Ninepins

by Rosy Thorton

  Chapter 23

  It was at supper on Friday – the night when Beth had been due to go to Rianna’s – that Willow issued her invitation.

  ‘Why don’t we have a sleepover here? Just you and me, in the pumphouse.’

  ‘Really?’ Beth’s eyes lit up at once.

  ‘Why not? It might be fun – and besides, it’s cooler down there than in the house. When I leave the door open, it’s nearly like being outside.’

  ‘Like camping? Oh, Mum, please, can I?’

  Laura smiled, glad to see her daughter enthused again. Since her run-in with Rianna, she’d been looking dull and exhausted; Laura would bet she hadn’t been sleeping much.

  ‘What’ll I use for a bed?’

  ‘How about taking the cushions off the settee and pushing them together on the floor? Take your own pillows. And you can use my old sleeping bag, if you like, so you don’t need to bother with sheets.’

  ‘Can we have some biscuits or chocolate or something, if there is any? In case we get hungry.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can find. And don’t forget to take your inhaler with you.’

  They headed off straight after supper, leaving Laura to wash up. Before they left, she found the sleeping bag at the back of the airing cupboard, and a Battenburg cake and a bag of Maltesers. Willow took them from her with a grin; seventeen was apparently not too old for midnight feasts. The settee cushions looked enormous piled up in Beth’s arms.

  ‘Can you manage those all right? Would you like me to come down and carry some things?’

  ‘No thanks, we’ll be fine.’

  When they were gone, the house jangled with silence. Laura banged on the radio for company while she gathered together the dirty dishes. Jonathan Dimbleby’s voice was soothing to the mind, as he marshalled his feuding panellists with aplomb. Any Questions? Plenty, thought Laura as she ran the hot water into the bowl, but none that wouldn’t keep.

  When the kitchen was clear, she took the newspaper through to the sitting room and read for a while, but her thoughts kept scattering off at tangents. In spite of the continuing heat – tonight, if anything, seemed hotter than ever – she decided to go to bed early. She ran a tepid bath, barely warm enough to melt the lavender salts she swilled in, and soaked herself until the water was cold. With a shiver, she pulled herself out and rubbed quickly dry, before enjoying the rare luxury of walking naked to her bedroom.

  Sleep claimed her almost at once. She surfaced at around midnight for long enough to glance at her watch and be surprised to have slept so well and so quickly, since when Beth was away she was often restless, and what with the heat as well. She was dimly aware of having been dreaming, and disturbingly so, but without knowing of what. The bottom sheet was rucked, and damp with her sweat. She rolled to the other side of the bed where the bedding was smooth and cool – the side where she never slept because it had been Simon’s.

  This time, as she drifted again beneath the layers of her consciousness, the dream came vividly alive. She was out of doors, walking naked across the fields behind Ninepins, which were not the wilted green of a hot early June but grown high with dry, ripe stalks of corn. Too high, in fact, for the ears reached almost to her waist, impeding her progress. Perhaps it was not the wheat that was taller but she herself who was shorter, perhaps a child. Sharp stones and ends of stalk jarred and jabbed at her bare feet. There was a strange light in the dream, which felt like neither night nor day, and the heat was harsh and hard-edged, as much a physical barrier as the impenetrable corn. It scorched her soles, it battered her head and shoulders, and beat upon her face with such intensity that she had to raise her hands to shield her eyes from the glare.

  After a time, it occurred to her that something was wrong. The heat, the light, came not from overhead where the sun should have been, but from the ground, and all around her. The cornfield was on fire. As soon as her dreaming mind had grasped this fact, the smoke closed round her, too; or perhaps it had been there all along, accounting for the weird half-light, but now it choked her nose and throat and stung her eyes, which were soon awash with tears. Through the blur and the fumes she made out walls of flame, surging from every direction towards the sky, and, as she saw, she understood the truth: that the whole of the fens was ablaze.

  She was coughing as she jerked awake. The scent of smoke still lingered in her nostrils; she rose and went to the window to drink in the night and dispel it, but it would not seem to shift. Her watch said five to three.

  Without any conscious decision, she walked out on to the landing and along to Beth’s room. The door was still wide open as Beth had left it. The bed was unmade from the previous night’s occupation; now, without Beth and stripped of its pillows, it looked very empty. The curtains were not drawn across but open to the blackness beyond, which, however, was not as black as she would have supposed, but flickering with light, and the window was wide open, so that now, borne to her on rising air, the smell was unmistakable – as was the sound, the low, hissing, sputtering sound, the same as in her dream.

  The pumphouse. The girls. Beth.

  She didn’t take the time to cross to the window and look out, but turned at once and ran for the stairs. She hardly knew how she made it down them, tumbling, two, three at a time; she was even half way to the door before she remembered she had nothing on, and grabbed her longest raincoat from the peg to wrap around herself. Shoes took too long, so she went without.

  The heat of the fire hit her with a smack the moment she rounded the corner of the house. There were no flames immediately visible, but a dense, rolling pall of blue-black smoke engulfed the upper structure of the pumphouse, obscuring the chimney and half of the walls, and issuing in billows from the one exposed window. Even here, at the top of the dyke, the air was red hot and laden with soot and ash, smearing greasy where it touched her skin; her eyes blinked against the acrid smart.

  As she descended the concrete steps, the heat, though it seemed impossible, grew greater. Raising one arm, she held it across her eyes and brow in an attempt to protect herself as she edged down the final few steps. She should have brought a scarf soaked in water – isn’t that what you were supposed to have? And what use would she be without shoes? But it was no use, in any case. The fire was too well entrenched. The smoke was all round and inside her, congesting and clogging and burning; it poured in through her mouth and nose and seemed to soak even through the pores of her skin, until she felt so full of it that her chest might burst.

  She should retreat. She should go back up the steps, go back in the house and phone for help. It was the best she could do. The only thing to do.

  Too late, drummed a distant voice in her head. Too late, too late, too late.

  That was when she saw it. It was away to the right; not towards the pumphouse but the other way, off in the middle of the dark lawn, through the miasma she made out a darker shape, slumped on the grass. She ran towards it, dropped down beside it, leaned over it, dragged it up against her heart.

  ‘Baby. My baby.’

  Beth was breathing, but with difficulty. Rapidly, Laura released her from her arms to give her space and air, manoeuvred her into a more conducive position for the single action by which she clung to life: the painful, scanty, all-consuming task of drawing in oxygen.

  She was hovering somewhere between conscious and unconscious. Her face, in the starlight, was wholly without colour; her eyes were closed and underscored with darkening patches. Each breath was a struggle, racking her chest and arching her back, but, for all the effort, finally shallow and unsatisfactory. Not enough, Laura saw, with a shot of panic. Not nearly enough.

  Beth’s inhaler would be in the blazing pumphouse, but they kept a spare in the kitchen drawer.

  ‘Hang on for me, sweetheart.’

  It was the hardest thing that Laura had ever had to do: to stand up and move away, to leave her daughter gasping on the grass and run to the house to fetch it, scrambling straight up the dyke to avoid the choking smoke by the
steps. She was back in two minutes at most, clutching the inhaler in one hand and her mobile phone in the other. She knelt down and raised Beth up again, cradling her across her knees; her breathing seemed jerkier, less effective than ever, and she was barely aware. Laura pulled the cap from the mouthpiece, shook the inhaler and laid it between her daughter’s lips, pressing down firmly on the button. Breathe, she beseeched her silently; please breathe. But Beth’s lips lay slack around the mouthpiece. There was no improvement in her laboured breathing. It wasn’t getting through.

  Flicking open the phone, Laura found the nine and thumbed it three times in quick succession, then pressed the green button.

  ‘Emergency. Which service do you require?’ The words were disembodied in the darkness, as from another reality.

  Then came her own voice, sounding high-pitched and over-loud. ‘Ambulance. Please hurry.’

  Come now. Be here now. It seemed inconceivable that she should have to wait, when everything, the whole world of time and space, was concentrated in the shape of the limp body in her lap.

  A click, followed by another voice, equally unreal, saying, ‘Emergency ambulance. Please give your location.’

  ‘Yes. Please. It’s Ninepins, Elswell. Four miles past the village on the Stretham road, then left into Ninepins Drove. We’re outside in the garden and I can’t move her. It’s Beth – my little girl. She can’t breathe, can’t use her inhaler, she’s only half conscious. She’s asthmatic, you see, and with the smoke – ’

  Smoke! How impossible, almost ludicrous, that she could have forgotten the smoke, and the scorching heat at her back. The pumphouse – and Willow. Oh, God, Willow.

  ‘A fire. There’s a fire, too – we need the fire brigade. And there was another girl in there, a teenager …’

  Some other distant self relayed the details of names and postcode, of medical history. Then everything else receded until there was only Beth and the scourging battle for air. With a fierce, tight focus of will, Laura drew in each breath along with her daughter. Breathe, Beth. Breathe, my sweetheart. Please breathe, please breathe, please breathe.

  Chapter 24

  The events of the rest of the night were indistinct, or rather, consisted of a series of discrete and vivid episodes, spliced apparently at random into an unfamiliar version of time. The ambulance arrived before the two fire engines, which came only as Beth was being lifted onto the stretcher. A minute, ten minutes, half an hour: Laura could no longer judge things in the intervals of normal existence.

  The paramedics were kind, but as they swung into their practised routine they distanced Beth from her, relegating Laura to a bit part player, a redundant bystander. The oxygen mask was bulky, swamping Beth’s pale, pinched face and taking her further away, and in the ambulance the cylinders to which they connected her were tall, metallic and torpedo-like, making Laura feel she might be inside a military aircraft. She was obliged to sit in a bucket seat and wear a belt, which meant she couldn’t reach to hold her daughter’s hand. Instead, she kept up a constant, quiet stream of reassurance, which she had no idea if Beth could hear.

  In A&E, they took her away completely for a time, bowling her off on a trolley through doors that swung shut behind her. Her mobile, Laura realised, was still in her hand. Vince. She badly wanted to call Vince, she wanted him to be here, but of course it was quite impossible. Instead, although her watch told her it was barely five am, she rang Simon.

  ‘Hi. Look, sorry, I know it’s stupidly early – ’

  ‘Laura – are you OK? Is it Beth? What’s happened?’

  ‘A fire. But it’s all right, Beth’s all right …’

  A nurse found her some clothes to put on under her raincoat: disposable knickers, an unaccustomed summer dress and a pair of hospital slippers. She struggled into them in a narrow toilet cubicle, and on her way out she glimpsed in the mirror a haggard stranger who could not possibly be her. No wonder the nurse had been tight-lipped; she looked like a drunk or a madwoman.

  Some time later, she was allowed into a room where Beth was trussed up in a metal-framed bed, with smaller torpedoes at her side, and a heart monitor straight off the television. Laura found a plastic chair and sat down to watch and wait. Her daughter, she saw, had been undressed and dressed again in a white hospital gown. Her vest top and pyjama bottoms were folded neatly on a shelf at the foot of the bed; on the top, on its plaited string, lay the mirrored sun of Willow’s good luck charm.

  Just once, Beth surfaced from the place where she was trapped, a place where all there was was breathing. She opened eyes, above the mask, that were clouded with fear; they met Laura’s, registered some slight alleviation, and flickered closed again.

  After what could have been days or only minutes, a plain-clothed fire officer came in, together with a woman, not in uniform either, who identified herself as ‘police liaison’. Willow was not inside. Laura asked them to repeat the intelligence three or four times, in her trembling anxiety to believe it true. Willow was not in the pumphouse; it was empty, completely empty, as it had been on the night of the flood. Thank God. But the faces of the officers were grave and their manner still noticeably reticent.

  ‘What is it? There’s something else, isn’t there? Tell me.’

  ‘You will receive a full report in due course,’ said the man from the fire service, ‘once our investigations are complete. But I think you should know that there are suspicious circumstances.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Blackwood,’ said the woman. ‘I’m afraid we are treating it as a possible case of arson.’

  Laura heard them as though from inside a bubble, as if it were she and not Beth who lay drifting behind the oxygen mask. A petrol can was mentioned, found empty by the pumphouse window. Did she keep one in her shed, perhaps? Fuel for her lawnmower? Really, she should have a lock on the shed door. A search of house and garden and the area surrounding had revealed, to date, no trace of Willow.

  When they were gone, she switched back all her attention to her daughter in the bed. Anything but Beth was a distraction for the moment, an irritation, an irrelevance, and far too burdensome for her exhausted brain.

  Nurses came and went with charts and checked readings and tweaked tubes but Laura was too numb and tired even to smile at them. Presently, morning noises began to filter in from the corridor outside the room: voices, and doors banging, and the clank of metal trays and trolleys. Thirst, hitherto unnoticed, seared her throat; when she swallowed, she tasted ash.

  It was just before six when Simon came.

  ‘Hello, sorry it’s taken me so long to – ’

  ‘Shh!’ Rising slightly from her chair to greet him, she cocked a thumb towards their daughter in the bed. Beth still wore the mask, was still wired up to all the monitors, but her state of inward concentration had relaxed and her breathing had slowed to an easier rhythm which Laura, the experienced watcher, could recognise as sleep. ‘Don’t wake her,’ she whispered.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said again, now sotto voce, and approached the bed. ‘How is she? What have they said?’

  ‘Not much. You know how it is in hospitals. But they say there’s no cause for alarm.’

  ‘But the mask?’

  ‘A precaution, I gather. They’re going to run some tests, they say, and keep her under observation for a while.’

  ‘Tests?’ His voice had risen again, and she flicked her eyes warningly towards the bed.

  ‘Because of the smoke – to see what she’s inhaled. In case there were toxins or something, I suppose.’

  ‘Toxins?’ he repeated, and she thought, in her weariness, what a child he still was, sometimes – and then, more charitably, how very much he loved his daughter.

  Simon stayed for as long as he could. There were frequent texts, no doubt from Tessa, which he was trying to ignore.

  ‘Look,’ said Laura finally, ‘there’s nothing you can do here. You’re needed at home. Go.’

  Uncertainly, and with repeated promises to call and check on progress, he did
as he was told. When he had gone, Laura subsided in her chair. She pushed it back against the wall next to the bed and let her head rest there on the cold plasterwork, closing her eyes. The wall was hard and the chair uncomfortable but she was dog tired, and it wasn’t long before consciousness began to loose its hold.

  Suspicious circumstances. A petrol can.

  When she woke with a start, somebody else was in the room.

  ‘Did I wake you?’ The voice, from close beside her, was gentle and familiar.

  ‘Vince.’

  He was standing between Laura and the bed, where Beth was still asleep behind her mask. ‘How is she?’

  ‘She’ll be OK.’

  He studied Beth closely. ‘She looks pale,’ he said. ‘But peaceful.’ Then he turned to Laura. ‘You look pale, too. Maybe it’s the light in here.’

  He hunkered down at her side and took hold of her hand, and she couldn’t remember why it was she’d imagined she shouldn’t ring him. It was so right that he should be here. But confusing, too, now that her thoughts began to clear.

  ‘How did you know …?’

  His laugh was low, no more than a rumble in his throat. ‘Cambridge is a small place. I heard it on the radio: a fire in a historic pumping station, converted to residential use; a village to the north of the city. How many places could it be?’

  She nodded dazedly.

  ‘I was terrified.’ His simple admission touched her with surprising force.

  ‘I drove straight out to Ninepins. The fire brigade are still there. They said to try the hospital.’ Then, more softly, he added, ‘What a mess.’

  Her throat clenched as she wondered what he meant. ‘The pumphouse?’

  He grimaced. ‘That, certainly. It was still smoking when I was there. The roof has gone, and everything’s blackened to buggery – not to mention the two tankerfuls of water they’ve dumped inside.’ His other hand was on top of hers now, tracing patterns on the back of her knuckles. ‘But that’s not the only mess.’