by Lucy Wood
Pepper shook her head. ‘You eat them,’ she said. ‘You haven’t eaten very much yet.’ Although her stomach growled. Her mother left the bowl right there in front of her, so in the end there was nothing to do but eat the rest of the peaches. Her mother was watching her very closely; sometimes she did that and Pepper hated it, so she tilted her face up and dropped the peaches into her mouth one by one, like a bird eating orange fish. The windows shook and wind shrieked through the gaps. A drop of water splashed onto the table. They both looked up and saw a dark patch spreading. The lights flickered.
‘I forgot what it was like,’ her mother said quietly.
There were crumbs and a bean on the front of Pepper’s shirt. Her head drifted down onto the dusty table and she sneezed, her nose dripped and she wiped it with the blanket. The lights flickered again and rain hurled itself against the windows as if it was trying to get in. She had to stay awake, there was something she needed to ask, but the blanket warmed to a fug of breath and body heat. She found the butter bean and ate it.
She hardly remembered being carried upstairs and put in bed. More blankets heaped on top. Drifting in and out of sleep, she swam up from a dream where everything kept moving, nothing would stay still, a tree turned into a cat snarling. Her feet were cold from sticking out of rucked sheets. It was completely dark, as if the whole world had disappeared. No fuzzy orange glow, no car lights sweeping across the walls. She must have called out because her mother came in, still dressed, and rubbed her arms and talked to her.
‘I couldn’t find the key,’ Pepper told her.
When she woke again she was alone and it was still dark. She sat up and looked around the room, could just make out a small chair, a mirror, bare walls – where was the picture of the silver mountain, where was the yellow clock? Then she remembered. No white birds cooing softly downstairs. Only a branch thumping against the roof. Blue covers with gold stars on. She turned over and tucked herself back under. The bedsprings crunched. A lump in the mattress where her shoulder needed to be. She kicked and turned. Back through the hall, there came a sharp, sweet smell, very faint, moving through the rooms.
Chapter 5
Gas. The whole place stank of gas. Ada checked the hob, paced down the hall, then back into the kitchen again. Draughts kept the gas moving, so that at first it was stronger in the kitchen, then by the front door. Too tired even to yawn, head numb as if stuffed with reels of wool. The gas moved again. She followed it through the kitchen and into the larder with its empty shelves and slate floor. Squat orange bottles lined up against the wall. A faint hissing sound.
‘Don’t do that,’ she said. She shut the door. After a moment realised she’d shut herself into a tiny room full of gas. Opened the door again, and the small window as wide as it would go.
The connector tube from the oven was crumbling, attached to one of the bottles with an elastic band. She turned the gas off, took off the tube and worked out the kinks. But when she went to reattach it, she saw there were two taps that looked exactly the same. Rain pelted through the open window. Which one, which one? She knelt down and studied them as if they were something holy that might yield answers. Must have fallen asleep for a second because she jerked awake with the tap digging into her cheek. Cursed all identical things. Left the gas switched off and the tube dangling.
She went back upstairs to check on Pepper, who was sleeping in Ada’s old bedroom. Her fist clutching the duvet, which was the blue one with stars, Ada’s favourite. She used to count them over and over in the night. She went past her mother’s bedroom without looking in. Paused at the door of the spare room, saw the crooked and rusting camp bed folded in the corner. Went back downstairs. Heard the river’s boom as it muscled forward. There was an armchair in the corner of the kitchen and she sat down among newspapers and crumbs. The fridge wheezed. After a while, she curled her legs up under her, pulled over a blanket and put her head down on the chair’s musty arm. The clock sometimes missed a tick – tick, pause, tick – and she found herself waiting for it nervously, like someone waiting for news.
She woke with a tender neck and crusty eyes. Hips stiff as a swollen door. She still had her shoes on, bits of grass and grit stuck to them. Couldn’t think where she was for a moment, and then realised the blanket she’d draped over herself was her mother’s long brown coat: mud-splashed hem and tissues in the pocket. It was early and still dark and raw. She folded the coat carefully and turned on the heater. Filled the kettle from the tap. The water smelled like ditches; it always tasted foul after heavy rain. She broke off some granules from the block of coffee in the jar. There was an eerie lack of noise. No rain battered against the windows, no branches knocked against the roof.
There were piles of empty tins everywhere. Bottles of milk behind the armchair, gone thick and dark like treacle; brown-rimmed mugs hoarded under the table. No idea what her mother had been eating. Where was the bag of bread, the potatoes ready to be fried, the tins of corned beef and sardines? Where were the tins of baby potatoes, which she would spear out with a knife one by one? Nothing but the husk of a carrot in the fridge. The freezer stuffed with uneaten meals, all labelled with someone’s neat writing: Don’t forget to turn off the oven at the end Pearl. And heaps of bills – all overdue as far as Ada could tell, even though her mother had always paid up the day any bill came, despite struggling for money. She had once swapped a coffee table for four steaks and a can of petrol.
Uneasy thoughts brewed up but Ada pushed them back down. Thirteen years. She pulled the plug on the water in the sink and scooped out fat from the plughole. It reminded her of making lardy cake – mix handfuls of fat with yeast, soak dried fruit. She had always found something calming about listing recipes: the careful methods and ingredients. Knead dough with oil, simmer onions with butter, get disgusting grease off fingers.
But thirteen years. She had planned to come back, but one thing after another, the years rolled. Scrabbling for a new job every six months, nothing permanent, hauling boxes and bags to towns further and further away. And she had tried, hadn’t she? Working up the time and money to visit, then getting notice that she had to leave her flat, or getting stranded halfway there on a bus, snow piling softly around the wheels. And then Pepper. Suddenly too exhausted for the difficult phone conversations – her mother never the one to ring, saying she didn’t know the right number, what address was Ada at again? Her voice irritable and faraway. It had seemed better to wait until things were calmer, more settled. Always thought there would be more time. And finally, when her mother had agreed to visit them instead, when she’d said she would definitely be there this time, Ada had waited hours at the station before giving up, Pepper clutching her hair and shouting, goose! whenever a train sounded its horn.
Ada stacked up the dirty plates and turned on the tap. No hot water. There had to be a boiler by now, there had to be. She looked in the larder, went up to the bathroom to check, then came back down. Opened up all the cupboards. There was the yellow mixing bowl; she ran her hand around the edge but it felt strange, the pattern indented rather than raised like she remembered. And when she picked up the green vase her mother used to cram wild daffodils in, it was plastic, not glass.
Through the windows came thin grey light. Mist low on the grass like thick ribbons.
There was a rustling noise and Pepper came into the kitchen dragging her duvet. ‘It’s cold,’ she said.
‘I know it is,’ Ada said. She wrapped Pepper up tighter. ‘I was just going to turn the heating on.’
‘You’ve got creases on your face,’ Pepper said. She looked around the kitchen. ‘Where’s the TV?’ she asked. ‘When are we going to the shops? I want to eat breakfast and sit in the bath.’
‘We’ll go to the shop later,’ Ada said. Toast, she should make toast. But of course there was no bread. An image of her mother appeared: standing on tiptoes to light the grill with a match, then watching the blue flame roll across it. Looking like one of the herons that she had loved so much.
Knees poking out of thin trousers – the grey ones she always wore. Solitary, wrapped in her own stillness. And the only time Ada had heard her sob it was a harsh, krrching sound.
She found a box of cereal and poured out two bowls. It was soft and stale, lurking at the back of the cupboard for God knows how long.
‘Why’s that all broken under the table?’ Pepper said, cramming in spoonfuls of dry cereal like she hadn’t eaten for weeks.
‘It’s a radio,’ Ada said. Taken apart but not put back together. Not that it had worked very well anyway – there wasn’t signal for anything in this valley. After an hour of fiddling you might find a dim babble of voices, a wavering cello.
Pepper slid down onto the floor to look. ‘But whose is it?’
Ada took a deep breath. Hadn’t yet told Pepper the whole story. ‘I told you about the woman who died. This is her house, remember?’ Praying Pepper wouldn’t go on about skin and teeth again.
‘She left her radio behind,’ Pepper said. ‘She left the chairs, the table, the books, the pictures, the . . .’ She whirled around, looking for something else to list.
Ada said shhuusshh, otherwise Pepper could list all day.
‘And her shoes and her coats,’ Pepper said quietly, so Ada wouldn’t tell her off.
‘Remember I told you that I knew her a long time ago? Well, we lived here.’ Ada took her bowl to the sink. She knocked her head on the low beam that went across – something she’d never done before.
‘You lived here,’ Pepper said. ‘You lived here together? Like us living together?’
Ada nodded.
Pepper jammed a spring into the back of the radio. After a moment she said, ‘You didn’t cry.’
The bowl clattered into the sink. Ada ran the tap but the water stayed stubbornly cold. ‘Help me find the boiler,’ she said.
But there was no boiler. She went through the hall and into the living room. Saw the wood burner and stared at it.
‘What is that?’ Pepper asked.
‘It’s instead of a boiler,’ Ada said. The old back boiler hidden in the wall behind it, which powered the heating and the hot water. It had to be fed wood all the time, like a greedy pet. A mean-looking thing. Always going out on the coldest day, the fire cement cracking, the chimney not drawing. Her mother out chopping wood for hours, the sound of it echoing like gunshots around the house.
‘I want to burn something in it,’ Pepper said.
‘We need to get wood,’ Ada told her. She had never lit a fire in her life. Her mother never let anyone else touch the thing. Where did she get wood from? There was no time to be messing around with the fire, but it was only going to get colder. And she couldn’t stand the thought of freezing baths and showers for either of them.
‘And her lamps and her shelves and her ceilings,’ Pepper chanted.
Out into the weather. The roar of the river. Cobwebs slung like hammocks in the hedge. The smell of bonfire and wet soil. Long grass soaked her shoes. Nothing in the vegetable plot except mushy weeds bowing to the earth, something sodden and green that may once have been a potato. In the shed, swallows’ nests festooned the beams. Old paint pots, their lids splashed with the blue of her bedroom, the yellow of the bathroom. The axe and saw were leaning against the wall but there was no wood, not even a twig for kindling.
Ada went back out of the shed. Mist hung over the valley like an awning. A sense of quiet and space, or constriction, depending on your opinion. The town was almost an hour’s drive in the other direction. To get to the nearest houses you had to walk up the lane, along the road for fifteen minutes and then across two wide fields. The shop was further out on the edge of the busier road. She had spent a lot of time here daydreaming about escape, circling places on maps – places where things happened, where the big news wasn’t another pub brawl, or a tree falling onto someone’s house, or a jackdaw that stole people’s jewellery and sold it on for a profit. Or something. A lonely place. And she didn’t want the same loneliness for Pepper, who was outside the shed patting a tree stump like it was a horse.
‘I’ve got a job for us,’ Ada said. ‘We have to find some wood to burn, but only small branches.’ She didn’t want to do any chopping.
Pepper dragged a branch over to the pile. ‘Now we won’t freeze like those other people,’ she said.
‘What other people?’
‘The ones where the price went up too high.’
Too many evenings eating dinner in front of the news – Pepper suddenly concerned about forest fires, unemployment, taxes. They would eat ice cream straight out of the tub, watch the old Western that came on and then fall asleep with their mouths open, as if astonished. ‘No one will freeze,’ Ada told her.
‘Someone will,’ Pepper said, morbid and logical as always.
Soon they had a big pile. Ada thought about all the times she had listened to her mother going on about the expense of wood, the difficulty sourcing it, when it was all down here, free. She put a bundle of smaller pieces in Pepper’s arms and took the heavier ones herself.
Inside, she found matches and balled up some of the old newspaper from the kitchen. It spluttered but was soon roaring. Ada laid small sticks over it, then bigger twigs, and finally two fat bits of branch. She closed the stove door. The fire spat and pinged against the glass. The glow got fainter and fainter. A second later, the fire was smeeching, a stench of acrid soot as smoke leaked out of the vents. A lot of smoke. God, there was a lot of smoke suddenly. It poured out and filled the room with a terrible bitter smell. She flung the windows open, coughed, then fled.
Pearl’s car was small and green and dented, rust in the wheel arches, a leaking roof. Ada brushed the wet leaves off it. The sealant round the windows crumbled under her fingers and the doors stuck before opening with a jolt. But Luke had said it was working.
She settled Pepper in the front and double-, triple-checked the seat belt. Then got in herself, cursing the fact that you had to drive to get anywhere in this place. She was used to buses and walking, pavements, trains. No one knowing who you were and asking things.
‘My seat’s wet,’ Pepper said. She lifted herself up and there was a dark patch on her trousers.
The number of times Ada had gone to school trying to hide a wet patch. ‘Sit like this,’ she said. She jiggled the gear-stick and put the key in, waited a moment before turning it. The engine spluttered then stopped. A burning smell and a glimpse of smoke in the wing mirror. She tried again. Her hands left clammy marks on the steering wheel. ‘It’s not going to start,’ she said. She thought of the narrow roads and corners that went on forever. And felt relieved.
‘But how will we buy food?’ Pepper said.
Ada tried once more and the car griped but the engine turned over. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘OK.’ Tried to get a feel for the pedals. Jesus, which was which, the brake and the clutch? She crawled forward slowly and turned onto the road. There was a tractor coming in the other direction. A flash of red, a horn bellowed, the crush of hedge against the car as Ada squeezed against it.
Pepper hunkered down in her seat. ‘Will we die?’ she asked.
‘We won’t die,’ Ada said. Hoped she sounded convincing.
There were branches all over the road, puddles that were inches deep. The car jerked when she changed gear. Once it stopped dead, but thankfully only sheep that saw and frowned. There were enough potholes to make the car bounce. But, finally, the shop. She pulled in, her heart clamouring, and smiled at Pepper, who stared back without blinking.
A man came out of the door just as they were going in – a tall man wearing a brown jumper, green boots. His hair a coppery colour. He held the door open, inclined his head, there was some mix-up with whose arm went where and in the end Ada had to duck under his. Then he was gone. It struck her that she hadn’t washed yet and was wearing the same clothes she’d slept in.
In the shop there was a whirring heater, notices for lost dogs, cars for sale, a room to rent. A stack of fishing rods and nets in one c
orner, a shelf full of those scratchy woollen blankets, Thermos flasks, maps. A wall lined with empty shelves, a few tins, soap, plastic washing-up brushes. A chest freezer with a motor that thumped, the insides coated in deep ice, empty except for a bright pizza box and a few grey shapes of meat. There was a shelf for comics, a tied bundle of newspapers underneath. On the counter, two sad-looking loaves and a jar of pink lollies.
Mick, who owned the shop with his wife, looked up at Ada and then went back to talking to another man, who was propped against the counter. Mick’s grey hair was pulled back into a ponytail and he rubbed his cheek slowly as he talked. Very small teeth, which gave his jaw a caved-in look. ‘The car jackknifed in the road,’ he said.
‘I heard the deer ran straight out,’ the other man said. His nose was hatched with blood vessels. He got out a tissue and blew it.
Ada took a basket from the pile. Tinned peaches, tomatoes, chickpeas. Rice. A box of cereal. Milk. Firelighters. Matches. Three withered onions from a basket – there was hardly anything fresh. Instead, tins of baby carrots, peas and potatoes. A vacuum pack of beetroot. A tube of garlic. She looked over at the counter and saw that Mick was watching her. ‘Do you . . .’ she said. ‘Is there any more fruit, or any veg?’ The shop was a lot smaller than she remembered.
‘There’s plenty out,’ Mick said.
The other man said, ‘Supermarket opened a while back. Edge of town. About forty-five minutes’ drive.’ He stared at Ada. ‘You still singing with that group?’
‘I only did that once,’ Ada said. ‘With the school.’ She had no idea who he was.
She felt Pepper tugging at her arm. ‘Can we?’ she asked. She held up two apples, both bruised, one with a mushy hole bored out. Mick was watching so she couldn’t say no. They went up to the counter and she picked up the least-crushed loaf of bread. But still a dark burn spread over the top of it.