Winter Damage

by Natasha Carthew

  ‘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.

  ‘Don’t forget us now you hear, birdy bird? Come back knockin when you’re passin. One or other is always here.’ She called Rabbit out from the kitchen and they stood and waved her from the house like long-losts and then from the path and finally from the ridged horizon.

  Ennor stopped once to wave and then twice and when her path was close to dipping from view she waved a third and final time and shouted thank you into the wind towards them.

  Things were going to start moving now. Ennor knew she was a day away from finding Mum and then they would be home and dry for Christmas.

  The sky was bright and the sun lay low and blinding on the horizon, barely up, almost down. Ennor looked at the time and she stopped to push up her sleeve. ‘Damn,’ she shouted. The old woman had stolen her watch and she would now have to make estimates by this and that and by the rare occasions the sun appeared because there was no time for backtracking. She stood and looked about her and up at the flat bright sky and guessed at the time being somewhere around two o’clock. She had two hours of daylight walking time ahead of her before stopping to set up camp.

  She narrowed her eyes to the smear of sun and followed its arc to where she thought it might fall, that was west. She would keep the sun sitting on her left shoulder as she headed north and when it was elbow high it would be time to stop.

  Ennor counted her steps to make up a minute and then an hour and by hour number two the sun had set someplace other than her guessing and the cold that replaced it slapped her clean across the face. She tried to ignore it because she liked plans to go her way but it was later than she had first thought and dark was racing towards her like a hit-and-run.

  Ennor looked about for anything that might resemble a shelter and she walked close to blind with the dynamo torch crunching and stalling in her hand until she saw the familiar turned and bundled wall of a cairn. She went to it with a whoop and threw down her rucksack and laid her square of tarpaulin across the damp ground.

  Outside darkness hammered down on her as fast as she could spy twigs for lighting and she realised she would not even have a small fire to look at tonight let alone to cook, and she returned to the stone hut defeated and sat with the dumpy coat heavy across her knees and told herself red was a lucky colour despite it sitting in the unlucky black of night.

  Through the half-tumbled doorway Ennor thought she saw movement of light and she rubbed her eyes to check if she was seeing things and watched as the swish of colour and warmth crawled up on her.

  ‘Who’s that?’ she shouted. ‘Got a shotgun here.’ She picked up the gun and held it in the pool of light, the realisation that she hadn’t loaded it dawning on her slowly, but it was too late.

  ‘Don’t shoot bunny rabbits, do you?’ laughed the light.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘It’s me, silly. It’s Rabbit.’ He flicked the beam on to his own face and the shadow complete with horror fangs pinned itself to the cairn wall.

  ‘What the hell – followed me, did you?’

  Rabbit continued to laugh. ‘Mother told me to come lookin so I come lookin. Knew you wouldn’t get far. Forgot to pack you a meal and all. Here, hold this.’

  He passed her the torch and swung a bag off his shoulder and a bundle of sticks tied up in rope.

  ‘Thought she was your grandmother.’

  ‘She is.’

  ‘And your mother?’

  Rabbit shrugged in the torchlight. ‘I dunno.’

  Ennor didn’t like him and didn’t much want him to stay but she was intrigued as to what was in the bag and she asked him.

  ‘Spuds and meat.’

  She kept the light gripped on him. He had a smile that said one thing and eyes that said another.

  ‘You my babysitter then?’ she asked.

  ‘Just goin to light you a fire is all. Mother would never forgive herself if she heard you’d gone hungry or cold or worse.’ He looked her over and smiled and told her that was all it was.

  When the fire was lit and growing Rabbit set about preparing the meat and he lifted it lovingly from the fold of newspaper it had been placed and speared it with two butcher’s hooks he produced from his bag.

  Ennor asked what meat it was and he didn’t know and she asked if he’d brought anything to drink and he had – the dreaded gorse wine.

  ‘You like that stuff?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘Why’d you bring it?’

  ‘Mother made me.’

  ‘Why?’

  He ignored her and continued to tend the fire and as it grew it decorated the cairn walls in splashes of orange and pinched her cheeks into a hot flush.

  The meat cooked slowly on a stick looped high above the flames and the smell was loaded with memories of her home kitchen and her mouth watered in anticipation. She felt the heaviness of thought and worry fall from her and she remembered her manners enough to thank the boy for the fire and the meat and she said she supposed he could stay to eat for one hour tops.

  Rabbit sat at the edge of the tarpaulin and he leant on one knee to worry the fire or turn the meat occasionally and his face was flat and ungiving like a soft-faced doll.

  ‘You got a dad?’ Ennor asked.

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Got anyone else besides?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’ He pulled his bag into his lap and pulled out the bottle of wine and asked if she had a cup.

  Ennor untied her metal mug from the frame of the rucksack and put it on the floor and let him pour the cloudy liquid to the brim.

  ‘You got parents?’ he asked.

  ‘Bit of both.’

  ‘That don’t sound right.’

  ‘I got a dad but he’s sick and a mother but you know bout that.’

  ‘You think you’ll find her?’

  ‘I’m sure of it. Tomorrow, defo.’

  ‘How’s your dad sick?’

  ‘He’s got cancer in the lungs but he’s sick with drugs.’ She took her baccy tin from her pocket and rolled two cigarettes and passed one to him.

  Rabbit thanked her and he asked her if her father had ever worked and what at.

  ‘Farmer all his life and before probably.’ She nodded and took a too-big gulp of the wine and swallowed it down hard.

  ‘So you got your own farm? Land and everythin?’

  ‘Not no more. Foot-and-mouth was the start of that and now with times tough and breakin and all . . .’

  Rabbit nodded in agreement ‘No jobs. No nothin.’

  ‘Strikes,’ added Ennor.

  ‘No job prospects. What we sposed to do after school?’

  ‘I don’t go no school.’

  ‘Exactly, nor do I.’

  ‘All closed in any case.’

  Ennor finished her drink while Rabbit drank from the bottle and they both nodded into the fire like old souls chewing over the fat.

  ‘Nice gun you got there. Saw it back at the cottage.’

  Ennor reached for the double barrel and passed it to him ‘Don’t worry it int loaded. Only a fool would point a loaded gun.’
/>   Rabbit smiled as he balanced the rifle in the palms of his hands and he felt the weight of it. ‘Looks heavier than it is. What you killed with it?’

  Ennor shrugged. ‘Tin cans and water bottles mostly but I’m keepin my options open.’

  She laughed and Rabbit joined her and his teeth glowed fluorescent and menacing in the firelight.

  ‘Why you called Rabbit?’ she asked.

  ‘Cus when I was a baby I was always jumpin bout like a bunny.’ He jammed the gun to his shoulder and aimed it at the cooking meat and then at Ennor when she asked him his real name.

  ‘I told you. Rabbit.’ He closed one eye and traced the barrel from her face to her chest and back.

  ‘How old are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Old enough to have a gun.’ She grabbed the barrel and twisted it from his grip. ‘Stop messin.’

  ‘Just askin your age.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just to ask.’

  ‘I’m fourteen.’

  ‘You look older.’

  ‘Well I int.’

  ‘Got a mouth on you for a fourteen-year-old girly, int you?’

  Ennor finished her second drink. Her head lifted and spun a little way out and away from her and she ignored it and waved her mug at the boy for a top-up.

  The alcohol set a fire in her belly that carried her close to sleeping and she smiled at the meat and at the fire and maybe she even smiled at the boy with a look that was mistook for saying something more than just smiling.

  The heat and the wine smelted Ennor’s event recollection into molten mush and she could not fasten one link of the chain to the next. One minute she was sitting with contentment in her lap and the next she was running hard and fast. She ran until she thought her lungs might rip apart and her weak ankle swelled tight and bloodless in her boot and as she fell she palmed a bullet from her pocket, loaded the gun and pointed it into the dark ether but nobody came. She shouted for the boy to go ahead and try it and see what he got but there was no sound but the painful cry of a fox transporting its hunger across the moor.

  She got to her feet and held the gun so tight she thought her fingers might bust through it and she pulled back the hammer and stood, trigger ready.

  She could see the glowing orb of the cairn in the distance and the smoke still idling against the night breeze and she called out and kept calling as she turned and made her approach.

  There was a part of her that wanted to shout some kind of apology but she knew this was just a deep-down habit girls were accustomed to doing through bullying and embarrassment so she called out his name and nothing more.

  When she neared the cairn she shouted a reminder that she had the gun and it was loaded twice and she tapped the metal against the stone wall.

  ‘You in there, Rabbit boy? Better be sittin on your grubby little hands, I’d say.’ Her voice was small and it wavered slightly but she continued to talk and she asked him to push her rucksack through the opening if he knew what was good for him.

  She waited to see movement in the dying firelight and listened and waited some more.

  A thought passed over her that maybe he had scampered back to the cottage and she loosened a little and thought briefly of the meat and hoped she hadn’t kicked it over in the scuffle.

  She told whoever was or wasn’t sitting in the stone hut that she was coming in and she one-stepped into the opening. The boy was still there and she stood over him and her shadow crushed him to the ground.

  Blood from his head had squiggled into a thin string line down his face and had knotted around his neck and his teeth peeped loosely from his mouth.

  ‘Rabbit?’ Ennor poked him with her boot and when he didn’t turn she kicked him hard in the hope of some movement because him not moving was bad.

  ‘Rabbit, you dead?’ She put the gun to the ground and bent to listen for breathing.

  ‘I won’t touch you,’ she shouted. ‘I won’t get into trouble for your crazies.’

  She pulled the tarp from the ground and rolled it into her rucksack and put on her gloves so she could settle the wine bottle into his lap without leaving clues and cleared all trace of herself.

  Ennor Carne’s destiny had led all roads to this. A dead carrion boy left to rot on the snow-blown moor.

  The journey would now take her deep into the night to escape the scene and she walked with the meat in one hand and the torch cranked in the other and the gun hanging prepared and ready from its strap across her chest.

  Darkness stayed with her for what seemed like for ever and the cold tightened her bones with such breaking force she was glad to be walking because if she stopped she would die.

  She walked blind but for the small puddle of light that she stepped into and into and into. The moor beyond the puddle was an evil being standing and watching, its ancient eyes fixed on her, and the fear snapping, urging her to keep going round in circles, laughing her mad.

  Ennor wished she hadn’t left home in the first place and she didn’t care if God heard and she shouted at him that if he was listening to please return her from this hell-wheel she was treading.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  In the desperate morning light Ennor stopped to smoke a cigarette and she watched a family of moorland ponies sketch silhouettes on to the horizon and move gracefully like oil riding water.

  She wondered if this was a sign of hope or impending doom and as they passed she saw their bellies bloated with hunger and the bone-impaled flesh of their hindquarters. She looked down at her cigarette and fingered the lean tobacco strands in her tin and she took her time with the one she smoked and made it last down to her fingertips.

  The ponies edged a little closer and she counted them and wondered if they remembered the recent past when folks leisured out on the moor and kids fed them ice cream and caressed them like pets.

  She put away her baccy tin and surveyed her surroundings and wondered if she should change her path any which way from the one she was on. What if the boy was found with a hit to his head in the shape of a double barrel? What if the old woman got on board with her clever tongue and the police got involved? What then?

  The whole county out hunting and the news headlines wondering how things had got so bad, children murdering children, whatever next? She was a fugitive now, a murdering fugitive.

  Throughout the morning Ennor occupied herself by spying bits of wood that peeped through the frozen snow and she tied them into a bundle with the rope Rabbit had used. Her head still swam from the gorse wine and she promised herself a pan of tea heated on a fire of her own soon enough.

  The collected wood was nothing but a few damp sticks and she eyed each patch of shadow that stretched across the high looped plains ahead for anything resembling trees. The search paid off when, in a sprawling cut of valley, she saw the green-white canopy of a pine forest.

  Ennor knew forests were dangerous places; the hostile forestry commission protected them from theft and she made sure to step just once past the boundary to scan for fallen limbs.

  Her ankle throbbed and occasionally buckled when she bent a certain way and she kept herself going with thoughts of warm fire and hot tea.

  She hauled what wood she could manage far enough away from the forest to not be seen and dug a snow circle with her boot, lighting some of the dry gorse she carried in her shirt pocket and feeding the fire in an orderly manner until it was big and smiling and she smiled back.

  Snow was boiled to water and then to tea and she sat on the tarp and savoured it and thought about the boy with his rude hands and his teeth snipping at her flesh like a wild thing and the strength in her bones weakened to a brittle snap and she thought she might sink down into the snow and peat earth and never be found.

  Tears bubbled in her eyes and ran into the corners of her mouth. She licked them away and washed the salt down with the tea and lay close and tangled to the fire and closed her eyes to the rising dawn.

  Sleep came in an instant and the young girl clung to this other wor
ld that was safe and familiar and she pulled the stillness into a place of covered thoughtlessness.

  In the passing hours while she slept the sun came and went and with its passing it pulled a drag of heavy cloud from the east which held a new kind of darkness.

  Ennor woke with a start and she called out into the abyss that was isolation. The fire was long gone and tiny flakes of ice caught on the wind and landed on her face. The snow had returned.

  Fast as a bullet she packed up her few belongings and chased the path she’d made crossways to the valley and towards the forest for shelter.

  Beneath the canopy of guarding trees Ennor felt as if she were among friends and she caught her fingertips on the tall trunks as she idled. The smell of rotting pine needles fixed in her throat and smelt like funny foreign tea and she pulled fresh needles from a lower bough and put them in her coat pocket for when teabags became history.

  At first the snow did not come into the forest and it was as if another set of laws ruled the place, something set in the granite shift of stone beneath the light-bounced surface.

  She took out her notebook and followed the winding route of words she’d written and forests were written here and there and everywhere with confusion and she snapped the book shut. All she could see was an imprint of the yellow door that would lead to Mum.

  As Ennor walked the forest came to life with whistles from its duelling boughs and she thought she heard music and smiled and marvelled at the trees and the wind and perhaps the brilliance of her imagination.

  The comforting music became louder as she walked and, further still, voices joined the music and the raucous singing threatened to lift the canopy of trees clean off the ground.

  Ennor stopped stony dead and she turned an ear to the sound and stared hard and fearless into the fading light. She squinted at things that weren’t there and crouched to the ground the way a wild animal might, her ear still cocked against the noise of trees for better listening.

  The flicker of light was occasional and jagged, turning off when movement eclipsed it with dancing shadows, erratic flicker-book acrobatics that nobody could see but Ennor. She rubbed her eyes and looked again and her instinct was to run but the fire and scent of happiness hooked her closer and she sat huddled in the dark shadow of the trees and watched the colourful strangers. The music fattened her ears until she was full to the brim with sugary pleasure and she dropped mindless into the exotic dream.