Authors: Lucy Wood

Weathering (34 page)

And out she went. Spreading and dissolving in the water, stretching into peaks and humps, creased, folded, scouring stones and bending sticks.

Out she went. Rushing and drumming, the house receding in her mind. Which filled instead with currents and eddies and melted snow. With silt and icy stones. She split and dispersed, shedding thoughts of watches and pins, of lenses and boots and chimneys; roiling over rocks then scattering in refractions of bright light.

Down through the woods, past roots and mushy leaves. Snatching at the trees’ cast-offs – their branches and twigs and wintry paraphernalia. Past boulders swathed in moss like winter coats, past networks of tunnels deep in the bank, past pools and brand-new, snowy waterfalls. Then there was something croaking above her and a heron flew over, wings spread and feet dangling, and for a moment they drifted side by side and then the heron was away, calling out frank, frank, and Pearl listened and thought: what a lovely sound, and she made it echo off the corner of a stone.

Past oak and beech and hazel that thinned, becoming gorse, bilberry, dry-stone walls. Down a set of jangling rapids and out onto the lower slopes of the moor, the riverbed stripped to bare granite. A few seams of quartz and mica. Browny-yellow seepage of bog and iron; the sudden taste of sheep dip and peat. And what was that tang? Ammonia? A walker just taken a piss in a stream.

And out she went. Washing off the edge of the moor and through something dark and prickly: a pine plantation. No light straining through, a resiny smell, needles stitching together into floating sheets. Split cones and sap, shadows darting, and then there was the wide grey sky and the trees opened out onto fields. The river surged and flooded over the bank and beached among the mud and grass. Horses raised their hooves and flicked their tails and shucked flies off their backs.

Part wallowing in shallow floodwater, part rushing past farms and barns and warehouses, past storage containers and supermarkets. Through the edge of town and siphoned into the middle, hemmed in by brick walls. Slower, glassier and more viscous, a nice change really, the soupy stillness. And a new kind of flotsam: an oily rainbow, crisp packets, algae, socks, plastic bags like collapsed moons. A bright cufflink that floated in circles. Tins sunk under the surface, which she scrubbed clean and then left behind. A sort of pent-up pressure, everything moving forward very slowly, stagnating, impatient shoving from the back. Then faster, and a great roaring sound ahead and just at that moment, a yellow bowl bobbing in the water and Pearl circled it, just managed to send over a gentle ripple, and then the bowl had gone and she was pouring downwards, an overwhelming plunging sensation because Christ, it was a weir, the unforgiving cement and then the steep drop on the other side.

Halfway to the sea and the first bite of saltiness. The wind turning the surface choppy and cold, and everything widening. No more ferns at the edges but, instead, seaweed, and the banks softening to marsh. Mud and water mixing into squelchy clay. Mile after mile of mudflats and claggy sand. Purple stones, dead green crabs on their backs with their legs in the air. The ribs of a boat. A bleached buoy. A thousand insects scavenging. Birds scattered all around, little brown ones on the mud, something with a curved bill probing. Their names . . . she let them sink into the mud, where feet and beaks sifted through, searching for whatever was lurking underneath. The sand and the mud sucking. Clumps of barnacles and inky mussels, flat white shells as big as saucers. The sea smashing its crockery. Pearl sunk into sticky mud, made runnels in the sand. She rolled her own name around on her tongue, where it mixed with salty water, turning opaque and gleaming. And then she dropped it.

Out she went. The river colliding with the sea. Fresh and salt water knuckling against each other, pushing the river into pleats. The river forced backwards and down by the tide, bending under the surface like a muscle under skin. And for a moment, the river was suspended, stuck between push and pull, and she remembered the first time she had seen it. She had expected a small thing: a ditch, a brook, muddy and oozing. But there it was: a silver slice, teeming and roaring. A messy cacophony of a river, all grunt and galumph and glinty rapids; wood and chemicals and blood and bits of stone. The sound of it all around, the smell of it all around, entangling everything.

A button dipped and floated on the waves. Where had it come from? She saw it through a haze of salt and blurry light. Maybe she would follow it, cling to the ingrained pattern and go out further and further. Maybe she would work herself into the clay and transform into something unrecognisable. Or maybe she would sweep into a rockpool and be sifted through by fat anemones. Or maybe the clouds would break, and the sun would lift her from the surface and carry her inland, back over the farms and the fields and the woods. And when it rained she would be back at the beginning, where the river was just a trickle in the middle of the moor. Conjuring itself drop by drop.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to my agent Elizabeth Sheinkman and my editor Helen Garnons-Williams for their encouragement, advice and enthusiasm. Thank you to everyone at Bloomsbury. Thank you to Jon McGregor for all the support he has given my writing; Ellie Roberts for the excellent and thorough notes on how to butcher a deer; Emma Bird for her memories of back boilers; Guy Bower for reading an early version; and Mum for patiently reading all my drafts. Thank you to Ben for everything.

A Note on the Author

Lucy Wood is the author of
Diving Belles,
a critically acclaimed collection of short stories based on Cornish folklore. She has been longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize and was a runner-up in the BBC National Short Story Award. She has also been awarded the Holyer an Gof Award and a Somerset Maugham Award. Lucy Wood has a Master’s degree in creative writing from Exeter University. She lives in Devon.

By the Same Author

Diving Belles

Also available by Lucy Wood

Diving Belles

Along Cornwall’s ancient coast, from time to time, the flotsam and jetsam of the past can become caught in the cross-currents of the present and a certain kind of magic floats to the surface... Straying husbands lured into the sea can be fetched back, for a fee. Houses creak, fill with water and keep a fretful watch on their inhabitants. And, on a windy beach, a small boy and his grandmother keep despair at bay with an old white door. In these stories, hopes, regrets and memories are entangled with catfish, wreckers’ lamps and baying hounds as Cornish folklore slips into everyday life.

‘A startling, and startlingly good, debut’ Jon McGregor

‘Wood’s imagination is extraordinary … Superb’ Kate Saunders,
The Times

‘Lucy Wood has an intensity and clarity of expression, deeply rooted in a sense of place. Her stories have a purity and strength, and an underlying human warmth; they resonate in the mind’ Philip Hensher

‘Wood’s finely wrought collection has touches of a benign Angela Carter and recalls the playful yet political transmogrifications of Atwood and Byatt’
Guardian

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First published in Great Britain 2015

This electronic edition published in 2015 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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