by Lucy Wood
‘Of course me and Robbie,’ Judy said. She took the full bag and tied the top. ‘Of course me and Robbie.’
Judy and Robbie had been together since they were fourteen. It was his family’s farm. He had dropped out of school as soon as he could, always working, always out from dark till dark. Ada remembered mucky overalls, oil, a tired slump to his jaw. The smell of beer. And his night terrors: Judy describing how he would jerk upright in bed, shouting, fighting the sheets. Judy had spent most of her time at the farm, although she’d never liked it. It was the cows, she said, the way they looked at you as if they were planning something, biding their time.
‘But why are you?’ Ada said. Judy looked at her and frowned. ‘I mean, the cows.’
Judy leaned further into the stove. ‘What about the cows?’
‘Remember when they chased us? And they were in a circle.’
‘I don’t remember that,’ Judy said.
‘They circled us,’ Ada said. Their wide faces had pushed in close, sides shunting against each other like rocking canoes.
Judy pulled out more tattered feathers. A ditchy smell and gloopy leaves. ‘Cows never do that.’ Grit clattered in the grate like hailstones. ‘There can’t be much more of this,’ she said.
‘Cows always do that,’ Ada told her.
The wind sounded louder in the chimney now. Judy scooped out a handful of grit. The smudges under her eyes were almost violet. A few grey hairs in her parting like frayed wire. So she had been stuck here all this time. Ada thought of all the places she’d lived in over the years. The town with the sculpture of a horse, the house where the woman next door grew huge pumpkins. Or was that the same place? Moving on whenever she had to: when rents went up, when landlords decided to sell, when neighbours in cramped flats made so much noise she didn’t sleep for a week. When things didn’t work out as she had expected.
They filled four bags with old nests. The bags bulged and warped. ‘I think it’s OK to light now,’ Judy said. She put her head right in to check. Soot trickled down onto her hair, but no more twigs or feathers. She got up and prodded a log with her boot. ‘Where did you get these from?’ she asked.
‘The shop. Yesterday. Mick did me a deal on them.’
‘How much?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ada said. ‘Twenty.’ She lit the firelighters and watched as the flames jumped. But they started to dwindle as soon as they got near the wood. She jabbed at them, adding small bits of kindling like offerings.
‘The wood’s crap,’ Judy said. She knelt down and poked at the fire. ‘Mick’s screwed you over with this. The pieces are too big and they haven’t been seasoned. Look how damp they are. How much did you say you paid?’
‘He said it was good stuff,’ Ada said, heard her voice become whiney. ‘He put it in the back of the car for me.’
‘Mick’s like that,’ Judy said, shrugging. ‘He’ll charge anyone double if he thinks he can get away with it. One price for tourists, another price for locals.’
An odd lurch in her chest. ‘He knows me,’ she said.
‘Wood takes six months to season. At least. I’ll get someone to drop some in as soon as possible. I know a few people. A big load of it, it’s cheaper that way,’ Judy said. ‘Tide you over until you leave.’ Her voice was gruff but had always had a chime to it, like a bell hidden somewhere. Her arms folded across her chest. Smeared in soot. They had once watched an eclipse together and had burned so badly they had to be covered in thick cream. A week later they had peeled their skin off in sheets.
‘Hopefully sometime next week OK?’ Judy said. Then she was gone, leaving the front door thunking in the wind like a rolling bucket.
Ada stirred a pan of pork and apples, decided to throw in a heap of blackberries that Pepper had left on the table. See how it turned out. She went into the lounge, along the hall, then back into the kitchen, sure she could smell melting solder – but it was so faint and then it disappeared.
She called Pepper for dinner. Heard the door to the study creak open. ‘What were you doing in there?’ she asked.
‘Nothing,’ Pepper said. She dipped her finger in the pan and licked it.
‘Do you want to help stir?’
‘Nah.’ Pepper dipped her finger in again – no cooking for her unless it meant stealing huge spoonfuls.
The sauce turned dusky purple, almost grey, and was watery, like it had been wrung from an old cloth. Definitely needed to thicken. ‘Could you find the cornflour in the cupboard?’
Pepper pulled out packets and boxes. ‘Which one?’
‘Try and read what it says,’ Ada said. Stirring the sauce, keeping her voice light.
‘That one,’ Pepper said, pointing to a packet of dried soup. When Ada shook her head, she tried again. ‘That one.’ This time a box of stock cubes.
‘What does it begin with?’ Ada asked. She used to be able to do it.
‘See, see, it begins with see,’ Pepper sang frantically, shoving a bag of coffee at Ada. ‘Did I get it right?’ she said.
Ada took the bag, wished for the thousandth time that someone would tell her what was best to do. Then she nodded and said it was right. Switched it for cornflour when Pepper wasn’t looking.
‘He had grey eyes like me, didn’t he?’ Pepper suddenly asked. ‘My dad?’
‘Grey eyes?’ Ada said.
Pepper opened her own eyes wide and stared.
‘No,’ Ada said. ‘I mean yes.’ The memory of him fading each year. What to tell Pepper? That she remembered a birthmark shaped like an anchor on his hip; a lisp in his voice when he was tired? That he had once electrocuted himself on her oven, filling the tiny kitchen with the stench of singed hair, and how he had cursed, then laughed magnificently, then cursed again?
‘But before you said they were blue,’ Pepper said.
Ada mixed cornflour into a paste. The lights flicked off, then back on again. ‘Did I?’ she said. ‘I guess I meant that sometimes they looked grey and sometimes blue.’
‘I see,’ Pepper said slowly.
The fridge juddered. The sauce thickened, wrinkling like wet paper.
Pepper picked out a mushy blackberry. ‘I would have eyes that sometimes looked red and sometimes looked black,’ she said. ‘Like blood. Like my eyes were full of blood.’
Where did that come from? Once again she was off and skittering away.
Chapter 8
The man who brought the wood had on a dark red jumper and his hair was the same colour as the wood: bright brown, almost orange. His bottom teeth were crooked. ‘Shep,’ he said to the dog in the back of his truck. ‘Stay there Shep.’ He carried an armful of logs into the shed and stacked them up against the wall.
Pepper skulked up to the truck and offered the dog her hand, which he sniffed, backed away from, then butted his head into, whining. He had curly fur like a sheep and a flat, mournful face. One of his eyes was blurry. There were a million dogs called Shep – she would have called him something better.
Her mother came out with two mugs of tea, the steam racing up into the air. Her cheeks were red in the wind and she had a red scarf tied round her hair. The man watched her as she walked across the yard and put the mugs down inside the shed.
‘She’s scared of dogs,’ Pepper told him.
In the back of the truck there were hammers and bits of metal, paint tins, a folded black sheet lifting in the wind. Pepper ran her finger along the edge of a box full of carved wooden shapes.
‘You can look at those if you want,’ the man said.
But Pepper stepped back and picked at her lips. The shapes were only interesting when she wasn’t meant to touch them. And if she looked at them now she would have to say something nice about them, it would be expected of her, and that should be against the law.
There were piles of soaking leaves everywhere that smelled like banana skins. Her mother’s voice floated over: ‘Sorry, no you. Gloves. Hopefully not very long.’
Shep barked suddenly, a furious yapping, and
he stood up in the truck, rigid and quivering, staring at something in the distance.
‘Shep, stop it,’ the man called. ‘Relax old buddy.’
Pepper looked around but there was nothing. After a moment, the dog turned a circle and lay down, twitching a leg out and an ear.
She drifted in and out of rooms, trying to imagine her mother here, growing up. She had never thought about her growing up before and she couldn’t picture it, especially not in this house, which was so cobwebby and strange and far away. There was no TV, no people in the street to watch from the windows. No smell of cars or fish and chips. No shops to stare into, no parks full of sandpits and pigeons. And when it rained it was grey and sharp, rather than yellow. And when it got dark it was like the house had been wrapped in black paper.
But she found things. A small waterproof coat, a tin of pencils in her mother’s old bedroom, a purple scarf, a necklace with half a silver heart dangling on it, a bottle with a candle stuck in. A set of measuring spoons and a creased recipe book with an orange cake on the front; she had seen her mother make that cake before. She found a clay bird with a chipped wing, painted black and white and with a splash of red. It had three wobbly letters on the bottom. She took it to her mother and asked what it said. A D A. ‘Did you make it?’ Pepper asked.
Her mother sifted through a pile of paper. ‘Do the taxable assets exceed the annual limitations?’ she said. ‘I don’t even know what that means.’ She turned the page over and asked for the calculator.
Another day, Pepper glimpsed the cat running past the front door. Dark rivulets of rain on its back. She went out and clicked her tongue. The cat stopped and looked back at her. ‘Come on old buddy,’ she said.
‘Gurmunuw,’ the cat said. It tilted its head to one side. Then it turned and bolted through the long grass.
And one day, rooting around in the garden, she found something red among a patch of plants with brown leaves. A mushy strawberry, all the plants wilted and dead but somehow this one strawberry left behind. She ate it in the cold drizzle, juice trickling into the corners of her mouth and down over her chin.
The study door was stiff when Pepper pushed it. The hinge screeched and she stopped, listening for her mother. She could hear her upstairs in the bath, talking to herself like she sometimes did, the faint splash of water and the taps rattling – she would have run the water so hot there would be a red line around her waist.
Pepper went into the study and clicked on the dim light. She touched the books, the notebooks full of lists, the broken watches and silver chains. There was a dusty bird on the desk that stared at her. She touched its body. It was stiff but it didn’t look dead. She reached up and took down a box of photographs. These were what she wanted to look at. There were no pictures of any people. Instead, there were three brown birds under a bridge; a flash of bright blue above the water; a swan with its head tucked under its wing; a magpie; crows flying round a field. On the front of one of the books there was a drawing of a tall grey bird with purple bits on its wings and a black wisp on its head. She had never seen a bird like that before and she looked through the whole box of photographs but couldn’t find a picture of it.
There was a camera on the shelf; an old, chunky one with a brown strap. It was heavy. She held the camera up and looked through it. All she saw was a black square. She clicked the button but nothing happened. Click, click. She shook it and tried again. Click. Nothing.
A night of heavy rain which left the trees dripping. Water pooled on the front step and some of it came in under the door. Her mother was going to the shop but Pepper didn’t want to go – it was always cold and the man that worked there, Mick, watched her and tapped his long fingers on the counter. Also, she felt a faint pang of fear whenever she thought of being in the car.
She was meant to stay indoors but everything looked varnished and bright after the rain, so she put her coat on and went outside, then came back in and slung the camera over her shoulder.
Through the sopping grass and down towards the river. It was wide and brown today, and it rippled and churned. There were deep creases when it went round rocks and a hollow, clunking noise. It looked strong, like a muscle. When she threw in a stick, the stick didn’t float on the surface – it got dragged under, as if something had reached up to grab it. She walked along the bank and there was the bridge she’d seen in some of the photos – it had rusty railings and a broken plank in the middle. She made herself stand on it. The river roared under her feet. She crossed the bridge and the trees thickened in front of her. They were almost bare now – their trunks were silver and they tilted upwards and there was a path going through them. Pepper looked back at the house, then walked up into the wood.
The noise of the river and the noise of the trees were the same. They both roared and thrummed. Twigs and leaves rained down. The ground was slippery and smelled rich and there were wide gullies of water that she had to jump over. There were coppery leaves everywhere, and plants dying back to a dusky colour, and a pile of sawn branches that had orange insides bright as lamps. There was a shiny black beetle that looked blue close up, mounds of horse poo, piles of pine needles that she poked until ants came out.
The wood increased ahead of her; below, the river swung in and out of sight as if a door was opening and closing. Something flitted across a branch and she fumbled with the camera but the bird had already gone.
The tilting trees made her dizzy. The path branched and she turned right without noticing. Mud and leaves caught in her boots. Fat drops of rain fell through the branches and landed on her arm. There was a wigwam up ahead, made of branches that had been tied together at the top. A sweet wrapper glinting at the entrance. She looked inside. A dusty floor, lots of small footprints. She put her foot in and made her own prints, then kicked the sweet wrapper into the ground.
The path branched again. Pepper stomped on with her head down. Old grudges bubbling up: that boy who said there wasn’t room for her to join his club, the teacher that forgot her name, that lowdown group of girls who told everyone she had a bad disease. That girl who seemed nice at first but then swatted a bee straight out of the sky. The stupid boy who wouldn’t go into the park with her because he was scared of pigeons. Her father. That sour-smelling man on the bus that sang romance songs to her and made everyone stare.
A branch cracked behind her and she spun around. The path veered downhill and she couldn’t see the river. There was a clump of mushrooms on a tree, wet and salmony, folded over like ears. White mushrooms blotched with grey. Brown ones with dark frills. A branch cracked again. She turned round and started walking back, too fast, her feet sliding on leaves, the camera bouncing against her chest. The path forked. Both ways looked the same. Her breath was ragged in her throat. Her heart clattered and there was a hot feeling in her eyes which she tried to rub away. A small bird flapped above her. She fumbled for the camera but it was too late. ‘Crapping hell,’ she said.
‘You’ve left the lens cap on,’ a voice said behind her.
She stiffened and turned round slowly. It was Luke, the man who had driven them to the house. ‘I meant to do that,’ she said. She looked away and wiped at her eyes with her sleeve. Waited for him to carry on walking down the path.
‘Heading back, are you?’ he asked.
Pepper pretended to be very interested in a particular tree. She crouched down and examined it. ‘Not yet,’ she said. But when Luke shrugged and carried on, she waited a few moments then followed behind, leaving a long gap between them so that he wouldn’t know she was there.
Luke kept his hands in his pockets and didn’t skid once. He whistled something slow between his teeth. He was wearing a shirt and tie under his jacket even though he was just out walking. His skin was very brown and creased, like a cloth after polishing shoes. After a while, he stopped. ‘Give us that camera a minute,’ he called back.
She stayed where she was and held the camera tight.
‘Don’t be a moron about it,’ he said. ‘I
don’t know much about them, but I can show you how to take the lens cap off at least.’ He came over and showed her, then twisted the lens so things looked clearer. ‘I think this is the focus,’ he said. ‘Do you know what that is?’
‘Yes,’ Pepper told him. You needed it for school and she didn’t have any.
‘Have a gander through him now,’ Luke said, passing her the camera.
She looked and saw crispy lichen right in front of her face, even though it was on a branch above. Then a mushroom on the ground, bronze and sticky. She prodded it with her foot.
‘I wouldn’t touch that,’ Luke said.
‘Why?’ She reached towards the mushroom.
Luke kicked at a pine cone. ‘It’s a death cap,’ he said. ‘Liver failure, chronic pain. It would be a slow death, maybe take a couple of weeks.’
The mushroom gleamed like a coin. Pepper aimed the camera at it and clicked the button.
There were roots all over the path and Pepper tripped, sprawled, tripped, sprawled. She tried to catch up with Luke. ‘Are there big grey birds here? By the water?’
Luke seemed to be listening for something. ‘Hear those trees creaking. Takes me back to being on the boats that does. The noises the sea could make – no one else would believe it, sometimes like an engine, sometimes chalk screeching on a board. Thinking maybe I could write something for the newspaper. But I don’t know if they’d want it. Probably no one would want to read something like that.’ He turned to Pepper like he wanted her opinion.
‘No,’ she said. ‘They probably wouldn’t.’ It was important not to lie.
Luke stumbled over a root and mud splashed up Pepper’s leg. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Maybe you’re right.’ The path levelled and he stopped and said something to a boulder, except it wasn’t a boulder, it was a man leaning over a wide bend in the river wearing a grey coat. There was a boy sitting next to him. They both had fishing rods in the water and there was a net and bucket. Inside the bucket, three dark fish.