Weathering (21 page)

‘You’ll always have that now,’ Pepper said. ‘Won’t you?’

Her mother touched the top of Pepper’s head lightly. Then she put the keys down on the table and said, what about pizza? Which was their tradition – home-made pizza and ice cream all afternoon. And games: charades and Cluedo, which her mother tried to play tactically, going slowly from room to room, but Pepper slipped through secret passages and made wild accusations, winning every time.

The last day of the year. Her mother was working at the pub and Pepper was going too. She had never seen the new year arrive before and hadn’t ever really noticed it. Usually, by the time she woke up in the morning, it had already begun. But now it felt like she was about to tip over a very steep edge, or that, any moment, the lights would go out and when they came back on everything would be different. She’d borrowed her mother’s watch and she kept checking the time every few minutes. It was important to know exactly when it was going to happen.

The pub was so full that there was nowhere to sit down. Val had to move people around, push tables together and find an extra chair so that Pepper could squeeze into the corner. The windows had steamed up. A woman knocked into Pepper’s chair. Pepper gulped her lemonade. Her throat was dry. She checked the watch again. Half past seven. There was a group of people standing so close that she kept having to lean out of the way of their arms. One of them said something about the holidays ending. Another one said something about children and school – the new term was almost here already. Pepper backed her chair away. She picked up a beer mat and started to shred it, layer by layer.

Someone carried a chair over and sat down right next to her. Pepper pulled another strip off the mat. ‘I’ve never seen it as busy as this,’ the man said. ‘It’s because of your mother’s food. Everyone wants to try it.’

Pepper looked up and saw that it was Luke. He sipped his beer and froth bubbled on his top lip. ‘Are you staying here till midnight?’ she asked him.

‘Thought I probably would,’ Luke said.

Pepper moved her chair a bit closer. Spoons tapped, plates clattered together. But it seemed to her that everything was different to usual. The lamps were dim and buzzing and looked like they were about to go out. Three glasses had smashed already. There were a lot of people talking, but their voices would get louder and louder and then suddenly stop, and the room would go quiet. After a while, there would be murmurs and laughing and the voices would build up again, like gusts of wind that came and went.

She glimpsed her mother through the kitchen doors. In the car, she had told Pepper that people made resolutions at New Year, which were things they wanted to change about themselves. Every year she resolved to stop biting her nails and learn how to bake custard without burning it. What about stroking Shep? Pepper had asked, but apparently you couldn’t make resolutions for other people. Pepper had thought about hers for a long time. She still hadn’t decided. What should she change? And did it mean that, after midnight, she would be a different person to the one she had been before? She checked the watch again. It was quarter to eight.

Luke pointed to someone across the room. ‘There’s Neil Simons. I haven’t seen him in here for years. Hardly ever see him out of his house.’ Pepper looked and saw an old man sitting by himself, staring down into his drink. He was still wearing his coat, which had patches glued on. He twisted at his dust-coloured hair with his fingers. Luke kept his voice low. ‘I probably shouldn’t tell you. But he suffered a bad loss a few years ago.’ He sipped his drink. ‘Where do you keep your money?’ he asked.

‘In my envelope,’ Pepper said. She didn’t have much left.

‘Well,’ Luke said. ‘Old Neil over there, his father kept his in his mattress. He stuffed it in and sewed it up. Thousands and thousands. Didn’t tell anyone about it. So when he died, Neil put the mattress in a skip at the dump. He didn’t find out about the money until a few weeks later, but the mattress had already gone.’

‘Someone’s got all that money,’ Pepper said.

Luke shrugged. ‘Maybe. Neil’s given up on it now. But he could have done with it, poor bugger.’ He leaned back. There was a bit of tattoo poking out above his collar. It looked like the tip of a wing and the end of a thin, forked tail. ‘It’s like the burial hoard that could be in my field. Some expert told me about it once. Meant to be amulets, brooches, coins. They said I should dig and see. I have a scrape around now and again but in the end you have to let it go.’

Pepper looked at the man in the coat. He was still staring into his drink. ‘Why?’ she said. ‘Why do you?’

Luke nodded slowly. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ he said. He sipped his drink and nodded again. Then he scraped his chair back and got up. ‘I need to take a piss. I mean, a leak.’ He pushed through the crowded bar.

More people came in. When the door opened an icy draught whipped round Pepper’s legs. The watch ticked very loudly. She wiped a patch of steam off the window and looked out. Nothing but deep black. The reflection of her own face staring back in.

Luke came back holding another beer and a glass of fizzy orange for her. ‘We’ve got food coming in a minute,’ he said.

‘What about them?’ Pepper said. She pointed to the people standing at the bar. ‘Tell me about them.’

Luke looked round. ‘You see that woman in the green hat?’ The woman was leaning forward and speaking to Val. Her scarf was trailing over the floor. She had very long orange hair that looked stiff, like brittle sweets. ‘She’s an expert on stars,’ Luke said. ‘She knows everything about them. Just woke up one day and decided to learn. Her telescope is this big.’ He held out his hands to show. ‘She can tell you all about the moon glowing bright red. And asteroids burning up right in front of her. And see the man standing next to her? He crashed his car and now he does stuff in his sleep. You know: walks around the house, walks down the road, cooks himself a meal. He can’t remember any of it in the morning.’

‘She just woke up and decided?’ Pepper said. Still thinking about the red moon.

At the bar, a group of men started singing loudly.
She was a great-looking lass and her tits and her ass.

Luke told her not to listen. But his foot jiggled along. ‘They’ll get Howard to do something next,’ he said. And just as he said it, someone pushed Howard into the middle of the room and everything went quiet.

‘What’s he doing?’ Pepper said. Howard stood very still. He cleared his throat. Then he started to sing. It wasn’t like the men at the bar; it was deep and rich and slow. He kept his eyes closed. The song was about a woman who got lost and didn’t come back and the person who loved her looked for her every day. Years passed and he kept looking. He got older and older and then, on the day he died, he finally found her. Howard finished and everyone whistled and clapped.

The song kept working its way around Pepper’s head. It didn’t seem fair, that he only found her on his last ever day. Her stomach felt very tight and cold. She looked at the watch. Half past eight.

Her mother came over and put a plate down in front of Pepper. Her cheeks were red and her hair was sticking to her face. ‘Yours is coming Luke,’ she said. Pepper watched her thread her way back towards the kitchen. The only person she stopped to talk to was Tristan.

The food smelled so good, onions and garlic sausages and potatoes covered in herbs and butter. She saw Luke looking at her plate and pulled it a bit closer.

‘I wasn’t going to steal it,’ Luke said. Pepper hesitated, then offered him a potato. The smallest one she could find. She didn’t think he would actually take it, but he put it in his mouth whole, which seemed like a waste. ‘And see that man in the far corner?’ he said. ‘That there’s Val’s brother. They don’t speak any more.’

Pepper chewed a big mouthful of food. ‘Why don’t they?’

Luke shrugged. ‘No one knows,’ he said.

The door opened again and another man came in, hunched in his coat. There was snow on his arms. It was Ray. Pepper slid down low in her seat. Her heart thudded. ‘Ah,’ Luke said. ‘You know, it’s a funny thing. He’s started asking me questions about the house again. I thought he’d lost interest.’

Pepper put her hands over her ears. The watch ticked loud and deep inside her skull. She left her hands there for as long as she could, then took one off to check what Luke was saying.

‘You’ll like this,’ he said. ‘You see that man over there? I’ll tell you a thing or two about him that will make your hair stand on end.’

Her mother came over with Luke’s food and told Pepper she looked tired, was she OK?

Pepper hid a yawn. ‘What things?’ she said to Luke. ‘Why will my hair stand on end?’

Luke put a hand to his face and stammered, looked at her mother out of the corner of his eye. Said he would tell Pepper another time.

Pepper turned over and kicked out a leg. Everything was very quiet. No singing, no sound of forks on plates. She opened one eye. She was in her own bed. Grey light came through a crack in the curtains. The watch was on the chair and she looked over at it. It was quarter to six. She lay very still and stared up at the ceiling. The stippled paint looked like a row of sharp mountains. She had fallen asleep and missed midnight. This was the new year.

Everything was very quiet. She got up and looked out of the window. It had snowed in the night. There was thick snow on the ground and the trees and everything was pale and grey and different. Things had changed shape, as if the snow was trying to hide them – the trees were heaped with lumpy snow and the ground was smooth and sloping and there were no stones, no tussocks of grass, no potholes in the yard. There was a wedge of snow on the car and another on the roof of the truck parked next to it.

She pulled on a jumper and socks and went downstairs. The kitchen was cold and dim. Snow had piled up on the windowsill. Shep was asleep on the floor, curled up on a sheet of newspaper. Pepper took a step towards him and he opened his eye, stretched and sat up. He whined. She stopped and watched him for a moment. Then she turned and went to the front door, put on her coat and went outside.

The snow creaked under her boots like polystyrene. A blackbird hurried in front of her, ruffling its feathers so it looked twice as big. Snow slumped off a branch and onto the ground. All the sounds were muffled and distant. Pepper turned and looked back at the house. No lights on. There were her footprints in the smooth snow. As if she was the only person left in the world. The prints looked small and unfamiliar. She stepped back and placed her boot in one of the prints, to make sure it was definitely hers. Her boot fitted. She took it out and made another careful print. Thought about the camera when she saw the contrast between the pale snow and the dark hatching of the boot – the mud and grass coming up through it.

The river was like cold metal; it was so dark grey it was almost blue. It wasn’t glinting. There were thin patches of snow along the bank and bits of dusty snow on the roots. Small flecks of snow started falling and they landed on her face and melted.

The snow was deeper in the next field. By the hedge there were tiny splayed footprints, and a leaf skeleton that was so white and crispy it looked like something her mother had spun out of sugar. When she was spinning sugar, she would put her hands in a bowl of ice, then she would take them out and plunge them into a pan of boiling caramel. Every time, Pepper would hold her breath, waiting for the sizzling caramel to burn her hands. But it hadn’t happened yet.

She kept close to the river, working her way along the bank. Muttered and hummed to herself as she walked, great-looking lass and her something and her ass. There was a flash down in the water. She fumbled for the camera, realised too late that she didn’t have it. Her foot slipped on a flat stone and she fell, grabbed at the bank and clutched a handful of snow. She rolled down the mud and landed on sharp pebbles. A stick dug into her hip and her cheek was stinging. Pain jolted through her knee.

She lay there for a few moments. The river lapped at her hair. She clenched her fists and her eyes shut. Water worked its way through her coat. She bent her legs slowly and hauled herself up, keeping most of her weight on her arms. Brushed off mud and slush and stones. The bank was churned up where she had fallen. She tried to climb back up, got one leg onto a root before a hot pain sliced across her knee. Her hand slipped on wet mud. More snow started to fall, heavier snow that settled on her arms. Upriver, the way she’d come from, the water was choked with trees and boulders and there weren’t any bits of beach. But downriver, there were enough bits of beach and roots and flat rocks to be able to walk on. Maybe. She hoped it would come out somewhere.

She splashed along the edge of the river and clambered over mossy boulders. Some of the shallow water had frozen and there were bands of ice around the bottoms of the rocks. Her knee kept giving out and she would jerk downwards, almost kneeling. Her socks were heavy with water, her toes numb and cramping. Nothing looked familiar at water level: a dead tree that had fallen; its roots heaving up a disc of earth; the surface of the river, which creased into seams and troughs. What was it the old woman kept talking about? Whether you could step into the same river twice. Look, Pepper had told her. You can, see? She had stepped into the water, then out, and then back in again. But today the river didn’t seem like the same river at all. It looked flat and metallic and endless, and, now that she thought about it, where did the river actually stop?