Winter Damage (2 page)

She started the list in order of importance, beginning with a proper house of their own like backalong and, despite knowing the facts, she wrote that she wanted her dad to get better in all ways. She added she’d like to buy herself and Trip horses so they could ride out in the fields together, and she underlined the word ‘buy’ to show whoever it was that presided over wish lists that she was serious and not asking for straight doley handouts.

With the radio off she could hear her father stirring in his bed in the other room and she huffed and pushed the table back to fill the kettle again.

‘Comin, Dad.’ She knocked at his door and went in. ‘Kettle’s on.’

She straightened the bedding and went to the window.

‘Leave that and come and sit down.’ He patted the bed and Ennor did as she was told.

‘Just bin thinkin bout what you said, money bein tight and all, and I remembered there’s this bloke in town who owes me a few quid. I’ll put the word out, see if I can’t get him to pay up.’

Ennor put her hands deep into her pockets to keep them from fiddling. Niggling suspicions had a way of making her rub them and scratch, and she’d been training herself to be calm.

‘Honest?’ she asked.

‘God’s honest.’ He smiled.

‘How much?’

‘Enough for Christmas, enough to treat my kids I’d think.’

Despite herself Ennor was warmed through by his moment of lucidity and fine words. She looked at the bootlace ring that lived around his neck and it winked. Mum’s ring.

She wished she could take that warmth with her from his room and carry it around like a kitten all day long but there was one fat spoiler she had to ask.

‘What about the rent, Dad? We’re massive behind.’

The smile on his face dropped a little and he tried to edge forward as if he were about to whisper in her ear.

‘Forget bout that, I’ll take care of it.’ He brushed the hair from her face with the hand that didn’t shake so much and painted a smile across her face with his thumb. ‘That’s my girl. Go and get your old man a cuppa.’

Ennor wondered if what he’d told her was true. She jiggled his words about in her head and decided it was because he never really lied. Sometimes he twisted the truth but that was because of his medication and not really his fault.

She made a pot of tea with a fresh tea bag and gave it time to steep while contemplating a Christmas list. Not wanting to jinx things like usual, she decided she’d write the things needed for a proper Christmas on lines, top to bottom, in her head. She started with the list for food, which was kind of a shopping list, working backwards from sweet to savoury because really she was still a kid and couldn’t think about what you needed for cooking when in her mind’s eye she could buy cakes and ice cream and ice-cream cakes.

She made the tea and carried the two mugs into her father’s room and put one on his bedside table and carried the other to the chair.

‘So who’s this friend then?’ she asked.

‘A long lost, you wouldn’t know um.’

Ennor watched him pick up the mug with both hands and despite its heat he took a big swig and winced as he swallowed it down. ‘That’s good.’ He smiled and she nodded and sipped at her own.

They drank in silence and Ennor watched his hands cradle the mug like a broken bird, still calloused and scarred from a lifetime in the fields, and she looked about the cramped room and wondered if he ever missed the outdoors and she wanted to ask but didn’t know how.

Around the room in dusty glassless frames were photos of prize bulls and favourite horses. Rosettes and trophies lined the shelves among collected crap and scrap from years of hoarding.

In his day her dad had been a proud man with a prize-winning Simmental herd to show. That time was like jelly in Ennor’s memory and in all probability was gone from his.

She wondered if there would be a little money in the pot to pay for a few bales of silage from the farm in the next valley, but this was something else she kept to herself.

‘Bucket needs emptyin.’

‘I know, Dad.’ She put her mug on the bedside table and looked at the bucket and sighed, then picked it up and carried it carefully across the room.

‘Don’t spill none.’

Ennor looked at her father and shook her head in disbelief. ‘Int like I’m goin runnin with it now, is it?’

‘Give up the cheek, girl. You int too old –’

‘For the belt, I know.’

She set the heavy bucket of waste down in the hall, then closed his door and propped open the trailer door and the one in the porch before carrying the bucket through. She returned to close up behind her.

Outside the snow fell in thick muffling strips like sheets on a washing line, and fixed blown to the hedges and fences that surrounded the farmland.

She put on her wellies and coat and stepped out into the white with the bucket swinging and threatening below. The slop pit was close enough for regular trips but far enough not to notice its stench back in the trailer and Ennor knew the path so well she could follow it easily despite the white. She held the wire-and-string handle tight and it cut into both her hands.

The pit was annexed to the side of the barn they used to house some of the furniture from the old house, stuff she couldn’t flog, plus the cattle in bad weather.

She climbed the concrete block that acted as a step up to the walled hollow and found her footing on the shallow dome of ice that had thickened there, counting to three and praying to God all at once as she lifted the corrugated lid and swung the bucket up and over the side.

The familiar stink filled her nose and her mouth and throat and she gagged the same as every day and she wiped her eyes with her sleeve and jumped down into the muddy snow. She headed back towards the outside tap to swill the bucket before the water finally froze but it was too late and she kicked the tap and then the bucket. A great urge to fall back into the snow engulfed her but she swallowed the want to be a child back down into her belly with a gulp.

The snow was falling like in a full-on Christmas card and Ennor knew the cattle would need to be brought down to the barn as soon as possible. She returned to the windy field and as she walked she snapped snow from the twine that was strung out between the hedges to guide the cattle and obediently followed the pink lines as if she too were some dumb animal.

Her gloveless hands were butcher red and the skin on her fingers shiny tight and she put them under her armpits and blew on them and hung them useless by her sides. If she had a mother, she would have been reminded not to forget her gloves when out in the cold, but she didn’t and there was no point in dwelling on it.

She called out to the cows on approach and snapped a stick from the hedge to poke them from the circle of silage, glad she’d not bothered to move it because they’d eaten it gone and the soil beneath was already frosting with ice flakes.

The cold made steel-blade peaks of the hoof-tilled land that surrounded her. Snow settled all around and over the hedgerows so that she could no longer see the dark trim of moorland beyond.

‘We’re goin walkies,’ she told the cows. ‘And I don’t need no nonsense so just move along now.’

They followed her out through the open gate and down the track to the barn and Ennor told them they were good girls because they were. She pushed them through the barn door and bolted it, one and two, with thoughts of the cosy stove inviting her back indoors, then she wondered about Trip and if she might go to meet him because his lift was near enough due.

Along the track Ennor looked up to see Butch in the upstairs bedroom window of the farmhouse.

This was the room that used to be her parents’ in the house that had harboured her family all the way back to the man who built it, her great-great-great-grandfather.

She waved and he waved back. ‘You comin down?’ she shouted.

Butch nodded and he put one finger to the rattling top pane, which meant ‘Wait a minute’
,
and she nodded and went to sit in the woodpile. She slumped against the seasoned wood and settled on one of the upended logs they used for seats, watching the snowflakes fill the potholes in the dirt track and thinking all things Christmas.

‘Now you know why I suggested my old man put a roof on that thing.’

Ennor smiled when she saw Butch approaching. ‘It’s cosy enough.’

He sat down and undid the buttons on his parka and Ennor knew he was up to something because of the glint in his eye. ‘Look what I got.’

‘What?’

‘Home brew. I found it in the pantry. Bin there for ever.’

‘Why int it drunk?’

‘The olds must have forgotten bout it.’

He passed the bottle to Ennor and she inspected the hand-written label. ‘What flavour is it?’ she asked as she wiped the dust away with the heel of her hand.

‘Elderflower.’

‘I hate elderflower, don’t you?’

Butch nodded. ‘Like soap.’

‘Tastes like sick and more.’ She dug at the cork with her penknife and took a swig and then nodded. ‘Bad.’

Butch laughed and Ennor saw him wince with pain.

‘What is it?’

‘Nothin, just muscle strain or somethin.’

‘You don’t do nothin to get muscle strain ’cept read. Maybe it’s liftin too much books.’

‘Don’t be daft.’

‘Is it your chest?’

‘Just leave it, would you?’ He took a sip of the wine and then another. ‘That is bad.’ He nodded and poured the liquid into a bubble in the snow.

‘Don’t need no booze anyway. I’ve got celebratin on my mind,’ said Ennor.

‘What kind of celebratin?’

‘The Christmas kind.’

‘What you got to celebrate bout Christmas?’

Ennor smiled and linked his arm. ‘Dad says he’s got money comin and he aims to spend it.’

‘And you believe him?’ asked Butch as he pulled away.

‘Why not?’

‘Cus hello?’

‘He don’t lie. Just circumstance turns up bad some days.’

‘Like a bad penny.’

‘Just like it. Why you on a downer?’

‘I’m not.’

‘Seems that way.’ She rolled herself a cigarette and passed the tin to Butch.

‘You heard the news recent?’ he asked.

‘Heard enough of it.’

‘Bad int it?’

Ennor shrugged and lit up and held the flame for him. ‘I’m not worried. Don’t affect us so much out here in the sticks. Things are bad here anyway.’

‘No fuel, no food, no government even. I dunno, it just might.’

‘You reckon? I hope not, just gettin used to a nice thought in my head.’

‘What’s that?’

‘
Christmas
, silly.’

‘Thought you had rent due.’

‘Big time, but Dad said not to worry.’

Butch shook his head and Ennor ignored him. ‘The power of positive thinkin.’ She nodded.

‘Maybe you should be careful. You’re sweet and all but gullible as –’

‘Don’t even know what that means. Is it a good thing?’

‘Means you believe everythin anyone’s got to say, no matter what.’

‘Like trustin?’

‘Kind of.’

‘Nothin wrong with trustin.’

Butch laughed and drew his hand up to his chest ‘Till it brings trouble.’

‘I int stupid, Butch.’

‘Just sayin.’

‘Well don’t. I was lookin forward to tellin Trip bout Christmas and now you’ve gone peed on me fairy lights.’

‘Don’t be daft, just watchin out for my best friend.’ He smiled.

Ennor liked it when he said things like that. ‘You don’t think Dad’s gonna pay off the rent?’

Butch shrugged. He looked tired, in pain.

‘Cus if he don’t we’re buggered, homeless and everythin.’

‘You can live here in the woodpile.’

‘We got the barn but I’m not livin with a load of snippy snappy rats.’ She shook her head and then looked at him. ‘Things will be all right, won’t they?’

Butch changed the subject and asked about Trip.

‘Fine, spose he is anyway. School’s closin and stayin closed. Trip thinks it’s great cus, you know, he don’t like it for the teasin. But school’s a good thing. It’s a right thing when everythin else is wrong.’

Butch nodded. ‘Learnin’s the only thing we got as a get-out. So what bout Christmas, you made your list yet?’

Ennor smiled. ‘Course.’

‘Got your mind on all things fancy, I bet.’

‘We int had a fancy one ever. Just a few nice things I’m plannin, for Trip, make some nice memories. I got a few of um myself in regards to Christmas.’

Butch said nice memories were better than a fancy Christmas and Ennor put her hand on his arm and then took it away. ‘We gotta make the best of it, don’t we? Whatever we got, one way or other.’ She leant forward to look at him, to see if he wanted to talk about his stuff the way she always did about hers but his mouth was on the fag and his mind had wandered someplace else.