Whistle in the Dark
Page 1
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA
Copyright © 2018 Emma Healey
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2018 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto, and simultaneously in the United Kingdom by Viking, a division of Penguin Random House UK, London. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
Alfred A. Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Healey, Emma, 1985–, author
Whistle in the dark / Emma Healey.
Jacket images: (girl) © Jonas Hafner / EyeEm / Getty Images; (textured background) © Eky Studio / Shutterstock.com
Cover design: Leah Springate
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 9780735274426
eBook ISBN 9780735274433
I. Title.
PR6108.E244W58 2018 823’.92 C2018-900041-4
C2018-900042-2
v5.2
a
To my mother, Kathryn Healey
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
The end
Man of God
Theological argument
Alternate universe
The paper
Holiday romance 1979
Holiday romance 2015
Awake
Continuous stationery
Self-sacrifice
Self-sufficient
Butterflies
Idea for a detective novel
Right to reply
Rumpelstiltskin
Q&A
Pretence
Creases
Things will look better in the morning
The dust settles
The youngest profession
Perspective
A family of brilliant conversationalists
Safe space
The woman with no name
Pramface
Getting it wrong
Feminism
Reassurance
Testing, testing
Inventory
Dysregulation of the neural hubs
Posterity
The definition of heroism
Ghosting
Deception
The curious incident of the cat in the night-time
Her Indoors
Significant other
Fanfare
Hazardous waste
Stigmata
Don’t think
Flutter
Stutter
Echo
Research
Rehearsal vs performance
Getting it wrong again
Body image
#rapture
Nine Ladies
Displacement activity
Baby animals
Passion
The farmer’s in his den
Any advance
Numbers game
Temptation
Heroine
Legend
Underground
Double
Fields
Quotation
Birds
Alibi
Framing device
Copyright
Breach of contract
Something sexual
Nude collection
Dick pic
Hand-wringing
Fall on deaf ears
Clip-clop
At home
Question
Rough with the smooth
Pulling teeth
Sightseeing
Cathedral
Modesty
Seeing the light
Imaginary friends
Coming out
Spectrum
Second skin
Experiment
Come on
Corporeal friends
Not in front of the children
Sunflowers
Mother’s Day
Making a scene
A play by Lana Maddox
Daphne
Washing
A cavalier attitude to washing-machine programmes
7 Theories about Where Lana Maddox Went for 4 Days
Break in hostilities
Have You Heard of the Boy who Visited Hell?
London Road
Unwanted social-media attention
An Old Woman Reading
Do you believe in ghosts?
Wrinkles
Red-faced
Still waters
Bad press
One of life’s little mysteries
Astrological argument
Tripping
Behind closed doors
Provocation
Holy cow
Skylight
Private conversation
Social media never sleeps
Storytelling
Visitor
Have you got the bag?
Heartfelt words
Knickers
Bless us Lord, every day
Not everything is about sex
Woman of spirit
Compartmentalizing
Snacking
Relief
Grapevine
Trinity
First sign of madness
Bingo
Crabwalk
Sump
Round chamber
River passage
Echo chamber
Choke
Hollow
Blanket shaft
Low crawl
Cold drop
Squeeze
Octopus cave
Dried-leaf cavern
Traverse
Low crawl
Stream
Crouch
River passage
Grotto
Revival
Confession
Hearing things
Acknowledgements
The end
‘This has been the worst week of my life,’ Jen said. Not what she had planned to say to her fifteen-year-old daughter after an ordeal that had actually covered four days.
‘Hi, Mum.’ Lana’s voice emerged from blue-tinged lips.
Jen could only snatch a hug, a press of her cheek against Lana’s – soft and pale as a mushroom – while the paramedics slammed the ambulance doors and wheeled Lana into the hospital. There was a gash on the ashen head, a scrape on the tender jaw, she was thin and cold and wrapped in tin foil, she smelled soggy and earthy and unclean, but it was okay: she was here, she was safe, she was alive. Nothing else mattered.
Cigarette smoke drifted over from the collection of dressing-gowned, IV-attached witnesses huddled under the covered entrance, and a man’s voice came with it.
‘What’s going off? Is that the lass from London?’
‘Turned up, then,’ another voice answered. ‘Heard it said on the news.’
So the press had been told already. Jen supposed that was a good thing: they could cancel the search, stop asking the public to keep their eyes open, to report possible sightings, to contact the police if they had information. It was a happy ending to the story. Not the ending anyone had been expecting.
The call had come less than an hour ago, Hugh, wrapped in a hotel towel, just out of the shower (because it was important to keep going), Jen not dressed and unshowered (because sh
e wasn’t convinced by Hugh’s argument). They had never given up hope, that’s what she would say in the weeks to come, talking to friends and relatives, but really her hope, that flimsy Meccano construction, had shaken its bolts loose and collapsed within minutes of finding Lana missing.
Even driving to the hospital, Jen had been full of doubt, assuming there’d been a mistake, imagining a different girl would meet them there, or a lifeless body. The liaison officer had tried to calm her with details: a farmer had spotted a teenager on sheep-grazing land, he’d identified her from the news and called the police, she was wearing the clothes Jen had guessed she’d be wearing, she’d been well enough to drink a cup of hot, sweet tea, well enough to speak, and had definitely answered to the name Lana.
And then there she was, recognizable and yet unfamiliar, a sketch of herself, being coloured in by the hospital: the black wheelchair rolling to the reception desk, the edges of Lana’s red blanket billowing, a nurse in blue sweeping by with a white-coated doctor and the green-uniformed paramedics turning to go out again with a wave. Jen felt too round, the lines of her body too thick and slow for the pace, and she hung back a moment, feeling Hugh’s hands on her shoulders.
He nudged her forward. Lana’s wheelchair was on the move and Jen felt woozy, the scent of disinfectant whistling through her as they got deeper into the hospital. She hadn’t anticipated this, hadn’t been rehearsing for doctors and a recovery, had pictured only police press conferences and a funeral, or an endless, agonizing wait. The relief was wonderful, the relief was ecstasy, the relief made her ticklish, it throbbed in her veins. The relief was exhausting.
‘How are you feeling?’ she asked Hugh, hoping his answer would show her how to react, how to behave.
‘I don’t know,’ Hugh said. ‘I don’t know yet.’
They spent several hours in A&E while Lana had skeletal surveys and urine tests and her head was cleaned and stitched and some of her hair was cut. Her clothes were exchanged for a gown, and her feet, pale and chalky, stuck out naked from the hem. Jen wanted to hold those feet to her chest, to kiss them, as she had when Lana was a baby, but just above each ankle was a purplish line, like the indentations left by socks, only thinner, darker. The kind of mark a fine rope might leave. They made Jen pause, they were a hint, a threat, and they signalled a beginning – the beginning of a new doubt, a new fear, a new gap opening up between her and her daughter.
The police noticed the marks, too, and photographed them when they came to take Lana’s white fleece jacket, now brown and stiff with blood. There was so much blood on it that Jen found herself wondering again if her daughter was really still alive.
‘Head wounds, even relatively minor ones, bleed a lot,’ a doctor said, seeing the look on Jen’s face.
There was a pat on the shoulder and another offer of coffee. This was followed by a great deal of waiting, and then of walking, and Jen found her boots were rubbing, though they’d been perfectly comfortable crossing fields and tracing woodland paths a week ago. And finally they were in a ward, Lana in a bed, the drip hung up and heat packs renewed. She was asleep, or, if not quite asleep, then in some fog of her own.
The day had been blue and bright, but now the sun was low, the air cold. A ladybird had got inside and kept throwing itself at the window with that particular beetlish noise, a whirring tap, an itchy sort of sound. Ladybirds had been waking up for over a month, coming out of hibernation because of the warm weather; they’d had three in the bathroom at home and Jen had dithered over whether to kill them or not because they were all definitely harlequin ones and therefore invaders, imposters, villains who threatened local wildlife.
She didn’t dither now but crossed the room and crushed the beetle in a tissue.
‘Meant to be bad luck to kill a ladybird,’ a woman said. She was on the cusp of being elderly, with grey-white hair cut very short and several layers of clothes stretched tight across her back, and she was sitting by the bed of a small child, knitting.
The colour of the cardigan she wore (teal) and the colour of the wool she was knitting with (dark turquoise) were so close it seemed as though she were adding to her own clothes as she went. There was something mythical about this, fairy-tale-like, which stopped Jen from telling her to piss off. She dropped the tissue into a hazardous-waste bin and sat down again.
She had painted a ladybird at the beginning of the week, mixing crimson and burnt sienna for the shell, dropping the paint lightly on to the paper. It seemed like a lifetime ago, or – perhaps more accurately – it seemed like a moment she had imagined during a sun-drenched daydream. Lana had painted the beetle, too, nestled inside a cowslip, but the red paint had bled into the pale yellow of the flower and she’d been annoyed and ripped the paper.
Lana had destroyed lots of her work over the holiday, despite Jen begging her not to. There were a dozen ragged edges in her sketchbook, the remnants of pictures that had gone wrong.
‘Hello.’ A man wearing the doctor’s uniform of a checked, rolled-sleeved shirt tucked into chinos greeted them, and Hugh stood up, his own unchecked, unrolled, untucked shirt a little more crumpled, a little tighter over the belly.
‘I’m Dr Kaimal. Can you open your eyes for me, Lana?’ He spoke with a deep, rich voice, tilting his head as he shone a light into Lana’s eyes.
Hugh stepped forward and Jen knew he wanted to save her from this last bit of discomfort. Lana blinked and groaned, her head shrinking back into the pillow, her movements jerky when the doctor asked her to squeeze his fingers and submit to another blood-pressure test. Each action seemed almost beyond her, and Lana’s head fell forward when he was done.
‘It’s all looking pretty good,’ the doctor said, pocketing the little torch. ‘We’ve got her temperature up, which we’re pleased about. She’s dehydrated and disorientated, obviously, and there are some infected scrapes, but the laceration on her head isn’t nearly as nasty as it looks. What we’d like to do is keep her in overnight for observation and give her some fluids and antibiotics. All right?’
‘What happened? Can you tell?’ Jen asked.
He grimaced slightly. ‘She might have had a fall but, apart from bruising, there are no other injuries. She’s been very wet for some time and her skin is quite sore, and of course she’s been cold. She should be able to tell you when she’s a bit stronger.’ He paused a moment. ‘Am I right in thinking the police have already spoken to her?’
‘She told them she got lost,’ Jen said. ‘They want to speak to her again, when she’s better.’
‘Right. Well.’ The doctor nodded at them both, dividing his nods between them equally. ‘Someone will be back to check her in an hour.’
The sun had sunk behind a building and all the previously golden edges were now grey. The relief Jen had felt at seeing Lana again was turning into something else, and though she mostly wanted to bundle her up and rock her and feel the weight of her and do anything she could to convince herself that her daughter was really okay, there was a thin thread of dread within her, too. She was frightened to tug on it but knew she wouldn’t be able to resist for long.
‘How did you get lost?’ she said to Lana, who opened and shut her eyes.
Hugh sat down slowly, listening, concentrating.
‘Was it an accident?’
Lana moved her head in what might have been a nod.
‘You didn’t go off deliberately?’ Jen asked, and her daughter’s reply could have been a yes or a no. ‘You weren’t trying to hurt yourself?’
‘Please,’ Lana said. The word was painful.
‘Okay.’ Jen smoothed a hand along the edges of Lana’s blood-matted hair. ‘Okay. You sleep.’
And she kept her mouth shut, though the questions rattled around her head, and she kept her hands steady, though she wanted to shake her daughter awake and demand an explanation. A desperate rage ran through her like a wick. It scared her, this anger, unfocused and physical, and she wasn’t sure she could trust herself.
‘Is s
he really here, Hugh?’ Jen said. ‘Is she really all right?’
He nodded. His hands were clasped as if he’d been praying, the fingers interlaced, and he moved them about as one, resting them on his knees, his thighs, his stomach.
‘And whatever happened, she’ll recover?’
‘Yes.’ He lifted the joined hands and then stretched up and over to support the back of his head.
‘She’ll be fine?’
‘Yes.’
‘And we won’t blame her?’
‘No,’ Hugh said, letting his hands spring apart. ‘No, of course we won’t.’
‘No, of course we won’t,’ Jen repeated. She sat back.
Lana’s name had been written on a whiteboard above the bed and someone had drawn a flower with a smiley face next to it. The ink had become powdery around the dotted eyes so it looked like the flower’s mascara had run. Jen got up to wipe a finger under the marks, but she couldn’t get them to look even and kept neatening and neatening until she’d rubbed the eyes away entirely. The face looked happier without them, she thought, annoyed to find the blue of the marker had got under her nails.
Man of God
On the painting holiday her hands had been covered in ink and paint, and they had used brushes and reed pens, small squares of thick, absorbent paper and huge rolls of wallpaper. They were encouraged by the course tutor to rub mud from the fields on to their pictures, to crush coconut-scented gorse flowers into their sketchbooks, to note the smells and sounds of the landscape on the edges of each painting.
Jen told herself she would carry on with this expressive work when she got home to London but could already predict how she would make one half-hearted attempt and never find the time again. It was the place that made it possible: the bright studio and the footpaths into the hills and the dining hall where all the meals were provided.
They’d booked on to the course in January when being outside was painful and they couldn’t imagine daylight lasting beyond four o’clock in the afternoon. It had been something to look forward to: a week in the country at the end of May, a week for walking and art, for self-improvement and, possibly, even some mother–daughter bonding after the last two years of conflict. Time together without social workers and doctors and psychiatrists.
They’d gone shopping for art materials and proper walking gear. Watercolour palettes, putty rubbers, paint brushes with water reservoirs in the handles, and masking fluid. Waterproof trousers, fleece jackets, thick socks and boots. The shopping trips had been fun and Jen had taken this as a sign that the holiday would be a success. But, as the day for departure drew nearer, Lana had become less enthusiastic.