by Rosy Thorton
‘What DVDs was she thinking, do you know?’ It might be the wrong thing to be worrying about, but you could bet it wouldn’t be Wallace and Gromit.
‘Oh, I don’t know. She says Liam sometimes gets films before they’re out. But I don’t think she’s into horror or scary stuff or anything, if that’s what you mean.’
‘All right. Well, I suppose I don’t mind 15s, but you definitely shouldn’t be watching anything that’s an 18. You’re only twelve, remember.’
On the Wednesday, two days before the projected sleepover, Laura came home from work early. Her office faced due west over a busy, narrow street; the afternoon sun struck the glass behind her desk, which amplified it to an insupportable intensity, but if she raised the sash the noise and fumes of buses and cars were equally unbearable. A small electric fan, clipped to the edge of her bookshelf, did nothing but slowly rotate the same clogged air. She craved the wide spaces of Ninepins.
Thus, with a back seat piled with books and papers, she drew up on to the dyke beside the house at barely ten past four. There was nothing unusual in seeing two bicycles lie sprawled by the front door; the surprise came as she climbed from the car and approached, with books and key in hand. Both bikes were full sized, and only one was familiar: Beth’s birthday bicycle and a battered red mountain bike that Laura didn’t recognise.
‘Hello there.’
When there was no reply she guessed they were on the computer, Beth and the owner of the foreign bike. But the sitting room was as deserted as the kitchen. The kettle was cold. Perhaps they had gone out for a walk, or to the tree house. It was too hot an afternoon, surely, for them to be closeted in Beth’s stuffy bedroom; besides, from up there Beth would have heard her greeting, and shouted back or wandered out in search of tea. Laying down her books, Laura stood still for a moment to enjoy the empty calm of her kitchen, which always stayed cool in the summer.
That was when she heard it: the sound of strangled sobbing. Even through a floor, two walls and possibly a pillow there was no mistaking Beth. There could be no number to the times she had heard her daughter cry: from the first small Moses basket next to the bed, when one snuffle would have her wide awake and watchful, through grazed knees and bumped heads to the larger losses and disappointments that no mother could keep away. And still, every time when she heard the sound, it tugged at the same place beneath her ribs where the invisible line connected. She moved for the stairs.
The crying was coming from Beth’s bedroom, of which the door stood slightly ajar.
‘Love?’ called Laura softly as she grasped the handle.
Her mind had emptied of everything but Beth, so she was startled to come face to face with another girl. Dark-haired, slim, with a narrow nose and sharp cheekbones: it was the other one, Rianna’s sidekick, Caitlin. What have you done to my Beth? How have you upset her?
‘I brought her home, Mrs Blackwood. I thought I’d better.’ Laura couldn’t recall hearing her voice before – or else it was not how she’d remembered. ‘She was in a terrible state at the end of school. I didn’t like to leave her to get home on her own. You know, on her bike and everything.’
‘Oh. Right. Er, thank you.’
Caitlin stepped meekly aside to let Laura to the bed, where her daughter lay doubled round a folded pillow, which she clutched like a life preserver. Her face was invisible, pressed down between her arms. Her back was tense but no longer shaking; the noise had ceased.
‘Love,’ she said again, and placed a hand lightly on the nearest of Beth’s shoulders. ‘What is it, sweetheart?’
A muffled moan was the only response, so she sat down on the bed and fretted gently at Beth’s shoulder and neck, murmuring the usual nothings. ‘Never mind … later … doesn’t matter … baby girl.’
From by the door, Caitlin, forgotten again, gave a cough. ‘Perhaps I’ll go, then. Now that you’re here.’
Laura looked up. ‘Oh, well, if you need to be off, then of course. Thank you so much for bringing Beth home and looking after her. It’s terribly kind of you. But you know, you’re very welcome to stay a bit, if you like. Stay and have supper with us.’
The girl shifted on to one foot. ‘Well …’
‘Go if you like. Or stay. We’re grateful either way.’
‘It was Rianna.’ Caitlin said the words quickly, and with her eyes downturned; they seemed to have cost her some effort of will.
‘Rianna?’
She nodded. ‘That made her cry, yes. It was at the end of last lesson, in the cloakroom, but I don’t know what it was about. Just that they’d been talking and Rianna said something and Beth was really upset.’ Then, with a surge of vehemence, she added, ‘Rianna’s a cow.’
‘I see. Well, thank you for telling me.’
Rianna – again. So much for the sleepover and the DVDs, the chip shop chips.
‘Um, do you think …?’ Caitlin sidled closer to the door. ‘Maybe Beth’d like a cup of tea or something?’
Laura smiled. ‘I’m sure she would. Maybe we could all have one? I’m sure you’ll find the things. Thank you, Caitlin, you’re a good girl. I expect we’ll be down soon.’
Caitlin escaped for the kitchen, leaving them alone. Laura bent forward and snaked her arms round Beth, who shifted and rolled until she was cradled in her mother’s lap. There was no need to say anything more, not for now; it was enough to hold her close and slowly, slowly, rock her to and fro.
It might have been two minutes, or five, or ten, before finally Beth stirred and made a throaty sound.
‘Thrrrghk.’ Then, more distinctly, ‘Thanks.’
‘Feeling a bit better? Shall we go down in a minute?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘I bought some Jaffa cakes. A cup of tea and a Jaffa cake.’
‘Mm.’
‘And macaroni cheese for supper?’
‘Mm. Mum?’ Beth raised a blotched and tear-blurred face.
‘What, love?’
‘Tell me you didn’t just call Caitlin a good girl.’
Downstairs, Caitlin had found the kettle and mugs and milk but not the tea bags; instead, the china tea pot, which had come from Laura’s aunt and not been used in years, stood steaming in the middle of the kitchen table, next to a battered packet of leaf Darjeeling.
‘Where’s Willow, I wonder?’ said Laura, as she searched through her bag for the Jaffa cakes.
‘In the pumphouse, I should think.’ Beth had rinsed her face in the bathroom before they came down, but her face was still mottled and her voice clotted thick. ‘She’s always down there now.’
The sunny weather had finally shamed Laura into finishing the decorating, and Willow had been moving back in by slow degrees. The spare room was still very much hers, but bits and pieces of books and clothes had found their way down to the pumphouse, which she now used as a daytime bolthole and, just recently, an occasional place to spend the night.
‘Perhaps I won’t call her, then, just at the moment. We’ll see if she wants to come in and join us for supper, later on.’
The present arrangements seemed a good idea to Laura: let Willow acclimatise, move back out of the house at her own pace.
‘Can me and Caitlin take her down a Jaffa cake, though? After we’ve drunk our tea?’
‘Of course, love.’
‘Is Willow your sister?’ asked Caitlin. Laura was curious. Had they really never met? Did Beth not talk about Willow to her school friends?
‘Lodger,’ muttered Beth through a mouthful of orangey crumbs.
Caitlin put her mug down on the table. ‘My nan had a lodger,’ she said. ‘He drank all her sherry and filled the bottle up with water. Then he took the electric drill out of the garage and left without paying the rent.’
‘Wow. Did she call the police and everything?’
‘Yes, but they never caught him. He said he was called Walter but the police said it might not be his real name. I hated him. He used to babysit for me sometimes and he stank.’
Beth sta
red at her. ‘Well, Willow’s not like that. Willow’s OK.’
The tea drunk, Beth stood up and reached for the packet of Jaffa cakes. ‘OK if we take them down there, then, Mum?’
‘Yes, you go.’ Laura turned to Caitlin, who had also risen from her chair. ‘So, does that mean you’re going to stay for supper?’
She smiled shyly. ‘If you’re sure that’s all right? Thank you very much, Mrs. Blackwood.’
The confounding of expectation, decided Laura as she sat alone at the kitchen table much later, could sometimes be a pleasurable thing. But if Caitlin, at least, was not the demon of her imaginings, that still left Rianna, and what she could have had said to cause so much distress to Beth.
It was after eleven thirty and she ought to be heading up to bed. But the kitchen was cool, the tiles fresh and smooth beneath her bare feet. Upstairs, beneath the eaves, the heat seemed to gather and coalesce to a warm syrup, clogging her lungs. Even with the window wide open since she first came home, her bedroom, she knew, would be stifling. Sleep would be impossible.
Willow might have the best idea. She was sleeping in the pumphouse again tonight, claiming it was cooler down there. Perhaps the damp soil at the base of the dyke, which for most of the year waged a siege to be resisted, was now to be counted a blessing. Yet it must be an airless spot; Laura was thankful for the house’s elevation, giving it surrounding space.
Sitting here at the table, in any event, was hardly a solution, and she was too hot and tired to read. Perhaps she should go out for a stroll along the lode, take a look at the stars. But she feared to find the outside air as thick as that indoors, and to come back more oppressed than ever. Instead, she might go up and have a cool bath, or at least clean her teeth and splash cold water on her face.
As she stood, eyes screwed and dripping, at the basin and turned off the tap, she heard a stirring in her daughter’s room. Evidently Beth could not sleep, either. Still with towel in hand, she walked along the landing and tapped at the door.
‘Beth,’ she said quietly, ‘are you awake?’
A groan supplied her answer; she pushed the door open and stepped inside.
‘Urggh. Why’s it so freaking hot?’
Beth was in the bed, or rather on it, but she wasn’t lying down. The top sheet that Laura had given her as an alternative to the duvet when temperatures first began to spiral lay on the carpet in a tangled heap, while Beth sat sideways across the bed with her back to the wall and legs spread forward and wide, clad in knickers and a vest top. She tilted back her head and blew upwards, sending her fringe into a dance.
‘Too ho-o-ot.’
‘I know, love. I’ve had enough of it, too. It’s hopeless for trying to get to sleep.’
‘Tell me about it.’
Laura picked up the discarded sheet and shook out the sticky creases, lifting it high and letting it billow. The movement caused the stilted air to shift a little.
‘Oh, yes, please. Do that again, Mum.’
Laughing softly, she began to rotate on the spot, flapping the sheet like a mainsail cut loose from its rig. Soon Beth was off the bed and grabbing for the bottom corners, lifting them up to join in the game. By the time they collapsed together on the bed with the sheet on top they were giggling like a pair of eight-year-olds but, if anything, even hotter than before.
Beth lay and panted, tongue out, until gradually her breaths returned to normal. When all was still again, she spoke. ‘I trusted her, Mum.’
Without turning to face her, or even raising herself from where she lay half-prone, Laura said, ‘Rianna?’
A short nod. Another pause, and then, ‘Stupid. So totally stupid of me, but I talked to her. I thought I could trust her. Why on earth did I ever tell her anything?’
The best thing was usually to bide her time and wait, but Laura’s impatience overcame her. ‘What did you tell her, sweetheart?’
Beth pulled herself upright, and slightly away from her mother, face averted. Laura sat up awkwardly and cursed herself for a clumsy fool; she had pushed too hard. But after some moments’ silence, Beth spoke again.
‘Dougie.’ It was a croak, not much more than a whisper. But then she added, more strongly, ‘I told her about Dougie.’
‘Oh, Beth.’
Inadequately, she reached over and laid a hand on her daughter’s knee. The skin was clammy with sweat.
‘I told her …’ Her voice choked; the tears were back again, welling to the surface beneath which they had lain only shallowly buried. ‘I told her, and she … and she …’
It was too hot to venture a hug; she was scared that Beth would find it uncomfortable, irksome, and shake her off – or, worse, might wish that she could. She made do with fishing a clean tissue from her pocket and passing it across. Beth blew her nose wetly and swallowed with a glug.
Through the open window, Laura thought she felt the first sigh of a slight breeze. It raised – or something else did – the fine hairs on the backs of her forearms. Somewhere off in the night, an unknown bird cried out its alarm. Laura, without intending to, strained her ears to listen. In the far distance, a car engine flared, then fell away; Beth’s bedside clock ticked off the seconds. Otherwise, the silence was complete. Now at last, in the enveloping quiet, sleep seemed almost a possibility. Its lure settled over her; perhaps they might both sleep here, together, in the silence of her daughter’s room.
‘She laughed.’ Beth’s words, hard and shocking, roused Laura from her reverie. ‘Rianna. She laughed about it. Dougie the doggie, she kept saying, and laughing like it was something funny.’ Beth’s voice ratcheted upwards through mimicking singsong until she was close to hysterical, caught between tears and a terrible, mirthless laughter. ‘Dougie the doggie, Dougie the dead doggie, Dougie the dead doggie.’
Laura stayed with Beth until she was calm; then she covered her over with the sheet and knelt by the bedside, stroking her hair until she fell asleep. By the time the slow, even breathing told her she was safe to leave, it was after one am by the bedside clock. The heat was not perceptibly less.
Taking a drink of cold water from her cupped hands at the bathroom tap, she noticed a pair of earrings, narrow twists of gold wire threaded with turquoise beads, which she recognised as Willow’s. She must have taken them off to wash and then forgotten and left them on the tiled rim of the hand basin. They were so small, they looked as if they might quite easily fall down the plughole and be lost. Picking them up, Laura wandered back along the landing to the spare room.
Already, denuded of even half of Willow’s things – the dressing gown from the back of the door, the trainers from next to the wardrobe – the room felt subtly more her own again, more how it had been when her parents had slept here. The duvet, in the black and grey geometric cover she had bought for Willow after the autumn’s flood, was down with her in the pumphouse; its absence left the mattress looking tired and bare. The old bedspread that used to cover it, the rose pattern one that had been her mother’s, was still in the linen chest. Lifting the lid, she took it out, shook it open and laid it across the bed, smoothing it out from centre to edges. Willow had left the window only slightly ajar, but now Laura threw it wide to the night air.
She had put the earrings down on the night stand, but now it occurred to her they were hardly safer there than in the bathroom. They really were so delicate; Willow might fail to notice them, and knock them off. Turning to the dressing table, she looked for a suitable receptacle. Beth had always had a magpie eye for trinkets; a hoarder of tiny pots and pretty boxes, she filled them up with beads and bangles, and buttons and hair clips, and pretty pebbles from the garden. Not so Willow. Apart from a jar of moisturising hand cream, the surface was almost empty. There was nothing else but the old blue shoebox, wrinkled and misshapen from its immersion in the flood. The only thing was to put the earrings in there.
Feeling slightly guilty as she did so, Laura took hold of the cardboard lid. It was wedged tight due to the distortion of the box, and came off on
ly with some prising. The inside of the box was crammed with paper: private letters, no doubt, and photographs, at which Laura took care not to glance. On the top, however, where she dropped the earrings, lay something which unavoidably caught her eye. She couldn’t help it; it was right there. It was a cigarette lighter. Slim and silver, smooth-cornered, slightly lozenge-shaped, it looked very much like the one she had last seen in Marianne’s hand at the psychiatric hospital. Now that she saw it properly, she noticed the engraving. With all the swirls and curlicues it was difficult, at first, to make out anything figurative at all. But from among the flourishes, as she examined it more closely, there emerged the two looping, intertwined letters, each the mirror of the other. M and W.
Laura replaced the box lid carefully and drifted to her own bedroom. It wasn’t so bad. The air temperature must have come down a good way since nightfall, logic, though not her senses, told her; at least her sheet, when she touched it with her hand, felt almost cool. She should undress and lie down, and soon she would sleep.
The pumphouse wasn’t visible from her bedroom window, which faced east towards the gate and the cinder turning space, where the drove led away to the road. Was Willow asleep, down there in the darkness? Did she sleep curled tight the way Beth sometimes did, her knees hugged high beneath her chin, or straight out on her back with arms and legs flung wide? Restlessly, with much turning, or calm and still all night?
Suddenly, with a sharpness that surprised her, she wished that Vince were here. Vince would have the answers to her questions; Vince always knew. He hadn’t called her since they parted company on the pavement outside his flat, when he leant to swing shut the taxi door. He hadn’t called her, and she hadn’t called him.
Dangerous, or vulnerable – which one was Willow? He would know. What would he tell her now, if she could ask him? As she stared out at the garden in its pool of black and the starlit fields beyond, she knew his answer with perfect clarity; she knew exactly what he would say. That the two were inseparable, that they were two faces of the same coin; that in Willow’s case, at least, they were simply two ways of saying the same thing.
