Ninepins

by Rosy Thorton

  ‘Are you OK? Can you breathe?’

  This was always how it began, with these rapid-onset attacks. Human bronchea could narrow a good deal before breathing was visibly impaired; with Beth it was the body language that changed first.

  ‘Fine.’ The tightly clipped monosyllable told her all she needed to know.

  ‘Have you got your inhaler?’

  Beth fumbled in her coat pocket and pulled it out, shook it, took a puff. For a few seconds her upper body remained frozen, strained, as the drug leached its way to her lungs. Then came a relaxation. Laura, at the wheel, felt her own tension ebb in sympathy.

  ‘Better?’

  ‘Bit.’

  The second puff brought further relief, but quarter of an hour later as they pulled into Simon’s street, the silence had returned, and with it the taut, bunched shoulders.

  ‘Can I – ’ with a gasp ‘ – stay here?’

  So Laura, with Vince’s jacket in her arms, walked to the door to face the task alone. Tessa was upstairs at Alfie’s bedside, so it was just the two of them, and she told him right there, standing in the hall. She had said some things to hurt him when they were breaking up, but this was worse, far worse. Then, she had been angry – they’d both been angry – but now she was cold and composed and he had a sick child upstairs. He was kind and offered her sympathy, which was all wrong-ended and made her feel a charlatan as well as a murderer. And all the way through the painful interview she couldn’t even give him her full attention because half her mind was outside with Beth, struggling for breath in the car.

  This one thing, nagged a voice in her head on the drive home. He asked you to do this one thing.

  The upside of Beth’s occasional sharp, unheralded asthma attacks was that they usually fled as quickly as they had come. Something to do with stress, Laura supposed – though in this case she couldn’t imagine that the source had gone away. By the time they reached the house, Beth’s posture was more natural and her chest rose and fell evenly. She made it upstairs to clean her teeth with only one pause for breath.

  ‘Where’s your inhaler? Shall I bring it up for you, in case you need it later?’ But it was merely precautionary; they both knew it was over.

  As Laura was doing some final tidying up in the kitchen, the telephone rang.

  ‘Hi. How did it go?’

  Vince.

  ‘Oh, you know.’ What was there to say?

  ‘Right.’ A pause. ‘How’s Willow?’

  ‘OK, I think. Gone to bed.’

  ‘And Beth?’

  ‘All right, now.’

  Another short pause. ‘And how about you, Laura?’

  ‘All right.’ She would be. ‘Yes, thank you. We’re going to be all right.’

  On her way to Beth’s room ten minutes later, she looked in on Willow. She’d hardly touched anything at supper so maybe she could be persuaded to come down for a hot drink and a biscuit. They might both appreciate the company. The spare room door was ajar, but when Laura tapped on it and stuck her head round, all was darkness. Willow was in bed and apparently asleep.

  Along the landing, Beth’s door was closed. Quietly, she pushed it open and stepped inside, standing in the middle of the room while she waited for her eyes to adjust to the dim light.

  ‘Beth?’

  Asleep, too, by the sound of it. The slow, nasal snuffle of her daughter’s breathing was a double blessing: no asthma and no anxious, guilty wakefulness. The curtains, she saw, were still open, so she moved to the window and drew them shut, before returning to stand near the bed. She could make Beth out clearly now: the disordered pillows, the left arm crooked behind her head, the hair she’d forgotten to brush. Her face, in repose, bore no trace of the day’s distress and grief. But her right arm was curled into the place which, for the past ten days, had been Dougie’s, and in her fingers she clutched the ear of the foundling teddy bear.

  Laura walked back down to the kitchen alone.

  On the Thursday of the following week, Laura came home at lunchtime. It was not a scheduled return. She had realised as soon as she reached the office that morning that the box file she needed still lay on the kitchen table where she had put it out the night before to bring with her. There were other, minor tasks she could be getting on with for a few hours, but by twelve o’clock she had reached a full-stop and really needed the file. The best thing seemed to be to collect up her papers from this end and decamp to Ninepins for the remainder of the day.

  She had, in fact, spread out her notes and been working in the kitchen for over an hour when she was startled by the bang of a door upstairs. Footsteps, and another door – the bathroom. Not a burglar, then, but only Willow. It was strange, though: Thursday was one of her days at the Regional College. She waited for the flush of the toilet, the sound of running taps, the renewed bang of doors. After a polite interval, she put down her pen and went out into the hall.

  ‘Hi! Willow, is that you?’

  An answering hello sounded faintly from the depth of the spare room.

  ‘Would you like a coffee?’

  There was no reply this time, and Laura was re-immersed in her notes when she heard a door again, and a tread on the stairs.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, as Willow emerged from the hall. ‘I hope I didn’t make you jump.’

  Willow shook her head. ‘I heard the car.’

  ‘I know I’m not normally home in the afternoons, that’s all. I hope you hadn’t been asleep or something, and then woke up and didn’t expect anyone to be here.’

  Why was she apologising for being in her own house, as if she were the one skipping class?

  ‘I thought Thursday was one of your college days?’ Was it the college half term, perhaps? ‘Didn’t you have any classes?’

  ‘Not today.’ Willow was gazing idly at the papers on the table. ‘Anything interesting?’

  ‘Not really. Or probably not to you, but it is to me. Finding ways of managing woodland to mitigate the effect of climate change. I have a report to write on it by the end of the month.’

  ‘Funny,’ said Willow.

  Laura looked up at her inquiringly.

  ‘You doing stuff about woods, I mean. When there are no trees round here.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ She smiled. ‘I’ve never thought of it that way before.’

  As Laura rose to fill the kettle, Willow slid into a seat at the table. ‘So you like it, then, your job?’

  ‘Yes.’ She plugged in the kettle and switched it on; it emitted a series of ticks, and she cupped her hands round the metal as the warmth began to spread. ‘There were times,’ she said, ‘when Beth was little, that I hated the mornings. I hated having to go in to work and take her to the nursery, missing all that time with her. Not that she was one to cling, particularly, or make a fuss. She was pretty good. But it was still a wrench, sometimes.’ Her hands were tingling; she pulled them away. ‘Apart from that, yes, I guess I’m lucky. I enjoy what I do.’

  She wasn’t sure Willow would care about these small private revelations, but she was looking across at Laura and nodding slowly. She fingered the corner of a file. ‘Vince likes his job, too. Says he loves it.’

  Laura smiled. The fact did not surprise her, although she couldn’t, personally, have done his job for the world. She simply could not imagine. … But it was hardly a thing she could say to Willow. The kettle clicked off and she poured the steaming water into the mugs.

  There was silence for a while when she sat down, as both of them blew on their hot coffee. Then Willow said, ‘I’m looking for another place.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Though she’d heard quite well what she’d said.

  ‘Another room. I’ve got the paper upstairs, with all the ads in.’

  Remembering last time, Laura asked, ‘Does Vince know?’

  Willow stared into her mug, her brows gathered and set. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘What do you think he’ll say?’

  A shrug.

  Stay. Go. Both, in their own way,
Laura realised, were equally unimaginable.

  ‘It’s the best thing,’ said Willow, still frowning down at her coffee. ‘I’ve brought you all this trouble, you and Beth. All this – Dougie – it’s all my fault. It’s really best that I leave.’

  There was something about the way she said it – a mulishness, or an angle of the chin – which reminded Laura painfully of her daughter. Whether it was that, or the unfairness of it, she didn’t stop to question: she only knew that the doubt had cleared. Her mind was made up.

  ‘Don’t go.’ She said it plainly, neither prescribing nor pleading. ‘We want you here. What would Beth do if you left?’

  Beth already blamed herself for Dougie. If Willow left now, it would be one more scourge with which to lash herself. ‘It’s nobody’s fault. Nobody’s to blame for what happened to Dougie: not Beth, not you. It was just one of those things.’

  Willow’s eyes flickered up from her mug and Laura made bold to trap her glance and hold it.

  ‘You’re not responsible for your mother.’

  For a moment it seemed that Willow might almost be able to believe her. But then she went back to the contemplation of her cooling coffee, twisting the mug to and fro on the table top.

  At length, she said, ‘They’re keeping her here.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘In Cambridge, at the hospital here. They’re not moving her back to London this time. At least, it seems not. The consultant here is going to take her on – the one who admitted her.’

  Cambridge. Panicked, Laura’s mind leapt into estimates of time and distance. It meant she was barely ten miles from Ninepins. Alarmingly near. And yet, be sensible, she told herself; the seventy miles between here and London had failed twice over to keep her away.

  ‘I suppose …’ She hesitated, uncertain. ‘I suppose it means you can visit her more easily. If you want to, I mean.’

  Willow’s face tilted up, at that. The green eyes looked straight at Laura. Oh God, she thought, was that the wrong thing to say? But then, slowly, the stare softened. Willow shrugged again.

  ‘Mm.’

  Even this non-committal response was some kind of concession; a chink of light, an opening. Or Laura, at any rate, chose to take it as such.

  ‘Is she – ? That is, when she’s herself, when she’s a bit better … What’s she like?’

  The question was so unfocussed, so unspecific, that she had little idea what form of answer she hoped to provoke. She only knew that she wanted something, some fragment of information, or at least a reaction. She needed to know what Willow would say.

  ‘Herself,’ is what she said, picking at the word. ‘Not sure I know what that is.’

  ‘Well, when she’s on the medication, then? Vince said – ’

  ‘Vince?’ Willow’s glance was sharp.

  ‘Yes. But he didn’t tell me anything – not really, nothing he shouldn’t. He only mentioned that she’s better when she takes her medication.’

  Apparently satisfied, Willow lowered her chin and began to play with her mug again, until Laura wondered whether the conversation was at an end.

  ‘Flatter,’ she said finally. ‘With the drugs. She’s sort of flatter. Like she’s been emptied out and left hollow.’

  There was nothing Laura could think to say in response to this, no consolation which didn’t sound utterly trite. If she’d been braver, or more demonstrative, she’d have reached out and held Willow’s hand. It was doubtless what Vince would have done.

  Instead, she took a deep breath and asked, ‘What is it she has wrong with her, exactly?’

  ‘Their diagnosis, you mean?’ She spat the word like a profanity.

  ‘Yes. But, of course, don’t say anything if you’d rather not. I don’t want to be intrusive.’

  Willow regarded her impassively. ‘Oh, they have words they use, things they fill in on forms. Bipolar spectrum. Auditory hallucinations. They never make up their minds. But it’s all crap – doesn’t mean anything. Just stupid, useless words.’

  After that, there really did appear to be nothing more to be said, so Laura rose and picked up the mugs. Neither was empty and both were cold. ‘Shall I boil the kettle again?’

  As she swilled their undrunk coffee down the sink and made some fresh, she filled the space with trivialities: the forgotten box file, the recent thaw.

  ‘I suppose I should be thinking about picking up Beth. I could fetch her early today, perhaps. I don’t know about you, but I’m starving. I was so busy coming home, I forgot about lunch.’

  Psychiatric hospitals reminded Willow in many ways of children’s homes. They shared a particular kind of forced informality, a disorder which meant that it was hard to tell residents from visitors or staff. Of course, the chaos was only surface deep; neither place could ever quite shed the odour of the institution. Here, beneath the sunshine and floor polish, lurked the sour tang of vomit.

  At least in the bin you could tell the kids – or, anyway, the younger ones – because they were kids. And most of them washed themselves, sometimes compulsively, even the boys. Cheap supermarket aftershave, on the whole, she decided, was a better smell than armpit stains.

  The ward which housed her mother was hardly a ward in the usual sense at all, but a low, single storey building set apart from the main complex. It was quite a walk from where the bus dropped her, past chess squares of car park and lawn, where skinny trees were lashed to stakes with bands of orange plastic. Willow had imagined rows of metal-framed beds, or at least shared rooms and a hospital feeling, as there’d been on the acute admission ward where she and Vince had left her mother on Sunday afternoon. But inside Stanforth House, opening off the central television lounge, were corridors of single rooms behind unnumbered doors.

  ‘Marianne Tyler?’ A woman who might or might not work there had checked a chart on the wall. ‘She’s in room 8. Down the end, turn right, second door on the left.’

  Maybe the numbers were removed in some hopeless attempt to create a family atmosphere – or perhaps to confound the enemy, in paranoid delusion. The most it was likely to do, in reality, was further disorientate the already confused. At the bin, they’d all had numbers.

  In room 8 her mother was asleep. She was fully clothed, including boots, and a dressing gown over her jeans and jumper in spite of the overheated room. The bed was pushed up against the wall and she was curled on her side, knees tucked and face to the pale yellow paintwork, where scuffs and scrapes suggested the moving of furniture, making Willow think vaguely of barricades. There was almost no furniture in the room now: just the bed and a tiny chest of drawers. On the back of the door hung a red dress that Willow thought she might remember. Everything else was strange.

  She looked completely out of it. Willow wondered if the drugs always made her tired in the daytime, or whether they might have changed her medication since Sunday’s jaunt, or upped her dosages. The doctors might tell her, she supposed, if she could find one to ask – even though she wasn’t eighteen yet, nor living with the patient. She didn’t really know; she didn’t want to know.

  There was no chair, so she sat down on the scratchy carpet and crossed her legs. That was how Mum used to sit sometimes when she was all right, cross-legged by Willow’s bed with the story book on her lap like any ordinary mother. It was always the same book, at least in Willow’s memory: the Bumper Book of Fairy Tales, bound in stiff board, with a grinning green dragon on the front. The stories Willow remembered were anything but ordinary. They twined and tangled round her bed like real, live witchcraft, thick with fantastical creatures, and transformations, and shifting, formless terrors. Willow was too young to read, then. It was only later that she came to know that the angels and demons her mother had summoned, the smoke and fire and ice and flood, lay nowhere in the pages of the book.

  It was later, too, much later, that she saw how her mother was not like other children’s. She was extraordinary. Often she was wonderful, magical, intoxicating. But there was one thing she never was,
there was one thing that Willow had never felt with her, not once. She’d never just felt safe.

  Chapter 15

  Beth remained subdued and uncommunicative all that week and the next, spurning suggested half term outings and sticking largely to her room, or Willow’s. Quite unprecedentedly, she even ducked out of her scheduled visit to Simon’s house at the weekend, pleading stomach cramps which Laura was convinced were psychosomatic, if not entirely fabricated. She might have bounced her into going, but decided to take pity on the child. Give her more time, she told herself. Vince stayed away, too; he neither rang nor dropped round to the house. No doubt he was giving them all some time and space – though Willow saw him as usual, on Friday at his office. Laura was surprised how much she missed having him to talk to.

  Given her daughter’s fragile state, Laura didn’t like to raise the question of inviting Alice for supper again. But on the Tuesday after half term, the issue was swung for them by Mrs Farrell, the science teacher, who decreed that the class should prepare PowerPoint presentations on the life cycle of the woodlouse for their homework, and that for this purpose they should work in pairs.

  ‘Alice says, can we do it at ours, please? Her brother always hogs the computer at their house, stuck in the World of Warcraft.’

  They were there already when Laura arrived home on Wednesday, having taken the bus together. The old desktop PC that was kept for Beth’s use lived on a side table in the sitting room; she heard the giggling from that direction as soon as she entered the hall.

  ‘Hello, love. Hello, Alice. Sounds as if you’re having fun with those woodlice.’

  ‘Hello, Mrs Blackwood.’ Alice was always polite.

  ‘Look at them when they’ve just hatched, Mum. We got this off Google images. Isn’t it gruesome?’

  Something almost transparent, with an orange head and fragile spindly legs, stared out at Laura from the screen, like a cross between a maggot and an uncooked prawn. Underneath, one of the young biologists had typed the helpful words: BABY WOODLOUSE.