Cold Enough to Freeze Cows

by Lorraine Jenkin

  She drummed her fingers, made a start, deleted it, wrote a bit more and sat back in her chair to contemplate. There was another tap at the door. What was it now?

  “Yes,” she barked. If her mother was disturbing her again to ask what flavour crisps she wanted with her sandwiches, she would be really cross.

  Instead a dark curly head peeped round the door.

  “Dad!” She smiled.

  “All right, love? Still working?”

  “Well, an assignment to do, but I’m at a bit of a loss of how to start.”

  “Silent Witness is on!” he goaded. “I’ll get your mother to put the kettle on again, shall I? Go on, leave the assignment – you can finish it another time when you haven’t had such a long day: you must be exhausted.”

  Louisa deliberated, looking at the single sentence on the screen in front of her. My name is Louisa Harrison and I live with my parents in Anweledig and I work in the local bank. Then she looked at the face at the door, smiling down at her.

  “Actually, looking at it, I think I’ve finished already!” she said, retied her dressing gown, pulled on her slippers and followed him downstairs to the lounge.

  The porch door of Cwmtwrch Farm banged open and a figure wrapped in an oilskin crashed in. An elderly lady grabbed at the door as it buffeted against the wind. “Come on in, bach,” she cried and helped the bundle of layers into the warm.

  “Oh, thanks, Nain,” puffed the bundle to his grandmother. “Phew, it’s cold out there!” The little lady reached up to help him off with his coat and scurried it away to its peg. The hats and scarf were taken from his hand and slung onto the airer above the Rayburn. By the time the young man had propped his wellies on the rack in the corner, a mop had sucked all the rain and sleet from the tiled floor and a brush had swept away the clumps of mud. A fresh mug of tea was poured and reached the old chair by the Rayburn just as Johnny Brechdan himself did.

  “There you are, bach,” smiled his grandmother with a look of complete love in her eyes.

  “Oh, thank you, that’s wonderful! Just what I needed,” Johnny grinned in return as he stretched out his legs and rested his socked feet on the front of the Rayburn.

  “Oi, socks off that!” clipped Nain, “you burn through any more pairs and I’ll stop repairing them!”

  “No, you won’t,” he laughed and winked at her.

  “You!” she chided. “You’ve got the cheek of your father, God rest his soul. How were the barns? Any problems?”

  “No, no, all fine. That draught seems to have worked on the two ewes that were a bit rough yesterday, so that’s good news. So, yes, all fine.” Johnny took a long sip of his tea and leant back into his armchair even further, as if it might be possible to get even more comfortable than he already was. “You go on up if you want to – Taid already in bed?”

  “Yes, twenty minutes since – told him to get himself ready for me and I would be up as soon as you were safely back indoors.”

  “Best not keep him waiting then! Nos da, Nain, good night.”

  “Good night, bach, nos da,” she smiled and walked to the heavy door leading to the stairs, collecting a pile of ironed clothes to take upstairs with her. “Cake in the tin,” he heard as the door latch clicked shut.

  Johnny stretched again, and then opened the door to the Rayburn’s fire. He poked and prodded it about, raddling out the ashes in a way that would have Nain tutting, “Gently, boy, gently!” A few logs from the broken-down wicker basket were slung in and he leant back into the chair, watching the flames curl around their new prey.

  He loved this time of night. He was physically tired, but, barring emergencies, he’d done all he needed to for the day. His grandparents, Nain and Taid, were early to bed and he would be left with the house to himself. Sometimes he would scoot off down the local, or maybe watch a bit of television or go on his computer. Other times he’d just sit in front of the fire, maybe doze or maybe just sit: there was always plenty enough to think about on a farm and far too little time to simply rest.

  As he sat and wondered whether he could be bothered to go and get a piece of that cake that his Nain had mentioned, his phone burst into song. Johnny sighed, then rummaged in his back pocket and pulled it out. Ah, Gina! Johnny smiled. What did she want at this time of night? Probably what she usually wanted at this time of night…

  CHAPTER 2

  Cyn flined â draenog – as cross as a hedgehog

  It was Thursday evening and Louisa was driving home in a bad mood. She knew that she shouldn’t have looked at it at lunchtime, but she had, and her whole afternoon had been foul as a result. She could still see the words in her mind’s eye, chatty, welcoming and witty and there for anyone who might come across it. Rachel Dowling’s blog. Miss Goody Two-shoes had not only done her homework, but she had made it interesting and fun to read. Whilst she, Louisa, had been wrapped in a blanket on the sofa watching telly, Rachel had been writing up the fun she’d had over the weekend. Louisa wasn’t really jealous, but Rachel did have a little more than her to write about.

  “Hi Everyone! My name is Rachel and welcome to my blog!” it had said. Louisa had tutted at its triteness, but she hadn’t been able to help reading on. “I’m 26 years old,” and Louisa had frowned at the knowledge – she had assumed that Rachel was much younger than she was, “and I live in a flat with my two great friends Rosie and Samuel.” Louisa had been annoyed – of course it was easier to have an interesting life if you lived with your two great friends. She would probably live with two great friends if she weren’t living with her mum and dad. Rachel needn’t be so smug about it.

  “We’re all just recovering from a fantastic weekend in North Wales where we were supposed to go hill walking, but actually didn’t manage to leave the pub!” Her immature ramblings had gone on to include a snowball fight with some locals that had resulted in an invite back to their house for an impromptu party. A few of the group were in a band, so they had all ended up jamming and singing the night away.

  So, Louisa had fumed all afternoon, crashing about the bank, glaring at her customers and making stupid errors. If she’d gone to North Wales for a weekend, the same thing would probably have happened to her. Instead, however, she’d trailed around a round of golf with her father and three of her father’s friends, followed by a meal at the golfie, followed by a night on the sofa in front of the television. Pretty much the same as every other Saturday night this year – and last.

  As her Corsa sped over the common, she beeped her horn angrily at the sheep that had settled in the road, reluctant to leave the warmth of the dark tarmac. Damn sheep; the sooner they fenced the blessed common, the better, she cursed. Those sheep had already caused Mrs Jeffers to end up in the ditch, and she was sure that someone else would follow before winter was out.

  As she neared the turning to Anweledig, she thought again about Rachel, Rosie and Samuel all coming home after work. Rachel was a nurse in the local Accident and Emergency Department and Rosie was a speech therapist. She didn’t know what Samuel did yet – perhaps tomorrow’s blog would enlighten her. He was bound to be a – a stuntman, or an astronaut, she thought, batting the small teddy that hung from her rear view mirror out of the way. They would all settle in the lounge, Rosie would be sat cross-legged on the sofa, Rachel would probably be sat on the floor. All would be chatting and laughing about their day.

  What awaited her? Her mum toiling in the kitchen, worrying about what she was cooking and her father trying to get her to sit and watch television with him all evening. No wonder she never did anything. No wonder she never got round to buying her own place or renting a flat with great friends – her father always got her to put things off, so that they could spend time together, sitting on the sofa like an elderly couple whilst her mum was bullied into waiting on them hand and foot.

  Mind, it had always been the same really, even when it had been different. In hindsight, it was her moaning one afternoon that she was bored and how she wished they could be more like t
he Ingalls family that had sparked off the big countryside adventure. Inspired by Laura Ingalls’s antics running about the prairies barefoot, Louisa had sulked to her dad that her life would be so much more fun if they lived on the prairies, rather than on their boring housing estate. She guiltily remembered saying to him, “I would love to catch wild animals and weave baskets with grasses, but how can I when we live on Mount Pleasant?”

  Looking back it was amazing that he gave it any more credence than simply saying, “Well, take your shoes off and go and collect some grass then. Mind out for dog poo and see you at tea time.” Instead, he’d taken it to heart and formulated a plan. Six months later, they were living in Anweledig…

  Somehow it had been decided that Esther, then in her early forties, would give up her part-time job in the local bank and spend her days tending a vegetable garden and attending weaving and other countryside classes, so that she could pass on her skills to their daughter. The money that they lost in wages would more than be recouped by cheap veg and giving woven mats away for Christmas presents. However, Esther hadn’t approached the role of Ma Ingalls with much enthusiasm.

  Louisa remembered the day they had waved goodbye to their friends and neighbours, many of whom she had never seen again, despite only moving seven miles away. They had been plucky adventurers, brave enough to grasp their dreams with both hands. Louisa would become a wild-child, running with foxes and communicating with nature through a series of whistles and clicks. Their neighbours had wished them well and Louisa had sat in the car thinking that her whole life was about to change. Change it did, but not in the way that had been expected…

  In some ways it had been lucky that Esther had had her stroke three days after they had moved: it meant that they never had to come to terms with the fact that they might not have lived out their dreams thanks to disinterest alone.

  Louisa remembered it as a time of turmoil, being shipped to Grandma’s house in the middle of the night and then returning to their new home to find a different mother inhabiting the body of her old one – one with a scrunched up hand, a flailing leg and a dribbling, drooping face. Over time, her speech had improved, but Esther’s mobility and dexterity was never fully recovered, although she managed daily chores with a stubborn slowness.

  David tried to push Louisa out into the wilds to play, but there was no one else for miles around to play with and she was not used to playing on her own. The guy across the yard became Uncle Bob, but he was in his late fifties and although he told her things about foxes, he never offered to take her to their dens.

  Louisa secretly never minded that she was unable to become a fox-child; by now she far preferred watching The Railway Children on video in front of a fire on a Saturday afternoon, to tending her own section of the vegetable garden, as had been the initial plan. David sat with her, keeping busy by attending to her needs and Esther pottered around in the background, muttering under her breath as she went. Somehow, even despite the massive change that had occurred within Esther, the life of Louisa and David wasn’t really that different to what it had been in Mount Pleasant. None of them seemed to notice that the family wasn’t living the dream; it was simply suburbia with a better view.

  Louisa had grown up a diligent child and she did well at school with the brains she had been born with, neither stretching nor addling them. When her mother’s old job in the bank came up, only now full-time, it seemed fate that she got it, the manager perhaps still feeling guilty that Esther had received no real help after her stroke, despite having left her post of twenty-two years just a week before.

  And that had been it: life. Up in the morning, tea brought to her by a muttering – but not complaining, mark you – Esther. Ironed blouses, MOT’d cars, packed lunches, straight back home to help her mother at the end of the day. Supper, sofa, bed. She’d never really questioned it – until now…

  Louisa flicked her indicator on and turned towards Anweledig. The turn was down a steep little lane that led into a hamlet of five old cottages clustered around a yard with the Harrison’s large modern brick house stuck on the end. It was the council planning department’s concession to allowing modernisation in Anweledig and was such an aesthetic disaster, that they would never have to allow such a thing again.

  The hamlet of Anweledig had been built to house workers from the big house nearby. The owner at the time, a dusty old lady who was only really thirty, ruled her household with a rod of unpleasantness. She had insisted that her domestic staff lived near enough so as not to be late, yet out of her line of vision so that she didn’t have to stare at their miserable little houses and hear their nasty little quarrels: she’d had plenty of her own quarrels to listen to. Anweledig had been the perfect solution. Tucked in a sunken bit of a north-facing hill, it was a quaint little cluster of houses built around a large yard that had a well in the middle.

  It was now a sought after location for “drop outs” as Louisa’s father called them. People who worked away and came to their houses every six weeks or so to spend the weekend frantically trying to get their second homes warm and aired. One house was awaiting its owners’ retirement, another was the dumping ground for stuff that was too bulky to have moved with its owner to her new lover’s house and was instead sat getting damp waiting for that relationship to finish.

  The Dingle was the only house in the hamlet that had a drive, a gate, a well-kempt garden and a security light that kept flickering on and highlighting surreptitious men with torches strolling in the shadows down by the river…

  Louisa turned into the gate that her mother would have popped out to open for her ten minutes before and her father would close behind her. Good, her dad wasn’t back yet, so there was room for Louisa’s car in front of the security light: hers was a newer model, so it made sense that it was the one nearest the house. The light clicked on making the hamlet as bright as day and Louisa frowned when she saw that the old grey snow was still piled at the side of the drive: surely her father could have moved that by now?

  What she should do tonight should be to go straight upstairs and make a start on that blessed blog. At least it would be done, and then she could start thinking about how to make it a bit more interesting for the next session. With her homework on her mind all the time, it was no wonder she couldn’t get stuck in to getting out and about a bit more, finding a few great friends somewhere, starting a couple of clubs or hobbies somewhere else. Yes, she thought, get stuck in to that, then she could begin on the rest of her life…

  “Hello,” called her mum as she opened the front door, “how was your day?” Louisa grunted: she wasn’t in the mood for small talk. “Your dad’s just left the office; he’ll be home in ten. Cup of tea while you’re waiting?”

  “Yeah, all right,” Louisa muttered, kicking off her shoes. She looked at the stairs with her bedroom door across the landing at the top of them. It was a bit dark and the stairs were quite steep. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to have a bit more of a chat with her mum for a while and then do the blog thing later. She could always look on the Internet for a club – perhaps get to contact a few people from it online before she actually went; that would save her turning up and not knowing anyone.

  Therefore, she chucked her keys onto the hall table and watched as they slid across the polished surface to drop quietly onto the carpeted floor: I’ll remember that they’re there tomorrow morning she thought, and headed for the sofa. The television clicked on all too easily and Louisa found a game show. Slightly different people to yesterday – but only slightly different. A cup appeared on the table next to her end of the sofa and Louisa reached out for it without a response. It looked like she was going to have to put off getting a life for another day…

  Louisa sat in the white leather sofa and her dad fetched the pouffe for her feet. He tossed over a chenille blanket and turned up the real-effect fire.

  “OK, love?”

  “Yeah, thanks, Dad,” replied Louisa as she snuggled down into the warmth.

&nb
sp; “Did you manage to start your assignment?” called Esther from the computer desk in the corner.

  “Aw, leave her be,” smiled David, winking at his daughter, “she’s been at work all day; let the girl have a break.”

  “Well, I just thought she said she had to get it started tonight.”

  “Leave it, Esther. All right?” growled David, the tone in his voice hardening. Esther shuffled in her chair as if a shuffle was somehow the only rebuke she was allowed. David winked again at Louisa and Louisa mouthed her thanks back. She knew her mum meant well, but she didn’t half go on.

  Silent Witness came on and David passed over the remote control for Louisa to adjust the settings.

  “Any chance of another cuppa?” he called over to Esther, sharing a cheeky giggle with Louisa as he did. Esther muttered under her breath but Louisa pretended that she hadn’t heard: her mother always muttered. One turned off to it eventually.

  Just as the first autopsy was being carried out in all-surround-sound, another cup of tea was plonked on the table at Louisa’s side.

  “Thanks, Mum,” she muttered. David muttered the same and Esther went back to her computer.

  The tuttings and the mutterings and the sound of pages of a manual turning back and fore rattled away from the corner as Louisa and David exchanged frowns. “File – save as – let’s call it, um, test page – save! There – done! Well, that was easy enough!”

  Louisa turned the volume up and slammed the remote control down on the table. The sofa pair tittered and settled down once more.

  After a bit more muttering there was the sound of a printer whirring into being and an exclamation of triumph from Esther. “At last! I knew it couldn’t be that difficult!” and she bumped her head on the computer desk as she reached down to check her printed masterpiece.