Authors: Lucy Wood
‘No,’ the woman said. She looked towards the house. ‘It’s good for that, at least.’
A week went by, and then another. Pepper went to school every day. She would hang her bag and coat on a peg with a picture of a flower on it. It was meant to be a primrose but it looked like a fried egg. The important thing was to stay very quiet when someone else was talking. And you had to think carefully and try to ask a question. Pepper had a lot of questions. There were jars of pond water and jars of clay and a big computer on a table in the corner. Some days there was an assembly where everyone went and sat in a big room and someone talked about boring things like Hope and Sharing and Health. Petey always listened very carefully. Some days she spelled a word exactly right, other days the letters went upside down. There was a huge book of birds with the names written in very big letters. The girl with the plait came in wearing purple shorts and boots up to her knees and she got sent home. The best place to go at lunchtime was the pond at the bottom of the playground. If someone was sick on the cement it got covered up with sawdust. The boy with orange hair collected scabs off people’s knees and elbows. The girl with black hair had a thing in her ear so that she could hear what people were saying. It was OK to copy someone’s work if you gave them your biscuits, but not your apple. If she tried to distract Petey in class he would close his eyes. One afternoon, they had to draw the house they lived in. Pepper bent over her paper and scratched with a thick pencil. Tried to capture the sprawling bits of the house, the bending trees, a glimpse of the river. Smoke winding up. She worked over break time. Dark, deep pencil lines and lots of crossings-out but she finally finished it. ‘Well,’ the teacher said. She went to get another teacher to look. The picture was pinned up in the corridor for everyone else to see.
Everyone said that the snow would go away but it didn’t. It hung around on the ground and the trees and it didn’t melt. Like it was waiting for something. By the road, there was a drilled yellow pee hole where a dog had been. But still no sign of Captain. If he had frozen to death somewhere it would be her fault. She went out every morning to check the food scraps and look for signs, but there was nothing.
Her mother kept buying bags of food from the shop. Just in case, she said, looking out at the snow. She bought bags of bread and about a hundred tins. Huge bottles of water. She put the bread in the freezer and whenever the power went off, the bread would soften and crumble.
It was Saturday morning. The mid-January sky like dusty slate. Pepper was under the kitchen table, looking for a piece of toast she’d just dropped. The phone rang and her mother answered it. Her voice sounded surprised, then went very quiet, then she didn’t speak for a long time. ‘OK,’ she said finally. She came back into the kitchen, sat at the table and went back to beating the mixture in the bowl. But a lot slower than before.
Pepper stayed under the table. ‘Who was it?’ she asked. ‘Are we going to the pub tonight?’ She studied her mother’s legs and feet.
‘Not tonight,’ her mother said.
Pepper found the piece of toast but didn’t eat it. She pushed crumbs around the floor, waiting for as long as she could. ‘Who was it then?’ she said.
Her mother stopped mixing. ‘It was Ray,’ she said.
Pepper’s stomach jolted. She stabbed the crumbs into the floor. ‘He said he didn’t want it.’
Her mother’s foot twitched. ‘He wants to come and look at it again,’ she said.
Pepper stayed very still. ‘He said he didn’t want it.’
The spoon moved slowly in the bowl. ‘I thought that too,’ her mother said.
A heavy, pumping feeling worked its way through Pepper’s arms. Her hands felt very hot. It was her fault, it was her fault.
Her mother pushed the chair back and crouched down so that she could see under the table. ‘He just wants to talk about it.’
‘Talk,’ Pepper said. ‘Ha.’ She pointed wildly at nothing.
Her mother was quiet for a long time. She shifted and her knees cracked softly. ‘Maybe you won’t have to go to school for much longer anyway.’
Pepper picked at her lips. Either way it was a trap.
‘We can try somewhere else,’ her mother said. Her voice was strange and quiet. ‘We’ll find somewhere else, OK?’ She breathed out slowly.
The sharp crumbs bit into Pepper’s fingers. ‘But is he definitely going to come?’ she said.
Her mother suddenly reached out and held Pepper around the wrists. They stayed like that for a moment, then she tugged her out from under the table. They both lost their balance, her mother fell sideways, Pepper sprawled face down across her mother’s chest and hip. The tiles were dusty. Her nose dripped onto her mother’s neck. They lay there on the cold floor. The clock ticked loudly. ‘What are we doing?’ Pepper asked after a while.
Her mother sighed. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.
Pepper wiped her nose on her sleeve. ‘I suppose you are trying your best,’ she said. Her heart beat hard and fast and she could feel through her chest, like an echo, her mother’s heart doing the same.
Ada got out her crumpled bit of paper and looked at it again. She’d written down a plan for the evening service but had suddenly decided to put meringue on the menu. There were a lot of egg whites that she didn’t want to waste, but they took a long time at a stupidly low temperature which meant nothing else could go in the oven at the same time. Skewed her whole timetable. She looked at it again. What was it that Ray had said on the phone? Something about coming over to look at the house again. But when? What had he actually said? She stared down at her schedule. If she got the onions on at four and the meringues were already in the oven then maybe . . . there was a loud clattering up on the roof. Loose tiles in the wind. Tristan said he needed to come and nail them down but Ada kept making excuses: that the weather was too bad, that she didn’t want him to catch her flu. Trying to untangle herself. She hadn’t seen him since New Year.
She sat down at the table and crossed out the thing about onions. If she moved them back, then maybe there would be enough time for everything else. The lights flickered. The fridge stopped, then struggled and started up again. She got up and checked the fire. There were enough logs in there but she put another one in anyway; at least there would be heat when the power finally went. Back into the kitchen. The potatoes needed to roast at some point. It was like those horrible maths questions at school. If she put the meringues in at four, and the sausages in at five, how long would she have to roast the potatoes? There was another loud thump on the roof. And if the potatoes were stubborn bastards that happened to take over two hours to roast, what then? The sound of a tile slipping. Or if the meringues went in earlier and were completely done and out the way by four . . . then she would have to be at the pub right now and already have them in the oven.
She needed to prep some of the food now. Val had asked her to pick potatoes up from Mick, so she could parboil those – that would be something. She started washing and peeling. Someone knocked on the door and she went to answer it. It was Tristan. He looked at the knife clutched in her hand.
‘I don’t know how I screwed up all the timings,’ she told him. She went back into the kitchen and carried on chopping. ‘But I should have started this about three hours ago.’
‘Listen,’ Tristan said. ‘I just thought I’d come over and . . . ’ He looked down at her schedule. ‘Well, you’ve got two o’clock written twice here, for a start,’ he said.
‘Where?’
‘Just below where you wrote, why the hell doesn’t Val have a decent oven by now? in capital letters.’ The lights flickered again. His hands looked cold. He took his coat off and put it over the chair. ‘I could help you peel,’ he said. ‘If you want.’
I could help you peel. It sounded like something someone had whispered to her once in a sleazy bar, a long time ago. She passed him a knife. They stood hip to hip at the sink. Loops of peelings by the plug. Ada’s in hacked chips, Tristan’s in long, curved strips, almost peeling a whole potato in one go. She and Judy had once peeled apples whole and thrown the skin on the ground – it was supposed to show the first letter of the name of the person you would marry. Judy had thrown hers carefully and made a skewed R. Ada’s had twisted and broken apart and didn’t look like any letter at all.
It was snowing again. Just the sound of the knives working, the tap sending out slow drips. A small frown on Tristan’s face as he concentrated. Graceful with the knife, giving it the same careful attention he would to carving something out of wood.
She watched his hands. The wide knuckles, the pale skin under his thumb. A bit of potato stuck to his sleeve. Remembered the way he had held her shoulder blades as if they were delicate ornaments. ‘You have nice fingernails,’ she told him.
‘Do I?’ He looked at her ragged nails. ‘You have bloody fingernails,’ he said. ‘Is that normal?’
Pepper came into the kitchen. ‘I’m meant to be at Judy’s,’ she said.
‘Shit,’ Ada said. ‘I was supposed to take you.’ She looked at the potatoes. Wondered for a second if she could simmer them on the car’s heater.
Tristan put down his knife. ‘I’ll take her,’ he said. ‘I’m going that way anyway.’
Ada pushed her hair out of her eyes. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’ Reluctant, now that he was here, to see him go.
She helped Pepper wrap her old purple scarf around her neck; it looped down twice over her chest. Something she had started wearing to school. No fake illnesses to get out of it yet, no phone calls from teachers, although Ada still jumped whenever the phone rang. On their way out, she heard Pepper ask Tristan if Shep minded sleeping on newspaper.
She put the potatoes on the hob, then started packing up ready to go. But the snow was falling a lot heavier now and settling over the ice around the front steps. Suddenly seized by the urgency of it. The clouds were dark grey and swollen. What if they couldn’t get back through tonight? Or snow started to drift up against the door?
She went outside and found the shovel. Carried it over to the front steps and began scraping. The front door creaked open and her mother was standing in the doorway watching. Ada carried on shovelling. The cold bit into her fingers and she couldn’t seem to shift the snow properly – she was just making a different pile in the middle of the path instead.
‘There’s no point doing that,’ her mother said.
Ada scraped at the snow, which was icy and grey and smeared with mud. ‘I’ve got to try and move some of it,’ she said.
Her mother looked down at the steps. ‘The snow was getting in through the kitchen window,’ she said.
‘What?’ Ada said. She looked up quickly, but the windows were all shut. She worked the shovel over a slab of ice; it slipped and grated against her heel. She bit her bottom lip, had to stop herself throwing the shovel down and kicking it.
‘Through the kitchen window,’ her mother said. ‘I’d left it open when I was out shovelling in the lane.’ She bent down and picked up a chunk of ice.
Ada looked out at the lane. The snow was settling on it. ‘Should I clear the lane instead?’ she said.
‘I was shovelling all morning. And all the time the snow was getting into the kitchen.’ Her mother studied the ice carefully. ‘It soaked into one of the sockets and blew it.’
Ada raked hair out of her eyes. ‘The windows are all shut,’ she said.
‘And another time, I was shovelling snow away from the steps when I should have been shovelling around the car,’ her mother went on. ‘I couldn’t get out for four days.’
Ada looked over at the car. The wheels were surrounded by an inch of snow. She stopped scraping the steps, started walking over to the damn car.
‘There’s no knowing which is best,’ her mother said to the ice.
At the pub, Ada whipped the egg whites into peaks. Made her think again of the snow. Couldn’t seem to get away from it. A difficult and slow drive over, a thin layer just starting to settle on the roads.
Val steered her over to the fridge. ‘I got landed with all this garlic-cheese stuff,’ she said. ‘So maybe in the next week or two you can make something good out of it. Look up some recipes or invent something. It’s stronger than you’d think. Pungent almost. Got to get it used up before it stinks the fridge up. And I need to talk to you properly about longer hours. Got to get the summer menu planned, make a big deal out of it. Bring in some of the tourists; they go straight past up here. And Valentine’s Day, only three weeks away now. Have you had any thoughts on what we might do? I was thinking filled pasta in the shape of hearts, something red stuffed in there. Something simple. Perhaps a dessert with champagne in it, charge more than usual – champagne jelly, although I wasn’t sure if jelly made it sound cheap. Do you think you could do that?’
‘I’ve got to get these in the oven,’ Ada said. Couldn’t deal with all Val’s pressure at the moment. She needed the money to sort the house, but couldn’t sort it if she was always working. Either way she was stuck. Unless Ray finally came over to talk, like he’d said he was going to.
Howard was back. He came in from the bar and looked in the fridge. The stocked shelves seemed to fill him with despair. ‘I can’t plan for summer at the end of January,’ he said. ‘I can’t even look at that cheese stuff without my heart twingeing.’