Ninepins

by Rosy Thorton

  ‘Only,’ he continued, ‘Ninepins is such an unusual name.’

  ‘I know why,’ chirped Beth. ‘Can I tell them?’

  Laura grinned down into the pan, which had begun to smoke. ‘Go on, then.’ She poured in the first two beaten eggs.

  ‘It’s not after the game of ninepins, like people think. It was a bit like skittles and they used to play it in the olden days, but that’s not why it’s called that. It’s really Ninepence, not Ninepins at all, only people said it wrong and it got changed over the years. Like Chinese whispers.’

  ‘Really?’ Vince’s interest sounded genuine. ‘Why Ninepence?’

  ‘It’s what you used to have to pay to get across the lode. There was a bridge here, you see, and that was the toll.’

  Laura slid the first omelette on to Willow’s plate. ‘Help yourself to salad.’

  ‘But it wasn’t 9p, it was old money – 9d – which means it was three-quarters of a shilling, and a shilling was only 5p in our money, so it was really only about three and a bit pence.’ Beth looked up at her mother for confirmation, proud of this exotic gem of knowledge.

  ‘What happened to the bridge?’ asked Vince.

  ‘It was swept away,’ said Beth with relish. ‘In the Great Flood of 1947. It was 1947, wasn’t it, Mum?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Swept away?’ Willow, who had been prodding at her omelette with her fork, looked up. ‘Here? Really?’

  ‘Yes, it came right up over the banks and everything. There are pictures on the internet. We Googled it, didn’t we, Mum? Not of right here, but of Elswell, with water running down the High Street, and people up to their middles in it, and a man outside the Post Office in a rowing boat. And there was one of here, but later, when the water had gone down again, and you can see the end bits of the bridge, all broken off, and nothing left in between.’

  Smiling, Laura moved back to the Rayburn and rebuttered the pan.

  ‘It sounds very dramatic,’ said Vince.

  ‘I know – really cool. I did a project on it for school.’ A hint of hesitation. ‘Just, y’know, at primary school.’

  ‘That’s great,’ he said. ‘And what about the pumphouse?’

  ‘Oh, it must have been under water, too. Just the chimney sticking out, I reckon, like a submarine with one of those periscope things. Bet it looked dead funny.’

  There was a snort from Willow, and an indulgent laugh from Vince. ‘I bet it did. But what I really meant was, what do you know about the place – about the pumphouse? You being the expert on local history, I thought you’d be able to tell us all about it.’

  Her daughter temporarily abashed, Laura stepped in. ‘Well, it housed a fen drainage engine – I think I told you? Not one of the old steam ones, the beam engines, like at Stretham or Prickwillow. They’re on a much grander scale. This one was a diesel pump, which is what came in to replace steam, between the wars. Built in 1929 – there’s a date on a brick above the door, but I don’t suppose you’d notice.’ She folded the second omelette in half and brought it to the table, where she manoeuvred it on to Vince’s plate. ‘It didn’t have much of a working life, though, in the end. These diesel pumps were mostly disused in the 1960s. The pumping’s all electric now. Much more efficient, I gather: the water here’s controlled from a station up on the main road.’

  Too much information. He was nodding politely while Beth and Willow were grinning at each other about something else. She clanked the frying pan back on the hob.

  ‘I hope you won’t be too bored, Willow, out here in the fens. It can get a bit lonely in the winter.’ She’d misjudged the eggs. In it all went; she and Beth would have to share the last omelette. ‘During the day, when I’m at work and Beth is at school, there’ll be nobody.’

  ‘I like it quiet.’ Willow sounded definite, even defiant. ‘I want it quiet. I just want some space to myself.’

  ‘Well, there’s no shortage of that here.’ Laura cut the final omelette in two and slid it on to the plates. ‘Space, that is.’

  Vince looked at Willow but addressed Laura. ‘Don’t worry. Willow won’t be sitting here by herself all the time. She’s enrolled for some NVQ courses at the Regional College, so she’ll be going into Cambridge a couple of days a week.’

  Willow’s gaze remained fixed on her side plate, where she was tugging her bread into small pieces.

  ‘What is it?’ he persisted. ‘Mondays and Wednesdays?’

  ‘Thursdays,’ she said, without glancing up.

  ‘Mondays and Thursdays, that’s it. And Fridays, she’s going to be seeing me, at my office. Not every Friday, but every other one, maybe.’

  Beth, who had devoured her half-omelette in record time, put down her fork and said, ‘Willow’s a funny name. I mean, it’s nice – but funny. I’m Beth ’cos it’s short for Elizabeth, and ’cos Mum used to like Little Women. Why are you Willow?’

  ‘My mother.’ She pronounced the words tonelessly. Everyone looked at her; no one seemed to breathe. Then with sudden vehemence, she added, ‘Useless bloody hippy. Waste of space.’

  Beth’s eyes were wide as plates. ‘Your mum …? So, is that why you – ?’

  Laura shot her daughter a silencing look, but too late.

  ‘Arson.’ The green eyes flashed with warning. ‘I set fire to a heap of rubbish, up by some old empty garages. One of them caught light.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Beth.

  ‘It was four years ago.’ Vince moved in smoothly. ‘There was very little damage and no charges were brought. But it did call to notice certain problems at home. That’s when Willow was taken into care.’

  There was an uncomfortable pause, which Laura filled with the clatter of cutlery as she collected up the plates. Her hands, she found, were shaking; her head spun with questions, resolutely squashed down. ‘I haven’t done anything for pudding, but there’s fruit, and some flapjacks left over, I think. And I can make coffee.’

  ‘Are there really flapjacks?’ Beth bounced out of her chair. ‘I thought we finished them on Thursday.’

  ‘I’m not sure how many are left. You and Willow might have to have them, if there aren’t enough.’

  Vince gave a conspicuous cough.

  ‘Oh, sorry. I only thought – ’

  ‘Joking.’

  By the time she had fussed about with flapjacks and plates and found the fruit bowl and boiled the kettle, the awkwardness had subsided a little. Willow was silent again, still playing with her uneaten bread, but Vince and Beth were talking about school.

  ‘Science is good. We didn’t have proper labs at the primary school, not like we do now, with poison and microscopes and everything.’ Bunsen burners, Laura remembered and tried to smile; things that might explode. ‘After half term we’re going to dissect stuff.’

  ‘That sounds exciting.’

  ‘Oh, not dead bodies or anything. Not even mice – you do them in Year 11. And eyeballs – in Year 8 you get to do sheep’s eyeballs, and they’re full of this gruesome jelly stuff, someone said, that oozes out when you cut them open. It sounds brilliant. But Mrs Farrell said we’re just doing woodlice.’

  Vince nodded. ‘And what else do you like, apart from pulling the legs off things?’

  ‘Art. English, sometimes. And PE. We have way better equipment at the college. There’s a gym with treadmills and rowing machines and everything, only I’m not sure when you get to go in there. It seems to be for adults: this girl Rianna, her aunty does a fitness class in there in the evenings. And the swimming pool is huge. Seriously, huge. It’s bigger than Parkside – the one in Cambridge, you know. ’

  ‘You’re keen on swimming, then?’

  ‘ ’S all right.’

  Willow laid down her crust of baguette. ‘What about here? In the river or lode or whatever you call it? Do you ever swim here?’

  ‘Oh, we’re not allowed. Mum says. It’s dangerous.’

  Both girls looked at Laura. ‘There are sluice gates,’ she explained. ‘Upstream,
towards Elswell, and they open them sometimes, especially after rain, so there can be sudden changes in level. The dykes are very steep, too; the sides can be slippery. It’s really not safe.’

  ‘Very wise,’ said Vince. ‘I’m sure you’re right to be cautious. The water doesn’t look too salubrious, either. It was practically black just now, when we were on the bank.’

  ‘That’ll be the rain last night. It flushes new groundwater into the lode, and the water takes the colour of the soil.’

  ‘It is very dark round here, isn’t it, the earth?’ he said. ‘Almost like peat.’

  She nodded. ‘It used to be all meres and marshland until they drained it, back in the seventeenth century. So, yes – one giant peat bog, I suppose you could say.’

  ‘It’s why it’s called the Isle of Ely,’ said Beth, through a mouthful of flapjack. ‘It actually used to be a real island. You’d have had to go there by boat. It must have been so cool.’

  ‘Why don’t you get one?’ wondered Vince, smiling at Laura. ‘Just a little rowing boat, on the lode? Or would that be dangerous, too?’

  ‘Oh, yes, Mum – can we? A boat would be awesome.’

  ‘There used to be one here, when we first moved in – moored up below the house and all full of water. We pulled it out to have a look but it was rotted underneath. I think your dad broke it up for firewood in the end.’

  ‘Mu-um.’

  Why had Vince had to go and mention boats? The last thing she needed was Beth developing some hankering for Swallows and Amazons adventure.

  ‘I can’t swim.’ Willow, swivelling her coffee mug, was frowning slightly.

  ‘What?’ Beth was incredulous. ‘Not at all? How come?’

  The question was shrugged off without comment. ‘I want to, though. I really want to learn to swim.’

  ‘Not here – ’ began Laura, before Vince cut across her. ‘You should. You should take lessons. I’m sure they have classes at Parkside pool. And it needn’t be with little kids – they’re bound to have sessions for adult non-swimmers. I’ll look out a leaflet for you, or print it off the Web.’

  Willow stared at him, still frowning, but she didn’t demur. Laura had no idea why her heart should be thumping the way it was, nor why she felt a peculiar urge to pull her daughter into her arms and hold her close, as she sat there beside her ladling sugar into her mug.

  ‘Is anyone having the last flapjack?’ asked Beth.

  After lunch and the gracious offer to wash up – declined with equal graciousness – Vince took his leave. The four of them went out and stood on the dyke beside the front door to say their goodbyes and thank yous; when Vince set off down the track to his car, Willow followed, while Laura held Beth back.

  ‘Give them a minute.’

  ‘Then can I go and talk to Willow, when he’s gone? She did say I could go back and help unpack her boxes. I can, can’t I?’

  ‘As long as you don’t bother her too much. If she wants you to leave, you leave. Understood?’

  Beth was dismissive. ‘ ’Course.’

  The red saloon started up with a cough, and backed slowly round on the saturated cinders. Willow bent her head to the wound-down driver’s window to impart or receive some final message, before Vince drove off along the lane, his right hand raised in valedictory salute. Come back, Laura wanted to shout. Don’t leave me on my own with her. Beth, at her mother’s side, waved back vaguely, but she wasn’t watching the departing car: her eyes were fixed on the figure remaining at the garden gate.

  ‘See you, then,’ she said, and set off at a shuffle, which tumbled into a run before she was half way down the track.

  Turning away to go back into the house, Laura carried with her the image of the two girls: arms linked, laughing at something she couldn’t discern as they walked towards the pumphouse.

  She filled the bowl for the washing up and immersed the pile of dirty plates, watching the trapped bubbles escape and rise, and her own wrists as they gradually reddened in the heat of the water.

  Arson, she thought, with a clutch of panic. Some garages – one of them caught light. What had she done, bringing this tinderbox into her home? Still staring at her hands, she realised she had forgotten the detergent. She reached for the bottle and squirted in a short, viscous stream. It was too late, now that the water was run, to make a proper lather; she swished her fingers round anyway, to little effect.

  Money, after all, was only money. They’d have managed a little longer without a lodger, managed without Vince’s ‘small enhancement’. Thirty pounds per calendar month on top of the rent. Thirty pieces of silver.

  What on earth had she been thinking, to bring a damaged teenager to Ninepins, exposing her daughter to who knows what unimagined dangers? Fearless, heedless Beth, who trusted everyone. Beth, who was only eleven. Oh, God – what had she done?

  Chapter 4

  How come she’d never learned to swim? That’s what Beth asked Willow, the day she moved in, and she had no answer to give her.

  There had been one time at the seaside: the only time she remembered going as a child. She had no idea where the resort was; she had been too young herself to know or care and there was nobody she could ask now who’d be able to tell her. She did recall a long train ride with lots of back gardens and washing and then cows and sheep, and her mother giving her Rice Krispies – dry from the packet, gumming the roof of her mouth – and a man with a newspaper telling her not to run up and down the carriage. She must have been four or five.

  They stayed in a caravan, the two of them. It wasn’t the pretty, oval-shaped kind she’d seen people tow behind their cars but plain and oblong like the back of a container lorry, and she could still feel the plunge of disappointment. It was cream on the top half and a pale salmon pink on the bottom. There were three steps up to the door with black rubber tread, which was peeling up at the corners like the underneath of a worn out wellington boot. To one side there was a single handrail of tubular metal not long enough for sliding down, but Willow spent hours dangling from it, or lying across it and lifting up her feet so that the metal dug into her tummy. By the end of the week (if a week was what it was) she could do a complete flip-over. The inside of the caravan, for some reason, was a blank in her memory.

  The site was at the top of a cliff, but it can’t have been a high one because there were wooden steps down to the beach and she counted them each time she went up and down. Seventeen. The beach was a mixture of sand and pebbles in stripes, and the cliff was made of sand as well, rather than rock or the white chalk that you see in picture books. It was soft and had crumbled away beneath the steps, so that in places you looked down through the gaps at empty air as if you were crossing a bridge; the sand settled on the steps, too, in a thin layer, silting up the grooves in the woodgrain and turning it as smooth and treacherous as a freshly polished floor. Clambering up was no trouble, but Willow always came down backwards, holding on tight to the step above with both hands. She counted backwards, too, starting with seventeen and ending on zero with her bare feet sunk in the fine, warm sand. There was no memory of rain, and the weather must have been hot because sometimes the sand was almost burning, so that she had to run to the line where the sea had been, where it was cooler and firmer. She didn’t recollect ever wearing shoes.

  One day stood out from the others. It could have been morning or afternoon but it was certainly sunny, and Willow was on the beach, on her own as usual. She had walked a little way out into the sea. The water was always cold to begin with and the first few times she’d gone in she’d hopped and splashed about to keep warm, or run straight out again. But then she found out that it stopped being cold if you stood really still. Sometimes, like this time, she went in deeper, up to her knees or even beyond, half way to the hem of her blue flannel shorts. If she stood there for long enough and then turned and walked back to the shore, something amazing happened to the sea. From being cold on the way in, the water at the edge was transformed on the way back out; it grew warmer
and warmer, and the very last bit, where it lapped on the sand, was actually hot, as if you were in the bath. Willow had tried telling her mother about it but she hadn’t seemed to hear. On this particular day, she was standing thigh-deep and waiting for the cold to stop when a woman in a sun-dress with big yellow roses on it called out to her from the beach. Willow turned but she didn’t smile because she didn’t know who she was.

  To her surprise the woman hitched up her dress and waded out to where Willow stood, taking her by the hand and leading her back to the sand. She didn’t like it but she didn’t struggle or protest, because the woman’s grip was gentle and the skin of her palm was smooth, and she had a nice smell of tangerines and sun lotion. Then she bent down to a level with Willow’s fringe and asked her what her name was and where she was staying, and Willow told her and said that hers was the caravan with the cream up above and the pink down below.

  They climbed the steps together, still holding hands, and then the woman went into the caravan, leaving Willow outside. She hung from the rail by the steps and watched the faint white smudges appear as the salt water dried on her legs. There was a lot of angry, quiet talking and afterwards some shouting, though none of it was at Willow.

  She didn’t go back to the sea again, after that.

  Chapter 5

  Laura scanned the homework room and experienced a moment of pure terror. It was the same physical, mind-blanking panic she had felt on occasion in the supermarket when Beth was small, or queueing for a bus, when she’d turned round to find her momentarily missing from her side. It was no different, she discovered, as her daughter grew older: the context might change but the essential fear persisted. The empty pushchair. Beth, gone.

  It lasted no more than a second, of course. Reason returned and she went to check the common room next door; there was only the faintest resurgence of fear when the pool and ping pong tables, too, yielded no result. It was a fine evening, and mild: she must be outside. Perhaps she was reading a book, on the benches round by the sports hall.