by Lucy Wood
The kitchen was full of the same bright clutter she remembered from Judy’s bedroom – now free to reign over a whole house. A blue dresser stuffed with recipe books and manuals: how to cook pasta, how to repair a washing machine. Four knitted hens and a bowl of buttons and nails. Woven baskets. China ornaments. Geraniums. Rag rugs, multicoloured and fraying at the edges. Jars crammed with dried flowers and bits of oily machinery.
‘Look what I did,’ Pepper said. There was a sheet of cardboard on the table with dried pasta shapes stuck to it. ‘It’s you.’ A ghoulish and distorted face, one eye falling off, a mass of pasta curls. Choose green spirals for the most flattering representation of your mother’s teeth.
‘I think she captured something,’ Judy said. She switched on the kettle and the kitchen filled with steam. ‘We weren’t sure what to do, then I remembered us making those pasta things.’
Pepper had stopped doing pasta pictures when she was four, but Ada didn’t tell Judy that. She squeezed Pepper’s clammy hand – she must have been fighting to stay awake for hours.
Robbie stayed by the sink and ducked his head towards Ada, wrists scalded from the hot water. A few more creases across his face, more weight around his belly.
‘Robbie said I could help check the animals,’ Pepper said. ‘Didn’t you?’
Robbie swept his arm over tired eyes. ‘I did indeed,’ he said. They went outside. A gate creaked, their hushed voices moving from barn to barn. ‘Why is that cow sleeping?’ they heard Pepper ask.
‘She’s a funny thing,’ Judy said. She gave Ada a mug of hot gingery stuff. Sat down, then got up again and came back with a bottle of whisky. She poured some into both mugs. ‘Robbie won’t let you take her back. He goes crazy over anything small. I almost have to prise the newborn animals off him.’ She stopped and looked down at her hands. ‘The daft fool.’
They both blew on their drinks. Ada sipped and coughed. ‘I’m not used to this any more,’ she said.
Judy took a drink. ‘Me neither.’ They both shifted on their seats. The TV flickered blue on the walls. There was an aerial photograph of the farm by the door – the farmhouse tiny among the patchwork of green and yellow fields.
‘Jake Trewin,’ Ada said. ‘I saw him at the pub, a few days ago.’
Judy raised her eyebrow. ‘Let me guess – he asked you out to his new truck.’
‘I almost went at first. I thought he just wanted to show me his new truck.’
Judy choked on her drink. ‘That truck’s ten years old,’ she said. She coughed again then glanced at Ada. ‘You should have gone. Asked to see his marbles.’
The shelves in the oven pinged as they cooled down.
‘You’re probably the first woman he’s seen in weeks who’s under forty,’ Judy said.
Ada tore at her ragged fingernails. Vowed once again to stop, then tore at another piece. ‘Not much under forty.’
‘God, don’t say things like that,’ Judy said. ‘Five and a half years is a long time. We could do a lot in five and a half years. We could probably tunnel through a prison wall or something.’
‘Or learn to play the harp,’ Ada said.
‘Ha. I was at the optician’s the other day and she said to me, Judy, you have a deficient blink. You’re going to need to practise blinking eight times a day. And I said: I have to practise blinking? There go my dreams of learning Mandarin. And then I cried.’
Ada leaned back against a knitted green cushion. The TV flickered pictures of a rocket going into space. ‘You and Robbie,’ she said.
‘What about it?’ Judy said. ‘What I want to hear about is you, off gallivanting.’
Since when did Judy say things like off gallivanting? Ada thought about it; a few fleeting relationships, a few awkward situations with people at work. All messy, all things to extricate herself from. ‘I went out with someone from work. He talked about his wife the whole night. How she liked to rake leaves. It relaxed her. He talked about leaves a lot. I told him to go home and work it out.’ Ada picked at the edge of the cushion. ‘I hate raking leaves. They always get impaled.’
‘Maybe that’s what she found relaxing,’ Judy said. She traced the lines on her hand as if she was reading her own palm. Outside, a shed door banged and a cow groaned. Judy sat up, listening. ‘One of them’s ill at the moment,’ she said. Her face was suddenly creased and tired.
‘Are you sure you—’ Ada said, but then the front door opened and Pepper and Robbie were in the hall stamping off their boots, Pepper saying that she would pay him seventy-five pounds for that beautiful horse with the limp and the punky hair.
Ada glugged down the last of her drink and stood, slightly woozy. Saw Judy do the same. ‘We’re not used to this,’ Ada said.
‘No,’ Judy said. She sighed deeply, like a pair of bellows. ‘We’re not.’
‘Come here Cooptin Schmooptin,’ Pepper said. ‘Come here my cherry.’ The cat stared at her then jumped onto the windowsill and mewled. ‘Get down!’ Pepper said. ‘Get over here.’ She picked him up and he thrashed at her.
‘Christ, be careful,’ Ada said. ‘His claws were really close to your face.’
‘Sit on my lap Captain,’ Pepper said. She sat down and patted her legs.
‘Maybe he should just go out,’ Ada said. Dreading telling Pepper they wouldn’t be able to take him with them. Thank God she’d got bored of the cameras already.
‘Cats are supposed to sit on people’s laps,’ Pepper said. She thumped her legs.
‘He’s not used to it,’ Ada told her. The cat was a stray her mother had found and taken in. She’d ignored him most of the time, let him come and go as he wanted. There was a feral look about him – his embattled tail, bite marks on his ears that had healed to hard ridges. Something desperate in his eyes.
Pepper thumped harder on her legs. Ada went over and held her fists, rubbing her thumb over until they relaxed.
The cat jumped back onto the windowsill.
A few days later someone rapped their knuckles against the door just as Ada was taking a blackened tart out of the oven – she’d tried to improvise custard but it had gone tits up – burnt on top and sloppy in the middle.
When she opened the door, frosty air wafted in, acrid smoke wafted out. There was a man on the front steps. ‘I’ve come to look at the house,’ he said. He had a drooping face and a small, worried mouth. Short, thick hair, cut so evenly it looked like a new carpet. He was wearing a sweatshirt that said my brother went on holiday and all he bought me was this lousy sweatshirt. ‘I’m Ray, spoke to you on the phone.’ He stuck out his hand, which was pale and very cold, a dirty silver ring on one finger.
Ada tried to sweep the smoke out of the doorway. If she’d known he was coming she would have made bread. Wasn’t it bread that was meant to sell a house? Or was it apple pie? Definitely not scorched and raw eggs. The smoke alarm started screeching and she took the battery out. ‘I meant to test this anyway,’ she said and was startled when Ray barked out a wheezy laugh.
They went into the kitchen. There was silt all over the floor again, a pool of water under the sink. She suddenly realised how poky and cluttered it was – Ray had to bow his head to look out of the window.
‘You’ve got a nice outlook,’ he said. ‘Trees and all that, people like trees.’ His shoes were pointy and polished, as if they were part of a completely different outfit. ‘It’s not the prettiest building out of context, but people like water. Not me personally, although I have to drink about two litres a day.’ He ran his hands over the wall, glancing at the pictures.
‘He hasn’t taken his shoes off,’ Pepper said. She hung behind Ada’s legs, almost tripping her up.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Ada said. She threw a tea towel over the cake, kicked something sticky and grim under the table, maybe a hairball the cat had left.
‘You can’t live here if you don’t like water.’ Pepper crossed her arms.
Ray kept his hand on the wall. ‘I wouldn’t live here myself,’ he said
. He squatted down and looked at a brown mark near the skirting. ‘Surprised if this place hasn’t flooded in the past. It’ll whack up insurance I suppose.’
‘I don’t think it’s flooded,’ Ada said. She heard a noise on the stairs, like someone stumbling, but when she glanced round the door there was nothing there.
‘Be surprised if it hadn’t,’ Ray said.
‘But who will live here?’ Pepper asked.
In the living room, Ray went straight over to the stove. ‘This just for heating in here?’ He straightened the logs with his foot.
Before Ada could answer, Pepper jumped in. ‘There has to be a fire all the time. Otherwise you get freezing water and the radiators don’t get hot.’
‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ Ada said. She explained how the back boiler worked; then shook her head at Pepper and swiped at her to make her go away. Pepper slunk back but didn’t leave the room.
‘You could put that in a museum,’ Ray said. An ember flared on the carpet and went out.
Round the rest of the rooms downstairs. Ray giving out sidelong looks, the skin between his eyebrows puckering like tacked cloth. A heavy feeling in Ada’s ribs with each step. How little she’d actually done – she could see it now. The house a wreck and still her mother everywhere: overflowing boxes, hoards of photos, her coats and boots waiting by the door.
Halfway up the stairs, Ray slipped and grabbed at the handrail, a low yelp in the back of his throat. He palmed his bristly hair. Stood looking out of the upstairs window for a long time before he turned round.
Ada started to speak, stopped, tried again. How to describe the particulars of the place? The way the wind bawled through the loose windows, the smell of soot and smoke from the chimney, the continuous whump of the river, like a heartbeat. ‘There’s three bedrooms,’ she said.
Ray nodded and glanced into each room but didn’t go in. In the bathroom, Pepper had been for a pee and hadn’t flushed. The lid left up and the bowl bright yellow. Pepper sniggered.
Ada clenched her hands. Hot and panicked as a trapped moth. ‘It’s messier than I would have liked,’ she said. ‘But if I just had some more time.’ Imagined a lifebelt on choppy water, fingers punting it away instead of gripping on.
Ray nodded. ‘Not sure it’s exactly what I had in mind,’ he said. He kept staring at the toilet until Ada went in and closed the lid. ‘I’m not sure it’s exactly what I had in mind,’ he said again. His voice flatter, like a battery losing charge. He went slowly down the stairs and stopped at the bottom to straighten a tilted frame. ‘Nice picture,’ he said. He plucked at the neck of his sweatshirt as if searching for a collar to turn up against the cold.
Ada slumped against the closed door. Less than ten minutes had passed. She listened to Ray’s car door thump and the engine start up. Behind her, she heard footsteps clumping up the stairs, a rattly cough and then the creak of someone sitting down on a bed. Her mother’s old bedroom; Pepper messing around in there again. The bedsprings screeched. Ada ran upstairs and opened the door hard, anger suddenly coursing through her. ‘Why were you being such a—’ she said. But the room was empty, just a thin edging of frost around the window, and a crumpled dent in the mattress as if someone had just got up and left.
A bath. She needed a boiling bath filled to the brim. Sickly smelling bubbles, skin stained red with heat. She lay back in the water, dunked her head under into the thunderous quiet. When she came back up, Pepper was there, undressed and covered in goosebumps. She slipped in, her toes digging into Ada’s thighs.
This had always been their routine, ever since Pepper had been a baby: red-faced and howling and needing soothing. When Ada was so exhausted she didn’t know what else to do, when her eardrums had felt like they were about to split, and the smell of milk and sick and dirty plates was too much to bear.
Pepper splashed water up the wall. Gurgled a watery song.
Their skin wavered – pale green and warped. Sheets of steam rose up. Ada wanted to stretch her legs out and close her eyes. Pepper asked her something but she pretended not to hear. She dunked back under and water pressed into her ears like hands. No sound except her heart clattering, the water humming, the pipes clanking and shifting through the house.
Chapter 17
Back in the house and her nerves as brittle as the frost. Knees crunching, aching teeth. Ice inside the letterbox, ice under her nails. But she was definitely in this time. Clinging onto the frost on the grass, on the windows, where the river couldn’t jostle her about. And her thoughts easier to get a grip on; not swilling around so much, a kind of grainy edge to them and everything suddenly much quieter, much stiller, as if the clapper in a clanging bell had been pinched between two fingers.
Pearl listened. A bed creaked upstairs. ‘Who’s there?’ she said. She went through the hall, paused for a moment at the stairs and looked up at them. All that time wasted being scared of driving, of poisonous fumes from the fire, and in the end it was stairs. She shook her head – no point dwelling on all that now.
She made her way slowly down into the study, then went straight over to the desk and opened the top drawer. Where was it, where was it . . . There. An envelope with photographs inside. She fumbled through, her fingers white and stiff; dropped them and watched as they scattered over the floor. A day’s worth of pictures. The light shifting from dawn to twilight. Nothing extraordinary, hardly any birds in them, but the ones she’d kept separate, the ones she used to look through from time to time.
She had been up early as usual. Boots on, coat buttoned up to the chin. February giving over to March. Wind bristling, huddling snowdrops, water still grey and stunned from the cold. She spent a long time finding the right spot – the correct angle of light, complicated colours, something to frame the shots with in the background. Then she set up the tripod, selected a lens, attached it and set the aperture and focus. And then waited. And waited. She blew on her fingers and stamped her feet. Took a few shots of the rusty sky reflected on the water, another of crusty lichen. Blew on her fingers again. The day billowing out in front of her like a pegged sheet.
Why did she do it? After all it was always a trial, what with the cold in winter that made her face so stiff. Or clouds of midges in summer, the devils biting her wrists and eyelids. Rain wrecking everything. Wind knocking the tripod over. Difficult to go for a piss without at least some of it trickling down her leg in the hurry to get it over with before some walker came along.
But she knew why. She could remember exactly why, even now. For the way that time seemed to slow down and stretch, measured in the river’s ripples rather than by clocks and mealtimes. For the invisibility. For the hush. To forget. To make some sort of record – but of what she wasn’t sure exactly. To notice things she wouldn’t otherwise have noticed: dragonflies hunting, the patterns of light, the specific way that water poured over a dipper’s back. There was that thing she had read once: would a tree falling in a wood make a sound if there was no one there to hear it? She used to turn that over in her mind, felt that somehow it related to her. But always ended up irked because Christ, there was no knowing one way or the other was there?
She had a picture in front of her now, on the floor of the study. A wren at the edge of the shot, scurrying into the bank. That had been taken mid-morning. The wren had darted out and she’d snapped it. A small moment, worth all those hours of waiting.
At midday she’d eaten a tin of baby potatoes, another of sliced pears.
And then there was a noise behind her and someone came through the long grass making a racket. Human sounds always seemed harsher after a few hours by herself – the croaky breathing and rustle of clothes. ‘Have you seen my dog?’ the man had said. He was wearing those shiny waterproofs that walkers wore, and a grey knitted hat pulled down to his eyes.
‘No,’ Pearl told him. She stared through the lens, waiting for him to go away.
‘She ran over this way,’ he said. He looked down into the water. Called out the dog’s name,
which was something stupid like Trudy or Rebecca. ‘She’s got an infection in her leg.’ He paced up and down the bank, his breathing panicked.
Pearl looked up from the camera. Resigned to it now. She stumped up the bank and towards the trees to look for it there.
It took an hour, a precious hour. The light changing. She heard a kingfisher flying down the river – it would have gone straight past the camera. She circled a bramble thicket and there was the wretched dog sniffing the ground. Pearl stiffened as it loped up to her and wiped its nose on her leg. Had never trusted the things, they moved too fast, impossible to know what they were thinking. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘You have to come here now.’ The dog didn’t follow her. She hesitated then felt for a collar and ended up pulling the thing back the whole way. Said, ‘Here you are then,’ and thrust it at the man. But he kept saying thank you, thank you, as if she’d done something worth mentioning and in the end she’d had to mumble something about the light and move herself upriver out of the way.
The last few shots showed the afternoon seeping away; the sky turning the dark blue of costly ink. A bright leaf like a star, a bedraggled feather. There had been a heron, she remembered that clearly, standing by the bank for almost an hour. But she’d given up taking pictures of herons a long time ago. None of them ever came out right. Herons hardly ever moved – there was always too much time. She’d get in close and adjust the settings, then reframe the shot, readjust the settings, trying to capture it perfectly. But the pictures always came out blurred or tilted or with her own shadow sprawled across them.
There was a noise in the house. Pearl looked up from the photographs. Footsteps. A floorboard creaked. She stayed very still. Then footsteps again, on the stairs this time. Pearl got up very slowly. ‘Who is it?’ she said. She stood in the doorway and looked out, just glimpsed something moving away down the hall. Her hands clenched and bits of frost dropped to the floor.