Read by Carrie Cohen
Red is quite the storyteller.
‘There was a deafening roar as it charged out of the undergrowth, coming right at me, straight for my pale throat ...’
She’s told this same story to locals and tourists alike over the years – while Apple gurgled in a basket at her feet; while Apple toddled in between the chairs and legs of audience members who pinched her cheeks; while Apple played hide and seek with her own shadow. Red tells it, now, beside the inn’s glowing fireplace, while Apple serves drinks behind the bar.
‘… eyes black, teeth bared, spittle dripping from its hairy chin …’
She takes a moment to look into the eyes of each audience member – tonight there are four; a family passing through.
‘We were face to face …’
She indicates the distance.
She has a flair for discerning the precise moment when she should lower her voice, drop her gaze, or slam her palm down on the table beside her, as she does now. Her listeners gasp, and she leans towards them, and they to her, as her story’s climax arrives.
‘I didn't hesitate – I dropped the apple pie, pulled the knife from my belt, and threw myself at the hideous beast!’
The essence of the story hasn’t changed over time, but Red has; she’s wider, greyer, and by the end of the night, she’ll be slurring her words.
Red’s finished.
She goes over to collect her double whisky, straight up.
Apple wipes the bar.
Red downs the whisky.
Apple pours another.
Red peers into her glass and says, ‘She’s dead.’
‘I know. The wolf ate her.’
‘No.’ She swirls her drink. ‘Not my grandma. Yours.’
*
Apple is eight. Her mother shows up late to collect her from school. It’s not a one-off. The teacher has a word with her. Apple feels embarrassed. Then confused. Why is she embarrassed? It isn’t her fault.
The next day, her mother arrives on time.
The day after, she doesn’t.
‘Why can’t I walk home by myself?’ Apple asks the teacher.
She asks her mother the same question.
Both say, ‘No.’
Apple expresses herself through pictures drawn with black, brown, and dark red wax crayons. Her mother never puts them on the fridge door. The pictures are of stick-men with animal heads. Later, when she remembers the pictures, she won’t remember this detail.
*
Apple is twelve. She won’t invite friends around to the house any more. She knows burnt toast and lukewarm soup isn’t much of a meal. She knows her mother will tell her friends about wolves in forests. She knows it will end in an argument. They’re too old for those kinds of stories. They’ve heard them all before. They want pizza, not soup.
She sticks her art on the fridge herself. Her mother doesn’t notice, even though it eventually covers the entire door; the paper flutters and crunches whenever one of them opens it.
She dreams of running away.
*
Apple is sixteen. She does her homework sitting at the bar. She has to put Red to bed most nights. Afterwards, she goes back downstairs and tidies up. Sometimes, she’ll drop a glass on the floor instead of washing it. It will smash, and she will feel better. Briefly.
Red’s stories are sometimes more elaborate.
‘I have a PhD,’ Red says to a man at the bar who, with his suit and glasses, looks like a doctor.
‘I used to live in Japan,’ she says to a Chinese tourist.
‘I own a cabin in the Lakes,’ she says to Apple.
But she always returns to her favourite content.
‘Wolf or no wolf; I was determined to walk that lonely path through the forest to grandma’s house,’ she says to the bank manager.
‘Black trees stretched their naked limbs into the dark, icy air. The ground was covered in fresh snow; a blanket of silence smothering the forest, masking the wolf’s footfalls,’ she says to the butcher.
‘Always,’ she says to the old lady who lives across the street. ‘Always carry a knife, and you’ll never need to worry about wolves.’
Apple isn’t embarrassed any more, just tired. She wonders why Red doesn’t understand that everyone can smell her bullshit.
Red becomes belligerent and falls out with customers all the time. She never remembers it the next day, but the customers do. Luckily, theirs is the only pub for miles.
She doesn’t remember her conversations with Apple, either.
‘You remind me of him,’ Red says, poking a finger in Apple’s direction. ‘The eyes,’ she says, shuddering.
One night, before passing out, she says, ‘Sometimes, you’re so like him, it scares me.’
Apple isn’t sure what any of this means. She assumes it’s about her father, whom she’s never met. She has brown eyes, but so does her mother. Is her father’s hair the same as hers? Maybe they like the same foods, or music, or movies; have the same bad habits. She wants to know, but also, she doesn’t want to know.
She begins to plot her escape.
*
Apple is seventeen. She goes to a party, and her first ever boyfriend gets drunk and hits her. She hits him back. Then she dumps him. It’s the only thing she and Red have ever agreed on. Or they would, if Red knew.
One day, Red nearly burns the house down because she leaves a pot boiling on the stove next to a dishcloth then passes out on the sofa.
Apple decides not to apply for university. It’s probably better if she stays at home. Everybody safe.
*
They set off driving along the road through the forest that leads to Red’s hometown. Apple didn’t know her grandma, and doesn’t know any of Red’s remaining family, but Red wants to attend the wake.
Apple yawns and inspects her teeth in the visor mirror.
Red frowns.
Apple cracks her knuckles.
Red sighs.
Apple fiddles with the radio.
Red tuts.
Apple turns off the radio.
They drive in silence for an hour.
They’re trapped in the car; they may as well have a conversation.
‘Why don’t you tell me about grandma?’ Apple says.
A pause.
Red’s lips are pursed, her head tilted.
‘The wolf had already killed twelve people. But it hadn't just killed them, it had torn them to pieces, leaving stumps of bone, lumps of viscera, matted hair, and clothing, strewn about the fo–’
‘–No. Tell me about grandma.’
Another pause.
‘Fresh snow obscured the start of the path, but I had to get to grandma’s hou–’
Apple slams her hand down, almost hitting the horn.
Red turns away, mumbling, and the silver flask comes out of her handbag.
Apple’s knuckles are white as she grips the steering wheel.
*
It’s a long journey.
They stop twice: at a roadside café for tea and sandwiches, and at a petrol station for a toilet break. When they arrive in Red’s hometown, which is actually a small city, it’s late afternoon. It’s autumn. Already, the light is fading. Drizzle hangs in the air. People scurry along the pavements like agitated animals, hiding under hoods or umbrellas. Dark buildings tower above, seeming to sway like tall trees in the wind. Apple is unsure which street to take. There are traffic lights and stop signs everywhere. She bristles and snaps at Red’s suggestions. She imagines this is what the tourists experience when they get lost in the forest on their hikes.
Red has tricked her. The burial was held the day before. Red says she didn’t want to attend it and see all those people, people she doesn’t know any more, people she never really knew; she just wants to go to the cemetery, to pay her respects in private. But first, they need to buy something.
She directs Apple, which means driving in circles until they come across a carpark that Red claims was their destination all along.
They continue on foot.
‘It’s around here somewhere,’ says Red.
They need to find a bakery from her childhood. She wants to buy an apple pie. Deep, shortcrust, full of Bramley apples, sprinkled with cinnamon sugar, browned on top. An offering for the dead woman. She says it’s a family tradition. Apple has never heard of this tradition before. She isn’t sure if they’re meant to leave the pie by the graveside, or sit there and eat it. She’s never much cared for apple pie.
‘This looks familiar,’ says Red.
Apple rolls her eyes. Every street looks the same to her. It’s cold and she’s tired. She hasn’t spent this much time with Red, just the two of them, ever. Usually, when they’re at the bar, they’re at opposite ends of the room.
‘Not much further,’ says Red.
They keep walking.
Red turns into the dark, narrow mouth of an alley. Scaffolding and pipes jut out on both sides. Apple follows her because, what’s she meant to do? She kicks a Coke can by accident.
‘Gimme your money,’ a voice growls in Apple’s ear.
He grips her elbow.
Presses his body against hers.
She imagines that the hot breath on her neck stinks of rotting leaves, but she can’t smell it with her back to him.
For some reason, she envisages an apple pie tumbling through the air and splattering on the ground, upside down.
Something inside her takes over. Apple’s so quick he doesn’t react – she reaches into her handbag, spins around, presses the knife to his throat. The blade glints. She wonders if it feels cold to him. If he’s aware how sharp it is. If it’s broken his skin, so when she removes it, there’ll be a little trickle of blood creeping down his neck towards his collarbone.
She switches her focus from the knife to his face. A teenager. Patchy facial hair that took his whole life to grow. An oily nose. Dark eyes, wide open.
She’s kept the knife in her bag for as long as she can remember, but never used it before.
The knife hovers.
Which way to go?
She’s pissed off. Powerful. Dangerous. She wants to hold on to that a little longer.
He’s the same height as her. Only a street kid. He doesn’t seem to have a weapon; just a loser after some pocket change.
‘Get the fuck out of here,’ she says, withdrawing her hand. He bolts into the shadows. She reckons he’s probably pissed himself in terror, and feels a sense of satisfaction.
Apple remembers Red, and turns to her. Red’s looking, not at Apple, but up at the sky. It’s like she isn’t even aware of what’s just happened.
‘Mum?’ Apple says, halfway between anger and concern.
‘She’d sent me out to Grandma’s. It was an alley like this,’ Red says. ‘There was a knife under the apple pie. After he’d finished with me, I managed to reach it. His blood ran thick. It pooled in the snow. I got him right in the heart, first try.’
They stand facing each other for a few moments; two dancers unsure who’s meant to be leading.
Apple steps towards Red.
Red reaches for Apple, touching her cheek with a hand that is, for her, quite steady.
‘You are your mother’s daughter, after all,’ Red says.
Apple nods.
She is.
Standing there in the alley, her mother’s hand still on her face, Apple wonders if, after hearing it so many times, over so many years, her mother’s story somehow managed to claw its way into her head through her ears, and burrow deep inside her brain. Or if, in fact, there’s been something of her mother inside her all along, something from before she was even born; a thought or memory passed through the umbilical cord.
She decides she probably will go to university after all. She knows who she is, now: she’s someone who can handle monsters, someone lethal. Her fear begins to melt away, like the blanket of fresh white snow that concealed the wolf’s approach all those years ago, and she joins Red in staring up at the bright Hunter’s moon.
(c) Mina Ma, 2023
Mina Ma is an English teacher by day, & a writer by night (not too late at night, though; she needs her beauty sleep). She loves writing poetic prose, dipping into magical realism, & giving allies to her alienated female characters. Her stories play with metafiction, intertextuality, & narrative structure.
Carrie Cohen has recently appeared as June Wright in Triggered at the Lion & Unicorn and White Bear theatres, Sandra in Tick Tock at the Arcola Theatre and various roles with SLAMinutes at The Pleasance. Films include the lead roles of Rose in Skeletons and Grace in Just Saying. TV includes The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe, and Starstruck. Full CV and showreel at www.carriecohen.co.uk
Comments