by Lucy Wood
She went back upstairs and stood in her bedroom. It was small and dark. On one shelf there was a row of porcelain animals – deer and horses and owls – that she had kept from when she was a child. There was also a small trophy which wasn’t engraved and she couldn’t remember what she had won it for, or if she had even won it at all. She made the bed. She picked up her hairbrush and sat on the edge of the bed and started to brush her hair. She thought it had become paler: she was thirty-six and she thought that over the last few years it had become paler. She could never shift the stale bread and onion smell that working at the café left in it. Once in a while, if she looked at a magazine in a waiting room or saw an advert on TV, she would think about dying it, but she never did. She brushed her hair and tried not to think about it changing to stone, how heavy it would get, how it would drag on her neck and then clog up like it was full of grit, knitting together and drying and splitting and matting. She brushed and brushed her hair.
She was watering the plants and moving them into the warmest places in the house when the phone rang.
‘Hi Rita,’ Danny said. ‘You enjoying the snow?’ He always sounded nervous on the phone – Rita could tell that he was drawing stars all over the notebook he kept on the living-room table. He had pages and pages of stars.
‘It was nice the first day,’ she said. ‘Now I want it to stop.’
‘Yeah, me too. Now everyone just wants it to stop. Except the kids, of course. No kid ever wants it to stop. It wreaks havoc, doesn’t it? Snow wreaks havoc.’
‘It can do.’ She waited for him to say what he was ringing for. Probably the snow had stopped something of his working. They had broken up five years ago but before that they had been together for eight. They still stayed in touch and saw each other now and again. Eight years was a long time; too long just to stop seeing somebody completely. It didn’t seem right to stop seeing somebody completely. They still went out for dinner together on their birthdays. Sometimes Danny would stay over, and in the morning they would take it in turns to shower. Danny always took too long and Rita would sit on the bed listening to him using up all the hot water and singing the long, strange ballads he always sang.
‘It can wreak havoc with a lot of things, can’t it?’ Danny said again. ‘Cars, for one thing. How many cars do you know that work perfectly when it snows?’
‘Mine works OK,’ she told him.
‘I just think that as soon as it snows, bam, most cars just give up.’
Rita let a moment pass. ‘Your car won’t start.’
‘Not really,’ he admitted. ‘I’d take it into a garage, but it’s a Sunday.’
‘Don’t you have breakdown cover?’ she asked, already knowing he would have forgotten to renew it. ‘Do you need it today?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘It just gave up. But listen Rita, don’t worry about it. I’m sure I can sort something out.’
She looked around the kitchen. Maybe she could spare an hour. An hour wasn’t such a long time and it was only half past ten.
‘I’ll take a quick look,’ she told him.
Her own car started up fine. She poured hot water over the windscreen and then scraped the rest of the ice off. As she got in, icy feathers started to grow back over the glass. She drove slowly past the banked-up snow. Town was mostly empty – a few shops and cafés open on winter hours, a walker looking at the derelict cinema. There were snowmen everywhere, most of them with arms or eyes slipping off and their bodies tipping over. She passed a snowman wearing glasses, its head tilted back so that it was staring up at the sky.
As she got closer to Danny’s, she saw that the weathervane that always pointed the same way had been taken down and a house had been painted yellow. Danny still lived in the flat they had rented together. They had lived there a long time and sometimes she missed this part of town. Afterwards, Rita had rented a one-bedroom house, and when the landlord put it up for sale a few years later she bought it. It wasn’t the house she had expected to buy, it was cold and small and didn’t let in much light, but it was what had come up.
She drove slowly down her old street, waved to someone she used to know. She pulled into the road outside the flat and parked. The snow in the road was packed down hard. A cold wind blew in off the sea. Her feet felt heavy and cold and her ankles were stiff. Stone grated inside her boots. The front steps were icy and she went up them carefully and rang the bell. Danny opened the door and smiled. He was tall and had to stoop in doorways. ‘I’ve just got to find my coat,’ he said.
She went into the hall to wait. It always smelled musty and garlicky. There was the broken tennis racket that had been there when they moved in, and the junk mail piled up next to the shoes and coats. Danny had recently been made a partner in the advertising company he worked at and now there were shiny black shoes, the kind he hated, among all the trainers.
‘I’m still getting post for Miriam Burns,’ he said. He pointed to a pile of cellophane-wrapped magazines on the floor. ‘I get at least two every month.’ When they had lived together, almost all their post had been for other people: repossession warnings, final bills. ‘Return to sender,’ Rita had written on everything.
Danny put his coat on over a faded T-shirt. Rita recognised almost all of his clothes, but they were starting to look slightly too small on him. He should get some more but he hated getting rid of anything, used to stop her throwing away flowers until the stems were bare.
‘I can’t stay long,’ she said.
They went out to Danny’s car. He got in and tried the engine. It didn’t make any noise, not even a splutter. He kept trying but nothing happened. Rita tried the ignition herself then went round and opened the bonnet. Everything in there was cold and icy. There was ice around the dipstick when she checked the oil. Jump-leads wouldn’t start it. She shook her head. ‘It’s not going to start,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to wait until tomorrow and get towed.’
Danny tried the engine once more. ‘I have to be somewhere this afternoon.’
‘Can’t you put it off?’
He stayed sitting in the driver’s seat with the door open. Rita watched the shape of each breath appear as it hit the cold air. Finally he got out of the car and slammed the door and she followed him up the steps to the flat.
He went through the hall and into the living room. Their old sofa was there – she’d let him keep it – and the one blue wall that Danny had started painting then given up. She had a sudden memory of Danny painting blue on her cheek and then kissing her up against the wall but she pushed it out of her mind. ‘I knead you,’ he used to say, rubbing her shoulders, her stomach. She pushed it out of her mind. She had to get going; she had a lot of things to do. She made a list in her head: lock the windows, phone work, move the plants. Or had she already moved them?
‘I had a viewing,’ Danny said. ‘For a house. I can’t make it in the week.’ He kept his coat on. He rearranged a pile of newspapers on the table. There were the pages of stars.
‘You’re moving?’
‘Apparently it’s got loads of space. I need a bigger place. I’ve got this new job now and I should move somewhere bigger.’ He stacked and restacked the newspapers. ‘It’s a good deal, better than anything I could get in town. I mean, Jesus, I’ve been renting this place for ever.’
Rita listened, knowing already that she would take him to see the house, knowing that Danny knew she would.
It was only twenty minutes away. It would be an hour and a half round trip maximum, Rita thought as she and Danny got into her car. An hour and a half max and then she would go home and sort everything out. She’d be back by lunchtime. She needed to be back by lunchtime. The bottoms of her legs had started to feel cold, as if she were standing in the sea. Soon the cold would rise up until it felt like she was wading knee-deep, waist-deep, shoulder-deep in water.
‘Apparently it’s a good deal,’ Danny said again as Rita started the car. ‘Better than anything I could get in town.’ He turned the radio on and when ther
e was nothing playing that he wanted, he rummaged around in the glove box and found a couple of the old mix tapes he used to make. He liked to listen to Chopin next to the Eagles. He put one on and leaned back.
Houses and fields went by.
‘You need to take the next left,’ Danny said after a while.
They drove slowly for another mile but no left turn came up. They passed a house with washing out on the line, all the sheets frozen stiff and leaning out at angles like roofs.
‘We’ve missed it,’ Danny said after a while. ‘We’ve missed the turn.’ He looked round and back at the road. ‘There should have been a left turn.’
‘I didn’t see a left turn,’ Rita said. She pulled in and turned round. There were tyre marks all over the snow and it was easy to see the places where others cars had skidded. All around, the fields were covered in snow and the trees were edged with snow, so that the trees almost disappeared into the sky.
They drove back the way they had come. After a while, Danny pointed out a turning and they took it. It led on to a single-track road. It hadn’t been gritted and the wheels spun on ice. Rita changed down to first gear. She really didn’t want to get stuck out there. So far they had been driving almost an hour.
There was a cluster of stone houses and a church and they parked at the side of the road. The church bells chimed the half-hour. They got out of the car. Snow slid off a tree and on to the pavement.
‘The estate agent said the neighbour would let me in,’ Danny said. He checked that Rita’s door was locked; she’d only forgotten once but now he checked every time.
‘Which neighbour?’
‘It’s that house,’ he said, pointing. They walked towards it and waited at the front, clapping their hands together and breathing on them. A dog barked over and over. Danny paced around then walked down the street, looking at the other houses. ‘I’m pretty sure it’s this one,’ he said, coming back. He always started off certain, then slipped quickly into uncertainty. He hadn’t brought the address. They went through the front garden. There were frozen pieces of bread mixed in with the snow.
A man came out of the house next door holding a key. He was wearing a dressing-gown and slippers shaped like wine bottles.
‘Are you two here for the viewing?’ he asked. ‘I’m surprised you made it in this. I wasn’t expecting you.’ He handed Rita the key. ‘I didn’t know her very well myself,’ he said, nodding at the house. ‘I did ask if she needed anything once and she told me she didn’t. Maybe I should have taken round some milk, or the paper, but she said she didn’t need anything.’ He looked at them as if he wanted some kind of answer, his eyes blurry as old glass.
‘Thanks,’ Danny said. ‘We’ll drop them back.’ Rita gave him the key and he unlocked the door and let them in.
The house was freezing. At first glance it looked completely empty but there was a doormat at the entrance and an umbrella leaning against the wall.
Danny hesitated by the door. ‘Do you think she died in the house?’ he asked.
‘Why would that matter?’ Rita said. She walked past him and went through the hall and into the living room. She wondered if they should have taken their shoes off but didn’t go back. All the time she was thinking: lock the windows, phone work, move the plants.
The living room was big and cold. The windows looked out over the churchyard. All the gravestones faced the same way. There was a boarded-up fireplace and a wooden chair in one corner of the room. They walked round it once, looking at the skirting, the ceiling. The floorboards creaked. The ceilings were high and there was a light socket but no bulb. As she was walking round, Rita thought about the position of the room, how much it would take to heat, but then she stopped herself; it wasn’t her house, she didn’t need to think about those things. She couldn’t imagine Danny sitting in this big room, though, with cold light streaming through. Their old sofa. She stopped herself thinking about it. She leaned against the stone wall. She felt the stone in her legs reaching out towards the wall so that for a second she couldn’t tell where it stopped and her legs began. She moved away. She watched Danny. He ran his hands around the window frame. Bits of the wood were flaking off.
‘Do you think these would be draughty?’ he asked. ‘They feel draughty.’
Old windows like that were always draughty. ‘Maybe a bit,’ she told him.
‘Only a bit, though, right?’ Danny said.
Just as they were going out through the door, they heard a scuffling, scratching noise coming from behind them. Rita went back into the room. There wasn’t anything there and the noise stopped almost as quickly as it had begun. It was probably just snow falling off the roof.
Danny was already back in the hall. ‘There are three bedrooms,’ he said. ‘It’s a good deal for three. Shall we look at them first, or the kitchen?’ He had his hands jammed in his coat pockets and his shoulders hunched up.
‘Three bedrooms?’ Rita asked. Then after a pause she said, ‘The kitchen.’ The kitchen was an important room. It was where children would be, if there were children. She wondered if there would be any salt left behind in a cupboard.
‘You could put a huge table in here,’ Danny said as soon as they went in. ‘One of those huge ones with about ten chairs.’ He stood back as if he were already looking at it.
‘So you could make cheesy beans for everyone?’ Rita said. She laughed but Danny didn’t laugh. He could probably make more things now. The house was quiet. Outside, someone called out. A bird landed on the windowsill, scrabbled around, then flew off again.
Danny was looking out of the window and on to the back garden, which was covered in a thick layer of snow. There was a stone wall around it. The snow was smooth with no footprints. A picnic table was up to its ankles. As they looked out, a few small flakes fell slowly, lightly, like spiders.
‘It might start snowing harder soon,’ Rita said.
They went upstairs. Rita’s feet were getting heavier and harder to lift. It took her longer than it should to go up the stairs. Halfway, she heard the scratching noise again and she paused for a second to listen. It didn’t sound like snow that time.
Danny was looking at the bathroom. Rita glanced round the door, thinking about the snow. There was a towel that had been left behind next to the sink. It was exactly the same one that she had, blue with white stripes. For a second, she thought it was hers.
‘The tiles in there remind me of something,’ Danny said, coming out. He took a few steps down the hall and then went back and looked in again. ‘The colour.’
Rita paced outside the bathroom. ‘It might snow harder soon,’ she said.
‘It’s not meant to,’ Danny said. ‘I heard it was going to stop.’
In the first bedroom, there was a pair of slippers under the bed. Danny looked around the room, but his eyes kept shifting towards the slippers. There was a hush to the house which was more than the hush of an empty house – it was the hush of somewhere almost empty. There was a sweet smell in the air, as if someone had just moved through it wearing perfume, or someone had just taken away a vase of flowers. It felt like, at any moment, they would meet someone coming round a corner or see a hand opening a door.
‘You like built-in wardrobes,’ Danny said. ‘They’re practical, right?’
Rita was over by the door but she came back to look. ‘That one smells of camphor.’
‘Camphor? How do you know what camphor smells like? No one knows what camphor smells like.’ He leaned right in, half expecting heavy fur coats, the smell of snow in the distance, such a strong image he often mistook it for his own memory.
‘It smells like camphor,’ Rita said, knowing that part of him was pushing through fur coats. She circled the joints of her knees, trying to keep them moving. They were aching and stiff. She had to concentrate hard on where she was, because more and more often she found herself back up at the cliffs with the other standing stones, watching the buzzard, watching the clouds fill up with snow. Her knees felt like they
had a blood-pressure band around them, slowly getting tighter and tighter.
‘This wardrobe is probably about as big as our old bathroom.’ He closed it.
‘Bigger, probably,’ Rita said. It was so cold in the house. She pulled her coat tighter.
‘There’s a leak in it somewhere.’
‘Wardrobes don’t leak.’
‘In the old bathroom,’ Danny said. ‘In the corner.’
She remembered fixing a leak in the old bathroom. She had plastered over the crack but the plaster had probably weakened by now. She would have to show Danny what to do about it, or maybe just tell him to ring the landlord.
‘You should look at the other rooms,’ she said. She waited out in the hall. After a while, she heard the scratching sound start up again downstairs, louder this time. It sounded like something shuffling backwards and forwards across a room.
She went downstairs and into the living room. She waited a while. The noise was coming from the fireplace. She knelt down and tried to move the board. It was wedged in tightly. She heard Danny come down the stairs and into the room. ‘I need you to help me move this.’
‘What are you doing?’ he asked.
‘Moving the board.’
He came over and leaned down and hooked his fingers over the top. Rita dug a finger into a gap in the side and they pulled. The board came loose and swung open, grating against the stone.