Whistle in the Dark

by Emma Healey

  ‘I’ve got more information about each piece, if you’re interested,’ a voice said.

  Jen jumped. A man in a checked shirt had been sitting between a great slab of stone which held the graceful white shape of an ancient sea lily and a framed tuft of gingery woolly mammoth hair. She hadn’t noticed him and hoped he hadn’t noticed her greeting his merchandise.

  ‘Everything’s so interesting,’ she said, just to say something. ‘Do you find them yourself?’

  ‘Some. Some I buy. A lot of it comes from America now. They’ve got bigger and better everything there, haven’t they? That includes fossils.’

  ‘They’re amazing. So detailed. Some of them hardly look real.’

  ‘Real enough, I promise you.’

  ‘Oh, I wasn’t really doubting that,’ Jen said, looking at the smaller things in little paper boxes at the front. There was a basket at the corner of the table full of what looked like broken fossils, or chipped bits of rock. ‘What are these? Flints?’

  ‘No, no. Those are what’s left of an extinct species of oyster, if you can believe it. You find fossilized oyster beds in cliffs and inside caves.’

  ‘Really?’ Jen said. ‘Only it’s funny. I have something similar.’ She took the stone she’d found on Lana’s bedroom floor out of her pocket and offered it to the man.

  ‘Oh yes.’ He turned it in his fingers. ‘That’s one. You can just make out the shape of it, and what they call the beak. See? Where did you get it?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Been to the Dorset coast?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about Yorkshire? Or Derbyshire? You’d remember if you’d picked it up in a cave, I suppose.’

  ‘In a cave?’

  ‘Yeah, there’s a few places underground where old oyster beds have been exposed, but you’d have to have proper equipment to explore them. You wouldn’t want to wander down there, it’d be too dangerous.’

  He held the fossil out to her and Jen took it. Grace had stopped waving at her, but Jen could see her thin figure through the glitter of the fair. She wondered if Grace would recommend that she suck on the fossil if she knew it came from a cave. She gave a small, slightly hysterical laugh and thanked the man, knowing her face had gone slack, that she must look slightly dazed.

  ‘Underneath,’ she said.

  Tripping

  It wasn’t like a real cave, nestled, as it was, high up in the side of a hill. The sketching group had had to walk and then climb for about an hour to find it, but the path was furnished with sweet-smelling hawthorn bushes, and boulders to rest on, to briefly sunbathe on, to lay your art equipment on, which made it easier. The cave itself wasn’t that impressive, only about six feet deep, and the crucifix carved into the wall (the reason it was worth visiting at all) was only a vague shape, best seen on the screen of a flash-enabled digital camera. It had suffered from the effects of the weather over the years and there were no edges to it, no way to bring it into sharper focus.

  Surprising, Jen thought, that it was apparently still so exposed to the elements, despite being sheltered by the mouth of the cave. But then, people – walkers, tourists, pilgrims – had rubbed at it, and the rain could be fierce and sly here. It came down almost sideways sometimes, the tutor said, soaking a walker or tourist or pilgrim even in full waterproofs. An immobile stone carving didn’t have a chance.

  Modern hermits still attempted to stay in the cave, and they’d left blankets behind and charred circles on the ground from cooking fires. Beyond these, right at the back, was a narrow opening into the ground, a bit like a well. Someone suggested it was where hermits had gone to the toilet in the past, but according to their tutor it was just a natural chimney from the underground tunnels beneath the hill.

  As they moved about the cramped space, one of the blankets got tangled up and kicked into the chimney. Jen saw it slip into the darkness. She knelt to see if it was reachable, then dipped a hand down, feeling for the blanket. She only managed a few seconds before pulling away with a shudder. It had been frightening to lose her arm to that black space, even for a few seconds.

  The day was hot and sunny, but the ground, even outside the cave, was dark, due to a great yew tree growing by the entrance. Its roots dug into a narrow strip of land with a sheer drop down to the road below. It wasn’t a friendly tree; it made the place gloomy and damp, the sun barely reaching through the branches. Passing close to the outside of the cave wall, Jen was confronted with the huge, gnarly girth of it, the twisting, crevice-filled, woody belly. To get anywhere, she was forced to edge along, needles catching at her clothes and hair.

  The tree had an animal smell, she felt, not like a plant at all, as if it were sweating in fear of something, hiding out in that narrow space, praying not to be discovered. And out of spite it tried to attack the visitors: several times, Jen tripped over the roots, which had concertinaed against the weathered stone.

  She worried about Lana, about that sheer drop, and tried to keep an eye on her, but the tutor kept coming to check on their sketches, and tourists kept arriving to take photos, and Lana kept disappearing into the shadows. One minute, Jen could see her, balancing on the arches of the roots, stepping nimbly from one to another; the next, she was gone.

  Matthew had come with them that day. On the hunt, he said, for a red-backed something, or a grey-tailed something, or a bearded-and-spotted something. Jen suspected he was really there because of Lana, but that had seemed simple enough, sweet enough, on the walk (and she had to admit she was pleased it had displaced Stephen from his usual position by Lana’s ear). Only now, in the gloom, it took on a more sinister aspect. And when their faces emerged from the cave, pale, almost luminous, in the blackness, she wondered what they’d been doing.

  Matthew was panting as he sat down beside Jen and the hems of his trouser legs were wet. ‘Weird smell around here, isn’t there?’ he said.

  ‘Peny just told me yew trees can cause hallucinations,’ Lana said, sitting, too. ‘It releases a toxic gas on hot days.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ Jen looked up and noticed Lana had dirt in her fingernails.

  ‘She said that’s probably why this became a holy site. Hermits seeing things.’

  ‘Makes sense, I suppose.’

  ‘It’s pretty hot today,’ Lana said. ‘It can only be a matter of time before we start tripping.’

  ‘I’ve done enough of that already,’ Jen said, rubbing her ankle.

  ‘Not that kind of tripping, Mum.’

  ‘I know. Joke.’

  ‘Anyway, I don’t think it’s quite that easy.’

  ‘Still, we probably shouldn’t take the risk, should we?’ Matthew said, moving to sit on the edge of the drop, where the air was clearer. ‘That might even be what’s given you a headache, Lana.’

  Jen was amused by how genuinely worried he seemed by the idea of an unasked-for high, and she caught Lana’s smile as she turned back to her sketch. Several times, she’d heard Lana tell Matthew she had a headache, and she wondered if it was an excuse, if Lana’s generation was still using that excuse to avoid intimacy.

  Her picture had come out too dark, too muddy, and she was packing up her things ready for the walk back down the hill when a large flock of birds suddenly appeared, flying through the tree’s canopy, their wings batting at the branches and sending a shower of needles down over the people below. Matthew wasn’t interested, didn’t even seem to notice, and Jen was surprised. Later, she wondered if she’d hallucinated them.

  And she wondered about the tear in Lana’s leggings, too, and the scrapes on her knuckles, and the bit of stone Matthew and Lana had tossed between them on the walk back to the holiday centre. Had these things been real, or just the effect of the yew’s taxine?

  Behind closed doors

  The journey home from the rock-and-gem fair seemed never-ending, and Jen remembered why she avoided visiting any station so close to the end of the Central Line. The motion of the Tube made her dizzy and she gripped her hands
between her knees as the train plunged into the first tunnel, the sudden blackness beyond the windows giving her a sense of panic.

  By the time she got home she was exhausted and, relieved to find there was no one else in the house, she shed most of her clothes inside the front door. She was thirsty but couldn’t face a trip to the kitchen on the way upstairs, so she drank the dust-skinned water from the glass next to the bed, wrapped herself in a dressing gown and went straight to sleep.

  When she woke, the house was dark and her head was thumping. She bumped off the wall as she left the bedroom and staggered along the hallway. Her headache seemed to be affecting her ears, she couldn’t get her balance, and the usual floorboard creaks were muted, the traffic outside oddly muffled. Crouching on the landing, she wasn’t sure at first if she could really hear voices coming from Lana’s room.

  ‘Did you speak to her earlier?’ her daughter seemed to ask someone.

  ‘I tried, but she wouldn’t talk to me because she said I was being aggressive.’

  It was Hugh. He was in there, too, and they were discussing something, discussing her, in low tones. A blue computer glow shone under the door, but there was no other light, as if they had gone into the room when it was day and hadn’t noticed the light failing, hadn’t thought to put a lamp on because they were so intent on something else. Something on a screen.

  Jen looked at her hands, pressed flat to the carpet. The blue light just touched them, making them ghostly and smooth, making them look like long cylinders of selenite. ‘That’s good for mental clarity,’ Grace had said. Mental clarity felt distant at that moment. The voices carried on, but Jen could catch only half of it and couldn’t guess at the meaning.

  ‘Doesn’t she understand that everyone can see what she’s done?’

  ‘I think she’s beginning to realize now.’

  Jen crawled to the other side of the landing, wanting to press her ear against the door. The smell of Lana’s honey shampoo came from the bathroom, which meant her daughter had only just had a shower. She tried to work out why Lana would have showered at that time of day. She tried to work out what time of day it was. Her watch wasn’t on her wrist, she’d left her phone somewhere, there was a distant ticking, but no clocks visible from her position on the floor.

  Jen felt she’d been curled up by this door for hours, or that she’d fallen into some space between time. She had a feeling that something important had happened but couldn’t remember what it was.

  Lana’s laugh rang out, then, and Jen suddenly understood. She was being mocked. They were standing behind the door laughing at her, perhaps looking through the keyhole. They hated her, they despised her, they wanted her to go mad. Jen began to crawl away. If she could just get back to the safety of the bedroom, she would be all right. If she could just stop hearing their voices, she might be able to forget, to forgive them.

  Provocation

  The next day, Jen wasn’t sure what had happened and what hadn’t. She woke early and roamed the house. Her clothes had been picked up and hung over the newel post, the newly identified oyster fossil was on her dressing table, Hugh slept with one hand tucked behind his head. Jen watched the flicker of his eyelids.

  She had had a bad dream, a migraine and a bad dream, and her mind had invented a whispered conversation between her husband and her daughter. This was what she thought and what she needed to think. Her brain had conjured it from a muddle of impressions.

  But the image of that blue light washing over her hands made her feel grimy, even after showering, so to counteract it she went into the garden and sat with the backs of her hands tilted towards the sun. Her brain seemed to have been replaced by a lot of air, a familiar feeling the day after a migraine, and she moved her neck about, as if it were the string of a helium balloon.

  Remembering the glow of the computer leaking into the hall, she got the laptop and set it on their patio table. The screen was almost invisible in the glare of the sun and she had to wait for a passing cloud to check the internet history. It was blank, had been cleared. She leaned into her chair and waited for another cloud, and perhaps another idea, to pass. She was still waiting when Hugh came to find her.

  ‘What are you doing out here?’ he asked.

  ‘What are you doing out here?’ she countered, lowering the laptop screen. ‘Shouldn’t you be at work?’

  ‘I’ve taken the morning off. You weren’t well last night.’

  It was the dream’s fault that Jen wasn’t touched by this, was instead instantly suspicious. ‘Just a headache,’ she said.

  ‘You were very groggy, though. I could hardly wake you for more than a few minutes, even to drink some water. What brought the headache on, d’you think?’

  ‘I forgot to eat breakfast, and then lunch. I only had a bit of a cake that Grace made.’

  ‘Ah, well, that might explain it,’ he said, opening the parasol over the table and adjusting it so she was in the shade. ‘You’re sure Grace didn’t put cannabis in the cake?’

  ‘Oh God.’

  ‘Only a joke, Jen. It was probably just full of some awful health-food supplement that isn’t fit for human consumption. Anyway, don’t get sunstroke.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Shall I make some coffee?’

  She nodded again, and he went away and came back with coffee and a large glass of water and a bowl of raspberries, and a little later, a pain au chocolat, which he must have gone to the bakery to fetch.

  ‘I don’t want you to go hungry again,’ he said, bringing out more coffee and sitting down to eat his own pastry, pulling the heavy iron chair into the shade next to her.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. And she was grateful for the food, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that he was monitoring her, monitoring her use of the laptop, especially, as if there was something on it he didn’t want her to find. The machine began to whirr then, a rising note, and for a moment she thought it was in on the plot, alerting her husband to the fact she was using it. But a moment later the noise stopped. It had just been a big bumble bee buzzing under the catmint.

  ‘Where’s Lana?’ she asked.

  ‘In the shower, I think. What are you going to do today?’

  ‘Nothing. Sit here,’ she corrected herself.

  ‘Shall I put the laptop back inside?’

  ‘No, I might want it.’

  ‘Okay.’

  They sat quietly, eyes following the small movements of the garden, the flicker of a flying insect, the ruffle of a leaf in the breeze. After a few minutes, Lana came to join them, standing on the lawn for a moment with her eyes closed, holding her face up to the light.

  ‘Well, I think I’ll tackle that yarrow,’ Hugh said, getting up and going to the shed. He stopped to say something to Lana as he passed her, and she nodded and turned to look at her mother. Jen watched them both for a while after that, watched while Hugh brought out bamboo stakes and various tools and pushed the bamboo into the earth, and cut a bit of twine off the spool, and tied the flat, yellow heads of the yarrow to a stake. She watched while Lana sat on the grass and ate a croissant and held her limbs out to the sun.

  A storm was coming, which was perhaps another reason for the migraine. The air was full of buzzing, but the big bumble bee crawled along the ground, its buzz more like a croak, a groan. It came every few seconds, along with a sporadic lift-off, a few inches of flight. You were supposed to feed tired bees sugar water, but she had none out here, so instead Jen picked a stalk off the catmint bush, which was covered in other, smaller bees, and held it down to the bumble bee.

  It leaped on it, pushing its sucker into every purple flower head, and then flew off, high and distant. Soon, though, it was back again. Dragging its heavy, round body along the patio under the buddleia. Jen knew it was the same bee because its buzz was bassier than the others’, was distinctive to her ears, as if she were a mother who could distinguish the cries of her own newborn. She held another stick of catmint out before turning back to the computer.

/>   Scrolling through files in various folders, she checked the recently opened documents: a list of their cousins’ addresses, which she’d checked to send a birthday card, a sleep log she’d been keeping on Lana’s behalf, a couple of essays that Lana had begun and abandoned – nothing caught her eye. She clicked on the trash, but it was just the usual collection of screenshots and blank documents. She opened applications at random, but they didn’t lead her anywhere.

  The bee’s mournful buzz made her sad, desperate, and she checked her emails just to have something to click on, finding an update on the petition she had signed asking the government to stop pesticide companies killing bees. Life was all of a piece, she thought.

  Hugh came over with a floret of feathery leaves which had broken off as he’d tried to tie them. ‘Don’t forget to drink your water,’ he said.

  ‘I won’t.’ She ran the leaves through her fingers and sniffed at them. The camphorous scent of the yarrow was comforting, addictive.

  Hugh seemed reluctant to leave her alone, looking at her, looking at the computer screen, and he waited until Lana had replaced him at Jen’s elbow before going back to the shed. Jen shut the laptop lid and smiled at Lana. Perhaps worried that her mother was about to begin a serious conversation, Lana bounced out of her chair and offered to take the computer inside, just as Hugh had.

  ‘Why? Do you want it?’ Jen asked.

  ‘Only if you’re finished with it.’ The casualness seemed studied.

  ‘I’m not finished with it.’

  ‘That’s cool.’ Which wasn’t a phrase Lana used. And she kept her eyes on the computer as she drifted back over to Hugh.

  So Jen began to play a game. Each time Hugh got up the ladder into the pine tree, she opened the laptop. That seemed to cause him to drop down the rungs on to the grass, or to come over and ask her if she wanted anything. And whenever Lana went to resume her position on the lawn, Jen would tap noisily, randomly, at the keyboard, making her daughter sit up and look at her.