by Lucy Wood
Mick always watched her. After a while he would call over: ‘Why aren’t you at school yet, eh?’ He would dig deep in his ear with his finger like he was scratching his brain. ‘Going to get in any more fights?’
Pepper would hold the swede up so he could see his own resemblance.
Mick would blink, shrug and gesture to a crumb on the counter, pause, then flick it onto the floor. Slowly, to make sure she got his meaning.
The power went out and everything was strange colours: yellow candles, the cold glow of a wind-up lamp. The gas flame in the oven turquoise and roaring.
Rain drummed on the roof. Her mother baked a thin cake and rolled it up while it was still warm, then let it roll back flat to cool. ‘It will remember how to do it now,’ she said. The smell of the matches she blew out was like birthdays.
Pepper always got in the way when her mother cooked, so she went upstairs and lay on the camping bed. There was a fabric bag under the slats. It had a label with something written on it. ‘P’ ‘e’ ‘a’, something then something else. Inside, there was a watch, a cardigan, a gold ring, three small pins, the tiniest screwdriver, a ball of tissues, and a delicate brass button with engraved swirls, which fitted exactly in the middle of her palm. She put everything back in the bag but kept the button in her pocket.
Early morning, the sky tinged orange in the distance but grey as a sucked mint in the valley.
Pepper walked over hail that crunched like broken glass. It was getting colder. The feeling that things were hardening, preparing themselves. The river was flinty and made a plunking noise, like someone was throwing in rocks. She held onto the camera and looked for birds, her eyes getting used to noticing particular movements: a wren darting, blackbirds rootling in leaves, the rich brown bobbing of a dipper.
There was someone sitting further up the bank and Pepper circled over slowly. Luke said you shouldn’t disturb anyone that was fishing, but if she could just see some more of those coiled fish.
‘What the hell?’ The person turned round. It was an old woman with her legs dangling in the water. She had rolled the arms of her jumper up to the elbow and underneath, her skin looked pale, almost blue, like cold milk in a bottle.
‘I thought you were fishing,’ Pepper told her. She turned to go.
‘Ha,’ the woman said. ‘Wouldn’t get anything in this stretch. Nothing but midges here, maybe a few skaters. And a heron very early.’
Pepper stopped. ‘A heron?’ she said. ‘Is that one of those tall, grey birds?’
The woman put her hand in her trouser pocket and felt around. Water and bits of hail leaked out. ‘Where is it?’ she said. ‘I had it in here.’ She looked in the other pocket and then on the grass around her.
‘It will be somewhere you don’t expect,’ Pepper told her. Like her glove, found that morning snagged on a piece of wood by the fire.
‘It’s only a bit of metal,’ the woman said. ‘I suppose it’s only a bit of metal.’ But she kept looking in her pockets all the same.
Pepper stamped her numb feet and walked along the bank looking for a good place to take a picture. There was a peeping noise and she looked up and scanned the river.
‘Kingfisher,’ the woman said. ‘It’ll be further up there, eating a fish probably. I’ll show you.’ She got up, clambered down the grass, into the water and started to wade.
Pepper followed along the top of the bank. But the trees thickened, the path veered away from the water. There was a muddy slope in the bank, below it purple shingle lapped by ripples, and she hesitated, remembering for a moment how her mother had stiffened and gripped Pepper’s hand when she had first seen the river. And Pepper did stiffen, but she scrambled down and sloshed into the shallows. Freezing water seeped through her boots. The current dragged at her with every step. Roots humped and tangling. A metal pipe trickled sludgy run-off. Moss garlanded rocks and suddenly a deep pool, where she stumbled and plunged one arm in. A cold shock of water, the back of her nose stinging. Under the water, stones wavered green and coppery as old coins, they changed shape, swelling and shrinking as the water moved.
Up ahead, the woman had slowed down and was running her hands over the water. She picked at bits of wet, mossy stuff. Pepper splashed over, and the woman turned round to look. ‘Why are you following me?’ she said.
Pepper stopped. ‘The kingfisher. You said I should follow you.’
The woman kept touching the surface of the water with her fingertips. It looked springy, like the water was bending, but when Pepper tried it her hand went straight through. ‘Maybe there was,’ the woman said. ‘But it’s miles away now.’
‘You said I should follow you,’ Pepper said. Her cold toes cramped up inside her boots. The familiar heavy feeling, like she had swallowed cement. Turning her into someone hard, who didn’t care. She turned and stumbled over a stone, holding the camera up so it wouldn’t get wet.
‘What’s that?’ the woman said. ‘What’ve you got there?’
‘Nothing,’ Pepper told her. Tried to make her voice savage.
The woman looked at it carefully. She seemed to be talking more to herself. ‘It’s just light,’ she said. ‘Just light hitting chemicals and producing a reaction. But it’s more than that. It captures something, pins it down, something so brief you almost wonder if you really saw it.’
Pepper stopped wading and glanced back, checking to see if the woman was making fun of her. For she had put into words exactly Pepper’s own jumbled and peculiar thoughts.
Every afternoon she saw Clapper and Petey walking along the road behind the house. She would stand and watch from the window. One day Petey looked up and saw her and she ducked behind the curtain. The next day he looked up and nodded, neat and solemn, pushing his glasses up his nose. The day after she waited and waited but they didn’t walk past. She went outside and stood in the road and then they came round the bend, too late for her to move so she pretended that she was looking for something in the hedge. They were carrying something big and yellow over their shoulders.
‘He won it in a raffle,’ Clapper said. ‘Up at the school.’
‘It’s a canoe,’ Petey said. He had a string of cracked conkers around his neck like war trophies.
Clapper put the canoe down on the road. ‘We should let the maid sit in it,’ he said.
Petey frowned and considered. ‘I suppose we should,’ he said.
‘Where are the paddles?’ Pepper asked. She sat down on the plastic bench.
‘Stingy bastards,’ Clapper said. ‘I didn’t even notice it didn’t come with any paddles.’
She left out food for the cat but it didn’t want any of it. Not bread. Not rice or cut-up bits of sausage.
‘Coo, coo,’ she called softly when she saw it running across the yard. The cat didn’t even turn round. She followed it through the long grass, which still had bits of frost in it that hadn’t melted.
That woman was there again, standing on the riverbank. The river rushed past, choppy and brown. The cat stopped and stared at the woman, then arched its back and its tail got fluffier. But it took a few steps forward, placing its paws carefully and quietly in the grass as if it were creeping up on something. Then its mouth went stiff and it made that quavering, scolding noise Pepper had heard it do before.
‘Don’t be stupid Captain,’ the woman said. The cat’s ears went back, it crouched very low, then bolted across the grass and into the next field.
Pepper dug her foot into the ground. ‘Where does that cat live?’ she asked. Praying the woman wouldn’t say it was hers, or someone else’s further down the valley.
‘He belongs up there,’ the woman said, pointing at the house.
Pepper turned and looked back at the house. ‘Up there,’ she said. Water welled silver in her bootprint and the river glinted. ‘Up there,’ she said again. She wiped her nose on her glove. ‘It certainly is cold today,’ she said.
‘What are you talking about that for?’ the woman said.
Pepper shru
gged. ‘I’m trying to make conversation.’
‘Oh,’ the woman said. ‘That.’
‘This is what you have to do. I say, whereabouts do you live and what do you do for a living? And then you tell me. And then I say it’s cold. And then you agree. And then I say I hope the road doesn’t get ice. And then you say you heard the road will get ice. And then I say—’
‘Christ,’ the woman said. ‘Why do we have to say all that?’
‘I don’t know,’ Pepper said. She held onto the camera strap. ‘Do you think there will be ice?’
‘Of course there will,’ the woman said. She looked at the camera. ‘What aperture have you got that set to?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What shutter speed?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What film’s loaded in there? Look there, what does it say?’
‘It doesn’t say anything,’ Pepper said. She opened the compartment. There was nothing inside. Her chest got a sharp pain. ‘I think the film fell out somewhere,’ she said. She pretended to look all over the ground.
‘You forgot to put one in,’ the woman said. ‘You dappy mare.’
‘Nobody told me!’ Pepper shouted. She looked in the empty compartment one more time and tried to remember all the things she’d taken pictures of but she couldn’t, they were lost, and she couldn’t even look for them because they had never really existed.
That evening, Luke turned up, hovering in the doorway carrying a plastic bag. ‘You mentioned I should come round sometime,’ he said to her mother. He had fixed the car for them and the engine didn’t rattle any more.
Pepper checked the pots to make sure there was enough food for someone extra.
Luke stood by the kitchen door, eyes glancing around uneasily. He knocked his head on the stooping ceiling and jerked whenever the lights flickered. ‘You mentioned I should come round,’ he said again. He looked awkward and strange in the small kitchen.
Her mother got him to sit down and she piled his plate with food. Which Luke picked at and moved from one side to the other. One foot jangling under the table like he was trying to press on a brake. In the end, he pushed his plate away and leaned back. ‘Smell is taste,’ he said. ‘Can’t have one without the other. But I imagine that was proper.’
‘How about coffee?’ her mother said quickly. She got up and filled the kettle.
‘Why can’t you taste?’ Pepper asked. She licked the last sauce from her plate.
Luke touched his crooked nose. ‘Have you ever walked into a glass door?’
Pepper paused mid-lick. ‘No,’ she said, watching him carefully to see if he was making it up.
Luke got up and put one, two, three spoons of coffee in his cup, then talked with her mother about boring things, so Pepper stood next to the heater and tried to see how long she could keep her hands on the hottest part.
After a while, Luke came over and hunched over the heater, gulping at his thick coffee. He made his voice low. ‘Heard you’ve been fighting,’ he said.
Pepper scowled and picked her lips. ‘So?’ she said.
‘See that scorch mark on the floor there?’
Pepper looked and saw something round and black in the corner.
‘And see this?’ Luke lifted his trouser up and showed a silvery mark on his ankle. ‘Your mother did that. Wasn’t meant to be cooking with alcohol but she wanted to make something flame in a pan, as far as I can remember. Dropped the hot oil. Curtains went up in seconds. I had to stamp it out before it spread through the whole house.’
Pepper stared at her mother, who asked what they were whispering about.
There was mud under Luke’s nails and Pepper asked him why, had he been digging? ‘Ah.’ Luke shifted, turning uneasy again. ‘Just been trying to find something out is all.’ He cleared his throat, then rummaged around under the table and brought out the plastic bag, which was full of camera stuff: lenses, a small folded tripod, spare rolls of film.
Pepper had to go and get the camera even though she had sworn never to touch it or think about it again. She fitted a lens on slowly. She zoomed in on her mother’s backside.
Luke looked away and pretended not to notice.
When Luke had gone, she heard something scratching at the door and there was the cat sitting on the steps. Hail gleamed in his grey fur. She clucked softly with her tongue. The cat looked away and yawned. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Come on.’ She patted her knees. ‘Come on Captain.’
The cat slipped round her legs and ran into the kitchen. Paced the room, rubbing cupboards and jumping up on the counter and the sink. She tried to lift him down but he kicked and lashed out and broke a glass into a hundred pieces.
‘Shhh,’ she said. She picked up the bits of glass carefully and put them in the bin. Scolded the cat, but not too much. Rolled the brass button for him to chase but he slunk under the table and licked his paw. His tongue rough and pink as a wafer.
‘Go into the lounge, it’s freezing in here,’ her mother said, coming into the kitchen.
Pepper glanced at Captain. One paw over its ear and then the other. ‘In a minute,’ she said.
‘There’s a cat under the table,’ her mother said.
‘I told you. I told you there was a cat.’ Pepper crouched down and stared at him. ‘You belong here, don’t you Captain,’ she said.
‘What did you call him?’ Her mother crouched down too and looked closely at the cat. ‘Jesus, look at him, he must be at least twenty.’
‘He has to stay here now,’ Pepper said. ‘Doesn’t he?’ She went under the table with Captain and touched his tail. He flinched and whipped round, yellow eyes glaring. Pepper crawled back out. Her own cat to look after. She called him and patted her legs.
The cat stayed under the table washing.
Chapter 16
Another shift at the pub – turned out that Val’s waitress was off sick permanently; the blues or the brittle bones, Val couldn’t remember which.
Howard frantically prepared a pasta sauce, sweat dripping into his ears. Chopping mushrooms and boiling them into a gluey paste. A few drinkers at the bar. Tristan propped up on one elbow. Val haranguing him about all the work he was doing – shouldn’t he be easing up a bit now that it was winter, looking after himself better? Although if he insisted on working himself into the ground she had a problem with a piano that was blocking a door she wanted to open.
Two customers for food: one who sent the meal back, and the other, Luke, who ate stoically, working his way through like it was a job that needed doing.
Tristan was walking along the road. He pressed against the hedge to let the car past, shielding his eyes from the lights.
Ada wound down the window. ‘Do you want a lift?’ she said.
It was a rare clear night. The sky stripped back to stars. On the cusp of December and a smell so particular to this place: the tang of frost behind the mulch and dank. And there was frost: the first glints as it laid itself down on the grass.
She drove slowly, the headlights picking out beer cans in the hedge, a pair of gleaming eyes.
‘You missed the turning,’ Tristan said.
‘There’s a quicker way down here,’ Ada told him. One of those roads with grass down the middle, the car shunting from pothole to pothole.
Her clothes smelled of singed onions and grease. She changed gear, the car jerked, revved, then shuddered over a cattle grid.
Tristan held his leg steady then flexed it at the knee. Saw her looking over at him. ‘It’s worse when it’s cold,’ he said.
Ada looked back at the road. Luke had told her about Tristan’s leg – how he’d broken it years ago in a hiking accident somewhere so remote he’d had to walk on it to get himself to the nearest town. ‘It gets pretty cold here,’ she said.
Tristan looked out of the window. The lane widened and there was a sprawling farm ahead. ‘I worked on that place,’ he said. He sat very still but suddenly words poured out. How he’d restored all the staircases
, the beams; stripped back panelling and discovered a stone fireplace. A bread oven in a wall that he’d researched, found out how it worked. It was all there already, he said. Just waiting for someone to find it, work it up. He rubbed over his knuckles as if he was polishing them.
‘Did they like it?’ Ada asked.
Tristan didn’t turn to look at the house as they drove past it. ‘They only use it for summers,’ he said.
Mud turned to tarmac and the lane joined up with the road. The moor stretched out behind it.
‘You’ve got bits of mushroom in your hair,’ he said. He reached over, his fingers above her ear.
‘Mushrooms are only the fruit of something much bigger,’ Ada told him. ‘Not a lot of people know that.’ There was Tristan’s house in front of them. ‘Here we are,’ she said.
‘Here we are,’ said Tristan.
And on to Judy’s. To pick up Pepper, who had begged not to come to that wretched place with the bad food.
Ada had paced. Picked up the phone and put it down again. Picked it up once more. In the end she dialled quickly and Judy picked up.
‘I’ve got your dish here,’ Ada said. ‘From the casserole.’
There was a pause. ‘That was a plastic dish,’ Judy said. ‘You can keep that, or throw it away.’ She tapped the phone to clear the static.
‘I think the static’s on my phone,’ Ada said. Both of them tapping like they were exchanging a secret code. In the end Ada had just blurted it out. ‘Can I ask you a favour?’ she said.
She turned up the steep track and parked outside the barns. No idea how Pepper would be; the scene in the cafe hadn’t been pretty. And another incident lingered in her mind: Pepper pretending to one babysitter that she was allergic to milk and her heart was about to stop. The poor girl ringing in tears saying Pepper was lying on the floor and wouldn’t move.
The corrugated roofs reflected a sliver of moon. The yard was strewn with husks of cars. The smell of silage and pigs and manure. The kitchen window threw out orange light. Ada hovered outside, looking in, until Robbie glanced up from the sink and saw her.