Catherine Kidd

Scales of an Orange

Seen through a bus window they are as startling as a colony of anemone, and as bright, piled in their wooden trough between steppes of other, greener fruit. But this is far too far away to touch them, their skins only appearing wet through glass, through rain, through glass again.

The space between a self and those spheres is intimate and remote: they become one's own heart when held in the hand, while there behind glass they are sold by the pound like lobsters or bullion.

I could not be the one employed to name their colour, as an object becomes its name and then becomes invisible. Naming the colour is naming the fruit: that particular fruit.

To eat one perhaps is to un-name it. An orange is held in the hand, rolled between the palms until tiny flakes of wax glitter on the skin like the scales of a goldfish. Then the hand is scaly too, an orange hand, sharing name sharing scent and substance.

But I am conscious of an indiscretion here: the orange is smaller than I am, and I press it through language having little choice. But its skin feels to my mouth as familiar as that inner arm, soft beneath the curved shoulder of some beloved one who sleeps--an arm unconsciously straying beyond the sheets and hovering there in the dark, becoming as cool as the room.

Blind fingers know the features of the fruit, how quickly it warms to the touch. They know, they are perversely drawn to the stumpy green callous of stem pried away to open up a pale and floral hollow, a socket, a follicle. The orange is mammalian like me. It has relied upon maternity, which is older and constant. Skin-pockets of pulp like wet tissue paper, the eyes or eggs of tropical fish, the buds upon a tongue. A skin-sac holding eggs: it is as intimate as this.

Some men have sexed the orange out of hunger, out of incompleteness calling it resilient perhaps. Once a man said to me You are resilient. I loved and hated him, knowing that resilience requires certain conditions for its flowering: a certain tawdry openness to fall or be plucked from the tree in the first place.

But once another man sat by a lake, played sax in the morning and said An orange is not a fruit you eat, you have a relationship with it. But it was over too soon, things being what they were, too much in the sun and too ripe.

And as with many delicious things there is a perverse compulsion to devour it too quickly, its juice already trailing down the fingers and under the nails as it clings to itself in the hand. Regrettably more time is spent in retrospective contemplation of the pale exposed undercoat, too soon left lying dishevelled and exhausted like a crayfish picked clean. Or a starfish, spread open on a window-sill and left to dry, even until its scent is gone.