Authors: Lucy Wood
She asked how his heart was, as if asking after a relative. Then wished she hadn’t when he launched into a long and complex explanation. Vascular tubes all wrong, weak muscle condition. He pumped his hands like he was playing an accordion, oomp pah, he said. Then showed it slowing and wheezing. ‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘I’m not touching anything to do with that cheese. Do you read your horoscope? Mine says: “Now is not the time.” I think it could be applied to this.’
He’d made a batch of his special hotpot – potluck, he called it – but she managed to convince him to leave out the raisins, remembering the weird tough consistency and the way they stuck in people’s teeth. Pepper picking them out one by one saying, rabbit poo, rabbit poo. She put the meringues in the oven, then got out the onions for her stew. Realised how similar it would be to hotpot and quickly switched her idea again. Something with pasta, some kind of rich sauce. She started chopping the onion, found the bunches of kale she’d asked Val to get in – it always tasted sweeter after frost and ice.
‘I could help you do that,’ Howard said. ‘Chop it up and wash it.’ He put the kale in the sink. ‘I could do a few easy jobs. I don’t mind doing prep.’
‘OK,’ Ada said. She hated prep the most, or maybe the washing-up. She crouched down and peered into the oven, checking the meringues. Howard added a handful of raisins to his pot with a sly look when he thought she wasn’t watching. Then he got to work slicing, working the knife like a lever so that the kale came out in very thin, even pieces. ‘Learned that technique in catering school,’ he said. ‘Took a month. Like a card trick – it’s all in the sleight of hand, see?’ He showed again. ‘We used to have competitions. Learned to slice pig cheeks so thin they were translucent.’ He smacked his lips against his hand.
‘Listen you two,’ Val said, coming back in and carrying on where she’d left off. ‘What about a themed menu in the summer, eh? I was thinking, June, you build it around strawberries – strawberry salad to start with, strawberry mousse to finish, what main courses could have strawberries in do you think? Does strawberry lasagne sound weird to you? And then maybe a saffron thing for July, conjure up the sun. Everything bright yellow. You’d have something like smoked haddock, the stuff that’s dyed yellow, maybe mushrooms in a sauce, colour it with turmeric. Paella, lemon posset for dessert. Although what is posset anyway? I thought it was baby sick, but I just read a recipe in a magazine the other day.’
‘It’s a cold dessert,’ Ada told her. ‘Chilled and set, like syllabub.’ But also the slushy, milky sick a baby brought up. Had never been able to eat the dessert herself.
‘Syllabub?’ Val said. She turned the word over in her mouth. ‘Syllabub?’
‘I can’t think about this now,’ Howard said. He rubbed over his old burns with his thumb.
‘We need to talk about it,’ Val said. ‘I’ve got a feeling about this.’
‘I won’t be here in the summer,’ Ada said. Strawberry lasagne would be a bloodbath. But liked the sound of a strawberry salad, could play around with colours, maybe the sharp contrast of vinegar drizzled over.
‘I’ve got a feeling about this,’ Val said again.
Ada stirred her sauce. ‘Arseballs,’ she said. It had got lumps in when Val distracted her.
‘That always happens to me,’ Howard said. He passed her the sieve. ‘There’s nothing else for it.’
Val went out and a moment later called back in again saying, someone wants a slice of the pie you made the other day, is there any left? And two hotpots, put them in bowls not on plates. Put some of that kale with it.
Ada looked over at the hotpot. ‘Howard?’ she said. ‘Could you go and ask Val which pie she meant?’ Howard sighed, dried his hands on his apron and went out. Ada quickly picked out all the raisins and threw them in the bin, before dishing up two servings.
Just as she was leaving, Clapper came over to her from the bar, holding something. It was a green box wrapped in layers of elastic bands.
‘It’s for the little one,’ he said. ‘From Petey. Strict instructions that no one else can open it.’ He tapped his nose.
She took the box and put it in her bag carefully. There were coded symbols on one side. Couldn’t believe that Pepper had made a friend, and that they had a secret language already.
It had stopped snowing but there was a smooth layer on the ground and the trees. Everything silvery. She stood for a moment, breathing in cold, grainy air. It felt good. The sudden hush and chill of being outside, the air raw and hard. A sense of being scoured. Under the pub’s lamp, the world glinted. Black branches against white, like lines of ink. The valley suddenly changed, draped in snow like furniture draped in sheets. But the same smokiness to the air, the same dry tang in the back of her throat. The air crackled. She stood and breathed it in.
The road had been gritted. She drove slowly. Another car’s lights emerged in the distance like dim moons. She turned into the road towards Judy’s, the headlights swept over the hedge, and she slammed on the brakes. The car stalled and was silent. Tristan stepped out of the hedge, where he had jumped back to get out of the way. He came over to her window and put his hand on it. He was wearing a black coat, scrappy at the edges like an old biscuit, and a navy knitted hat. A simple recipe for death: narrow lanes and dark clothes.
‘You shouldn’t wear dark clothes at night,’ she told him. ‘Hasn’t anyone ever told you that?’
‘I was just going for a drink,’ he said, gesturing towards the pub. But he walked round the car and got in and she started it up and drove.
Snow had been pushed to the sides of the road in heaps, like crumbling walls. More snow collected in potholes. She glanced at Tristan, saw the freckles on his cheeks, thought of the tea-coloured freckles on his back. Stopped herself. Looked again. Tapped her fingers against the wheel.
‘I should have finished nailing the tiles on,’ Tristan said.
Ada turned down a narrower lane, which looked like a white carpet unrolling. Then another. She had no idea where she was going. ‘You know I’m leaving soon,’ she said. ‘Don’t you?’
‘Of course I know that,’ he said. ‘I’m working on your house.’
There were lines in his face she’d never noticed before, faint etchings around his eyes and mouth. Ada nodded. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘That’s good.’ She kept tapping her fingers.
Tristan wiped the steamed-up window with his sleeve and looked out.
‘Because I don’t know when it will happen exactly,’ she said.
‘I know,’ Tristan said.
‘It’s just too much work,’ she went on. ‘And too isolated, too hard to get around. That’s what I always said.’
‘I know,’ Tristan said.
‘And Pepper. You know I’ve got Pepper. I just wanted to get the whole thing done as quickly as possible and get out.’
‘I know,’ Tristan said.
There was a lay-by in the road and she pulled in and stopped the car. Her hands still gripping the wheel. ‘You know? You know?’ Something unravelled and snapped in front of her like a flag. Tristan just going along for the ride.
Tristan turned round sharply. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know, Ada. And you knew as well. But there’s nothing I can do about it whether I want to or not. Do you know that?’
‘Do I know that?’ she said. ‘Of course I know that. I know the hell out of that.’ She always got lost in arguments; what did she know? She knew nothing. She got out of the car. Her breath billowed out. Her cheeks stinging. Snow crunched. She climbed up the bank towards a low fence, a field beyond covered in snow. The field was smooth. No marks, no tracks. Her boots sank, leaving deep prints. She walked a wide circle. Heard Tristan get out of the car and climb up the bank. Felt him watching her. She looked up. God, that stupid hat made him look young. He’d found a curved stick and he held it in front of his mouth. First curved downwards, then gradually making the ends point up. Behind it, his own mouth in a lopsided grin. And this was her problem, this was definitely her problem: when it came down to it, she would do anything for a really good grin, all chapped and bemused and leaning teeth.
Tristan walked into the field, put his hands in his pockets and started pressing his own deep footprints into the snow.
From above, the field was stamped with wide arcs, like links in a chain, each one getting smaller and closer as they slowly circled each other in the snow.
The buckles on Pepper’s shoes rattled. She sat on the stairs and pressed her feet against the rails. Waiting for her mother to get off the phone. ‘Could you say that again?’ her mother kept saying. She shook the phone and looked at it. ‘All I can hear is crackling.’ She shook the phone again, listened, then put it down.
‘What is it?’ Pepper said.
‘I think the school’s been closed,’ her mother said. She picked the phone up once more and listened. ‘It’s not working,’ she said. She went over to the window and looked out. It had been snowing heavily all night. In the distance, the moor was submerged. The clouds were so low and bulky it looked like they were going to land on the ground. There were drifts of snow all around the house and the wind was getting stronger, flinging snow against the windows.
Pepper pressed her feet hard against the stairs. They were meant to be doing pictures with chalk. And she wanted to show Petey her knee – she had a bruise that was changing from purple to yellow. ‘How long for?’ she asked. Trying to keep her voice casual.
‘All this week,’ her mother said. ‘The snow’s forecast to get worse.’ She stared out of the window.
‘But maybe the week after,’ Pepper said. She ran her finger over the shiny wood. There was a black knot in the step she liked to sit on, which looked like a spider in a web. She touched the fat middle. The day stretched out ahead of her. She followed the spider’s web with her finger, round and round and then round again.
The snow made the house seem dim and green. Her buckles rattled. She got up and went down the hall, looking again at the pictures along the wall – she had looked at them so many times she knew them off by heart. The kingfisher on the branch over the river; the paper turning yellow in the right-hand corner. The picture of the wren in the bank – the shadow of the person taking the photo spilled out on the grass in front. The one where the water was so flat that there was a whole tree reflected upside down in it. And there were fingerprints on the wall around the pictures. Different-sized ones that Pepper liked to put her own fingers against. In the other houses they’d lived in, the walls had usually been scrubbed so hard that there was no sign that anyone had ever lived there before.
There was a lot of noise coming from the kitchen. Her mother was looking in all the cupboards and filling a bag with packets and tins and pieces of bread. Pepper watched from the doorway. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.
‘I’ve got to go and check on Luke,’ her mother said.
‘Why?’ Pepper asked.
Her mother gestured outside. ‘He’s in the house by himself.’ She put another tin in the bag. She went to the door and put on her coat and scarf and gloves and a hat. Then she took her coat off and put on the long brown one that was hanging by the door. ‘Stay inside, OK?’ she said. ‘And don’t touch the fire. I won’t be long.’ She pushed the door. It only opened a few inches, so she shoved it hard with her shoulder. It scraped past a heap of snow, then closed softly.
Pepper stayed in the hall listening for the car, but it didn’t start. She went upstairs and just glimpsed her mother trudging up the road through deep snow. She watched until she couldn’t see her any more. Now Luke was in his house by himself, and she was in her house by herself.
The house was very quiet. She went and stood by the fire. It was very low. There were a lot of logs stacked up at the side. She put the oven glove on and opened the stove door carefully. Then she placed two medium-sized logs on the embers. Let enough air whoosh in so that they caught and then closed it again. There. A burning smell. The glove was smouldering. She stared at it. Smoke curled out. She pressed it against the slates for a long time with her eyes closed. When she opened them it had stopped smoking.
An hour passed, and then another. She wasn’t scared of the house’s noises any more: the creaks, the groans, the soft chunterings. It was like the house was talking to itself. When it was windy, the upstairs windows shook, and when the water was low in the tank the radiators banged. Once, when the wind was very strong, it shook bits of old horsehair out of the beams because part of the house used to be a stable. There was a beam in the kitchen with a stain that looked like a bat, and a crack in the wall by the phone that was so deep that, if she picked at it, she could slide most of her hand in. Her coats and boots were lined up by the door. She knew the best place to watch the road, the best places to hide, the best place to stand if she wanted to listen in to conversations. She avoided, without even noticing, the rusty nail sticking out of the third step, and the sharp tile by the door in the kitchen.
She went into the study, picked up the camera and a bird book and took them under the kitchen table. Got back up and found a tin of cherries in the cupboard. She opened them and crawled back under the table, ate them one by one, dripping dark syrup over the floor. She hummed to herself. Turned the pages slowly. There was a picture of a heron in the book. She studied it for a long time. Snow fell outside the window. She turned the page slowly. A grey shape moved past the window. The glass rattled. She stopped humming. She held the page very still. The window rattled again. She closed the book and crawled out, then looked outside. Saw nothing but deep snow. She opened the window. Snow whirled and landed in the sink. There was a paw print in the snow on the windowsill. She closed the window and went to the hall, then pushed the front door open as hard as she could. The world was deep and white. She stepped out into it. Almost fell down the buried steps. ‘Captain,’ she called. She blinked snow out of her eyes. She took another step out. Could hardly see through the snow, but there was the cat, turning to look at her. There was snow all over his ears and his face. His tail looked like a white brush.