Authors: Lucy Wood
‘I should be helping,’ Ada said.
Judy turned to look at her. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said. ‘You should probably catch up on sleep, young lady.’ Putting on her Uncle Granville voice: prim and high. Which was also the voice she used to slip into in school presentations when she got nervous.
Ada got up and went over to the sink and trailed her fingers in the water. ‘Remember that plan we made? You were going to be a chemist, and I was going to do that thing where I went round to people’s houses and read to them.’
Judy put a handful of cutlery into the water. ‘You went round to Mrs Henderson’s house and sat in her kitchen the whole afternoon, reading. She didn’t know how to get rid of you.’
‘I was brightening her day.’
‘You made her miss her hospital appointment.’
Outside, Robbie and Pepper loaded the truck and got in. Doors thumped. The trailer rattled. Judy was watching Robbie out of the window. He looked up and saw her, both their mouths moved, almost too slight to notice, but some kind of shared signal.
‘It’s peaceful here,’ Ada said.
‘Yes,’ Judy said. ‘Sometimes.’
‘I can see why Robbie never wanted to leave.’
Judy stopped washing and left her hands in the water. ‘He worries so much. The uncertainty. Costs going up. We’re only just breaking even. All the new regulations. He thinks we should stop. Sell the place and move into town. Find stable jobs. It’s me that won’t let us.’
The snow fell down in front of the window, blurring the farm buildings and the fields.
Ada moved her hand through the thinning bubbles. She was close enough to see the measles scars on Judy’s forehead. After a while she said, ‘The snow’s probably quite deep on the roads now.’
‘It will be,’ Judy said.
‘Maybe I should stay a bit longer.’
‘You could stay over, if you want.’
There were bubbles in Judy’s hair, tinted rainbow colours. ‘Maybe that would be better,’ Ada said. She watched the snow come down. Her hands tingled as they warmed up in the water. The kettle steamed. ‘But it did brighten her day,’ she said. ‘When I got to the end of a sad story, she kept wiping her eyes.’
‘That’s because she had cataracts,’ Judy said. She splashed water over Ada’s hands.
Ada splashed back. ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘That’s exactly why I thought I should go and read to her.’
Outside, the snow came down thickly and silently and heaped up against the bright windows.
Ada slept on the fold-out sofa, which sagged in the middle like it had been punched. It smelled ancient and musty; a cloud of dust puffed out when Judy unfolded it and they clapped their hands to clear it. The pattern was orange and brown daisies and coffee stains.
She turned over, exhausted, but couldn’t sleep. Pepper had gone to bed hours ago. She’d insisted on sleeping upstairs in the spare room, and had pretended to be asleep when Ada went in to check on her.
There was a noise and someone shuffled into the room – Pepper, clutching her duvet. She stood in the doorway. ‘Robbie made a funny noise,’ she said. ‘Like he was scared.’
She lay down next to Ada. Cold and rigid.
‘He does that sometimes,’ Ada said. ‘When he’s asleep. It’s just a bad dream.’
Pepper stayed still for a long time. Something clicked in the kitchen, a gate creaked outside. Then she turned and burrowed into Ada’s side. Her eyelashes tickling Ada’s neck. It was very dark. The clock ticked softly. Ada thought Pepper had gone to sleep, but then she said: ‘Judy doesn’t want to have any children.’
‘How do you know that?’ She moved her leg out from where Pepper was crushing it.
‘I asked her.’
Ada smoothed back Pepper’s hair. ‘Not everyone wants to,’ she said.
Pepper nudged her bony legs in closer. ‘I probably won’t have any myself,’ she said. Then she turned over, fell asleep and slept like a drunk, heavily and full of noise. She groaned and the breath in her nose rattled. Ada held her tight.
It seemed like only minutes after she’d gone to sleep, before there was any glimmer of light, when she heard Judy and Robbie get up. Moving around upstairs. Laughing quietly together. They opened the door and went outside and something metallic clanged and echoed in the sharp air as they said good morning, good morning, to the animals.
The snow had turned slushy enough to drive back. Ada felt a tickle in the back of her throat and through the day it got worse and worse. By the evening her throat was like a blocked gutter, swollen and sore, and every time she swallowed something in there got irritated and made her cough. Her eyes were red and streaming. Skin prickly and her scalp felt like it was full of cold sand.
She made Pepper a bowl of rice and beans, then went upstairs and lay down, shaking and clammy. Her legs ached and she kicked them around, couldn’t seem to keep them still.
‘Why do you look like that?’ Pepper asked. Hovering at the edge of the bed, picking at the sheets.
‘Have you brushed your teeth?’ Ada said. Pepper nodded. ‘Are you in your pyjamas?’ Pepper nodded again. ‘You should go to bed in a minute,’ Ada told her. ‘And could you move those balloons out of the way?’ Her head swilled. Balloons were the last thing she needed. She closed her eyes. Pepper said there weren’t any balloons. Ada slept. When she woke up it was very dark. She coughed, then couldn’t stop coughing. Thought she saw her mother standing in the doorway. That same look on her face she always had when Ada was ill. Ada had always thought it was anger, but now she recognised the worry in it. How lonely she must have felt out here, watching, listening all night to the way Ada was breathing.
The camp bed groaned and the springs dug into her. She twisted and moved her legs. After a while, she got up and moved into her mother’s bedroom, into the bed, the sheets cold and musty but soft. She closed her eyes. A weight creaked down at the side of the bed. A cool hand, wet and grainy as snow, pressed down on her boiling forehead.
She wasn’t a sickly child, but when Ada did get ill it was sudden and forceful. And it was so much worse when she was younger – when she was three, or four, or five, and she was shivering and refusing to drink and her feet had gone so clammy that she left small, damp footprints across the kitchen floor.
This is how it went: first there would be a tinge of red in the corner of her left eye. Then she would start rubbing her throat, certain that there was something stuck in there. After that, a rattly cough, shivering that wouldn’t stop, and then she would go upstairs and lie down in the dark, saying, no lights, no lights, they hurt my eyes.
Pearl would stand by the bed and listen to the way Ada was breathing. Was it shallower? More laboured? But it was just a cold for God’s sake, maybe the flu at worst. It happened to everyone. She would make hot-water bottles and find the cough mixture in the bathroom. Dip her finger in and taste some of the purple syrup herself. Straighten the rucked-up sheets. Feel Ada’s head, which would be boiling one minute and chilled the next. ‘It’s just a cold,’ she would tell her. Hoping that Ada would suddenly sneeze and blow her nose like anyone else, rather than lying there with a bruised and grey-looking face, her legs pedalling restlessly against the bed.
She always stayed in Ada’s room the first few nights. Dragging in that wretched camp bed she had bought especially, lying stiffly, not sleeping. Trying to decide what was best to do. Drive out and get someone, or wait it out? When Ada was three, Pearl had packed her into the car and driven to the doctor’s in town. It had been late afternoon and dark. The journey had made Ada sick and, when they got there, the doctor said it was a cold, just a normal cold, and it would have been better to keep her warm in bed. A patronising sod of a man, if Pearl remembered correctly. As if he knew what it was like to be stuck out here alone, listening to Ada shrieking about her throat and legs. Seemed only right when Ada threw up on his desk, bits of slushy liquid splashing over his expensive pens.
But if only she could go back now and tell herself, lying there in the dark, that the fever would break, that it always broke in the end. Spare herself those long hours, the hollow, aching feeling in her chest, wondering why there was no one that she could call on for help. No parents from the school that she could ring up – how had it got to that stage? A few stilted conversations that she had let dry up, a few invitations that she had declined. She’d stopped joining them at the gate after a toddler a woman was holding had pointed at her and shouted: old! Why is she so old? But sometimes, half asleep, her imagination conjured up a knock on the door and she would stumble out of bed to answer it, opening up to the rain and the wind.
By the second day, Ada would be delirious. Pearl would go upstairs to check on her and find her sitting rigidly upright, pointing at the wall. ‘Look at those bright lights,’ she would say. Pointing at a dim, grey wall. ‘Look at the way they’re moving.’ Or she would whirl her arms in front of her shouting, bats, bats! Pearl would hold Ada’s arms down, trying to stop her plucking invisible bats out of her hair. When she was five, she fell out of bed trying to reach a rope bridge she’d seen swinging across the room. When she was six, she’d spread her arms wide and bowed to the chair in the corner, saying, welcome to my country, her sweaty hair sticking to her forehead. And Pearl had snorted with laughter, then felt so awful that she’d spent an hour rubbing Ada’s back, right between the shoulder blades, to help her get to sleep.
It always seemed to happen at the worst possible time. Just when the dragonflies were hatching on the river; those few precious days. Or when there was a rare hoarfrost in the woods. Or when she had finally been given enough work to tide them over and she needed to be at her desk all day and all evening, her back aching, her fingers getting calloused, the sickly smell of oil and polish on them, looking forward to the time when she didn’t have to do it any more, when there was enough money for her to turn the work away.
Countless times it happened. And the worst time – that week in March when Ada was eight and the daffodils and garlic were just starting to push up. Luke had come over. They didn’t know each other very well, just enough to say hello over the years, maybe stop if they passed each other on the road. She had fixed one of his watches – he’d come over to pick it up and ended up staying the whole morning. Offered to look over the car once or twice when it was playing up. But that day, when she answered the door, he seemed different: dressed even smarter than usual, the glint of cufflinks, his hands shaking. She’d thought someone had died. Remembered staring at his broken nose, from where a door on a boat had crashed open in the wind. But he’d come to ask her over for dinner. He’d said it so quietly she had to ask him to speak up. Next weekend, Saturday, he said loudly. Was she allergic to anything in particular? And she had said, limes, she was allergic to limes, but only the skin, not the juice, if he wanted to use the juice then that was OK with her.
She got ready carefully. Put on a brown dress that she had bought in a sale. Wrapped around some beads. Had some trouble rolling on thin tights and when they were finally on they felt strange after her loose jeans. And her smart shoes were hard and unfamiliar, her make-up had dried to crusts in the pots. She brushed her hair for a long time and pinned it up, enjoying all the complicated twists and flicks. Then she went downstairs to find Ada, explain to her again that she would only be gone for two hours, that she would lock the door, that Luke’s phone number was on the table. But Ada was upstairs in bed, coughing, shivering, rubbing her throat, saying she had seen a horse galloping through the house.
Pearl had taken off her beads and peeled off the dress, a ridiculous thing anyway, made her look like she was trying too hard. And the price tag had been dangling down her back the whole time. She stood by the phone for ten minutes before dialling Luke’s number. Her hands shaking. She told Luke she wouldn’t be able to make it after all, then waited for him to say, come next week instead, but he didn’t, and she couldn’t bring herself to suggest it either. Neither of them had mentioned it again.
Pearl put the phone down, put her head in her hands and wept, making sure she kept it short and quiet. When she went back upstairs, she glimpsed Ada running into her room from the landing, jumping to avoid the sharp floorboard, not shivering, not coughing, then diving under the covers. But when Pearl came in, she hacked and held her head and groaned the deepest, most heart-rending groan, it seemed almost impossible that she could have made it up.
Now, Pearl stood next to Ada and watched her sleeping. Not a pretty picture: her nose red and swollen, her top lip chapped, grey cheeks. But sleeping quietly in Pearl’s old bed. Pearl remembered the long nights alone in that bed, how cold the sheets would get overnight, the sound of the rain against the windows, the wind rattling. Sometimes, when Ada was small, she would come in and climb under the covers and ask things like: why is the sky so high up? Why do we have to sleep? What are all the different ways people die?
‘I don’t know,’ Pearl would say. ‘I don’t know.’
Outside, the snow was getting deeper and still falling. There was ice in the corners of the windows and the corners of Pearl’s eyes. Snow building up under her tongue. She rolled it round and round. Felt each piece of snow as it landed and melted on the river, which was cold and stunned, running slower than usual, stiffening like a joint.