Read Online Winter Damage by Natasha Carthew - Free Book Online Page B

worry fall from her and she remembered her manners enough to thank the boy for the fire and the meat and she said she supposed he could stay to eat for one hour tops.
    Rabbit sat at the edge of the tarpaulin and he leant on one knee to worry the fire or turn the meat occasionally and his face was flat and ungiving like a soft-faced doll.
    ‘You got a dad?’ Ennor asked.
    ‘Nope.’
    ‘Got anyone else besides?’
    ‘Not that I know of.’ He pulled his bag into his lap and pulled out the bottle of wine and asked if she had a cup.
    Ennor untied her metal mug from the frame of the rucksack and put it on the floor and let him pour the cloudy liquid to the brim.
    ‘You got parents?’ he asked.
    ‘Bit of both.’
    ‘That don’t sound right.’
    ‘I got a dad but he’s sick and a mother but you know bout that.’
    ‘You think you’ll find her?’
    ‘I’m sure of it. Tomorrow, defo.’
    ‘How’s your dad sick?’
    ‘He’s got cancer in the lungs but he’s sick with drugs.’ She took her baccy tin from her pocket and rolled two cigarettes and passed one to him.
    Rabbit thanked her and he asked her if her father had ever worked and what at.
    ‘Farmer all his life and before probably.’ She nodded and took a too-big gulp of the wine and swallowed it down hard.
    ‘So you got your own farm? Land and everythin?’
    ‘Not no more. Foot-and-mouth was the start of that and now with times tough and breakin and all . . .’
    Rabbit nodded in agreement ‘No jobs. No nothin.’
    ‘Strikes,’ added Ennor.
    ‘No job prospects. What we sposed to do after school?’
    ‘I don’t go no school.’
    ‘Exactly, nor do I.’
    ‘All closed in any case.’
    Ennor finished her drink while Rabbit drank from the bottle and they both nodded into the fire like old souls chewing over the fat.
    ‘Nice gun you got there. Saw it back at the cottage.’
    Ennor reached for the double barrel and passed it to him ‘Don’t worry it int loaded. Only a fool would point a loaded gun.’
    Rabbit smiled as he balanced the rifle in the palms of his hands and he felt the weight of it. ‘Looks heavier than it is. What you killed with it?’
    Ennor shrugged. ‘Tin cans and water bottles mostly but I’m keepin my options open.’
    She laughed and Rabbit joined her and his teeth glowed fluorescent and menacing in the firelight.
    ‘Why you called Rabbit?’ she asked.
    ‘Cus when I was a baby I was always jumpin bout like a bunny.’ He jammed the gun to his shoulder and aimed it at the cooking meat and then at Ennor when she asked him his real name.
    ‘I told you. Rabbit.’ He closed one eye and traced the barrel from her face to her chest and back.
    ‘How old are you?’ he asked.
    ‘Old enough to have a gun.’ She grabbed the barrel and twisted it from his grip. ‘Stop messin.’
    ‘Just askin your age.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Just to ask.’
    ‘I’m fourteen.’
    ‘You look older.’
    ‘Well I int.’
    ‘Got a mouth on you for a fourteen-year-old girly, int you?’
    Ennor finished her second drink. Her head lifted and spun a little way out and away from her and she ignored it and waved her mug at the boy for a top-up.
    The alcohol set a fire in her belly that carried her close to sleeping and she smiled at the meat and at the fire and maybe she even smiled at the boy with a look that was mistook for saying something more than just smiling.
     
    The heat and the wine smelted Ennor’s event recollection into molten mush and she could not fasten one link of the chain to the next. One minute she was sitting with contentment in her lap and the next she was running hard and fast. She ran until she thought her lungs might rip apart and her weak ankle swelled tight and bloodless in her boot and as she fell she palmed a bullet from her pocket, loaded the gun and pointed it into the dark ether but nobody came. She shouted for the boy to go ahead and try it and see what he got but there was no sound but the painful cry of a fox transporting