Weathering

by Lucy Wood

  The phone rang but she didn’t answer it.

  The blackberries came out in their millions.

  Sometimes, on a cold day, Luke had to hold her mug so that she could drink. Sometimes she could slot a cog into the back of a watch and pinch a delicate clasp together. Sometimes they both just sat on the sofa, Luke’s blanket over their knees, listening to the river. Luke had his thoughts, whatever they were. He would plonk down plastic bags of food that he’d brought over, make hot drinks one after the other. The food and the cups stacked up because he was not her housekeeper and never would be. He tucked the blanket around her when it fell off. He told her she was a grumpy bastard. He told her he should just leave her to it then. He said he had his own things to attend to. He opened the front door but she heard him come back and sit at the table in the kitchen.

  There was something she was meant to ask him about, something about his garden, something she thought they should do together, but it kept slipping her mind. She listened to his small sounds. She moved her fingers slowly, waiting for something to mend.

  Chapter 14

  ‘I need to get paint today,’ Ada said. ‘And new brushes.’

  ‘I’ll come too,’ Pepper said.

  The wind had risen in the night, elbowing down the chimney and putting the fire out. They had woken to a freezing house and the kitchen window flung wide open. A plate had smashed and Pepper had a splinter in her foot before Ada could tell her not to go near it. Had to heat a needle and ease it out; hard to find amongst the grime and dust and scuffed heel.

  ‘I’m not getting it from the shop,’ Ada said. Just so Pepper knew she wouldn’t be able to pick up any sweets or bird ornaments or anything else that she kept going on about.

  The tiniest pause. ‘So?’ Pepper said, shrugging.

  ‘It’s from a place that Luke mentioned. It sells paints and stuff further down the valley.’

  But the car wouldn’t start. At first, she thought the wind was drowning out the engine noise, but after a while she realised the engine wasn’t going at all.

  She sat in the kitchen with her coat on, drumming her fingers on the table. The man Howard mentioned, Ray, had phoned yesterday and said he’d come over in the next few days to look at the house. But the walls were only half painted, half-filled boxes everywhere. She glanced at the cupboard under the stairs. Drummed her fingers faster.

  ‘It’s a long walk,’ she told Pepper, who ran ahead, her coat streaming out.

  Following the main road would be easiest, but cutting across the moor would be quicker. Ada walked up the lane and turned onto the road, past rumpled puddles and strewn branches. The sky was clear blue. The wind sloughed off the fustiness of the house. She undid her knot of hair so that the wind could tug at it. Thought again of how keen Ray had sounded – as if the viewing was just a formality to go through. She swung her arms. It had all been a lot easier than she’d imagined; she had come back, she had done what needed to be done. Dipped her toe in without being dunked right under.

  After a mile they climbed a gate into a field and followed a track which sloped past a dry-stone wall. The field turned to tussocks and gorse as it edged onto the moor, the ground boggy and splashy. Everything was merging colours: greens, greys, rich browns like a horse’s back. The maroon of dying bracken. Red water welling through peat.

  The path climbed uphill over jutting granite. Pepper stood behind Ada and pushed her up with both hands. ‘You’re heavy,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t rub it in,’ Ada told her. She leaned back so that Pepper was pushing and pushing but not going anywhere.

  ‘What would you pick out of no toes or no fingers?’ Pepper asked.

  ‘How am I meant to choose out of that?’ Ada said.

  ‘It’s the game, you have to.’

  Ada raked handfuls of hair out of her eyes, then stopped and tied it back up tightly. It was always so much windier up on the moor. ‘I don’t know. No toes.’

  ‘That’s what anyone would say,’ Pepper scoffed.

  ‘OK. What would you choose out of eating kidneys or that maggot-ripened cheese I told you about?’

  Pepper thought about it for a long time. ‘That is a very good question,’ she said eventually. ‘A very good question indeed.’

  The path stopped at the top of the hill. Not even a sheep track going down the other side. Ada scanned the moor but it looked blank; identical in all directions. And yet her mother had just walked across, as if following some kind of inner compass or map. Which Ada definitely did not have. She had taken Pepper to a park with a maze in it and got trapped in there for two hours.

  Clouds loured in the distance. ‘Is that the spinster over there?’ Pepper asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ada said. Why didn’t she know? She looked over at the hunched and misshapen rock that Pepper was pointing to. ‘Spinsters made their own living spinning wool,’ she said. ‘So they didn’t have to get married.’

  ‘Spinster, shminster,’ Pepper said, not listening. She looked down the hill and then hurtled head first, hair sticking up like chopped hay.

  Ada watched her run, then starting picking her own way down, braced and stiff, ankles squelching in bog. The wind was freezing but sweat dribbled down her ribs. Her knees ached and there was a twinge in the side of her back. This was why she never exercised: she only ever felt decrepit when she was doing something active – day-to-day she felt fine. She rubbed her back, stopped looking down for a moment and stumbled on a root, twisted and fell sideways onto the sopping ground. Not gracefully.

  Pepper stood over her. ‘You almost fell on poo,’ she said. She squatted down and tugged at the tough root. ‘It could have happened to anyone,’ she said kindly.

  Ada sat up and moved her foot around. The sooner off the moor the better. A drenched, barren place, especially in winter. Although now that she looked closer, there were things she’d never noticed before: a thin tree with pink and orange flowers, a bush full of sloes. On the ground there were lichens like crochet, tiny purple flowers, yellow mushrooms like thimbles.

  ‘Did I make a stupid noise when I fell?’ she asked. Pepper nodded and did an impression. Ada threw a bit of sheep poo at her, then got up slowly. When she was five, walking across the moor with her mother, she’d thought the shiny black lumps were liquorice – at least she wouldn’t make that mistake twice.

  Pepper bent down and picked something up – it was a sheep’s skull, gnarled and sallow, one snapped horn and two worn teeth. She held it up to her face and growled.

  The wind pushed clouds and fog down from higher ground. At first Ada could see twenty metres in the distance, then ten. The landscape blurred and thickened to wet grey.

  ‘Put your hood up,’ she said. She stopped and looked back the way they’d come. ‘Stay on the path, OK.’ But there wasn’t a path any more. Nothing but fog all around, wet yellow grass and mud under their feet, pale granite showing through like bone.

  Pepper glanced up from under her hood. ‘I want to go back home now,’ she said.

  Ada took a few steps forward. Out of the dim fog she saw a tree, bent over by the wind like a streaming flag. Was that the tree her mother had always saluted, a way-mark for the path ahead? She went towards it, looking for a stone wall, and almost stumbled against the remains of a wrecked hut. ‘I think I know where we are,’ she said. Home. Pepper had called it home.

  Pepper went into the hut and stared out of the empty window. ‘Did you used to walk here?’ she said. ‘Before?’

  ‘Sometimes.’ Ada circled the hut, remembering a broad path leading down to the road. Fog galloped down the hill.

  ‘Did you used to see this house?’ Pepper asked. Then she pointed at a rock. ‘Did you used to see that?’ She swung the sheep’s skull on her finger. ‘Did you see this?’

  There wasn’t a path. There were probably hundreds of these old wrecks dotting the place. Ada paced around it once more. Nothing. She was about to turn back the same way they’d come, when she saw shorter grass, a footp
rint in mud, and glimpsed the path through banks of fog like a causeway through the sea. She turned and saluted the tree – realised too late that it was actually a fence with a snagged bin bag flapping on it.

  The moor turned back to fields and hedges and a car went past on the road in the distance.

  ‘Look at all them birds,’ Pepper said.

  ‘They’re crows,’ Ada said. There was a flock wheeling around a group of bare trees like leaves in the wind.

  ‘Not crows,’ Pepper said. ‘Ru, rok.’

  ‘Rooks?’

  ‘Rooks. Lots of birds today. Those little grey ones. And a starling. And a magpie. And one with black under its head and red here.’ She pointed to her chest.

  ‘When did you see all those?’ Ada asked.

  Pepper shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Just around.’

  Ada stopped at the gate and looked back. Thought about those little yellow mushrooms and flowers. But in the fog, the moor was an empty blur; like a face in the distance you don’t recognise until you get close enough to see the scars, the crinkles, the way the bones slope.

  The house was on its own next to the road. It had a blue door and a withered tomato plant with a few hard green tomatoes on it. Ada knocked and waited. A dog barked. She knocked again. The dog barked louder and then ran out from the back. Ada stood rigid as it skidded and weaved around her legs. ‘Good dog,’ she said. ‘Bugger off.’ Dogs were like the worst drunks – lunging at crotches then pissing over other people’s shoes.

  ‘It’s Shep,’ Pepper said. She crouched down and wrapped her arms around the dog’s head.

  A voice called out and then Tristan came round from the back of the house, brushing dust off his hands.

  ‘You,’ Ada said. ‘I mean paint. We’re here to buy paint.’ She knelt down and tried to clean Pepper up, who was daubed with mud.

  Tristan watched her. ‘You look like you came right across the moor,’ he said.

  Ada rubbed her hands over her own face, felt grimy streaks down her cheeks.

  ‘Shep’s licking my feet,’ Pepper said.

  Tristan showed Ada a shed stacked with paint and tools. Wood shavings heaped on the floor like shorn hair. She chose two tins of cream paint and a brush and paid him. The skin on his hands was split and calloused. He locked the shed door and said he was just about to head up to the cafe and Pepper butted in saying she wouldn’t be able to make it back home unless she ate something right now, so could she come too? And Ada felt the same herself.

  His truck stank of wet dogs. Mud dripped off Ada’s boots, her hair matted like felt. When she was six, a supply teacher had told her class to draw pictures of their souls. Hers was a tangled mass of felt-tip that sprawled off the page. ‘Your soul seems to have spilled onto the table,’ he had sighed, and gone to get a cloth to wipe it off.

  The sign outside the cafe said ‘Brake for Hot Food’. It was a pebbledash bungalow at the top of the valley and the main road snarled past. She and Judy used to go there sometimes to drink milkshakes and had once slipped out the back to smoke a cigarette Judy had found – both of them hacking like unsettled swans.

  Inside there was a heater clanking and the smell of burnt crumbs. A couple dressed in creased wedding clothes, their small daughter in a ballerina tutu.

  The plastic chairs creaked when they sat down. Pepper put the skull on the table. Tristan took his coat off; underneath he was wearing a thick red work shirt and khaki trousers. Freckles on his hands and throat, glints of orange in his hair. Put Ada in mind of the moor’s colours. His bottom teeth were overlapping, his skin chapped but smooth along the tops of his cheeks. Younger than Ada had first thought. He nodded at the waitress who came over with a pad and pen.

  ‘Alright Tristan,’ she said. She was about forty, with a bored drawl and a clip like a shooting star in her hair. ‘What are you having?’

  ‘Coffee,’ he said. ‘And have you got any of that special left?’

  She nodded and wrote something down. Looked at the skull for a long moment, as if it was next in line to order.

  ‘Coffee for me, too,’ Pepper said. She slipped off her chair and went over to the counter to study the trinkets for sale.

  The waitress flared her nostrils. ‘Anything to eat?’ she asked. She glanced back at the till, where two men were waiting, blowing steam out of their mouths like cold horses.

  ‘We’ll all have the same,’ Ada said. Outside, the fog had thinned and the sky was a wan green. The waitress brought over their coffees, thick as gravy with a rainbow sheen.

  Tristan dropped sugar into his mug and stirred it with his finger.

  Ada’s jeans tightened as the mud dried. She wiped at her cheeks with the back of her hand. Felt something gritty crunch on her teeth. Silence apart from the clatter of plates. Spoons clinking against cups. She wiped her face again. ‘Luke told me where to go to buy paint,’ she said.

  The coffee left a gleam on Tristan’s lips. ‘He tries to help me out. Recommends me for decorating work, carpentry when it comes up.’ His voice was deep, almost hoarse.

  ‘Your house. It was always empty when I was growing up.’

  ‘They put it up for rent a couple of years back. Saw it when I was driving past.’ He kneaded his right leg. Something stiff about the way he walked on it. ‘But they’re thinking about moving in there themselves soon, the owners.’

  The sky turned mirey. A few silver rain streaks on the window. Ada gulped her coffee, glanced at Tristan, drank some more. ‘I’ve got someone coming to look at the house. That’s why I needed the paint quickly.’

  Tristan reached over and touched the sheep’s jaw so that it clacked.

  ‘So it shouldn’t be more than a few weeks now.’ She stopped, realised she’d been addressing the skull.

  Tristan was studying the hinge of the jaw. ‘They come down and look at the place now and again. Trying to make up their minds.’

  The waitress brought over napkins and cutlery and a basket of sauce sachets. Ada took a packet of ketchup and tore bits out of the corner. Her stomach gurgled.

  Tristan leaned back in his chair and looked around the cafe. ‘This is a good place,’ he said. Seemed not to notice the buzzing strip lights, bleary floor, frayed wires behind the counter. He pointed at a blackboard that said: ‘Cake, Chips, Pheasant’. ‘A few weeks ago that said: “Oysters”. From the estuary. Best thing I’ve eaten. You probably used to have them here all the time.’

  Ada grimaced and shook her head. She couldn’t abide oysters. The same went for radishes and those weird crackers made out of rice – each one you ate made you hungrier and hungrier.

  ‘I only had them once before, in Canada, near the mountains, except they called them prairie oysters there,’ he said.

  ‘Prairie oysters.’ Ada glanced at him. ‘You know what those are, don’t you?’

  Tristan spoke like he moved: slowly and carefully. He rubbed at his jaw. ‘I thought I did,’ he said.

  The strip light above them fuzzed. ‘Where would the oysters come from? It’s up in the mountains. No sea.’ She stirred her coffee for a while, trying to think of a delicate way of putting it. ‘You ate bull’s balls,’ she told him. Fried in batter probably, with plenty of sauce as a disguise.

  He breathed out slowly. ‘Well,’ he said. His lip twitched, either going to laugh or say something else, but he stayed quiet. Folded his hands across his stomach. After a while he said, ‘Now I’ll tell you something.’

  Ada leaned forward, thought he was going to tell her what was floating around in their drinks.

  ‘Your house is tipping.’

  She slopped coffee onto the table. ‘No it’s not,’ she said.

  ‘That’s what I’ve heard. And if it is, the whole foundation would need to be reset.’

  There was a bellow from behind them. Pepper and the girl in the tutu suddenly scrapping. ‘Get off it,’ Pepper shouted. She bit at the girl’s hand. ‘Put it back.’

  ‘I didn’t do anything,’ the girl shrieked.

>   Ada jumped up and dragged Pepper away, one hand under each armpit, as if rescuing her from drowning.

  ‘Horrible thieving sod,’ Pepper said. ‘I saw it first and she hid it in her shoe.’

  The girl’s parents glared at Ada as they carried their daughter out. She was licking her injured hand. Something silver sticking out of her shoe. ‘She is a sod,’ Ada told Pepper. ‘But Jesus, who do you think’s going to get in trouble if you carry on biting, you or me?’

  The waitress came with heaped plates. ‘Three specials,’ she said. A strong meaty smell and onions, fried potatoes. They all looked down at the food. ‘It’s the pheasant,’ she said, ‘like you asked for.’

  ‘It’s good,’ Tristan said. Caught Pepper’s eye. ‘Good fighting food.’

  The meatballs were earthy and full of herbs. Rain lashed against the windows. The waitress came back and smiled smugly at their emptying plates. ‘It’s the chef’s family recipe,’ she said. ‘For when everyone has pheasant they want to get rid of. You might find some bits of shot left in there,’ she said. ‘Meant to tell you earlier.’

  Pepper’s fork clattered down.

  Tristan heaped up a huge bite. ‘My sister gave up meat,’ he said. ‘She’s only eleven but she won’t have any of it.’

  ‘Eleven,’ Pepper said. ‘That’s not very old for her to be your sister.’

  ‘I’m twenty-four,’ Tristan said, as if that explained anything.

  Pepper thought about it. ‘I’m six,’ she said. Then pointed at Ada. ‘And she’s thirty.’

  Ada pushed her food from one side of the plate to the other. ‘Thirty-four,’ she said.

  ‘Thirty-four,’ Pepper announced. She worked her tongue around in her mouth, then coughed and spat out shot like a good hunk of tobacco.

  Chapter 15

  At the shop there was a china bird with a chipped beak, a box of maps with tattered corners, a basket by the door with a few crusty vegetables. Pepper would look in and find carrots with two legs, a swede with a withered and fuming face.