Weathering (7 page)

In the back of the truck there were hammers and bits of metal, paint tins, a folded black sheet lifting in the wind. Pepper ran her finger along the edge of a box full of carved wooden shapes.

‘You can look at those if you want,’ the man said.

But Pepper stepped back and picked at her lips. The shapes were only interesting when she wasn’t meant to touch them. And if she looked at them now she would have to say something nice about them, it would be expected of her, and that should be against the law.

There were piles of soaking leaves everywhere that smelled like banana skins. Her mother’s voice floated over: ‘Sorry, no you. Gloves. Hopefully not very long.’        

Shep barked suddenly, a furious yapping, and he stood up in the truck, rigid and quivering, staring at something in the distance.

‘Shep, stop it,’ the man called. ‘Relax old buddy.’

Pepper looked around but there was nothing. After a moment, the dog turned a circle and lay down, twitching a leg out and an ear.

She drifted in and out of rooms, trying to imagine her mother here, growing up. She had never thought about her growing up before and she couldn’t picture it, especially not in this house, which was so cobwebby and strange and far away. There was no TV, no people in the street to watch from the windows. No smell of cars or fish and chips. No shops to stare into, no parks full of sandpits and pigeons. And when it rained it was grey and sharp, rather than yellow. And when it got dark it was like the house had been wrapped in black paper.

But she found things. A small waterproof coat, a tin of pencils in her mother’s old bedroom, a purple scarf, a necklace with half a silver heart dangling on it, a bottle with a candle stuck in. A set of measuring spoons and a creased recipe book with an orange cake on the front; she had seen her mother make that cake before. She found a clay bird with a chipped wing, painted black and white and with a splash of red. It had three wobbly letters on the bottom. She took it to her mother and asked what it said.
A D A.
‘Did you make it?’ Pepper asked.

Her mother sifted through a pile of paper. ‘Do the taxable assets exceed the annual limitations?’ she said. ‘I don’t even know what that means.’ She turned the page over and asked for the calculator.

Another day, Pepper glimpsed the cat running past the front door. Dark rivulets of rain on its back. She went out and clicked her tongue. The cat stopped and looked back at her. ‘Come on old buddy,’ she said.

‘Gurmunuw,’ the cat said. It tilted its head to one side. Then it turned and bolted through the long grass.

And one day, rooting around in the garden, she found something red among a patch of plants with brown leaves. A mushy strawberry, all the plants wilted and dead but somehow this one strawberry left behind. She ate it in the cold drizzle, juice trickling into the corners of her mouth and down over her chin.

The study door was stiff when Pepper pushed it. The hinge screeched and she stopped, listening for her mother. She could hear her upstairs in the bath, talking to herself like she sometimes did, the faint splash of water and the taps rattling – she would have run the water so hot there would be a red line around her waist.

Pepper went into the study and clicked on the dim light. She touched the books, the notebooks full of lists, the broken watches and silver chains. There was a dusty bird on the desk that stared at her. She touched its body. It was stiff but it didn’t look dead. She reached up and took down a box of photographs. These were what she wanted to look at. There were no pictures of any people. Instead, there were three brown birds under a bridge; a flash of bright blue above the water; a swan with its head tucked under its wing; a magpie; crows flying round a field. On the front of one of the books there was a drawing of a tall grey bird with purple bits on its wings and a black wisp on its head. She had never seen a bird like that before and she looked through the whole box of photographs but couldn’t find a picture of it.

There was a camera on the shelf; an old, chunky one with a brown strap. It was heavy. She held the camera up and looked through it. All she saw was a black square. She clicked the button but nothing happened. Click, click. She shook it and tried again. Click. Nothing.

A night of heavy rain which left the trees dripping. Water pooled on the front step and some of it came in under the door. Her mother was going to the shop but Pepper didn’t want to go – it was always cold and the man that worked there, Mick, watched her and tapped his long fingers on the counter. Also, she felt a faint pang of fear whenever she thought of being in the car.

She was meant to stay indoors but everything looked varnished and bright after the rain, so she put her coat on and went outside, then came back in and slung the camera over her shoulder.

Through the sopping grass and down towards the river. It was wide and brown today, and it rippled and churned. There were deep creases when it went round rocks and a hollow, clunking noise. It looked strong, like a muscle. When she threw in a stick, the stick didn’t float on the surface – it got dragged under, as if something had reached up to grab it. She walked along the bank and there was the bridge she’d seen in some of the photos – it had rusty railings and a broken plank in the middle. She made herself stand on it. The river roared under her feet. She crossed the bridge and the trees thickened in front of her. They were almost bare now – their trunks were silver and they tilted upwards and there was a path going through them. Pepper looked back at the house, then walked up into the wood.

The noise of the river and the noise of the trees were the same. They both roared and thrummed. Twigs and leaves rained down. The ground was slippery and smelled rich and there were wide gullies of water that she had to jump over. There were coppery leaves everywhere, and plants dying back to a dusky colour, and a pile of sawn branches that had orange insides bright as lamps. There was a shiny black beetle that looked blue close up, mounds of horse poo, piles of pine needles that she poked until ants came out.        

The wood increased ahead of her; below, the river swung in and out of sight as if a door was opening and closing. Something flitted across a branch and she fumbled with the camera but the bird had already gone.

The tilting trees made her dizzy. The path branched and she turned right without noticing. Mud and leaves caught in her boots. Fat drops of rain fell through the branches and landed on her arm. There was a wigwam up ahead, made of branches that had been tied together at the top. A sweet wrapper glinting at the entrance. She looked inside. A dusty floor, lots of small footprints. She put her foot in and made her own prints, then kicked the sweet wrapper into the ground.

The path branched again. Pepper stomped on with her head down. Old grudges bubbling up: that boy who said there wasn’t room for her to join his club, the teacher that forgot her name, that lowdown group of girls who told everyone she had a bad disease. That girl who seemed nice at first but then swatted a bee straight out of the sky. The stupid boy who wouldn’t go into the park with her because he was scared of pigeons. Her father. That sour-smelling man on the bus that sang romance songs to her and made everyone stare.

A branch cracked behind her and she spun around. The path veered downhill and she couldn’t see the river. There was a clump of mushrooms on a tree, wet and salmony, folded over like ears. White mushrooms blotched with grey. Brown ones with dark frills. A branch cracked again. She turned round and started walking back, too fast, her feet sliding on leaves, the camera bouncing against her chest. The path forked. Both ways looked the same. Her breath was ragged in her throat. Her heart clattered and there was a hot feeling in her eyes which she tried to rub away. A small bird flapped above her. She fumbled for the camera but it was too late. ‘Crapping hell,’ she said.

‘You’ve left the lens cap on,’ a voice said behind her.        

She stiffened and turned round slowly. It was Luke, the man who had driven them to the house. ‘I meant to do that,’ she said. She looked away and wiped at her eyes with her sleeve. Waited for him to carry on walking down the path.

‘Heading back, are you?’ he asked.

Pepper pretended to be very interested in a particular tree. She crouched down and examined it. ‘Not yet,’ she said. But when Luke shrugged and carried on, she waited a few moments then followed behind, leaving a long gap between them so that he wouldn’t know she was there.

Luke kept his hands in his pockets and didn’t skid once. He whistled something slow between his teeth. He was wearing a shirt and tie under his jacket even though he was just out walking. His skin was very brown and creased, like a cloth after polishing shoes. After a while, he stopped. ‘Give us that camera a minute,’ he called back.

She stayed where she was and held the camera tight.

‘Don’t be a moron about it,’ he said. ‘I don’t know much about them, but I can show you how to take the lens cap off at least.’ He came over and showed her, then twisted the lens so things looked clearer. ‘I think this is the focus,’ he said. ‘Do you know what that is?’

‘Yes,’ Pepper told him. You needed it for school and she didn’t have any.

‘Have a gander through him now,’ Luke said, passing her the camera.

She looked and saw crispy lichen right in front of her face, even though it was on a branch above. Then a mushroom on the ground, bronze and sticky. She prodded it with her foot.

‘I wouldn’t touch that,’ Luke said.

‘Why?’ She reached towards the mushroom.        

Luke kicked at a pine cone. ‘It’s a death cap,’ he said. ‘Liver failure, chronic pain. It would be a slow death, maybe take a couple of weeks.’

The mushroom gleamed like a coin. Pepper aimed the camera at it and clicked the button.

There were roots all over the path and Pepper tripped, sprawled, tripped, sprawled. She tried to catch up with Luke. ‘Are there big grey birds here? By the water?’

Luke seemed to be listening for something. ‘Hear those trees creaking. Takes me back to being on the boats that does. The noises the sea could make – no one else would believe it, sometimes like an engine, sometimes chalk screeching on a board. Thinking maybe I could write something for the newspaper. But I don’t know if they’d want it. Probably no one would want to read something like that.’ He turned to Pepper like he wanted her opinion.

‘No,’ she said. ‘They probably wouldn’t.’ It was important not to lie.

Luke stumbled over a root and mud splashed up Pepper’s leg. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Maybe you’re right.’ The path levelled and he stopped and said something to a boulder, except it wasn’t a boulder, it was a man leaning over a wide bend in the river wearing a grey coat. There was a boy sitting next to him. They both had fishing rods in the water and there was a net and bucket. Inside the bucket, three dark fish.

‘Not much today Clapper,’ Luke said.

‘Nah,’ the man replied.

The boy stared at Pepper and she stared back. He had very neat hair, like he had just combed it. A pair of thick glasses that he pushed up his nose.

‘That’s Petey,’ Luke told her. ‘Lives with Clapper. He’s about your age I’d say. This is Pearl’s granddaughter.’

Clapper didn’t look up. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Down at the house.’

Luke looked once more in the bucket, then carried on along the path. Pepper followed. When she turned back to look, Clapper was watching the water carefully and his hands were very steady.

The ground turned sandy and there was the bridge in front of them. ‘There’s lots of birds next to that,’ Pepper said. ‘In the photos.’

Luke nodded. ‘Pearl used to wade out into the water. Sometimes squat for hours, waiting.’

‘I could do that,’ Pepper said. She should have been back before her mother, but she could see the car already parked next to the house.

‘No one’s stopping you,’ Luke said.

As they went over the bridge, purple clouds rolled closer and rain came down in a torrent. Pepper’s nose ran over her lip. Her waterproof crumpled against her skin like a leaf. She looked over the railings and saw someone sitting on the far side of the bank. It was raining so hard that whoever it was blurred into the rain. Pepper glanced at Luke but his head was bowed towards the ground. When Pepper looked back, the air was so full of rain she could hardly see three inches in front of her face. Huge drops splashed down, soaking everything, and Luke was too slow so she ran over the gravel, up the steps and into the hallway, where the saucepan caught the rain as it came through the roof.

Chapter 9

Pearl endured the rain all night. The kind that wore away at her bones. Battered, huddled on her rock, each drop seeping in until she was doused.

The rain filled holes in the road; it filled flowerpots to the brim. It filled the blocked gutters of the house and spilled over – dark, shiny water mixed with leaves and soil. It churned the fields to mud and when the fields couldn’t take any more, it ran down in wide gulleys to the river. The river rose by a foot.

Then, slowly, very slowly, it stopped, as if someone was turning a stiff tap. Leaving behind sallow light, roads and roofs lacquered with rain. The ground pulpy and bruised as an old peach.

The river was up around Pearl’s knees and flowing fast. It was choppy and brown as dishwater. She got down off the rock and stood in the water, leaning against the current. The weight of it knocked into her legs and she staggered, managed to get her balance, then started to wade towards the bank. Halfway across she stumbled and plunged her hands in to steady herself. The water rushed on, grabbing anything – sticks, rocks, weeds – and dragging them with it. Breaking up leaves, spitting and guzzling. Trying to do the same with her. She braced herself, then stumbled again on clumps of roots. She gripped them and clung on, managed to get one foot on a rock, another on a root, handfuls of mud and stones, and then she was at the top of the bank, hauled out in the long wet grass.