Authors: Lucy Wood
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.
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.
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.