I blame myself. When I was pregnant I craved lemons. Ate them like oranges. Perhaps I swallowed a pip, and it perforated my stomach lining, got into my womb somehow, lodged there. The doctors said that’s impossible. But none of this is possible, is it?
She hadn’t long turned twelve. When I went to wake her one morning, the whole room smelled of lemons. It was her, on her breath, her skin. And she was turning yellow.
We rushed her to the hospital. Jaundice, we thought. Something wrong with her liver. Maybe diabetes, ketoacidosis. They ran all these tests. High levels of vitamin C in her blood. They couldn’t explain it. She started vomiting, this sour pulpy stuff.
I stayed by her bedside all night, watching her. It was awful. Her skin went waxy, hard, like a cocoon, and she started to shrivel up. In the morning, where she had been, there was a lemon. Sitting there on the pillow.
I slipped her in my pocket and smuggled her home. Sat in the kitchen, holding her in my hands. Which bit of her was which? I supposed the peduncle – that’s the stem bit where the fruit attaches to the tree – was her bellybutton. That was comforting, somehow. A recognisable part of her. Where she was attached to me, once.
I wondered what the hell to do. Couldn’t stand the thought of her mouldering in the fruit bowl. Pickle her, maybe? Freeze her? In the end I peeled her. I tried not to think about whether she could still feel pain. I took out her seeds, potted them up. They grew, slowly but steadily. I planted them out. Five years ago now.
Look – there, out of the window, at the bottom of the garden. A grove of lemon trees.
Rebecca Pert lives in Gloucestershire with her husband Lewis, son Arthur, and dog Rosie. She is the winner of the Cheltenham Literary Festival’s First Novel Award for her debut novel, STILL WATER, which will be published by HarperCollins’ Borough Press in June 2022. Find Rebecca on Twitter at @Rebecca_Pert and at rebeccapert.com.
Photo by Steve Doig on Unsplash.
