by Lucy Wood
She got ready carefully. Put on a brown dress that she had bought in a sale. Wrapped around some beads. Had some trouble rolling on thin tights and when they were finally on they felt strange after her loose jeans. And her smart shoes were hard and unfamiliar, her make-up had dried to crusts in the pots. She brushed her hair for a long time and pinned it up, enjoying all the complicated twists and flicks. Then she went downstairs to find Ada, explain to her again that she would only be gone for two hours, that she would lock the door, that Luke’s phone number was on the table. But Ada was upstairs in bed, coughing, shivering, rubbing her throat, saying she had seen a horse galloping through the house.
Pearl had taken off her beads and peeled off the dress, a ridiculous thing anyway, made her look like she was trying too hard. And the price tag had been dangling down her back the whole time. She stood by the phone for ten minutes before dialling Luke’s number. Her hands shaking. She told Luke she wouldn’t be able to make it after all, then waited for him to say, come next week instead, but he didn’t, and she couldn’t bring herself to suggest it either. Neither of them had mentioned it again.
Pearl put the phone down, put her head in her hands and wept, making sure she kept it short and quiet. When she went back upstairs, she glimpsed Ada running into her room from the landing, jumping to avoid the sharp floorboard, not shivering, not coughing, then diving under the covers. But when Pearl came in, she hacked and held her head and groaned the deepest, most heart-rending groan, it seemed almost impossible that she could have made it up.
Now, Pearl stood next to Ada and watched her sleeping. Not a pretty picture: her nose red and swollen, her top lip chapped, grey cheeks. But sleeping quietly in Pearl’s old bed. Pearl remembered the long nights alone in that bed, how cold the sheets would get overnight, the sound of the rain against the windows, the wind rattling. Sometimes, when Ada was small, she would come in and climb under the covers and ask things like: why is the sky so high up? Why do we have to sleep? What are all the different ways people die?
‘I don’t know,’ Pearl would say. ‘I don’t know.’
Outside, the snow was getting deeper and still falling. There was ice in the corners of the windows and the corners of Pearl’s eyes. Snow building up under her tongue. She rolled it round and round. Felt each piece of snow as it landed and melted on the river, which was cold and stunned, running slower than usual, stiffening like a joint.
She made her way through the house, leaving piles of snow and ice behind her as she went. She was stiff and slow but her footsteps were steadier, more solid; she could see where she was going now that her eyes weren’t murky and streaming. No buckling bones, no persistent feeling of being dragged at. No stumbling, nothing jostling. No sound of the river roaring, but rather, the faint ping of growing ice. Her toes crunched.
Down the stairs, through the hall and down into the study, where she had always retreated to. Someone had tidied away the photos she had spilled. She stayed by the bottom step and didn’t go in any further. The room was much smaller than she remembered. And the curtains that sickly orange colour; had she chosen them? She couldn’t remember. If all the time she’d spent here was calculated, how much would it have been? This one little room, out of anywhere in the whole world.
Something caught her eye on the shelf. The camera the little one had been using. She went over to it. Her old camera, and there were the others on the shelves. The one with the dodgy lens, the one she had dropped and dented. She ran her hands over them. Ice crept onto the lenses and powdery snow clung to the straps.
But how had it happened, this fascination with cameras? When had she become someone whose first thought on a stormy day was to go out and take a picture? Pearl thought back over it. There was no sudden decision, no sudden urge, as far as she could tell. She had just found a camera. Yes, that was it – Ada had been ill and finally fallen asleep one afternoon. Pearl couldn’t leave the house, but she couldn’t settle; couldn’t concentrate on work, couldn’t concentrate on any book. So she’d come into this room and looked through her old boxes of stuff. All the things she’d never bothered to sort out: folders and files and crappy ornaments. A set of old cutlery. And a camera that she’d hardly ever used before. No idea why she even had it.
She’d taken it out of the box and looked at it, unclipped the cap and fiddled around with the dials, just about worked out how to adjust the focus. She went over to the window, opened it as wide as it would go and leaned out. Then aimed at a twig covered in lichen, pressed the button and the camera made a lovely whirring sound. She aimed again, focusing on something blue up in a tree which she thought might be a kingfisher but actually turned out to be a bag snagged on a branch. Just those two shots, and then she’d closed the window and put the camera away. But the next day there was a rainbow and she thought she might as well take a picture of that. And the next day a fish jaw had washed up on the shingles and it looked like a mouse-trap. And the day after that, there was a dipper on the rocks and she didn’t have the camera so she’d run all the way back up to the house to get it.
Pearl picked the camera up, fumbled it, then cradled it in her stiff hands. It fitted so particularly in her palms: the shallow grooves down each side, the cool plastic, the weight of it. Although not weighty enough. There was no film inside. She found one in a drawer and carefully fitted it in. Now she could sense the chemical tang in the film, feel the light bouncing off every surface. She lifted the camera up and looked through it. The lens smudged with ice. She rubbed it off and looked again. Saw snow falling wherever she aimed.
She lowered the camera and blinked. Outside the window, the little one was crouched down in the snow. Her face all creased up and frowning as she studied something on the ground. For a second, Pearl thought it was Ada. The same expression, the same intense concentration. Bits of hair flying out in the wind, red cheeks. Pearl stepped closer to the window. She looked tiny out there, crouched in the snow. A small, dark dot. How lonely. How lonely it must have been for Ada out here, left behind in the house while Pearl went out looking for her dragonflies and her hoarfrosts.
The snowflakes were falling faster now, whirling in curved patterns, like flocks of knot showing their pale bellies. As Pearl stood by the window, memories started coming in flurries. Broken glass; someone beckoning her out into the river; a dent in the side of the car. Memories drifting and piling up quietly, like letters on the doormat of an empty house.
She raised the camera again, her arms numb and stiff, her joints grating over ice. She aimed the camera and moved her finger over the button, tried to push it down, summoning up the force of the water, how it snapped sticks and forced reeds to bow their heads. Her finger was on the button and she aimed at the little one and she pressed it.
Chapter 27
‘Come on,’ her mother called from the car. ‘We’re late already.’
Pepper bent down to look at the snow. It had been trampled and there were muddled tracks and marks. It was hard to tell if there were paw prints there or not. There were bits of feather and bird prints, maybe a speck of grey fur snagged on a bramble.
Her mother called again. Pepper walked slowly over to the car. Snow clung to her trousers. Everything was hushed. She stopped and pretended to get a stone out of her shoe. It was very cold, probably too cold for a cat to be outside by itself. Maybe his fur would freeze. Snow pattered down from trees and branches. It was like a lumpy blanket over the ground.
The car engine hacked and stuttered and then started up. Pepper had one more look around the garden. Then she got in the car and slouched down in the front seat. The tyres crunched on snow and juddered over the potholes in the lane. The snow on the road was thinner and bits of grit flicked up at the windows.
‘You won’t have to go for long,’ her mother said.
Pepper slouched down further in the seat. Now and again a glimpse of the river through the trees, grey and wide and cold. She picked at a loose thread on her belt. She was wearing her old green jumper and the
horrible black shoes with buckles on, which rattled like her broken lunchbox whenever she moved.
Her mother kept glancing over at her and then back at the road. She drove slowly over the snow. Her nose was still red underneath but she didn’t have to lie in bed any more. Pepper had spent two days eating cereal and washing her bowl up carefully. She’d made herself a cup of coffee the way her mother had it, and sat for an hour trying to drink it.
Her mother picked at the side of her thumbnail. ‘It will be OK,’ she said. But it wasn’t her that had to go.
They turned into a narrow road and there was a brown house and then a postbox. After a while, her mother pulled in next to the pavement and stopped the car. ‘Why are we stopping here?’ Pepper said. A sudden hope that her mother had changed her mind.
‘That’s the school,’ her mother said.
It didn’t look like a school. There were four green cabins with flowers and huge insects painted on them. A small concrete playground with a wooden train. She stayed in the car. She could hear other children screaming and running around.
‘I’ll come in with you,’ her mother said.
Pepper picked at her lips. She shook her head. Kept herself very stiff and upright when her mother kissed the top of her head.
She got out of the car and held onto her bag. Didn’t look back as she made her way over to the playground. She stood at the edge and waited. There were red and blue circles painted on the ground. She waited in a blue circle. After hours and hours someone blew a whistle and everyone went inside. There were only two classrooms, one for older people and one for younger people. You had to sit on a table with people the same age as you. Petey was in her class and a boy she had seen at Luke’s party. She recognised almost everyone.
The teacher had very short grey hair and three rings on each hand. One of them had a purple stone on it. She showed Pepper how to hold the pencil so that it didn’t keep slipping. She had a funny way of saying the letter R. There was a green dinosaur on her desk which nodded slowly. When a girl with a fat plait in her hair threw a paperclip at Pepper, and Pepper got up and tangled it into her plait, the teacher didn’t shout. She talked to both of them and then she took Pepper out into the corridor and showed her a line of framed photos. Each one was of a different class. And there was her mother, standing in the front row of one of the pictures. She was very small and her hair was tangled and she wasn’t smiling. She was looking away from the camera and up at the ceiling, where the sun had turned a window bright white.
At lunch, she ate her sandwiches with Petey, then went outside. ‘Let’s sit in the train,’ she said.
Petey shook his head. ‘The older class don’t let us sit in it.’
Pepper looked over at the train. ‘So?’ she said. Someone kicked a football into one of the carriages. She chewed her lip and was relieved when Petey shook his head again.
‘I’ll show you something,’ he said. He went to the corner of the playground and prised up one of the concrete slabs. Underneath there were hundreds of pale worms. ‘No one else knows about this,’ he said. He watched the worms for a minute, then took a book out of his bag and told her about all the kings and queens that had been beheaded. He liked to read about things that had happened a long time ago.
‘Why can you read books so well?’ Pepper asked him.
Petey shrugged.
‘But you can’t draw very well, can you?’ she said.
‘No,’ Petey said. When he drew, the pencil wobbled and none of his lines joined up. When he tried to draw people, their eyes floated outside of their faces. He had been born with yellow, wrinkly skin and had to be put under a lamp to change it back to pink.
In the afternoon there was a game in one of the snowy fields. The first team to grab their flag and run all the way back to their own side won. The girl with the plait tried to trip Pepper up, but she dodged out of the way and stamped on her toes. And Pepper’s team won, and she rescued Petey, who had been captured straight away and was stuck in prison.
Then, suddenly, she was back out in front of the school again, and her mother was waiting. She looked cold. She’d been waiting by the gate rather than in the car.
‘Was it OK?’ she asked. She unlocked the car and they got in. ‘Was it OK?’
Pepper shrugged. ‘I dunno,’ she said.
The car was so cold that Pepper could see her breath floating out, but her mother didn’t turn the engine on. ‘What’s that in your bag?’ she said.
Pepper showed the picture she’d done. ‘The teacher said we had to draw our Christmas lunch.’
‘You drew our pizza,’ her mother said.
‘The teacher said she wished she could have had pizza. I told her we almost didn’t because the oven stopped working until you kicked it. She said, sometimes that works for her too.’
Her mother sat with her hands on the wheel. ‘So it was alright?’ she said.
Pepper glanced at her, then slouched down in her seat. ‘I stuck a paperclip in a girl’s hair and stamped on her feet,’ she said. Just so that her mother knew she couldn’t trick her into things and expect them to turn out OK.
They had to bring something in to show what they enjoyed doing at home – but it couldn’t be TV or computer games, or animals, alive or dead. Pepper hovered outside the study for a long time before she went in. She’d left the cameras on the shelves but they had been moved around – one of them was on the desk and another one was lying on the floor. She picked them up and wiped them with her T-shirt. They were very cold. She looked at the camera she’d been using before. There was a film in it; it felt heavier and she could see a code written behind the see-through plastic. She looked around the room. The curtains swayed slightly in the draught. She turned and went to get her coat.
The snow was a lot of different colours when you actually looked at it. At first it just looked white, but there was grey in there and yellow and blue and sometimes purple shadows. She aimed the camera and pressed the button. When she clicked the lever across, the number on the dial changed. She made her way slowly down towards the river. She aimed at a blackbird that looked even darker against the snow; held the camera steady, then adjusted the focus.
‘Down here by yourself again,’ the old woman said behind her.
‘Hmmmm,’ Pepper said. She concentrated very hard on the blackbird. It shuffled and moved to one side. She readjusted her settings.
The woman cleared her throat. ‘You’re by yourself a lot, aren’t you?’
‘That blackbird will hear you,’ Pepper whispered. She aimed the camera again. The river drummed behind her. Snow pattered down onto the blackbird’s feathers and it ruffled itself up. Its bright yellow beak had a snowflake on the end – if only she could get it now . . . her finger hovered, about to click.
‘Is it lonely, being out here?’
More snow pattered around the blackbird. ‘Sometimes,’ Pepper said. She focused in again.
‘Is it?’ the woman stepped closer. ‘Because maybe if I’d done things differently.’
The blackbird was right in the centre. One more second. Got it. Now the blackbird was hopping to one side, leaving behind clear tracks. She moved forward.
The woman followed behind. ‘I just think, maybe if I’d done things differently.’
Pepper blinked. She kept the camera steady, watching the blackbird.
‘But I tried my best. I’m sure I tried my best, didn’t I?’
The blackbird turned and stared at them, then flew away, spraying up a fine mist of snow. Pepper lowered the camera. The woman was covered with snow and her hands looked cold and grey. Her boots were coated in thick ice. She was always by herself too. ‘I don’t feel lonely when I take pictures,’ Pepper told her. She put the camera carefully back in its bag.
‘No,’ the woman said. She looked towards the house. ‘It’s good for that, at least.’
A week went by, and then another. Pepper went to school every day. She would hang her bag and coat on a peg with a picture of a
flower on it. It was meant to be a primrose but it looked like a fried egg. The important thing was to stay very quiet when someone else was talking. And you had to think carefully and try to ask a question. Pepper had a lot of questions. There were jars of pond water and jars of clay and a big computer on a table in the corner. Some days there was an assembly where everyone went and sat in a big room and someone talked about boring things like Hope and Sharing and Health. Petey always listened very carefully. Some days she spelled a word exactly right, other days the letters went upside down. There was a huge book of birds with the names written in very big letters. The girl with the plait came in wearing purple shorts and boots up to her knees and she got sent home. The best place to go at lunchtime was the pond at the bottom of the playground. If someone was sick on the cement it got covered up with sawdust. The boy with orange hair collected scabs off people’s knees and elbows. The girl with black hair had a thing in her ear so that she could hear what people were saying. It was OK to copy someone’s work if you gave them your biscuits, but not your apple. If she tried to distract Petey in class he would close his eyes. One afternoon, they had to draw the house they lived in. Pepper bent over her paper and scratched with a thick pencil. Tried to capture the sprawling bits of the house, the bending trees, a glimpse of the river. Smoke winding up. She worked over break time. Dark, deep pencil lines and lots of crossings-out but she finally finished it. ‘Well,’ the teacher said. She went to get another teacher to look. The picture was pinned up in the corridor for everyone else to see.
Everyone said that the snow would go away but it didn’t. It hung around on the ground and the trees and it didn’t melt. Like it was waiting for something. By the road, there was a drilled yellow pee hole where a dog had been. But still no sign of Captain. If he had frozen to death somewhere it would be her fault. She went out every morning to check the food scraps and look for signs, but there was nothing.