QUINCE

QUINCE by Chris Green

Giles Riddler tells me the quince tree blossoming in the front garden was the deciding factor in them buying the house. Had it not been for the quince tree, the Briggs and Mortimer board outside the 1930s semi-detached villa in Heisenberg Avenue might have gone unnoticed. Giles and Audrey apparently were out walking their labradoodle, Hendrix. They were not looking for a house.

‘Look, Giles,’ Audrey had said. ‘What a lovely quince tree!’

‘Indeed! Cydonia oblonga,’ Giles had said. ‘In such a beautiful sunny position. Exactly what we need. Let’s buy the house.’

‘Just like that?’ Audrey had said. Although I have not met her in person, I have formed the opinion that Audrey is in many respects more circumspect than her husband.

‘Absolutely!’ Giles had said. ‘It’s a sign. In this uncertain world, you have to be able to spot these things. And this is a first class quince tree.’

Their house in Cat Stevens Court was on the market the following day along with an offer of £400,000 on Heisenberg Avenue. Giles tells me they had not even looked around the new house when the offer went in. There was just no need, he says.

Their offer was accepted. The Cat Stevens house too sold in a day. It was as easy as that.

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I first came across the word, quince years ago in Edward Lear’s poem, The Owl and the Pussycat along with the mystifying word, runcible. Something about dining on mince, and slices of quince, and eating it with a runcible spoon. Mince presumably refers to sweet mince and not spag bol mince and quince is a fruit used primarily to make jelly. A runcible spoon is probably a spork.

Edward Lear was born in 1812 and was the youngest surviving child of twenty-one. There was a high infant mortality rate back then. Average age expectancy at birth in cities was nineteen. A precocious child, Edward first became celebrated as a teenager for drawing parrots, before turning his hand to landscape painting, travel writing and composing music. Although nonsense verse is what he is mostly remembered for, this was apparently just a sideline.

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I am a writer of experimental fiction, trying, like the paperback writer in the Beatles tune to get my new novel published. Like the one in the song, it’s a thousand pages give or take a few. Unlike Paul McCartney’s scribbler, I do already have a large and varied body of work. Sometimes I give readings at Nena Emanuel Care Home. One of the residents, a Hilma Faraday, tells me she grew up with Edward Lear in North London. They used to play in the streets of Holloway together and Eddie talked endlessly about the land where the bong tree grows and told her the tale of the Quangle-Wangle’s Hat. By my reckoning, this must make Hilma around two hundred years old, yet she doesn’t look a day over eighty. It’s a strange world. Things are not always what they seem.

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I was only familiar with Heisenberg as the pseudonym chemistry teacher, Walter White chose to do his drug deals in the cult television series, Breaking Bad but I discover that Heisenberg here is a reference to physicist Werner Heisenberg, the fellow behind the uncertainty principle. The uncertainty principle states that the more precisely the position of a particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa. Walt’s choice of the name Heisenberg is by all accounts a joke by series creator, Vince Gilligan, aimed at fans who might remember the uncertainty principle from the long afternoons in the lab for double Chemistry.

And then there’s the Observer Effect. The act of observation makes changes to a phenomenon being observed. This is often the result of instruments that, by necessity, alter the state of what they measure in some manner. Reality is hard to pin down. If you take this to its logical conclusion nothing can be verified.

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Writers sometimes find they have time on their hands. In order to get myself out of the house, now and again I help out at my friend, Max Brooks’s bookshop. Brooks Books stocks a comprehensive range of reading, the type of books you may not find at Waterstones. Giles Riddler is a frequent visitor. He comes in for a cup of coffee and likes to spend an hour or two browsing the shelves. Sometimes he makes a bulk purchase. A week or so ago he ordered a dozen copies of Costa Rican novelist, Quince Duncan’s, A Message from Rosa. Today he is asking for Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater. He wants fourteen copies and we only have one on the shelves. While I look it up on the catalogue, he asks about the new Edward Lear biography that is due out. I don’t believe there is a new Edward Lear biography due out. He might be referring to the new Paul McCartney biography, but we don’t stock that. I humour him. He tells me about the yellow fruit on his tree. I may be wrong but I think I notice a thread running through our conversations. Although I can’t quite put my finger on it, there does seem to be a recurring theme.

Giles goes on to say that the quinces from the tree ought not to be ripe yet. It is only August. Quinces should not be ready to pick, he says, until September or October. Yet they are. He has one in his pocket to show me. He takes it out and puts it on the counter. I can’t help thinking that it bears a remarkable resemblance to a jar of sweet mince. I don’t know what to believe, anymore. As the great Jorge Luis Borges says, ‘reality is not always probable, or likely.’ Could we possibly be living in a hologram?

© Chris Green 2016: All rights reserved