Winter Damage (7 page)

Ennor hardly knew which direction she was heading but she knew there was no alternative but to keep moving no matter how slow the turn. The weight of the storm felt like a landslide collapsing on top of her. If she stopped, she would weaken and fall. She would be nothing but a dead thing and she counted herself in the ground, one.

The cottage was set in memory’s muddle and no place else. A pretty square with sunshine windows and a twist of smoke circling the chimney. She told herself she was nearly there and in reality maybe she was.

Sometimes she closed her eyes and when she opened them was amazed to find she was still walking, the cottage getting closer, vivid. When doubt kidded that maybe she was seeing things and the landscape dipped and altered suddenly she sped up and winced with each painful step. Time slowed and stopped and did not matter until finally she fell against the cottage gate and shouted through the storm, waiting to be heard.

The cottage was not how she remembered it on that rare visit; the overgrown garden had things that looked wrong and so did the dark netted windows.

She unhitched the gate and pushed into the thorny briar, its claws snagging her clothes and stealing her hat like a school bully.

She banged on the door with the crippled stick and bent to call through the letterbox but it was welded shut and she fell back on to the path and cried until her insides were out.

The rain fell in fast, heavy drops and she felt it smother her face and soak into her clothes and she let it puddle her eyes blind and fill her ears deaf.

Ennor Carne was alone in the world and she would die alone. This was her truth, her destiny.

CHAPTER FOUR

The room that Ennor had been assigned was cramped and dark and smelt near enough to her own home.

She looked at the cracks in the ceiling and the curls of flaked plaster that were close to falling. She knew every imperfection as if it were the ceiling in her bedroom. There was not much else in the room besides the bed and the stool where the old lady, who may or may not have been kin, occasionally sat with the medicine or a spoon of tasteless soup.

Through the curtains she could see daylight and she rubbed her wrist and the indent where her watch used to be. She had a bad feeling she’d been in bed some time and she wondered if Christmas had been and gone.

Under the weight of hospital blankets and military coats she stretched out her legs and lifted the covers with her good foot to make a tent for looking and she circled the bad ankle and waited for the pain to come but it didn’t.

She guessed the medicine that tasted like earthy bread mould had worked. She sat up next to the window and pulled the damp net curtain around her shoulders like a cape and rubbed the wet from the pane expectantly. The snow that had covered the moor however long ago lay thick and solid on the path and had part melted and refrozen into thin needles of ice that dangled like sugar bells on the jumble of foliage.

It certainly looked like Christmas to Ennor and she called out in a panic because she needed to get going. She looked about the room for her rucksack and shouted for it to be brought and her head banged with sudden exertion.

There was a thump and a draw back of chairs in the room next to hers and a brief thinking silence as the house went stone-cold quiet.

‘Hello?’ she shouted. ‘I need to speak to you.’

Footsteps came to the door and backed away and were followed by the old lady’s slipper shuffle, then the door opened.

‘What’s up, birdy?’ the old lady scuffled to the side of the bed and lowered her face close enough that Ennor could smell the sour stench of recent meat on her breath.

‘How you feelin?’ she cuffed a rough hand over her forehead and up close Ennor could see stranger’s eyes.

‘Who are you?’ she asked.

‘You still got a temperature, bird.’

‘You’re not my great-aunt.’

‘Never said I was.’

‘What you done to her?’

‘Done nothin with nobody besides lookin after you. You’re welcome, by the way.’

Ennor wanted to ask about her rucksack. She remembered telling someone something about its whereabouts but details were blurred and then she noticed the old woman was wearing her woollen cardigan.

‘Hey, that’s mine. You’re wearin my cardy.’

The old woman stood at the door and wrapped the cardigan about herself in a snuggle and she gave a little spin, smiled and skipped from the room.

Ennor lay back in the bowed and broken bed and listened to the voices in the other room and the occasional splinters of laughter angered her. She swung her legs out of the bed and placed her feet, one and two, on the filthy wooden floor. They looked silly and white compared to her ruddy rest and she bent to take a good peek at her injury. She peeled back the rag bandage and the herb poultice stuck like dried nappy poo and she ran a finger over the paper-thin skin and pressed.

The swelling had gone down but the area was sore enough to tell her not to keep touching. Her clothes lay in a heap in the corner of the room and she reached for them and was grateful to find that, while not clean, they had been fire dried and cleaved of mud.

Ennor dressed and the cold of whatever time gripped her skin tight like swaddling to her bones and she pulled a small red army coat from the bed and hung it across the shoulders of her own and, bootless, she stepped with consideration for her weak ankle from the room and into the next.

The old woman and a boy about her age sat face in to a roaring fire and when Ennor entered the room they remained fixed to the heat.

‘I need my boots,’ she said.

There were no other chairs in the room but the two that were occupied and she stood back against the heat for attention and warmth.

‘I need my boots,’ she said again and she looked at the old woman’s feet.

‘Take them off,’ she shouted. ‘Please, I need to get goin.’

The old woman coughed out a splattered laugh and she made a face at the boy. ‘Bossy little madam, int she?’

‘Please, I’m grateful for your care and all but I got things I need to take care of. Important things.’

‘Just like that, is it?’ the woman stood up and pushed the chair back against the slate tiles.

‘Eat our food and take the only good bed existin and you’re off now with no regard.’

She was taller with anger in her, a good head and shoulders taller than Ennor’s great-aunt from what she could recall.

‘I got regard and I got grateful too. Dint I just say as much?’ She pulled herself to full height but felt tinier than ever without her boots. ‘Please, you can keep the cardy, but I need me boots.’

The old woman laughed wet spittle into her face and she sat back down with a humph and the boy laughed too. ‘Only kiddin, birdy. Tell her, Rabbit, only kiddin, int I?’

The boy nodded at Ennor and as he smiled she saw two long thick teeth sticking crazy from his gums.

‘Only keepin um warm for you, int I? Ready for the get go, birdy bird.’ She held each foot in turn across her lap and unlaced the boots with melancholic eyes and Ennor could see she really liked them. She watched as she kicked them into the grate and stretched her sticky bare feet towards the fire.

‘Whatever, don’t matter. Your socks are hangin by the back door in the kitchen. Rabbit’s bin usin um for double gloves, int you, boy?’ The woman ordered him to fetch the socks and she beckoned Ennor to sit in the vacated chair.

‘Long time since we got visitors, see? Things get a little lonely out here on the moor. Only lost souls like yours and farm folk wantin me gorse wine. Drives men crazy but it’s warmer than a fat slag, or so they tell me.’

Rabbit appeared with the socks and Ennor put them on and held her feet to the flames until roasting.

‘How long have I been here?’ she asked the woman.

‘Not long.’

‘How long?’

‘Couple days, couple nights. Not long.’

‘Damn, I gotta go.’ She pulled on her clammy boots.

‘So who’s they in the photo, bird?’

Ennor looked up.

‘Don’t worry. Rabbit’s packed the bag back the way he found it out in the snow. Strange place to leave your belongins by all accounts.’

‘’Cept the cardigan,’ said Ennor and she laced the boots loose and stood and tested her full weight on the ankle.

‘Only I seem to recognise them from someplace, someplace long past. Them faces, there’s somethin there.’

Ennor steadied herself with a hand on the back of the chair and she looked long and hard at the woman, Butch’s words about her being gullible ringing ding-dong in her ears.

‘Knew your great-aunt too. Dint live but a stone toss away. Sad when she passed, she was one of me best customers.’

‘Nana Burley?’ asked Ennor.

‘Poor old Nana. Had a cottage much like this un, dint she?’

Ennor nodded but she was unsure of which way lies and truth were tied and what she herself had said with the mouldy wine medicine that was probably clouding her memory.

‘This is crazy, int it? Me knowin Nana Burley and you half Burley yourself, turnin to me door in your hour of need?’

Ennor scratched her head and she found herself sitting back by the fire when she really wanted to leave and she asked what the woman knew about the people in the photo.

‘Well, let me think, it’s been a long time but I recognise the girl all right. She visited Nana once or twice.’

Ennor sighed and leant into the chair. She was not sure if the woman knew her mother or not and the giddy curl of hunger twisting in her stomach had her head as light as a lantern.

‘Got soup on the stove.’ The old woman nodded as if reading her mind. ‘You’ll stay for some soup, won’t you? Maybe I’ll even tell you the quickest step cross the moor to find that mother of yours.’

‘I told you bout that?’ asked Ennor.

‘No. Rabbit read it from that notebook in your bag. We’ve bin havin a right laugh, int we, boy?’ she sat forward and grinned. ‘Just teasin you, girl. Where’s your humour?’

‘You pullin me bout my mother? Tell me honest cus I int got the time.’

‘Course not. Her name’s Eleanor, int it? Don’t say that in your notebook now, does it?’

Ennor shrugged. She couldn’t remember much of anything. ‘I lost my map,’ she said. ‘Lost me map and now I’m lost meself.’

‘Bless.’ The old woman smiled. ‘Now you eat. Let’s see if I can’t get you back on track.’

Ennor supped at the unidentifiable soup and she listened to the old woman as she walked them across the moor, sketching everything into her mind’s eye and scratching notes with her pen to make sense.

The woman sat low and heavy in her chair and with eyes half closed she visualised everything in detail and sometimes she smiled and pointed out things of interest to Ennor as if she were part of the memory.

‘Not far now. Brown Willy just to our right, see it, girl? Always keep it to your right, biggest tor on the moor, you keep him in sight and you won’t go wrong.’

The woman fell silent and Ennor sat forward in anticipation. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

Suddenly a magpie slammed into the front-room window with a thump, causing them to jump and Rabbit got off the floor to go outside to look.

‘There it is, good-sized house on all accounts, small village tip-top north of the northmoor. What’s it name? Treburdon, I think, and there’s that yellow door. That’s the house you want.’

Ennor looked at the old woman and asked her how she knew all this.

‘Your nana told me.’

‘Really?’

The woman shrugged.

‘And you int pullin me?’

‘Why would I do that, birdy?’

Ennor thanked her because maybe she really was telling the truth and if she was she didn’t want to seem rude. She underlined the words ‘Treburdon’ and ‘yellow door’ and closed her notebook.

The front door slammed and Rabbit stood grinning with the magpie swinging and its feet sticking like pegs through his fingers.

‘That’s bad luck,’ Ennor and the old woman said in unison.

‘I’m gonna stuff it.’ The boy grinned and he ran to the kitchen with a squeal.

‘Please excuse the kid. He’s fifteen but a life lived out on the moor with nobody but his old gran has him turned backwards a little.’

Ennor wondered about the rest of his family but before she could open her mouth the old woman told her they were dead.

‘All of um dead,’ she repeated. ‘In the ground one way or the other, burnt or bones, but it don’t really matter, does it?’ She offered up more soup but Ennor declined. The sound of knives chopping in the kitchen and the talk of death had turned her off it.

‘I gotta get goin, while it’s still day.’ She stood and went to take off the red coat and was told to keep it like a swap shop and she thanked the woman for everything and let her put the rucksack on to her back and fuss her a little.

‘Got your hat here somewhere. Found it danglin in the bushes like a poor dead thing.’ She took Ennor’s hat from a nail in the back of the door and tucked her hair tight and bulbous into it.