She wasn’t a sickly child, but when Ada did get ill it was sudden and forceful. And it was so much worse when she was younger – when she was three, or four, or five, and she was shivering and refusing to drink and her feet had gone so clammy that she left small, damp footprints across the kitchen floor.
This is how it went: first there would be a tinge of red in the corner of her left eye. Then she would start rubbing her throat, certain that there was something stuck in there. After that, a rattly cough, shivering that wouldn’t stop, and then she would go upstairs and lie down in the dark, saying, no lights, no lights, they hurt my eyes.
Pearl would stand by the bed and listen to the way Ada was breathing. Was it shallower? More laboured? But it was just a cold for God’s sake, maybe the flu at worst. It happened to everyone. She would make hot-water bottles and find the cough mixture in the bathroom. Dip her finger in and taste some of the purple syrup herself. Straighten the rucked-up sheets. Feel Ada’s head, which would be boiling one minute and chilled the next. ‘It’s just a cold,’ she would tell her. Hoping that Ada would suddenly sneeze and blow her nose like anyone else, rather than lying there with a bruised and grey-looking face, her legs pedalling restlessly against the bed.
She always stayed in Ada’s room the first few nights. Dragging in that wretched camp bed she had bought especially, lying stiffly, not sleeping. Trying to decide what was best to do. Drive out and get someone, or wait it out? When Ada was three, Pearl had packed her into the car and driven to the doctor’s in town. It had been late afternoon and dark. The journey had made Ada sick and, when they got there, the doctor said it was a cold, just a normal cold, and it would have been better to keep her warm in bed. A patronising sod of a man, if Pearl remembered correctly. As if he knew what it was like to be stuck out here alone, listening to Ada shrieking about her throat and legs. Seemed only right when Ada threw up on his desk, bits of slushy liquid splashing over his expensive pens.
But if only she could go back now and tell herself, lying there in the dark, that the fever would break, that it always broke in the end. Spare herself those long hours, the hollow, aching feeling in her chest, wondering why there was no one that she could call on for help. No parents from the school that she could ring up – how had it got to that stage? A few stilted conversations that she had let dry up, a few invitations that she had declined. She’d stopped joining them at the gate after a toddler a woman was holding had pointed at her and shouted: old! Why is she so old? But sometimes, half asleep, her imagination conjured up a knock on the door and she would stumble out of bed to answer it, opening up to the rain and the wind.
By the second day, Ada would be delirious. Pearl would go upstairs to check on her and find her sitting rigidly upright, pointing at the wall. ‘Look at those bright lights,’ she would say. Pointing at a dim, grey wall. ‘Look at the way they’re moving.’ Or she would whirl her arms in front of her shouting, bats, bats! Pearl would hold Ada’s arms down, trying to stop her plucking invisible bats out of her hair. When she was five, she fell out of bed trying to reach a rope bridge she’d seen swinging across the room. When she was six, she’d spread her arms wide and bowed to the chair in the corner, saying, welcome to my country, her sweaty hair sticking to her forehead. And Pearl had snorted with laughter, then felt so awful that she’d spent an hour rubbing Ada’s back, right between the shoulder blades, to help her get to sleep.
It always seemed to happen at the worst possible time. Just when the dragonflies were hatching on the river; those few precious days. Or when there was a rare hoarfrost in the woods. Or when she had finally been given enough work to tide them over and she needed to be at her desk all day and all evening, her back aching, her fingers getting calloused, the sickly smell of oil and polish on them, looking forward to the time when she didn’t have to do it any more, when there was enough money for her to turn the work away.
Countless times it happened. And the worst time – that week in March when Ada was eight and the daffodils and garlic were just starting to push up. Luke had come over. They didn’t know each other very well, just enough to say hello over the years, maybe stop if they passed each other on the road. She had fixed one of his watches – he’d come over to pick it up and ended up staying the whole morning. Offered to look over the car once or twice when it was playing up. But that day, when she answered the door, he seemed different: dressed even smarter than usual, the glint of cufflinks, his hands shaking. She’d thought someone had died. Remembered staring at his broken nose, from where a door on a boat had crashed open in the wind. But he’d come to ask her over for dinner. He’d said it so quietly she had to ask him to speak up. Next weekend, Saturday, he said loudly. Was she allergic to anything in particular? And she had said, limes, she was allergic to limes, but only the skin, not the juice, if he wanted to use the juice then that was OK with her.
She got ready carefully. Put on a brown dress that she had bought in a sale. Wrapped around some beads. Had some trouble rolling on thin tights and when they were finally on they felt strange after her loose jeans. And her smart shoes were hard and unfamiliar, her make-up had dried to crusts in the pots. She brushed her hair for a long time and pinned it up, enjoying all the complicated twists and flicks. Then she went downstairs to find Ada, explain to her again that she would only be gone for two hours, that she would lock the door, that Luke’s phone number was on the table. But Ada was upstairs in bed, coughing, shivering, rubbing her throat, saying she had seen a horse galloping through the house.
Pearl had taken off her beads and peeled off the dress, a ridiculous thing anyway, made her look like she was trying too hard. And the price tag had been dangling down her back the whole time. She stood by the phone for ten minutes before dialling Luke’s number. Her hands shaking. She told Luke she wouldn’t be able to make it after all, then waited for him to say, come next week instead, but he didn’t, and she couldn’t bring herself to suggest it either. Neither of them had mentioned it again.
Pearl put the phone down, put her head in her hands and wept, making sure she kept it short and quiet. When she went back upstairs, she glimpsed Ada running into her room from the landing, jumping to avoid the sharp floorboard, not shivering, not coughing, then diving under the covers. But when Pearl came in, she hacked and held her head and groaned the deepest, most heart-rending groan, it seemed almost impossible that she could have made it up.
Now, Pearl stood next to Ada and watched her sleeping. Not a pretty picture: her nose red and swollen, her top lip chapped, grey cheeks. But sleeping quietly in Pearl’s old bed. Pearl remembered the long nights alone in that bed, how cold the sheets would get overnight, the sound of the rain against the windows, the wind rattling. Sometimes, when Ada was small, she would come in and climb under the covers and ask things like: why is the sky so high up? Why do we have to sleep? What are all the different ways people die?
‘I don’t know,’ Pearl would say. ‘I don’t know.’
Outside, the snow was getting deeper and still falling. There was ice in the corners of the windows and the corners of Pearl’s eyes. Snow building up under her tongue. She rolled it round and round. Felt each piece of snow as it landed and melted on the river, which was cold and stunned, running slower than usual, stiffening like a joint.
She made her way through the house, leaving piles of snow and ice behind her as she went. She was stiff and slow but her footsteps were steadier, more solid; she could see where she was going now that her eyes weren’t murky and streaming. No buckling bones, no persistent feeling of being dragged at. No stumbling, nothing jostling. No sound of the river roaring, but rather, the faint ping of growing ice. Her toes crunched.
Down the stairs, through the hall and down into the study, where she had always retreated to. Someone had tidied away the photos she had spilled. She stayed by the bottom step and didn’t go in any further. The room was much smaller than she remembered. And the curtains that sickly orange colour; had she chosen them? She couldn’t remember. If all the time she’d spent here was calculated, how much would it have been? This one little room, out of anywhere in the whole world.
Something caught her eye on the shelf. The camera the little one had been using. She went over to it. Her old camera, and there were the others on the shelves. The one with the dodgy lens, the one she had dropped and dented. She ran her hands over them. Ice crept onto the lenses and powdery snow clung to the straps.
But how had it happened, this fascination with cameras? When had she become someone whose first thought on a stormy day was to go out and take a picture? Pearl thought back over it. There was no sudden decision, no sudden urge, as far as she could tell. She had just found a camera. Yes, that was it – Ada had been ill and finally fallen asleep one afternoon. Pearl couldn’t leave the house, but she couldn’t settle; couldn’t concentrate on work, couldn’t concentrate on any book. So she’d come into this room and looked through her old boxes of stuff. All the things she’d never bothered to sort out: folders and files and crappy ornaments. A set of old cutlery. And a camera that she’d hardly ever used before. No idea why she even had it.
She’d taken it out of the box and looked at it, unclipped the cap and fiddled around with the dials, just about worked out how to adjust the focus. She went over to the window, opened it as wide as it would go and leaned out. Then aimed at a twig covered in lichen, pressed the button and the camera made a lovely whirring sound. She aimed again, focusing on something blue up in a tree which she thought might be a kingfisher but actually turned out to be a bag snagged on a branch. Just those two shots, and then she’d closed the window and put the camera away. But the next day there was a rainbow and she thought she might as well take a picture of that. And the next day a fish jaw had washed up on the shingles and it looked like a mouse-trap. And the day after that, there was a dipper on the rocks and she didn’t have the camera so she’d run all the way back up to the house to get it.
Pearl picked the camera up, fumbled it, then cradled it in her stiff hands. It fitted so particularly in her palms: the shallow grooves down each side, the cool plastic, the weight of it. Although not weighty enough. There was no film inside. She found one in a drawer and carefully fitted it in. Now she could sense the chemical tang in the film, feel the light bouncing off every surface. She lifted the camera up and looked through it. The lens smudged with ice. She rubbed it off and looked again. Saw snow falling wherever she aimed.
She lowered the camera and blinked. Outside the window, the little one was crouched down in the snow. Her face all creased up and frowning as she studied something on the ground. For a second, Pearl thought it was Ada. The same expression, the same intense concentration. Bits of hair flying out in the wind, red cheeks. Pearl stepped closer to the window. She looked tiny out there, crouched in the snow. A small, dark dot. How lonely. How lonely it must have been for Ada out here, left behind in the house while Pearl went out looking for her dragonflies and her hoarfrosts.
The snowflakes were falling faster now, whirling in curved patterns, like flocks of knot showing their pale bellies. As Pearl stood by the window, memories started coming in flurries. Broken glass; someone beckoning her out into the river; a dent in the side of the car. Memories drifting and piling up quietly, like letters on the doormat of an empty house.
She raised the camera again, her arms numb and stiff, her joints grating over ice. She aimed the camera and moved her finger over the button, tried to push it down, summoning up the force of the water, how it snapped sticks and forced reeds to bow their heads. Her finger was on the button and she aimed at the little one and she pressed it.