by Rosy Thorton
She sat back down at the table. ‘Is everything all right at college?’
It was hardly subtle. But Willow was weary as well, of course: too weary, it seemed, to dissemble. She said nothing – an immediate admission of guilt.
‘Only, I notice you’ve been missing a few classes, and I wondered if there was a problem.’
Willow prodded her mug of cold tea, pushing it away. ‘I’ve stopped going.’
Unsure quite what to say, Laura played for time. ‘You’ve stopped …?’
‘College, yes. I’ve dropped out.’
‘Since when?’
A shrug. ‘Since Christmas. Or a bit before that.’
The parent in Laura, and the university researcher, wanted to seize on all the irrefutable arguments. The need for qualifications; the expansion of personal horizons along with job opportunities. But she was too tired and she knew it would do no good.
‘Why?’ was all she said.
Instead of bridling, Willow gave the question thought.
‘I do want to learn things,’ she replied, after a moment. ‘There’s such a lot to learn. I’m learning to swim. I can nearly do a width.’
This seemed to call for comment, so Laura said, ‘That’s great.’
‘But I didn’t want to learn there. Not at college, sitting in rows in classrooms like school. Not now, not at the moment. Not yet.’
It gets harder when you’re older, Laura thought of saying. It was what people always claimed. But was it true? What could be harder than being seventeen?
‘I only just got out of school, last year. And then out of the bin, too. I’ve had enough of those places. I just want to be here.’
Freedom, Laura supposed; independence. And you couldn’t really blame her. But there was a fine line between independence and isolation. Or was it something else she meant? Like being a proper family.
‘You are here,’ she said. ‘You’ve got this. So why not college as well? It’s only two days a week.’
But Willow’s eyes were flint; and besides, it wasn’t Laura’s responsibility to persuade her, even if she knew how. It was someone else’s job; which led to the question, ‘What does Vince say?’
There was no answer; Willow’s lids dropped.
‘He doesn’t know?’
The eyes came up again, half pleading, half warning. ‘Don’t tell him.’
‘Well, I …’ But she was hardly about to tell Vince anything, was she, or even speak to him in a hurry. And why should he be the only one with secrets? ‘All right, I won’t.’
‘Thing is …’ Willow traced circles on the table, which was still not wiped clear of last night’s pizza crumbs. ‘Vince always wants me to talk to him, tell him things. And I do talk to him, I like talking to him.’ Then she looked up, and straight across at Laura. ‘But I don’t tell him everything.’
The following week, work was completed on the pumphouse. The new plasterboard was up inside, and the damp course replaced. The door and window frames had been checked over and renewed where necessary, and were ready to paint.
‘All yours, then,’ said Alan Cowling of Cowling and Son, builders, as he drained his final mug of tea. Laura had not, in the event, ferried down that many mugs to him over the four weeks or so, on and off, that he’d been working on her property. She had generally been at work while he was here and refreshment had been dispensed mostly from his own thermos. Today, before they exchanged brown envelopes (her cheque for his final invoice), she had brought him digestives on a china plate by way of partial recompense.
‘So, all the plaster is dry, is it, and the chemicals from the damp-proofing and timber treatment? It’s all right to go in there and start on the decorating?’
The builder narrowed his eyes. ‘Should be fine by the weekend, if you open all the windows.’
That, of course, ruled Beth out – had she not been ruled out already – from helping with the interior paintwork. But Saturday dawned bright and fresh with a stiff, easterly breeze, apt for quick drying and the efficient dispersal of fumes. Laura had said that Beth might join her and Willow in priming and undercoating the exterior woodwork, with the proviso that she stand down immediately should she feel the slightest tightening of the chest.
It was more than a week since the last frost and the lawn was squelchy underfoot, especially where it dipped down towards the pumphouse. Any indentation deeper than a bootprint back-filled rapidly with peaty liquid. The wind was biting so they all wore ancient sweaters of Laura’s, and she found them each a pair of old gardening gloves to paint in. But March had brought new growth stealing in everywhere to places Laura hadn’t noticed. The grass itself was higher than she remembered its being last week, and would need the mower putting over it as soon as the water table subsided enough to allow it. Every limb of every shrub seemed to be longer by a tender half-inch, and fat buds tipped the branches of willow and hazel, splitting already in places to reveal the emergent catkins. Across the far side of the lawn, where the soil was better drained, a rash of crocuses had erupted, livid in purple and gold against the muddy green. A couple more weeks and there’d be daffodils.
‘Why is primer always pink?’ Beth wanted to know as she dipped her brush in the pot. ‘We’re doing it white, aren’t we?’
‘Maybe so you can see where you’ve been,’ Laura hazarded. ‘Now, make sure you cover all the places where there’s bare wood.’
Beside them Willow worked in silent concentration, her tongue tip trapped between her teeth. She wetted only a careful triangle of brush at each dip, pausing for a second above the pot each time before transferring her hand to the window frame; Beth’s brush, by contrast, was already thickly clogged, with runnels of pink streaking the handle as far as her gloved fingers.
It was fast work with three. In less than an hour, the last sections of exposed wood had disappeared, and Beth was dispatched to the kitchen to make tea while Laura fetched a jam jar of turpentine from the shed.
‘Leave your gloves here,’ said Laura. ‘And don’t lean against anything with those painty sleeves.’
By the time the tea was drunk, the first parts they had primed were dry and ready for undercoating. This was slower work, especially round the edges of the glass. Several times, Beth smudged the parts she had done by leaning against them with her other hand; then, climbing the stepladder to paint the top of the window, she contrived to dash the pane with a long trail of white paint. Laura, armed with a rag and the turpentine, followed behind righting the mishaps and resisting the temptation to dismiss her daughter summarily from the project.
‘I think you’re getting rather too much paint on your brush,’ she observed mildly. ‘Try dipping it less far into the pot, and then really work it on the wood until all the paint is gone before you dip again.’
‘I am. But it’s hard. It all gets up the end near the handle and then it squishes out and drips down.’
‘Not if you get less paint on your brush. Look at Willow.’ Below Beth’s ladder she was making a meticulous job of outlining the sill; the roots of her bristles glistened clean and black. ‘She isn’t dripping everywhere.’
‘Isn’t she the clever one?’ muttered Beth beneath her breath.
As the areas of window frame left to undercoat diminished, so it grew tighter for three people to work, and presently Laura moved round to start on the door. This side of the pumphouse was sheltered from the wind, and the sun, which had seemed to have no power in it, began to warm the back of her neck. Her muscles were heated now, too; her right arm felt the pull as she plastered to and fro. She was just contemplating the removal of a jumper when a sudden shriek sent her back round the corner to Beth and Willow.
‘Sorry,’ mumbled Beth, standing pink-faced and unrepentant at the top of the stepladder.
Willow, underneath, was feeling in her hair for the blob of paint.
‘Here, let me.’ Laura found a clean rag and, bending Willow’s head towards her, rubbed at the smear, wiping it away as best she could. ‘Beth, what were you doi
ng? You really need to be more careful. Look down here.’ She indicated the grass beneath the window, which was spotted and splashed in white. ‘What’s all this?’
Beth looked belligerent. ‘It’s only the lawn. What’s it matter?’
‘It looks a mess, that’s what. And it won’t do the grass any good.’
‘Dad wouldn’t mind. He never minds a bit of mess. He’s fun.’
‘Dad?’ Suspicion formed in Laura’s mind. ‘You’ve never done any painting at Dad’s, have you?’
Beth’s eyes slanted away. ‘Not really.’
‘What do you mean, ‘‘not really’’?’ Simon knew about her asthma; he knew she shouldn’t be breathing paint fumes.
Her daughter, apparently, could read her mind; or else, poor child, she’d heard it all too often before. ‘S’OK, it was outdoors. It was nothing – just putting some browny-black stuff on the garden fence. Ages ago. Last summer.’ She sat down on the top step of the ladder with her brush across her lap, transferring an oblong of white to her jeans. ‘Honestly, Mum, I knew you’d go ballistic about it. That’s why I told him not to tell you.’
‘Was it creosote? Or Sadolin?’ She wasn’t sure which was worse. Inhaling coal tar couldn’t be good, but those liquid woodstains no doubt contained all kinds of evil fungicides.
Beth stared blankly at her mother. ‘How should I know?’
Willow, meanwhile, had reached across to the bucket of soapy water which still stood, now grey and cold, where Laura had left it after washing down the woodwork before they began. She drew a cupped handful of water and suds and flung it up at Beth, catching her across the midriff. Beth gasped, and sent Willow a look of pure venom, so that Laura thought she might either cry or launch a murderous assault. But then she was down the ladder in one bound and over to the bucket and the two of them were at it like warring washerwomen, flicking each other with filthy water and cackling fit to burst.
When order was restored, along with Beth’s fair humour, Laura sent her up to the house to fetch dry jumpers for herself and Willow, and to put the kettle on again. ‘You’ll both catch your deaths out here, else, in this cold wind.’
The window frame completed, Willow came to join Laura in painting the door. For a while they worked together side by side in companionable silence. When Laura paused to flex her stiffening wrist, she took the moment to examine Willow’s handiwork. It was tidy; very tidy indeed.
‘Nice,’ she said. ‘You seem to have quite a knack for this. Have you done any decorating before?’
Willow worked her brush slowly up and down the wood. ‘We never lived anywhere like this. Anywhere with an outside.’ Then, catching Laura’s puzzled expression, she laughed and said, ‘Well, of course there must have been outsides. But you know what I mean – bedsits, people’s spare rooms. It was always someone else’s job.’
It made sense. One year at university, Laura had lived in a high-rise student residence and it had taken her until Christmas to work out, from down below, which one was her window.
‘What about the insides, though? Didn’t you ever help to paint your bedroom?’
Willow’s brush halted for a moment; liquid paint gathered at the tip to form a welling bubble, which distorted, broke and began to roll. Then she shrugged, neatly trapped the escaping drip, and the slow, even strokes resumed. ‘No. We were never anywhere long enough, I guess.’
‘Tea break,’ called Beth, approaching across the lawn with a tray. ‘Hope it’s OK, Mum, I’ve brought down that packet of digestives. I’m totally starving.’
Willow sat cross-legged on the floor in the room which had belonged to Laura’s parents, and stared at the wallpaper. It was vinyl coated, a green lattice pattern on a white background with tiny sprigged roses in lemon yellow. As she stared, the pattern performed a slow dance, twisting and merging into itself and away, like moving scenery behind a play.
She held her breath. One, two …
When it resolved itself it was a different wallpaper in a different room. She didn’t know where the room was, or how old she was in it, but she saw the paper with a keen clarity: vertical stripes of gold on cream, narrow then wide, and, round above the skirting at the height where her blue tractor bumped, a horizontal frieze of cream on gold. This was a wall she had looked at for a long time, with her mother in the big double bed behind her, that they shared at night and never got made. Eleven, twelve.
There was a room with pale yellow paint, but that one swam out of reach in her memory; when she tried to grasp for it, it transformed itself into the paint of her mother’s hospital room in Cambridge, scuff-marked and stripped of furniture. The original, she thought, had been the small back bedroom in a house in London, belonging to a man; the landing had been dark, with just a hanging wire and no bulb, but she couldn’t call the room itself to mind at all. Except that the bed was narrow and small; she hadn’t shared the room with her mother. Now, even with her eyes closed, she could neither picture the man nor remember his name. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine. She wondered whether Mum could.
Another wall. This one was painted, too, no plain canvas this time, but a wild panorama of colour. It was a mural, executed in a naïve hand. She recalled it exact in every detail, from the purple mountains at the top to the thick forest undergrowth at the front, tangled with a gnarl of roots and branches. The image was endlessly seductive and Willow sat lost in it for hours. The place must have been a squat. Sometimes there was no water in the taps and they told her not to flush the toilet when she’d been, and there always seemed to be someone different minding her.
Next she saw dark blue tiles, a double row of them at the back of an electric cooker, and above the tiles a wall which had once been white, now stained and splashed with grease. Fifty-two, fifty-three. She was nine or ten, and cooking scrambled eggs in a saucepan she’d found. But the ring was too hot and she didn’t stir fast enough and the bottom part went dry and brown and smelt of burnt car tyres. She scraped off the top part on to a plate to take up to her mother, but the rubber smell went all the way through. Fifty-nine, sixty. She threw it away later, when Mum was asleep.
Finally, she remembered a wall in a toilet, a public one with an electric hand dryer. Place hands under nozzle. Rub hands gently in warm air flow. Air stops automatically. She read the instructions over and over so she didn’t have to look in the mirror, which stared from the wall to her left in metallic accusation. Behind the dryer, the wall was painted an institutional cream, the same cream as in the corridor outside, where the WPC was standing waiting for her. The same cream as in the interview room, three doors along, where there was a desk with a tape-recorder in the middle. Seventy-six, seventy-seven. On one side of a desk the police sergeant was sitting, next to an empty chair which was the WPC’s; on the other side were three chairs. Eighty, eighty-one, eighty-two. A social worker occupied one of the chairs. Not Vince, not then: this must have been the duty social worker, a name from a telephone list. She was greying and weary, with a voice that dragged like boots on gravel. The second chair was Willow’s. Eighty-eight, eighty-nine. While she held her breath and counted, she could stay here in the toilet; she didn’t need to go back in. Not yet, ninety-one, not yet, ninety-two. The lighter was in there with them. It lay on the desk beside the tape-recorder and the sergeant’s notebook, not her mum’s silver one, but a cheap disposable thing from Forbuoys. Ninety-nine, a hundred. While she held her breath, she didn’t have to go back in there and see her mother in the third chair, and face the look in her eyes.
A hundred and one, a hundred and two, a hundred and three …
Chapter 17
When Vince finally called it was with a peace offering of lobster.
‘It’s my friend Sam, with the boat. He’s got some beauties. And nobody can eat lobster alone. It wouldn’t be decent.’
There was nothing sheepish in his voice, no indication that he even remembered the terms on which they’d parted. But if he’d been awkward it would have made her awkward, too – and he wouldn�
�t have been Vince.
‘He landed them at the weekend, and he’s got me down for two nice big ones. I know you said Beth didn’t eat things with tentacles, but you never mentioned pincers.’
‘At the weekend?’ It was Thursday already. How long did lobster keep? Then a nasty thought struck her. ‘Are they … still alive?’
He laughed. ‘Naturally. But don’t worry, I shan’t ask you to do the deed. I was going to suggest you all come over to my flat, and I’ll be the one with blood on my hands.’
Prospective murderer or not, this softened her towards him at once. An invitation to his private space must surely represent a gesture of compromise, a lowering of professional walls.
‘That would be lovely,’ she said, and hoped he heard her mean it. ‘Though not for the lobsters. Is it true about them screaming, when you drop them in the pot?’
Another laugh. ‘Utter nonsense, I gather. Pure urban myth. Sam says they don’t have vocal cords, or any means of vocalisation. There’s a bit of a hiss sometimes, but he reckons it’s air escaping from their stomachs through their mouths when they hit the boiling water.’
‘Oh. I see.’ This information didn’t make her feel much better about the barbarity to which she was to be party. But she was very fond of lobster.
‘Anyway,’ said Vince, ‘I have a colleague who claims the same thing about carrots.’
‘What about them?’ Laura was confused.
‘That scientists have recorded a cry of pain when they’re uprooted. But she’s a fruitarian, this colleague, and completely bonkers. Works in family liaison.’
When, over supper, Laura told Beth about the invitation – omitting specifics as to the provenance of the lunch – she was not enthusiastic.
‘I wanted to have Alice round on Saturday.’
‘Well, you still can. Why doesn’t she come over in the morning before we go, or else later on, for supper?’
‘S’pose so.’
Laura looked at her in exasperation. She would have hoped for curiosity, at the very least, about seeing where he lived. Beth had always been so keen on Vince. Until just recently.
