Page 25 of Sad Girl Hours
I break away from her, clearing my throat and moving to stand up, stumbling in the long grass. “Come on. We should finish picking our apples so we can get to our next activity.”
“We have another activity?” Saffron also gets up, far more elegantly than I did.
“We do. And the quicker we pick the finest apples that Sizergh has to offer, the quicker we can get to it.”
Saffron sighs, saying airily, “Fine.”
We move through the orchard, collecting an excellent variety of apples, splitting the load between both our bags, Saffron filming clips of the whole endeavour. When we reach the far end where the chickens have gathered just outside their pen, pecking at the ground, I peer into my bag, looking at all the apples we’ve gathered with glee.
“We’ve collected an excellent abundance of pommes here, Saffron.” I do a little goblin dance. “We’re going to be able to get our Snow White on,hard.”
“Snow White made a gooseberry pie in the film,” Saffron says offhand. “If we were to do what Snow White did with an apple, we’d be lying in a glass coffin in the woods waiting for a necrophiliac prince to come and rescue us.”
I slap my knee. “Damn it.”
“What?”
“I can’t believe you guessed our next activity.”
Saffron laughs. “I’m so sorry for ruining the surprise. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me.”
“It’ll take time but I’m sure we’ll get there. You a Disney nerd then? Gooseberry pie is a pretty deep cut.”
“I’m not a Disney Adult or anything,” she says (thank the Lord). “But I did watch a lot of Disney movies as a kid. I was a bit in love with Belle fromBeauty and the Beast. I used to get furious that she chose to marry Prince Adam, supposedly because he was ugly in human form, but in retrospect probably because she wasn’t marryingme.”
“That’s so cute,” I say. “I can just imagine a tiny baby gay Saffron flying into a fit of rage because the beautiful princess was choosing to marry a gross man.”
“It was very dramatic. Not quite as bad as my obsession with Miss Honey fromMatilda, but still.”
“LoveMatilda.” I nod. “I read that book so many times as a kid.”
“It was my comfort film,” Saffron says. “I used to pretend I was Matilda all the time and dream that one day I’d live happily ever after with Miss Honey.”
That thing, the shadow, passes over Saffron’s face for a moment in the silence, before she shakes her head a little and smiles.
“What about you? Any funny stories of child you being queerer than you realised?”
“Oh…” I don’t know what to say.
I guess I always feel like a little bit of a fraud. I know I’m queer in some sense. I make jokes about it with the others all the time when we all get going – Jenna’s our only token straight in the group, Casper being aggressively bisexual and Vivvie pan. I have a vague, innate sense that when I do have a partner in the future they will probably be a woman, but shouldn’t I know more than this? Shouldn’t I have an endless string of gay awakening moments like Saffron?
“Um, not really?” I shrug, desperately scanning my brain forsomethingto say. “Oh, wait! There was my friend Anya in primary school. She was new in Year Two, and we used to spend hours together hiding out and reading and talking about everything. But her parents moved a lot, and I remember in Year Four she told me she was moving to the Isle of Man and I was inconsolable for the rest of the day. Looking back, the amount I loved her was probably not straight behaviour. And nor was thefact that I asked my dads for a canoe for Christmas so that I could paddle over and be with her again.”
“That’s so sad.” Saffron laughs while pulling a sad face. “Poor tragic Nell and Anya, separated by circumstance—”
“And the Irish Sea,” I add sadly, getting on my tiptoes to try to pick a very round-looking pippin.
“I always love things like that,” Saffron says, reaching up with ease to pull the branch lower for me with the arm that’s not holding the camera and filming us. “It’s so funny that—”
“EXCUSE ME!” a voice calls out, loud and clear in the quiet of the orchard.
We freeze for a moment before I glance round, spotting someone in a National Trust branded fleece heading towards us with a mutinous expression.
I turn to Saffron. “Run?”
She nods. “Run.”
Apple-stuffed bags banging up and down on our sides, we flee the orchard past the chickens, through the thatch of evergreen boughs, out into the rockery and back up into the courtyard.
