Winter Damage (5 page)

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ she whispered and she told them not to try changing her mind when a couple of them answered back. ‘I got concerns bigger than you. Bigger and bigger still.’

Ennor climbed over them to reach the back of the barn and she told them not to bother moving and they didn’t.

‘It’s out here somewhere,’ she said. ‘Someplace among the crap.’ She was looking for an old rucksack she hadn’t seen in years. It had belonged to one of the farmhands who used to work the farm in summer, in the days when irrigation ditches needed digging and fences needed fixing, back when Dad could pay for the privilege of hired help. She remembered the rucksack because it was left with her in mind, some travelling lad who moved into the village and didn’t need it any more. Maybe he saw something in the young girl, some wild mustang spirit when really she was just showing off.

There was nothing about her but dreaming and the day to day. Wishing and dreaming and counting and praying; four things about Ennor Carne, just about. She climbed the ladder to the loft of ‘nothin but more junk’ and sat cross-legged on the floor. Most things weren’t even boxed and that was fine by her. She pumped the torch until her hand hurt and placed it on the floor beside her.

This kind of rooting and nosing usually made her sentimental but not tonight; tonight she was looking for the destiny rucksack.

She dragged the junk from one side of the space to the other and tied the torch around her neck with an old tie to go hands free. ‘Load of rubbish,’ she told herself. ‘Everythin useless or mouldy or both.’

Standing with hands in pockets she scanned the corners of the loft. There was one last bin bag she hadn’t checked and she tore at it until the rucksack fell free and she threw it down into the barn and climbed after it.

Ennor sat on the chair nearest the fire and looked the rucksack over. It was bigger than she remembered, way bigger, and it was heavy with metal tubing crawling up the back like a kiddie’s climbing frame. She told herself it was sturdy. Sturdy was good and, if all else failed and the snow kept coming, she could always use it as a sledge.

Closing her eyes she tried to picture herself out on the moor. Walking for real and not just the usual A to B. She wondered if she should be worried, because she wasn’t. The world was busted and damned yet Ennor buzzed with big-bang excitement.

She listed the everyday essentials: porridge oats, tea, the everyday pan, matches. What else? Her penknife, tarpaulin for sitting on, warm clothes, a blanket. She’d also bring a pack of playing cards and her notebook for writing, maybe even bring the picture frame, for proof.

She crept about the trailer, finding things and adding them to the rucksack, and when it was full she emptied it on to the kitchen floor and started again. She knew heavy things went on the bottom because that was common sense, but what if she needed some things more than most? The tarp she’d taken off their miserly woodpile was the most important thing, it was also the heaviest.

She stood at the sink and looked at her reflection in the window and she wetted her hands and scooped them flat against her hair. Butch would arrive soon to go through her plan and although she didn’t have one she’d agreed because it was nice to have company besides family in the trailer. She filled and set the kettle ready on the stove and banked the fire to roasting, then sat down. The rucksack sat next to her and she looked at it and sighed. If there were things she’d forgotten, it was too late now. It was packed to bursting and she had no thinking left for it.

The moor and all it had got was out there waiting for her in the dark, a cold rock thing, hard as nails. She got up and went to the airing cupboard in the hall. There was one last thing she needed to bring with her, a ‘just in case’ thing that she hoped never to use, but with all things upended in the country, something she just couldn’t leave without: the shotgun.

CHAPTER THREE

Ennor shifted the heavy rucksack on to her back and shrugged it into place between her shoulder blades. The weight of her world was packed tight into pockets and swung jangling from baler twine and the rifle sat jabbed through the straps of the bag like a yoke.

She walked with purpose despite the uneven weight and didn’t dare look back at the trailer once.

Before she left she’d sat Trip down to explain things over and she was honest with him like always. She told him it would only be for a few days and she and Mum would be home for Christmas and when he’d cried she told him he was made of strong Carne stuff and she kissed him and called him ‘buddy’ one last time.

The snow had stopped falling and despite dense cloud the morning was awake with a sudden clarity that lifted Ennor’s spirit to bursting and she made a good pace through the fields towards the track that led to the moor.

She had plans written by Butch and plans written in her mind’s eye but a girl used to life’s underhand knew plans for travel and actual journey were two very different things.

The one link that would lead her to her mother lived less than five or so miles west and Ennor hoped to reach the cottage before nightfall.

She passed through the kissing gate that marked the end of the farm boundary and hiked up the gradual incline north-west. When she reached the top of the hill she stood in the thick snow-laden ground to settle the urge that grew in the well of her stomach – the urge to look back at the farm one last time before the landscape swallowed it up.

Her father would be calling from his bed around about now, his weak voice breaking to finish her name. Perhaps he’d be wondering the why and the where, perhaps he knew something was up, perhaps he did not. Ennor wanted to turn and say goodbye to something, something she was losing, something she had already lost, but she held off the melancholic fog and reached into her shirt pocket for her tobacco tin, rolled herself a cigarette and moved on.

Ennor Carne told herself there was no room for crying in this new world: it would be the one guarantee she could put in the box stored at the back of her mind labelled ‘sure things’. It was a small box, there wasn’t much she was sure of to put in it, but the not crying thing and the getting on with things were packed in tight.

When the track she followed leant full-tilt west she looked out at the whitewashed landscape and a bump of excitement bubbled and burst from her insides and pulled at the corners of her mouth with a smile.

The following few days would be hers and hers alone. No chores and no demands to bog her down; these would be her freedom days. She dug her heels into the frozen ground and kept an eye on markers and monuments to stop herself from straying. The standing stones and tin mines she knew so well had become unfamiliar pointers in the snow. The stones wore thick broad hats as high as boxes and skirts that drifted into her path. Ennor felt as if she were being lifted gracefully towards her destination.

Her great-aunt’s cottage sat stitched into a tangle of gorse and bracken, as far as she could recall. She and Dad had visited it once when her mother first went missing, but the scramble of texture and colours had stayed with Ennor, and she was sure once she found the cottage she would be on route to finding her mother.

All around her the moor rose higher and the land below melted and broke away like icebergs. She imagined herself setting sail towards unknown territory and fancied herself something other than a dumb kid. She thought about the country crumbling slowly to ruin and wondered if it was as bad as the news made out. There was a part of her that wanted to see a little of the crazy stuff, find something to prove that she wasn’t the only person poor and searching.

She stopped occasionally to study the way the land played out and she painted everything in summer colours to match that in her mind’s eye and she counted out the skeletal trees half fallen like matchsticks all higgledy from a box and counted them back in with a nod.

An even number meant God was with her and she continued on her way.

Ennor liked to talk to herself and she raced through the list of things she needed to ask her great-aunt and numbered them one to five. These were her main questions. There would be other questions, but they would be labelled ‘spontaneous’ and couldn’t be numbered.

When the opportunity arose she introduced herself to a hawthorn tree with her hand outstretched and she shook the branch with a firm practised grip.

‘You might not remember me.’ She smiled. ‘But I am your great-niece, Ennor Carne.’

The branch shook her hand and the tree swayed indifference and Ennor moved on.

Question number one was, ‘Do you remember me?’ Question two a plain, ‘How are you?’ Three was, ‘Do you know where my mother is?’ And numbers four and five were, ‘Could you tell me?’ and ‘Can I stay the night?’

She asked the questions in her head and she said them out loud to feel the words like sweets in her mouth and she moved the sequence and the words about with her tongue, adding new ones for the flavour, before changing everything back.

There was also a set of questions saved for when she met her mother and she kept these quiet and separate from the others so as not to get them all scrambled. She settled her mind squarely on the thought of her missing parent. She recalled the last time she’d seen her she was seven years old, seven years back. Lucky numbers, but not for Ennor. Her mother had been standing with the baby in her arms and crying like often and always, except this time there was something different about her, a streak of defiance and decision that danced in her tawny eyes, replacing resignation.

She must have planned and schemed all summer long before she ran away, pulling the baby from her breast and leaving the only other love apart from God’s behind.

Ennor remembered the Christmas Mum was pregnant. Sitting bundled by the fire toasting chestnuts they had foraged in autumn. The Christmas before the baby came, when they were a family of three, a happy trinity.

Despite abandonment Ennor did not resent her. She knew she might seem naive to others but she didn’t hate her because her mother had been sick in the head and sick in the soul. She had told Ennor on leaving that only God could save her and one day Ennor would understand. Each day she looked into her beautiful brother’s eyes she did not. Every time she made a meal from scraps and emptied the slop she did not. With her dad sick and dying and her brother a kid, and perhaps herself too, she did not understand. But still she didn’t resent her, didn’t pity either.

She traced the skyline with her finger and the ribbons of cloud knotted and tied together, hanging like heavy bows close to clipping the countryside and they were like nothing Ennor had ever seen. She wondered if she’d seen the last of the snow storms because the clouds looked menacing and she stamped her boots all ways for the patterns in the snow and tiptoed and went wide and looked back at the yellowing swirls like hoof marks.

The route Butch had numbered one she knew like the back of her hand because he had worked it and fiddled it a hundred times last night, but there was another route that stuck in her mind, a rough sketch of maybes, and this was route number two.

Route number one took terrain and variants into consideration and route number two did not. Number one was part track and leant into the moor as if driven by a guiding hand all the way to safety. Number two was a straight line and had no regard for safety but was direct and fast.

Ennor knew, given the time, that one meant getting there sometime tomorrow. Two meant getting there tonight and, despite all the reasoning Butch had given her to stick to his plan and all the promising and everything, the path less travelled meant warmth and a hot meal. It also meant talking about Mum and planning out and doing the list numbering for the next stage of her journey.

A seagull called out to her on the passing wind and she scanned the skewed sky until she spied it and counted it, one, and when it joined its flock she counted the rest in a panic and got only halfway before they dropped from the horizon. A bad sign she chose to ignore and she continued to follow route number two.

Seagulls meant many things to the Cornish. Inland they meant either rain or ploughing and in winter just rain, but in the cold like today seagulls just meant seagulls passing through. Perhaps they were journeying coast to coast, south to north like Ennor. They were the lucky ones: an hour on the wing and they’d arrive, fishing for lunch and whatever else seagulls did.

Every now and then she stopped to adjust the rucksack and each time a little voice told her it was time to eat. Her stomach fisted into a rubber-band ball and her mouth rinsed with the thought of food but this was not the time for weakness. If she was to have any luck on her journey, she’d have to make sacrifices along the way, pretend this was hard even when it tickled her into thinking it was fun.

Simply put, luck was long overdue; it owed her big time. Ennor believed in it and indulged it and gave it life, helping it to exist by holding tight and loading faith into it like a reusable carrier bag. There would be no hitches or snags on her journey, the snow would not return and she would complete her mission in time for Christmas. If luck was paying up, she’d have it bagged in a heartbeat.

She wished there was a way Butch could have come with her. He wasn’t the type for sport and doing, but it would have been fun for the company, a bit of chat to pass the time.

Ennor stopped to survey a granite outcrop of rock that had bubbled into view and she wondered whether to climb it or go around. She imagined Butch whispering for her to take the long way and she smiled and clambered to the top and cleared a circle of the snow to sit.