Figs by Scott Lavene, a story exclusively published inside HERO 32.
Scott is an Essex-born singer-songwriter who recently released his record, Disneyland in Dagenham.

I met Debbie on Romford Market, late in the summer of 2006. I’d been away from Essex for 8 years, wandering in and out of bands, jobs and derelict houses, during which time I’d learnt to speak French, gut roadkill, make fine sauces, write songs and drive 7.5 tonne tipper trucks. What I hadn’t learnt was how to deal well with breakups so I was back in Essex, licking my wounds after splitting up with a woman I’d once imagined dying beside. Most days I was hurt, skint, sick, drunk and doubting the point of existence so I did what any good boy would do and moved in with my mum who was happy to make me tea and meat pies, run me baths and even pay for me to go to the dentist to replace a tooth I’d knocked out. She also set me up with a job on Romford Market four days a week, selling fruit and veg alongside a friend, a wiry man called Dennis with ice blue eyes and a roguish charm who’d had the stall for 30 years though all he’d ever ingested were burgers, sausages, brown sauce, cigarettes and lager.
I enjoyed the job, mainly bagging up the things Dennis handed me. He was the crowd pleaser, the frontman, hollering out prices and offers with his booming cockney growl, flirting with pensioners and mums, his eyes sparkling, the fruits and vegetables always fresh and well priced. Dennis bought me Wimpy for lunch every day and though I was lonesome and restless I loved being on the market, especially the end of the day with a few cans to sip on the quiet set down, with most of the public gone and the late shadows falling, long across the cobbled square.
Early one morning in mid-August, it’s quiet, the sun is high over Debenhams and Dennis has gone to the bookies, when a woman with no shoes or socks on drifts up to the stall, her bare toes light on the cobble.
“Do you have any French figs?”
“Ours are Spanish, I think,”
She has long curly brown hair tied in bun on her head, a bindi on her forehead, smooth dark skin, a loose flowery dress, sweat across her collar bones.
“Did you know that figs survived the annihilation of the dinosaurs?” she says, eyeing the Spanish figs.
“So did frogs,”
“Really?”
“Apparently.”
She takes out a tatty notebook, opens up a page and writes down, ‘frogs.’
“Why are you writing down frogs in your book?”
“It’s a list of things I might take,”
“Take where?”
“To another time,”
“Pardon?”
“I’m building a time machine.”
It’s a hot day, too hot for the lady selling chocolate. I glance behind for her stall but there’s just a bare metal frame then look back at the woman, straight in the eyes. She looks serious. Like she’s not joking at all. She doesn’t look mad or drunk.
“A time machine?”
“Yep,”
“Can I ask why?”
“I’m just so tired of the modern world,”
“Me too. How many figs would you like?”
“A dozen please.”
I bag up her figs and she pays for them and then walks off.
“Wait,” I shout. She turns around and walks back slowly.
“Do you want to go for a drink later? I finish at 3.30,” I say.
She smiles, takes a fig from her bag and hands it to me.
“See you in the Red Lion at four,” she says, turning with a flick, walking in slow motion, slim ankles and broad shoulders.
At four I enter the warm musty pub filled with cigarette smoke and bad carpets, pool table rattle and dart board thump, and there sat at the bar is this strange but glowing time traveller, or perhaps fresh out of the nut ward? Either way, she’s my kind of woman.
I sit down on a stool next to her. She’s got a pint, half drunk, an open bag of beef crisps.
“I’m Debbie,” she says. “Pint?”
And we drink pints and we smoke and she gives me a wrap of speed to dab in the toilets and it makes me skittish and thirsty and talkative and I ask her questions and I watch golden dregs slip slowly down the inside of glasses and she tells me that she was once a child genius with degrees in chemistry and physics by age fifteen and almost a PhD in astrophysics at twenty when suddenly her dad died, the man who’d pushed her young educational success. Once he’d died Debbie had no motivation for learning so began playing bass in a dub band and selling strong, home made amphetamine. She then spent three years in Northern India working as a mountain guide providing hash and snacks for Western tourists, but one night she was attacked by an Israeli man so came back to England riddled with panic attacks and depression.
After two hours we tire of the pub as it has become filled with men with suits and big voices so we leave, walking close, bumping shoulders, to a shop and then sit outside on the empty market with a bottle of Asti and a fresh packet of red Marlboro, the stalls all gone, leaving behind the faint waft of fish, five pound notes and leather handbags.
“Why do you want to go to another time?”
“I’m tired of all the choices.” Debbie lights up a new cig and hands it to me, takes a swig of Asti.
“I want to go to a time when it was just plain tea or coffee. I want less TV channels. I want to go to a time when only ex-cons and sailors had tattoos, when you could smoke cigarettes on trains and planes and in hospitals. I want only two or three choices of pasta, rice, milk, cheese and bread. I want a milkman. I don’t want to know everything. I want to wonder. I want no internet. I want to want things. We have everything we could ever need but we are unsatisfied. We are lonely. We are fat pigs. And I want to leave. I want to go to 1982.”
I swig some Asti, a long pull, a foamy and vinegary gulp that makes me cough.
“Can’t you just go to Scotland?” I say.
“No. I’ve tried to get lost. It’s not enough,”
“So you’ve a time machine?”
“Nearly,”
“Where?”
“In my garden,”
“Can I see it?”
“Maybe.”
We drink the Asti and we walk through an underpass away from the market down the high street and she takes my hand, which sparks and sizzles with the essence of Zeus. We skip past the spot where a bad fountain once stood, the fountain where punks drank cans and spat on the floor but helped out old ladies with their shopping. We skip past the spot where Our Price once stood, past Wimpy where I kissed a girl for the third time, past where the Canon cinema was, now an expensive block of flats. You couldn’t escape the waft of the brewery when I was a kid, a thick and noxious smell I didn’t like back then but now miss. We stop in the Railway pub by the station and drink a few pairs of whiskeys and I tell Debbie about a night when I was 17 and someone brought an axe into the pub and started chasing another man around.
After dark, Debbie drives us out of Romford, me in the passenger seat with a bag of figs on my lap, and it might be the booze and the speed but Romford feels like California with the sun falling plump in front of us, throwing roses at our feet. Driving below the speed limit out and out to Upminster and down stony country lane, up a track to a small rundown house where we fall into the house and she shows me her records and she shows me a couple of machines that look like toasters but we are not ready for toast and we drink like desert children until 2am when she shows me kindness with two valium and I sleep the best sleep fully clothed. The next morning I don’t ask about the time machine so instead we eat boiled eggs in an easy silence with bird song sneaking through the open window and after, she gives me a lift back to the market as I’m late for work. She takes my number and she tells me that the sky has no ceiling and promises to call but she never does and everyday for a month I keep an eye out for her and I wonder if she is in 1982 or if she’s just at home dabbing wiz or if, actually I am a figment of my own imagination, a made up fig man, a balladeer, a thin beam of market square sun.

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