‘I can’t wait to find Mum. Can hardly think about it for wantin it so much.’ Ennor could see Sonny nodding but she knew she was thinking about something else.
The kestrel finished scavenging all things wet from the fish head and it looped up into the air, caught a ride with the rising wind and was gone.
Ennor looked at the fish fattening and flaking above the flames and tried not to think about the hunger cramping in her stomach.
‘Wind’s comin up,’ said Sonny. ‘Comin up pretty fast in fact.’
‘Maybe it’ll bring warmer weather.’
Sonny stood and looked to where the last slither of daylight crumpled against the moorland.
She licked a finger and held it up to feel for the cold wind and then shook her head.
‘North, north-east, I’d say.’
‘Always,’ said Ennor. ‘I think the planet’s got stuck somehow. Keeps on blowin from the north no matter what. Can’t we just say hell to it and eat the thing?’
Sonny shrugged. ‘Spose. You did catch it.’ She released the fish from the heat and carried it to Ennor and the plate.
They sat like birds of prey hooked in the moment of a good kill and an even better feed, their fingers pulling at the white flesh like barbarians.
Ennor felt full before she knew it and she cursed her shrunken stomach and continued to eat, the pleasure of food on her tongue and pressed against her gums, and she acknowledged another moment when she would have been happy to die.
She sat back with the last chew of fish in her mouth and watched Sonny wipe the plate clean with her fingers.
‘Fat cats.’ Sonny grinned when she saw her looking. ‘The cats that got the cream.’
‘The fish.’
‘The cats that got the fish, int got such a ring to it, has it?’ She wiped her fingers on her jeans and pulled up next to Ennor. ‘Dint need nothin addin to it.’
They sat with the dregs of tea in mugs on their laps and watched the fire dance the day into total darkness.
No guiding stars hung in the sky and there was no bright farm window light on the horizon to point a wayward traveller towards civilisation.
Two girls in the black of a moorland night with the worrying wind and nothing but conversation to keep them from thinking negative detail.
Sonny asked Ennor if she planned to live the rest of her days where she was born and raised and she said she guessed she would. ‘When everythin’s fixed the way it’s supposed and everyone’s happy.’
‘Family-wise?’
‘Family-wise and money-wise with everyone gettin on.’
‘No fightin and lootin and the rest.’
‘And you can go and do anythin and not worry that you might never come home.’
‘That’d be somethin,’ Sonny agreed. ‘Although I’d probably miss the fightin bit.’
‘Int there somethin you’d rather do besides?’
Sonny shrugged. ‘Like it cus it’s the only thing I’m good at. When I turn pro, cage fightin and that, I’ll get myself a stage name and a character, become someone else.’
‘Where’d you go?’
‘LA, New York, see the world if it’s still there.’
‘That’s ambition you got.’
‘It’s more than that. It’s in the marrow of my bones to travel. I can’t wait, hell.’
Ennor laughed. She liked it when Sonny got going; she kind of knew what she was going to say before she said it and this made them like old friends.
‘I like to write.’
‘Lists? Girl, I know that. I’ve seen you scratchin away.’
‘Not just lists. Poems and stuff.’
‘Feelins stuff?’
‘Sometimes.’
Sonny shook her head. ‘What’s the point in that?’
‘Dunno, always done it.’
‘And who reads your mushy bosh? Hell, who’d want to?’
‘Nobody, just me.’
‘Why?’
‘Dunno.’
Sonny looked confused and this made Ennor laugh even more.
‘Can I read it?’
‘My mushy bosh? No.’
‘Anythin in there bout me?’
‘No, why would there be?’
‘You might have had mean thoughts then writ them.’
‘Don’t look so worried. There’s more interestin things to write bout than you.’
‘Good cus don’t.’
‘I can write what I like. It’s called artistic licence.’
‘Autistic more like.’
‘Shut up. Don’t say that.’
As usual congeniality was soon spoiled by arguing followed by silence and this time it was Ennor’s turn to do the sulking.
She thought about Trip and how excited he had been with the Christmas talk and she prayed that all this would be over soon.
If there was a God, and she believed there was, now was the time for some good luck payback. She prayed that the country was so skewed that Trip would be forgotten in the mess of it.
When Sonny asked her if she was moping and tried to soften the darkness by cracking jokes Ennor told her she was tired.
She wrapped her blanket tight around herself like a sleeping bag and lay propped against the rucksack to get the best of the heat. Through the flames she watched Sonny’s silhouette shadow-box at the water’s edge and guilt and affection made her want to shout that she wasn’t really cross with her but melancholy pinched her mouth shut.
CHAPTER NINE
Ennor lay as still as a dog-buried bone and really this was just what she was. She opened an eye to the outside world, expecting to see some colour in the dying fire but saw none. The black of night straddled her and pinned her down with its weight, brushing her face with feather fingers, settling, unsettling. She went to scream but her mouth was dumbstruck shut, a frozen zip rendered useless in the cold.
‘Sonny,’ she tried to shout, her mouth filling up like a balloon. ‘Mm mm.’ She pulled her arms from the hard blanket and reached for her friend.
‘What? What is it?’ shouted Sonny.
‘Mm mm,’ said Ennor.
Sonny gunned the torch and swung the beam towards Ennor.
‘Hell.’
‘Mm?’
‘Your mouth’s frozen shut. Hold the torch so I can look.’
Sonny poked at Ennor’s mouth and tried prizing it open but it didn’t work.
‘It’s frozen,’ she said simply ‘What did I say bout keepin your face covered?’
Ennor nodded and tried to smile.
‘I’m gonna have to warm you up. Don’t want to, but I have to.’ She clapped a hand over Ennor’s mouth and blew a gutful of hot air through her fingers.
Ennor could see she was trying not to laugh and she too felt the beginnings of a giggle somewhere deep in her belly and her ears tickled from the pressure.
She looked into the warm circle of torchlight and saw that their blankets were fluffy white from the snow. Everywhere she looked was white and snowing and she watched it build the fire into a wigwam and turn Sonny into an old maid with white eyebrows and hair.
‘What you smirkin at?’ she asked.
‘Mm mm.’
‘Nothin?’
‘Mm.’
‘Maybe I should leave you stitched. It’s lovely and quiet round here.’
She kept up the blowing for some time and Ennor could feel a tingling sensation return to her lips.
‘Can you open them yet?’
Ennor tried and then shook her head.
‘Let me try.’ Sonny pinched the upper and lower lip and then pulled and they came apart with a rip.
‘Aw!’ shouted Ennor. ‘Did you have to make it hurt so much?’
‘Yep, here, take this.’ Sonny handed her the handkerchief from her pocket. ‘You’re bleedin.’
They packed up their few belongings as quickly as they could and ran towards the nearby woods. The snow was falling fast and crossways to the lake and the two girls hung on to each other to keep
from tumbling. The blizzard wind slapped and pushed from all angles and bit at Ennor’s mouth with barbed kisses. She thought she might faint or cry from the pain, maybe both.
Sonny was shouting something and she nodded. Whatever she was saying was just that, whatever. Wherever they were going, whatever they were doing was fine by her. She dabbed her lips until the tissue no longer showed red and she kept her hand over her mouth like a keeper of secrets. She kept hold of Sonny’s jacket when she climbed the fence and stomped the snow-laden bracken flat and Ennor did the same, turning her face out of the bully wind to keep an eye on their path.
In the woods the trees gave partial shelter from the driving snow and Sonny shouted that she wanted to keep walking until they were out of the wind.
The small outcrop of trees seemed to double in size as they got nearer and had grown into tall, thick woodland. The snow had crept into the tree line and slunk vertical to each exposed tree and Ennor wondered if anyone had ever been trapped in a snow-banked wood or forest? Tonight it could happen. She looked out into the shaded wilderness for something to count, anything to keep her mind from the claustrophobic fear, but there was nothing but dark and she started to sing instead.
When she counted down to ninety green bottles she realised she was not alone in singing and she smiled despite the cracking sting of her lips. Sonny was a little scared too and this made her feel better. They were equal.
Together they reached sixty bottles and Sonny stopped singing and turned to Ennor.
‘We should stop, if we go any further we’ll be back in the storm.’ Sonny waved the torchlight through the trees and then back at Ennor.
‘Your mouth looks bad.’
‘How bad?’
‘Like proper bad. You got any balm?’
‘No, you?’
‘Don’t be daft. You’ll have to rub it with ear wax.’
‘Get lost.’
‘The SAS do it in jungles. If it’s good enough for them.’
Ennor sighed. She didn’t want to do it; she knew what ear wax tasted like and it tasted bad.
Sonny was sitting on the tarp she’d laid out on the ground and she was watching Ennor with intent.
‘Turn that light away, will you?’
‘Why? It int no dirty act.’
‘Just let me do it.’ Ennor stuck both index fingers into her ears and wriggled them in deep.
The momentary silence was a relief from the rush of wind through the trees and she closed her eyes to enjoy the peace. Her mind travelled back to the tropical shores of fantasy but this time she was aboard a fishing boat.
The rise and fall of undercurrent was like a gently rocking hammock adrift on a warm summer breeze. Ennor could smell the saltwater, could taste it on her lips, soothing.
She lay back in the boat and looked up at the sky and could have sworn she saw God in the smiling sun.
‘Get up,’ shouted Sonny. ‘Are you hurt? Hell, you int hurt, are you?’
‘I’m not hurt,’ said Ennor. She lay on her back and looked up into the black canopy of trees and wondered if she looked hard enough she might see more of a devil place waiting for her.
‘What’s wrong with you, are you sick?’
‘No why? What now?’
‘You fell over.’
‘No I dint.’
‘You did. You were diggin for wax and then slam.’
Ennor sat up and wiped her fingers over her lips and she tried not to lick them.
‘What’s it taste of?’
‘Sick, only not sick but that yellow stuff that comes after.’
Sonny smiled. ‘How many fingers am I holdin up?’
‘Two and two thumbs.’
‘What’s the date?’
Ennor shrugged. ‘Twenty-third I think.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Ennor Carne.’
‘What’s my name?’
‘Sonny somethin.’
‘My real name.’
‘Summer somethin.’
‘OK, I guess you’ll survive, for now anyway.’
Ennor got up and attempted to brush herself off, then sat down on the tarp. ‘What now?’
‘We wait till mornin. Stupid question but still.’ She shook the last of the snow from their blankets and pegged them to branches she’d snapped into spikes to act as hooks.
‘These’ll stop the wind and dry out a bit,’ she nodded to herself. ‘If they don’t, we’re buggered cus I’m not draggin wet wool round with us.’ She turned to Ennor and clapped her hands. ‘You listnin to me?’
‘Course.’
‘I’m not draggin them wet blankets round with us.’
‘I heard you. What we goin to use tonight?’ Ennor asked.
‘We’ll have to pilchard up in the tarp.’
‘It’s freezin.’
‘Tell me somethin I don’t know.’
They lay rolled in the tarpaulin sheet like frozen sardines stranded on the shore and Ennor thought about fish. Caught, eaten and gone from the earth. She thought about her own meat hanging from her bones and all the wild things that might make a meal of her. Ennor Carne was half-dead anyway, a soon-to-be skeleton sinking into the ground. She imagined the slow decay and the tiny lives that might move in there, the worms and the maggots and the mites you couldn’t even name or see with the naked eye, chewing the rot.
She wondered if Sonny had the same thought and she would have asked but knew the answer well enough.
Ennor commenced singing under her breath. Ten green bottles down from sixty and she wouldn’t stop until she got down to none. No mean feat when your brain was closing down to hypothermia. Sometimes she missed whole chunks of numbers and had to go back to the beginning and sometimes she fell briefly to sleep, one lonely number stuck to her grizzly lips, on hold.
Ennor counted out her heartbeat, ‘One banana, two banana, three banana.’ She wondered what number banana would be its last and hoped to reach one hundred. A good clean number, a good one to go on. Number one hundred was a ‘finished business’ number and she counted out her bananas like a market trader, hoping to clear the table before closing time.
‘What’s with all the bananas?’ asked Sonny.
‘I’m countin my heartbeat.’
‘Do you have to do it out loud?’
‘I wasn’t.’
‘So how’d I know bout the bananas?’
‘Sorry I woke you.’
‘It’s too late now. I got bananas everywhere I look.’
‘You goin bananas?’
‘Gone,’ giggled Sonny. ‘Bleedin fruit-loop bananas.’
The girl’s splintered laughter warmed them a little and Sonny wondered if she might light a fire.
‘If you got the spirit to do it, then do it. Otherwise don’t.’ said Ennor.
‘Once it’s done it’s done, and it’s heat and light and tea in the mornin.’
‘Do it if you want to do it.’
Sonny sighed and then she buried her head under the tarp. ‘Hell, I’ll do it and then it’s done. It’s not as if we int shy of wood.’
‘Take the torch.’
‘Course.’
‘Don’t be long.’
Sonny rolled out of the rough-ready bed and Ennor watched her fade into the woods with the tying rope slung across her shoulders and the wind-up torch revving in her hand.
She must have fallen asleep because the sun had returned to her dreamscape and she could feel the heat on her face. Maybe this was death, or heaven. The smiling sun of God or the furnaces of hell, either way it was warm.
‘You asleep?’ asked Sonny. ‘Eh, bananas, you asleep?’
Ennor rubbed her eyes and then opened them. ‘You made a fire.’ She smiled.
Sonny nodded.
‘You made a big fire.’
‘I’ll burn this whole wood down if I have to. The downdraught’s blowin it good.’
Ennor sat up. ‘Maybe we won’t die after all.’
Sonny laughed. ‘Never thought we wo
uld. Did you really think that?’
Ennor shrugged. ‘Could be as easy as that. You fall asleep, then dead.’
‘Or you fall asleep and wake to a raging fire.’
‘Lucky.’
‘Luck’s got nothin to do with it. Called common sense if you int noticed. Dint I tell you I’d look out for you till you found your mum?’
Ennor nodded. ‘I’ll make some tea, got some pine needles left.’
‘I wish we had teabags and milk and sugar. Hell, if we had coffee, I’d probably die in ecstasy.’
Ennor looked in her rucksack for the pan and then looked in Sonny’s. ‘Where’s the pan?’ she asked. ‘My everyday pan, the one I use for boilin snow. We’ll die without it.’
Sonny agreed. ‘Can’t live on snow, get hypothermia that way. You sure it’s not in your huge everyday bag?’
‘No.’
‘In mine?’
‘I’ve looked. We must have left it on the shore. Damn, no hot water means no water at all.’
‘I’ll go,’ said Sonny. ‘It’s not far.’
‘No I’ll go, you collected the wood.’ She stood up and stretched the cold from her legs and took up the torch.
‘I won’t be long. It’s probably buried in the snow by the fire.’
She adjusted the scarf around her face and pulled the woolly hat down past her ears. ‘Wish me luck.’ She smiled.
‘Don’t believe in luck. Have fun.’
Ennor followed their tracks back through the woods towards the lake. Every now and then she’d look back to check that she could still see the home-fire burning and she could.
She walked with the torch in one hand and a stick in the other and she beat at the space in front.
The further she walked the stronger the wind became and their earlier tracks were close to gone as she neared the tree line.
Ennor took off her scarf and tied it to a tree as a guide for her return.
The storm would not get the better of her, not tonight and not ever. She climbed the fence and stepped out on to the wash of thick snow where the jewel stones lay like fossils beneath and headed towards the ice lake.
Exposure to the blizzard had caused all trace of their footsteps to disappear and even the lake was buried beneath a flat white skid of white.
Ennor dared herself to step out on to the ice and she stood to enjoy the luxury of having her boots and shins out of the freezing suck. She skidded her feet a little to feel the motion and when she stepped forward the wind pushed her back on to the snow shore of her desert island, stranded. She tried to guess where they had made their camp and poked her stick, kicking at irregular shapes in the snow until finally her foot sunk into the ashy remnants of the dead fire.
Winter Damage Page 12