The Apple by Michel Faber

Author:Michel Faber
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2006-12-01T06:00:00+00:00

A Mighty Horde of Women in Very Big Hats, Advancing

My father made half of me. Exactly half, my mother said. She didn’t specify which half, so for some time I imagined my head, arms and chest to be the handiwork of my father, who was the artistic type and might therefore have enjoyed the challenge of crafting my facial features – especially my eyes, which seemed to me miraculous bits of apparatus. As for my mother, I imagined her taking responsibility for my lower torso, legs and genitals. (There was nothing sexual in this, I hasten to add: I was only seven, and you must remember that it was a different era.)

My misunderstanding about the manufacture of children might have become one of those beliefs that we can never quite unbelieve, one of those daft convictions whose last chance to be removed is overlooked one Tuesday morning in April and which consequently burrows deep into our brain. But it was not destined for that. My mother and I were very intimate, you see. We had long conversations each day, about everything. I suppose I must have made some remark about the half of me my father had made, perhaps speculating about the authorship of my belly-button, because I remember her giving me a corrective lecture about ingredients. Each human person was a mixture of ingredients, like a soup, she said. The mother provided half of them and the father the other half. Then they all got mixed up and cooked and the result was the child, in this case me.

To be honest, I rather preferred the mistaken version of the story. I didn’t like to think of myself as a bag of stew, an envelope of pale skin with all sorts of dark, gooey stuff slopping around inside. It was undignified, not to mention alarming. I was an adventurous boy, and had spent my first six years in the wilds of Australia, crawling over stony terrain, falling off logs, rolling around in dirt, and generally taking advantage of my permissive familial circumstances. I knew all about scratches and bruises, but the thought that a chance injury might spill out my entire contents: that was something else.

Looking back now, I can see that the spring of 1908 was not an innocent season like the ones before it, but a conspiracy of alarms, a concerted assault on my childish self-confidence. The news about my soupy ingredients was just one of many intrusions into what had been, until then, a life of serenely self-absorbed play. I suppose the time had come for me to learn that I was not exempt from History, but mixed up in it.

You know, because I was a child in what’s now called the Edwardian era, and because I was born the day Queen Victoria died, I always think of the Edwardians as children. Children who lost their mother, but were too young to realise she was gone, and therefore played on just as before, only gradually noticing, out of the corners of their eyes, the flickering shadows outside their sunny nursery.

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