Whistle in the Dark

by Emma Healey

  ‘I think it’s unfair that Dad can’t come,’ she’d said, and, ‘How much walking will we have to do? What if I can’t keep up?’ and, ‘What if everyone else is an amazing artist and I’m shit?’ and, ‘Who else will be on the course? Will it all be adults?’ and, ‘It’s miles away. How long will it take to drive there?’

  In the event, they didn’t drive. Hugh had needed the car so they took the train. And Jen thought the journey might be a good time to start to ‘reconnect’ and ‘open up the lines of communication’, but while they were waiting in the station, Lana said again the phrase Jen had come to dread.

  ‘I want to kill myself.’ Her voice was flat and quiet, toneless and powerful.

  Jen spent a couple of seconds trying to formulate an answer but, somehow, before she could speak, the conversation moved on and she found she’d missed her chance.

  ‘Those are the shoes I like,’ Lana said, pointing. ‘See? That woman in the blue.’

  ‘Yes, they’re nice,’ Jen replied, her mind gasping for air while her real breathing stayed even.

  ‘But my feet are too ugly,’ Lana told her, looking down, rather cheerily, Jen thought. ‘Too veiny. You have to have smooth brown feet for those shoes.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ Jen said, not knowing how to get back to the beginning of their exchange, not knowing if she should try to get back to it, and thrown, as usual, by the speed in the shift of her daughter’s emotions.

  On arrival, they found that Lana was the youngest of the group by thirty years but, once that was established, she didn’t seem to mind and Jen felt proud of her daughter, chatting away, working hard on her pictures in the studio, helping the older amateur artists get through gates and climb over the more difficult stiles. She complained only once about the basic accommodation, the cold lino floors, the occasional woodlouse, the fact that the shower block was a separate building down a dark gravel path. And she’d seemed less tired than usual, not hanging on Jen’s arm but striding off to find the best spot for a picture. She never repeated what she’d said at the station.

  Jen was pleased Lana had thrown herself into the activities so whole-heartedly, but she’d been keen to have Lana to herself and was vaguely irritated by the way the other people on the holiday demanded her attention. The class was full of interesting characters, or so everyone kept saying. Almost all of them were female. There was a pagan and a Tarot-card reader and a reiki practitioner; there was a woman named Peny who insisted they make sure they were pronouncing her name with only one n, as she could tell if they were using two, and another woman who was currently engaged in designing motifs to decorate her own cardboard coffin.

  ‘Someone should write a novel about us,’ they kept saying, which made Jen wonder if any of them had ever read a novel.

  Stephen might have, she supposed. A watercolourist in his mid-forties, he tended to avoid evening activities in order to ‘catch up on some reading’, and Jen thought more highly of him for a couple of days. But then it turned out that the reading he was doing was part of the training he had undertaken for the ministry of some obscure Christian sect called the New Lollards Fellowship. The books mostly had fuzzy pictures of waves on them, or sunsets confused by curling typefaces, and her estimation of him fell.

  It turned out his previous hobby had been family history and he’d unearthed an ancestor with a link to the Church, and although he’d spent his life as an uninterested agnostic this connection had convinced him to become a member.

  Jen found this idea seductive and wondered how her own life might be altered by discovering the occupations and interests of her predecessors. But she had a sneaking suspicion that she’d never manage to be as committed, or suggestible, as Stephen.

  By the third day of the holiday he’d begun to use any opportunity to ‘save’ his fellow painters, attempting to explain how the Bible had been wrongly interpreted, to convince them that his was the one true religion, to defend his Church’s preoccupation with Hell, which they believed it was possible to visit.

  ‘I don’t remember that being in the Twelve Conclusions,’ said Peny, who wasn’t a pagan or a reiki practitioner but did have a degree in theology.

  ‘We are not connected to the Lollards of Wycliffe,’ Stephen said. ‘We take that term “lollard” to mean heretic in the best way.’

  He was by turns tedious and infuriating. Despite this, there was something charming about him, boyish and cheeky. The other women often asked for his opinion of their work and were readier to laugh when he was with them. Jen couldn’t exactly bring herself to dislike him, until he began to spend all his time with Lana.

  This seemed to happen suddenly. Jen would find them walking together at the back of the group, Stephen holding brambles out of her way, or retying the arms of her jacket around her waist. They shared a series of jokes which Jen only half caught, and in the studio he had a habit of throwing pieces of Blu-Tack at Lana, making her squeal. This flirtation (what else could she call it?) worried Jen, especially when he began to talk to Lana about the Right Path and Sin and Saving Souls. Lana listened intently and asked questions, and seemed to be genuinely interested, and Jen imagined that Stephen’s smile when he met her eyes had a hint of triumph.

  But, to Jen’s relief, Lana wasn’t particularly susceptible to the religious arguments and was quite annoyed when she found him trying to convert other visitors during a group trip to a National Trust property.

  ‘People don’t come here to be stalked by religious fanatics,’ she said.

  Stephen didn’t seem to be upset by her categorization but gave a roguish smile. He appeared to be generally impervious to Lana’s criticism, however insulting she made it, and it was Lana who always walked away, agitated and incredulous.

  Theological argument

  STEPHEN (smiling, his tanned walker’s knees displayed by khaki shorts):

  Forgive me, but you’re being naive, the world is only ten thousand years old. Those fossils have been planted to test our faith.

  LANA (leaning forward and trembling slightly):

  That’s a load of crap and you’re insane.

  Alternate universe

  Someone, usually a nurse, came every two hours to shine a light in Lana’s eyes and take her blood pressure, and she seemed to fall into a disturbed sleep in the meantime, trembling and frowning as if she were still having an argument with Stephen. Jen wondered what her daughter was really dreaming about, and whether she should wake her.

  ‘When can we ask what happened?’ Hugh asked a nurse as the light balance tipped from outside to inside and their reflections appeared on the window.

  The nurse, tucking a clipboard under her arm, looked confused behind her glasses. ‘When she’s awake?’ she suggested.

  ‘So that would be okay?’

  ‘Yes, I should think so.’

  ‘What are you asking that for?’ Jen said, when the nurse had gone.

  ‘They always check on detective shows,’ Hugh said. ‘I thought you had to.’

  ‘But we’re not police. We don’t need permission to talk to our own daughter.’

  ‘I didn’t think it was about permission,’ Hugh said. ‘I thought it was about not inhibiting recovery.’

  ‘How can it inhibit recovery to ask where she’s been?’

  He turned a weighty look on her. ‘In detective shows, any questioning they do always inhibits recovery.’

  They sat watching the bed for a moment, as though it were a television screen. Jen was uncertain whether or not she should feel for Lana’s hand under the blankets; just how delicate was she after her ordeal? Whatever that ordeal might have been. She held Hugh’s hand instead, despite being irritated by his insistence on following the procedure of TV detectives. A few minutes later an older nurse appeared from behind the curtain like an actor.

  ‘Hello, sir. Hello, ma’am,’ she said, very formally, but with a jauntiness that made Jen think she was mocking them.

  ‘Hello,’ Jen and Hugh said, looking at her as if the
y expected a performance. Their united voices were rather half-hearted, an audience that hadn’t been warmed up yet.

  The nurse had cropped hair and a Chinese name, and her voice was already familiar: Jen had heard her jollying patients along in the rest of the ward. She rolled a blood-pressure machine away and came back again, her walk a heavy shuffle, her thick-soled shoes loose on her feet. They were black slip-ons, scuffed and well worn, the shape of her toes clear in the leather. Reassuring shoes, Jen thought, the shoes of a good nurse.

  ‘So what we got?’ she said. ‘Dehydration, cuts, bruises. Nothing too serious, hey? And she said no to the forensic examination. So. So. The doctor thinks tomorrow she can go home.’

  ‘Great,’ Hugh said, sounding like he’d just been told there was a table ready for them in a popular restaurant.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Jen asked. ‘The forensic-examination part?’

  ‘It means she thinks she doesn’t need one.’

  ‘Great,’ Hugh said again.

  Jen felt like elbowing him. ‘But, sorry. What is a forensic examination?’

  ‘It’s,’ the nurse said, pausing to raise her eyebrows high, ‘a rape kit. The police asked. They talked to you about it?’

  ‘No,’ Hugh said. ‘I don’t think they mentioned that.’

  He sat perfectly still, and Jen copied him, though her brain was cramping with questions. What had made the police think a rape kit was necessary? Had Lana said something to them? And why had she turned it down? Because nothing had happened? Because she was embarrassed or ashamed? Jen briefly felt another version of herself, in another universe, reacting to the alternative answer, reacting to the news that Lana had said yes to a rape kit. The Hugh and Jen in the other universe also sat perfectly still, but their internal organs had shrunk and the world around them had grown large. Jen had to work hard to keep herself in the right universe, to remember which she belonged to.

  ‘Well, okay. Good sign, no? Good sign,’ the nurse said. ‘You don’t worry now.’

  ‘Right, we’ll try.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, good. Where you from?’

  ‘London,’ Hugh said.

  ‘And what’s that?’ The nurse patted a plastic bag on top of the bedside locker.

  ‘Sketchbooks,’ Jen said, struggling to concentrate. ‘I had them with me…’ In fact, she had clung to them over the last four days, feeling as if the half-finished watercolours and smudgy charcoal drawings connected her to Lana.

  ‘Can I see?’ the nurse said.

  Jen was inclined to say no, as the police had already been through them, looking for clues, and the pages were slightly dog-eared, some of the pictures stained and muddy from handling. But it seemed rude to refuse when she was showing an interest and the nurse’s fingers were delicate and clean-looking, so she just nodded.

  ‘Oh, very good. And I can see where this is.’ The nurse held up a picture of a stone circle known as the Nine Ladies. ‘Your daughter do these?’

  ‘Actually, they’re mine,’ Jen said. ‘The other sketchbook is Lana’s.’

  ‘You’re a talent, aren’t you?’

  She flicked through Lana’s sketchbook more quickly, nodding and mentioning each location. ‘Now, I know this place,’ she said, and, ‘I recognize that church,’ and, ‘That view, I know.’ But mostly she just held up each page and repeated the same sentence: ‘Where’s that? Where’s that? Where’s that?’, as if they were flash cards for a geography test – historic and architectural sites of the Peak District – rather than a sketchbook.

  Jen answered as best she could, though the names of some of the places were already forgotten. It began to seem absurd, and she and Hugh looked at each other when the nurse had left the ward. They were still holding hands, and he bounced hers up and down now.

  ‘Where’s that?’ he said, parroting the nurse.

  ‘Under…I’m underneath,’ Lana said in her sleep, startling them.

  The paper

  Hugh went down to the foyer to buy a paper, though the last thing Jen wanted to see was the news. There had been a picture of Lana on the front page of the local gazette and of two national tabloids, and the sight of that photo reproduced in soot-like ink had been as disturbing as anything she’d experienced. It had made her daughter seem really lost, like those other children on the news, the ones who never come back, who become a byword for gruesome death, or a joke in the routine of a shock-reliant stand-up comic. She had focused on the layout of the article, the off-centre image, the awkwardness of the margins, the slightly unaligned adverts at the bottom of the page, convincing herself that, if the design wasn’t perfect, the story – her story – couldn’t be true.

  There was very little to focus on within the hospital – everything was neat and regular, set at right angles, and matching – so Jen looked at the reflection of her own face in the darkened window to find a bit of asymmetry, something soft and imperfect. Behind her, Lana’s shape was slight and marble-esque, like an effigy.

  People often said she and Lana looked similar, though neither of them could see it. Lana’s hair was lighter, her face longer. Jen’s eyelids were heavier, her lips thinner. Meg was her mother’s copy. Lana was Hugh’s. But it was the smile, people said, it was the smile that highlighted the family resemblance. They always shrugged at that. They had the same shrug.

  ‘Your daughter, is she?’

  It was the knitting woman who spoke. Jen had forgotten she was there; the tapping of the needles had receded to the level of a ticking clock, a background noise.

  ‘On holiday, weren’t you? It was in the paper,’ she said, as if warning Jen that there was no point in denying it.

  ‘A painting holiday.’

  ‘Yes, I heard it said. From London, are you?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Wouldn’t live there, I wouldn’t. Wouldn’t bring up children there, neither. Dirty place.’

  ‘Well, I suppose it depends on what you mean by dirt,’ Jen said, thinking of the fields of sheep dung and cow pats she’d walked through the week before.

  There was no break in the click of the knitting needles or the steady addition of stitches and yet the woman didn’t take her eyes from Jen.

  ‘Is this your…’ Jen glanced at the bed: ‘relation?’ she finished, unable to guess at the age of the woman or the sex of the child under the stiff hospital sheets.

  ‘Four days she was missing,’ the woman said, ignoring the question. ‘And no idea where she went. That was in the paper, too.’

  Jen didn’t answer, not understanding why the woman was summing it up for her. Did she think Jen hadn’t noticed? Was she getting some sort of kick out of repeating the story?

  ‘Terrible, terrible,’ the woman added, but the sympathy sounded false.

  ‘It was,’ Jen said, and she felt she’d made her voice firm, authoritative, but the woman didn’t react. ‘What are you knitting?’

  ‘Lampshade,’ the woman said, though Jen was sure she’d misheard. The knitting paused for a moment and the woman counted stitches under her breath.

  ‘Think she’ll tell you where she’s been when she wakes up?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it.’

  ‘We’re very close,’ Jen said, though this was a kind of lie. What did she mean by ‘close’? Close enough to have a screaming row, close enough to cry in each other’s presence, close enough to sit for hours in silence while Jen waited for some sign that she could leave to go to work, or have lunch with a friend, or just make a cup of tea without the fear that Lana would be dead when she came back.

  When was the last time Lana had wanted her company? When had she last confided in her? The holiday had been a study in keeping her mother at arm’s length: slipping away by herself to sketch, talking to pretty much anyone in the group except Jen. She wouldn’t have been surprised to discover Lana had gone off in the middle of the night just to get away from her.

  And then there was the boy. The son of the ho
liday-centre manager. Matthew. Jen had hoped that Lana would talk to her about him; she’d had her own holiday romance once, when she was eighteen. That had been on a painting holiday, too. But there were just shrugs and sighs and accusations of being embarrassing when Jen asked where they’d been in the evenings.

  ‘They keep things to themselves at that age,’ the knitting woman said. ‘I know teenagers. Had four myself.’

  ‘Each child is different.’ Jen could feel her lips tighten around the words. ‘My elder daughter wasn’t secretive.’ Though perhaps this wasn’t entirely accurate either; when Meg had told them she was gay, they hadn’t exactly been expecting it.

  ‘Got another one, have you?’ The woman sounded surprised.

  Jen felt rather exasperated and, wanting to end the conversation, started to leaf, pointedly, through the sketchbooks again, setting the same views against each other, her own more exuberant pictures against Lana’s careful drawings.

  ‘There’ll be a storm this evening,’ the woman said, glancing out of the window.

  Jen looked at the sky, hoping to spot whatever it was that had tipped off this daughter of the soil and, thinking she might learn some country wisdom, asked how she knew.

  ‘It was in the paper,’ the woman said.

  Holiday romance 1979

  He’d been blond. Unusual in Spain, noticeable, and later he’d explained that he was half Austrian, his hair inherited from his father. Jen remembered very little now, except the feel of his hands on her arms, the warmth of his body as he stood behind her during a painting demonstration. The heat of him and the heat of the sun were the same in her memory: it was the first time she’d been abroad, it was the first time she’d had sex.

  His name was dark to her now, but the brief – very brief – courtship remained undimmed. There had been a series of gallant acts, of easel-carrying and shade-searching and ice-offering. He’d brought her a sea daffodil from the beach, a white, star-shaped flower that smelled faintly like a lily. She’d included it in a picture, a good picture, using wax to preserve the white of the paper, and he’d asked if he could keep it, rolling it up and tucking it into his rucksack.