Winter Damage (14 page)

Out in the open she took off her rucksack and bent in half to catch her breath and the cold air was painful in her throat and lungs.

She drank a little of the water she had left and crouched to watch the buzzard circle and fall against the white of sky and land and she realised the blue hint of morning had been wiped clean by the stupid clouds. The gypsies were wrong; the storm was returning.

Up ahead the cut of a tin mine silhouetted black on the horizon and Ennor decided this was where she was heading if she wanted any kind of shelter.

She collected what wood she could from the forest floor and swung the pack and set a course direct. Every so often she glanced back at the forest and she laughed in its face because she’d walked it safe and really it was just a bunch of trees.

In the comfort of ancestor-built walls Ennor set about pushing a circle clear in the snow and she pulled hand-sized rocks from the ground and circled them neatly round the fire pit. She used seven for luck. She knelt with her back to the rising wind and lit the last of the gorse tinder and added twigs then sticks into a wigwam of fire. Clean snow she clubbed into her pan and she set it to boil for tea and built back fallen granite bricks into a wide seat and sat with her back against a wall. While the water boiled she took a handful of the pine needles she had collected and chopped them against a stone with her pocket knife and added them to the water to simmer and she enjoyed the aroma because she knew it would smell better than it tasted and she was right.

Ennor rested her head and watched the clouds thicken into a jumble of jigsaw-puzzle outlines and some were plain white and some were grey but most were teal and rust orange. She sat with her legs outstretched and drank her tea with snow falling all around as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The snowflakes were as gentle as rose petals and they drifted and rocked on the breeze like miniature rowing boats and they moored on her cheeks and in her lap, empty vessels there, and then gone.

Her mind was heavy from earlier fear and stringy remnants of a hangover and she closed her eyes to settle her thoughts and put her mind’s eye on the task of finding her mother.

She took her notebook from the side pocket of the rucksack and, sheltering it from the snow, read over her notes. She stared at the pages and reread the fumbling words but nothing was of any use and she snapped it shut and returned it to the bag.

Half asleep she finished the strange tea and warmed herself as close as she dared to the fire. She was dog bone tired and, no matter how much she wanted to blaze a trail through the snow, there was no escaping the fact that she’d had little sleep last night. She took up her things and crept down into the mouth of the mineshaft with her torch cranked and stuck forth like a sword. Underground, out of the snow and wind, she found herself a dry square of nothing and she lay down her tarp and blanket and wrapped her coat around the rucksack for a too-high pillow. Just an hour of rest to see out the worst of the storm and she’d be ready for anything.

Daylight faded fast from the entrance of the mine as though a stone had been rolled across it, but Ennor didn’t notice because she had fallen asleep, hypnotised by the drip of fractal snow seeping into bedrock cracks.

Outside the snow fell fast in the wind and landed in heavy dumps at all angles against the moor and the silence cocooned the girl deeper underground. A subterranean pocket of safety emanating from a past world that carried her unwittingly through the long dark night.

At first the faint chip-chip of knocking was a mere scratch in Ennor’s ear and she turned on the hard ground with the memory of home’s bed and for a brief moment she was back there and she pushed the itchy army coat to her face as if it were a duck-down pillow.

Maybe the knocking was her dad summoning her to his room, or Trip throwing stones against the trailer wall. She’d warned him about that. She shouted, then woke with a start and reached for her gun and she came close to swearing when she realised she’d left it in Sonny’s bedroom.

Ennor sat tight and listened against the dark and was suddenly aware of the salty sting in the mine air that dried her nostrils and sanded her lips.

‘Hello?’ she shouted. ‘Anyone there?’ Her brittle fearlessness was short-lived when the knocking returned. She ran blind and screaming out of the mine with a kind of laughter chasing her through a wall of snow and smashing her into daylight.

‘I got you, dint I? Don’t tell me I dint get you cus I did, hell.’

Sonny stood larger than life in the entrance of the mine and she held her sides as she laughed half in pain from her antics.

‘I’m the funny one, int I?’ She grinned.

‘You’re a crazy witch, is what you are. I thought you were the knockers.’ Ennor lurched towards Sonny with all her strength and she pulled her down into the snow where yesterday’s fire hand been and smacked her face until her nose was level with the snowline.

‘Why’d you have to scare me half to death?’ The fear and worry of past days turned to anger and she pulled Sonny from the ground, sparks of blood and spit flashing from her mouth and patterning the snow. She looked down at her hands red and ugly against the white and she wanted to rewind time but it was too late, she was transforming into someone unrecognisable.

The two girls locked eyes and Ennor waited for retaliation and when it came she let it wash over her with a tsunami crash and they fell bundled into one. They rolled head and tail down the bank of snow and took turns to leap their bundle of blood forward and back until buckled legs and deflated lungs had them still and quiet and sprawled out on the ground.

Ennor rested up on her elbows and she looked across to Sonny and they both started to laugh. ‘You look like road kill.’

‘So do you and worse. Only tracked you down to give back your rifle.’

‘Dint have to scare me half to death in the process, did you?’

‘Thought you could take it, put a bit of fun in your humdrum. Anyway what the hell are the knockers?’

‘Mine spirits.’

‘Like ghosts?’

Ennor shrugged.

They sat up against one of the mine’s collapsed walls and took turns to cuff snow to each other’s wounds.

Sonny told Ennor to be proud of the black eye she’d given her because it was some punch but Ennor had never hit anyone in her life except the boy Rabbit and her apologies kept running until Sonny threatened to knock her teeth out.

‘Why you goin on? I’m near KO’d. That don’t happen every day.’

‘Neither does me fightin.’

‘Let me see your hand.’

Ennor wiggled her fingers. ‘It’s fine, see.’

‘Push it deep into the snow for the cold just in case.’

Ennor did what she was told and she closed her eyes to the brief startling pain.

‘I’m injury prone just bout.’

‘Why what else you got?’

‘Twisted me ankle few days back and these things come in threes.’

‘You’re stupid superstitious.’

‘Whatever.’

‘So what you do to fix it?’

‘An old woman took me in and cared for me a bit.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Why not?’

‘Dint ask nothin of you? Kind or money or nothin?’

‘Nope.’

‘Was she mad?’

‘A little, I think.’

‘Guessed as much.’

‘You took me in. Makes you mad the same.’

Sonny agreed and she disappeared behind the mine and then reappeared with an armful of wood. ‘We gonna eat or what? Carried this wood with me. Better than nosin for twigs.’

‘I’ve got porridge.’

‘Well I see your porridge and I’ll raise you a chunk of leftover pork and a cut of lard to fry it in.’

Sonny set about making the fire. She didn’t use the lucky seven rocks that Ennor had recovered from beneath the fresh snow and it was ten times the size of a regular cooking fire. Soon the meat was frying and the smell mixed with wood smoke had the girls a little giddy and Ennor could not help but ask about the police.

‘They were just nosin. Why?’

‘Just askin.’

‘Why?’

‘Just askin to ask.’

‘You want some of this grub or no?’

‘Wouldn’t mind.’

Sonny picked the fried meat apart with her fingers. They sat opposite each other across the fire and ate slowly to make it last.

‘They were askin all sorts of questions actually.’

‘Yeah? Like what?’

‘Suspicious stuff out on the moor, things like that.’

‘Suspicious like what?’

‘Anyone actin strange. Strange comins and goins.’

‘Like what?’

‘Somethin bout a strange kind of girl, a real shortarse roamin the moor, just countin things over and over.’

‘That’s not funny.’ Ennor flicked snow across the fire and sat back.

‘Friend of the ghostly knockers.’

‘Shut up.’

‘There’s somethin you’re not tellin me, I know that all right.’ She moved around the fire and sat next to Ennor. ‘What you done? Why did you leg it this mornin?’

Ennor took a deep breath. She supposed it didn’t matter to tell her story from the slip and fall and the old lady in the cottage and she went into detail because it was good to walk events over in her own mind and Sonny kept quiet beside her until the story was told.

‘You think he’s dead?’

‘I know it.’

‘For definite?’

Ennor shrugged. ‘I saw him flat out and I saw the blood runnin and continuin from his head.’

‘Was he breathin?’

‘Don’t think so.’

Sonny pushed a boot into the fire to steady a fallen log. ‘You can’t beat yourself up over a maybe, maybe not.’

‘What you mean?’

‘Maybe you gave the bastard a headache and nothin more.’

‘You think? You think he deserved it?’

‘Course he did. Self-defence is what that is.’

‘I don’t wanna go back.’

Sonny shrugged. ‘Who said you have to? A thing like that gets carried around for ever unless you decide not to let it. For ever is a long time for a heavy-weight burden.’ She looked in her bumbag and pulled out a square of crumpled paper.

‘What’s that?’

‘A map. Help you get to findin that mother of yours since you lost your own.’

She opened it over and over until fully spread and she laid it against the wall and let Ennor trace her footsteps from home to the tor where she had fallen and she guessed at the location of the cottage and the cairn. She smoothed the map to the wall and felt the tiny bumps of granite sand poke through the paper and she walked her fingers with stepping-stone hops up and down and around the moor.

‘It’s not so big, is it?’

‘Ten by ten miles if you want to count them, but it’s not so easy when you’re walkin the rough and the snow and everythin.’

‘A hundred miles of dirt roads and snow.’

‘Somethin like that. You can keep the map.’ Sonny bent to clean the pan and plates in the snow and she got up as if to leave.

‘You goin then?’ Ennor asked.

‘Looks like it, why?’

‘Just with your map and everythin, you might want it back.’

‘Maybe, what’s your point?’

‘Nothin, I’ll see you round.’

‘You got somethin to ask, just ask it.’

‘Just if he’s alive, what then?’

‘Dunno, finish the job?’ Sonny laughed and when she saw how serious Ennor was she laughed even more.

‘If you ask me, I’ll say yes. But you gotta ask me.’

‘Ask you what?’

‘You know what. Just ask me.’

Ennor sighed. ‘Will you come with me? Help me find Mum?’

Sonny kicked her boot into the snow to pretend she was having a think. ‘Well some kind of magic word would be nice, hell.’

‘For God’s sake,
please
.’

‘Why not? Headin to the north moor, int you?’

Ennor nodded.

Sonny took back the map and smiled. ‘We’ll find her, greenhorn. Aunty Sonny knows a short cut by a lake.’

‘Which lake?’

‘Siblyback.’

‘You think?’

‘I know. Get packed up and I’ll show you.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

Ennor watched Sonny stride towards the horizon and she shouted for her to wait. ‘What makes you think you’re right in any case?’

‘Cus I got smarts plus I got the map.’

Ennor rushed to pack up her things and she wished she had a streak of nerve that would have her turning in the other direction, but Sonny was right. She was a greenhorn.

She stood with her hands on her hips and waited for her to look back and when she was nothing but a head bounce on the snow horizon she shouted for her to wait and ran after her.

‘I was waitin but now I int. Come on,’ Sonny shouted back.

‘Why you comin if you gotta be so mean?’

‘I said I’d help you and I will, but you gotta put a little faith in me. Besides, this way we get to go fishin.’