Pollard Read online

  But he called her a good little worker, so maybe.

  Other times he asked her, How’s it going with the pheasants? Caught one yet?

  She plucked up her courage and she brought him her snares. She’d been trying for rabbits. She hadn’t caught a thing. And he took the snares in his big hands, turned them over. These ought to be just the job I reckon. What’s the matter with the bloody bunnies these days? They don’t know a good thing when they see one.

  Tell you what, he told her, hop in the truck and we’ll have a see. He’d help her get them set. He used to do a bit of bloody poaching in the old days. They’d have a crack at a pheasant and all. Have a bit of fun why not.

  So Steve showed her. They parked the truck and Steve took his gun, because you never knew and he gave her a wink. Might see a tasty old fox. Anne smiled.

  Steve said no point setting them where the fields were too busy so they walked, with the grass tall and wet up to their knees. Don’t mind getting a bit damp do you? He had the gun up on his shoulder and Anne’s snares hanging out of his pocket and as he went along he picked the heads of the grass with his finger and thumb.

  She’d been setting the snares in the wrong place.

  Set it on their usual track, see. Look for the droppings and the recent track. Set it up next to an obstruction so there’s no going round. He was intent while he told her these things, half talking to himself a lot of the time, wheezing, looking around, surprisingly careful and skilled when he needed to be, parting the grasses with hands that had their own intelligence.

  When she went back later to check, there was a rabbit in the first snare.

  Steve could have got anything if he’d wanted. Steve could have got the birds out of the trees. Steve could have got a fish in a snare. He could have got a deer, a pheasant, a quiet woodcock. Steve was king in Anne’s eyes after that rabbit.

  She carried it carefully down to the dump because it was Steve’s rabbit and he smiled when he saw her. He gave her the thumbs up. Let’s have a bloody butcher’s. Not bad, not bad. That’s quite a nice young buck that is.

  But Anne had had trouble killing it. It wasn’t as easy as all that, killing rabbits. Rabbits wanted to live. They kicked and they scratched and you could make a mess of it if you weren’t careful.

  That’s where you want to get him, Steve showed her on the back of the rabbit’s neck. Hit him hard and down and we’d better get that cleaned up. He pointed to her hand, which she didn’t know he’d noticed. You don’t want that going bloody bad on you. He got down a little tin of first aid and he sorted out Anne’s cuts with Dettol that made her eyes water. Give you a plaster on that one I reckon. Then he showed her how to paunch the rabbit and how to flay it. Lesson number one, he said at the end, wiping his hands down his tummy. How do you fancy rabbit for dinner? He had a lovely smile, Steve did.

  ♦

  After that it was easy. She knew how to do it, though she wasn’t always successful. Sometimes she’d try different things herself, variations on her first snares, bait, different locations, anything she thought might increase her chances.

  At teatime Steve would ask her how it was going. He’d give her advice, or he’d let her know, I’ve seen a hen pheasant with a nice little brood running about in the west field. Reckon you could have a go at the old cock. She’d show him the improved snares and he’d click his tongue. I tell you what, that’s a nifty little piece of kit Anne. That’s got a bloody good chance I reckon. Wouldn’t mind giving that a go myself. And that was a compliment to make Anne hum inside.

  She worked extra hard for him. She worked like a demon, not that it was difficult. She liked the dump. It fitted her almost as well as the wood. She liked its geography, the simple straight lines of the trailers and sheds, the blocks of the containers, the order of it. A little world in itself.

  She’d go up the gangplank and look down on it all and take pleasure in her place in its odd order, the thing she was working on and her tools, her own shed and all the people she knew and who knew her coming and going.

  Up there as usual, one day, enjoying herself, no indication that anything was different, expanding with the air and the perfect familiarity of it all, and, suddenly, there was Suzie.

  She got out of a car and Anne opened her mouth and stared. Colour of blood the car was, with a man in a T-shirt and muscles like a bull. Small world, Anne’s father had told her. Small bloody world.

  Tip tap tip tap along the paths, Suzie went, between the trailers while the man went to and fro with the rubbish.

  Anne panicked inside. Get out, Anne’s head said to her, get out. But Suzie didn’t hear. She just went on as if nothing had happened, tip-tapping down the paved path, picking up something to have a look. And now Anne’s head filled up with Suzie’s rubbish, with the bad words and the unkindness, and up on the gangplank, in plain view, she pulled at her great big fingers in distress. Better chuck her in too, Anne thought. Throw her over the side and see the cruncher mash her down and tip her out for the gulls, why not. That’s all she’s worth. Tip tap tip tap, Anne could hear it from the gangplank, with her pretty little heels and her pretty little nails and her hair all up and curled. I’m up here Suzie, she shouted in her head, it’s your sister Anne up here on the gangplank. I’ll push you in the rubbish where you belong. See how you like that. She’s worth nothing she is. Can’t do anything for herself. She wouldn’t last two minutes.

  And then Steve came round the corner, with his hair tousled and his shirt tight round his tummy and his shoulders dipping with his walk, like always, and he looked up and said, Hello Suzie, like he knew her already. Hello Suzie, and he smiled. And Anne had to watch while Suzie smiled back, with her head on one side like some stupid bird, while she wriggled and fluttered her hands to her hair and smoothed her skirt on her hips. Kick her up the arse and into one of those containers. Mash her down why don’t you. Only Steve didn’t look like he was going to do any kicking.

  You couldn’t hear everything they were saying whether you wanted to hear or not, not from up on the gangplank anyway, and Anne’s feet were as if they had taken root.

  But you could see. You could see that Steve was leant right forward and Suzie, you could see Suzie, still swaying about like a grass and doing a little laugh every now and again and the hands busy all the time, fluttering, fluttering, like the old days.

  Then the man with the muscles was finished and calling her over, Come on, girl.

  Hello, buddy, to Steve. Alright? Getting into his car and revving the engine. Suzie jerked her head over her shoulder at the car and the man and Steve looked up and nodded and didn’t smile any more, and then, as Suzie walked back to the car, he just stood there, fixed and looked after her and didn’t move.

  So Anne came down the gangplank and didn’t go to the tip for a bit, after that.

  ♦

  She didn’t go to the tip but she couldn’t help seeing, one day as she lay on the bank to watch her family, that Steve’s truck went up the hill and came down again with Suzie in it.

  Suzie was sat up in the front seat, dolled up and not touching the sides because it was dirty in the truck, Anne knew that. She won’t last long, Anne thought sourly. She won’t like the dump and old Buster if she doesn’t like the truck. But the fact that she was there at all. That and the look on Steve’s face. That was enough. That was more than enough.

  ♦

  Autumn came and Anne stood in a whirl of yellow, while the trees cried their leaves around her, as if it was the first time. She couldn’t have left the wood at a time like this anyway, she told herself.

  The first day the sky swapped its blue for a whipped grey and the wind got up, Anne noticed that it blew into the hut through the cracks in the palisade. She squatted inside with her chin in her hands, shivering and fighting panic. She wasn’t going to make it if it was like this in the winter. It would be worse in winter. Then the wind got behind the fire and blew the smoke straight into the hut. She flapped at it with her jumper. It made no
difference. Curling in, the smoke was, great choking billows of it making her eyes sting and pour. She got really wild. Since Suzie had come to the tip, things like this made her unreasonably and unmanageably angry. Sometimes they made her shout or cry. Sometimes she smashed things. Nothing, she thought, ever gave her a break. When night fell and the wind was still blowing, she lay in the dark and the trees clattered with it all night long and Anne swore like Suzie had taught her, every word she knew.

  But in the morning the wind died down and Anne got up and went out, dogged once more, and plugged the cracks with wet mud and grass, from roof to floor. It was a long and exhausting job, day after day, cold-fingered and caked in mud herself. Then she put in a stake over every join, just for good measure, till her house was ridged like a shell all round. After that she rested. She sat inside for two days just feeling warm. She sat and she looked at her hands, that were big and that had built a house. So she’d survived rain and she’d survived hunger and cold and she wanted badly someone to tell it to. I made a house myself. I made it all nice with things and I made it warm. Keeps out the rain and the wind now. But there wasn’t anyone to tell and it was commonplace to the birds, survival, house-building; they did it all the time. She thought of her elation when the hut had been roofed for the first time. Oh Steve. She put her head in her hands.

  Fog, mud and drizzle. You had to fight to stop it getting inside you. Weather is catching. Anne raked leaves with her dad’s rake. There were leaves everywhere, choking the ditches, clogging her pond. She dragged the pond clean with a board nailed onto a pole, pulled the leaves out onto the banks, clapped them up with two more boards that she wore on her hands, with straps made of folded plastic sacks, nailed to the back, with the nails bent over like staples. Good job Anne. Another good job.

  She worked round the piles of leaves on the banks, harrowed them to the garden, where she heaped them up by the compost, edged them round with wood from the timber pile. Then she covered them to help them rot. A layer of plastic bags, weighted down with stones just to be sure. The rest she put straight into the soil. She trench-dug the plot as best she could, around the roots and suchlike. She put the leaves into the bottom and piled the earth back on top. She had no idea whether it would work or not but it used up the leaves and it was something to do.

  At night Anne went to bed stumbling through the dark with exhaustion. Sometimes she fell asleep before she could get into the bag. Then she’d wake rigid with cold, and crawl in and shiver. And whenever she woke Steve was there, floating up out of her dead mind with his ball tummy and his old ways and Suzie like a tinny little lipstick beside him.

  She’d got so familiar with her loss, she knew it like it was a place. She would prod it like a bruise first thing in the morning, as she lay on her back and looked at the ceiling of the hut and tried to get up. See if it still hurt. She visited it so often, doing her mindless tasks, making tools, scratching about in her garden, gathering wood for her store, that it lost its pleasurable ache and she began to question. Sometimes she couldn’t even call to mind his face. She didn’t know any more. Perhaps it wasn’t just Steve. Only you had to have someone. Everyone had someone.

  Paint my nails for me, Suzie, she said slowly in a voice that had cracked and rusted with no use. Paint my nails then, she shouted into the night’s quiet, out loud, just because she could and because there was no one there, no one to slight her hands, to admire her house, to make her bloody breakfast.

  ♦

  One day, she fished for her old latchkey, in her pocket, where she’d kept it just in case. She threaded it onto a piece of string and tied it round her neck.

  She sat on the floor of the hut, fingering the key and swallowing. Maybe she should go down to the dump, just to see some people. Nigel even, or down to the café, to sit and watch Sue. Anyone. Steady Anne.

  Her eyes met the flat and shiny gaze of the lilac teddy above her door. There was always a project. She hadn’t finished covering the walls yet, had she? And if she wanted something big to do, the dam needed seeing to. She had to keep that in constant trim. She needed things, a bed, a floor because the inside of her house turned into mud pudding in the rain. She needed something to store her food in, a stove for the winter when she couldn’t sit over a fire outside, a proper door for goodness’ sake. Anne put her hands over her eyes; it was never-ending making a house. Wash the pots for me Anne do the dishes mend Michael’s bike fetch in the washing do your dad’s tea bath the baby for me.

  Nothing new there then, said Anne to herself. She took her hands away from her eyes. I’ll keep going.

  She took her barrow down to the fields at ploughing time and collected flints and cobbles that she wobbled home half a barrow at a time because of the weight. She started at the back of her house and worked towards the front, scraping out a section at a time, watering the floor, setting the stones in the wet mud and then sweeping the dry stuff back to fill up the cracks. It was nice when it was done.

  When things became too much for her she would finger her key. She had her own house now, so she knew she could manage, but she could always go back if she felt like it. She might go back in fact; probably would go back, one day.

  ♦

  She did go back. She went back with the wheelbarrow, one autumn night. She wasn’t going to go in. She didn’t need to do that. She’d only come for the metal dustbin outside. She lifted the lid and wrinkled her nose at the contents. Her family didn’t half smell. She shook the bin over the hedge, a chute of rubbish glinting briefly in the drizzle. Maybe they’d left her something she could eat. She half regretted not having checked through the bin first. But then she thought, Not likely, not those gannets. Anne crammed the lid on the empty bin and put the whole thing in the barrow. Her third visit. She shifted from foot to foot on the doorstep. She looked up at her window and touched the key like a talisman. At the gate she turned back. She thought of the telly sitting quiet in the dark, how it would wake up for her at the touch of a button, open its eye, show her its furious world. She took out the key and put it to the lock. Maybe one more bowl of cereal. The metal of the lock looked shiny even in so little light. There was pale new wood around it. She jiggled the key. No joy. She nearly got desperate. It was the thought of all those comforts, so close by. It was just stiff tonight, she said to herself. Must have been the rain. She took the key out and smoothed it with her finger and put it back inside her shirt. Another time then. Instead, Anne looked through the window at the kitchen, cupping her hand on the glass to see better, but it was dark except for a red light on the cooker. She wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t burn the house down one of these days. Michael and John and Connor. Stupid twat, they used to call her, dizzy cow. But she never left the cooker on. Her feet made indents in the flower bed, big prints that her family would find in the morning. She turned away.

  Down the hill with the bin in the barrow and not even the moon could be bothered with Anne tonight. Without its light she banged herself and stumbled. Once a car swept round a corner. That was scary. Anne saw the driver’s face momentarily amazed and then he must have put his foot down because the car sped on its way, dumping Anne in deeper darkness than before.

  The dustbin was Anne’s stove. She punched out a ragged hole in the front and one in the lid for the smoke. She couldn’t do a chimney but she cut an opening in the most sheltered wall of the house and pushed the bin in from outside, until the dome of the lid jammed, leaving the hole for the smoke on the wrong side and the hole for the fire in the room. Now she was warm and she was dry. She had water and more or less enough to eat. She settled into a season as slow as herself. She moved as little as she needed. Often she lay and observed inwardly the workings of her body, the rise and fall of its breath, its red tides, its silt and damps, spit and slime and hot streams.

  The wood emptied. Just the regular dog walkers. Nigel occasionally, not much. He sat in the café mostly, Anne had seen him, sipping endless mugs, windbagging at Sue. Anne didn’t go in when he was
there, if she could help it. She shuffled through the rides thick with leaves, kicking them up to fall again. At the foot of the limes, and the larches, the ground was bright with yellow, lighter now than the sky most days. Grey days, while the wood waited. There was something fresh and quick about the air, and the dark came down earlier and round the rabbit fields at the edge of the wood the trees stood with their hands still full of leaves and watched the tinny lights of the town come on at tea.

  Anne walked all day, hung about with bags. She listened to the leaves that whispered, plenty, above her head and she foraged, because the wood produced fruit in every corner. In every tangle, dip or dell, hips, haws, cobs, crabs, sloes and acorns. And in the feet of the trees and all the slips of space between dead wood and undergrowth, mushrooms pushed up, complete and solid, formed overnight with the speed that only autumn understands. She picked what she knew, the field mushrooms, the parasols, the penny buns, pinching them carefully at the root, smelling them before she put them in the bag.

  Several times during each day she had to come back, to unload. In the clearing a moorhen had found its way to her pool. It looked precarious, roosting in the hawthorn, its red bill just like another berry. Anne put her bags down. Get out of it, she said, not to the moorhen, but to a fox nosing round her vegetable patch. They’re all mine.