Januariad

My dad’s friend Justy is in the kitchen peeling a grapefruit for me and a grapefruit for him. He runs a small, sharp knife in a circle around the top, then a circle around the bottom, then levers them off. Next he starts running the knife from the top to the bottom, making stripes. He peels the stripes off. It’s taking forever.

‘Why are you peeling it like that? Why not just peel it like an orange?’ He grins and hands me my grapefruit. I can’t get my fingers through the skin so I bite a chunk off. It tastes disgusting. I get about half of it peeled before my fingers are too tired. By this time Justy is peeling the little white bits off his grapefruit. He takes mine and finishes it with the knife.

‘Mark told me if you eat the white bits they stay in your stomach forever.’

‘That’s not true,’ he says. ‘You’d be full of white bits. They’d be up to your neck.’

‘Why are you peeling yours off, so?’

‘It doesn’t taste great, that’s all.’

The game is that you have to eat the grapefruit without making a face. We both eat a segment at the same time. Justy grins so I grin. ‘Is smiling making a face?’ It isn’t. I can feel me cheeks trying to get away from me. Juice runs down my chin.

He dips his next piece in the bowl of brown sugar on the table. ‘Hey, hey! That’s cheating!’ I shout.

‘So’s talking with your mouth full.’ I dip my third one in the sugar. It’s good.

‘Did I ever tell you about your dad and me swapping fingers?’ asks Justy. I don’t know what he means. ‘It started out with an argument about crossing over plants. We’d seen this article in the newspaper about people making these brand new fruits by combining two old fruits.’

‘What!’

‘It’s true.’

‘Like a melon with a strawberry?’

‘Sure.’

‘Like a grapefruit with a strawberry?’

‘Quite possibly.’

‘What!’

‘It’s true. Although I think that one would taste awful. So your da and I went out to the garden. We wanted to try combining something, so each grabbed a plant. I got a piece of grass, he got a dandelion.’

‘I’d get a strawberry.’

‘Thing is, we didn’t know how to go about genetically combining them. We got into a big fight. I said you’d have to mix them together in the seeds, and he said you’d have to put the plant together. Like, graft the top of one onto the other.’

‘You’re both wrong. You’d need to be a scientist.’

‘You’re probably right. So I get a few grass seeds and a few dandelion seeds and mash them together with my hands and bury them. He goes inside and gets the sellotape, and comes out and sticks the top of his dandelion flower to the bottom of a grass stalk.’

‘What happened?’

‘Nothing happened.’

‘No new plant?’

‘No plant. But it got us reading all about genes and cross-breeding and everything else. Did you know that if you cut a branch off a pear tree, you can put it onto an apple tree and it will still grow pears?’

‘What!’

‘It’s true. Horticulturalists do it all the time. It’s called grafting.’

‘So Dad was right.’

‘Well, not really. You’ll still just get pears and apples. No new fruit.’ He’s finished half his grapefruit. Still no faces. ‘Anyway, your da comes in one day and says “What if you could graft bits of people to other people?” After we talked about it for a bit it seemed like a transplant, maybe. They were already putting people’s kidneys in other people at that stage.’

‘Like in Fair City?’

‘Yeah, exactly. Well that night we went out to the shed, and we each cut off the tops of our little fingers with a knife like this.’ He holds up the fruit knife. ‘Then he stitched his onto my stump and I stitched mine onto his stump. That way we figured no one would be losing out.’

I look at his hand on the table. There’s a thin scar running in a circle around the top of his pinky finger. And the tip of it does look like it’s a different colour. It’s a bit whiter than the rest of his hand. I try to remember if Dad’s hands are that white. ‘I don’t believe you,’ I try.

‘Suit yourself,’ he says. ‘It only took about a week to heal. We both told our mas we’d cut ourselves opening a tin of dog food.’

‘But that would mean that’s Dad’s fingernail!’

Justy grins as he polishes off the last piece of grapefruit. No faces. ‘If you don’t believe me, you know where to look.’ I check the kitchen clock. Dad won’t be home from work for two hours.

‘I don’t believe you.’