Read Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit for Free Online

to a cold trolley. The castors squeaked and the man who pushed me went too fast. Corridors, double doors and two pairs of eyes peeping over the top of tight white masks. A nurse held my hand while someone fitted a muzzle over my nose and mouth. I breathed in and saw a great line of water-skiiers falling off and not coming back up. Then I didn’t see anything at all.
    ‘Jelly, Jeanette.’
    I
knew
it, I’d died and the angels were giving me jelly. I opened my eyes expecting to see a pair of wings.
    ‘Come on, eat up,’ the voice encouraged.
    ‘Are you an angel?’ I asked hopefully.
    ‘Not quite, I’m a doctor. But she’s an angel, aren’t you nurse?’
    The angel blushed.
    ‘I can hear,’ I said, to no one in particular.
    ‘Eat your jelly,’ said the nurse.
    I might have languished alone for the rest of the week, if Elsie hadn’t found out where I was, and started visiting me. My mother couldn’t come till the weekend, I knew that, because she was waiting for the plumber to check her fittings. Elsie came every day, and told me jokes to make me smile and stories to make me feel better. She said stories helped you to understand the world. When I felt better, she promised to show me the basics I needed to help her with numerology. A thrill of excitement ran through me because I knew my mother disapproved. She said it was too close to madness.
    ‘Never mind that,’ said Elsie, ‘it works.’
    So we had quite a good time, the two of us, planning what we’d do when I got better.
    ‘How old are you Elsie?’ I wanted to know.
    ‘I remember the Great War, and that’s all I’m saying.’ Then she started to tell me how she’d driven an ambulance without any brakes.
    My mother came to see me quite a lot in the end, but it was the busy season at church. They were planning the Christmas campaign. When she couldn’t come herself she sent my father, usually with a letter and a couple of oranges.
    ‘The only fruit,’ she always said.
    Fruit salad, fruit pie, fruit for fools, fruited punch. Demon fruit, passion fruit, rotten fruit, fruit on Sunday.
    Oranges are the only fruit. I filled my little bucket with peel and the nurses emptied it with an ill grace. I hid the peel under my pillow and the nurses scolded and sighed.
    Elsie Norris and me ate an orange every day; half each. Elsie had no teeth so she sucked and champed. I dropped my pieces like oysters, far back into the throat. People used to watch us, but we didn’t mind.
    When Elsie wasn’t reading the Bible, or telling stories, she spent time with the poets. She told me all about Swinburne and his troubles, and about the oppression of William Blake.
    ‘No one listens to eccentrics,’ she said. When I was sad she read me
Goblin Market
by a woman called Christina Rossetti, whose friend once gave her a pickled mouse in a jar, for a present.
    But of all her loves, Elsie’s favourite was W. B. Yeats.Yeats, she said, knew the importance of numbers, and the great effect of the imagination on the world.
    ‘What looks like one thing,’ she told me, ‘may well be another.’ I was reminded of my orange peel igloo.
    ‘If you think about something for long enough,’ she explained, ‘more than likely, that thing will happen.’ She tapped her head. ‘It’s all in the mind.’
    My mother believed that if you prayed for something long enough it happened. I asked Elsie if that was the same thing.
    ‘God’s in everything,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘so it’s always the same thing.’
    I had a feeling my mother would disagree, but she wasn’t there, so it didn’t matter.
    I played Ludo with Elsie, and Hang the Man, and she took to reading me a poem just before she left at the end of visiting time.
    One of them had these lines it it:
    ‘All things fall and are built again
And those that build them again are gay.’
    I understood this because I had been working on my orange peel igloo for weeks. Some days were a great disappointment, others, a near triumph.