Authors: Lucy Wood
‘I’m coming,’ Pepper said.
‘Wait here. Stay by the door, OK?’ She took the torch and went back down the steps. Over the gravel and then back onto the wet grass. She shone the torch on the ground in wide arcs. Everything glinted and looked like keys. She looked back at the house and thought again about breaking a window. How did people do that? Tie something round your fist and smash it? Or hurl a brick? All those hours at school struggling with algebra when these were the things she needed to know. She took a step forward, stopped, then stepped back. Scanned the grass, scanned it again, then remembered that there used to be a spare key hidden somewhere in the garden, lodged in the wall, or under a stone by the steps. She ran back and found Pepper in the driveway.
‘I told you to stay by the door,’ she said. When would Pepper stop wandering off? Ada had lost her in a car park once and found her, ten terrified minutes later, underneath a van cooing to a pigeon she’d been following.
‘I saw something,’ Pepper said.
‘There’s a spare key somewhere here,’ Ada said. ‘Look in the wall for me. Any loose stones.’
‘How do you know?’ Pepper asked.
‘You’re good at finding things,’ Ada told her.
They turned over stone after stone with nothing but mud and worms underneath. Pepper picking stones up and throwing them down hard. ‘I can’t find it,’ she said. ‘I can’t find it.’ Her cheeks mottling. She picked up a stone and threw it at the wall of the house.
Ada closed her eyes for a moment. Wished she could throw one herself. She lifted up another stone and the key was under it. The lock was stiff and swollen and the key went in slowly and almost didn’t turn. The door heaved open. Damp and mouldy smells rushed out. Cold, stale air. But they were in. Ada shoved their bags into the hallway and closed the door. The house was very dark. She pressed her back to the door, suddenly expecting to hear her mother clomping, clearing her throat, her terrible sneeze that would startle cows in the next field. There were Pearl’s shoes, her long coats. The crushed waterproof hat.
The house creaked and griped, while they waited in the doorway like nervous guests.
‘What does it say?’ Pepper asked. She was looking at the wooden box. Running her finger over the side.
‘It’s just flowers,’ Ada told her.
‘It says something,’ Pepper said. She squinted at the box and turned it upside down.
‘Let me have a look.’ It was probably just the date or something. Ada held the box up and tried to see in the dim hall.
A Beloved Pet
. She read it again. Her mother had been tiny – probably tinier at the end. But a pet box. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. So did neither.
The first cloud of dust hit Pepper and she sneezed, then her mother sneezed too, loud and sharp like she always did, so that it rang out twice in the empty hallway. Once, she had sneezed so loudly it had made a woman in a shop drop a bottle of milk. By the door, there were boots and umbrellas and a lot of knotty sticks. A long coat hanging down, like a person standing there waiting. Further up, sheets of wallpaper were peeling off and bending backwards in big arcs. A bony leaf rattled around their feet.
‘Hellooooo,’ Pepper said. To show she wasn’t scared.
‘The light switch is behind you,’ her mother said. ‘Can you see it?’
Pepper felt along the wall by the coats. Her fingers brushed against cobwebs. She looked for the spider but couldn’t see one. She found the switch and clicked it but no lights came on. She tried it again, click, click, click, until her mother told her to stop. Then she said something about staying by the door, don’t go anywhere, looked like there might be
loose boards, the ceiling could be about to cave in. She opened the door, wind rushed in and billowed the wallpaper, and then the door shut and she was gone.
The house creaked in the wind. At first, all Pepper could see was the pale wall up ahead, but then it was easier to see other things: an open door further down the hall, a lampshade rocking in the draught. There were rows of photographs in frames along the wall and she stood on tiptoe to look at them. They were all birds and their small eyes were dark and bright as oil. Some of the pictures were brown, like tea had spilled on them, some were black and white, some were faded blues and greens. She followed them down the hall – there was a small bird on a branch, a blurred shape between trees, and then there was a tink tink sound, and on the floor a saucepan catching water dripping from the ceiling. Reminding her of her own full bladder.
She turned and went through the open door and found herself in the kitchen. Tried the light switch but no light came on. The floor was brown and sticky. There was a table with a chair pulled out as if someone had just got up and left. Speckled grey tiles, dirty mugs and plates in the sink. The sink was full of brown water with leaves floating in it and a greasy sheen. Pepper put her finger in the water and the plates bobbed and looked like lonely faces that had been left behind. Everything had been left behind and it was like intruding. She jabbed the plates so that they clacked together.
There was a rustling noise and she turned, expecting to see her mother, but there was no one there. The kitchen was quiet except for a clock ticking and the wind pressing against the window. There were notes stuck to the fridge. She squinted at the one closest to her.
Blue with orange, blue with orange.
What did it say? She knew it started with a ‘b’ at least. But words were devious; they twisted and played tricks so that you ended up writing, ‘I have brown hare’ and everyone laughing. What you had to do was look at them out of the corner of your eye until they turned blurry and almost disappeared, and then you didn’t have to worry about them any more. It was the same with cracks in pavements and clocks with heavy, swinging pendulums.
The noise started up again, a sort of rustling somewhere in the house. She followed it past a closed door, past the stairs, making sure she stood on the carpet’s big flowers rather than the gaps in between them. The hall curved and at the end of it there were stone steps going down to another room. Inside, there were thick orange curtains and shelves full of books and boxes. A row of glass birds. A toolbox with the lid open: a hammer and screwdrivers and broken watches inside. Jars and jars of silver pins on the desk. More photographs on the walls. One of the windows had swung open and rain was blowing in. She crossed the room to close it, then heard the scrabbling right behind her. She turned round. The window banged. Nothing for a long minute. Then the noise again. Her legs tingled. She needed to pee, urgently. The sound came again and she licked her tooth. The window rattled, banged shut, then creaked open. Something moved behind the chair. She stayed very still. Then a grey shape hurtled past her legs, skidded and ran out of the door. Hoarse grunts and a faint hiss. Its tail bent at an angle. A squashed, startled face.
Pepper ran after it; back down the hall where the cat had scrabbled under the kitchen table. ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Come here.’
The cat turned to look at her. There was a bit missing out of one ear. Ribs showing above a droopy belly. Big paws. Matted grey fur like a threadbare carpet. It hissed again. Pepper stepped backwards and the cat galloped past her, back down into the low room and jumped out of the window.
It was too dark to see where it went. Something roared and thumped. The river. It sounded like it was in the room. She closed the window, then knelt on the deep ledge and looked out. Dark humps of grass, the mass of all those trees. One tiny light in the distance. Her breath steamed on the cold glass. There was a quivering wail from outside. Was that what an owl sounded like? She had never heard one before. A shape moved down by the river – her mother. But then the lights clicked on and she heard her mother close the front door, take off her coat and stamp her shoes, saying: Where are you? The lights are working now.
In the kitchen, her mother opened cupboards and drawers. ‘There’s got to be something we can eat,’ she said.
Pepper sat at the table wrapped in a blanket, which smelled like someone else’s soap and biscuits. Outside, the sky was very dark and there was a single star among all the murky clouds, like a peephole that looked out into space. If she tipped back and concentrated on the star, it felt like she was getting sucked right out there. She tipped further and further. ‘What doesn’t make sense,’ she said, ‘is how space is supposed to go on for ever and ever,’ and her voice sounded higher and different to usual.
The fan heater they’d found rattled loudly. The fridge was back on and there was a sour smell coming from it. Her mother didn’t go near it. She didn’t look over when it shuddered, stopped, then started up again. She didn’t look at anything; not the papers, or the bits of plastic and wires, or the notes stuck all over the walls. She kept her coat on and stared into the cupboard.
Usually they would have unpacked by now. Her mother would be running the bath, the bathroom filling with steam and lavender. She would be saying things like: this is exactly right, I’ve got a feeling about this place, I think it’s going to work out. Pepper would have laid out her precious things in the room she was going to sleep in.
Her mother crouched down and opened a drawer. ‘Nothing but bags of bird seed in here,’ she said.
‘I saw a cat,’ Pepper said. There was still rain in her mother’s hair, which made it look very dark.
‘There must be about seven bags,’ her mother said.
‘In a room with thousands of books and pictures.’
Her mother stood up, then reached into the highest cupboard. She brought down a tin and a lot of dust. ‘Don’t go in that room at the moment, OK?’
‘Why?’
‘God knows how old these things are,’ her mother said. She found the tin opener and opened the tin and poured it into a pan, then clicked something and a bright blue flame roared up. The kettle shook as it boiled.
‘Why can’t I?’ Pepper said. Then tipped back again in her chair. Who cared anyway, they wouldn’t be here very long.
Her mother spooned coffee into a mug and it came out in fat lumps. She drank two huge gulps while it was still steaming. She made Pepper a cup, weak and with lots of sugar. It tasted dusty and of burnt meat but it warmed her insides. The windows fogged up. Pepper leaned her head against the table and when she woke up the kitchen smelled of familiar cooking smells and there were butter beans in tomato sauce, soft biscuits to dip in and a bowl of tinned peaches. Her mother could make a feast out of anything. When she cracked eggs there were sometimes two yolks inside.
‘Finish these,’ her mother said, pushing her bowl over.
Pepper shook her head. ‘You eat them,’ she said. ‘You haven’t eaten very much yet.’ Although her stomach growled. Her mother left the bowl right there in front of her, so in the end there was nothing to do but eat the rest of the peaches. Her mother was watching her very closely; sometimes she did that and Pepper hated it, so she tilted her face up and dropped the peaches into her mouth one by one, like a bird eating orange fish. The windows shook and wind shrieked through the gaps. A drop of water splashed onto the table. They both looked up and saw a dark patch spreading. The lights flickered.
‘I forgot what it was like,’ her mother said quietly.
There were crumbs and a bean on the front of Pepper’s shirt. Her head drifted down onto the dusty table and she sneezed, her nose dripped and she wiped it with the blanket. The lights flickered again and rain hurled itself against the windows as if it was trying to get in. She had to stay awake, there was something she needed to ask, but the blanket warmed to a fug of breath and body heat. She found the butter bean and ate it.
She hardly remembered being carried upstairs and put in bed. More blankets heaped on top. Drifting in and out of sleep, she swam up from a dream where everything kept moving, nothing would stay still, a tree turned into a cat snarling. Her feet were cold from sticking out of rucked sheets. It was completely dark, as if the whole world had disappeared. No fuzzy orange glow, no car lights sweeping across the walls. She must have called out because her mother came in, still dressed, and rubbed her arms and talked to her.
‘I couldn’t find the key,’ Pepper told her.
When she woke again she was alone and it was still dark. She sat up and looked around the room, could just make out a small chair, a mirror, bare walls – where was the picture of the silver mountain, where was the yellow clock? Then she remembered. No white birds cooing softly downstairs. Only a branch thumping against the roof. Blue covers with gold stars on. She turned over and tucked herself back under. The bedsprings crunched. A lump in the mattress where her shoulder needed to be. She kicked and turned. Back through the hall, there came a sharp, sweet smell, very faint, moving through the rooms.
Gas. The whole place stank of gas. Ada checked the hob, paced down the hall, then back into the kitchen again. Draughts kept the gas moving, so that at first it was stronger in the kitchen, then by the front door. Too tired even to yawn, head numb as if stuffed with reels of wool. The gas moved again. She followed it through the kitchen and into the larder with its empty shelves and slate floor. Squat orange bottles lined up against the wall. A faint hissing sound.
‘Don’t do that,’ she said. She shut the door. After a moment realised she’d shut herself into a tiny room full of gas. Opened the door again, and the small window as wide as it would go.