Authors: Lucy Wood
‘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.
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.
She followed. Down the hall and towards the living room. Looked through the doorway. Saw the tattered rugs, the mildewed sofa. Brown stains on the walls like the sepia on old maps. That terrible purple lamp – what had she been thinking? And the table with its legs practically sawn off. Pearl stepped into the room. The cat was curled up on the chair like a threadbare cushion. His ears twitched. He opened one eye and stood up, back arching, then jumped down and stalked straight past her. Not even a glance, the disloyal sod.
There was someone kneeling in front of the fire. A woman. She opened the stove door and poked at the embers. Smell of soot and wood smoke. Pearl moved a little closer. Her clothes steamed in the warm. Frost melted off her boots and her hands. Found herself scowling at the fire like at an old enemy. It had always been her responsibility to keep the fire going, to tend it so that there was enough heating and hot water. It was a burden but at least it was something she could do, something to show that she . . . yes, she had kept the house warm at least.
She watched as the woman leaned over the fire. Caught the profile of her face. It was funny, if she squinted the face reminded her of something. It was a lovely face, round and smooth and pale. Two bits of mottled pink high on each side. A darker scatter of freckles. What was it? Something familiar. Pearl dredged back . . . it was before all those years by herself, before all that . . .
The woman turned and blinked. The poker gripped in her hand. A log slipped in the fire and flung sparks against the glass.
‘You’re back then,’ Pearl said.
Because that was it. Those photographs. That was the day Ada had left. Pearl had finished up just as it was getting dark, packed the camera back in the case and walked home, holding the tripod over her shoulder like a rifle. Opened the front door and heard Ada upstairs, opening her wardrobe, brushing her teeth, some kind of urgency about it. A packed bag at the bottom of the stairs.
She’d put the tripod down and called up that she was back. ‘Why is there a bag down here?’ she said.
‘I’m leaving today, remember?’ Ada called down. ‘I told you. That job came up. Temporary, six months.’
Pearl went into her study and sat at her desk, listening. A cold feeling beginning to spread up from her feet. She had forgotten the date, thought that it was a week, maybe two weeks, in the future. Imagined some dreary town far away. She got up and listened by the door, but there was no sound upstairs. She went slowly up the steps and out into the hall. The front door was open and the bag had gone. She felt weak and leaned against the wall. Thought, well, that’s that. Thought, I was eating tinned potatoes. Felt in her pocket and touched the button that she kept there, for luck or comfort or just out of habit. Her hands too warm and then too cold.