Ninepins

by Rosy Thorton

  ‘What was she wearing?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ A cardinal sin. ‘All I noticed was, she had on a vest top and no jumper. Apart from that – jeans, I think. Maybe trainers.’

  More slow, approving nodding.

  ‘She isn’t a student, like the others have been.’

  ‘Oh? Is she still at school? Doing A levels or something?’

  ‘No. At least, I don’t think so.’ One shouldn’t assume; but Vince had said nothing about school or college.

  She laid down her chopsticks and looked carefully at Beth. ‘Actually, Willow’s had rather a tough time, I think. She’s been in care.’

  ‘Like Tracy Beaker, you mean? Wow – cool.’

  Laura, who had been fearing her daughter’s reaction, couldn’t help but laugh. Then she stopped herself and said, ‘I don’t suppose it’s as much fun as it might appear on TV.’

  ‘So, what happened to her parents? Are they dead, or drug addicts or something? Or in prison? They might be bank robbers.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Though much the same list of terrifying possibilities had run through her own mind. ‘And you do know, I’m sure, that you absolutely wouldn’t ask anyone that kind of question. It would be very rude, and it could be really upsetting.’

  ‘OK.’ Beth looked contrite – and more than a little disappointed.

  ‘But, listen, I don’t even know yet if she’ll take the place.’ If Willow would want to come – or if she was ready to have her. ‘So don’t get too excited about it, yet, all right? It might take a bit longer – we might end up with someone else.’

  ‘Well, I hope she does come. I think she sounds cool.’

  Laura reached for Beth’s plate and placed it on top of her own. ‘Why don’t you go and watch your thing on TV? I’ll wash up and then come and join you.’ Twenty minutes of teenage soap was a small price to keep alive the mood of communication.

  As it happened, though, she never made it to Hollyoaks. Half way through wiping the dishes, the telephone rang.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hi, Laura. It’s me.’

  Simon.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry about this, but could we possibly switch Beth’s weekends? You know I wouldn’t ask unless it was an emergency.’

  ‘Another one?’ Simon’s life of recent years seemed to be one long domestic crisis. And she’d planned to repaint Beth’s bedroom this weekend.

  ‘Yeah, I know.’ She could almost hear the grin, frank and disarming but not quite apologetic enough.

  ‘It’s Alfie, this time. He’s been off school with a cold but then it’s turned into an ear infection and now Jack seems to have caught it, and whatever Jack gets, Roly always has next.’

  A pale apple green: Beth had chosen the colour and would have loved to help, but paint brought on her asthma. It had to be done when she was sleeping elsewhere, so there was time to air the room and clear the fumes.

  ‘You don’t want Beth coming home with a cold, not with her chest. And it does seem to be an evil one. Half the nursery is off with it. Poor Jack is all crusted up and can hardly breathe, and Alfie’s been mutinous with his ears. It’s one hell of a job to get the drops in. There’s screaming.’

  When wasn’t there, at Simon’s house? Those three boys were the loudest children she had ever encountered, and never kept still. No wonder it was hard to get a syringe in their ears.

  ‘Not that Beth wouldn’t be a help – I’m sure she would. But it isn’t really fair on her. I promised I’d take her roller skating the next time she came, and we can’t do that with Alfie and Jack laid up, and maybe Roly, too. Not that they ever really do – lie up, that is.’

  ‘I can imagine.’ Beth had always been a quiet invalid, content to stay in bed and be pampered with hot water bottles and chicken soup. But her colds had always left her blue beneath the eyes, lungs tight and fighting for air. ‘Look, it’s OK. Don’t worry – she can come the following week, we’ve nothing planned.’

  ‘Thank you, Laura. Knew you’d understand – you’re a star. How is she, anyway? How’s school going?’

  ‘Oh, fine, I think.’ It was a struggle to know what else to say. ‘She’s making some new friends, I gather. And on Monday she had a merit in science – like house points, you know. She seems to like science.’

  It seemed to satisfy him. ‘I liked science. All kids do, when they arrive at secondary school. It’s the Bunsen burners. They’re irresistible. Gas and lighters and tubes of things that might explode.’

  ‘They’re doing amoeba.’

  He laughed. ‘Not quite the same thrill.’

  ‘How about you; how’s things? Apart from the ailing offspring, that is?’

  ‘Not bad. At least Tessa and I haven’t had the lurgy – or not so far, touch wood. And I’ve not been too busy, recently, so I’ve had time on my hands to blow noses and administer Calpol and Vick’s. The article I was lining up for Rural Living fell through. They liked it at the initial pitch, but not when they saw the detail. A whole week’s research gone to waste.’

  ‘What a pain.’

  ‘It happens,’ he said, and she knew enough from having lived with it to be sure he was right: freelance journalism went that way. But why was he telling her about it?

  ‘Can you send the idea anywhere else?’

  ‘Oh, yes, probably. There are a couple of places I can try, so you never know. It might still sell. Problem is, a cheque this month is what I could really have done with.’

  Laura closed her eyes in stage weariness – feeling a fair modicum of the real thing. She knew what was coming next.

  ‘So, I wondered … I hate to do this to you again. But the thing is, Laura – ’

  ‘Yes, Simon?’ She hated the way he used her name all the time, when he wanted something. He used to do it when they argued, when they were breaking up.

  ‘Oh, bugger, sorry. You’re annoyed. Are you annoyed? I think you are. Look, you know how I feel about Beth. I’d do anything for her, you know I would, give her anything.’

  She sighed. It was true. As far as intentions went, he was a model father.

  ‘I know I was late with her money in June and July, too, but I caught up when I did that piece in The Observer. And I’m not saying I can’t pay anything this month, I can manage a hundred or so now, and in a couple of weeks, who knows? I wouldn’t ask …’

  Her smile was wry. ‘Don’t tell me – unless it was an emergency.’

  ‘What emergency’s this?’ Beth, holding a cushion in one hand and the TV remote in the other, was standing in the kitchen doorway.

  Laura covered the receiver. ‘The boys are ill.’

  ‘Dad! Can I talk to him?’

  ‘Here,’ Laura told Simon. ‘Speak to your daughter.’

  Swapping the phone for the remote, she headed for the sitting room to switch off the television before retreating to her study. Behind her, she caught the sound of Beth’s laughter: a proper, leaping laugh, spontaneous and gleeful, that she hadn’t heard enough lately – not nearly enough – and was struck by a shaft of pure jealousy.

  ‘Click it down properly when you hang up,’ she called back towards the kitchen. ‘Or the battery will go flat.’

  It was all very well for Simon to plead pennilessness. Not that he would say it if it wasn’t true; a new wife and three sons must eat up money, and his work had never been lucrative or even reliably regular. But it wasn’t easy for her, either, even with just the two of them. Academic researchers were not well paid. Eighteen years in the department without achieving tenure meant a hand to mouth existence, surviving on a series of precarious, soft money posts; it brought in sufficient, but only just. The outside steps needed doing, and she ought to have someone look at the roof, too; there were loose slates after last winter, and she was worried about the flashings. And now no maintenance this month, or less than she’d expected. It made it imperative – she had to let the pumphouse as soon possible.

  But, to Willow? Of course it was a risk, but ther
e had been mention of an enhancement on the rent. And if not her, then how soon would she find another prospective tenant?

  The space between bath and bed had always had a magical quality. When Beth was small, of course, it was literally a time of fairy tales, and the spell, for Laura at least, had never quite lost its hold.

  Where once she would have been on the bathroom floor, encouraging washing operations and playing hide and seek with plastic ducks, now she liked to work with her study door open when her daughter was in the bath. That way she knew at once when she emerged, trailing warm, shampoo-scented vapour, and could follow her along the landing to her bedroom, drawn like some maternal version of the Bisto kid.

  ‘Hiya,’ said Beth as Laura came in the room, announcing her entrance with the token knock she had recently adopted in deference to her daughter’s shyness when unclothed. ‘How d’you think I should do my hair tomorrow?’

  Laura went to the window to draw closed the curtains on the starless fen night; then she turned towards the bed. ‘How about a French plait? I could put it in for you in the morning.’

  ‘Hmm. I don’t know about French plaits. Nobody really has them at the college.’

  ‘We could frizz it? I’ll do you a Hermione Granger.’ This had been a favourite game since Beth was small: Laura bound her wet hair up in a dozen tiny, tight braids and in the morning it brushed out into a glorious bounce of curls.

  ‘Uh-uh.’ Beth shook her head emphatically. ‘God, no. I’d get so laughed at. Everyone has totally straight hair. Rianna has extensions. Hers is down to here.’ She indicated somewhere near the base of her spine. ‘Can I have some straighteners for my birthday, d’you think? I mean, I know you’re getting me the new bike, but just as an extra thing. They’re not expensive. Fifteen pounds, Rianna said.’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘Or I could ask Dad.’

  ‘We’ll see. What if you used the hair dryer, for now, and combed it straight as you dried it?’

  ‘It wouldn’t stay straight, it never does. Maybe if I had some mousse – or serum. You can get this straightening serum.’

  Laura sat down next to her daughter on the bed and tried not to breathe in too obviously. Even the familiar tang of tea tree and mint shampoo was overlaid with other smells she didn’t recognise: smells from the expanding collection of bottles and jars on which Beth now spent her pocket money. The cleansers and toners and moisturisers – so wholly unneeded by her clear, young skin – were like a veil of teenage mystery to Laura, who used nothing but old-fashioned soap.

  ‘Maybe we could buy you some, then.’

  ‘Thanks, Mum. You’re a legend. It comes in this little red tube and you get it in Boots. Can you get some for me tomorrow? Please.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Laura again, but she was already replanning her lunch break. She knew it was pitiable, but when Beth called her a legend, she was powerless to resist.

  ‘Could you hang my dressing gown up, please?’ Beth peeled it off as she climbed under the duvet.

  Rising to oblige, Laura bent over her daughter and kissed her good night. ‘Light on or light off?’

  ‘On. I’m going to read a bit.’

  ‘Not for too long, then. It’s school in the morning – light out by half past nine.’

  There was no chance she’d be allowed to get away first time. It was another game, a power play of Beth’s, evolved when she was a toddler afraid of the dark. Then, it had been just one more story, Mummy, one more cuddle. Now her daughter traded in the new currency: the sharing of small confidences. When Laura was at the bedroom door, hanging up her dressing gown and preparing to go downstairs, or back to her desk, that was the time Beth chose to talk.

  ‘Break times are weird.’

  Laura turned, and took two steps back towards the bed. ‘Why weird?’

  ‘Break times and lunchtimes. Nobody wants to play.’

  Her stomach plunged; she sat down heavily on the edge of the duvet. ‘No one will play with you, sweetheart?’

  But her concern was brushed away impatiently. ‘I don’t mean that. It’s not me especially, it’s everyone. Nobody plays.’

  ‘Oh?’ By her daughter’s expression, she was clearly being very dense.

  ‘They don’t play. They don’t do anything, even the other Year 7s. They just stand about and talk.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ Now that she understood – or thought she did – Laura’s relief turned to half-amused sympathy, and she leaned across to gather Beth into a hug. At primary school they’d played It and Forty-Forty or dangled from the climbing frame to gossip, even the Year 6s; how much easier than the closed circle of conversation, faced without props. Laura remembered it herself from school; girls were so political, and Beth wasn’t good at that. Asthmatic or not, she’d rather run about. ‘Nobody plays any games at all?’

  ‘Well, the boys do. They’re OK – they play football and stuff.’

  ‘And you couldn’t join in with them, sometimes? Don’t girls ever play football?’

  ‘Huh,’ said Beth, against her chest. Not, it seemed, the girls who mattered.

  ‘Well, then …’ She cast about for ideas. In Year 6 they’d still skipped, or at least turned the rope for the little ones, but she knew enough not to suggest taking a skipping rope to the college. ‘What about netball? There must be netball hoops, aren’t there? Can’t you borrow a ball and shoot a few goals while you chat?’

  ‘Hmm. S’pose so.’ But she could tell she was being humoured: that Beth knew there was no point in striking against the tide, and she just had to learn to swim with it. With a sigh, Laura laced her arms more tightly about her daughter; she laid her cheek against the warm, damp hair, which was already springing into unco-operative kinks. Her eyes were closed, and she thought that Beth’s were, too. ‘Mum?’

  ‘Yes, love?’

  ‘Can I have a Power Bar in my packed lunch? Everyone has Power Bars.’

  They were all on their own in the end, she reflected, as she padded back to her study five minutes later. Maybe when they were very small you could fight some battles for them but, when it came down to it, kids had to do it for themselves and all you could do was stand on the sidelines and watch and hope and ache. And Beth was more on her own than some. She had no father to hand, nor the younger brothers or sisters she might have had, to fill the house with noise and bring home germs from nursery. Not much of a family. Sitting down, she stared at the open files on her desk, but saw instead Willow’s thin, bare arms, her hollow elbows. Willow, who had no family at all.

  Stuck out here with only her mother: it would be good for Beth to have someone around who was nearer her own age. A teenager to talk to – it would surely be good. And didn’t every kid deserve a chance?

  Chapter 3

  It was a Saturday when Willow moved in. Vince and his car were summoned to duty for the ferrying of possessions, making it inevitable that both he and Willow should be invited in for lunch.

  Laura kept out of the way to give her new lodger space, and had instructed Beth to do the same. But it was a bright morning for the end of October, with banks of high white cloud on a canvas of gentian blue: a perfect day for an eleven-year-old to be outside in the garden, treating the dyke as a makeshift BMX ramp. When Laura glanced out of the window at half past eleven, there was her daughter turning one-eighties on the old bike that was too small for her. Ten minutes later, when she looked again, the bike lay abandoned on the lawn and Beth was in the cindered turning space, standing by the boot of the red saloon and being loaded up with cardboard boxes.

  On the whole, she looked more useful as a pack-mule than Willow, who was marginally the taller of the two but by far the slighter. It was curious to watch them together: Beth, large-framed and awkward, with her size seven feet and hands to match, and Willow, who was suited to her name – though the impression of her limbs, Laura thought, was not of elasticity like the willow bough but all spike and brittleness.

  The car seemed to empty remarkably quickly. Ev
en allowing for three pairs of hands, the boxes and bags were poignantly few, since one could presume no childhood bedroom somewhere with a wardrobe of disfavoured clothes, no junk stored in a parental attic. By noon, the journeys from gate to pumphouse had ceased and all was quiet outside. At quarter past, Laura, washing lettuce at her sink, heard the thud of the front door, followed by voices in the hall. Laughter – Beth’s – and Vince’s light tenor, saying something about a workers’ canteen.

  ‘Hello,’ she called. ‘All done?’

  Beth was first into the kitchen. ‘We’ve moved all her stuff, Mum. There was heaps of it, but I helped and it all fitted in OK. Except it’s still piled on the bed and all over the floor, and she says I can help her unpack later, after lunch. Can I, please?’

  ‘Willow has a name, you know,’ said Laura. ‘And are you sure you won’t be in the way?’ She turned to Willow with a rueful smile. ‘Do please just kick her out if you don’t want her.’

  Willow shrugged and shot a glance at Beth. ‘ ’S’all right.’

  ‘Something smells good in here,’ said Vince. ‘A proper farmhouse kitchen smell.’

  ‘Completely illusory, I’m afraid.’ Laura smiled over her shoulder as she shook the colander of lettuce at the sink. ‘That’s the smell of plastic-wrapped baguettes, the kind you finish off in the oven and try to pass off as homemade. It’s just going to be omelettes, if that’s OK, with bread and salad.’

  ‘Wonderful,’ he said.

  ‘Can we have Brie in the omelettes, Mum? So it goes all melty and gooey?’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure there is any Brie. Have a look in the fridge, could you? Is an omelette all right for you, Willow? Otherwise I’ve got some cold chicken, or just cheese with the salad. ’

  ‘Omelette’s fine.’

  Upon instruction, Beth set the table with Willow’s assistance, and the three of them sat down while Laura ran butter round the frying pan.

  ‘Is it a farmhouse, in fact?’ Vince asked. ‘Or was it once, I mean?’

  ‘I think so. Or a farmworker’s cottage, at any rate.’