Winter Damage (12 page)

‘It tastes like summer.’ She smiled. ‘Summer and heaven all squished into one.’

Sonny laughed and took the bottle and drank without swallowing.

The dancers had joined hands in the dip below and they circled the fire as one and Ennor asked if Sonny was related to everyone.

‘Not all. The pagans and the travellers are from down west. More their thing than ours all this worship crap but a party is a party, init?’

‘What about them other fires?’ Ennor pointed towards the horizon at the small jewels of dancing flames flashing out in the countryside below.

‘Wait a minute.’ Sonny reached into the black leather bumbag she wore strapped around her waist and she produced a compact telescope.

‘What’s that?’

‘What you think it is?’ She crouched behind Ennor and rested the telescope on her shoulder and told her to hold steady.

‘Maybe it’s other pagans?’

‘Shut up, would you? I’m tryin to focus here. Ah, got the buggers.’

‘What is it?’

‘Cars, burnin cars on the edge of the village. I’m guessin somethin must be goin down.’

‘What kind of somethin?’

‘The crazy kind. People are goin mad roundabout with the hunger and the cold, I swear they are.’ She passed the telescope to Ennor and sat back down. ‘Guess I should tell me dad.’

Ennor looked through the lens and she walked it from one fire to the next and back and counted them one to five. ‘There’s five cars burnin. Why burn five cars?’

‘Useless I spose. Int bin no petrol or fuel oil for two months or thereabouts. Don’t you listen to the news?’

She took the telescope off Ennor and stuffed it into the bumbag and took out another bottle of scrumpy. ‘If we drink enough, we won’t care one way or the other soon enough.’ She unscrewed the top and drank while Ennor finished the other carton.

‘You bin livin under a stone or somethin?’

‘Course not. Dint think things were all that bad. Spose I thought it was just us.’

‘Well it’s gettin that way. Gotta keep your wits more and more these days, hell.’ She sat forward and pointed into the crowd. You see everyone here? Dad and the boys know every single face, every name.’

‘Apart from mine, I’m a stranger.’

‘No,
strange
is what you are.’

Ennor laughed and repaid the compliment and when Sonny asked her why her life was so bad she surprised herself by telling her about Dad and Trip and the trailer and in a roundabout way she told her about Mum too.

‘Let me get this straight. You’re trekkin out in the snow to the north moor to find a mother who may not even exist?’

‘Oh she exists, I’m just not sure where. I’ve got no choice, got to get our lives on track before the social take Trip and Dad dies and I’m left without a home.’

‘What’s up with your dad?’

‘Cancer.’

‘Bummer, hell.’

‘I need someone to take care of us before the social split us up.’

‘Really?’ Sonny started to laugh a little. ‘Like they really care bout things like that, with everythin goin on.’

Ennor shrugged. ‘Got a letter to say as much. Sounds like they got a prison waitin for us.’

Sonny nodded and said her getting somewhere and back made sense. They drank the scrumpy and then the beer and, when the sky cleared to moon and snowflakes became stars, they danced out with the others and sang along to songs they didn’t know.

Boys of all ages danced around Ennor and they took turns to dance her around the fire and for a moment she forgot herself in the spin of things.

‘Who are these boys?’ she called out to Sonny in passing.

‘Cousins, each and every one of them.’ She told Ennor she was meant to marry one of them soon enough and she made a face like she was going to be sick.

Ennor didn’t think they were all that bad. They had manners and praised her on her dancing, smiling and winking as if they found her in some way special.

‘Don’t be taken in,’ shouted Sonny on her next passing. ‘They’re only after one thing.’

Ennor nodded but she didn’t believe her and she thought briefly about Butch and how maybe he was supposed to be the one. She blushed when she thought what he might think of her dancing wild with a gang of strange gypsy boys and this made her suddenly sad and she said she had to sit down when Sonny next came laughing around the fire.

She sat back from the crowd on an upturned crate and lit a cigarette. When people smiled at her she smiled back and she tapped her hand on her leg so as not to seem rude but her mood had changed abruptly.

The drink and the boys and Sonny made her fit back into the place where she should by rights be, a fourteen-year-old girl out having fun, careless and carefree. She wished she could stay cocooned in the party for ever because life and the changing world around was just plain wrong. Nothing fitted as it should, all and everything square pegs in round holes.

There was one boy who kept looking her way and smiling and finally he had courage enough to come over. Ennor told herself that this was the way things were done. The girl was supposed to sit and look and the boy was meant to stand and look and, when he found some nerve down there in his pockets where his hands were stuck, he came over. In truth the long looking made her nervous and, besides, there was a lot more than one boy to look at.

He stood in front of her and asked if he could sit down beside and she nodded and smiled and stubbed out the cigarette she’d been smoking and put it in her pocket for later.

‘Good night.’ He smiled.

Ennor nodded.

‘You a friend of Sonny? She’s my cousin.’

She shrugged and looked him over, noticing the family resemblance. The thick black hair and black-pebble eyes, the type you might pick up off the beach.

‘You want a drink?’ he asked. ‘I can get you one.’

‘I got one, thanks.’ She picked the plastic bottle up off the ground and passed it to him. ‘I don’t mind sharin.’

He took the bottle and drank some down and wiped his chin with the back of his hand where it had spilt.

‘You go to school?’ he asked. ‘You look like the type of girl who goes to school.’

Ennor nodded. She wanted to look like that type of girl.

‘Where’d you go?’

‘Just in town.’

‘You like it?’

Ennor nodded and then shrugged.

‘You?’ she asked.

‘Not really.’ He smiled again. ‘Never did really and now I’m sixteen so that’s the end of that.’

They watched the others dance about the fire and Ennor thought what question to ask next and she folded her arms to stop herself fidgeting.

‘What do you do?’ she asked.

‘This and that.’ He shrugged.

Ennor wanted to ask him his name but the chance had come and gone. She looked out for Sonny but she was leaping about the flames with the rest of the revellers.

‘My name’s Gary by the way.’ The boy extended his hand and she shook it hard like a grown-up and he asked if she wanted to walk a little way from the noise.

‘We can talk easier.’

‘OK.’ She smiled and she hoped this was the way to behave with grown-up boys.

They walked with a little distance put between them and Ennor talked about school and her life like she was reading from a book and in a way this was exactly what she was doing.

She told the boy she was top of her class and that her favourite subject was English because she liked to write and she told him she lived in a big house with both her parents and she knew that she was drunk because she enjoyed spreading the lies way too much.

‘We put up the Christmas tree this mornin.’ She smiled. ‘Put it up in the hall by the grand staircase so guests can see it when they come to the door.’

Gary nodded. ‘You must live in a big house.’

‘Yep, big enough.’

‘That’s nice.’

Ennor nodded and agreed and she thought how nice it really would be to have a mother and a father and a nice big house.

Gary asked her question after question and Ennor answered without the usual reserve because she was making it all up. She jazzed up her replies with flair and bright sparks and the boy’s eyes grew wide with wonder. Maybe he could picture himself someplace in Ennor’s world, smartly dressed and nervous at the dining table on Christmas day, trying to make a good impression and failing. He was no Butch.

Ennor laughed. If the boy could see her father and the trailer, he’d laugh too. He’d probably turn around and leg it without a goodbye or a thank you.

‘What you smilin at?’ he asked.

‘Nothin.’

‘Don’t look like nothin.’

‘Just a funny thought, nothin.’

They had been walking for quite a while and they turned and stood to watch the party unravel below them.

‘We have some crazy parties,’ said the boy.

‘I can see that.’

‘Spose it’s different for your kind. From what you know, I mean.’

Ennor agreed, it was, but not for the reasons he thought.

They stood awkward against the wind and Ennor worried that now was the time they were supposed to do something. ‘Shall we go back?’ she asked.

The boy shrugged. ‘You want to see somethin really cool?’ he asked.

‘Is it far?’

‘Not far at all.’

‘How far?’

‘Just up to that quarry a bit.’ He started to walk and Ennor followed and she laughed when she slipped.

‘Where you takin me?’

‘To the quarry. Come on.’

She followed him up the incline and she wanted to go back but didn’t know how to say it without sounding like the fourteen-year-old girl she was.

‘Here we are,’ he shouted as they followed a path towards the pit.

‘What is it?’ she asked, squinting into the dark.

‘Christmas come early,’ he laughed.

Ennor stood next to the boy and looked towards the crater of rock and the circle of frozen water that flattened there.

‘Summit else, int it? We come up here in summer, just swimmin and muckin bout, but this is summit else, don’t you think?’

Ennor nodded and she stepped forward and tapped her toe on the thick ice.

‘Spect someone like you bin skatin enough times.’

‘Not really. Is it safe?’

‘Hard as rock.’

‘You sure?’

‘Come on. I’ll show you.’

He took her hand and led her out on to the rink and Ennor found herself suddenly skating in a fairy tale of forbidden love and long-losts and happy-ever-afters.

Gary was guiding her and pulling her close and she laughed when he spun her in his arms. She was at a school dance and the world was watching, cheering ‘Good on you’ and ‘Go, girl, go’.

She let go of his hands and swung out on her own, holding her breath to keep the moment from dying. The ice below her dancing feet sparkled like summer sand and she let it carry her up through the cloud and snow and to the moon and back. She grabbed at the stars and put them in her pockets for the warmth and bent low to the ice as she skated to touch the amber orbs beneath her. Eyes just like her own and like her mother’s, looking back and flashing bright like fires in the snow.

‘You’re a natural,’ shouted Gary as he caught up to her. ‘You defo done this before.’

‘Maybe.’ She smiled. Alcohol ran riot in her veins and she was of a mind to do and be a million dazzling things. This was what it was like to let go and she picked up speed and called for the boy to chase her.

‘Hell,’ shouted Sonny from the path divide. ‘What you done with her, Gaz?’

‘Sonny!’ screamed Ennor with delight. ‘Look, I’m ice-skatin.’

‘I can see that.’ Sonny put her hands on her hips and waited for them to come over.

‘Where did you find her, cuz?’ asked Gary. ‘Bit posh to be your friend, int she?’

Sonny shrugged. ‘I guess.’ She looked at Ennor in the half-light and raised her eyebrows. ‘She’s as posh as I don’t know and that accent, hell, it’s like chattin with the Queen.’

‘She’s bin tellin me bout her life.’ He grinned.

‘That’s nice.’ She smiled again.

‘You don’t have to look after me,’ giggled Ennor. ‘I’m fine.’

‘I’ll be goin then, only with your screamin and goin on.’

Sonny turned to go and they followed her. When they got back to the party Gary left them and joined the other boys.

‘He’ll be tellin the others he had you,’ said Sonny.

‘No he won’t, he was all right.’

‘Really?’

‘Really. Why? You jealous?’

‘Of my cousin’s attention?’

‘Of any attention.’

‘Girl,’ Sonny laughed. ‘You got a lot to learn bout life, int you?’

Sonny went to get them food and Ennor sat and lit the half-smoked cigarette and she smoked it down to her fingers and apologised that it was her last to anyone that asked. The singing and dancing stopped and gave way to some kind of worship and all of the gypsies and some of the travellers sat back from the fire or went to the roasting pig that cooked over a small fire pit beyond the stone circle.