Ninepins

by Rosy Thorton

  ‘Really? Won’t it be filthy? Everything’s still so wet out there – the garden’s a bog. You don’t want to arrive at school all covered in mud, do you? Or the bike either, for that matter, when it’s so new.’

  ‘I meant the path on the top of the dyke. It’s not too muddy up there.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know.’ The pan was boiling now; Laura rose from the table and picked up the packet of spaghetti, sliding out a fat handful. She slipped it into the rolling water, pushing down on the ends until it disappeared beneath the foam. ‘It’s pretty slippery,’ she said, ‘and the banks are steep.’

  ‘Mum, I’m not eight. I’m not going to wobble off my bike and fall in the lode.’

  Laura, who had been picturing more or less exactly that, shot Beth a grin through the cloud of starchy steam. ‘All right. But it’s pretty lonely along there, too. Suppose you had an asthma attack?’

  It wasn’t a fanciful fear; Beth had sometimes had attacks triggered by exercise or exertion. In a public place, on the road, there would always be someone who’d stop and help, someone with a car.

  ‘I’ll have my inhaler with me, won’t I? And my mobile.’

  ‘What good is a mobile, along that footpath? The ambulance couldn’t – ’

  ‘Ambulance? Mum – seriously. You make it sound like I’m some kind of old lady or cripple or something. I’m sure I can manage to bike three miles to Elswell without having to be carted off on a freaking stretcher. It’ll only take, like, fifteen minutes.’

  The spaghetti, revolving slowly under Laura’s wooden spoon, was starting to yield and soften. ‘Go and give Willow a shout, could you, please, love?’ she said.

  They were back before she’d drained the pasta.

  ‘What’s in the sauce?’ asked Beth, lifting saucepan lids.

  ‘Bacon and mushrooms. And I’ve done some runner beans. Now wash your hands – and could you get the knives and forks, please?’

  ‘Willow’ll do that. I’ll grate the Parmesan.’

  When they were all seated and served, a brief silence reigned. But Beth seldom let go of a bone for long once her teeth were in it.

  ‘It doesn’t get dark now ’til six o’clock. I’d be home ages before that. I could stay at school ’til half past four or something, be home a bit before you, and it would still be daylight.’

  Laura nodded. The longer evenings certainly made things easier.

  ‘And biking’s good for you. They’re always on at school about kids not getting enough exercise because they’re guzzling snacks in front of the computer.’

  ‘Doubly bad,’ said Laura, choosing the side alley. ‘Crisp crumbs in the keyboard – fatal.’

  Beth refused to be diverted. ‘And that asthma doctor, at the hospital last summer, said exercise was good, didn’t she? ‘‘Regular gentle exercise’’ is what she said. So if I bike every day, there and back, that’s regular. And along the lode I’m not exactly going to be zooming along, am I? It’s too lumpy.’

  There was nothing here Laura could easily disagree with, so she focussed on wrapping spaghetti round her fork.

  ‘Might be good for my flabby thighs, too.’

  ‘What nonsense,’ she said. ‘Your thighs are just fine.’

  She’d seen Beth through the open bathroom door, sitting on the linen basket with her legs pressed flat, prodding censoriously at the pale, splayed flesh. But somehow her daughter, now shovelling spaghetti and sauce like a brickie’s mate, did not seem a high risk for anorexia nervosa.

  ‘Is your old bike still in the shed?’ They were the first words Willow had uttered since she came down. Laura and Beth, battle lines momentarily abandoned, both turned their eyes to her.

  ‘Think so,’ said Beth. ‘Unless Mum’s chucked it.’

  ‘No, it’s still there. I keep thinking we should find some younger child who’d like to have it, and then not getting round to doing anything about it. Why?’

  ‘Thought I might have a go on it sometime, that’s all. If you don’t mind?’

  ‘Of course not, but it’s very small. Beth had outgrown it.’

  ‘It’s teeny weeny. I had it when it was about seven or something.’

  ‘Well, nine, maybe. Nine or ten.’ Beth had been riding it around quite happily in the early autumn, and now she made it sound like a relic of infancy. ‘But it is small.’

  Willow shrugged. ‘I’m not very big.’ And indeed, sitting across the table in her skinny black T shirt, there looked to be nothing of her. The half-inch spurt that Beth had put on since the end of the old year might, in fact, have taken her past Willow, though they were still very much of a height.

  ‘Try it, then, by all means. The saddle and handlebars will already be up at their highest.’ She refrained from asking Willow whether she had a helmet.

  ‘Thanks. So, Beth, d’you mind if I come along the lode with you in the morning? Just for the ride?’

  ‘Yeah – that’d be great.’

  Thus it was settled between them, and Laura knew herself outmanoeuvred. Gracious defeat seemed the only option. She arranged her face in a genial smile. ‘Would anyone like more Parmesan?’

  Willow was twelve years old when she learned to ride a bicycle.

  It wasn’t her first. There had been an earlier bike – actually a tricycle with pink plastic wheels and white tyres that smelt like rubber bands. Her mother had brought it home one day, tied all over with big pink ribbons and shiny foil streamers. It might have been a birthday or it might not; nothing was said. She sat on the moulded pink saddle, and her mother pushed her down some long, uncarpeted hallway; the pedals turned so fast that it was all she could do for her legs to keep up, and now and then her feet spun off and the pedals clattered her shins. They left that house with people after them and no time to pack. Willow never knew if the chasing demons were real or only in her mother’s head, but either way, the trike was left behind.

  The bike she learned to ride on wasn’t hers at all. She had found it in a brick lean-to at the back of the house which was still black inside from when it had been a coal shed. They were living in a council house on an estate on the edge of Cambridge. The tenant had gone away to Ireland for the summer and left Mum with the rent book and a bunch of keys. According to the officious neighbour, Mrs Pauling, the council would be down on them like thunder if they knew, since subletting wasn’t allowed. So Willow hauled the bike to the end of the garden, away from Mrs Pauling’s windows and out of view of the road. It was old and heavy and too big for her, as black as the coal shed and stiff with rust. The three-speed was jammed in place and wouldn’t have shifted, even if she’d known what gears were for. The chain was brittly dry and creaked as it turned.

  She taught herself because there was nobody else to teach her. It was four pedal turns from one side of the garden to the other, with the gears stuck on ‘3’; four long, slow, wobbly pushes with her right leg and four with her left, while her hands on the handlebars kept up a constant frantic fight, adjusting and readjusting to keep her weight above the wheels. The turf was threadbare and dry, each lump and bump set hard as concrete in the August sun. When she overbalanced and fell – which at the start was often – it came up to meet her with a breath-depriving slam and the dry grass burned her skin. The bike was too heavy to turn in the short space, so at each end, uncertain of the brakes, she jumped down to stop, learning to land on her feet before the bike toppled over and took her with it.

  It was impossible to say, now, how long she’d spent riding the bike to and fro across the narrow, yellowed lawn. It could have been every day for a fortnight, or just a couple of afternoons. She remembered the sun on her shoulders, which were turning pink and she knew she ought to go indoors or they would burn, but was too caught up to stop. She remembered the slight rise of ground by the left-hand fence, which meant the bike was liable to tip the other way as you stopped, unless you leant into the slope for the last half-turn of the pedals before you jumped off. She remembered the worst fall, close to the other en
d, when she tugged the handlebar too suddenly and caught the mudguard on the toe of her trainer, sending herself sprawling flat to the side with the bike on top of her. She remembered the broad graze which stretched down her thigh as far as the knee, streaky white at first and blotching slowly to purple, and the blobs of blood which appeared only later, welling from a series of tiny parallel nicks; but she couldn’t recall any pain.

  What if I fell? she remembered thinking. What if I really fell and hurt myself, like kids sometimes did, and broke their arms or ankles or cracked their heads and had to be in hospital? What would happen then? In hospital, there were meals, weren’t there, normal meals that an adult had cooked, and someone to make sure you had clean pyjamas. It could happen so easily. Maybe out on the road, on the tarmac, where she’d be going faster. It wouldn’t take much. One sharper turn, a heavier fall, the negligent snap of bone. What if … what if …?

  It was close to the Easter holidays when Laura found the hair straighteners. Sunday morning, after breakfast, was when she always changed the sheets. She’d stripped Beth’s bed and thrown across the fresh sheet, smoothing it over with the heel of her palm to work out the wrinkles. She pulled it tight and tucked it in along the front edge, then dragged the bed away from the wall by six inches or so to tuck it in behind. The straighteners were underneath the bed, right at the back by the wall. Either they must have fallen there, slipping down between bed and wall – or else they’d been hidden.

  There had been no mention for months of Beth’s desire for straightening tongs. Laura had not bought them for birthday or Christmas, and Simon’s cheques had gone on other things. She reached down and picked them up. They were square-edged in cream plastic, the metal jaws closed tight and wrapped neatly around with the black flex. There was no brand logo, but they didn’t look cheap.

  At the spare room door she paused and knocked before entering. Willow sat cross-legged with her back to the door, facing the bed on which Beth lay prone, head to the foot and feet on the pillow. She was sure there had been laughter, but they were silent as she came in. It was too late, however, to dissemble or delay her purpose, to begin with something else, since the straighteners were in her hand and Beth had seen them.

  ‘These were under your bed,’ she said. ‘Where did they come from?’

  Beth raised herself on one elbow and looked at Willow, but there was no help from that quarter; her hair was short, choppy and unkempt as always.

  ‘They’re mine.’

  ‘I see.’ Laura waited. They both knew it wasn’t what she’d asked.

  Beth’s voice rose a defensive notch. ‘Someone gave them to me.’

  ‘Lent them to you, do you mean, or actually gave?’

  ‘Gave.’

  Simon, perhaps. He’d always watched her battles with her hair in sympathetic amusement; the stubborn kinks had come from him. ‘Were they Tessa’s?’

  But she knew she was clutching at straws; Beth looked down and said nothing. Laura tried another tack.

  ‘What were they doing at the back there, under the bed?’

  Again, nothing. Instead it was Willow who spoke. ‘Bad idea.’

  ‘What is?’ Beth blinked at her, surprised from her silence.

  ‘Putting them under the bed. You could cause a fire that way.’

  ‘They weren’t hot.’ But she spoke rather too quickly, and Laura’s nostrils twitched with the smell of scorched carpet and smouldering bedlinen.

  Collecting herself, she said, ‘Beth, love, would you mind coming and helping me with your bed? You can put the duvet in its cover for me.’

  Back in Beth’s room, she finished tucking in the sheet while her daughter obediently started on the duvet. It made it easier to be doing something.

  ‘Were they from Willow? The straighteners, I mean.’

  ‘No.’

  This came as a relief, though Laura wasn’t sure quite why, and it was, in any case, shortlived. ‘Then who? Sweetheart, please tell me where they came from.’

  ‘I said. Someone gave them to me.’

  Shoplifting. Her mind, which had been resolutely shutting out the word, suddenly shouted it loud. The hiding place; the evasive answers. Shoplifting – again.

  ‘Who did, Beth?’ she asked quietly. ‘Who gave them to you?’

  No shop in Elswell sold electrical goods. It must have been in Cambridge. But how, and when?

  ‘Rianna.’

  Laura’s thoughts were so busy forging their own track that the answer threw her for a moment. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘It was Rianna that gave me them.’

  Her head spun. ‘When?’

  ‘Last week, week before.’

  ‘But I thought …’ What had she thought, exactly? ‘I didn’t know you two were friends any more.’

  ‘We weren’t, for a bit. But she kept on at me, being really nice and everything. And the thing is she’s fallen out with Caitlin so she’d got no one to hang out with.’

  Poor little Rianna, thought Laura bitterly. The friendless loner act, and Beth was fool enough to fall for it. Except it was also just like her daughter: staunch and kind.

  ‘I thought you were mainly in with Alice now, and her friends. Ellie and Gemma.’

  ‘I did try. I said to them, let’s include Rianna, but Gemma hates her. They all do. Gemma said some really spiteful things about her, and about her family, too.’

  ‘Well, of course, that isn’t nice. It’s really not right of Gemma, to say mean things …’ Laura could feel her ground begin to crumble. She dug in her feet. ‘What about Facebook? Those things Rianna said about you. She really upset you. And now you’re friends again?’

  ‘What things?’ Beth’s face fought between anguish and denial, before resolving itself into accusation. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I saw on the screen, that day – or guessed. I’m sorry.’ But this was not the point; she was losing her way again. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I’m not sure you should be accepting a gift like that.’ Though this, as well, glanced off from the central issue. ‘Sweets, perhaps, all right, but not big things, things like these hair tongs. It’s not as if it was your birthday or anything.’

  ‘You didn’t mind when it was Willow. She gave me the mirror necklace, and that wasn’t my birthday, either. You never said anything then.’

  ‘That’s different.’

  ‘Why?’

  Why was it different? Because I know Willow; because she’s family. Laura took two corners of duvet and cover from her daughter and together they shook it into shape. Instead she said, ‘They must have been expensive.’

  ‘No.’ Beth shook her head, eager to reassure. ‘No, she said Liam got them. Her brother, you know. He had loads. He has a van and does deliveries for people, and sometimes they give him stuff. I think they were free, or at least really cheap.’

  Oh, God. Perhaps not so far off, then, when she’d thought the straighteners stolen.

  Between the two of them, they lifted the duvet on to the bed and tugged it smooth. Beth tossed her pillows, freshly cased, towards the headboard, where they lodged at rakish angles.

  Laura straightened her back. ‘You know, you don’t have to be friends with someone just because she gives you things.’

  ‘I do know that, Mum. I’m not a total div.’

  ‘Beth, you know I don’t like your using – ’

  ‘Anyway, it wasn’t like that. You make it sound like she was bribing me, or paying me to like her or something, but that’s not how it was at all. She just had these spare straighteners lying around in a box at home, and she knew I’d been wanting some for ages, so she was being nice, and I don’t see how there can be anything wrong with being nice to someone.’

  She spoke in a rush and with an intensity that brooked no contradiction; a year or two ago, she’d have finished, ‘So there.’ The set of her lips was suddenly so precisely the same as when she was seven years old that Laura couldn’t help but smile.

  ‘Come here,’ she said, and stepped forward
to pull Beth into a clumsy hug, their feet tangling in the discarded heap of dirty sheet and duvet cover and pillow cases. I love you, I am afraid for you, I don’t want you to get hurt.

  Rather than voice these impossible things, she pushed Beth gently away to arm’s length, and held her eye. ‘All right. But you use them only on the dressing table, in a nice, clear space. And afterwards you leave them out to cool properly, and never, ever put them away hot.’

  Chapter 19

  It was sheer chance that Laura noticed the swallows. On the first Monday of the Easter holidays she was working at home; at ten o’clock she went out to her car, which was parked on top of the dyke as usual, to fetch a file she’d left on the back seat. With the folder in one hand and the car keys in the other, she turned for a moment to look out across the empty fields before going back inside the house. It was a habit with her, almost a superstition, like touching a charm. She drank in the fens as she’d draw in cool water, to reassure herself of their existence, or take a slice of them back indoors with her to sustain her at her desk. More often than not she hardly looked, or saw, at all; the long habit had become a reflex.

  It was a movement, now, that caught her attention: a sudden streak, low over the winter wheat, that was gone before she truly saw it. It was no more than a tick, a dash. Could movement have a colour? If so, she sensed that its shade was dark – though the field itself was dark, too, black soil between green shoots, so there was nothing to differentiate what she saw but the simple fact of motion. She knew at once what she had seen. That dizzy speed, that plunging arc, had been missing from the landscape since last summer’s end. It was the swallows, back again; it was the spring.

  As every year, she found their absence registered consciously only on their return. In August and September, when they ceased their skimming and swooping and congregated on the wires that, in places along the road, were the only architecture of those unbroken levels, she’d felt a sympathetic, gathering sadness; yet when they were gone she’d given them no thought again until just now. The place had been lifeless without them – how was it she had not missed them?