Terroir (19 page)

At the top of their three
-
storey house was the attic. In the long room – all bare bulbs and floorboards and peeling wallpaper – was a cupboard with folding doors that took up the narrowest wall. The doors got stuck if you wrenched them too hard because the runners were shot. There was a thick grey skylight, the glass covered in pigeon lime. If you peeled the wallpaper away crystals of white appeared behind where the salt was leaching from the plaster. In the cupboard was an old trunk full of scraps of animal fur. The fur was red like fox fur, or dark brown with pale stripes. There was dried skin on the back, real skin from when the animal had been alive. Annie didn't know where they'd come from, though perhaps her grandmother or great grandmother had used them to trim clothing. If you climbed into the cupboard and slid the doors shut, you could hear big birds pattering on the roof. The fur was soft against your cheek. It smelt faintly of perfume, of the forest where a woman was being drawn through the snow on a sledge, cracking her whip over a team of dogs that strained in their harnesses. Behind her in the forest the eyes of wolves glared yellow between tree trunks. Their tongues glowed like molten lava as darkness fell and stars sprinkled the sky. If you clenched your fingers hard, you could feel the woman's heart there, afraid, beating like a fisted bird.

After school Annie's mum used to picked her up from the playground, waiting with the other mothers with their prams and pushchairs, sharing the latest gossip or inventing it. Sometimes Annie was the last to leave the school, lingering over her painting, which had not quite dried, volunteering to tidy away the toys in the nursery classroom. Once she worked for Miss Sanderson, using a blob of Blu
-
Tack to get all the stray bits of Blu
-
Tack from the wall where things had been stuck. You had to press hard with your fingers and roll a fresh ball over the old stuff until it gradually came away. Copydex smelt like hot rubber and you could wipe that away with a damp cloth until everything was clean. She liked the smell of paper glue too, though someone had told her it was made from old horses, rendered down. Her mother had been cross that time, because she'd waited ages and Annie hadn't appeared until Mr Carstairs was locking up the school. Couldn't Annie understand how worried she was? Annie thought about that, about the kind of worry it might be. After all, she was safe in school, helping the teacher.

In summer you could hide in the long grass in the field, or in the patch of fennel that had been slung out of the gardens and gone wild. The stems had a minty smell and the dry seeds tasted wild and hot. In winter, Annie and Jodie roamed the lanes with torches, pressing themselves into the hawthorn hedges and signalling to each other by flashing the beam. When there was a fog or heavy mist it was like a horror story. The streetlamps shone with yellow haloes and vampires could emerge from alleyways and from around street corners to pierce your neck with their fangs and suck your blood and carry you off to be undead. Sometime they played at being zombies, stumbling forward with their eyes half closed and their hands held out, sleepwalking. Fear made your laughter spurt and bubble out.

In winter, flights of geese went over the low hills to the estuary where water gleamed and froze. They flew in a wide vee, sometimes in double formation, finding their way behind their leader. She'd seen in a nature programme on television about how the geese took turns at being leader, then dropped back. Her father had a special metal cabinet in the house where he kept a gun locked away. It had a long black barrel and a polished walnut stock and there were boxes of red cartridges with brass ends. Annie wasn't allowed to touch the gun and the key to the cabinet was on the bunch of keys chained to his belt. Sometimes he went with other men from the village in his waxed jacket and Wellingtons and cap to shoot rabbits that infested the meadows leading down to the river. She'd seen him pulling the skin from a dead one, the pink flesh appearing like melted pink plastic. Like when they'd burnt her old dolls because she was getting to be a big girl. Sometimes a policeman came to look at the cabinet and make sure it was safe and he and Annie's father stood chatting in the front room. They'd done that one time when the Christmas decorations were up and the tinsel had almost touched the policeman's hat with its silver badge and chequered band. Annie had giggled at that, covering her mouth up with her hand. At Christmas time, her father sold turkeys and geese and the shop window was filled with their pale plump breasts and thighs. There was a row of coloured lights that blinked on and off and her father moved in tangled reflections and shadows in his blue striped apron.

The railway ran close to the village. There was a crossing with a white signal box and an iron bridge where the railway lines went over the canal. On each side of the bridge a rampart of stone swept up to the metalwork in a long curve that held the banking on either side. You could walk up the slabs. At the top was a ledge that led into a space between the ironwork and the stone uprights. When you squeezed through you were in an iron box, hidden from view, the black ribbon of the canal spooling below. If you stayed there long enough a train would come by and the noise of iron wheels on iron tracks in an iron box was amazing. It shut out everything else until the surface of the water shuddered and the sound grated through to the roots of your teeth. The stones was cold against your bottom and legs and you had to be careful not to get tar on your clothes from the little stones that had dropped there. They called the bridge
the iron clanger
and it had a little chamber at each of its four corners. Annie had her favourite one just above the words
Ken loves Pat?
that someone had sprayed onto the stone with silver paint. She wondered about the question mark.

When her father got home from work he was careful to wash his hands at the kitchen sink. They were cold looking, red
-
skinned with blond hairs that grew up his arms and ticked your face and legs. He'd take off his wristwatch and soap them first, locking his fingers into each other, massaging his thumbs, wringing soap into his skin. Then he'd rinse them and dry them on the towel that hung over a radiator. It reminded Annie of the surgeons she'd seen on TV. He was washing away a good day's work, he said, but she saw threads and clots of blood flushing into the drain then down to the backyard grid where moss grew between the stones. Sometimes he brought home liver or slices of belly pork for their tea. At weekends it might be a joint of brisket or a corner of ham. A butcher could afford to eat well, if nothing else. Whenever she opened the fridge to get some orange juice or find the eggs for her mother's baking, there was usually a piece of meat lying on a special willow pattern plate. It was weird to think that the red muscle lying there had once been warm and alive. Cattle had wet, slobbery black noses and pigs had white eyelashes. Lambs were really cute and clean until they reached a certain age when they became just as stupid and shitty and forgetful as their mothers.

Annie liked the bathroom where you could shoot the long bolt on the door and run a deep soak in the cast
-
iron tub. God knows how much water it used, but her Mum and Dad never minded that. She loved to lie there, feeling herself buoyant, floating away in the steam that rose to the ceiling and formed little droplets. She remembered the shouts in the swimming pool in the town, the sting of chlorine, the way voices were shut out when you dived and felt the pressure in your nose and ears, everything bleary as the tiles wavered. The bath water was heated by a big gas boiler that grumbled away in the basement. It was like having an imp down there, making things work, knowing everything. There was a blue glow from the pilot light, deep shadows you could steal away to and the smell of old cardboard. In the bath her knees were rough from playing out and the skin on her thighs was mottled red from standing too close to the coal fire in the lounge. She loved the roughness of the big bath towel before her mum started nagging at the door to use the toilet, telling her to get on with it in the voice that came down her nose when she was cross. Then it was pyjamas, toothbrush and toothpaste; then her mum putting her hair into pigtails, her dad reading her a bedtime story, his feet coming up the creaking stairs like falling weights. Annie imagined him as dense matter, a collapsing star, a black hole treading the timbers towards her, sucking in all the shadows of the house.

Down below the village in the river meadows they were building new bungalows.
A terrible eyesore
her mother called them, with that tight little sniff.
Bloody numpties
, her father said for building where the river would flood them,
not got God's sense they were born with.
Down there the diggers were parked at night when the workmen went home, carrying their hard hats. There was a stack of pipes that would line the new drains. They were so big that Jodie and Annie could crawl into them and sit sideways so their spines curled against the circle of cement, their knees almost touching their noses. Once Annie went down there on her own and crawled into one of the pipes and lay there in her duffle coat hearing her mother shouting her to come in for her tea. She waited a long time, then went home in the failing light, just so no one would worry. What she'd really wanted to do was go to sleep there inside that tight circle, inside the sycamore roots, shrinking herself down to something tiny and invisible. Once she caught a frog in the composter in the garden and held it in her hand so that its flat head and its bulging eyes stuck out. She wondered if it felt safe or felt frightened. When she put it down under the laurel bush it was too stunned to move, its legs hunched under itself, its throat panting. The frog was cold and her hand had been warm. It was strange to imagine its chilled blood, its cold heart pumping, its reptilian soul of ice.

At the end of that summer, in September, she'd be starting at the High School in town. That meant getting the bus each morning with Jodie and the older village kids. It meant braving the bullies who climbed on from the farms and villages on the way. Her mother was small with an upturned nose and springy brown hair that was going grey.
Stay away frae them and they'll leave ye be,
her mother said, as if she didn't believe Annie about the name
-
calling and sly punches.
Gie as good as ye get
, her father said,
gie 'em a smart crack.
But somehow Annie didn't think
he
ever could. Even her mother said he was soft
-
hearted and weak when it came down to it.
Talking the talk but nae walking the walk.

That year they went on holiday near Anstruther, eating fish and chips on the beach, paddling in freezing seawater, watching the sun go down behind the harbour, her father's arm around her, her mother's eyes a bright slate blue in the falling light. They'd rented a fisherman's cottage in Cellardyke with crooked sash windows. Annie had imagined that lost way of life: fishing boats putting to sea or riding out the storms, the fishermen mending creels and nets on the cobblestones, their wives gutting the dead
-
eyed fish. In the evenings her father went for a pint in The Haven and she watched television with her mum or sat on the harbour wall watching the gulls rake over the sea until it went dark. At the night the floorboards creaked in a deep rhythm, like the movement of the sea, and she thought she could hear voices whispering through the hiss of waves.

Jodie's dad had come to the door once, the day after her dad had taken them to the pictures for Annie's tenth birthday and her mother had stayed at home to decorate the cake. They'd watched the film in the dark cinema that smelled of bubble gum. She couldn't remember what it was, the film, something weird. Something unsuitable. And something had happened though she never found out what it was. Jodie had started crying, then gone quiet on the way home in the van.
Naw, naw
, her father had said and his voice sounded like he was pleading with Jodie's dad who was a wiry wee bastard.
No like that Jamie, ye ken full well it wasnae like that.
After that, he sent Annie round with some meat for Jodie's mum –
That mingin' wee bitch
. Something
ay
special
, a piece of topside with blood staining the paper, making it sticky. She'd stopped to smell the meat and it'd smelt like her dad's hands smelled after work.

Jodie's family were left
-
footers and there always seemed to be a new baby to look after and the house smelled of milk. Jodie's mum had a nose ring and worked part
-
time at the newsagent selling
The Scotsman
and lottery tickets and cans of lager. Her dad didn't do much.
Nae work
, Jodie said, shrugging. She became a mother at seventeen, like her own mother.
Nae bother
. Annie saw her once after leaving school, but she'd already gone her own way.

Once Annie was at the High School, she did her own pigtails and started her periods and there were no more stories and the stairs were silent as she lay in bed reading or listening to her radio, or finishing homework. Strange, how that silence seemed louder than the creak of timber under shoe leather and her father's bulk. She began to think of life after school, of life beyond the village, of a life that was her own and not everyone else's.

Down in the little bit of swampland beyond the sycamore there was a pathway you could find if you were careful. It was made of barrel lids laid on the marsh. James Gowan had showed her. You had to step carefully, feeling for the timber with your feet, balancing as the marsh gave up an eggy smell of decay.
The pathway led to a little island overgrown with willow trees. A wild place where no one went, where you couldn't be seen. In spring the hazels and willows were covered in yellow catkins and pussy willow. In late summer, there were bulrushes. You could brush your face against their brown velvet cylinders. They seemed a kind of perfection, symmetrically formed, perfect in their way, unspoilt. They reminded her of the story of Moses, the abandoned baby rescued by the pharaoh's daughter and restored to his mother.