Ninepins

by Rosy Thorton

  ‘What’s lobster like, anyway? Sounds disgusting.’

  ‘It’s a bit like crab. You love crab.’ Beth used to demand crab paste in her sandwiches every day at one time, in about Year 4. ‘Or king prawns. Except it’s even nicer.’

  Cambridge was not a city known for its purpose-built flats, but Vince lived in one of them. It was in a compact two-storey development, perhaps fifteen or twenty years old at most, tucked down a cul-de-sac off the Milton Road and set back behind plantings of firethorn and cotoneaster. There was a small car park round to one side, and nowhere was it indicated that it was for residents only. Laura pulled into the last free space. The flats had intercoms; when she rang Vince’s bell and said, ‘It’s us,’ he didn’t speak, just buzzed them in. His flat was upstairs, past a small landing where a bedraggled pot plant stretched thirstily towards a high window, and along a carpeted corridor.

  ‘Welcome,’ he said with deadpan formality as he pulled back the door. Then he grinned. ‘Better come in quick, I’ve left the pan on.’

  Laura tried not to picture the bubbling cauldron of death as they followed him in and through a door at the end of the tiny hallway. In fact it was a frying pan that he whisked off the gas, smelling smokily of garlic and butter.

  ‘Sam’s mother’s recipe,’ he explained, as he caught Laura’s glance. ‘Brown butter with garlic and parsley. Sam insists it’s the only thing to serve with lobster.’

  ‘It sounds very nice,’ she said, polite and a little awkward.

  Willow, meanwhile, had found the fridge where she helped herself to a Diet Coke. ‘Want one, Beth?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Beth installed herself on a stool at the breakfast bar and looked at nobody. Yes, please, Laura thought but didn’t say.

  The room was untidy, she was surprised to note. Not in the way that Simon was untidy, that wanton disorder that hit you as soon as you entered the house, but still, a mild slovenliness in corners which wasn’t what she’d have associated with Vince. The imperfection gave her covert pleasure.

  ‘How about you?’ He waved a glass in her direction. ‘Coke as well, or orange juice, or will you join me in a glass of wine?’

  ‘Oh, sorry, yes. I brought some. It’s in my bag. It’s sparkling actually, if that’s OK?’ She felt foolish now, especially at a lunchtime, wishing she’d stuck with chardonnay. ‘Not the real stuff, I don’t mean, just some Italian fizz. But I thought, you know, with lobster …’

  ‘Perfect. Like Guinness and oysters. Or vodka and caviar. Shall I open it, or will you?’

  ‘Or fish and chips in the paper,’ she said, smiling as she unscrewed the wire, ‘and a glass of real, old-fashioned lemonade.’

  There were only two bar stools, but Willow had hopped on to the worktop and Vince was back at his pan, stirring, so Laura climbed up next to her daughter. She filled the two glasses he had placed before her, watching the bubbles rise and then subside. The girls were both drinking straight from the can.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Vince, without turning round, ‘are you ready for the main attraction?’

  Laura hoped he didn’t mean what she thought he meant. ‘What’s that, then?’

  ‘The lobsters, of course. I assumed you’d want to watch.’

  Oh, God. ‘Well, I don’t know. I mean, I know you said there’s nothing to it and they don’t really scream, but I’m not sure I really want to see them go in.’

  Willow surveyed Vince from her perch on the worktop. ‘Are they alive?’

  ‘Of course they’re alive. You have to cook lobsters from live, it’s the whole point about them.’

  ‘Where are they now?’

  ‘Bucket in the bathroom. I’ll get them in a minute. Come on, Laura. I’ll stick the water on to boil, and then I can show you how it’s done.’

  The skin of her arms felt hot and cold at the same time. ‘Honestly, Vince, I really don’t – ’

  ‘Shut up.’ It was Beth; they all turned to look at her. ‘It’s cruel and horrible. She doesn’t want to look and I don’t blame her. Why don’t you leave her alone?’

  ‘Sweetheart – ’ began Laura, but Vince cut across her calmly. ‘It’s OK, Beth. Don’t worry.’ In fact, he almost seemed amused. ‘They’re already cooked and dressed and in the fridge. I sorted it all out this morning. I was just teasing your mother.’

  He tried to lay a hand on Beth’s shoulder, but she ducked away. ‘Well, don’t,’ she muttered.

  It took a second Coke and half a tube of Pringles – which Vince set down at the table in the living room and announced as ‘the starter’ – before Beth recovered anything like her usual countenance, and even then Laura sensed she was out of sorts. She spoke little, and when her half-lobster appeared, surrounded by salad and dressed with the steaming garlic butter, she prodded it with theatrical suspicion. It was, however, undeniably delicious. They all set about it with a will, and the assortment of forks and skewers and nutcrackers yielded by Vince’s kitchen drawers. By the time Laura had leisure to sit back, take stock and lick her fingers, the shell on her daughter’s plate was more than half empty.

  ‘I don’t care if they died in agony,’ Laura declared. ‘They’re absolutely glorious.’

  ‘Mm-mm,’ agreed Willow through a mouthful of claw.

  After lunch was over and the debris scooped into the kitchen bin, Vince hauled them away from their offers of washing up and back into the living room. ‘I’ll make some coffee in a minute. Or there’s more of that bubbly.’

  ‘Coffee would be lovely,’ said Laura. ‘Would you like me to – ?’

  ‘Sit!’

  Willow, however, disobeyed; instead, she hovered. ‘I thought I might go into town.’ She looked at Beth. ‘Just round the shops, you know. D’you want to come?’

  Beth bounced up at once, all too obviously anxious to be out of there; then she remembered herself and turned to Laura. ‘S’that OK?’

  ‘Fine. How long will you be, do you think?’

  ‘Back by four,’ said Willow.

  ‘Take a twenty from my purse, sweetheart. It can be an advance on your pocket money.’

  When the flat door banged, Vince poured himself some more of the spumante and Laura subsided into her armchair, uncertain whether to feel more relaxed or less.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘was this supposed to be revenge? For last time.’ Immediately, she wished it unsaid; the reminder of that previous encounter set her cheeks uncomfortably aglow. She rushed on. ‘The lobsters, I mean. Was it revenge for the pizzas? Were they booby-trapped?’

  He wasn’t helping at all; his face was a blank.

  ‘After we poisoned you with the Mozzarella. Weren’t you sick?’ Coffee would have helped; she wished he’d let her make it.

  ‘Sick?’ A smile twitched his mouth. ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘We were all three sick as dogs the whole night afterwards. I assumed Willow would have told you. You mean to say you escaped?’

  ‘Not a twinge. I came home and slept like a baby, before rising to breakfast, as I recall, on sausage and eggs. They were excellent pizzas, I thought.’

  ‘Excellent pizzas that gave us all food poisoning.’

  ‘Well, I’m very sorry to hear it. Willow didn’t say. Poor you.’ He sipped his wine with what looked suspiciously like satisfaction.

  I’m sorry, she knew she ought to say. For the row; for sending him out in the dark with no taxi. But it was difficult to know quite how to begin, and then he was speaking again and it was too late.

  ‘Beth didn’t seem herself today.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry about the thing with the lobsters. I shouldn’t have joked about it. I didn’t mean to upset her. Animal cruelty – at that age, it’s no laughing matter. Or at any age, come to that.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think it was that, not really. It’s like you say, she’s not herself, hasn’t been all day. I don’t know what’s got into her.’ Though she might, perhaps, have some inkling. You’re wrong. I’ve got a dad.

  ‘
How is she, otherwise?’

  ‘Oh, all better now,’ said Laura, still distracted. ‘It was just a twenty-four hour thing.’

  He grinned. ‘I didn’t mean the vomiting. I meant at school. Those girls who were giving her a hard time.’

  ‘It’s eased off, I think. At least, she hasn’t said anything recently.’ But then, she never said anything before, did she? ‘She seems happier about school, anyway. She’s been seeing a lot of one of her old friends from primary school. Alice – a lovely girl.’

  Nodding, he took another swallow of wine. ‘What about on Facebook?’

  ‘No more trouble that I know of. She’s always on there, chatting in the evenings and she never seems upset.’ Maybe she should have another half-glass of spumante herself, but Vince’s wine glasses were large and she was driving. ‘Are you on there?’ she asked him. ‘Do you have a Facebook page, I mean?’

  He showed an apologetic palm. ‘Guilty as charged. I have some ex-clients on there, like to use it to stay in touch. Funny thing, really. Bit of a far cry from Ivy League alumni tracking their frat house chums.’

  ‘True. And the same goes for twelve-year-old schoolgirls, swapping gossip out of class. Actually, the reason I was asking is that I’ve got a page now, too.’

  ‘You have? There, you see, it gets us all in the end.’

  ‘It was this post-grad student we had in the Department, doing her PhD. An Indian girl, Punita, working on water management. Anyway, she’s finished and had her viva, and she’s leaving to take up a teaching post at the university back home in Delhi. Getting married later in the spring, too. She persuaded us all to sign up so we can look at the wedding photos.’

  ‘And what did Beth have to say, about her mum being on Facebook?’

  ‘Oh, she thought it was hilarious. She’s convinced it’s only for people under twenty. But she made me a Friend. She said otherwise I’d have no mates and look like a loser.’

  ‘Ah – sweet, innocent child.’

  Laura looked at him. ‘Why?’

  ‘I see she isn’t the only one who’s sweet and innocent. Because Friends have access to everything on one’s Facebook page. You’ll be able to see all her embarrassing ramblings, her seditious slanders, her debauched photographs.’

  Debauched? ‘Vince, she’s twelve.’

  ‘And twelve-year-olds don’t have anything they wouldn’t want their mother to see?’

  No doubt she was frowning, because he said, ‘Don’t worry. I can’t imagine Beth with any terrible, dark secrets. I expect it’s all about question 12 in the maths homework and how big the art teacher’s bum is. At the very worst, it’ll be which boy they’re all fancying this week.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘There is one thing, though.’ He rose from his chair. ‘It’s like listening at keyholes. Not everything you discover may be to your advantage.’

  With a guilty lurch she thought of the spare room door.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s go and put on that coffee.’

  Installed at the breakfast bar, and with a cup to occupy her hands, things became easier again. While she speculated about the girls, and what magpie pickings they would come back with from town, he pulled the other stool round opposite her, elbow to elbow across the laminate. His coffee was good, strong and smoky.

  When smalltalk lulled, Vince laid down his cup and said, ‘Marianne was undiagnosed.’ He was looking unwaveringly at Laura, who held her breath and said nothing. Was this the apology? The concession to friendship? ‘When Willow was living with her, she wasn’t known to the mental health services. Her condition hadn’t come to light.’

  He stopped there, so she edged her way gingerly to a question. ‘Does that mean she wasn’t so ill then, perhaps? When Willow was little, she may have been all right?’

  But he shook his head. ‘Unlikely, as I understand it. Not with her symptoms the way they are now. They’re likely to have been with her always – probably since she was a teenager herself. There are blanks there unexplained by bipolar disorder, suggesting long-term damage. Drug use, perhaps, when she was young.’

  ‘Well, then, how – ?’ She hesitated, but his face signalled encouragement, so she said, ‘It’s hard to imagine how she’d have managed, that’s all, with a child, and her illness. With no support, no medication. How she’d cope.’

  He smiled faintly. ‘It’s surprising how people do manage.’

  ‘But also,’ she persevered, ‘it’s so strange that nobody noticed how things were. I don’t know … the school, the GP?’

  ‘They moved around a lot. Willow may not have been in schools for long at a time – or sometimes not at all. And I don’t think Marianne ever went to the doctor. Willow was seen, for the usual childhood things – earaches, rashes, minor ailments. Marianne took her to the surgery or other people did. Friends. She seems to have had a lot of friends, and stayed with them. Maybe they helped her with Willow, even took her off her hands for spells. But Marianne never saw a doctor herself.’

  ‘But that’s awful. Someone as sick as she is, I mean, slipping through all the nets like that.’

  ‘It happens,’ he said simply. ‘Marianne and her friends were mobile, probably suspicious of authority, a lot of them. Hard to pin down. An alternative lifestyle will cover a multitude of sins.’ Then he grinned. ‘Bloody hippies.’

  But Laura wasn’t ready to laugh. ‘What about the child? What about Willow? With children, there should be tabs kept, surely? The health visitor, for a start, when she was a baby.’

  ‘I think …’ He was frowning now, no longer making that training-manual eye contact of his, but staring down at her hands where they circled her coffee cup. She wondered if, as she did, he saw the newspaper photographs, the litany of names: Victoria Climbié, Baby P. ‘I think,’ he resumed at length, ‘you can never underestimate the resource of a mother in shielding her child. It’s amazing what even the most apparently dysfunctional parents can do, if think their child may be taken away. Perhaps when there were visits from the health visitor or the practice nurse, or headteachers to talk to, Marianne managed to get her act together. For all we know, in fact, she may have done a pretty good job of looking after Willow, even while she was neglecting herself.’

  ‘Is that what Willow says?’

  He didn’t reply at first, and she was afraid she had pushed too hard. But then he looked up at her, and his answer had the ring of candour. ‘She doesn’t say much. She’s very loyal.’

  ‘I bet she is,’ she said, surprised by an upsurge of anger. ‘So basically, Marianne hid from the doctors who could have helped her, and Willow was left to run wild and play truant.’ Reminded of the abandoned courses at the Regional College, she felt a twinge of guilt towards Vince, but rapidly suppressed it. ‘To play truant,’ she repeated, ‘and worse than that, in the end.’

  But something of the old, guarded manner had come back over Vince; he became again his professional self. ‘It’s hard to judge these things from the outside,’ was all he said; then, signalling an end to further confidences, ‘More coffee?’

  As he was pouring it, the entryphone buzzed and he put down the percolator to go to the door. Hellos in the hallway, Vince’s and Willow’s, and then they were in the kitchen. Beth swept past Vince to deposit a carrier bag in front of Laura on the breakfast bar.

  ‘Willow got a T shirt,’ she announced. ‘A black one, with long sleeves and a hood and it was only ten pounds. Show her, Willow. It’s really cool. And I got some sparkly bangles from Accessorize. They came in a set, six of them for eight pounds.’ She pulled them out, still joined by the plastic tag, and slid them up her wrist, jingling them in evident satisfaction.

  ‘And look.’ She rummaged in the bag and drew out a flat parcel of white tissue paper, folded to a square and sealed with Sellotape. ‘This is just the best. Willow bought it for me with her own money. She really wanted to – that is OK, isn’t it, Mum? It was on this stall in the Grafton Centre, next to that African one that’s alw
ays there, where I got my wooden elephant.’ As she spoke, she was carefully unfolding the tissue paper, layer by layer. ‘It was mostly a bit New Agey for me – crystals, you know, and CDs of whales moaning and stuff. Though they did have some nice dolphin earrings. But then Willow spotted this, and said I had to have it, and she was right. It’s perfect.’

  ‘This’ was revealed to a necklace; or rather, it was a pendant on a fine string of plaited red cotton. The pendant itself was small, about the size of a ten pence piece, and resembled a blazing sun.

  ‘It wards off evil spirits, apparently, the lady said. That’s what the mirror’s for. She had loads of things with little mirrors on – bags and purses, as well as jewellery – and all of it’s for getting rid of spirits. It reflects back the evil, she said.’ Beth twisted the pendant round so it caught the light, like ice in car headlamps. ‘Isn’t it gorgeous?’

  Around the perimeter of the mirror were tiny tongues of wire-framed glass in orange and red and gold. As Laura watched, they trapped the light and seemed to come alive, curling and licking outwards like so many dancing flames.

  Chapter 18

  ‘Mum, can I bike to school tomorrow?’

  Laura, who had half her mind on the benefits of sustainable woodland management for the local economy and the other on the pan of water coming up to the boil behind her, adopted the parental default position of equivocation. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’ve hardly used my new bike since I got it because it was winter, but now it’s spring, and it’ll be fun and everyone cycles.’

  Putting down her pen, Laura looked up properly at her daughter and smiled. ‘Not many reasons at all, then?’

  It was true that since a couple of weekend try-outs soon after Beth’s birthday, the much-coveted bicycle had scarcely been out of the shed. And the weather had been fine this week, the few clouds mobile and high-riding, sharp-edged as in a child’s drawing, white against a sky of brilliant blue.

  ‘I thought I’d ride along the lode. It’s much shorter than by road.’