Whistle in the Dark

by Emma Healey

  ‘You should have told me if you were hungry,’ Jen said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So I could make you something to eat.’

  ‘But I’m making me something to eat.’

  ‘I know. But…’ But you’re eleven, Jen wanted to say. She watched as Meg fished two slices of toast from the toaster and buttered them and poured the heated beans on top and sat down at the table, laying her cutlery on a piece of folded kitchen towel. A bunch of Michaelmas daisies had been put in a vase and arranged near her plate. Jen was about to remark on it when the baby began to cry and she went to feed her, and by the time she came back everything was stacked neatly in the dishwasher, the vase carried upstairs to sit on Meg’s desk.

  Hugh had thought it sweet, said she obviously wanted to be helpful, to be responsible, now there was a new baby in the house, and Jen had tried to be as light-hearted as he was about this show of independence, this pulling away.

  The next day at six o’clock Meg was grating cheese for a baked potato, and the day after that she was washing mushrooms, which she drizzled with oil and sprinkled with crushed garlic and slid into the oven.

  ‘Careful,’ Jen said over the roar of the fan.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mummy,’ Meg told her. ‘I’m quite capable.’

  Unlike you, was the subtext, Jen felt. Each evening the meals-for-one seemed to get more elaborate. An omelette dotted with green peppers and feta, a salad covered with home-made herb dressing, a pile of toasted pitta bread, served with cucumber-and-yoghurt dip.

  ‘Don’t you like my cooking any more?’ Jen asked finally. ‘Are you worried I won’t have time to make you something you want?’

  ‘Have you become a vegetarian?’ Hugh joined in.

  ‘No, I just thought this was best,’ Meg replied. ‘This way, you won’t have to worry about me.’

  ‘But we’re still your mummy and daddy. We’re still here to look after you.’

  ‘Okay.’ Meg didn’t seem convinced. She folded her paper napkin and sat down to eat, alone.

  In the weeks that followed Meg seemed to be busily arranging her life in order to get out of her parents’ way. She joined a homework club, which meant she never asked them for help any more, she passed a cycling-proficiency test and found a group of other children to bike to school with, she spent her pocket money on liquorice toothpaste, pomegranate molasses and a tiny appointments diary.

  Then, one Saturday morning, Jen discovered her loading the washing machine. ‘Did you have an accident? Overnight?’

  Meg dropped the handles of the washing basket. ‘Of course not. My hamper was full, that’s all.’

  ‘I’ve got a bit behind,’ Jen said, trying to take over the task. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘That’s okay.’ Meg gently pushed her away. ‘I can do this, Mummy. I know how it works.’

  And so Meg began to do her own washing. And Jen noticed that a bottle of fabric softener appeared next to the machine, and the unfamiliar smell of gardenias drifted about the house, and Meg nearly always wore matching socks.

  Butterflies

  Jen found she was wearing odd socks as she slipped into the camp bed that the nurse had made up next to Lana’s. She was glad to lie down, but wasn’t planning to sleep; she hardly even closed her eyes, feeling sure that, if she did, her daughter would sneak away again and they would have to restart the cycle: the shock and despair, the hope and searching, the suspicion and relief.

  Something made a shadow on the wall above her head, two long, thin shapes, crossing again and again. Tree branches outside the window, or knitting needles, perhaps. But the knitting woman had left while Jen was in the bathroom getting ready for bed. She mentioned her absence to Lana, who said she hadn’t noticed her earlier, and Jen began to wonder if she really had been mythical, if the sleep deprivation had made her hallucinate. How infinitely depressing, she thought, if the best her imagination could do was conjure a belligerent, grey-haired woman armed with knitting needles and a knowing manner.

  The pull-out bed wasn’t particularly comfortable. It was plastic-creaky, low and short, and there was a dim blue light which blinked in the ceiling and appeared to be mysteriously linked to a constant beeping somewhere along the corridor, but lying awake in the dark next to her daughter was bliss.

  ‘You’re not going to ask me questions all night, are you?’ Lana asked, and Jen promised to be quiet. Knowing she could put out a hand and find the warmth of an arm or shoulder or back was enough.

  Anything was better than the last few nights, the hours after the searches had been stopped for lack of light, when she and Hugh could only wait for morning, for sunrise, for another chance to discover a clue, a trail, a lead, their hope perpetually diminishing.

  ‘Are you awake?’ Lana whispered now. ‘Can I? Can I have your hand?’

  Jen put it up, waving it into the shadowy space above her, and felt a jittery, internal flutter as Lana caught it in her own. ‘Is it the storm?’ Jen asked. The knitting woman had been right: there had been a crash of thunder just after Hugh left for the hotel.

  ‘No. It turns out I’m not so keen on the dark. Weird, huh?’

  ‘Do you think that’s something to do with where you were?’ Jen said. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to ask.’

  ‘It’s okay. The answer’s still the same, anyway.’

  ‘I don’t remember?’

  ‘Right.’

  After a few minutes Jen’s hand began to go numb, held above her body like that, her fingers chilly in the warm and unchanging temperature of the ward. She sat up and gave Lana her other hand, though it meant she wouldn’t be able to lie down again. There was a tap-tapping in the corner of the room and when she turned her head she thought she saw the hunched shape of the knitting woman lit up by a flash of lightning, but there was no one there, and the tapping was just a regular drip from a gutter outside the window.

  Lack of sleep had made her see things before. During a week of very late nights and early mornings in her last year at art college, a face had appeared in the Celtic-motifed curtains, a very definite, three-dimensional, moving and looming face, which might have distracted her if she hadn’t had an immovable and looming deadline to focus on instead. Once her project had been handed in, she’d fallen into bed and slept for fifteen hours, and the face had never come back.

  Years later, when her father was dying, she’d had a late-night telephone conversation with one of her brothers, who’d afterwards sworn he hadn’t spoken to her and, sure enough, when she checked, there was no record of the call, though she could have given an almost verbatim account of it. And then there was the man she’d met on the train when she was a sleep-deprived mother and Lana was a baby, a man she always called Rumpelstiltskin in her head. She was certain sometimes that she’d conjured him from thin air.

  There was a rumble of thunder, soft through the hospital’s insulating walls and double-glazed windows.

  ‘Just after I found you were gone,’ Jen said, ‘when I definitely knew you weren’t in the loo, and hadn’t gone skinny-dipping with that boy, I thought I saw you.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Lana said.

  ‘Yeah. I thought I saw you on the top of a hill, looking back down at everyone, watching us begin the search. It can’t have been you and, if it had, I wouldn’t have been able to tell where you were looking, but it gave me a fright.’

  ‘A fright? Why?’

  ‘I felt like you were saying goodbye.’ Jen’s back was aching now so she switched hands again and turned to lean against Lana’s bed. ‘I felt like it was a message.’

  There was a long silence, and Jen thought Lana might have fallen asleep.

  ‘What made you think that? What made you think it was me?’ Lana asked finally.

  ‘I just knew it was,’ Jen said, reliving briefly the ominous feeling the vision had given her. She had been able to see Lana’s facial expression, too, though, obviously, it would have been impossible over that distance, and she’d had the sense that Lana could hear her
as she spoke to Hugh.

  ‘Which hill was it?’ Lana said.

  ‘The one where we painted the butterflies that first evening.’ Jen turned to peer at the half-lit planes of Lana’s face. ‘Was it you, then?’ she asked. ‘Up there?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Jen heard her take a breath in and hold it. ‘I love you, Mum,’ she said in a rush as she released the breath, and Jen thought perhaps she’d fallen asleep and was dreaming.

  Lana’s hand was rough in hers – the chipped nails, the scabbing blisters on the palms – and Jen felt again some echo of her daughter’s pain run through her own limbs. This pain was meaningful. It meant she should try to guess at, to imagine, what Lana had been through. It meant she should avoid guessing or imagining. It meant something terrible had been done to Lana. It meant she had done something terrible to herself. It meant she was telling Jen everything she could. It meant she was hiding something. It meant too many things.

  She stopped trying to determine the meaning and remembered painting on top of the hill. It was a vivid memory because she had carefully studied the view, and drawn the view and painted the view, and she’d noticed so many details, the orangetip butterfly on a purple rhododendron flower, and the beetles crawling through the clover, and the silvery undersides of the whitebeam leaves. It was vivid, too, because of the notes they were encouraged to write along the edges of their sketches. Cool breeze, the excited whistling of curlews, smell of cut grass, the ground spongy under my feet. These had been Jen’s notes. But Lana had written: I’ve got a headache.

  The police had gone through the sketchbooks and drawn Jen’s attention to the sentence, wanting to know what Lana had meant. But the only annotations Jen had been aware of were the crude sad faces that Lana had drawn over the top of the pictures she thought were unsuccessful, before she tore them out and crumpled them up.

  ‘You liked the holiday, didn’t you?’ Jen asked now. ‘You didn’t find it too frustrating? Or stressful? Or like school?’

  ‘It was great,’ Lana said, but she didn’t sound completely sincere.

  Jen pictured Lana’s fingers, which seemed unfamiliar now they weren’t a child’s fingers, now they were slender and lifeless rather than chubby and eager. She saw them drawing a sad face and crushing the paper into the shape of a giant sweet wrapper. And then. And then? Nothing, no disposal. The paper just vanished from her mind, and she couldn’t see it being slipped into a pocket or scattered on the wind.

  ‘What did you do with the pages you ripped out of your sketchbook?’ Jen said, knowing she shouldn’t be asking. ‘The police wanted to know where you’d thrown them. They weren’t in the bin in the studio or in our room.’

  Lana struggled up, her body curling from the mattress. ‘You’re still annoyed about me ripping up my sketches?’ she said, sounding almost amused. ‘I’m sorry I tore them up. Okay?’

  ‘I’m not annoyed. I just wondered where they’d gone to.’

  ‘Hoping to rescue them?’

  ‘Well, it would have been nice to look back over them. They might even have jogged your memory.’

  Lana’s scarred hand tightened on hers. ‘They might have,’ she said, ‘but it’s too late now. They’re long gone.’

  Idea for a detective novel

  One day, when she had time, Jen was going to write a novel. A crime novel, she thought, with a female detective, a female detective who was also an artist. And one of the clues would be in a sketchbook. In the last chapter, it would turn out that the name of the murderer was written on one of the sketchbook pages in clear wax, and this name would become visible only when a deep blue watercolour wash was painted over the paper with a soft, wide brush.

  Jen didn’t tell anyone her idea for fear it would be stolen.

  Right to reply

  There were other things to write in the meantime. Starting with replies to the dozens of messages from friends and relatives. Every time she looked at her phone, though, Jen felt writing a novel would be easier. Because, what was she supposed to say? She couldn’t explain the events of the last week. She didn’t know where Lana had been. She was unable to say how her daughter was doing, or even how she, Jen, was feeling now. She didn’t need them to do any cooking or cleaning. She had no suggestions of other ways they could help. And the last thing she wanted was a long telephone conversation, or an inquisitive visitor, or an obligation to go out for coffee.

  ‘Just send them all the same reply,’ Hugh said, seeing Jen panic as yet another notification lit her phone screen. ‘I’ll even write it for you.’

  Hi. All fine now. Thanks ever so. See you soon. X

  ‘That’s a bit breezy, don’t you think?’ Jen said. ‘A bit short, a bit offhand.’

  ‘Okay.’ Hugh took the mobile back and typed again.

  To whom it may have concerned. Lana is now safe and well. Thank you for your message(s) of support, it is/they are much appreciated. However, we do not need to be mucked out or catered for. I am unable to give you an answer to your questions at this time but hope to satisfy your curiosity at some point in the future. Kind regards, Jen.

  ‘Mucked out? Hope to satisfy your curiosity? Are you trying to lose us all our friends?’

  Hugh grinned. ‘Too stiff that time? Too pointed? Fine, I’ll try again.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Jen handed over the phone. ‘I did enjoy To whom it may have concerned, though.’

  Hello. Lana’s recovering and we’re going home today. We don’t really know what happened yet. Thanks so much for your kind offer, but we just need some family time to sort everything out. Hope to catch up properly in a few weeks. Lots of love.

  Rumpelstiltskin

  Many messages of support had arrived when Jen was a new mother, scribbled in cards and left on the answering machine. People offering congratulations and sympathy and help, and studiously avoiding giving advice. She hadn’t known how to answer them then. Unless someone could magically make her baby stop crying, there was nothing she wanted. And hardly anything stopped the baby crying.

  Except trains. She had got into the habit of taking Meg for short journeys to settle her. A car might have worked, too, but they didn’t have a car in those days, couldn’t afford one, so getting on the suburban line and travelling a few stops out and a few stops back had been the next best thing. And when Lana was born, Jen had done the same again, even though Hugh had bought a car by then. It was tradition, she said, it was a charm.

  One night, when Lana was only a few days old and had been crying for a long time, Jen got on a train to Strawberry Hill. It was one of the old rolling stock, the type the railway companies were always promising to withdraw: freezing in the winter except just by the heater, where, if a passenger put a foot too close, the rubber of their shoes would melt. There was a breeze coming from every direction, from the rattling windows, from the open door at the end of the carriage, and her ears had begun to ache from the noise of the train.

  But Lana was finally asleep, though she wasn’t Lana yet; they hadn’t yet been to register her birth and, in fact, Jen had provisionally named her Milly. She was a warm little lump in her arms. Two solid hours of crying had made her go purple, but she was nearly the right colour again and Jen just had to be careful she didn’t fall asleep herself.

  It was twilight and, from the window, she could see hundreds of birds flitting in and out of trees beyond the tracks, making their way back to roosts and perches – part of a kind of feathered rush hour. Lights glowed mysteriously in a patch of woodland as the night got darker, and then there was nothing to see at all and she found she was staring at the inside of the carriage in reverse.

  The train was nearly empty, but there were two heads visible above the seat backs. Jen couldn’t tell if they were men or women. A smell of beer drifted along and she wondered in that anxious, distracted way of tired mothers if a baby could be harmed by the smell of alcohol in the way it might be harmed by cigarette smoke. She decided probably not and closed her eyes for a minute, pinching her hand in the z
ip pocket of her jacket so she couldn’t drift off. When she opened them again there was a man opposite her.

  She hadn’t heard him sit down and thought she might have fallen asleep for a few minutes, that the train might even have stopped at a station. The man had thick, wild hair, and he held his long, pale hands between his thighs, making the shape of a v. His head was half turned away, looking towards the window, but Jen could see, clearly, that his eyes, reflected in the glass, were fixed on Milly.

  Turning her daughter, she put her over her shoulder so her tiny face was away from the man. She was annoyed because she risked waking her to do it, but she wanted a better grip on her little body, wanted to be able to hug her closer. The man followed Jen’s movements in the window’s glass, and his teeth, the lower set, jutted forward to bite his top lip. Suddenly there was fear in the cold breeze and the heated air and the rattle of the windows.

  She realized then that she must have slept, that the train must have stopped at a station, because when she looked over, casually-casually, she saw the other heads behind the seat backs had gone. She was alone with the man and her baby. The guard was nowhere in sight and she hadn’t got round to buying a mobile yet (had only recently been convinced that it would be useful).

  ‘What’s her name?’ the man said, pointing at Milly.

  Jen told him she and her husband hadn’t quite decided, but Milly was probably what they were going for. She told him it was a family name. She told him her great-grandmother had been called Amelia. And then recited the names of all the other members of her family tree, or all the ones she knew. She told him the other names she’d come up with for her daughter. She told him her husband was getting impatient at her inability to decide. She talked and talked and thought she could humanize them both by talking (there was a lot of stuff on the radio about that sort of thing then).

  ‘Milly,’ the man said. ‘Milly, Milly, Milly.’