Whistle in the Dark

by Emma Healey

  Reassurance

  What Jen wanted to tell Lana when she was in despair: One day you’ll have a rewarding job and a lovely husband and a beautiful home and sweet little children and a springer spaniel. And this will seem like a tiny blip. Think about that.

  What she suspected might be more honest: One day you will be thirty-five and receiving IVF treatment and desperately trying to feed your cat a thyroid tablet and getting ready to apply for a mortgage on a studio flat and complaining about your colleague being promoted over you. And this will seem like an idyllic time. Think about that.

  Testing, testing

  Lana obviously wasn’t going to confide in her mother, so Jen was counting on her revealing something to her best friend, Bethany. But as far as Jen knew, they’d had no contact. Lana’s replacement mobile hadn’t arrived and she hadn’t been back to school yet.

  The headmistress had been very understanding and a card had even arrived from Lana’s class, Get Well Soon on the front. The message didn’t quite fit the circumstances, but Jen doubted there was a card with the words Hope you recover from your nameless ordeal soon available in the shops.

  The messages inside, from teachers and classmates, were vague, and most of the pupils had plumped for Hope you’re okay (or Hope your ok), but a couple of them were more direct, enquiring. What happened? asked a Jason P, and an Elsa had drawn a heart with arms and legs and said she wanted to hear the whole story. It was reassuring for Jen to see that other people had questions, too.

  Bethany had called several times the evening they got home, but Lana had been asleep, and she’d seemed strangely nervous about speaking to her friend since. If Jen could get them on the phone, if she could just get Lana to return Bethany’s calls, it might mean progress.

  She was sitting in front of the TV, waiting for Hugh to get home from his Friday-night piano lesson, when Bethany rang again. A few minutes later Jen heard Lana’s footsteps in the hall and pressed the off button on the remote.

  ‘That was Bethany,’ she said, ‘while you were in the shower.’

  ‘Right,’ Lana said, towelling the ends of her hair as she walked into the sitting room. A smell of shampoo, a cold, wet smell, invaded the warmth of the space, made it feel tainted, unclean.

  ‘That’s your friend from school.’

  Lana stared at her. ‘I know. I can’t remember everything that happened in the Peak District, Mum, but I haven’t lost my memory altogether. I don’t need you to tell me who I am or how I take my tea.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Sorry.’

  ‘What were you watching on the telly?’

  The truth was, Jen couldn’t remember, but she felt too embarrassed to admit it. ‘The news,’ she said. ‘Are you going to call Bethany back?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Lana teased a few tangles out of her damp hair, careful to avoid the area around her stitches, which still looked raw, the line of the wound running almost parallel to her parting.

  ‘She sounded anxious to speak to you.’

  ‘Oh, fine.’ Lana took the landline from its cradle. ‘It’s shitty not having a mobile,’ she said, as she pressed call return and waited for her friend to answer. ‘When did you say my new phone would be here?’

  ‘Monday.’

  ‘Oh, hi,’ Lana said, her attention slipping into the receiver, along the wires, out of the house.

  Jen made her hands into a T sign, which Lana nodded at, and walked quickly to the kitchen to boil the kettle before rushing upstairs to pick up the extension in the bedroom. She caught sight of herself in the dressing-table mirror as she did so. She looked sly and angular, listening in on her daughter’s conversation, her body bent over the phone, the light from the window harsh on the planes of her face. A stereotypical villain, a Richard III or a Weird Sister.

  ‘They’ve said I don’t have to go back till I feel like it,’ Lana was saying, her voice slightly metallic.

  ‘Lucky,’ Bethany said.

  ‘I s’pose.’

  ‘Oh. I didn’t mean about what happened. I just meant about school.’

  ‘I know, Bambi,’ Lana said.

  Bambi? Jen repeated in her head. Since when had she called her friend Bambi? Bethany, Beth, Bet, Bête Noir, Betty Boop, Bezza, Bell End. She’d heard all these, but never Bambi.

  ‘So what exactly did happen?’ Bethany asked.

  Jen held her breath.

  ‘I was kidnapped.’

  Jen held the phone away briefly so she could breathe out. She felt faint.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah, by these, like, mysterious men in cloaks.’ An upwards inflection had crept in, as if Lana were asking for permission.

  Jen tried not to grip the phone too tightly; she made eye contact with herself in the mirror, as if her reflection could be relied upon for moral support.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Bethany said.

  ‘They were chanting, and carrying candles and everything, and they tied me up and forced me to drink the blood of a hundred chickens.’

  ‘Freaky shit.’

  Jen settled the phone into its base then walked slowly downstairs. She made tea for herself and Lana and took the mugs into the sitting room. Her daughter was on the sofa, watching the TV with the sound turned down low; this phone, too, was back in its cradle.

  ‘You made your point,’ Jen said, putting the tea on the side table.

  ‘If you thought I wouldn’t be able to tell you were listening –’

  ‘Yes, I realize that now. Sorry.’

  ‘Nothing happened. Nothing major happened, you know,’ Lana said. ‘I was just lost.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Lana reached for the remote control.

  ‘Was Bambi code?’ Jen asked.

  Lana grinned. ‘I told Beth you’d be going upstairs to eavesdrop. I knew it when you kept on at me to phone her back.’

  ‘I thought it was odd.’

  ‘What’s odd is that when I switched on the TV a shopping channel appeared. Not the news. A shopping channel.’

  ‘That is odd,’ Jen agreed. ‘Don’t forget to drink your tea.’

  Lana did as she was told and then grimaced. ‘Ugh, Mum. I haven’t taken sugar since I was twelve.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Jen said. ‘Just testing.’

  Inventory

  Having established that Lana’s tea-drinking habits were still the same, Jen thought she should begin to make an inventory of Lana, of the Lana they’d got back. There were the old things, the familiar things: the huddled pose, the long, exasperated blink, the marks on her arms, old ones and fresh ones, the slight aniseed smell of her sweat. And there were the new things: the bandana she wore to cover the scabbed, cropped section of scalp, a sudden restlessness which made her open and shut drawers and doors and curtains, the sharpness of her shoulders and elbows, the yeasty smell of her breath and, most disturbingly, the cracked left canine.

  ‘Don’t you think it looks a bit like an eye?’ Jen whispered when she and Hugh got into bed that night.

  ‘What?’ Hugh asked.

  ‘Lana’s tooth. I wonder if it’s dead. It’s gone a funny colour – greyish, yellowish. Haven’t you noticed? And the middle of it has cracked in a long, dark slash.’ She made a performance of the last word, made it as onomatopoeic as she could. ‘It looks like a cat’s eye.’

  ‘I haven’t noticed,’ Hugh said. ‘Did that happen…recently?’

  ‘Must have.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you take her to the dentist?’

  ‘Shouldn’t you?’

  It was too dark to see, but she stared at the space where she knew his face must be.

  ‘Have you asked her about it?’ Hugh said.

  ‘I thought I was banned from asking any more questions.’

  ‘Enquiries about dentistry are probably allowed. You don’t think it’s hurting her, do you?’

  Hugh had always had a special horror of the children getting toothache, and he couldn’t bear taking them to the dentist. He’d greeted their scraped knees and bumped
heads and even Meg’s broken arm quite cheerfully, but taking Lana to have her pre-molars out had left him white and shaking, and, according to Lana, he’d offered (rather insanely) to exchange places with her and have the procedure performed on himself instead. ‘As if that would work. As if it was just a kind of torture,’ she’d said, laughing, her words still soggy from the anaesthetic.

  ‘I don’t think it’s hurting her,’ Jen said now, ‘but she will have to get it treated. It might have to come out.’

  She felt Hugh tense next to her.

  ‘I don’t think she’d mind that, actually. She’s always said she fancied a gold tooth.’

  The lights of a passing car slipped through a gap in the curtains and turned about the room, making the mirror flash and the shadows of the wardrobe and bookcase lurch about. Jen got a glimpse of Hugh’s tightly screwed-up face, and she put out a hand to smooth the creases away. But the light was gone by the time she made contact and her thumb caught his eye.

  ‘Ow. Thank you for that,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘What were you aiming for?’

  ‘Your cheek.’

  ‘Oh, good. I was worried you were working towards more cracked teeth to whisper about.’

  ‘Ha bloody ha,’ Jen said.

  She turned over, partly for comfort, partly to make sure she didn’t accidentally jab Hugh in the eye again, and soon began to feel as if she were drawing sleep towards her, sucking it in. Almost full, she hardly had the energy to react when Hugh sighed out his question.

  ‘Do you think it’s the tooth that’s made Lana’s voice different?’

  Dysregulation of the neural hubs

  Hugh decided he’d been imagining things when they spoke the next morning, but over breakfast (while Lana kept to her room) the question became a theme and, unable to ask Lana anything, Jen rounded on Hugh.

  ‘Is her voice breathier, or more breathless?’ she asked. ‘Do you think she seems angrier than before? Do you think she’s developed a tremor? Do you think she’s been picking at her scars? Do you think they’re taking too long to heal? Do you think she’s deliberately not eating? Do you think she’s in some kind of pain and won’t admit it?’

  Hugh watched the too runny marmalade drip off his toast and said no. He said no all day, while he read the paper and emptied the bins, while he loaded the dishwasher and ironed his shirts, while he made a chorizo and pork belly casserole and drank his Saturday beer. And Jen filed her nails short and repotted a little lemon tree and thought of more questions.

  ‘Do you think she blinks too often?’ she asked, settling on to the sofa.

  Hugh stared at her over the rim of his glass. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked. A gurgle of water sounded through the central-heating pipes. Lana’s footsteps could be heard on the creaking floorboards above.

  ‘I thought we weren’t supposed to watch her all the time, judge her all the time,’ Hugh said, finally. ‘You keep telling me that, and now…Too frequent blinking? Really?’

  Jen began to explain but was interrupted by the sound of something shooting through the letterbox.

  Hugh sighed as he got up. ‘It’ll just be the Advertiser. I’ll put it in the recycling. Oh, nope,’ he said, at the door. ‘It’s for Lana.’

  ‘What is it?’

  He held up the A4 envelope. The address had been typed on to a fleur-de-lis-patterned sticker. ‘More schoolwork, I expect. She got a bundle of essay questions and chemistry equations last week. They like to keep them busy, don’t they?’ He looked about for somewhere to put the envelope then gave up, sitting down again and dropping the package on the floor.

  ‘Blinking,’ Jen began.

  ‘Oh, good,’ Hugh said, his voice dry, ‘I was worried that subject had been dropped.’

  ‘I read something that said rapid blinking could be a sign of dysregulation of the neural hubs.’

  ‘And what exactly does that mean?’

  Jen paused. ‘Yes, well, I’m not absolutely clear on that point.’

  Hugh rubbed his face and reached for the remote control.

  ‘But it has something to do with amnesia.’

  ‘Do you think she has amnesia?’

  ‘Not really,’ Jen said. ‘I think she was dehydrated and confused, and now she’s hydrated and obstinate, or not obstinate but doubtful, suspicious.’

  ‘Give her time,’ Hugh said, using another of those reassuring phrases which somehow didn’t irritate when they were in his voice.

  He flicked through the TV channels until he found a midway-through, black-and-white Saturday-afternoon film and settled down. The discussion was over. Jen tried to focus on the film; it was one she’d seen before, there were a lot of American men in soft felt hats threatening each other but speaking so quickly and in such a stagey monotone that the threats seemed distant. It was relaxing. But she kept seeing the envelope in the corner of her vision.

  ‘What if it’s not schoolwork?’ she said.

  Hugh waited for a dialogue-free chase scene to answer. ‘Well, what if it’s not?’

  ‘What if it’s from someone…sinister?’ She looked at the package for a long moment, the men on the television still telling each other they were making a mistake or would regret their mistake or pay for their mistake.

  ‘You’ll be glad of me one day,’ a man with a little painted-on moustache said. ‘I ain’t no weak sister.’

  ‘Okay, go on, spill,’ said the blond leading man.

  ‘Give the envelope here, will you?’ Jen said.

  ‘What about allowing her some privacy, and all that?’ Hugh asked.

  Jen ignored him, reaching for the package. Inside, she could feel a thin wodge of papers, as if several small sheets had shuffled themselves together. She ripped the flap open and tipped the contents on to the floor. Hugh switched off the TV, and there was a stark silence to accompany the slight darkening of the room. They leaned forward to survey the bits of paper, fluttering on their oatmeal-flecked carpet: press cuttings, dozens of them, newspaper articles covering Lana’s disappearance. Her face was replicated on each one and the flapping of the paper in the breeze from the fireplace made it seem like she was blinking, over and over and over.

  Posterity

  Jen felt they should put the whole lot in the recycling, but Hugh wanted, unreasonably, to ask Lana’s opinion. And, inevitably, that opinion was the opposite of Jen’s. Their daughter looked at the cuttings, read about the police search, scanned the kind words from her school friends and headmistress and, pushing everything back into the envelope, carried it upstairs. The next day, Jen would discover that her daughter had pinned every article to the corkboard above her desk, and the newspaper Lanas in the photographs challenged Jen whenever she went into the room.

  There was a note in the envelope, too. It read: Lovely Lana, see how important you are? Hang on to these to look back on when you’re my age. Write me a letter, please. Love, Gran.

  ‘Of course, it had to be your mother,’ Jen said, annoyed at not having guessed when she saw the address label. Carolyn had an insatiable passion for fleurs-de-lis. They adorned her shopping bags and scarves, topped the banisters, were stencilled along the dado rail. Lana had once suggested she get a fleur-de-lis tattoo, much to Carolyn’s horror.

  And Hugh’s mother was the only person who sent clippings in the post. They were usually from magazines and had titles like How to lower your cholesterol or Ways to keep your prostate healthy. But she also collected anything to do with Hugh or his sister, or her grandchildren. She had once sent them a dozen copies of an article about a local cinema, after Hugh had got involved in the campaign to save it. They still had one of the newsprint photos in a frame: a brightly sunlit Hugh looming in front of the art deco façade, the angle unflattering, as it made the viewer focus on the underside of his chin.

  Then there was the time he had inspected the work of an unscrupulous builder and helped to have a man prosecuted for swindling an old woman out of her life savings. When that st
ory had been in the papers they’d got a whole sheaf of clippings, even though each one was only a few lines and none of them had a photo.

  ‘You need to start a scrapbook,’ Carolyn had said, last time she phoned. ‘For posterity. You should get Jen to do it.’

  Jen, listening on speakerphone, had silently mouthed obscenities.

  ‘I’m a building surveyor, Mum, I’m not starting a career in show business,’ Hugh had said. ‘And Jen’s busy.’

  ‘I see.’ There’d been a ruffling sort of noise on the line. ‘Well, I’m proud of you, even if she isn’t.’

  ‘She’s right,’ Jen had said, after Hugh’d wished his mother goodbye and ended the call. ‘I should make time to create that scrapbook. I mean, you are a hero.’

  ‘It was nothing,’ Hugh had said, attempting to flex his biceps and flutter his eyelashes at the same time.

  The definition of heroism

  When he inspected the work, consulting building surveyor Hugh Maddox found that Mr Bryant had failed to complete the roof-felt replacement he twice claimed he had undertaken. Mr Maddox condemned the work as having ‘no purpose or value’.

  Ghosting

  There was no doubt that other people’s mothers were a problem. Jen’s friend Grace constantly complained that hers was needy and destructive and a clear case of borderline personality disorder (though sometimes she thought it was just negative Ketu, or the influence of a retrograde planet). Jen almost felt let down by her own supportive and even-tempered mother, a woman who occasionally had to acquire quirks just to have something to say.