legends · 4 min read ·
Orchard Count
A fruit picker's notebook follows the one tree in the orchard that is never picked.
**Notebook of A. Delacroix, seasonal picker, Marlow Farm, Kent. September.**
**Sept 2.** Arrived. Bunkhouse is clean. Forty pickers, mostly from abroad. Team leader is a man named Brannock, who talks as if he's selling something. We pick Bramleys in the old orchard, then Cox. Twelve hours. Paid by the bin. Good money if you're quick.
**Sept 3.** First day. Ladders are long and light, three-legged, the old sort. You lean them in the tree and climb in to the foliage and fill the bag, and the bag is emptied into a bin. A bin is worth nine pounds. I filled seven. The work is easy, the smell is sweet. The apples come away in the hand with a little twist.
**Sept 5.** The trees in the old orchard are enormous. They were planted a hundred and fifty years ago and nobody has pruned them properly since the war. They're twenty feet high, great gnarled hands. Brannock told us there are four hundred and eight trees. We number them with paint on the trunk. I did row 12 this morning.
**Sept 6.** Counted my row again. Twelve trees in row twelve. Rows have between ten and fourteen. Brannock says it's the same every year.
**Sept 9.** Someone's been painting numbers on the trees at night. This morning I found a tree in row 12 numbered 13. A freshly painted white 13. There are only twelve trees in the row. I went to the end, counted along the grass, and there were twelve. Then I looked again from the top of the row, and there were thirteen.
I told Brannock. He said I'd miscounted.
**Sept 11.** The extra tree is there. I've been picking it. It gives the best fruit I have ever seen. Large, firm, rosy, with a smell like honey. I filled four bins from it in a morning. Brannock came round to look and said, quite firmly, that I was not to pick it again.
I said why. He said that's the one we leave.
**Sept 12.** I asked the others. A Polish man called Tomasz, who has come for eleven years, said: "Every orchard has one. We never pick it. It isn't ours." He said that if you took the fruit of it, you would find that you could not stop thinking of it. He said a man had once come back for it every autumn, for years, until it was all he came for.
**Sept 15.** I haven't touched the tree. I walk by it each morning. The apples hang so thick that the branches bow. At night, from the bunkhouse, I can see it faintly, as though the apples give off light.
**Sept 18.** I've started to dream about the taste. A clean sweet crispness, a bite like a window opening. I wake with my mouth watering. I haven't eaten a proper meal in two days. The food in the canteen is all beige.
**Sept 20.** I took one.
I took it at dusk, when the others had gone. It came away in my hand with a little twist. I ate it on the spot, standing, with the juice running down my wrist. It tasted of things I cannot name. Of a long July afternoon. Of a kitchen with a window. Of being forgiven.
It was the best thing I have ever eaten.
**Sept 21.** Hungrier today than I've ever been in my life. I can't think of anything else. I'm out in the orchard before dawn. The tree has dropped three apples in the grass, and I've eaten those.
**Sept 22.** Brannock found me. He looked more sad than angry. He said, "Mr. Delacroix, you'll have to go. It's the rule." I said I'd leave at the end of the week. He said, "No. Today."
**Sept 22, later.** I'm on the bus. I have my bag. I have a taste in my mouth like warm glass. I haven't been able to eat anything since. A sandwich, a bowl of soup. They taste of nothing. The only thing that tastes of anything is the memory.
**Oct 14.** I'm back in the city. I've lost nine kilos. The doctors say I should eat. I do, but it passes through me like water. Last night I dreamed of the orchard, and in the dream the tree was in my yard, and it had grown in the night, huge, laden, with its branches reaching across the window. A woman stood under it with a basket. She held an apple out and said, kindly, in my own mother's voice: "Come on, then. Bring the others. You've already had yours."
**Oct 16.** I went to the window this morning. In the yard of the flats, among the bins and the broken paving, there is a sapling. Thin, no higher than my knee. It wasn't there yesterday. It has one apple on it, small and green, hard as a stone.
I'm going to stay at the window until it is ripe.