In the morning, the quilt was tangled around my ankles. I was damp all over, even though the air still felt chill, and had to peel myself from the sheet. I closed my eyes for a moment and wished I’d not come back to Trewarnen. That I’d stayed out on the moors instead, with the Beast to protect me. Being home was bringing too many memories back and I wasn’t sure what to do with them.
Maybe it was the sensation of sleeping in a different bed, or the shock of being home. Maybe the journey, the six hours from city to countryside, had unbalanced me. Or maybe it was the low ceilings, the thick walls that trapped the air inside the house. In my memory, it was large and sprawling. But when I arrived, it felt as if it had shrunk; the ceilings lower than I remembered. During my absence, the house had remade itself into a place where I no longer fit. I hit my head on doorways that I once glided under, stubbed my toe on a fireplace that had spread itself an inch further across the floor.
I felt the farmhouse rejecting my presence, squeezing me out. I didn’t know the history of the house, beyond the fact that the women in our family had always lived in it. My mother and Ysella were both born here. We belonged here, as my grandmother used to say. The only ones who’d ever left were Mum and me, and even then, we returned quick enough. There was no reason for the house not to trust me.
Still in bed, I took my phone from under my pillow and googled ‘Pedri’. The notebook, also under my pillow, was calling to me. I wanted to look at it desperately, but I knew if I saw what was written inside, I would be changed. It was safer to learn what I could about the word Pedri for now.
When I tried to search for the definition of Pedri on my phone, the worst thing happened: nothing. Every time I refreshed my browser, it came up blank. In the corner of my screen, next to three measly bars of signal, was an ‘E’. Which meant there was no 4G, no 3G, no way to connect to the Internet at all. It was going to be a long trip if I had no way to access the outside world. I sent Chris a text, asking him if he wanted to meet me at the pub the next evening, and then I switched my phone off.
I couldn’t understand why Ysella had hidden the notebook under her drawers. Usually with any new project, Ysella would want to share any and all findings with me and my mother – the fact that I had never heard her speak the word Pedri was bizarre. If Ysella hadn’t told me the story of the Pedri, it meant she didn’t want me to know. I knew I should respect that, but I didn’t want to – I couldn’t understand why it would be a secret. The word stuck to me like a tick, so I decided to use the old computer in the living room to try and look it up. Of course, no amount of hope would get broadband to work in the farmhouse, so I had to ask Ysella for the ethernet cable so that I could dial-in to the Internet. She couldn’t understand why I’d possibly want to use the Internet, what questions I could need to ask that she, my mum or the stacks of musty books in her bedroom couldn’t answer. I have flashbacks to a childhood spent using an out-of-date set of Encyclopaedia Britannica to write my geography homework on tectonic plates.
I convinced Ysella to relinquish the cable by telling her that if she didn’t, work might not have me back at all. I laid it on thick, told her I’d have to move back home for good if I missed something important. Before I could finish, she was dumping the dusty cable into my arms.
It was a pointless lie in the end. The Google search gave me nothing at all, beyond a Spanish footballer called Pedro, who used Pedri as a nickname. Unless she’d really pushed the boat out in retirement, I was certain Ysella had no interest in football, Spanish or otherwise. And even if she did, she’d never refer to anyone by their nickname. She’d never agreed to calling me Sprig, even when Mum insisted on it when I was little.
I googled Claud instead, then. She still had a Facebook page, a memorialised one that her father kept up. I had never written anything on it, but I visited it often, just to scroll through the photos of her from when we were together. If you were to look at her page, there would be no evidence that the two of us existed in the same world as each other, apart from one blurry photo. Me, Chris and Claud, sat on the moors, two tents behind us. Chris is sat on a twelve-pack of Bud, his hand over his eyes, shielding himself from the sun. I’m lying down, propped up on my elbows. My hair is long, wild in the small bit of breeze we had that day. Claud is alongside me, her head in my lap. She’s wearing sunglasses. There are freckles on her shoulders. You can’t see them in the photo, but I know that they’re there. She was so thin then. Already. That day was the last good day, the last pure afternoon before it all went to shit. I think I would give away whatever future I have to be back there again.
Before I switched the computer off, I checked one last thing. Is it normal to think you see someone after they die I typed, feeling ridiculous. I scrolled past results about open caskets and landed on a page about visitations. Feeling a ghostly presence, hearing voices, white feathers. It all felt too airy-fairy for me. When Claud died, I saw no signs. There were no visiting birds on my windowsill or final messages in my dreams. I didn’t have a sudden sense that she had left, like people so often talk about. I knew that she was gone through text messages and phone calls. Nothing ghostly or unusual happened to me in the city, the only thing that haunted me was grief.
I closed the page I had been reading. I had thought, earlier, that I had seen Claud, her coat, walking through that gorse. But I wasn’t seeing a ghost; I was seeing a memory. Back home, on the moor, I was too close to what had happened, and my imagination was in overdrive, that was all. That was all it could be.
I was in Manchester when I found out Claud was gone, and I couldn’t face it at first. I couldn’t face anything. The city felt too full for my grief – there wasn’t room. Each night of that first week after it happened, I would pull a hoody on over my pyjamas, slip out of my shared house in Fallowfield and into the shed in the yard.
The shed was nothing but a dumping ground for the landlady’s belongings. Things she left for her underpaid, overcharged tenants to deal with, rather than move to her own five-bedroom house, where everything was owned by her and there were no Ikea utensils in the kitchen. Tins of used paint, the expensive type with existential names like Sulking Room Pink and Borrowed Light, abandoned there after her latest renovation project. Colours too rich to grace the walls of the rented accommodation. The room I had been renting was painted in a dull cream I named Possibly Damp Magnolia.
Each night, I tucked myself away in there and smoked, directing my ash onto my landlady’s belongings, angry at the £680 I paid in rent for a room with an MDF wardrobe, angry that I couldn’t smoke on the doorstep because my housemates didn’t like it, angry that Claud was dead and I was 300 miles away.
I wanted to set the shed on fire or scream or smash my head against the old wooden walls with all my might, but I never felt mighty. Part of me, the part that had always self-aggrandised, had hoped I could be the type of person to make a Big Stand. I thought all it would take was something big, and then I would finally stand up and take action. I wanted people to know who we were to each other, what our relationship meant, but now she was gone, and there was no big love story for me to declare. When she died, she still hadn’t been ready for people to know that we were in love – or, at least, that I was in love with her – and to tell anyone that would be betraying her trust. Still, I couldn’t help but think of how disappointed she’d be that our story had ended this way. Her dead and me hiding in a shed, too fearful to do anything good.
I was there because of the tightness of it, the shed. When I sat myself down in the furthest corner, the boxes towered high on either side of me, and I couldn’t stretch my legs without dragging an old side table out the way first. When I squeezed into that gap, forcing myself to fold so my knees were under my chin and my shoulders were hunched by my ears, I felt safe, sheltered.
Later, I went back into the village. Unlike my walk when I arrived, this was a walk of convenience, and therefore dreadful and long. I had been trying to make toast in the kitchen, but the bread was fetid and blue. I’d pulled it right from the back of the bag – the crust tended to stave the mould off for longer – but there was nothing to save.
‘Just scrape it off,’ Mum said.
I turned the slice over in my hand. It was sticky. ‘I’m OK. I’ll walk to the shop, I think.’
‘Walk? All that way?’
‘Unless you want to drive me?’
‘Oh no, no I mustn’t.’
‘Right.’ I looked for butter but there was only the lard that Ysella had been using, flecked through with hints of silver from the fish skin. ‘I’ll grab some butter too.’
Me and Claud would walk this route often as teenagers. She lived just outside of the village with her dad, who rented an annex on the edge of a larger farm after his divorce. Her dad would send her into the village to the shop, and I would meet her to walk the three miles home. She would share her observations, and I would give her whatever gifts I could, little shells or stones, interesting flowers I’d found in the hedges. Claud was a magpie girl, a collector. Before her parents divorced, her mum kept a spotless house, she told me. Empty and devoid of anything apart from Claud. At the time, I thought she was handling the abandonment of her mother well. She used to joke about how much freedom she gained from not being loved, and I would laugh, call her a lucky bitch and tell her all about how my mum had thrown all the cereal out of our house that week because she didn’t trust fortified wheat.
Still, I met her whenever she asked. Just so she would know she was loved, after all.
‘I saw your aunt yesterday, walking along with used poo bags hanging off her fingers.’ Claud said.
‘Sounds about right.’
‘She doesn’t have a dog though, does she?’
‘No, but she loves to get involved. She hooks them out of trees.’
‘Trees!’
‘Yeah, I don’t know who decides to go through the whole process of watching their dog shit, picking it up, tying a little knot in the bag, and then decides just to fuck it off up a tree.’
‘Tourists or Tories?’
‘Hmm. Tories. Waiting for someone else to clear up for them.’
‘That’s it. What’ve you got me then?’
‘OK, so, the middle of a cinnamon bun—’
‘The nipple!’
‘—right, the nipple of the cinnamon bun, and one of these stones.’ I pulled a stone threaded with leather from my pocket. ‘I found it on the moors. I made it a necklace.’
She thanked me and dropped the stone into the murky depths of her coat pocket, along with every other charm I gave her. We didn’t speak of it again. Claud would often beg for attention or gifts, but once presented with either, she became shy and non-committal.
We were never a gifting family. It’s not easy without means, and a house like Trewarnen sucks the meat off your bones with its need of fixer-upping and its maintenance costs. On birthdays, my aunt would write me stories, page after page until her hand cramped. And my mother knit me scarves – or rather, one long, loose scarf, that she gifted and retrieved throughout my youth, forever purling away at it.
When it came to showing Claud how I felt, I searched for the little I had to give, saving my coins, and using my hands to catch what I could for her.
*
When I arrived at the post office, there were two women behind the counter. One was local, melded to her stool. I recognised her from years before. Joan. Her hair was grey, cropped close to her skull. The other woman was clearly an emmet, volunteering. She was wearing a Breton top, with a bright scarf tied at a horribly jaunty angle around her neck.
‘Don’t you look different?’ said Breton top, looking me up and down. She’d obviously been around longer than I realised. This was exactly what I’d wanted to avoid.
‘She does ’n all.’ Joan replied. ‘Your hair’s all gone,’ she turned to the other woman and muttered, not quietly enough, ‘mind you, her mum was always a queer one. And her nan.’
‘Pardon?’ I pushed the bread further across the counter, nudging it closer to the long fingernails of the one closest to the counter.
‘Oh, not your type of queer, maid. Odd, s’all.’
‘Always a funny bunch up there, but I’ve never had no trouble with any of your lot, no matter what the others say,’ said Breton top.
‘Who says what?’ I asked.
‘All talk, innum,’ Joan said, ‘s’pose, trouble follows this one round, you know. Remember May Day?’
I felt a prickle in the back of my knee. I didn’t nod or shake my head; I just pushed my change across the counter.
‘Proper mess,’ Joan tsked. ‘Bread’ll be 80p. Butter’s £1.50. That boy were a state after. Stayed friends though, didn’t you?’ She looked at the money I’d put on the counter. ‘Eighty pence and £1.50, then.’
Breton top picked up the bread and shoved it into a wrinkled Tesco bag, and then turned the butter over in her hands. ‘I’d never eat this fake stuff. Bloody awful.’
I tapped on the glass of the pastry counter. ‘I’ll take a Chelsea bun too.’
Outside, I dropped my bag on the floor and tried to roll myself a cigarette. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. The paper stuck to my fingers, tearing the Rizla the first attempt, and the second. My eyes were welling up in frustration, but I knew I couldn’t let myself be seen crying in the village. If anyone saw me, they’d view it as an admission of guilt. I knew I couldn’t be held responsible for someone’s suicide, but that didn’t stop other people from believing I was. And whenever I confronted my own memories of Claud, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it had been my fault, somehow.
I was fumbling with my third attempt at a cigarette when Joan appeared beside me, pack of straights in hand.
‘After a fag?’
Begrudging, but also pathetically grateful, I took one and thanked her. My hand shook slightly as I lit it. I picked my bag back up and started to walk, but then she called after me.
‘You’re up at that posh uni, aren’t you? Up country, ain’t it? Over the bridge?’
I’d been so close to leaving. ‘Yeah, by quite a bit.’
‘Good for you, to get away. Living up on those moors can send a woman batty.’
‘Right.’
‘Mind, did your aunt go in for that hunt last night?’
This again. A hunt was no big deal around here – God knows, the people here killed foxes like they had a personal vendetta, regardless of the ban. But that was all pomp and showmanship, horses and red jackets and bloodthirsty braying. It wasn’t a group of people on foot in the night. This had to be something else.
‘No. No, she was in, why?’
‘Funny that. They didn’t catch nothing.’
‘What were they after?’ She looked at me blankly, not responding. I tried again. ‘Couldn’t be foxes, not at that time of night. Deer?’
She shook her head and continued to shake it with every suggestion I made.
‘Badgers? Rabbits? Hares? Escaped circus animals?’ I got more ridiculous, reasoning she might snap and tell me what it was if I bombarded her enough, ‘the Loch Ness monster? Big cats? The Beast?’ She glared at me when I said the Beast.
Joan was one of the locals who swore down she’d spotted the Beast. To the people who lived around here, the Beast of Bodmin was a fact of life, not a piece of folklore. It was one of few things that connected my grandmother to the villagers. Many times, Joan saw it, tucked behind a hedge, our hedge, just outside Trewarnen. She’d been convinced the hedge was protecting it, allowing it to blend in, so no one who meant it harm could catch it. Once, when I was thirteen, we were dragged out of the farmhouse by Joan herself, out of breath and pink-cheeked. She took my aunt by the wrist and pulled her across the yard, ‘You’ve got to see it, Ysella, I think your ma was right, over by the hedge, clear as day.’
Of course, when we got there, there was nothing to be seen, apart from the crumbling Cornish hedging that looped around part of our land. It didn’t look like a usual hedge. It was covered, almost haphazardly, with different sized granite stones on either side, like a wall. But the centre was filled with earth, the top covered in scrub and grass, and in between the stones, bits of moss and small flowers that looked like daisies peeked out. When Ysella found no crouching big cat outside, Joan seemed upset. She slumped against the hedge, rubbing her palms against her thighs.
The whole thing had felt like the ramblings of a gullible woman, and I had enough of that in my own family. I didn’t want to entertain the superstitions of every person in the village too. It was only now that I began to wonder why Joan’s sightings were always on our land. What was it about Trewarnen that shook her up enough to see things? Was it how old it was? Or did the dilapidation and the way it stood alone make her feel uneasy, the way it sometimes made me? Perhaps it was nothing like that, and she was just a lonely woman who knew she’d have an audience in my aunt and grandmother.
Outside the village shop, I suddenly felt cruel for the way I had been taunting her. I softened my tone.
‘Will you just tell me? Why did you ask if you weren’t going to say?’
‘I was curious, maid.’
‘Well so am I!’ I’d had enough of people avoiding my questions. ‘What were they hunting, Joan? What’s so important that you’d follow me out here asking about it? The way you’re acting it’s like a group of you tried to end some emmets last night. Was that it, a bit of people hunting?’
‘Course it wasn’t.’ She sighed.
‘Ghosts? Smugglers from Jamaica Inn? Have we gone back a couple hundred years?’
‘Something like that.’ She looked at her feet, her old leather sandals, her pale toes.
‘What?’ I waited for her to continue, but all she did was squish the end of her cigarette under her shoe and rub her hands on her jeans.
‘I’ve got to get back to work, girl. I can’t gab out here all day. Tell your aunt I’m thinking of her.’
I grabbed hold of the door so she couldn’t shut it. I couldn’t let her go until I knew something. ‘You don’t know what a pedri is, do you?’
Joan had one foot in the shop. She didn’t let go of the door, and nor did I. I saw her grip change. It faltered.
‘What’re you asking that for, maid?’
Why was I asking? I couldn’t be sure. Something had felt wrong since I’d come down from the city. Trewarnen felt off. Unhomely. I was out of sorts, and it wasn’t just grief. There was something else going on. Joan was about ten years older than Ysella, which meant she’d known my grandmother as well as my aunt and mother. It didn’t seem like too much of a leap that she’d know something about what Ysella was researching. Once I said it aloud though, I felt anxious. I thought Joan would’ve laughed at me, accused me of making up words, asked if it was something I’d picked up from ‘up North’. But she’d seemed rattled. Suddenly, it didn’t feel like a stupid question. It felt like an important one.
I fiddled with my cigarette, ashing it way more aggressively than I needed to. The cherry ripped off the end and floated down to the floor, fizzing out of the ground. Me and Joan both watched it go out before I spoke. I tried to sound nonchalant, but my voice hitched part way through, betraying my nervousness.
‘Just curious. Heard the word and wanted to know the meaning.’
Joan shook her head and offered me another cigarette. This time she didn’t take one herself. ‘I think you’d be best leaving that well alone until you’re back up country. Bigger folks than you have been trying to work that one out and not found answers. Shame you can’t ask that grandma of yours.’
Had Esolyn known what the Pedri was? It wasn’t the reaction I was expecting. I thought she’d tell me it was a stupid ghost story, but she spoke about it like it was a conspiracy. ‘What’s Esolyn got to do with it?’
‘Esolyn, is it? Well, haven’t you got some airs and graces now you’ve been off to the city,’ Joan was back to her old self. ‘Imagine, calling your own grandma by her first name. That probably comes from your mam, don’t it? Couldn’t be me. I would’ve gotten a slap round the head if I called my mam her Christian name. Though that would’ve done your one some good, by the sounds of it.’
‘What?’ I’d had enough. There was no way she was going to tell me anything. She’d seemed worried before, when I was asking about the hunt, but now she was defensive, rude. She didn’t want me to ask her about the Pedri. The sensation that I was being lied to by omission by those around me strengthened.
‘A good slap would’ve sorted your mam out a long time ago and then nobody would’ve been in this mess. Walking round asking such stupid questions,’ she tuts, ‘young ones don’t even know they’re born.’
‘Oh, fuck off, Joan,’ I said, walking away before she had a chance to respond. I heard another tut and the slam of the shop door. I’d have to get Ysella to give me a lift into town the next time we needed bread.