits down too, pulling their legs up into their chest. They look at me. I nod.

“Thought so,” they say. They tug at their ear.

“Careful,” I say. The ears are newly pierced, a weekend trip to Claire’s Accessories that we had taken together two weeks ago. I go to the sink and wait for the water to get so hot I can’t touch it anymore. Then I fill a mug and pour in salt. “Here,” I say. I slide my body behind my child’s and dab around each piercing with a dampened kitchen towel.

“It’s hot,” they say.

“It’s supposed to be.” I am very close to their ear so I speak quietly like they are much younger and I am trying to get them to sleep. “You’ve got to do this every night, remember? That way the skin will heal. Promise me you’ll remember?”

“Yes, Mum,” they say. “I promise.” I stroke their hair. “Plait it?”

I nod into their neck. “How’s school?” I ask as I begin to wind the hair.

“School is alright. I’m thinking about trying out for the football team. They get to wear sports kit in whatever class they have before practise, and if there’s one thing I hate - I mean HATE, Mum - it’s the new skirt length rules. Am I a student or a nun? I might write an article titled that for the school paper. Do you think it’s a good title, Mum?”

“Yes.” I tie a green hair band around one plait and move onto the other side of the hair.

“I’ll have to do it, like, this weekend though, because Mandy Johnson said she wanted to write something about it. But I bet she won’t have a title like that. Will she, Mum?”

“No,” I say. I listen to the way my child says ‘mum’. They always do this, when they know I am leaving. Mum, they say, mum mum mum. They are telling me they still need me. This is always the moment where I think about staying, but there is an ache growing in me like rot. And these things are better dealt with alone. I tie an orange band around the second plait and then wind my arms around their body. “I’ll miss you,” I say.

“Then why are you going?” they ask me.

I kiss the back of their ear and get up from the chair. “Come on, I’ll tuck you in.”

“How old do you think I am?” they say. They launch out of the kitchen and slam the door behind them.

A light is flashing in the stairwell as I come down from the flat. I wonder why it hurts so much to be left. I wonder why I am leaving.

Toni

Material billows around Greta. The smock is long and black (of course) and wide, and filled with breeze as she opens the door to me. She has woollen socks on her feet. Her hair sits just above her ears, shorter than when I last saw her. She leads me down a corridor covered in photographs and into her flat, which is small and covered in colour. There is a purple sofa and a small dining table with yellow chairs next to the mint kitchen. Through a white curtain pulled across the space I can see the shape of a bed, boxey furniture, and clothes hanging.

“Home,” says Greta, spreading one arm out. She makes tea and I touch things (books, a snow globe, long candles that don’t match). Outside the window I can see sky and the top floors of other blocks of flats. Someone on a balcony is watering their plants. A child between their legs is biting a plastic tractor.

When I turn around Greta is behind me. She is holding a mug in each hand and steam rises from both. I take one and realise we are stood very close to each other. “Sugar?” asks Greta. I shake my head.

We sit on the sofa with our knees touching. “It’s lovely,” I say about the flat. “The photos, the colours.”

“I haven’t been here long. A few months. I chose it for the colours. Sometimes I forget how much colour exists in the world. Not here.”

I think about my own kitchen which is beige with a silver hob and black handles on the cupboard doors. We chose it because it was clean and timeless. We said these words to each other: clean, timeless. The salesman told us it would make our home easier to sell. People like a blank canvas, he said. I move closer to Greta.

“And the view,” I say. “The sky.” It is blue today.

“Yes,” says Greta. “Light.” Greta moves closer to me. We both look down at our mugs of tea and move them around in our palms.

“I took the bus here and the light through the front windows was almost blinding. I had to close my eyes, but I could still feel the light on my eyelids.” I close my eyes and feel the tips of Greta’s fingers touch my eyelids.

“Here?” she asks. Her voice is close to my mouth. Her fingers touch my forehead and my temples and my cheeks, down the line of my nose, around my mouth, my ear lobes, my neck.

I open my eyes and I kiss Greta. It is me who kisses her. It is the only thing I can think of to do.

When we open our eyes again Greta stands up. She walks towards the white curtain and holds it open. A bed, a desk, a wardrobe. The walls are white apart from the left wall which is dark orange and green.

“I painted that,” she says.

I touch the wall. I run my hands over the ridges of the paint.

“Come here,” she says.

She takes off my clothes first. I feel her cool fingers on my stomach. Then I pull the smock over her head, and she is only wearing pants underneath.

We stand with our bodies very close together.

Later, Greta has turned small lights on all around the flat as the natural light has faded. We showered earlier, and then had sex again, so our hair smells like conditioner but our bodies smell of sweat. I am running my fingers around Greta’s areolas.

She is laughing at me.

She says it is strange to see a woman my age touch another woman’s areolas for the very first time.

First published in Queer Life, Queer Love 2' by Muswell Press, 2023