Read Online The Apple by Michel Faber - Free Book Online Page A

fiction? There aren’t any!
    She turns her face away from the stack of books and periodicals. She was foolish to buy them in the first place. (Well, granted, a few of them she stole.) What is the point of reading other people’s stories? She ought to be writing her own. Reading, by its very nature, is an admission of defeat, a ritual of self-humiliation: it shows that you believe other lives are more interesting than yours. Sugar suddenly wishes she could scrape her soul clean of all the fictional heroines she has ever cared about, claim back all the hours she has wasted worrying about star-crossed lovers and tragic misunderstandings. All of it is trickery, a Punch and Judy show for the gullible masses. Who will write the truth if she doesn’t write it herself? Nobody.
    And will the portals open , yammers the evangelist,
    To me who roamed so long
    Filthy, and vile and burdened
    With this great weight of wrong …
    Sugar considers hurrying downstairs and opening the portals of Mrs Castaway’s brothel to this idiot. Why not drag her indoors? Introduce her to the smell of semen? Offer her a swig of gin? A generous dose of Christian hospitality.
    She edges back up to the window, peers down at the evangelist, who has paused in her song and stands still, head bent, as if in prayer. In truth, she is bending down to listen to her child. Her child is saying something Sugar cannot hear. The mother hunches down lower, visibly annoyed that the child’s words make no sense to her. The child begins to whimper and sniffle, evidently fed up with standing in the glare and the chill, singing to nobody in an alleyway that smells of fermenting horse piss.
    After several seconds of flustered communication, the mother rummages in her basket and, from under the religious pamphlets, extracts an apple. She offers it to the child, who begins to weep louder. The mother seizes the little girl’s hand and pushes the apple into it, but the child’s grip fumbles – accidentally? wilfully? – and the fruit falls to the ground. At once – as though the impact of the apple has released a tripwire attached to the mother’s arm – the mother slaps the child in the face. The child, poorly balanced, trips and falls.
    Sugar is on the stairs before she has time to think. She’s barefoot, clad in a bodice and rumpled skirt but without bonnet or shawl: barely dressed, in other words. She leaps down the stairs two steps at a time, determined to assault the evangelist, smash her ugly nose, crush her windpipe, break her skull on the cobbles like an over-ripe melon.
    She bursts out of Mrs Castaway’s and out onto the street. The evangelist and the child are gone.
    Sugar makes a noise like a cornered cat. She lurches first in one direction, then another, then teeters around. They can’t have vanished so soon! She hurries from the deserted mews to Silver Street proper, and peers up and down the thoroughfare. There’s a fruit barrow with Fat Meg behind it, and Fat Meg’s dog, scratching himself in the sun. There’s an old man selling shirt collars on a stick. A street-sweeper waiting for horse-turds to fall. Tess, a prostitute from a rival house, struggling to open a stiff parasol. Two swells, striding purposefully towards a cab they’ve hailed. A group of hard-faced, grubby boys in cloth caps. A policeman, watchful for illegal behaviours that have not been rendered invisible by bribery. But no fat matron in a black bonnet, no little girl.
    Sugar stands in the public street, aware all of a sudden that she is barefoot, that the soles of her naked feet are pressed against gritty, probably shit-soiled cobbles; aware that her unbrushed hair is being lifted by the breeze, and that her bodice is unhooked at the back, and that everyone can see. Her legs are trembling with rage and frustration, but they might as well be trembling because she’s just been fucked against a wall. Tess, the rival whore, snaps her parasol open at last and, raising it, notices Sugar at