Weathering by Lucy Wood Read Free Book Online Page A

easy,’ Ada told her. She looked up once more. The horrible sensation that everything was tipping forwards. And she wasn’t even on the bloody ladder yet.
    The first rungs bounced under her feet. Ten steps up she realised she’d forgotten to ask Pepper to hold it steady. Went back down slowly and showed her how to grip the sides.
    Her heart clanged like the rungs. She paused, then kept going. Felt the ladder tilt, looked down and saw Pepper staring off to one side, only one hand on the ladder. ‘Oi,’ Ada shouted. ‘Concentrate on this.’ Add Pepper if you want to plummet to your death.
    The wind seemed to pick up as she went higher, dragging her hair across her eyes. She made the mistake of looking down again. God it was high and the concrete yard glared below. The trees a swathe of dusky orange, like dim lanterns.
    At the top, she had to lean forward to see into the chimney, hands scrabbling against the roof. There were a lot of tiles missing; something else to add to the list which kept growing and growing. There was a mass of sticks clogging the chimney. She tried to pull one out but tipped, swung sideways, somehow grabbed the ladder. Pepper called something, her voice a thin waver. But Ada couldn’t look down. She clung hard to the ladder, mouth dry, swaying like a pendulum on a broken clock.
    The ladder shook. ‘Can you put your right foot down a step?’ a woman’s voice called up.
    Ada groped with her foot, but her leg stretched down and down without hitting a rung. ‘I can’t,’ she said.
    The rungs clunked. ‘Here,’ the woman said. A hand gripped Ada’s ankle and guided it onto the rung below. ‘Now the other foot, OK?’
    They went down slowly, rung by rung. And then there was the bottom. Beautiful solid ground. Pepper desperate to tell her, the little git, that she’d seen the cat again; it had run right past the ladder and round the back of the house.
    The woman took the ladder down and folded it. ‘Where does this go?’ she asked.
    ‘I’ll take it,’ Ada said, but Judy – she had realised halfway down that it was Judy – carried it back to the shed herself.
    ‘There’s this,’ Pepper said, holding out a white dish. She shoved it into Ada’s hands, stared at Judy for a moment, who shifted and pushed at her sleeves, then ran off in the direction she’d said the cat had gone.
    ‘I brought you something,’ Judy said. She watched Pepper running. ‘It’s nothing much, leftovers, you don’t have to eat it or anything.’ Her russet hair was cut short and clumpy. A kitchen-scissor job. Red cheeks, her eyes squinting even though it wasn’t bright. Her body stockier, something taut in her folded arms. The colours were all washed out of her clothes, mended seams on her jeans. Wellies with an ankle line of mud.
    ‘Up there,’ Ada said, pointing to the roof. ‘I’m sure I would have been able to, if you hadn’t come.’
    Judy pushed her hair out of her eyes. Which had almost rolled. ‘I could use a cup,’ she said.
     
    Judy’s boots left slices of mud along the floor. Ada put the kettle on. Still the last residue of panic flitting around her body. She made a pot of tea and got out cups. A gaudy purple one for herself and gold for Judy. All her mother’s things either tacky or practical, no middle ground between a garden fork and a plastic chandelier. She heaped two sugars into Judy’s.
    ‘I cut down on sugar,’ Judy said. ‘For the teeth.’
    Ada nodded. She tipped the cup away and poured another. The tea bags rose up in the pot and then sank.
    Judy gulped scalding tea and poured more. The gold cup held carefully in chapped hands. ‘I heard you were back,’ she said.
    Ada looked around the squalid kitchen. She pushed a pile of catalogues out of Judy’s way – outdoor clothes: gloves with leather pads, cheap tweed like shiny granite. ‘Just until this place is sorted out,’ she said. She stood at the edge of the table. ‘How long have you been back?’ There had been a