Chapter 23
In Season
Tariq’s father’s allotment was in Walthamstow, at the end of a long row of plots behind a railway line. On the first Sunday in June it was a riot of green: bean poles, netted brassicas, a water butt with a dragonfly sitting on its rim, and a shed painted a startling shade of turquoise.
“He chose the colour,” Tariq said, apologetically. “He says it’s so he can find it.”
Yusuf Farouk was seventy-eight. He’d been a tailor in Leyton for forty years and still dressed like one, in a pressed shirt and braces even to dig potatoes. He shook Maya’s hand formally, told her she was very welcome, and went back to his broad beans. His eyesight was going, Tariq had explained on the walk from the station. It was macular degeneration, slow and then less slow, and he could no longer read his seed packets or the gardening calendar he’d kept for thirty years in a spiral-bound notebook.
“So I made him something,” Tariq said. “It’s stupid, really.”
It was inside the shed, fixed to the wall above the potting bench at eye height. It was a single e-ink screen about the size of a paperback, in a wooden frame Tariq had made himself. A thin wire ran from it out through a hole in the wall to a small probe pushed into the soil of the nearest bed. The screen showed four lines of text in very large black letters, first in Urdu and then in English.
THIS WEEK Broad beans — pick now. Sow: beetroot, last of the carrots. Soil 16°. Water tomorrow, not today.
“It knows the date, the soil temperature and the forecast,” Tariq said. “And it knows what he grows, because I spent an evening typing in his old notebook. Thirty years of it, everything he’s ever sowed and when, and what came up and what didn’t. So it tells him what he’d have told himself.” He touched the frame. “When he presses the button on the side it reads it out. In his voice, actually. I recorded him saying all the words.”
Maya read it twice.
“How long did it take?”
“Three weekends. Mostly the frame.” Tariq shrugged. “I had an agent write nearly all the software. I barely read it, honestly. I just checked the screen said the right things for a few weeks against his notebook.”
“You didn’t read it?”
“No.” He seemed to understand why she was asking, and smiled slightly. “If it’s wrong, he plants his beetroot a week late. Nobody dies. I know where the five percent is, here. There isn’t one.” He looked out through the shed door at his father, bent over the beans in the sunshine. “Ruth would approve, I think.”
“Who else uses it?”
“Nobody. It has one user. It will only ever have one user.” He said it with quiet satisfaction. “Someone at work asked if I was going to open-source it, and I said no. It wouldn’t work for anyone else. It’s his notebook. It’s his allotment. It’s his voice.” He paused. “Everything else I’ve made ended up as infrastructure for strangers. This is just for my dad.”
Outside, Yusuf straightened up, a colander of broad beans in one hand, and called something in Urdu.
“He says the beans are perfect today,” Tariq translated. “He says tomorrow they’d be too big and yesterday they were too small.”
Maya laughed out loud before she could stop herself. Tariq looked at her, puzzled.
“Sorry,” she said. “There’s a restaurant Marcus takes me to. It’s called Shun. It’s a Japanese word. It means more or less that. The point in its season when something’s at its best.”
Tariq looked at the screen above the potting bench, with its four large lines. Broad beans — pick now.
“Huh,” he said. “Yes. That’s what it’s for, I suppose.”
He walked her back to the station at four, carrying a paper bag of broad beans his father had insisted she take.
“I’ve done something with sweep,” he said, as they crossed the railway bridge. “The public one. I added a section at the top. Before the rules. It’s called Why these rules exist. It’s not instructions for the agent, it’s for whoever’s reading it. It explains that the rules don’t make the agent safe, they make it more likely to be safe, and that you should check anything that matters. And it explains why rule one is rule one. There’s a paragraph about a hospital, not named.” He hesitated. “I don’t know if it’ll help. People will probably trim it.”
“Probably.”
“But it’ll be in the history. If anyone ever goes and looks, it’ll be there. What it was for.” He handed her the bag of beans at the ticket barrier. “Ruth says that’s the most you can do. Write it down, so it’s there when someone finally reads it.”
Marcus booked the counter at Shun for that Thursday. When Maya arrived, there were three of them, not two.
Ruth was sitting at the end of the counter in her dark jacket, very upright, with a small cup of tea in front of her, looking at the kitchen with the same careful, assessing interest she gave everything. Marcus was beside her. Aiko was behind the counter, and the two women had clearly already been talking for some time.
“Maya,” said Marcus. “You’re late.”
“I’m five minutes early.”
“I’m told that’s late, here.” He gestured to the stool beside him. “Ruth’s been telling Aiko about infusion pumps.”
“And Aiko’s been telling me about allergen sheets,” said Ruth. There was something in her voice Maya hadn’t heard before, a sort of wry warmth, as if she’d found someone who spoke a language she’d assumed was dead. “It’s the same thing. It’s exactly the same thing. She wrote it all down as well.”
“I wrote it all down,” Aiko agreed, setting a small bowl in front of Maya. “Then a man in a bad jacket put it in an appendix.” She looked at Marcus without any particular reproach. “He’s been apologising for thirty years. He’s very slow.”
“I’m getting faster,” said Marcus.
“You’re not.”
The first dish was a single spear of white asparagus with a spoonful of something golden and a few grains of salt. “The last of them,” Aiko said. “Next week, no more until next year.”
“Shun?” Maya asked.
“Nagori.” Aiko set a second plate in front of Ruth. “The end of the season. The first ones to arrive are hashiri, the runners. They’re exciting, but they haven’t found their flavour yet. Then there’s shun, the peak. Then nagori, the ones that linger.” She looked at the asparagus. “People pay most for the first and talk most about the peak. I like the last ones best. By then you know exactly what they are.”
The meal went on, the way it always did, without hurry, fast. Maya watched Ruth watch the kitchen. She saw Ruth notice the small movements, the bowls set down a fraction early and the cloth handed across before it was asked for. She saw her understand, quite quickly, what it was she was looking at. Halfway through, Ruth leaned over to Maya and said quietly, “There are two of them. And eight of us. She can see every plate.”
“Yes.”
“That’s the team,” Ruth said. “That’s the whole thing.”
Near the end of the meal, Yuki was at his board on the far side of the kitchen, slicing something long and pale for the next course. Maya saw him stop.
It was a very small thing. The knife had been moving through the fish in long, steady strokes, and then halfway through one of them it simply stopped. Yuki’s hand went still above the board. He looked down at the fish for a second, frowning slightly, as if listening. Then he turned the piece over, looked at the other side, adjusted the angle of the blade by a few degrees and cut again, cleanly.
Aiko, at the other end of the counter, had seen it too. She didn’t say anything. But she looked at Yuki for a long moment, and the corner of her mouth moved, the way it did when she was pleased and didn’t intend anyone to know.
“Was that—” Maya started.
“Yes,” said Aiko. She didn’t explain. She went back to her own board.
At the end, over tea, Maya told Aiko about Ruth’s experiment with the summariser, and the person who read every risk paper by hand each month and wrote one sentence about the worst thing in it.
“I told Ruth it was like ichigo ichie,” Maya said. “That it means you taste it every time.”
Aiko considered this while she wiped her knife.
“No,” she said. “If you tell yourself you’ll give everything your full attention, every time, forever, you’ll have failed by Tuesday. Nobody can do that.” She put the knife down. “Ichigo ichie is smaller. It means this bowl, tonight, with these people. It will never happen again in exactly this way, so you give this one your whole attention. Then you think about the next one when it’s in front of you.” She picked up the last small dish of the evening, a single sweet pink strawberry on a dark plate, and set it in front of Maya. “Your friend isn’t reading every paper there will ever be. She’s reading this month’s, properly. Next month somebody else reads next month’s. That’s how it can be done.”
She went back to her end of the counter.
“Eat it now,” she said. “Tomorrow it won’t be this good.”