Help the Witch

by Tom Cox

  It was a long time before any taxis arrived outside the venue, and while we waited Rosie made some practical and persuasive arguments for me to not try to get back to Grindlow and to stay at her place instead: the fact that Mark and Carla had long since vanished into the night; the black ice on the lane leading up to the top of the mountain; the comfiness of the new memory-foam mattress on the bed of her flatmate, who was currently in Greece; the breakfasts at the new vegan café at the end of her road. I kissed her once more, gave her my number, and put her in the first cab that arrived. I had to wait another three quarters of an hour before I found a taxi that would agree to take me to where I live, and even then, when we climbed the mountain itself, he refused to take me up to the final ledge. ‘Never in January, mate,’ he said. ‘Not a chance. You’ll not find one cabbie in this city who’ll take you up there.’ I stumbled and skidded and sloshed my way home, bidding a final farewell to my suede boots in the process.

  I woke less than four hours later to the agonised sounds of one of Winfield’s cattle giving birth. My clothes, which I’d left strewn about the landing, were in a neat pile outside my bedroom door. The bird feeders were both empty, so I went outside to top up their feed, my head rattling in my skull. There was still a little bit of snow in the firebowl. The carved owl sat neatly on top of it.

  29 JANUARY

  ‘Are you angry?’ I ask her. We’re in the kitchen. Me: washing the pots. Her: somewhere less specific, mostly in the underutilised top part of the room.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yuss. Not with you. Always angry, though. A bit.’

  ‘Will you tell me about it sometime? I’d like it if you did.’

  ‘Maybe. Yuss.’

  ‘And what about the owl?’

  ‘Don’t like it.’

  ‘You don’t like owls?’

  ‘Yuss. No. Yuss.’

  ‘You just don’t like representations of owls in art?’

  ‘Yuss.’

  4 FEBRUARY

  Two of Winfield’s lambs died today. It is nothing unusual for him, at this time of year, but it’s still deeply sad. In the coldest March of recent years he arrived one morning to find all his sheep facing the wall, and an entire field of their offspring frozen to death. He is hardened to it, but I still impulsively asked him if he fancied going into the village for a pint. I’ve not asked before, as I always assume he’s working too hard for that kind of thing, and that after a day on the farm all he wants to do is get back home to his wife and his boys. But he surprised me by accepting.

  Behind us at the bar a fat-necked racist bemoaned the multicultural shops on his recent trip to London, and joke-seriously chided his drinking companion for not looking into his eyes as they clinked glasses. A little threat sizzled in the air around them. The bar room smelt of meat and damp and wood. Winfield talked about the ‘shit weather corridor’ we are in here, which comes down from the north, and often manages to miss the flanking villages and hills, or at least never hit them nearly as hard. He’d heard next week was going to be bad, and was making a new warm space in the barn for the lambs. He said that whenever he meets someone new he looks at their hands to see if they’re small, which can be useful at lambing time. It’s an ingrained habit, hard to stop. ‘How did you rate mine?’ I asked. ‘Didn’t quite make the grade, I’m afraid, yoth,’ he replied. He said I was doing well up there. Some of the other tenants who’d come up here in winter hadn’t even managed to hack it this long: they’d gone to stay with relatives, or left altogether.

  When Winfield returned from the bar with our second pint, he was accompanied by a much older man, with enormous sideburns. He introduced him as Norman, his dad. Norman farmed for years on the other side of the ridge and looks how I assumed farmers ceased to look in about 1965. He is eighty-three – older than I’d taken him for – and has lived in the area all his life. He was a first-hand witness to the Grindlow air crash in the terrifyingly cold winter of 1947; listened to the plane go over his head in the fog, then the impact. ‘You could hear t’ice cracking everywhere in t’trees that year,’ he said. ‘When you took your coat off it stood up all by itsen.’ Had he met my landlord? ‘Aye, I’ve met him. He’s not a proper person. Woke up from t’first day with everything and never learned how to appreciate it. Bad news, that family. Always ’ave been. Owned everything round ’ere for ever. Course, it’s just him now, after she died, a few years back. There’s his son, too, but he won’t come back from abroad. Don’t know what will happen to the place after he’s gone.’

  8 FEBRUARY

  Phone call from my mum, who wants to know why I have posted her a carved owl covered in bubblewrap. I told her it wasn’t permanent, just for safekeeping. ‘Could it not have waited?’ she asks. She said she is worried about me, up here, all alone. I told her it’s no big deal. What about people in the northern provinces of Canada? What about people on mountains in Scotland, in January, in the seventh century?

  Text message from Mark, inviting me to a pub quiz in Sheffield. I decline. I am worried about this weather that’s coming in. Just little flurries of snow so far, but the top ledge of the mountain road is still dicey from the last lot. The council’s attitude to gritting seems to be that over a certain altitude it should be done on a self-serve basis. Catherine is quiet today but, I sense, more peacefully so. It’s a month and a half since solstice, but the day is still a slit of light, bookended by big black cushions.

  10 FEBRUARY

  I saw them through the back window, coming up over the ridge, with their dogs and guns. A Good Size Cat was out there and I hurried him in quickly. Locked the cat flap. I couldn’t quite see what they were carrying: rabbits, certainly, something longer, stringier, maybe a hare. I moved to the front of the house, keen to get confirmation of their departure. Their faces were hard and sharp. They lingered around the barns for a while, talking to Conkleton. He stuck around for a few minutes after they left, stroking gates, inspecting barns, ostentatiously showing to himself that everything was still in order, like a friendless child playing at being king. He steered noticeably clear of this place.

  ‘Is he scared of you?’ I asked her.

  ‘He’s scared of it all. Scared of himself.’

  ‘Do you ever go to his house, too?’

  ‘Sometimes. But that’s Joan’s territory.’

  ‘Joan?’

  ‘Sister.’

  13 FEBRUARY

  The fog is marauding on the other side of the valley this morning, angry and rampant. Sometimes it will be there for three or four whole days without lifting. But if you looked back from there to this side, it would no doubt be thicker. When I’ve walked over there and the view has been clear, it’s amazing how hidden this place is. The system of ledges and copses makes the spot almost impossible to pick out. It’s a vast valley that has totally redefined the word ‘hill’ for me. I find myself thinking a lot about all that wild ground in the middle, where the derelict pump house is. It’s been so left to itself that it has brewed its own atmosphere. The hunters – and me – are really the only people who go down there. I don’t like the thought of them doing their shooting, asserting their bullshit supremacy, but I don’t think they are winning. I think the valley is still winning. It has too much strength. It is a primeval strength that scares me, but the fear is different from my other common fears: the prospect of getting a speeding ticket, or hurting a person’s feelings, or falling terminally ill, or losing a loved one. It’s an important and timeless and necessary fear, with no anxiety associated with it.

  15 FEBRUARY

  ‘I haven’t asked you about the cat.’

  ‘Not mine. Came with the house.’

  ‘But I assumed, what with …’

  ‘That’s just it. People assume too much. Life’s big problem.’

  I resist the urge to add, ‘… and death’s?’ I don’t want to be rude.

  17 FEBRUARY

  The house was built in 1837. I have decided that
it happened in winter but have no evidence that it did, other than the fact that winter has become all I associate this area with, and the actual raw materials of the house were blatantly picked out with the kind of winters you get up here in mind. The building probably seemed a little show-offy at the time, purely due to the size of its rooms, but in a dour way that mirrors the meteorological environment: it’s a house that smacks of gritting your teeth and toughing it out, of scant humour, all of it black. A blizzard pelted the walls tonight and I was glad of their thickness, as almost two centuries of residents before me must also have been. This spell of extreme weather – or rather, even more extreme weather – has been longer in coming than we were informed on the news, but it has not been overhyped. The cats – the two I can see as a corporeal presence, anyway – look genuinely bewildered. The scene outside the front door is as frightening as something pristine can be. My car is totally invisible, a lump of snow notable only for being larger than nearly all the other lumps of snow around it. The flakes are still falling. They’re not even flakes. They’re ready-made snowballs.

  I have worked it out, and I think I have ten days’ worth of food, if I go easy on the crisps. I can feel Catherine watching me as I cook. She sees me make space amidst the fresh chillis, peppers and tomatoes and carefully drop my eggs into the pan, and I can tell she finds it all a bit needless and elaborate. I’ve noticed that she’s talking in a different way: her sentences are clearer. I wonder if it’s from speaking to me a lot, listening to me on the phone, or hearing the radio. I have got into the habit of leaving Radio 4 on for her while I’m out. By the looks of it, she won’t hear Radio 4 for a while.

  19 FEBRUARY

  I thought today of a story I overheard in the post office during my first few days here. A lady from the village – she must have been at least in her mid-eighties – was talking about one winter here in her youth when the snow was so extreme that she and her husband could only get down the hill for food by crawling through the drifts on their hands and knees. It seemed preposterous at the time, an exaggerated recollection from an unrecognisable age. Today I can believe it. I’ve just been out to do the bins and the birdseed and it’s like a whole different planet out there. The dark white light of December and January is history. Now it’s all blasted silver. Your whole body squints as you fight your way through it. The double sycamore man-tree looks like it’s drowning, not raging, as it waves its endless arms at the sky. The relief as you shut the front door on it is monstrous.

  We keep the fire going all day with more of Winfield’s wood, and we tell each other stories. She tells me the cat prefers Joan to her.

  ‘Does it have a name?’ I ask.

  ‘Cat,’ she says.

  21 FEBRUARY

  When she tells me her surname I immediately realise I knew it all the time. ‘Not …?’ I reply. ‘No,’ she says. ‘Daughter?’ I say. ‘Granddaughter,’ she replies. Not all of the children died in that Satanic week in that most Satanic of years, 1666 – that’s what people forget. One baby – Josephine – lived and, with her, Winifred carried on. It was sympathy and support that kept her in the village, stopped her from starting a new life elsewhere, which might have been a more sensible option. Neighbours cooked and washed for her. But over the years sympathy gradually thawed out, then froze into suspicion – much more coldly by the time Winifred had died, and Josephine was living with two young daughters of her own. It was less about the Cowlishaws than it was about the village itself: its need to unshackle itself from its own recent past. When residents visited other places, there was name-calling, a stigma, a taint. A grudge seemed to be held, even though it made no sense. Surely the surrounding villages should hold the opposite of a grudge, after the suffering that Wentworth had saved them from, with his decision to seal Grindlow off? But it felt like a new, harder, less forgiving era.

  ‘Even then?’ I ask.

  ‘Even then,’ she says.

  How, I wonder, can eras always do this, keep seeming harder and less forgiving than the previous one, yet never reach a peak, unsurpassable hardness, without mercy or kindness?

  People looked at Catherine and Joan, and they were reminded of the plague years. It didn’t help that illness was their speciality. They’d learned the remedies from Josephine, as she had learned them from Winifred before that. What comfrey can do to help to heal broken bones. The relationship between nettles and the blood. How to apply yarrow to a cut. People had a conflicted relationship to the cottage on the hill, outside the village, a steaming, pungent house full of medicated goo. They went there for poultices and remedies, but they often kept quiet about it. In spring Catherine and Joan headed through the woods to the stream bordering the big farm. Sometimes trespassing was necessary to get to the places where the Lady’s Smock and ramsons grew most abundantly, but what was trespassing? Then was not now, with its Ordnance Survey order. Paths were a debate.

  The sisters were spotted a few times, but it never really mattered until one year early in the new century, when several of the Conkleton cattle were struck down. It was a harsh, late dragging winter, where almost nothing came up in the hedgerow. Lambs died in more abundance than ever. Then the son, the big family favourite, the one born into it all with so much to lose, out riding on the sharp bit of the ridge, was flung. It was later agreed that the mare in question would not have flung anyone, least of all him, not under normal circumstances. There was no way it could happen. The body was not found until the next day. Blood had soaked the front of his blazer. An owl, once all grey, was half red.

  23 FEBRUARY

  The absolute coldest. They say −16°C, with windchill. And that’s at the edge of the village. I think you could safely take away another three degrees from that, up here on the ledge. I am using my laptop to heat my feet: a second, electronic hot-water bottle, to add to the one on my lap. Winfield’s wood has all gone, and I do not want to trouble him for more. He’s coming up here every day still, but only to check on the sheep in the barn. No way you can work in this. I have not seen Conkleton for days. I have replied to only two of the text messages I have received during the last week: the one from my dad, asking if I am OK up here on the mountain, and the almost identical one from my mum, also asking if I am OK up here on the mountain. I will get around to responding to the others soon, when I have a moment. They are as follows.

  1. Just wanted to say it was really nice meeting you the other day. Let me know if you fancy a coffee when you are next in Sheffield. Rosie x

  2. Hey fella. Wanted to check you are ok out there. It is pretty bad here right now and I heard it’s worse where you are. Please holler if you need anything. Mark.

  3. Your latest O2 bill is now available to view online.

  4. Shit. It must be pretty scary up there right now. Hope you are OK. Matthew.

  5. Open mic tonight at café in Nether Edge. Might wander up. You’re probably snowed in, out there in the haunted house, but just thought I’d mention it. Rosie.

  25 FEBRUARY

  Found a jar of olives at the back of the mug cupboard. Result! In less salutary news, I cannot eke out the cat litter any longer. Nibbler and A Good Size Cat are refusing to go and do their business outside, so I have been out with the shovel, cleared some snow, and scraped some frozen soil into their tray. They will just have to use that, when the ice drips off it, until I can venture out again in the car, if that ever happens.

  ‘What do you think of the world now?’ I ask her.

  ‘It’s the same.’

  ‘Surely you can’t think that? So much has changed. So much progress.’ I hold up my phone: still switched off, as it has been for the last thirty hours.

  ‘Humans are still the same.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘They still need something to hate. They still operate in packs. They repeat sayings, like sheep. When something is said about someone enough times by enough people, it becomes a fact, whether it is true or not.’

  ‘What about the cottage? Is it sti
ll there?’

  ‘No. Not even a brick.’

  ‘Was it here? Where we are now?’

  ‘No. Half a mile.’

  ‘So why are you here instead?’

  ‘You ask a lot of questions. Men didn’t, in my day.’

  ‘So people are different, after all?’

  27 FEBRUARY

  There has been a thaw over the last day. I can see a central dividing line of meltwater coming down the track. But it’s creating a new kind of slippiness, on top of the ice. I do not think I will attempt to get in the car yet. Winfield’s dad has been here, helping him with the lambs. He brought me a casserole made by his wife. I did not have the heart to tell him I don’t eat meat. We could see some snowdrops just showing their heads above the ice on the side of the track, beneath the wire fence.

  ‘They’re amazing things,’ he observed. ‘They’ll thrive under snow and ice, but if it’s warm and dry, they won’t grow. You can’t tell me that can be explained. That’s not just nature. There’s something more going on there.’