by Rosy Thorton
‘Here. Sit up a bit, sweetheart. Don’t spill it.’
First the syrup to settle the coughing, then the inhaler to open her lungs.
‘Were you asleep, Mum?’
‘Not really,’ she lied. ‘Shall I bring you some cough sweets to suck?’
‘What sort are they?’
‘The green ones. Menthol and eucalyptus, I think.’
Beth grimaced. ‘No, I’m fine.’ She took the inhaler from Laura and had her second puff, then lay back against the pillows. ‘Drama tomorrow. We’re starting these sketch things and we have to be in pairs. Rianna said she’d be with me, but then Caitlin was in a horrible strop about it, so now I don’t know. Do you think he’ll let us go in a three?’
Laura blinked but didn’t answer. Her attention had switched, and Beth’s switched presently, too, to a noise from downstairs. A banging at the front door.
‘What’s that?’ said Beth.
Laura looked at her watch: almost eleven forty-five. ‘Probably just the wind,’ she said, tucking the duvet closer about her daughter’s legs. Beyond the paper snowflakes, the night had been frosty, clear and still. But nobody came calling at Ninepins unannounced, and certainly not at night. They had heard no vehicle.
A moment later the banging resumed, now with some urgency.
‘I’d better go and look,’ said Laura. ‘You stay here.’
Tightening the cord of her dressing gown she descended the stairs in semi-darkness, suppressing a bubble of fear. Surely bad news came by telephone, not knocking on the door? There was no police car, no blue flashing light. And Beth was here safely with her.
She clicked on the hall light. The knocking had stopped for the moment and, in the space it left, she caught the sound of movement on the landing. Beth stood at the top of the stairs, pale and squinting.
‘I told you to stay in bed,’ said Laura, half-heartedly, but her daughter was already on her way down.
‘I want to see who it is.’
Just as they drew near the door, it came again: three abrupt, insistent thuds. Laura pulled back the catch.
The woman who stood on the step was unknown to her. Not very old, early thirties or so, she was oddly dressed – at least for a chilly winter night – in a cotton shift dress, red, with a bold, hippy print. The sleeves of a loose-knit sweater were pushed back and emphasised the thinness of her arms, one of which was still raised, knuckles clenched, towards the doorway. Below the hem of her dress, bare shins emerged from a pair unlaced biker boots that looked several sizes too large.
‘Hello?’ said Laura. When the woman did not respond, she tried again. ‘Can I help you?’
Slowly, the caller lowered her arm, until it hovered at waist height, still awkwardly extended. ‘Ninepins.’ She pronounced the word cautiously, as if she were speaking a foreign language, though her accent was neutral, south-east. Then she lapsed back into silence.
Laura smiled an encouragement she didn’t feel. ‘That’s right. This is Ninepins. This is my house. Who were you looking for?’
Silence.
‘Only, it’s quite late.’
Instinctively, Laura moved closer to Beth, who was standing behind her shoulder. There was no objective reason to be fearful. It might be close to midnight, and remote out here, but there were three of them in the house. The telephone was on the hall stand, her mobile just upstairs. The woman was small, shorter than Beth, let alone Laura, and palely skinny. But there was something disconcerting about her extreme stillness, punctuated by unnatural, stiff movements; her eyes were focused slightly behind them, somewhere in the recesses of the hallway. Drugs, is what occurred to Laura, though she had little experience of the subject, and this woman’s dislocated manner was nothing like the slack-limbed bonhomie of the music students she remembered on her corridor in undergraduate days, when they’d been smoking hash.
‘Are you all right?’ Laura asked. ‘Are you lost? Has something happened?’ An accident. A car. The lode. Don’t scare Beth. ‘Or maybe you’ve got the wrong address. Maybe you’re looking for someone else, another house?’
‘Ninepins,’ repeated the woman, staring into the hall.
‘Look,’ began Laura, as calmly as she could, ‘perhaps you’d be better to come back in the morning. Maybe – ’
Her mistake was to shift back a little towards Beth again as she spoke, leaving a space in front of her in the doorway. Still with her eyes fixed over their shoulders, the woman stepped forward to fill the space, and before Laura could stop her she was past them and into the hall.
By the foot of the stairs she stopped and stood, rock still again, frowning down at the polished, black floor tiles.
‘Ice,’ she said. ‘Black ice.’
‘Are you cold?’
It was Beth who had spoken. It seemed to Laura a strange leap to have made from the woman’s words, but it was true she did look chilled; she was under-dressed and there was a tight, pinched look about her face, and the tip of her nose was redder than the rest. Perhaps she was homeless, or a traveller. But what was she doing right out here by herself? No car, no van. No bag.
‘Dangerous.’ The woman raised her head and stared straight at Laura so that her throat closed up. ‘Ice is bad. Dangerous. Anyone could slip on it and get hurt.’
She slid the sole of one boot slowly along the shiny tiles until she stood broadly straddled, like an orator taking stance to declaim. Or more like a child, Laura decided, remembering games of Twister. And actually, she didn’t seem right for a homeless person. Her hair was too clean, her skin too indoor pale.
Beth had begun to edge towards the woman, as though she were a nervous cat. Laura laid a retraining hand on her daughter’s arm, and she stopped and said, ‘Why us? Why’ve you come to see us?’
‘Hurt,’ repeated the woman, switching her gaze to Beth.
Laura’s heart clamped shut in her chest. She strove to hold her voice steady. ‘Perhaps it would be better if you went home. Can you tell us where you live? Maybe we could call you a taxi?’
Or the police. The phone was right there.
‘Someone might slip. Might break their necks.’ The visitor was no longer looking at Beth. She craned her head back and was staring at the ceiling – or at least her face was pointed upwards, though Laura could no longer make out whether her eyes were open or shut.
Then, so softly at first that you couldn’t be sure it was really coming from her, she began to make a noise: a kind of low droning or crooning, like the rumble of a distant motorway. Laura glanced at Beth, but she was engrossed, staring at the woman. Gradually, the noise modulated, rising in pitch and volume, and beginning to stutter and fragment, until finally it was recognisable. Laughter. The woman threw her head even further back, straining her neck to an unlikely angle, and shouted aloud with laughter: great, jarring blocks of sound that shuddered her thin frame.
‘Shhh. Please.’ Laura wasn’t sure quite why she was asking the woman to shush, and it certainly wasn’t doing any good. She didn’t even seem to hear her. The noise went on and on, until it hardly seemed to be laughter, hardly seemed like a human sound at all.
Upstairs, a door clanged. The woman gave no sign of registering the sound but continued with her weird, unfunny laughter. It had slowed a little now, the separate sounds diffracting themselves into a more regular pattern, each on its own gasping exhalation. It was as if she were not laughing but labouring for breath, like Beth, like an asthmatic. Or sobbing: it could almost have been sobs.
‘Please,’ said Laura, drawing an arm round her daughter but looking steadily at the woman. ‘Please stop. You need to go home now. You need to leave, or we’ll have to call the police.’
She kept her voice low, or as low as was possible while making herself heard over the woman’s noise. But just as she was speaking, the laughing suddenly stopped, as abruptly as if a switch had been thrown, so that her last three words rang loud in the suddenly silent hallway.
‘… call the police.’
At the same time, she became aware of movement on the stairs and someone else’s presence. Willow.
The visitor, hushed now and standing very still again, looked at Willow and Willow looked at her.
‘I’m sorry about this,’ said Willow quietly, as she moved down into the hall. ‘This is my fault.’
‘Your fault?’ began Laura. ‘But why should – ?’
‘My fault,’ repeated Willow, cutting her off. She walked towards the woman and stood beside her, facing them. ‘This is my mother.’
Chapter 10
They should have met in town, thought Laura, as she looked round the lounge bar. Elswell had only one pub, and the Fisherman’s Arms was not a place you’d choose if there were any option. The décor was stuck somewhere between the 1950s and the 1970s, mixing the elements of each that were least worth preserving. The ceiling and walls were yellow with years of now-forbidden tobacco smoke, and hung about with lobster pots and other maritime impedimenta quite inappropriate to fishing in a lode. With Christmas now approaching, the effect had been capped by the addition of a plastic tree, some garish foil paper chains and, around each beer pump, a strand of tired-looking tinsel.
Vince, at the bar, was laughing with the barmaid while he paid for the drinks. His round; she had insisted on paying for the first one. After all, it was she who had asked him here.
‘Crisps,’ he said on his return, tossing the bag on the table. ‘Prawn cocktail, I’m afraid. Seemed to be all they had.’
‘Sorry.’ Her apology took in the room: the dusty fishing nets, the carpet worn to a shine.
Vince, however, merely laughed. ‘My patch covers a lot of the fen villages. I’ve seen worse. And the beer’s still beer.’ He raised his glass, as if to prove the point, and took a long pull. ‘How’s the clean-up going?’
Momentarily she floundered, until he added, ‘In the pumphouse.’
‘Oh, well, I’ve stripped it out completely, of course. The carpet had to go, and the mattress, and most of the bedding. The furniture itself will be all right, I think. Willow’s got the little desk with her in the spare room. The rest is drying out in the dining room until we’re ready for it.’
‘That must be a nuisance.’
‘Not really. We hardly use the dining room, to be honest.’
He munched a crisp and raised an eyebrow. ‘What about Christmas? Are you going to be tucking into turkey and all the trimmings, wedged in between a wardrobe and an upended bed?’
She shrugged. ‘We’ll manage.’ Christmas dinner was something she wasn’t thinking about; Beth was going to Simon’s. ‘I’ve had some estimates now, too, for the repair work. It’s going to be pretty major. The plasterboard is ruined. It looks like a case of dry-lining the place over from scratch. The woodwork seems sound, but they can’t be sure until it’s fully dried out. Then there’ll be that to strip and repaint, too. The insurance should cover most of the work, but I’ll probably do the decorating myself.’
‘How long are we looking at, then? Before Willow can move back in.’
Laura hesitated. The subject of Willow’s plans had never directly been broached. ‘Depends on the weather, and how long it takes to dry out. Late February or March, perhaps, before it’s habitable again. But I wasn’t sure … I mean, she may have found another place before that.’
‘No.’ His shake of the head was succinct and definite. ‘She wants to stay.’
‘Well, naturally, she’s very welcome.’ But in the spare room, for three more months? ‘It’s the least I can do in the circumstances.’
‘She’s had enough of moving and disruption.’
‘Of course, yes.’ She frowned guiltily into her gin and bitter lemon. ‘Absolutely.’
More conciliatorily, he added, ‘She likes it at Ninepins.’
‘Yes?’
‘She likes you both.’
‘Beth does love having her in the house.’ Then she shook herself, looked up and gave him a proper smile. ‘We both do. She’s a nice kid.’
More to change the subject than anything else, she asked, ‘How about you? Christmas, I mean. Where do you spend it?’
‘With my old mum. She’s on her own – has been for four years now.’
‘So sorry. Me, too. I mean, my parents both died when Beth was small.’
‘That must have been bloody tough.’ His fingers rested fleetingly on her knuckles. ‘Any siblings?’
‘One half-brother, Mark, lives in Canada now. But we were never especially close. He’s twelve years older.’
‘I’m an only child, so it’ll be just the two of us.’ A rueful grin. ‘In Wisbech.’
That made her laugh. ‘I bet you love it, really.’
‘Home,’ he said, and tilted his pint towards her. ‘We’re entitled to malign it, aren’t we?’
‘I think it’s more or less compulsory.’
‘Anyway, it will be mercifully short. I’m on call from the evening of the twenty-sixth.’
‘What about that day?’ she found herself asking. ‘Boxing Day. If you’ve done your duty and want an excuse to get away, we’d be very glad to see you for lunch. We’re thinking of having Christmas dinner on Boxing Day, because Beth’s at her father’s on the twenty-fifth.’ The plan was forming only as she spoke, but she plunged ahead regardless. ‘I’m sure Willow will join us, and it would be lovely if you could come, too. That is, if you can face roast parsnips and bread sauce and plum pudding two days in a row.’
He looked genuinely pleased. ‘Any number of days. I love bread sauce. It’s very kind of you, and I’d be delighted.’
The invitation and its acceptance cast a self-consciousness over Laura, so that she was pleased when he drained his glass and she had the excuse to escape to the bar. Their third drink (this time she’d better move on to grapefruit juice) and she still hadn’t embarked upon the conversation she had come here to have.
Seated again at the table, she took her courage in her hands. ‘Have you heard anything more about Willow’s mother?’
‘Not really.’ He eyed her carefully, his expression guarded. ‘She’s back in London, as I understand it.’
Laura nodded and lapsed back to silence. Their first call that night had been to Vince. He had come out, but not until after Willow had phoned the consultant in London, who had rung a colleague in Cambridge, who had sent round an ambulance, bumping along the drove at one thirty in the morning, with a driver and a psychiatric nurse.
She tried again. ‘Is she all right?’
Such a stupid question. People weren’t wrapped in a hospital blanket and led glazed and wordless to an ambulance if they were all right.
There was no answer for some little time, while Vince sat back in his chair and studied her face as if considering his options. Laura’s hands strayed to the empty crisp packet, folded it in half, then in half again.
‘What I mean is, was that … Was how she was that night how she often is? Still is?’
What’s wrong with her? Is she dangerous? Will she come back?
Finally, Vince seemed to come to a decision. ‘It’s difficult,’ he said. ‘Marianne – Willow’s mother – is not my client. And Willow is. Either way, there are problems of confidentiality.’
‘Right. Yes, of course.’ How naïve of her, to imagine he could just tell her the whole story, casually, over a few beers.
‘But I think I can set your mind at rest to some extent at least. Marianne lives in London. She is under good care there, I believe. The night she came here, it seems she had stopped taking her medication. I understand things are very different when she takes it.’
‘Right.’ It was all she could think to say. ‘I see.’
They paid attention to their drinks for a while in awkward silence. At least, it felt awkward on Laura’s side, though Vince appeared unperturbed. Then she said, ‘What about Willow?’
She hardly knew what it was she was asking. How Willow dealt with it, she supposed, how she coped. That night, in the hall, she had been brisk and mat
ter-of-fact. She’d made her phone calls and talked about sectioning and chlorpromazine as if they were quite ordinary and not the stuff of TV drama. To her mother she spoke scarcely a word.
‘Why don’t you ask her?’ He regarded her steadily. He wasn’t smiling, but she thought there was sympathy in the lift of his brow. ‘If you want to know about Willow, then why not ask her yourself?’
‘Yes.’ She circled her fruit juice on the beermat. ‘I should. I will.’
‘So,’ he said presently, ‘is there anything I can bring to the feast on Boxing Day? Wine, mince pies, satsumas? Any customs of the house that I should know about? Do you wear oak green for the winter solstice, or weave herbs through your hair?’
Grateful for the switch of mood, she grinned. ‘Oh, our Paganism is pretty well buried here in Elswell. Beth might wear her headband with the reindeer antlers, but that’s about the limit of it.’
‘And should I come prepared to play charades, or go for a long, bracing walk? I don’t have you and Beth down as sofa slumpers.’
Her grin widened. ‘Sharpen your pencil,’ she said. ‘My daughter is a demon at Pictionary.’
They talked comfortably about Christmas and Wisbech and other nothings for some minutes, before Vince asked, ‘How is Beth?’
It was a strange question, on the face of it, because Laura had been talking about her fairly constantly, about her part in the school carol concert and what she wanted for Christmas. But something in the way he asked it brought her chatter to a halt.
‘She has a new group of friends.’ Why was she telling him this? ‘Since she started at the village college in September, she’s drifted away from her old primary school friends and got in with a new set.’
He nodded. ‘It happens.’
‘There are two in particular.’
‘The girls she was going out to meet that time? The other weekend.’
