by Lucy Wood
Ada moved so that the mop handle wasn’t sticking into her back. The wall was cold and damp. Bits of limey paint flaked off. Pepper was laughing so much she was practically hysterical. But upstairs, stabbing at the wet paint with her finger, her face had suddenly become Pearl’s – the furrowed brow, the way her eyes darted when she was looking for a way out of doing something. Like the time Ada had come back from school and reminded her mother that she needed a costume for the next day – they were doing a play and the costume could be anything.
‘Anything,’ her mother had said. She’d looked around and then unhooked her coat and hat from the peg. ‘Wear this.’
‘What would I be?’ Ada asked. She put it on and the hat fell down over her eyes.
‘I don’t know,’ her mother said. ‘A scarecrow. I’d have to find some straw from somewhere, maybe take a handful from the Jamesons’.’
But Ada shook her head, said no, she didn’t want to be a scarecrow.
‘Well, what then?’ her mother said. Pacing, grabbing lampshades and colanders and putting them on Ada’s head.
‘A witch. I want to be a witch.’
‘That’s a bit obvious, isn’t it?’ Pearl hung the hat and coat back up and stared at them for a long moment. Then she went into her study and closed the door. There was no sound for a long time, then something thumped, there was a lot of rustling. Hours passed. Ada cooked spaghetti and grated in cheese but her mother didn’t come out to eat. The sound of a bottle clinking. Ada went to bed and lay awake listening. Something ripped, her mother murmured, ‘Go in there you bastard needle.’ One of the girls at school said her mother had sewn a white fur cloak and crown. Another girl said her father had spent all week making something out of colourful wool. At a school fete, someone had pointed to Pearl and asked Ada if she was her grandmother, and Ada had nodded. She lay in bed and listened. The thumps and clinks went on all night.
In the morning her mother held out a heap of bin bags and pins. A sagging bin-bag hat. A bin-bag dress with torn sleeves. Looked at Ada carefully as she tried it on. ‘It’s not too bad, is it?’ she said. She put in another pin so that the waist was tighter and then smoothed the plastic down over Ada’s back.
‘It’s just right,’ Ada told her. She put the costume on over her uniform and walked slowly up the road to meet the bus. Then, just as the bus came round the corner, she pulled it off and pushed it into the hedge. Told her teacher that she had forgotten to bring anything and was cast as the schoolgirl, watching the robots and fairies rampage over everything.
There was a noise outside the cupboard and Ada held her breath. The door creaked open and there was a wedge of dim light. Any second now Pepper would burst in shouting, got you, got you. But the door shut again. The floorboards upstairs creaked. Ada pressed herself against the wall and felt water dripping. Water splashed onto the floor by her foot. Her leg was cramping up and she stretched it out.
Her leg touched someone else’s leg. She sucked in her breath. Could hardly see anything in the dim cupboard. Another splash of water on the floor. ‘Pepper?’ she said. But she could hear Pepper at the top of the stairs. More water dripped down. There was a gritty pool by her feet and a scattering of small stones. A musty smell, like soaking clothes that couldn’t dry, wet leaves, standing water.
Outside the door, one of the clocks chimed and Ada jumped. The mop clattered to the floor.
‘Shhhhh,’ a voice whispered. The familiar sound of a throat being cleared. ‘You’re going to ruin the game.’
Rain drummed on the roof. Pepper’s footsteps stopped, then came slowly back down the stairs. The air was so thick and wet it was hard to breathe. Water dripped onto the floor. ‘I know you’re here,’ Pepper called out. Her voice was trembly and thin. She came closer and the cupboard door opened. ‘Found you, found you,’ she said. She pushed herself into the cupboard, breathing hard and fast.
Ada climbed out slowly. She turned at the door and looked back; saw nothing but the mop and the ironing board, a damp box and a pool of water on the floor. Which she mopped away carefully.
Chapter 13
Who was it? They definitely seemed familiar, but she had been in the house alone, hadn’t she? Yes, now that she looked back over it – back past the chair and those final tangled months – she had been in the house alone for years. But at least more herself, whatever that was.
Those were the years when the work started to dry up. Pearl dusted off her desk and her tools. Told herself that it made her eyes sore, it paid about as much as a kid’s paper round. Less probably. The tools bankrupted her, the mechanisms fussy and arthritic. But she took to rubbing her thumbs over her index fingers until the skin turned shiny. Wanting to do something with her hands.
Snapped bracelets, brooches with broken pins, rings that needed resizing. Other people’s precious things. But less and less of them. Maybe one small package came through a week, then every month. The jewellery shop that used her to clear their backlog closed down. Replaced by a pharmacy – a window display of breast pumps and hair dye, the smell like a sweetshop and a graveyard.
But now and again there would be work and she would lean over her desk fitting chain links together, soldering clasps. Relishing the technical language: filigree, fob, locket bail. Completely opposite to the way people spoke about the things they sent her. ‘I couldn’t do without it,’ they would say. ‘I don’t know what I’d do if it stopped working.’ Even though it was only metal for Chrissakes. It was only bits of metal – melted and worked into casings and twists. And it was only stones – dead trees and animals subject to so much time and pressure that they buckled, turned unrecognisable. What happens to everyone, she thought.
She wore trousers people donated to charity shops – cord ones and probably men’s from the way the crotch bagged out. Possibly made her look like a pillock, but they were hard-wearing; she hardly ever had to wash them. She rolled the legs up and stuffed them into boots. She wore the same jumper every day each winter, because she loved the dark green colour and the soft wool around her neck. She wore shirts loose enough to cover her slumping belly and chest. Her skin determined to turn her into someone else, someone with pouchy cheeks and eyes, and a dry, pale mouth.
She was sent a watch to fix. It had a silver strap and gold engraving. Some heirloom or other. She spent weeks on it, the stiff gears like her stiff hands. Her fingers were calloused, seared from years of working with metal. Always the comforting smell of oil on them. The watch’s workings were delicate and Pearl took her time: cleaned them out, greased a new mainspring, fitted the parts carefully back in. She sent it off and then a note came back saying that the spring had been put on the wrong way, so that it had jammed. The mechanism busted and they would not be sending her any payment, and she was lucky that they’d decided not to take it any further.
She should have written back. She should have phoned them up. But instead she made excuses: her handwriting was illegible and getting worse; she hated using the phone, everyone sounded like a stranger, even people she knew very well. Her own voice echoing back, nasal and uncertain. And if it was so bloody precious they shouldn’t have burdened her with it in the first place.
The bilberries came out and she gorged on them until her mouth was stained black.
She felt a twinge in her back and knew that it was her liver – something awful, something rare and awful. She told him about it – who was it? He always seemed to be there, sitting at the table with a mug of tea, and when she came in he would look up and nod, and then get back to whatever he was thinking about. He had a dent in his nose, waxy hair, a lilt to his voice like someone patiently working through a conundrum. What was his name? Luke, that was it. Always there, and if he wasn’t, she would be restless for some reason, unable to just settle down and do something.
‘Your liver isn’t at the back,’ Luke told her.
Pearl sat down next to him and gulped at his tea. He never bothered making her a cup. ‘My kidneys then,’ she said. She scooped the
cat up and put him on her lap, fussed its ears and said something mortifying like, ‘There you go fluffy face. How about that then, eh?’ Pressing his grizzled body into her chest, kneading his back. Somehow slipping into the habit of coddling the thing, speaking to it like it was a baby.
‘Did you hear about the fire at the shop?’ Luke said. ‘A spark from the oven apparently. Although Mick put it out straight away.’
‘I might have heard something,’ Pearl told him. But Luke was the only person that she learned any news from. He was brimming with stories of the place. Of the man from a farm a few miles away that got his arm stuck in an antique hare trap – had to get the thing cut off with a saw. Of the plans to build a bigger road, the kind with four lanes, a few miles away. The price of milk, the price of petrol. Of the fact that Mr Jameson had crashed his car into a lorry, but the interesting thing was his passenger. Not Mrs Jameson. And those stories trailing into stories of his days on the boats. Of icebergs like cathedrals, of the sun so hot it was like a cage over you. He had seen a tornado pick up cows. He had picked a coconut and drunk the milk, which was actually more like water. ‘Don’t rub it in,’ she would tell him. But she liked to hear about the birds he had seen: flamingos, pelicans. Showy birds, he said, and not as good as the ones on the river.
Months passed and nothing to mend. Pearl paced and looked out of the windows. The car’s tyres were going flat – she barely used it except to go up to the shop. She hardly went out except to walk along the river or up into the woods. The world seemed vast and difficult; much easier to stay put; there was more than enough here that she had to do. But whenever she heard a car go past, or whenever a door creaked open in the wind, she would stop what she was doing and listen. Always looking out for someone . . . Who was it? It would come back; it would come back to her any minute now.
She sold a few things she didn’t need: the TV, an expensive copper pan, a leather travelling case with buckles.
A package arrived with a ring to be resized. A wedding ring which needed five millimetres adding. A bride with fat hands. Pearl ordered a piece of sizing stock to match the metal, then when that came she laid everything out on her table, cut the ring and heated it. That was the part she liked – it had to be exactly right. Too much heat would damage it, too little and it wouldn’t bend in the right way. She knew the exact moment, could feel it when the metal gave. Then pull the ring apart and solder in the stock. When it cooled she buffed it up, wrapped it, and sent it back.
She ate so many ramsons that her skin reeked of garlic.
‘Your advert’s gone out of the paper,’ Luke told her. He spread the local pages out on the table and pointed to where her advert used to be. Right next to the birth notices, a photo of a baby with a creased old man’s face.
‘What do you think would cause a twitching eyelid?’ Pearl asked.
‘Why has your advert gone?’ Luke said.
‘Maybe something in the brain, do you think?’ Like a faulty mechanism that needed refitting.
‘I’m going to ring them up.’ Luke went over to the phone and picked it up.
‘Don’t do that,’ Pearl said.
‘Tell me why it’s gone then.’
‘Because the editor’s an arse,’ Pearl said. ‘He put the price up.’
‘How much?’
‘It was too much.’ She bent down and worked her fingers through the cat’s fur.
‘How much?’ Luke said.
‘I don’t remember,’ Pearl told him. ‘Twenty, I think.’
‘Twenty more for the year? That’s not much,’ Luke said. ‘What with the price of paper going up, ink, printing, electricity. Twenty’s not that much.’
‘It’s a rip-off,’ Pearl said. She looked at the newspaper again. Couldn’t quite believe that her advert wasn’t there. But she could just ring up again, she could always just ring up at any time and get them to put it back in.
The river flooded and the bank crumbled, as if something had come up and taken huge bites out of it. Mushroom rings appeared every morning. The trees turned orange as torches.
She saw a mass of flocking starlings, the patterns they made like the way water moved. She wrote down the observation in her notebook, mur, murms, her pen hovering over the paper. Couldn’t think of the right word. A little slip that she barely noticed at the time, a precise description reduced to murmurs.
And God forbid either of them ever admitted it, but it was getting harder to hike the long distances. Neither of them wanted to stray too far from the house, always using the river as a marker. First, Luke would slow down and she would press on ahead, then it would switch. Urging each other on. Who could spot the heron first, who could identify the migrant bird blown in by a storm. Who could read the weather to see what they had coming. Tired and stumbling but not wanting to admit it. They both knew the particular scratches of hawthorn and gorse.
But one time, Luke fell. He was up ahead and she heard a strange cry and then he was down, his foot twisted into a rabbit hole and his ankle completely gave out. Bruised, maybe broken. They were miles from anywhere. The moor turning bone-coloured as the light went.
‘You’ll have to leave me here while you get someone,’ Luke said.
‘Nah,’ Pearl told him. ‘It’ll get too cold.’ A hollow feeling spread through her chest. There wasn’t a path that she could see and daylight was disappearing every second.
‘You don’t need to worry about me,’ Luke said.
‘I’m not worried about you. Why would I be worried about you?’
Luke put his foot down and crumpled again. Pearl wondered for a moment if she could carry him but he was not a small man. She looked in his bag. There was a blanket, a bar of chocolate, some crap book about a detective chasing a killer. And there were hollows in the granite that the weather had carved out. She lowered Luke down gently, sat next to him and pulled the blanket over. They ate the chocolate. Just their backs touching but she woke up with her head on Luke’s chest and a sheep pissing right next to them. It was a better night’s sleep than she’d had for a long time. Which was probably because of the cold, the way it slowed the heart right down.
The phone rang and someone asked when their ring would be returned and she told them she had sent it back already.
A strange pain in her eye, a throbbing feeling. Sure for a whole week that she was going blind but it didn’t happen.
Sometimes Luke didn’t stop by for days. And then he would turn up and eat all the bread and drink all her milk. Sit for hours in the kitchen. Pearl would keep to her study, pretending to be busy. She would straighten out her books, take down boxes of photos then stack them up again. Waiting for Luke to come in and find her. In the end, she would have to go into the kitchen for something.
‘Listen to this,’ Luke said. ‘This bloke at the pub was talking about people digging up metal and things on their land. Precious stuff. Apparently there’s a lot around here. Someone found a load of coins. And they reckon my garden’s got something in it.’
‘So?’ Pearl said.
‘I should have a look, don’t you think, see if there’s something there.’
‘Dig your whole garden up?’ Pearl said. ‘Just because someone told you there might be a coin in there?’ The lines around Luke’s eyes and mouth were deep and dry. He shrugged and put his hand on the back of his neck. Pearl picked at her lips. In a few days she would ring him, in a few days she would say that maybe they ought to have a dig around and see what they could find.
A package came and she tore it open. It was about the size of a ring box. Already imagining the hot metal, what type of stone she would have to reset. But it was a sample of washing powder. She threw it down on the table. She sniffed it. She washed her clothes with it. They came out cleaner so she switched.
She ate as many hazelnuts as she could find in the hedges.
Then one day a woman turned up holding a locket with a broken hinge and insisted that it was mended straight away. It would be difficult for her to come
back and collect it, and no, she didn’t want it posted; hadn’t Pearl heard how much stuff was lost in the post?
‘I’ll have to push all my other work back,’ Pearl said. She took the locket into the study and looked at it through a magnifying glass. There was a tiny photograph of someone in there. The hinge worn from too many openings and closings. She glanced at the woman, who was watching intently, then fumbled with the locket, dropped it, picked it up again.
‘Be careful with it,’ the woman said.
‘I know what I’m doing,’ Pearl told her. She looked in her drawer, couldn’t think what she needed, then remembered hollow wire and hinge pins. She laid them on the table. The jewellery saw, the soldering iron. The woman started to cry. A quiet, watery noise. Pearl opened a drawer and stared into it. The woman didn’t stop crying. Pearl went over and patted the woman’s arm with her fingertips. ‘There,’ she said. ‘There.’
‘I don’t know what I’d do without it,’ the woman said.
Pearl put the jewellery saw away and got out pliers. Her hands shook. She wiped them on her thighs. She felt very tired. She took a breath and cut into the locket.
She could ring up about the advert and get it put back in any time she wanted.
A persistent ache in her fingers that turned into sharp pains. She couldn’t hold a mug of tea, she couldn’t sleep. ‘It’s nothing,’ she said to Luke. When he finally drove her to the hospital they told her it was the tendons, something in them seizing up, stiffening, pulling her fingers inwards towards her palm.
Someone brought her food in labelled boxes, with instructions on how to heat it up. The one with the frizzy hair and the kind face. Who was it? Always talking about the farm. A smell of grass about that one, wind-whipped skin. Feeding the cat as if Pearl might have forgotten.