Authors: Lucy Wood
The first rungs bounced under her feet. Ten steps up she realised she’d forgotten to ask Pepper to hold it steady. Went back down slowly and showed her how to grip the sides.
Her heart clanged like the rungs. She paused, then kept going. Felt the ladder tilt, looked down and saw Pepper staring off to one side, only one hand on the ladder. ‘Oi,’ Ada shouted. ‘Concentrate on this.’ Add Pepper if you want to plummet to your death.
The wind seemed to pick up as she went higher, dragging her hair across her eyes. She made the mistake of looking down again. God it was high and the concrete yard glared below. The trees a swathe of dusky orange, like dim lanterns.
At the top, she had to lean forward to see into the chimney, hands scrabbling against the roof. There were a lot of tiles missing; something else to add to the list which kept growing and growing. There was a mass of sticks clogging the chimney. She tried to pull one out but tipped, swung sideways, somehow grabbed the ladder. Pepper called something, her voice a thin waver. But Ada couldn’t look down. She clung hard to the ladder, mouth dry, swaying like a pendulum on a broken clock.
The ladder shook. ‘Can you put your right foot down a step?’ a woman’s voice called up.
Ada groped with her foot, but her leg stretched down and down without hitting a rung. ‘I can’t,’ she said.
The rungs clunked. ‘Here,’ the woman said. A hand gripped Ada’s ankle and guided it onto the rung below. ‘Now the other foot, OK?’
They went down slowly, rung by rung. And then there was the bottom. Beautiful solid ground. Pepper desperate to tell her, the little git, that she’d seen the cat again; it had run right past the ladder and round the back of the house.
The woman took the ladder down and folded it. ‘Where does this go?’ she asked.
‘I’ll take it,’ Ada said, but Judy – she had realised halfway down that it was Judy – carried it back to the shed herself.
‘There’s this,’ Pepper said, holding out a white dish. She shoved it into Ada’s hands, stared at Judy for a moment, who shifted and pushed at her sleeves, then ran off in the direction she’d said the cat had gone.
‘I brought you something,’ Judy said. She watched Pepper running. ‘It’s nothing much, leftovers, you don’t have to eat it or anything.’ Her russet hair was cut short and clumpy. A kitchen-scissor job. Red cheeks, her eyes squinting even though it wasn’t bright. Her body stockier, something taut in her folded arms. The colours were all washed out of her clothes, mended seams on her jeans. Wellies with an ankle line of mud.
‘Up there,’ Ada said, pointing to the roof. ‘I’m sure I would have been able to, if you hadn’t come.’
Judy pushed her hair out of her eyes. Which had almost rolled. ‘I could use a cup,’ she said.
Judy’s boots left slices of mud along the floor. Ada put the kettle on. Still the last residue of panic flitting around her body. She made a pot of tea and got out cups. A gaudy purple one for herself and gold for Judy. All her mother’s things either tacky or practical, no middle ground between a garden fork and a plastic chandelier. She heaped two sugars into Judy’s.
‘I cut down on sugar,’ Judy said. ‘For the teeth.’
Ada nodded. She tipped the cup away and poured another. The tea bags rose up in the pot and then sank.
Judy gulped scalding tea and poured more. The gold cup held carefully in chapped hands. ‘I heard you were back,’ she said.
Ada looked around the squalid kitchen. She pushed a pile of catalogues out of Judy’s way – outdoor clothes: gloves with leather pads, cheap tweed like shiny granite. ‘Just until this place is sorted out,’ she said. She stood at the edge of the table. ‘How long have you been back?’ There had been a few letters, stilted and formal, neither of them good at writing, then after a while, no letters.
‘I’m not,’ Judy said. ‘I’m not back.’ She pushed her sleeves up higher above her elbows. ‘I never left. I wanted to come to the funeral, but Dad got a problem with his stomach, we had to take him to the hospital, turned out there was a pseudo cyst in there.’
The funeral. Ada took the pot and filled it again. ‘A pseudo cyst,’ she said. Didn’t that just mean no cyst?
‘He’s living in town now,’ Judy said. ‘Had to sell the bungalow, pay for his residential bills. They let him take his sound system but not his fish tank. They don’t allow pets. I told them that if a fish escaped it probably wouldn’t be able to terrorise other residents. They said: how did I know?’ She stopped and looked at Ada. ‘I guess you won’t remember the fish tank.’
‘I remember,’ Ada said. They would scatter bright food pellets and watch them sink.
‘They said I should buy him curtains with fish on instead. And I did.’ She shook her head. ‘And a duvet.’
Ada swallowed the gritty dregs in her cup. The kitchen clock went, tick, tick, pause, tick. ‘Mario,’ she said. ‘There was a fish called Mario.’
‘There was never a fish called Mario,’ Judy told her. ‘They were all female.’ She picked up one of Pepper’s gloves and smoothed out the wrinkles, then dropped it on the table and scraped her chair back. ‘I should look at your chimney while I’m here.’
There were the cold remains of the fire. The feathers like decoration. Judy knelt down and put her arm in. ‘What I thought,’ she said. She showed the black twigs and feathers. ‘Some old nests in there. Good job you didn’t light a fire or the whole thing might have caught.’ She started pulling out tangled handfuls.
‘I can do it,’ Ada told her. She got out a bin bag but there was nothing to do except hold it open while Judy stuffed twigs in. They ripped holes through the plastic. Lichen flaked like old paint. In one handful, a few broken pieces of egg shell.
There was a gold band on Judy’s ring finger that was loose and slipping over her knuckle.
‘Are you in town now then?’ Ada asked.
‘I’m up at the farm,’ Judy said. She nodded towards the window as if the farm was just outside it. ‘We’ve got the whole thing just the two of us now.’
Ada pushed the twigs down so that more would fit in. ‘You and Robbie?’
‘Of course me and Robbie,’ Judy said. She took the full bag and tied the top. ‘Of course me and Robbie.’
Judy and Robbie had been together since they were fourteen. It was his family’s farm. He had dropped out of school as soon as he could, always working, always out from dark till dark. Ada remembered mucky overalls, oil, a tired slump to his jaw. The smell of beer. And his night terrors: Judy describing how he would jerk upright in bed, shouting, fighting the sheets. Judy had spent most of her time at the farm, although she’d never liked it. It was the cows, she said, the way they looked at you as if they were planning something, biding their time.
‘But why are you?’ Ada said. Judy looked at her and frowned. ‘I mean, the cows.’
Judy leaned further into the stove. ‘What about the cows?’
‘Remember when they chased us? And they were in a circle.’
‘I don’t remember that,’ Judy said.
‘They circled us,’ Ada said. Their wide faces had pushed in close, sides shunting against each other like rocking canoes.
Judy pulled out more tattered feathers. A ditchy smell and gloopy leaves. ‘Cows never do that.’ Grit clattered in the grate like hailstones. ‘There can’t be much more of this,’ she said.
‘Cows always do that,’ Ada told her.
The wind sounded louder in the chimney now. Judy scooped out a handful of grit. The smudges under her eyes were almost violet. A few grey hairs in her parting like frayed wire. So she had been stuck here all this time. Ada thought of all the places she’d lived in over the years. The town with the sculpture of a horse, the house where the woman next door grew huge pumpkins. Or was that the same place? Moving on whenever she had to: when rents went up, when landlords decided to sell, when neighbours in cramped flats made so much noise she didn’t sleep for a week. When things didn’t work out as she had expected.
They filled four bags with old nests. The bags bulged and warped. ‘I think it’s OK to light now,’ Judy said. She put her head right in to check. Soot trickled down onto her hair, but no more twigs or feathers. She got up and prodded a log with her boot. ‘Where did you get these from?’ she asked.
‘The shop. Yesterday. Mick did me a deal on them.’
‘How much?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ada said. ‘Twenty.’ She lit the firelighters and watched as the flames jumped. But they started to dwindle as soon as they got near the wood. She jabbed at them, adding small bits of kindling like offerings.
‘The wood’s crap,’ Judy said. She knelt down and poked at the fire. ‘Mick’s screwed you over with this. The pieces are too big and they haven’t been seasoned. Look how damp they are. How much did you say you paid?’
‘He said it was good stuff,’ Ada said, heard her voice become whiney. ‘He put it in the back of the car for me.’
‘Mick’s like that,’ Judy said, shrugging. ‘He’ll charge anyone double if he thinks he can get away with it. One price for tourists, another price for locals.’
A
n odd lurch in her chest. ‘He knows me,’ she said.
‘Wood takes six months to season. At least. I’ll get someone to drop some in as soon as possible. I know a few people. A big load of it, it’s cheaper that way,’ Judy said. ‘Tide you over until you leave.’ Her voice was gruff but had always had a chime to it, like a bell hidden somewhere. Her arms folded across her chest. Smeared in soot. They had once watched an eclipse together and had burned so badly they had to be covered in thick cream. A week later they had peeled their skin off in sheets.
‘Hopefully sometime next week OK?’ Judy said. Then she was gone, leaving the front door thunking in the wind like a rolling bucket.
Ada stirred a pan of pork and apples, decided to throw in a heap of blackberries that Pepper had left on the table. See how it turned out. She went into the lounge, along the hall, then back into the kitchen, sure she could smell melting solder – but it was so faint and then it disappeared.
She called Pepper for dinner. Heard the door to the study creak open. ‘What were you doing in there?’ she asked.
‘Nothing,’ Pepper said. She dipped her finger in the pan and licked it.
‘Do you want to help stir?’
‘Nah.’ Pepper dipped her finger in again – no cooking for her unless it meant stealing huge spoonfuls.
The sauce turned dusky purple, almost grey, and was watery, like it had been wrung from an old cloth. Definitely needed to thicken. ‘Could you find the cornflour in the cupboard?’
Pepper pulled out packets and boxes. ‘Which one?’
‘Try and read what it says,’ Ada said. Stirring the sauce, keeping her voice light.
‘That one,’ Pepper said, pointing to a packet of dried soup. When Ada shook her head, she tried again. ‘That one.’ This time a box of stock cubes.
‘What does it begin with?’ Ada asked. She used to be able to do it.
‘See, see, it begins with see,’ Pepper sang frantically, shoving a bag of coffee at Ada. ‘Did I get it right?’ she said.
Ada took the bag, wished for the thousandth time that someone would tell her what was best to do. Then she nodded and said it was right. Switched it for cornflour when Pepper wasn’t looking.
‘He had grey eyes like me, didn’t he?’ Pepper suddenly asked. ‘My dad?’
‘Grey eyes?’ Ada said.
Pepper opened her own eyes wide and stared.
‘No,’ Ada said. ‘I mean yes.’ The memory of him fading each year. What to tell Pepper? That she remembered a birthmark shaped like an anchor on his hip; a lisp in his voice when he was tired? That he had once electrocuted himself on her oven, filling the tiny kitchen with the stench of singed hair, and how he had cursed, then laughed magnificently, then cursed again?
‘But before you said they were blue,’ Pepper said.
Ada mixed cornflour into a paste. The lights flicked off, then back on again. ‘Did I?’ she said. ‘I guess I meant that sometimes they looked grey and sometimes blue.’
‘I see,’ Pepper said slowly.
The fridge juddered. The sauce thickened, wrinkling like wet paper.
Pepper picked out a mushy blackberry. ‘I would have eyes that sometimes looked red and sometimes looked black,’ she said. ‘Like blood. Like my eyes were full of blood.’
Where did that come from? Once again she was off and skittering away.
The man who brought the wood had on a dark red jumper and his hair was the same colour as the wood: bright brown, almost orange. His bottom teeth were crooked. ‘Shep,’ he said to the dog in the back of his truck. ‘Stay there Shep.’ He carried an armful of logs into the shed and stacked them up against the wall.
Pepper skulked up to the truck and offered the dog her hand, which he sniffed, backed away from, then butted his head into, whining. He had curly fur like a sheep and a flat, mournful face. One of his eyes was blurry. There were a million dogs called Shep – she would have called him something better.
Her mother came out with two mugs of tea, the steam racing up into the air. Her cheeks were red in the wind and she had a red scarf tied round her hair. The man watched her as she walked across the yard and put the mugs down inside the shed.
‘She’s scared of dogs,’ Pepper told him.