Granddad’s Apples

A story...

‘It was the apples that saved me, you know.’

My grandfather - self appointed storyteller.

He’d said it as I walked in the door like it was a ‘Hello’. I remember I’d eyed him for a second. It was his way with me then, in that time when he was still living with us. He’d throw some obscure statement at me, then wait and see if I’d bite.

You see, back then, when he first told me the ‘Story of the Apples’, I was pretty arrogant; I thought I knew it all and that everyone else was either ignorant or backward. Of course, it was really that I thought I ought to know it all, and too scared to admit I didn’t. Granddad knew that.

‘Cut him some slack.’ Was my dad’s advice when I’d complained about how much the old man teased me. ‘He’s an incorrigible, devious, truth manipulating, sly and possibly evil-minded old sod – or so he always insists.’ His serious expression cracked and laughed at his father’s joke (he laughed just like Granddad too), then he smiled at some unspoken memory. ‘He was a great dad, you know,’ he went on, before adding in a kid’s sing-song voice: ‘My dad’s makes up better stories than your dad does!’

‘Maybe,’ I’d replied in my clever way. ‘But I don’t think mum would agree.’

But he was right. Granddad was good at tales. He told us all stories; as often as we’d stop long enough to listen - not that we’d all got the same ones though. No, we each got different types. For my mum it would be funny tales that cheered her up when she came in from work at the children’s home (the kids there ran her down); my dad got exaggerated reminisces from his own youth that usually embarrassed the hell out him, but kept him young he said; and my little sister got exciting fairy tales about knights, princesses and, for some strange reason, evil accountants. And as for me? Well, Granddad had it in his mind to play this little game with me: he’d tell me some far-out story, something that sounded like complete make-believe, but was, he always swore, the gospel’s truth. My job was to try and prove it false. The thing was, I had to do it before the end of the story - I couldn’t come back later and pick him up on something. Once the story was told he wouldn’t say another word about it. Only that it was up to me to figure it out.

So, down I sat in the armchair next to him. In a kind of a flop; like I was doing him a favour by giving him someone to talk at for a while. He just grinned – knew me too well. He knew I couldn’t pass him and his stories by, not even if the house had been burning.

‘Go on then,’ I gave.

‘Well…’ He started slow - the bit where he would let the line run out, like a wily old fisherman. ‘My brother and me were lying on top this old hill. A big grassy knoll. We were twelve, twins, and it was our birthday. We’d been up to some silly game I don’t mind now, and we were taking a breather. Just lying there watching the sky, not a cloud in it, dreaming and such and…’ he paused for effect before rushing out the next bit. ‘And then there’s this thud.’ Boom! He bangs his hand on the chair arm, making me jump. ‘Big and loud it was, like the sound of a ball in a glove. Made us both leap up and look about. And it didn’t take long to find out what it was, because there was nothing up there but us.’ He paused, looking away inside himself, as if remembering.

My cue. I knew it. He knew I did. I sighed.

‘What was it, Granddad?’

He spun on me, eyes gleaming and bright. ‘The apples boy! Weren’t you listening. I said it was a story about apples.’

No doubt my face showed my annoyance, but he just ignored it.

‘Yeess,’ he goes on, steady again now. ‘Two apples, they hit the ground together, and with some force. But that’s not surprising, considering how far they’d fallen. You see they hadn’t come from a tree, as there was none up there for them to fall from.’

He stopped again, a long pause. I froze. Another bait. I knew he was waiting for me to ask another apparently sensible question that would somehow turn out to be stupid.

‘Somebody threw them?’ I said slowly, checking the logic even as I spoke.

He looked at me; I at him. It was like an old western stand-off.

‘Ah boy, you’ve got to listen more closely, if you’re gonna to catch me out.’ (He made out he was disappointed – two faced bugger). ‘I told you we were on an old knoll, and we were up and looking about as soon as they hit. We’d have seen anyone before they’d get more than a skip away. No lad, there wasn’t no one there to throw them, and no trees for them to fall from neither. So they must have come from the sky – there can’t be any doubt about it.’

‘Passing plane,’ I said. ‘They were thrown out a passing plane.’

‘Not bad,’ he said, feigning generosity. ‘But no, that’ll not do. There weren’t that many about back then. Besides, we’d have seen it, or heard it at least.’

‘Freak weather – some weird cloud action or something, sucked them up from an orchard somewhere, and dropped on you and your brother.’

String of tuts, head shaking as if sad. ‘Now didn’t I just say it were a clear day?’

‘But Granddad, apples don’t just fall out of the sky!’ I cried out. I was puffed up and indignant, and must have been quite a sight.

‘That!’ he exclaimed, excited. ‘That was just what I said. Yes, I was the miserable one back then. Suspicious of everyone, cynical of the world and moody with it. Moved around in a great show of self-importance, slouching here, flopping there.’

He’d paused for a bit, looking at me with his mischievous expression – until I realised that I’d been unconsciously straightening myself up in the chair while he’d been speaking. I got the point all right, and wondered if God had put him on earth just to torment me.

‘My brother, on the other hand, was as bright as the Sun itself. Happy go lucky, he never had a bad word to say, nor a fear to run from. Used to annoy the hell out of me, it did!’ My Grandfather chuckled to himself, before falling into a fit of coughing.

‘So what did your brother reckon they were?’ I asked when he was okay again.

‘Well as I said, they came from the sky. So, he reckoned that as there was nothing up there but the sun, that must be what they were. Sun Apples.’

‘Sun Apples!’ I cried. ‘Granddad, I know you like to kick to death every sacred cow going, but there’s no way I’m buying a story about apples coming from the sun, let alone falling all the way from it.’ I looked at him with a determined face. ‘Anyway,’ I added, ‘they’d have smashed if they’d have fallen that far.’

‘They’d have smashed whatever,’ Granddad said. ‘If they’d been normal apples that is,’ he added, all mysterious. ‘But like I said, there was nothing else up there. That’s why my brother was so sure they was special sun apples.’

‘And how then,’ I came back, ‘did they get through space?’

‘Oh lots of ways we probably know nothing about. Maybe the space twisted and curved like Einstein said. And they didn’t have to travel at all, and were just sort of dumped here.’

‘What?’

‘Or maybe,’ he went on, making himself sound sinister. ‘There’s some kind of weird, alien type of thing, out there in space, that turned itself into a couple of apples when it got close to earth. There it is, imagine, flying through space and it passes by the earth. ‘Hello,’ it thinks, ‘nice looking place.’ And it wants to land. Well, maybe it’s a shape-shifting alien and has no shape of its own. It needs a shape so it listens in to all our minds, searching for what we’d expect to see falling from the sky. And there you go, what is it we all think of when we think of things falling? Apples. Thanks to Newton, remember?’

‘Granddad?!’

‘Or,’ he went on, ignoring me. ‘They were something else altogether…’ he trailed off meaningfully.

‘Which means that you have no idea what, right?’ I challenged.

‘Well, not then I didn’t, not when I was just a know-it-all-no-nothing little sprog who thought life was all about MTV, Money and Macdonald’s.’

‘And you know now, do you?’ I almost growled.

He grinned at me; his eyes twinkling as if there could be no doubt about his knowing. ‘Let me tell you what happened first,’ he said instead. ‘My brother, well, he jumped straight in. Takes a huge bite and starts chomping away. But not I. I didn’t want to know. It was evil, I told him. It wasn’t natural, I said. Apples don’t just fall from the sky, let alone come from the sun. But like I said, I was cynical back then, you see. No imagination. So, I don’t want to know, and told my brother he’s was fool and all sorts of other nasty things.’

It had come out in a stream, his eyes switching from bright and awed, to piecing and hard (making me sense the difference between how he viewed himself and his brother), but now he paused, tutting to himself and remembering. After a moment he turned to me again, speaking now in a softer tone. ‘The truth of it though was that I was cross and twisted up inside. I was scared and that I didn’t want to say so; I was always scared then, you see, and I hated being so.’ He chuckled. ‘You know, right then I’d would have strangled God himself for putting me on the earth, if I could of got my hands on him.’

Despite the laughter, his eyes were serious. Whatever garbage he was giving me about apples, he meant what he was saying now. In that moment I saw him sort of afresh. He seemed to want to share something important with me, and the gesture, a kind of vulnerability in a way, got to me. For the first time perhaps, I was really listening.

‘After that I went from bad to worse,’ he went on. ‘I couldn’t do anything right. I didn’t seem to have any confidence and everything I touched went wrong. I was a mess at school, no drive, no ambition.’

He stopped again and looked distant, shaking his head with pain in his eyes. Then they snapped back to me, burning bright again, and he went on.

‘But my brother on the other hand. He had it all,’ he said it powerfully. Not like he was cross or against it in any way; it was more as if he was proud. ‘Amazing it was. His life went so sweetly, and whatever he wanted he got. As for whatever he didn’t want, well, that somehow always seemed to move away. He knew just where he wanted to go and he always got there.’ He laughed again. ‘We were complete opposites!’

‘But you’re not like that now,’ I said, trying to understand. ‘I’ve never known you like that. What happened?’

‘My brother! You see, just because everything went right for him, it never made him cruel or arrogant. He was always kind. Well, it turned out he’d kept the other apple. And when we reached our twenty-first birthday, just before he died, he gave it to me. I was at the bottom then, you see. I had next to no friends and never before felt so alone. But somehow he understood it more than I did, and knew that by then I didn’t have enough bile left in me to care what happened, that I wouldn’t refuse anything. So, that was when he gave me the apple – a birthday present he said, one that had always been mine and he’d just been looking after it for me until I was ready. Well, I was surprised, not just because it was still perfect, after all them years, but because I’d gotten so used to having nothing – nothing that was really mine.’

Granddad grinned. A really happy one.

‘So I ate it. And my brother watched me do it, smiling with his eyes so kind, despite all the things I’d said to him over the years. And as I ate I felt what he’d been talking about, felt the thing that had made him what he was, and me what I was. And I knew I’d be all right.’

‘What? What was it?’

‘Ah, now, if I could tell you that so you’d really know what I mean, believe me I would. There isn’t any gift I’d rather give you. But I can’t, so maybe the gift of it’s going to have to be in the truth of what had happened to my brother just before those apples hit the ground. Something I never knew myself until the moment he gave that apple back to me, all those years later.’

He paused, watching me close. But somehow, I knew this time it wasn’t a cue; nothing for me to try and guess. This time, in a funny way, I knew he was on my side.

‘You see, just before they landed, my brother had been lying there thinking about life and how wonderful it was – he saw it like that, you see, always did – and he’d said to the sun, in his head: ‘Is it real, is it really the way I’m seeing it?’ and then he asked for a sign to tell him if he was seeing it right. So, when the apples hit a second later, his certainty in life, his knowing that it was all right, well, it went right off the scale! He didn’t care where they’d come from, how or nothing else. He was the happiest bloke in the world because they came right when he’d asked. From then on there wasn’t anything that could shake him.’

‘But where did they come from?’

The old man grinned. ‘I don’t know, I never did. My brother, bless his faith, believed they came from himself. That his mind made them up with all its happiness, joy and his wanting to know. And then he told me, that though he’d asked for the sign for himself, he knew that when two came, that it meant one of them was for me.’

He paused, looking at me softly.

‘And that was what did it for me, son. That’s what saved me. You see, as I stood there listening to him telling his story, eating my apple while he spoke, I knew what he meant. He meant that I was there as well! I mattered too. That in his eyes I was as much as he was, and son, my brother was a lot. He was everything!’

My grandfather’s eyes were gleaming as they remained locked to mine for a few more seconds. Until finally he sat back in his chair, and second or two later he started to drift of to the sleep that came to him so often in his last days.

I sat thinking about him and his brother, wondering what it meant. When I heard him start to snore, I rose quietly and slipped away.

Later, when I told my father about the story, he listened carefully. His eyebrows rose often, but he said nothing. I’d thought he’d been as puzzled by the tale as I was, but now, years later, I realise it was because he knew, all through my telling of it, what the old man had been really saying. You see, they both knew what I was going through, knew about the doubts and insecurities that made me so grumpy all the time. My dad could see what his father was doing for me with all those tales that rocked my watery, fear-filled certainties. He knew the old man was trying to bring me down to earth with his gentle humour; down to where I could build a foundation of my own. But when he heard the apples story, well, then he finally knew how much the old man loved me – I’d have seen that in my Dad’s eyes that night, if I'd known what to look for. But when I’d finished re-telling the story he didn’t say much, except this:

‘You know he’s giving you a bit of himself, don’t you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, I’ll put it this way. Your Granddad was a lonely kid, his own dad left when he was young, his mum drank. He was mostly on his own.’

‘But what about his brother?’ I interrupted. ‘He had him, even if they didn’t get on.’

My dad smiled. ‘That’s where you’re wrong.’ He said, then chuckled a bit. ‘In fact, that’s where you could have got him too, with that silly-story game he plays with you. You see, your Granddad made up his brother to be the ideal he thought he wasn’t – he put all that was good into him, and left himself with all the bad. But he didn’t need to have done that; it was all in his head, you see.’

He paused, watching me frown just like Granddad did, before adding, ‘You see, your Granddad, he was an only child.’