Winter Damage (6 page)

He had made her a stack of potato cakes and a flask of milky coffee as preparation for her trip into the wilderness and she ate a little and drank some coffee and thanked him and she meant it. She looked up at the sky. The brightness of morning had been rubbed and washed with hues of grey and orange and a slight breeze was picking its way from the north-eastern slopes of the moor.

The rest was welcome, but idle sitting felt awkward to Ennor, her mind raced everyplace wrong.

Bad thoughts rattled her and fear stalked the tor where she sat. Leaden fear with doubt whistling senseless through its teeth.

She sipped her coffee and thought about home. If she went at it fast, she’d get back in time for the goodnight and have everyone forgetting she’d ever been gone. Turn the radio on and off and make a proper cup of tea, climb into her bed, bundle up and dream.

Ennor knew in two, maybe three hours the snow would return and she finished off her coffee, cleaned the mug with snow and packed the flask and plastic box of potato cakes back into the rucksack.

She stood up and brushed herself down and swung the pack on to her shoulders, careful of her footing as she climbed down.

With the snow tagging and threatening behind her, she moved on and picked up speed as best she could. The straggling brightness had been eclipsed by thicker cloud and Ennor took to humming to keep her mind from wandering further than each new step she stamped in the snow. She stamped over fear and its nibbling questions and was happy to be moving to keep the chatter at bay.

The afternoon came and went and with its passing came the crossover of time and light that was twilight. Ennor stopped to make a cigarette and she scratched her head and reached inside her coat for the map Butch had given her.

She crouched behind a disgorged stack of granite blocks and opened the map crossways from the wind and stroked it flat with the palms of her gloved hands, retracing her footsteps from the morning’s walk with her fingers. The realisation that she was a little lost dawned on her slowly; her mind had been settling on too many other things to pay attention to the basic detail of this way and that.

Maybe she was enjoying herself more than she should have been. Perhaps Butch was right, she had not thought things through.

Flints of wet snow were dashed by the increasing wind and Ennor resigned herself to the fact that she would have to take shelter until it passed. She replaced the map and dipped her head as she continued on her way, occasionally sharpening her eyes to the horizon in the hope that she might spy a familiar run of farm outbuildings in which to stop.

Darkness came knocking and menacing shadows crept about the moor. The heavy snow built towers out of specks and arched in frozen waterfalls from skeletal trees.

She twisted the cuffs of her coat round her fists and cursed the woollen gloves that scratched between her fingers and she narrowed her eyes to trace a faint outline of trail that led to the gash of a small quarry.

The carefree attitude from earlier had now deserted her and she could feel the choke of tears tightening in her chest like a slow snapping rubber band. The quarry was an ink blot compared to the higher ground and she stumbled as she stepped down, fingering the rock for anything that might resemble a roof for shelter.

Inside the belly of the quarry the void split open to reveal a mountain of thick granite slabs heaped together like fallen cards. Ennor took off her rucksack and stuffed the ridiculous frame into the largest hole.

She lifted her collar to the wind and pulled at her hat until it rested against her eyebrows and wedged herself as far down into the dank crevice as she could without getting stuck.

Ennor thought about the future and she punched out at the darkness in frustration, her fist hitting rock with a thud, and she let the pain warm her like something reassuring brought from home.

The quarry and the moor were silent with the black of night and white of snow and she thought she might go crazy with her heavy breathing bundled into damp clothes and her heart beating out loud and threatening in her ears.

She thought to look at her watch but didn’t want to know that it was maybe early teatime and she convinced herself that it was later to shorten the entombed sentence, lighting a cigarette to make good with doll’s house light and heat.

She sucked the backwash dregs of tepid coffee through her teeth to make it last and she swished it and sniffed it and was reminded of Butch and his sweetness.

When there was nothing left to smoke but the glowing ember of butt and the flask was tapped dry Ennor settled bony and crushed against the rucksack and sighed. She closed her eyes to the dark and painted her eyelids with a bright blue sky and a sun as warm as embers and she put people she loved into the mix with laughter and dance and everyone summer drunk.

Her mother waltzed into her dream with her sanity intact and happiness for everyone was a given. A sure thing before the decline of little things unnoticed.

Ennor danced with her mother while in her imagination Loretta was singing a whole lot of lovey-dovey; a little girl standing barefoot on her mother’s, singing and giggling with the stretch and awkwardness of things.

The merry flight of fantasy soon turned shocking and unbearable and Ennor sat balled and cold and insignificant to the world, the past hanging like an old damp coat hooked to the back of a door, lifeless and rotten. She pressed her hands over her eyes and dug her fingers in close to popping, pinning what couldn’t be explained to the back of her mind to stop herself from crying.

A reluctant dawn loped across the moor and tapped at the young girl’s shoulder until she woke and opened her eyes to the funnel of grey half-light that split the rock in two.

She lifted her face to the gentle breeze and the salt smell of sea air indicated the wind was now coming from the south and she heard the double drip of melting snow outside.

She stretched her legs as best she could and startled herself with a yawn that ripped her mouth wide with a wild howling echo, then she slid from the shelter and pulled at her rucksack until it dislodged from a snag in the rock and she stood to slap the dirt from her clothes.

Sunlight was sudden and bright through a hundred layers of cloud and the quarry rocks moved with shifting snow. The landscape changed around her and Ennor sat on a corner of rock and pulled the rucksack between her legs and she untied the tin mug from the tubular frame and went and held it beneath a run of melting snow.

When the mug was inch-full she swallowed it down and refilled it and splashed the iced water over her face. She took off her hat and wetted her hair into some kind of tidy, itching at the rib-lines on her forehead with relief.

Her empty stomach turned somersaults and she tried not to think about the last of the potato cakes. Saving them would stave off a ‘no food’ panic so she could think about other things.

Even so, the flat fried potato nested in her mind and she thought she could smell them as she tied the mug to the frame of the rucksack. She told herself no and, when her stomach wouldn’t listen, she shouted it and waited for the quarry to echo its agreement, realising that in that snow hole she would be waiting a long time.

She did star jumps to warm up and jiggled the stiff from her legs until her knees no longer snapped with the cold, then crouched to wiggle the rucksack on to her back.

Outside the quarry Ennor sensed the creeping, coming daylight and she loosened her scarf and folded her hat back into a wide turn on the crown of her head in anticipation.

Today was the first proper day of her adventure and she was determined to forget last night and make good progress. She would get to her great-aunt’s in a matter of hours and tomorrow she might even end the day standing at Mum’s door.

Ennor pulled the map from her pocket and she held it out of the wind to study and tapped her finger on the creased paper at the shading that represented a quarry. She looked out across the moor with newfound authority, deciding the quarry on the map was the quarry where she’d spent the night.

Map reading was easy, it was useful too and she strode out to kick at slushy heaps of snow with soldier pride as if battling a war she’d already won.

She thought about Dad and Trip without the usual melancholic pull, and imagined them all together at Christmas, not quite a big happy family, but some kind of family of four, equal.

Ennor hoped Trip was coping best he could and she told herself he was fine because anything else would have fear back snapping at her heels.

She made herself think about the potato cakes to take her mind off home. For now her shadow walked in front and this other self gave comfort in the lonely landscape, a silent friend looking out for her, testing the unmarked ground one step at a time.

She knew the sun wouldn’t be out for long. The horizon concealed the clouds but she knew they were circling, planning their line of attack. She was in the eye of it.

If she kept to the present, settled on the one foot two foot, things would rattle into place. She sang songs learnt at Sunday school and songs half-eared off the radio and she mashed them together into a continuous stream of lust and condemnation.

Her impromptu entertaining and carrying on turned the moorland foreign the further she walked. Places she would have recognised in summer or on Sunday visiting in better days were nothing to her now. The shadow picked up speed and Ennor followed in obedience. She would walk for two hours and at midday she would stop to eat the remaining potato cakes and light a small fire to heat water for tea.

She walked on through thawing marshland and fell into a labyrinth of trenches that had her stepping in every direction but forward. The smell of rotten vegetation caught at the back of her throat and she coughed and spat into the wind. Following her shadow towards a firm footing, she sat damp to the ground and told her shadow to go on without her. The potato was salty and fat on her lips and she stuffed the potato cakes gone, then licked the paper clean and chewed it like a wad of bubble gum to get the last of it.

Ennor sat back and took out her baccy tin to roll herself a cigarette and as she smoked she blew smoke rings at the splashes of mud that weighted her jeans and stiffened her boots and attempted to pick at the sleeves of her coat that were stitched with nature’s barb. She leant back on to her rucksack and clipped her fists beneath her chin. She was lost. Fear crawled up her spine and blew cruel damp words into her ear. She was lost and cold and hungry.

She unfolded the map and scanned the horizon and sighed. There was nothing left to do but take a short cut across to a granite ridge that bumped the yonder skyline, hoping the vantage point would settle her mind on some kind of course.

At the foot of the granite outcrop she shunned the weight from her back. She dug her toes into the rock as she climbed and called out at the wind to catch her when she scrambled to the precarious summit. The moorland stretched out for ever below her, immersed in low licking fog. Ennor turned to look to the south to see the last column of sunlight get snipped by scissoring clouds and she watched the sun’s reflections bounce across the cradle of sea, everything sucked of colour and spat out in a smudge.

Ennor knew rain would replace snow and she counted out the time it took. Ten quick-step seconds before huge droplets began to fall from the sky. She hurried to check the diminishing landscape beneath her against the contours of the map that softened in her hands. If there was ever a time for hope, this was it. Faith, hope and courage stood beside her and together they looked out into the wind and together they saw it. A square of stone nestled dark and deep in the valley below; a house, her great-aunt’s cottage.

She climbed from the rocks with her heart playing ping-pong in her chest. As she ran, the wet rocks tripped and tricked her and Ennor jumped to keep from stopping, battling forward until the toe of her right boot shunted and wedged itself into a crevice and her left foot skidded by. Head over heels, she fell from the tor and back into the snow and she waited for pain to come and when it did she nodded with congratulation and raised her head to watch the map she had been holding catch in the wind and bellow into a sail, escaping to the sea.

Her ankle was hurt. Just how badly, she didn’t know. Part of her wanted to bed down in the window of time that was ignorant bliss and just stay put, but this was it, this was her test, her trial. She felt around in the wet snow for anything that might resemble a stick and her fingers pulled at the dead root of a gorse bush and she wrenched it from the ground. The pain in her ankle made her nauseous and she swallowed to keep the remnants of food from leaving her stomach. She waited for the pain to numb to a fizz and hobbled towards her rucksack and she punched it into a secure holding in the rocks. There was no way in God’s name she was carrying that damn thing through the snow. She would have to collect it tomorrow when she was better and she hoped above anything else that her leg wasn’t broken because if it was all hope of finding Mum before Christmas would be over and worse was that she might never see Trip again.

Ennor lodged the stick beneath her arm and edged around the tor. Each step had her near to fainting and she cried out a little from the pain. The heavy rain clamped her hat tight to her head and loose hair stuck to her face and fingered her neck in a stranglehold. Everything itched and everything was weighted with water and at times the stick became a paddling oar. Ennor’s boots sank into the boggy snow and she yanked her injured leg out of the suck with a hand beneath her thigh. She looked for things to count to keep her mind from going under but the rain had the world blurred and painted wrong. Raindrops filled her eyes and there were times when she thought she might be crying, though there was no way of knowing because everything stung and hurt inside and out.