Pyrus Communis

I remember vividly the night on which Gabe correctly predicted his own death, though I have never told anyone about it.

My grandmother’s birthday fell on 27 November. She was a quiet, humble woman - certainly not the type to relish flattery or attention – but every year she threw a party at her modest house as an excuse to ensure that the family got together at least once annually.

It wasn’t a large family. She had two children – a son, and a daughter – my mother. Each of her children married and had two children of their own – myself, my sister and our two cousins Oscar and Gabe.

So, most years – though there were exceptions – it was a modest party of nine and regardless of complaints of busyness; travel – whatever circumstances befell the attendees on that particular year – nobody was ever absent from one of my grandmother’s birthday parties.

This annual event had been happening since before I was born. And so to me it was a deeply engrained, intrinsic, inevitable occurrence – like Sunday, or Christmas. Throughout my childhood, the parties were a source of uninhibited anticipation.

That stretch of the year from September through until Christmas is tinted with a sort of magic that does not occur at any other time. It is a contradictory season in some respects – a fresh start – a pair of welcoming arms promising endless possibilities. It’s sudden chill-air snaps wake up after the languid haze of the summer months. And although it signifies a degeneration – inevitable death – it seems to serve as a stark and necessary reminder that life is simultaneously cyclical and chaotic. It seems – in its sly, creeping darkness - to give a potent and poignant reminder of life’s transience – and therefore perhaps to provide a regenerated appreciation for it after the seemingly endless light and apathy of summer. It whispers abruptly, open your eyes.

Partly for these reasons, and partly because of Grandma’s parties, it has always been my favourite time of year.

Regardless of the day of the week on which they fell; how far we would have to travel; how early we would have to leave the next morning – I always looked forward to them with a prickling delight. There was a warmth about them that can only be felt by a child in the company of loving family. Despite internal complaints, particularly by the older attendees who had to book days off work or navigate endless motorways in the dark - everyone harboured a sense of reverence toward the event, as though it held some peculiar significance.

In this regard – my grandmother’s life – though modest – was happy. She succeeded where so many others seemed to fail – in maintaining a thread of connection through the people in her life she held dearest.

Never one for ceremony or formalities – the food served at the parties was always rustic and simple. My grandmother knew that she would never be able to enjoy the company if she were too concerned with playing the role of host, or cook – so she would prepare a spread of food beforehand to put out just before her guests’ arrival.

Though simple – Grandma had good taste and it was always indulgent and delicious. I have tried several times to replicate this supper during my adult life, but – like a paint-by-numbers Van Gogh; or a pianist trying pay due homage to Chopin – though everything was technically in its rightful place, all of the ingredients sourced diligently – there was something lacking; that elemental je ne sais quoi that emerges from the layer within us not consciously accessible – Freud’s id, for example - or perhaps the soul.

The meal’s composition rarely altered and it consisted largely of freshly baked sourdough bread; thin slices of gammon she prepared herself from a cut of meat procured at the butcher; an array of cheeses; homemade pickles – chutneys, of course, and every year a large fruitcake that she would make with care weeks in advance. All of this would be accompanied, inevitably, by bottles of her sweet, home-brewed perry – usually from the previous year’s batch.

Yes, there was a magic in this yearly meal that perhaps came from that deep, secret place within Grandma – or perhaps from the pears.

At the bottom of the garden at my grandmother’s house, stood a large, lone pear tree that each year bore the fruit that went into the sparkling wine, tarts and jams. She cultivated them; harvested them; poached them; boiled them. Strips of candied peel went into the cake; the flesh was boiled down into sweet, sticky chutney, or carefully fermented in brown bottles of varying sizes for that yeasty, sweet, intoxicating drink, ready to be served the following year.

The pears from this tree were not like the pears you might see at the local grocer. They were dark, misshapen and ugly – bulbous and firm – ungainly – and quite useless unless you knew what to do with them. My grandmother learnt – during the course of a life time – how best to temper this wild, obnoxious fruit and it’s inimitable, harsh sweetness infiltrated into the bloodstream of our family; it’s distinctive flavour evolved into something mythical and enduring.

Grandma may have been an unassuming, humble woman, but she was shrewd and wise and sharp, like autumn and the pears themselves.

Within the family – as I mentioned – there were four of us in the third generation. Throughout the strange and unpredictable, meandering circumstances of life, we have shared a bond – a deep-rooted understanding; an idiosyncratic worldview – that can never be replicated elsewhere in life’s corridors. I love each of them dearly; and that peculiar, steadfast channel runs generously through us all – but I always had a particular affinity with Gabe – my eldest cousin.

Of course grandmother’s parties weren’t the only place the four of us saw one another. Throughout childhood there were visits to each other’s home; days out – even holidays. There were spats of time in which we lived in the same town – the same house even.

We always had a distinct bond, the two of us. We existed in the same, strange plane: a world of stories and adventures that bore very little resemblance to – and paid very little heed to – the real world. All children are like this to a degree – but we seemed to be more fanciful than most; and neither of us ever really grew out of it. In fact – when we reached adolescence we descended further into it – our imaginations ran riot and the whole world was filled with a sort of manic and insatiable energy. The world was tumultuous and unstable and Gabe in particular felt it keenly. I recall – hazily - an evening drinking cheap port in his room by candlelight. He played Tchaikovsky’s sixth symphony – his Pathétique - on vinyl and wept. I think he had a preference for the Russian composers because they seemed to harbour the same sensitivity to the magnificence and ugliness of the world as he did. It was so many years ago, but I can remember from those nights Tchaikovsky’s fearless swells – his unromantic and unapologetic bursts of rage; terror; panic – the most potent of human sensations expressed without apology – and in dispersed with outpourings of celebration; impossible beauty and trickles of elusive, seemingly ironic appreciation – a distinct brand of emotional nihilism - and the way it tore through Gabe with the power and ferocity of a storm.

At Grandma’s birthday parties, the two of us stumbled into a particular annual tradition that seemed to hold a special sort of significance. Each year, when the adults of the party were satisfactorily settled into their wine and conversation, Gabe and I would retreat to the garden and sit on the bench under the pear tree and talk – on some occasions through the whole night. This began when I was fifteen and allowed to sample the perry for the first time. Gabe was two years older than me and had been indulging in this strange elixir for a couple of years already.

Looking back now, I can see clearly how unusual that strange drink was. It was headier than wine – heavy, sweet, light, tart altogether. It was yeasty and intoxicating and its effects were all at once more potent and more subtle than the wines, beers and liquors which are served at pubs or lined up on shelves in supermarkets. It was more like a potion that distorted – shifted – just slightly – the way one experienced the world when they drank it. At the very least, that is how I remember it.

That year when I was fifteen – just before Gabe came to live with us – that was when the tradition started – and it lasted until his death ten years later.

With my first glass – it was always served in those distinctively shaped wide and shallow coupe glasses – I felt an adolescent, misplaced sense of conceit and supposed maturity. By the time I had finished my second – about an hour later – I actually had matured. That was the strange effect of my grandmother’s perry – it had the same influence as Tchaikovsky, and autumn – it opened up the universe somehow in a grave new way – as though you were both a part of it, and detached from it. I remember that feeling so distinctly – it was like I could see everything.

I looked around Grandma’s large living room. She was brushing crumbs off the white tablecloth on the table where the supper had been laid out. My parents and my uncle and aunt were seated on mismatched chairs arranged at the edge of the room and were engaged in a discussion about premium bonds. I couldn’t hear exactly what was being said but occasional bouts of hearty laughter arose – although I couldn’t understand what could possibly be so funny. Oscar and Harriet, my sister, had gone upstairs to play dominos a while beforehand. And where was Gabe?

‘Grab your glass, and get your coat.’ His voice whispered from behind me, like he could read my mind. Feeling rather bemused, and driven suddenly by a strong compulsion to get away from that living room, I complied.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked as I threaded my arms through the sleeves of my jacket and wrapped my orange scarf around my neck.

‘Just to the garden,’ he replied. ‘I can’t stand listening to this chatter for one more second.

‘Mmhm,’ I affirmed, feeling quite the same.

Clutching his glass in one hand and an extra bottle of perry in the other, Gabe opened the back door in the kitchen that led out into the garden and indicated for me to step through it. It was already dark.

Side by side, guided by the small string of lights my grandmother had strung on the pear tree, we walked to the end of the garden.

Underneath the tree, which had become the central feature of the garden – and a kind of shrine – sat the wooden bench that would bear witness to hundreds of our conversations over the years.

Gabe took my glass and his own and topped them both up from the brown bottle. He then took a packet of cigarettes from the breast pocket of his beige jacket and proceeded to offer me one. He lit his own.

‘What if they come out?’ I asked, wide-eyed.

‘They won’t.’ He replied with confidence. So I took one. ‘I’ve never told you this,’ he continued, exhaling his lungsmoke, ‘but I know things.’

I laughed.

‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘I know things. It’s difficult to explain.’

‘What are you talking about? Prophecies? Visions?'

‘Not exactly, it’s rather more nuanced than that.’ He half rolled his eyes and I felt a little foolish.

‘Well… what then?’

‘It’s more like an odd instinct about things. Like how I know that your parents, or mine, or Nana won’t come out here tonight for us. Or that I won’t ever live to see the age of thirty.’

I was used to Gabe talking in this way, but there was something different in his voice that night. He wasn’t being his usual, obstinate self. He was serious.

I said nothing and we continued to smoke our cigarettes in silence.

***

Almost twelve years later, I received the call.

The family were distraught. After all, Gabe was only twenty-seven – he had his whole life ahead of him.

Only to me, he hadn’t.

While I felt the loss keenly – and I did – I did not mourn in the same way as the others. His death to me seemed like an inevitability. We had talked about it many times since that night when I had my first sample of that sweet, yeasty, alluring pear wine. Gabe did not experience life in the same way that others around him did, and he did not fear death, either.

The circumstances around his death were ambiguous and ultimately ruled by the coroner as ‘unexplained’, which seemed to me to be morbidly appropriate.

To this day it is ambiguous whether Gabe prophesied his own death – or whether it was a self-fulfilling prophecy borne from the inexorable stubbornness of his will.

It is ambiguous whether there was something in those sweet, ugly pears that shaped and bonded us all – or whether they were just pears.

It is ambiguous whether my Grandma was some sage, matriarchal, sha-woman – puppetmaster of the whole family - as she seems to be in my memory - or whether she was just a mother and grandmother who found a way of getting her family together once a year.

There is ambiguity in autumn; ambiguity in Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique; ambiguity in childhood memories; ambiguity in death.

Gabe lived and died in acceptance – celebration even – of this ambiguity. And it always seemed to me that he was the one person who got life right.

And I choose to believe that it was, in fact, all of this ambiguity that made those pears so distinctively, compulsively succulent.