Authors: Lucy Wood
‘I wonder if I’ll die,’ she said. Maybe that could be her resolution: not to die. There was a lot she wanted to do: take a picture of a heron. Invent a new flavour of crisps. Find out if dinosaurs definitely had feathers. Go into space.
Her knee jarred with every step. No sound except the river clucking its watery tongue.
There was no one else around. And then, suddenly, there was a sheep on the bank above her. ‘Brrroo gnnrrr,’ it said. It stamped its hoof in the snow.
‘I can’t get up there,’ Pepper said. Her teeth clattered together.
‘Brrrurgh,’ the sheep said. It stamped again. Its breath steamed out of its mouth and its teeth were brown and yellow. There was snow matted into its curly back.
‘Do you know where we are?’ she asked. The sheep stared down at her like she was stupid for even asking.
She turned and looked back the way she had come. No footprints. Smooth snow on the banks all above. It was very quiet. The river was fast and quiet. Brittle ice spread between the stones. It was like she had never even been there at all.
Things lost, things lost . . .
. . . Things she had lost in the river: five shoes. Three lenses. A watch. A scarf. A small fortune. Her footing. Her favourite screwdriver. A tin of fruit. A tin of fish. Two gold fillings.
Things she had found in the river: purple stones, sheep bones. A leaf gone through to the veins. An oily rainbow. A piece of copperplate. Blue eggs floating in a nest. Fertiliser. Five oars. An upturned canoe.
Things she loved about the river: its endlessness. Its silvers and rusts. Its babbling that sounded like an old friend.
Things she hated about the river: its rushing. Its endless rushing.
Things she loved about the river: the cold in your teeth like biting on ice cream. The way the water was smooth one minute and the next minute pleated like the top of a curtain.
Things she hated about the river: how it could never make up its mind.
Things she had found in the river: a drowned kingfisher. A tripod. Salmon shouldering against the current. A newly hatched dragonfly drying out its wings, bright as a carnival.
Things she couldn’t stand about the river: its bloody-mindedness. How it churned everything up. How it reeled you in. How it reeled you in and didn’t let go.
Things she could tolerate about the river: how it rose up in rain and shrank back down in good weather.
Things she had lost in the river: years and years and years.
Things she had found in it: warm pools. Peace. Miles of meshed and mossy roots.
The smell of exhaust through the draughty window. Ada lay on the bed and listened to Tristan’s truck pulling away. The tyres crunched on snow. Hopefully it wouldn’t be loud enough to wake Pepper up. She listened for movement in Pepper’s room but couldn’t hear anything. She licked her fingers and rubbed over her crusty eyes. Her throat was dry from shouting over the din at the pub. Still the smell of beer and onions in her hair. And Tristan’s soap. It was New Year morning and she had broken her resolution already. Probably a new record. She bit her ragged thumbnail. Might as well go and burn some custard, get them all over with before breakfast.
She ran a bath as hot as it would go. The tank shuddered and the taps dribbled lukewarm water. She got in and lay back. The water was barely tepid, bits of old hair floated and got caught on her toes. There were red lines across the backs of her thighs from where the camp bed had dug in – nothing elegant about it.
She pushed her hair back with her wet hands. It was snowing; she could see it moving past the window, casting a murky light. It turned the bathroom a dim yellowish colour, like a pan of butter and water simmering. She leaned her head against the edge of the bath, then dunked right under, letting the thrum of the water push out all the thoughts that were circling and tangling together in her head.
The pipes were chuntering, or maybe it was Pepper speaking. She came back up, water streaming off her face. Her mother was sitting on the toilet seat. Her skin and hair were the same colour as the dim light and there was snow lodged under her nails. A rim of smooth ice around the bottom of her boots.
‘And down there, in that shallow pool,’ her mother said. Staring at the bathwater. ‘There’s a heron standing very still. It’s seen something, its muscles are tensing up. There.’ She jerked her neck forward. ‘It caught the fish.’
Ada sat up in the water. ‘I’m having a bath,’ she said.
Her mother stopped talking. A shadow, which looked like spreading wings, moved across her chest. She looked up at the ceiling. ‘The leak’s going to come back through,’ she said. She paused for a moment, then a moment longer. The bathwater started to chill at the edges. ‘He hasn’t been doing a very good job up there.’
‘I just want to have a bath,’ Ada said.
‘He’s very young,’ her mother said. ‘I suppose he’s inexperienced.’ A ripple moved under her skin: through her fingers and up the backs of her hands.
Ada reached forward and turned the hot tap back on. Cold water came out. ‘The water’s bloody freezing,’ she said.
Pearl looked at her. ‘You’ve got fat,’ she said.
Ada crossed her arms over her chest. ‘I haven’t.’
‘Around your waist.’
‘Not much,’ Ada said.
‘No,’ her mother conceded. ‘I suppose it’s what happens.’ Her voice had gone quieter and she was studying Ada very closely. Taking in the lines and the creases. Lingering on Ada’s face. Then she glanced down at her legs. ‘It will take a while for those red marks to go, the way they’ve dug in like that.’
Ada closed her eyes and dunked under again. If she stayed under as long as she could, maybe her mother would have gone. If she could just stay under a bit longer . . . A bubble rose out of her mouth and broke on the surface. She came up gasping.
‘The water is moving faster and getting deeper and there is a very loud drumming,’ her mother was saying. ‘There is a deep pool. The riverbed is very smooth. There is a very particular green stone with glints of orange which is actually an old chunk of copper, and a tiny fish darting. The water looks green and you can see right through it. A dipper just took off and is flying up the river, and the water is narrowing and the trees are leaning in.’
Her voice seemed to bubble and drum. Sometimes a silty crunch on her teeth, sometimes she seemed to be rolling stones around on her tongue.
Ada shivered. Thin feathers of ice had grown in the water around her feet. Suddenly reminded all over again how well her mother knew the place, how she’d belonged: the weather not difficult and unexpected, the river not strange, the valley not lonely or trapping. When Ada couldn’t even remember what street she’d lived on five years ago, or what tree it was that had tapped against her window every night.
‘And further down, the river widens into silty beaches. A dent in the middle where the little one landed. The stones all rucked up and disturbed but the water will work at them, soon they will be flipped back over.’
Ada sat up quickly in the water. ‘What did you say?’ she said. ‘About the beach?’
‘The little one had been there, you can see from the way the stones are.’
‘Pepper?’ Ada said. ‘She’s in bed.’ A strange humming in her ears.
‘You can see from the way the stones are all disturbed,’ her mother said.
Ada lurched out of the bath, grabbed a towel and wrapped it around her body. She ran to Pepper’s room and opened the door. There was a hump under the covers. She drew the blanket back slowly so that Pepper wouldn’t wake up. There was nothing underneath. Ada was wet and shivering, dripping water everywhere. She ran downstairs and looked in every room. Then went back up to the bathroom. ‘Christ, why didn’t you tell me before?’ she said.
‘She’s not there any more,’ her mother said.
Ada went over to the window and looked out. It was still snowing, fat flakes that would cover any footprints.
‘The water’s slower in that bit,’ her mother said. ‘Eurgh, a sheep’s got in somehow. There are enough bits of beach and root to carry on, and a bridge of flat stones. She will have gone that way. Yes, the bank is all churned up and there’s a handprint in it. There are footprints going through a field.’
The phone rang, sudden and shrill. Ada ran to answer it. Her towel slipped off and she answered the phone naked, her hands too numb to grip the receiver – it fumbled, almost fell. It was Judy. She said they’d just found Pepper wandering across one of their fields, cold and wet and hungry.
‘I’ll be there in ten minutes,’ Ada said.
The car skidded on the snow but she drove quickly and didn’t meet anything coming the other way. Her hair was soaking. Her skin was freezing and her damp clothes stuck to it. Another new year that had gone tits up already – not sorted, not settled, and rushing to find her daughter, who she hadn’t even known she’d lost.
She pulled up outside the house and went in. There was Pepper, wrapped in a blanket, telling Judy and Robbie that this was the third time she’d almost died – the first being the time she drank the very old apple juice in the fridge and threw up so many times she couldn’t remember her own name. She was about to tell the second but stopped when she saw Ada, and her face flushed at being caught out boasting.
Ada went over to her, still shivering, water dripping off her hair onto the floor. ‘What were you doing?’ she said. ‘You should have told me where you were going.’ There was a cut across Pepper’s cheek, and she reached out to touch it.
Pepper scowled at her. ‘None of you were awake,’ she said.
Ada stopped, felt her own face flush. No one spoke for a few moments. Judy passed her a towel.
Pepper tipped back in her chair. After a while, she said: ‘And the second time was when I touched a wire on a plug and it—’
‘Why don’t we make breakfast?’ Judy said loudly. She glanced at Robbie.
‘Toast,’ he said. ‘We could have it with eggs and tomatoes – does that sound OK?’ He started carving bread into thick slices. He was wearing a sweatshirt with something written in Spanish and a picture of a palm tree. Socks that seemed to have shrunk in the wash – the heels halfway down the soles of his feet.
Ada sat down at the table. She blotted at her hair with the towel. The kitchen was warm and she stopped shivering, now just felt very tired. She leaned her head on her arm. Judy put a mug of coffee down next to her, then draped a cardigan over her shoulders. Ada closed her eyes. Listened to Judy and Robbie’s quiet noises as they made breakfast; talking about whether the snow was setting in, could Judy check if the toast was burning, something about the cows, back to the snow again. A comforting rhythm to their voices, the way their sentences blurred into each other’s. When Ada opened her eyes, the snow was falling thickly past the window.
‘Let me have a look at your cheek,’ she said to Pepper. It looked sore but not deep. She asked Judy for some cream to put on it. But Pepper squirmed and said it stung. ‘It needs to be clean,’ Ada told her.
‘It doesn’t have to if it doesn’t want to,’ Pepper said. She put her hand up to her cheek and wouldn’t move it. Ate her toast in huge bites, spraying crumbs everywhere.
‘It’s setting in,’ Robbie said, looking out of the window. He held his plate up so there was a shorter distance between food and mouth.
‘It’ll be fine,’ Judy said.
Robbie paced while he ate. ‘I thought it was meant to have stopped by now.’
‘If you choke I’m not doing that manoeuvre on you again,’ Judy told him.
He sat down, but sideways, so that he could get up more quickly. Judy put her hand on his jittering leg.
‘Finished,’ Pepper announced. Her fork clattered down. She resisted catching Ada’s eye and hummed shrilly.
Robbie pushed his plate to one side. ‘What about that trick I showed you?’ he asked. ‘Have you practised it?’ He reached towards her ear and pulled out a coin.
Pepper snatched at it. ‘I’ll do it,’ she said. She waved her left hand elaborately while hiding the coin up her right sleeve. Then shoved her hand into Robbie’s ear and tugged. The coin thudded onto the floor. ‘Arseballs.’ She got down on her knees and scrabbled around under the table.
Ada closed her eyes again. When she opened them the sky had turned very dark and more snow was falling, wet flakes that piled up on the window ledges. Judy looked out of the window. ‘We should go and check the animals,’ she said.
‘I’ll do it,’ Robbie said. Pepper followed him out into the hallway.
When they had gone, the kitchen was very quiet. Judy was still standing at the window. ‘The roads are going to be covered soon,’ she said. ‘Your car is already.’
Ada propped her head up on her hand, trying to stay awake. The kitchen so warm and the smell of toast and butter. Steam blurred the windows. The TV in the background. ‘I’ll wait a bit longer,’ she said.
Judy put the kettle on for the third time. Filled the sink, took her ring off and put it by the taps, then started going through the pile of plates.