Ninepins

by Rosy Thorton

  The benches were empty. But as Laura was turning to retrace her steps and go to see if the school library was still open, she heard laughter. Girls laughing – not Beth, but there was an edge to it that made her follow the sound, past the corner of the building and into a narrow courtyard lined on one side with large, green plastic bins. To the other side was a windowless wall – the back wall of the gymnasium, Laura thought – and against it lolled three girls. The furthest from her was Beth.

  All three looked across at her approach, and the laughter ceased abruptly. There were no smiles. The two unfamiliar faces were composed into the careful blanks presented to the world by the uncompliant young; Beth looked merely awkward.

  ‘Hello,’ Laura ventured. ‘I wondered where you were hiding, Beth.’

  Beth looked at her shoes. Her two companions held Laura’s gaze a little longer before rolling away their eyes in studied boredom. Were they allowed to wear that eyeliner at school?

  ‘Shall we go, then? The car’s round by the front entrance, in the pull-in.’ You weren’t supposed to park there for more than a minute or two. ‘I’ve bought kippers for supper.’

  Her daughter shot her an agonised glance and then stared back at her feet.

  One of the girls sniggered – the taller of the two, with the curtain of sheer blonde hair. ‘Better go home to tea.’

  The other – darker, sharp-featured – produced a perfectly manufactured smile. ‘You mustn’t keep Mrs Blackwood waiting.’

  Eyes still cast down, Beth peeled herself off the wall and away from her companions.

  Don’t drag your bag on the floor: Laura carefully swallowed the words.

  ‘See ya,’ muttered Beth, without looking back.

  ‘Later,’ tossed back the blonde.

  They walked to the car in silence; Laura, conscious of her unauthorised parking spot, had to slow her steps with conscious effort so as not to draw ahead of her daughter.

  ‘Here we are.’ She flicked the central locking as they came up. ‘Do you want to sling your bag in the back?’

  At five feet two and a secondary school pupil, Beth had recently been promoted to the front passenger seat. It had caused a subtle shift in things. In the driving mirror, she had been used to scrutinising her daughter’s face as they talked; now, Beth was closer but her head was often turned away. Like tonight, for example, as she sat and looked out of her own side window, and Laura had no idea what she was thinking.

  ‘How was school?’

  ‘ ’Kay.’

  It was the maths test today – the square numbers she’d been learning. Drama, too, and the day they’d been going to do impro. But Laura knew better than to ask direct questions. She’d hear about it in the end – over supper, perhaps, or after Beth’s bath.

  ‘So, was that Rianna?’ she said, remembering the hair extensions.

  An affirmative grunt.

  ‘The one with the long hair? And how about the other girl, the dark one?’

  ‘Caitlin.’

  ‘They weren’t at the primary, were they, those two? I don’t remember them.’

  Silence.

  ‘Not at Elswell, anyway. I suppose they were at a different school. Longfenton, maybe, or Wade?’

  Another grunt, possibly affirmative. Then, still facing the window, Beth asked, ‘Why d’you have to say that? About having kippers for supper?’

  ‘You love kippers. I was going to do us a poached egg on the top, the way you like it.’

  Beth’s shoulders were hunched and tight. ‘Nobody else has kippers.’

  This must plainly be nonsense. No doubt plenty of Beth’s classmates lived off chicken dippers and frozen pizza but there had to be some families who occasionally ate smoked fish.

  ‘I got them in the Co-op.’ The defence was oblique; if they stocked them in the village, then other people must buy them.

  ‘Old grannies eat kippers.’

  ‘Well, I am old.’ The attempt at humour fell heavily in the car. It was too close to the truth to be funny: at forty-five she was ten years older than a lot of the mums. Her jeans were neither skintight nor voguishly labelled. Regardless, she soldiered on. ‘Kipper’s good for the elderly. I can chew it without putting my teeth in.’

  ‘Shut up, Mum.’ Beth wasn’t laughing, but at least her shoulders softened and she turned into three-quarter profile.

  ‘We could have ice-cream for pudding, if you like. That’s also good for the aged and infirm.’

  But it was too soon; she had overplayed her hand. Her daughter’s jaw was again firmly set.

  The best way, she had come to the conclusion in recent weeks, was to fill the difficult space with chatter, the kind requiring no response. ‘Sylvia was off sick today. It was a nightmare – honestly, the whole place grinds to a halt without her. Students kept coming in demanding lecture handouts and nobody knew which ones were which. We had to put through one another’s phone calls, but none of us understands how the system works. I cut myself off twice.’

  They were out of the village now, and on the main road towards Ninepins. It was too dark to see anything much in the lightless spaces beyond the side window, but Beth turned that way anyway, tracing circles in the beads of condensation which lingered on the glass.

  ‘And then, inevitably, the photocopier jammed, as it always does, and Sylvia’s the only one who can un-jam it. It’s a crabby old machine, and bares its fangs at anyone else. You risk losing a hand.’

  Paying these banalities the heed they deserved, Beth suddenly demanded, ‘Did you get three?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Kippers. Did you get one for Willow as well?’

  ‘Well, no, I – We hadn’t invited her for supper tonight, had we?’ Arrangements were fluid. Willow came and ate with them if they happened to run into her, or if Beth was down in the pumphouse before supper and brought her back up with her. Or else she didn’t.

  ‘I really wanted her to come.’

  ‘All right. Of course, if she wants to, she’s very welcome. We can save the kippers for another night. I’ll do spaghetti.’

  Nothing was right, though, when her daughter was in this mood, which seemed always to infect her after school these days. From Laura’s left came a sigh of deep frustration. ‘Why couldn’t you have said that?’

  ‘Said what?’

  ‘Spaghetti. To Rianna and Caitlin. That would have been OK. But, no – you had to go and say freaking kippers.’

  As soon as they were home, Beth threw her fleece and bag on the kitchen table, pausing only to extract her lunchbox and deposit it unceremoniously on the draining board. ‘No homework tonight – only that geography, and it’s not due in ’til Monday. Can I go to Willow’s?’

  Unable to think of a reason not to say yes, Laura bent to put the kippers in the fridge; as she rose again, she heard the front door clang without a goodbye. Radio voices – even the impish Eddie Mair – failed to fill the emptiness of the kitchen.

  Probably she should seize the opportunity, should go upstairs and work for half an hour. Lethargy, however, exerted its pull; she’d make a cup of tea first, then think about it. There’d been no shortage of time alone just recently to spend in her study, but she felt less and less inclined to use it. Concentration, in a deserted house, should have come easily; instead, it frequently eluded her. The empty rooms held a strange oppression. After school and at weekends, Beth was spending long hours in the pumphouse. Yesterday she’d fled down there straight from the car, returning with Willow at supper-time; after a meal of silences and the exchange of surreptitious glances, the two had escaped again directly afterwards.

  It was hard to say exactly why she minded so much. Willow herself had done nothing to justify alarm, but Laura had to admit to a nagging unease about her. If spoken to directly, she answered; she said please and thank you; but there was a privateness, a guardedness about her which Laura found intimidating. Nor was it as if, had Beth been here in the house, the two of them would have communicated very much in the
space before supper. She seldom came home talkative, particularly since September and the new school. But with Beth in the next room watching TV, or upstairs reading on her bed, the coolness was less of a threat, as if somehow the smaller physical distance made the emotional distance less. It had felt like necessary recovery time, time to recapture the closeness of home. Now every hour that her daughter stayed out of the house – stayed down there with Willow, talking about Laura knew not what – seemed only to place her further out of reach.

  She filled the kettle at the tap and found herself a mug, still drying on the rack from breakfast. Beth’s fleece lay sprawled across the table; Laura picked it up and smoothed it out, pulling the sleeves back right side out. From the lip of her daughter’s school bag trailed a single, scarlet mitten. She opened the bag, thinking to reunite it with its mate; Beth went through five or six pairs of gloves per winter. Inside, there was no sign of the other mitten: just pencil case and exercise books and the fleecy cover of her mobile phone, with the face of Shaun the Sheep. And, tucked to the side and coiled in a knot, something mauve and chiffony and foreign. Laura pulled it out and unravelled it. It was a broad, rectangular scarf of fine, filmy cotton, the kind which is textured into permanent creases. Rianna’s? Or Willow’s. She raised the scarf to her face and inhaled, testing the unfamiliar smell – then chided herself for her foolish possessiveness. The mother vixen, jealous of the scent of her young.

  Instead of taking her tea to the desk upstairs, she laid out her work at the kitchen table, propping a lever arch file on Beth’s bag. It contained a new Forestry Commission paper on sustainable forest management that she had printed off the web that afternoon. But continuous cover silviculture failed to hold her attention; she could not absorb herself in wood energy or biomass initiatives. Her eyes kept drifting from the text – and finding their way back to her daughter’s school fleece, which she had laid across the back of the adjacent chair. Really, all these unfocused anxieties were quite groundless, she told herself; she was acting like some dreadful, clingy parent, controlling and neurotic. Beth was simply growing up. She should learn to let go.

  Finally, after an hour or so, she achieved immersion, so that nothing had been done about either kippers or pasta sauce and her mind was spinning with native woodland ecosystems when the front door banged again. Just a bang – no voices.

  ‘Hi, there,’ she said, as her daughter appeared in the doorway. ‘No Willow, tonight?’

  ‘I asked her. But she said she wasn’t hungry.’

  Laura hid a smile in her notes as she stacked them away. Beth might well sound mystified: hunger, for her, was a given.

  ‘Just the two of us, then.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Beth stood in the middle of the floor, arms hanging. Then she seemed to shake herself and there was the flicker of a grin. ‘Boring.’

  ‘Well, since we have no guest to impress, how about we slum it for once and eat in the other room?

  ‘What – in front of the TV?’ It was, admittedly, a rare concession. Supper on a tray usually meant Wimbledon or the aftermath of asthma. ‘Brilliant. It’s Hollyoaks.’

  It was a companionable meal. Laura needed to seek clarification about a number of plot points, and Beth took satisfaction in offering the necessary explanations, through mouthfuls of kipper, egg and brown bread.

  As the final credits rolled, Laura drew in a breath and said, ‘What about your birthday party?’ They’d fixed on the date for the party weeks ago, but Beth was proving singularly evasive about finalising the details. ‘It’s getting close – less than a fortnight, now. We ought to be getting the invitations out.’

  ‘Mm.’ That was the reaction she’d been having every time she brought it up. Mm.

  ‘Who are you thinking of inviting? I think any number up to fifteen or sixteen should be manageable. How many did we have last year?’

  No reply at all this time: just a shrug.

  ‘Alice, for one, I assume? And Gemma and Ellie – they always come.’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘What about Joanne who we used to take to Brownies? Are you still mates with her?’

  ‘Not really.’

  She took the plunge. ‘And I expect you’d like your new friends to come, too? Rianna and Caitlin.’

  But even this produced only another non-committal grunt.

  ‘Come on, love, let’s make a list. And then we can think about the food – whether you want party food like sausage rolls and crisps and cakes, or whether you’d rather have a proper sit-down meal, now that you’re bigger.’

  Beth’s eyes were fixed on the television screen. Laura felt herself growing a little desperate. ‘I could do you a really sophisticated birthday menu. Those chicken breasts with the creamy garlic filling, or something from the River Café. It could be like a grown-up dinner party.’ Too much: she was trying too hard. ‘I assume you’re too old for party games, now, but what about music? Do you think your friends will want to dance?’ Did they dance, at twelve, in the absence of boys? Should there, in fact, be boys? And why wasn’t Beth saying anything?

  When she did speak, it was flatly and without looking round. ‘Nobody has parties.’

  Just as, presumably, nobody has kippers. Perhaps ill-advisedly, Laura took the bait. ‘Alice had a party in August. You went to that – and enjoyed it, I thought.’

  Silence. Evidently, Alice was no argument against that ‘nobody’.

  ‘Well, what do people do instead? We don’t have to have something here. It’s too late to book the village hall for a disco, but you could invite a few friends and we’ll go out to the cinema, or bowling, and out for a pizza. Or even to Peterborough, ice-skating. I could fit four of you in the car – you and three friends.’

  Her daughter had picked up the TV remote and was fiddling with the battery cover, sliding it backwards and forwards. Don’t do that, you’ll break it.

  ‘I just want to go into town.’

  ‘Right. Great, then – we’ll just go into Cambridge and do something there. So, what do you think – movie or bowling? Shall I see what’s on at the multiplex? Or there’s that new Laser Quest place – I think they’ll do the meal afterwards, too, for birthday parties.’

  With a theatrical moan, Beth flung herself lower on the settee.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Can you imagine? It’d be like having a kiddies’ party in McDonald’s or something. I bet they bring you balloons and the staff all sing Happy Birthday at your table. I’m not five, y’know, Mum.’

  Laura felt her face heating. ‘Adults go to Laser Quest. Some people from the department went in the summer, for a team-building day.’

  Not the right line. Beth assumed an expression of pain.

  ‘OK. So then, what? The cinema?’

  ‘I just want to go round the shops. Just hang out.’

  ‘That would be nice. We can spend your birthday money.’ Simon always sent her a cheque. Fifty pounds, the same every year, and a hundred at Christmas. ‘But we can do that as well, another time.’ They always had a lovely afternoon of it, trying things on in Top Shop and sharing the earphones in the HMV music section.

  ‘I thought I’d go with Rianna and Caitlin. And Willow.’

  ‘Well, all right, if that’s what you want. We can make the shopping trip your birthday treat. We’ll go into town, or to the Grafton Centre, and have lunch out. And why don’t we see a film as well, in the afternoon?’

  Possibilities for the expedition began to suggest themselves. It might actually be rather fun: a girls’ day out shopping. And they could all come back here for birthday cake afterwards, before she dropped them home.

  ‘We can get the bus.’ Beth was fidgeting with the remote again, turning it over and over in her hand. ‘I meant just us. Shopping in town on our own, on the bus. Without you.’

  Chapter 6

  Willow clutched her breath tight within her chest and prepared to open her eyes. It was the next step she had promised herself to take: on the count of three she would open the
m.

  One … two …

  Maybe just a bit longer, though; she had come so far already, she deserved a little longer. The water slapped softly against her forehead so she knew she had ducked down far enough this time, that her eyes and nose and mouth were all under water. Without the motion, caused by other bathers, it would have been hard to tell; the water and the heavy, heated air were both blood-warm and equally oppressive. Her lungs burned; she imagined them shrunken, squashed flat by the water. Next time: next time she would open her eyes. But now she needed to breathe.

  With a burst of released tension, she straightened her spine and broke the surface, opening her mouth to gasp in oxygen and shaking off water like a dog. Eyes still closed, she pressed her knuckles into the sockets, screwing away the wet; her nostrils felt blocked, and she dragged down a pinched finger and thumb, wringing the taste of chlorine from her nose and mouth.

  Again. She reared up and filled her lungs to their fullest extent, taking in air through her mouth before closing it with a snap. This part she was good at, the holding of the breath; she had trained herself well. Then she plunged down, knees bent and neck curved forwards, immersing her head once more.

  The strangest thing was what happened to sound. Above the surface, the air was alive with the jagged shouts of children, amplified and bizarrely fractured by the moisture and the high, glass roof. But as soon as the water covered her ears, everything went dead; it was as if a switch had been flicked to cut the world off. It wasn’t just that the noise was muffled or distorted or more distant than before; the sounds weren’t merely different – it was as though they weren’t sounds at all. Her eardrums seemed to experience them as compaction or movement rather than anything to be heard. Nor was it at all the same as putting your head under the bathwater. There was something about the pressure; she had the unnerving impression that the water was entering her head through her ears, that it was filling her skull, cutting off normal perception.

  Nevertheless, she must take the next step forward: it was time to open her eyes. One … two … three.

  At first no image registered at all but only the alien sensation of water against her eyeballs. It didn’t sting, exactly, as she’d thought it might – all those chemicals and God knows what – but her eyes felt strange and invaded and sort of stretched. She wanted to blink the feeling away and couldn’t: it was like having someone pull your eyelids back and not let go. But when she waited, the underwater world took shape, and it was bigger and brighter than she’d expected, wobble-edged but lit by arcs of broken light from above; she took in magnified squares of turquoise tile and snatches of legs, palely swollen, before her chest hurt and she had to come back up for air.