Authors: Lucy Wood
Weathering
For Ben
Contents
Arse over elbow and a mouthful of river. Which she couldn’t spit out. Which soaked in and weighed her down until she was steeped in silt and water, like old tea. But where was her arse anyway, where was her elbow? There was nothing but water as far as she could tell. A stew of water and leaves and small stones and herself all mixed up in it – a strange grey grit. Scattered, then dragged under again, everything teeming, and not sure which way was up or down. Light and dark, light and dark, like a door opening and closing.
Pearl flailed, grabbed at the water, but with what? Nothing to grab with but somehow she was back on the surface, dipping and whirling and strewn about. Bits of grey dust here, bits of grey dust there – almost impossible to recognise herself. Everything sodden and spreading out, couldn’t keep herself together; she was floating in a widening circle, dispersing like seeds kicked out of a tree. A godawful sloshing, and Christ, that wind. That was almost the worst of it, blowing over the water, flinging her about. So that some of her skittered off downriver and some snagged on a raft of sticks and leaves and the rest was trapped in the current and reeling.
She floated, the water pulling and sucking at her. Hard to gather her thoughts, which drifted and wedged into the riverbank. Which had never been much use. Where was she again? It was hard to keep track of it. Washing over stones, circling around stones, lodged underneath a stone. Stones bloody everywhere and a rivery smell, like fresh air and mud and something green dying. Shadows and copper glints. Heaps of silt. And cold – the sort of cold she couldn’t abide, the kind that bit right in.
There was a bend up ahead, where the water started to slow and turn in a wide circle and a nest of stuff had built up. The current took her towards it, turning sluggish, slackening, and for God’s sake now she was getting caught up in it: sticks and weeds and feathers. Wet leaves. Roots. An old gatepost. Horrible yellow scum washed off the fields. Everything bumping up against everything else. Everything tangling.
Some of her sank. Some of her tangled in. She tried to speak but nothing came out except the river’s drum and babble. She felt like grit, like small stones. The water turned a slow circle. Where was she again? She tried to dredge something up but her thoughts were brimful with river. A root wrapped around itself over and over. The water pushed her against the bank, unceremoniously, into a mush of leaves and foam. A fetid reek, as if something had given up. Branches weaving together, something unspeakable brushing the surface of the water. A ridiculous place. Leaves circling and tilting like sinking boats.
She struggled, tried to untangle herself but the water weighed her down, made her sodden and slow. Everything murky and swimming with silt. Leaves came down like raindrops. The wind turned the river into peaks and humps, which jostled her, which slopped her about; she couldn’t keep a hold of anything: now washing against the bank, now trapped among leaves, now caught under a rotting branch. She dipped, sank, took on another huge gulp of water. Tangled deeper in. The river getting into everything. Impossible to get away from it. Her thoughts soaking, everything full of stones. And who even knew where this was, exactly?
Typical – now sideways rain, billowing in on the wind like sails, drenching everything, churning the river, turning it brown and squally, dragging her back under into the dim, where there was no sound except the river thrumming.
The river was dark and wide and the wind was louder than Pepper had ever heard it, like a train getting closer. It pummelled her, knocking her shoulders. There were a thousand trees bending. She licked her front tooth, which was sharp and tender – she had just fallen over and banged it on the front steps and there was a tiny chip in the corner. She was riddled with old injuries: at three, had crushed her thumb in a door; at four, had caught a glimpse of a bright bird and fallen out of a window, splintering her collarbone; at five, she’d grabbed a hot light bulb and seared a semicircle onto her palm. Now, at six, she had a chipped tooth, the edge rough as a cat’s tongue. But it would fall out one day and another one would grow back. And the new one wouldn’t be broken, would it? She glanced at her mother, who was looking down at the water, holding the wooden box.
‘The new one won’t be broken,’ Pepper told her.
Her mother walked up and down the side of the river, looking at the water. ‘I think they’ve all gone,’ she said. ‘I can’t see any.’
The wind bellowed. When her mother had opened the box, it had snatched at the bits inside and sent them flying away like a flock of birds. They had landed on the river and floated, staying clumped together for a moment before spreading out. The choppy water had pushed them around and some of them had sunk and the rest had been swept away. As they’d flown out of the box she’d smelled something musty and grey, like potatoes left in the back of a cupboard. Her mother’s smell of lavender and bread. Wet breath and wet trousers from crossing the grass to get to the river. Her mother had sneezed twice – eat stew, eat stew, it sounded like she was saying. She had hardly spoken the whole day, except once to the person who was meant to be in the box. ‘Back where you’d want to be,’ she had said, touching the smooth lid, the carved flowers. She had told Pepper that there was a person inside, sleeping. But Pepper knew that it wasn’t someone sleeping. It looked all gritty and broken up and white. And the box too small for someone sleeping.
In the distance, car lights swept across the trees and then disappeared. There were heavy clouds and it was getting darker. Late October, the sky turning deep blue. No street lamps, no other houses.
‘I think they’ve all gone,’ her mother said again. Her hair blew out to one side; it was long and tangled and always moving. ‘Untameable,’ her mother called it. Which made Pepper think of it as a wild horse, rearing and galloping. And she had crackly skin that got electric shocks when she touched car doors or other people’s coats, and she had very red lips, and dents like thumb prints in the squashy skin on her thighs. And she was tall, like the trees. Pepper had never seen so many trees – they stretched into the distance and turned into a dark mass. Behind them, there was a big empty space with no trees that looked humped and crooked.
‘Where’s the moon?’ she asked. The clouds were hiding it. Her mother put her dry hand on Pepper’s head. Pepper used to be scared of the moon. The way it kept shrinking and growing. Its sly, shadowy face. She’d thought that, at any moment, it would fall out of the sky and crash through roofs and houses. But now she knew it was held up there somehow.
She leaned against her mother’s legs. Through her head, she could feel the faint thump of her mother’s heart and her belly creaking. The big buttons on her coat like hard sweets. Pepper butted her head in, then butted again harder. It was boring standing there, and her stomach all clenched up with hunger. They had been travelling for hours and hours – first a bus, then a train, then another bus, the seats smoky and scratchy and a man across the aisle who had fallen asleep with his mouth open and spit dribbling onto his neck. A bottle under the seats which had rolled and rolled. They had been running late, as usual, her mother pushing the last of their things into bags and no time to pack any food, so they’d bought sandwiches with ham in and a pot of potatoes all cut up into pieces. But the ham had yellow seeds down one side and the potatoes had green bits in them. She’d spat it all out and hidden it under the seat. Then done an impression of the man sleeping, lolling her tongue out and snoring, until her mother told her to stop, but she had almost laughed, making a strange gulping sound that had nearly woken the man up.
She butted her head and hit against her mother’s hip. Dreaming of warm pancakes and thick crusts of bread. She had an appetite without end, but people always wanted to tell her how small she was for her age, as if she didn’t know already.
‘Not so hard,’ her mother said.
‘Why are we standing here?’ Pepper asked. She tried to catch one of the leaves that kept spinning down, a yellow one, but missed.
‘You know why,’ her mother said. She looked again at the water. ‘We’ll go in a minute.’
‘But where are we going?’ Pepper said.
Her mother looked down at her and made the face she always made when Pepper asked the same question a hundred times. And knew the answer anyway. Pepper scuffed at the grass with her shoe. She knew where they were going: to the house of the person that had been in the box, but it was important to keep asking because she was never told all of the information. She was always the one that got left out of everything.
They hadn’t even been inside yet. Their bags were piled up on the steps by the door. Wet steps, where she had slipped and banged her tooth, then squeezed her hands tight until her nails dug in, watching the sliver of tooth get blown away by the wind. It wasn’t like any house she’d seen before. It loomed up, huge and dark. Completely by itself, not huddled in a row like all the other ones they’d lived in. Lots of dark windows, a rusty letterbox, a bristly orange doormat. A watering can with plastic flowers stuck in it. The walls were a strange grey colour that was almost blue, like an egg she’d once found that had fallen out of a nest and broken. And the river was so close. You could glimpse it over the grass and hear its deep glugging.
She looked at the water. No more bits left. She watched the river as it swept round a bend, maybe saw a clump of something pale catching in the bank further down. She glanced at her mother, licking her tooth. What she wanted to know was: what about the teeth, what had happened to them?
‘I don’t know,’ her mother said.
‘But where are they?’ she asked. She crouched down and found a stick and scratched at the wet ground. ‘In all that dust?’
‘We should go back to the house.’
Pepper worked the stick in deeper, imagined she was prising open a huge lid. ‘You said there was a person in the box.’ The stick hit against a stone and wouldn’t go any further. She thought about the white gritty stuff. She knew what it was really, but it gave her a strange, heavy feeling and if she didn’t keep asking then she would be a coward. ‘So the bones as well?’ she said.
The wind came again, making the trees bow. ‘Do your coat up,’ her mother said, even though it was her that was shivering.
‘So it was the bones as well?’ Pepper said. She picked at the skin around her lips. Waited, then waited some more. Sometimes her mother would tell her things, but mostly she would just look away into the distance and then Pepper would have to stay very still and hold her breath, or she would have to make a loud, sudden noise, and then her mother would blink and look around as if she didn’t know where she was, even though she’d been standing in the same place the whole time.
After a while, Pepper reached into her mother’s pocket and tugged her hand, then tugged it harder. The nails were all bitten down. Soon the hand would move and grab her, make her shriek. But it stayed still. She tugged it again.