THIS IS A SNAPSHOT of time, a feeling and an uncertain state of mind. The woman is real, although she doesn’t have a name. She ought to because she needs to exist.

It’s not the living, it’s the wondering why and every day is an education.

She buys fruit. Fruit like everybody else at first — apples, oranges, bananas — until she encounters the pomegranate. She has never heard of it before, let alone tasted one.

Bright red hair like the May sun at five in a heat-wave and that fascinating way of walking: propelled past the off-licence by limbs with bearings like a fine Swiss watch.

Exceptional behaviour demands exceptional circumstances. The reason for her being there is that she wants love and not only fruit.

And the reason he sells her fruit and gives no love is his business. Fruit is his business. But you haven’t been introduced to him yet and he may change; every man is capable of change. What can he change? Perhaps not his face, but the way it is perceived.

It’s an electric world and she is full of it and you are not the only one with questions. Look up there. The sky has no corners. Life made it. There’s no place to hide.

So she buys fresh fruit. Apples, oranges, bananas. Nectarines in the summer. Until she hears about pomegranates; sees the word in the solution to a prize crossword puzzle and looks it up in her dictionary because she can’t remember the clue. Before that, she had never heard of them, let alone tasted one.

Bright red hair shining like the May sun at five o’clock in a heat-wave. That lubricated way of moving with the bearings of a fine watch. Scrubbed skin and the perfumes of Europe in even the most secret of places. A real smile for everyone. First call at the grocer’s for a bottle of effervescent spring water, then to the newsagent’s for the paper with the ever pleasant crossword and its reassuring two or three clues left over at the end that she can’t do.

But she’s putting all that behind her now and there’s no looking back. Across the street passing the builders’ full skip and the crushed cardboard boxes and the cabbage leaves in the gutter like pages from abandoned diaries. She thinks this but she doesn’t know how she’s made the connection.

Across the street past the builders’ skip, over boxes and green pages, hair bouncing like fine jewellers’ springs.

Pomegranates are out of season at the time.

The young man at the fruit and veg. shop can’t spell guava and says that the loquats taste like a cross between peaches and apricots or something, but he likes her very much because every day she brings her smile and her hair is like jewelled springs and every day she comes he likes her more.

He is young and rash and not too bright, wears pastel sports shirts (every day a change of colour) and football is his favourite thing, but he means well and has a kind of superficial sparkle which consists entirely of the truth with no artificial sweeteners. His one genuine ambition is to remain alive long enough to experience a spate of that curious breed of Saturday night which has been popularised in song. So far, he can’t call to mind a single one that falls into that category, nor will he ever be able to. For some time, he has had his suspicions that this goes for the rest of us, too.

For a long time — maybe years, it doesn’t matter too much — she buys apples, oranges and occasionally a few pounds of gritty potatoes and goes on her way. He watches things move back and forth into the right places, feeling a faint tingle where her fingers have dropped coins into the palm of his hand and the day follows like ice melting in his faulty refrigerator.

Then she comes asking questions. Have you any pomegranates, she says and he watches her cherry lips so closely that he almost doesn’t hear. Where her skin ends and the day begins there exists a small respectful void.

No, he says, out of season, and to him it comes out weak and squeaking.

When she asks about the guavas he has an idea. But that is another day. And every day is like another and every life passes around her as if she is an obstacle and there is a chaos of movement, bodies on collision course, purposeless and tired.

He took the job at the fruit shop because it was something he could walk straight in to. Like a lamp post. The fruit becomes his way of getting through to her, because she doesn’t only want to eat the exotic berry, she wants to hear about it, too.

She will eye quizzically the laden trays. This fruit or that. He will cut for her a delicate slice of sweet Italian cantaloupe or a crescent of West Indian guava and let her taste it. If he chooses the right piece of fruit, its juice dampens her bright lips or cascades over her chin and she laughs. She revels in sweetness and he feels that he has made her happy and achieved something worthwhile.

It seems as though her eyes have been mined like diamonds under the hard sun at the ends of the Earth.

He does his best to satisfy the curiosity of her palette, exciting her taste buds by allowing her to gorge herself on sapodilla and tire of passionfruit. She sates herself on oblong pawpaws and a plethora of figs. She grows bored with coconut and sick of satsumas. Even the freshness of the Barbados tamarind seems tainted, but she comes back for more.

He discovers something from New Zealand that he can’t spell: green and full of seeds with a texture like banana and a flavour of fruit salad and he calls it feijoas or something. Acerbic physalis in geometric skins, texture like that paper they wrap around oranges before Christmas. She loves them and asks about mangoes.

Persimmons, he tells her, are American date plums, sweet when softened by frost. And then there’s the tree tomato, or tamarillo.

She thrills at watermelon and tangerine, mandarin and honeydew. Green limes and tart grapefruit pucker her lips and bring tears to her eyes. Quinces. Ogems. Ortaniques and pineapples. Israeli galias and sharon-fruit; oriental kumquats; delicate lychees uncurled from their purple armour; fragrant plums and kiwifruit; peeled maracuja, like black pearls, from Africa; Haitian star-apples; custard-apples like bulls’ hearts. He even makes the ugli fruit seem appealing to her.

He shows her a photograph on a yellowed wall-chart in the back-room of the shop, behind empty mushroom boxes and strawberry punnets. A black man’s hand points at a cluster of shiny black seeds inside thick reddish skins that look as though they have burst themselves apart. She is astounded by a caption under the photo, reading:

When akee akee has turned red it is ripe. ‘Jamaica poisoning’, caused by eating the unripe or overripe ‘arils’ (the edible part), can result in death. Eaten with salt fish, akee akee helps reduce the saltiness of the fish.

Within hours of reading those words, she forgets all about akee akee and the faded wall-chart.

She walks by the Grand Union in bad sneakers at dusk; listens for the pull of the water, black as bin bags. Looks in at toothless women old as horse brasses in ochre drawing rooms, net curtains rippling behind peeling sashes.

Catches a cab and rides like a movie star to a far cinema.

There had been a past. Rock-and-roll days and parties and bristle-faced men who took no pride in appearances but were eager to put her on her back and to hell with the consequences until it was all over which wouldn’t ever be long enough. Music spilling out of crumbling flats into summer nights with no sharp edges, too much cheap booze and a lot of stupid mistakes is what she remembers.

There had been a Man. Then, after the hurt and the scars that would never heal but leave no marks, only her again, looking for the snapshots and trying to remember how safe her life had seemed until that moment splintered. There could be a future. Instead, only the present and ‘getting by’. A few badly-paid jobs, working for no other reason than to take care of the rent. Rainy days flowed by, pissed off, not saved for.

At Rembrandt Gardens, a sliver of Westminster Council heaven by the Grand Union canal, the homeless and the causeless gather like stones; on benches to quaff plastic-bottled cider or gold-canned Carlsberg Special Brew and talk that stuff the homeless talk. Empty, unrinsed milk bottles reproduce and litter draining boards, foul-rimmed — worldwide, she imagined. Brave sunrises stain London orange for no one but the better milkmen, a few shiftworkers, the Rembrandt Gardens homeless and the cabbies.

When she had the stamina to question herself about this, her heart left a sour residue. Most people seemed to have a dismal time of it, one way or another, and the gathering of confidence, energy or whatever-it-takes to unravel the conditioning of a lifetime doesn’t come easily. The best she dared hope for was the sort of distraction that would live longer and die with more dignity than a guru.

So she squandered her past in waves of alcoholic excess and lost it in a smoke-screen on the pretext that a lot of people who had hoped for better were doing the same thing.

Let’s get back to now.

On warmer spring evenings between LP sides, she takes the air; to the midnight shop for her favourite chocolate; eyes in at windows for unearthly blue light; illuminated mezzanines, shadows and the pulse of screens in mysterious dimly-lit rooms. Somehow this makes life more comfortable. She is rarely afraid of anything and least of all the unknown, which serves to intrigue her.

She hears her own footfalls between the stately buildings on the crescent, adds her fleeting weight to the scrawled-then-obscured pavement graffiti. Are these her streets? She crosses the canal and meets friends at the Bridge House for a smoky bottled beer and blots out more pain.

At the fruiterer’s, he tries to imagine all the money that has passed across his palm so far in his lifetime. What would he do with it if it came his way again today? A crate of Chinese pears for the lonely woman with the red hair, for starters.

So who says she’s lonely? He assumes too much.

What’s plum-sized, orange-like, with a sweet rind and an acid pulp? He’s tried kumquats already. Could be he’s running out of ammunition.

It seems to him that there should be no life without her, such therapeutic routines have her daily preamble and purchases become. Someone once told him that most people can’t handle change, and they were right. These people may even hate the route that they have chosen and yet changing course hurts worse, because then they don’t know where they are going.

Well, in the course of her buying some avocados one day he finds out that she’s moving to the other side of the river and he thinks that in a city as big as this it might just as well be St. Lucia (home of the spiny-shelled soursop) as Streatham Hill. And, being a man who can’t handle change, it hurts until she throws him her pure smile and asks for seedless grapes and then he knows where he stands again. He feels good. In fact, better than good.

If she had gone without telling him, he would always be waiting for her to come back and ask him if the Spanish strawberries are in yet and if he has any yams. But at least she would have left him some hope. What good is it for him to know that he’s never going to see her again?

Well, this way he can cut her a slice of sweet Italian cantaloupe or, better still, hear her ask for ripe guava in her liquid voice. Offering her a crescent of the right fruit, he watches the juice dampen her bright lips and she laughs as she swallows and revels in sweetness and it’s absolute. Total. Now. He feels that he’s achieved something because he’s made her happy and because it was never about those breathless things that happen between covers in darkened rooms and somehow this is better than that could ever be, because this is his business.

Every day is an education.

She walks away, past the builders’ skip, moving like the bearings of a fine watch, and her perfume fills the space in front of him and he can see her hair bouncing like springs, red and golden at the same time.

There she goes.

And as she goes, sucking a seedless grape, or biting on something sharp and succulent, she thinks to herself: I like that guy. Because she wants to like him. No other reason.

And it seems as though her eyes have been mined like diamonds under the hard sun at the ends of the Earth. Taking her scrubbed skin and European perfumes and secret places back to her topsy-turvy room to drink spring water, try out the crossword puzzle, pack her bags and think again: I like that guy with the fruit.

But she’s put all that behind her now and there’s no looking back. Because she wants to think that. No other reason.

-0O0-

(On Formosa Street first appeared in print in Issue 22, the Winter 1995 issue, of New Zealand’s Takahe magazine. It subsequently appeared in 1997, issue 5, of Medusa’s Hairdo, USA; and Britain’s Story Cellar.)