Authors: Lucy Wood
The door swung open and Val barged in, got out a cheap frozen pie and stuck it in the microwave. Ink stains on her fingers, a harassed look. She saw Ada looking and shrugged. ‘No one will know the difference around here.’ The pie came out grey and soggy and Val slapped it on a plate with a heap of potatoes and took it out to the bar. Butting the door open with her hip. The door swung shut again.
The pieces of deer on the table were still quite big; there was probably more she could do with them. Ada looked at the neck and thought it could be cut into rough chops. Steaks from the leg; what she thought might be fillets from the meat around the spine. Hitting a sort of rhythm, slicing the meat off the bone, picking off shin meat, cutting strips from the loin.
Sweat trickled down her ribs. Her hair was damp on her forehead and she brushed it away with her shoulder. Hours had gone by. She tied up the bag of bones for Val to deal with, then found a roll of plastic bags and divided the meat up into neat packages, wrote out white labels with the date on, found an empty shelf in the freezer. Something pleasing about finishing the job and parcelling it up. A relief. She sealed the bags carefully.
Ada untied her apron and washed her hands. Blood and gristle flecked up her arms. She washed the knife and the saw and swept bits of bone and trimmings from around the table. It was early afternoon. She was meant to be doing the evening shift as well – there was enough time to go back to the house, check the gas, try and make another start on the boxes.
But when she opened the freezer, she found sliced apples and bags of peas. In the fridge there was cream, wine, butter, a few soft carrots and half a swede. Potatoes in one of the cupboards, flour, a packet of crumbling stock cubes. She unhooked the apron and put it back on.
She took out a frying pan, a roasting tray and a battered orange casserole. Sliced butter and let it sizzle, added onion, then pieces of the finer meat and cooked it until the juices ran out. Added white wine, handfuls of frozen apple. A bay leaf. Spooned the mixture into a pie dish. In another pot, she braised the tougher meat, added hot water, tomato puree, stock cubes and red wine and left it to cook into a stew.
It was dark outside. She switched on the lights. Got out a bowl and made pastry, rolled it out and covered the pie. Put it in the oven and baked it. Added chopped potatoes to the stew. Fried the bits of meat she’d picked off the bone with more onion then layered it with potatoes, plenty of butter and the cream. When it came out of the oven it was golden and bubbling.
The window steamed up. A waft of good, rich smells. But she had cooked a lot of food, used up most of what Val had spare in the kitchen. She took off her apron and wiped over her eyes. Tidied up, listening for Val. There was no noise from the bar. She cleaned out the pots and swept the floor, then swept it again.
After a while the door opened and Val came in. She looked around the kitchen at the steaming food. ‘What’s all this?’ she said.
‘I just tried something out,’ Ada said. ‘A few things lying around so I used them. The potatoes going soft anyway and—’
‘Stop whining about it,’ Val said. ‘I’ve got a couple of men out here asking what’s cooking. Realised they were starving – I told them that’s what happens when you come out for a drink over dinner time to escape your family. I’ve got my tax woman telling me she fancies a bite herself. So I need to go and tell them what there is.’
Ada told her what she’d made. Val went back out to the bar and a moment later she was back in again. ‘Four orders,’ she said. ‘Pie and potatoes twice. One of the potato bake things. One stew. Have we got anything green to set it off?’
There was nothing but frozen peas, but Ada mixed in some extra fried onion and butter. She arranged a portion of each dish on the plates and garnished them while Val told her to hurry the hell up before it got cold.
Ada swept the floor once more, then dried up the last of the dishes. Stuck her finger in the stew and tasted it again. It definitely needed more pepper and less wine. And the potatoes were crumbly and grey as old snow. She strained to hear anything from out at the bar. Nothing. Then Val said something and laughter went up like geese.
She stood in the middle of the kitchen. Checked the oven was off – it was. Checked the freezer door was shut – it was. Caught a whiff of the bake and it reminded her of the dish she’d left in the oven when she’d moved away – she wasn’t even sure if her mother had eaten it.
It got darker and darker. She switched off the lights and put her coat on, was just about to slip out the back door to the car park when Val came in carrying four empty plates.
Val looked at her. ‘One of the blokes has booked a table for tomorrow night,’ she said. ‘A table of six. His birthday or something. The tax woman finished her plate and said no point scrutinising the rest of the accounts.’ She carried the dishes to the sink and piled them up. ‘I should try some myself. See what the fuss is about.’ She took a big forkful of pie. Chewed it slowly. Her lips pursing like something had irritated them. ‘Come in again tomorrow,’ she said eventually. ‘I’ll pay you a bit more for the trouble. And write down anything extra you need.’
Typical for Ada to come back now, right in the middle of winter. Not a good time – what with the roads iced up and the house freezing; difficult to get anywhere, cooped up for days, the lights clunking on and off and plunging everything into such deep darkness that it was impossible to move without clouting your hip or your shin. A fretwork of cracks on their bones probably, like maps of the long winters.
Pearl would work out the finances, which always boiled down to the same thing: not enough money for the endless supply of wood the stove needed. So, two jumpers, two pairs of trousers, tie a hot-water bottle to your stomach, don’t sit still long enough for chilblains to get you between the toes. But Ada never listened. She would sit for hours under a blanket, her feet sticking out, nose numb and red. She would run a bath when the tank was low and shiver in tepid water. She would cook a pie that took so long the gas would cut out halfway through, leaving them to pick at the crust, the middle gooey and raw.
One winter, when Ada was twelve, ice took over everything. Pearl chipped it away from the windows, brushed piles of hail from the steps, knocked frost from the car’s wheels. A bracelet of icicles hung from the porch roof. Ada ducked under them when she went out of the door; she had grown three inches in a few months. A new habit of tearing at her nails, a lisp when she was unsure of what she was saying. Made it hard to hear her sometimes.
And they started to mishear each other a lot. Table slipped to ladle, flour slipped to fire. Pearl went to the doctors and got them to check her ears – skulking in at fifty-seven, worried about going deaf, sitting amongst the other mothers with their soft skin and perfect eardrums. She was given drops to soften any wax. Outside, the ice thickened. She bought a bag of cheap salt for the lane which turned orange and smelled like metal. It didn’t stop the ice. She scooped up a handful and threw it at Ada and Ada shrieked and threw some back. Ada said it looked like someone had peed all over the lane. Pearl said, since when has your pee been orange? Ada said, my pee has never been orange. Pearl said, so why did you say it looked like someone peed all over the lane? Ada said, I said it looks like
orangeade
all over the lane. Pearl passed a hand over her ear as if she was pushing aside a curtain. She scraped the grit up with a shovel.
For Christmas she bought Ada a yellow mixing bowl. Ada bought her a glass photo frame wrapped in tissue paper.
The next winter it rained. At first it was a relief – every day was mild, grey, wet. The sky looked like wet newspaper, water collected in footprints in the fields. The windows streamed with all the different kinds of rain: sometimes heavy and lashing, sometimes sharp and sideways, sometimes grey mizzle which draped over like a net.
Pearl repaired the porch roof, put tape over the leaking windows, found an old sandbag and put it by the front steps. She tried going out but the rain drummed against her face, soaked the camera, sent the river slopping over the best paths. So she stayed in, listening to Ada pacing around the house, the floorboards creaking as she moved from room to room. Stopping at each window and looking out, fretting that there was nothing to do, she couldn’t get to Judy’s, she couldn’t go up to the shop, her books and shoes were going mouldy because the house was so damp. Which was true. When Pearl took up the mouldy jackdaw and danced with it around the room, Ada did something new: she laughed then tried to hide it, her lips puckering like old fruit, shielding her mouth with her hand.
One particular evening, Pearl was struggling to resize a ring, which was always a pain in the arse, the metal either over- or under-heating. Ada was in the kitchen clattering pots and bowls. Pearl started to cut into the metal. A cupboard slammed. Then another. Pearl got up and stood at the door, listening, tracing her finger over the grain in the wood. No noise from the kitchen. When she went to look, Ada was sitting at the table with an empty bowl next to her.
‘What are you making?’ Pearl said. Hoped it was something with raisins, she couldn’t get enough of them for some reason.
‘There’s no ingredients,’ Ada said.
Pearl looked out at the belting rain. Could hardly see the car through the smeary window. But she knew that the rain was corroding what was already corroded anyway. ‘The brakes are playing up,’ she said.
Ada nodded. ‘The shop’s still open.’
‘The brakes are playing up,’ Pearl said again.
Ada’s fingers tapped against the empty bowl. Chink, chink, chink.
Pearl watched the rain. Her fault, after all, that they lived so bloody far from anywhere. She went and got their coats and started the car. Splashed it through a deep puddle and turned onto the road. The tarmac was slick with rain. The windscreen gushed water. She drove slowly, knew she should have stopped and turned round but she kept going. Ada was sitting very still, holding her breath round every bend. Pearl changed gear, turned a corner and swerved to avoid a deep puddle, felt the brakes slacken and not catch. Slammed them and slammed them again. The hedge reared up, branches tore at the car and they were flung sideways. The engine went quiet, the car tilted into a ditch and both of them sat there, stunned. In the hedge next to them, baffled bluebells that had come up far too early.
For Christmas she bought Ada a set of cake tins and Ada bought her a leather notebook.
The next winter there were starlings, hundreds of them, in the bare trees. Ada started sleeping until midday; she confused litres with pints and grams with ounces; she came downstairs in the night and nibbled at a block of marzipan, leaving behind small teeth marks and fingerprints.
The winter after that, the river froze. Pearl thanked Christ it wasn’t more rain, but after a few weeks, the steely quiet started to get to her. It seemed like, if you rapped on anything, it would ring out like metal. The water pipes froze and they had to buy bottles of water from the shop and Mick, that greedy bastard, put the price up each week. A pipe burst and left a brown stain on the ceiling that looked like someone giving them the finger.
Pearl wanted to show Ada the frozen river. The way it creaked, the bubbles and stones trapped in the ice.
‘It’s too cold out there,’ Ada said. She had started drinking coffee, but only if she heaped in half a pot of sugar and about a pint of milk – wouldn’t listen to Pearl’s advice about the benefits of having it strong and black.
‘It’ll only take a minute,’ Pearl said. She half expected Ada to say no, but Ada put her mug down and got up. Pearl pushed past and strode on ahead, suddenly worried – what if the river didn’t look as good today, or the ice had started to melt?
But the river was still ridged with ice. Clear in some places, opaque in others, like someone had huffed on a mirror. A thread of silvery glints running deep in it, and blue and grey shadows.
Pearl cleared her throat. She wanted to say something about how strange the frozen river made her feel – uneasy but also astonished at the colours the ice could make. ‘Here it is then,’ she said. The cold air made her voice gruff.
‘Yes,’ Ada said. She looked down at the water.
Since when had Ada’s cheekbones jutted out like that? And why had she started plucking her eyebrows so ridiculously thin and arched? Made her look as if she was constantly startled.
‘It’s thick,’ Pearl said. And then, because she didn’t know what else to do, because she wanted to show Ada how important the ice was, how beautiful, she stepped onto it.
The ice creaked. Pearl stood very still. After a moment, Ada stepped onto the river too. The ice groaned and shifted. A bubble contracted, then sprang back. They stood there for a long time, their hands in their pockets, staring down at their feet on the ice.
She bought Ada a recipe book that she had a copy of already. Ada bought her a camera bag that was too small.
And the next winter there was a spate of burglaries. First the pub had its window jacked open and the till raided. Then Luke’s place – they took his whalebone with the patterns inked on. Then the new houses by the road – each time getting closer and closer.
Pearl fixed another bolt to the door, propped a chair in front of the handle, left the poker by her bed. She lay awake, listening. Jumped at every small noise. Went down to check the bolts and then check them again. A tight feeling in her chest which carried on all winter. She learned the particular nocturnal movements of Ada: how she would sit up watching TV until the early hours; how she would sneak out of the low study window, leaving it propped open with a book so she could get back in. How she would half-wake sometimes and murmur a name that Pearl didn’t recognise; how she would make hushed, urgent phone calls, talking in stifled laughs and gasps, so that, however hard Pearl listened, it sounded like a different language entirely.