Whistle in the Dark

by Emma Healey

  ‘Invisible or able to fly?’ she’d started to ask everyone she met. ‘Which would you prefer to be? Think carefully now, there is a wrong answer.’

  Lily had been trying out for the role of perpetual mischief-maker at the Women’s Institute, and various other clubs, since her retirement twenty years before. It was a role she wasn’t much suited to, but the attempt had won her many friends. Unfortunately, due to cancer and strokes, dementia and emphysema, there were few of these left, and Lily had fallen back on the company of a second (or possibly third) cousin. Peggy was one of life’s organizers, and Lily occasionally joked about dying in order to get away from her, but in reality Peggy was invited to participate in nearly everything Lily did, and usually came with them to lunch, every third Sunday.

  This Sunday was bright and hot and blue-skied, and the quiet Suffolk suburb, which Jen had not been lucky enough to grow up in, might almost have been taken for California in this weather, with its wide streets and big, one-storey houses.

  ‘Hello,’ Lily said, as Jen and Hugh got out of the car.

  Her front door was already open, her handbag on the hall shelf, the windows closed and locked, the lights off.

  ‘Hi, Mum,’ Jen said, stooping to kiss her. ‘Are you ready, or…’

  ‘Not quite. Come in a minute, will you? Oh, that’s the phone ringing now. It’s all go this morning.’

  Hugh and Jen followed her into the house, which seemed smaller and darker and more full of stuff each time they visited. While they waited, Jen went about turning frames away or lying them face down.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Hugh asked.

  ‘I just can’t bear them.’

  Jen had always thought school photos looked like photos of dead children, children who’d died in mysterious and gruesome situations. They were the kinds of pictures newspapers printed and broadcasters flashed up, and she’d nearly refused to buy any when Meg and Lana had had them taken. But, of course, all the grandparents had requested them and Jen had dutifully sent each year’s set.

  Meg’s school photos were slowly being replaced by shots of her in trendy cafés or standing next to signs in New Orleans and Barcelona, but school-formal Lana was still on display. Neat, uniformed Lana, grinning widely enough to show the gaps in her baby teeth, or smiling, lip-glossed Lana, or the latest Lana, looking at the camera with that oddly familiar dull look in her eyes. This dull-eyed photo was the one that Hugh had sent to the police the day after Lana had gone missing. It was the photo the police and newspapers had chosen, despite the fact that Jen had given them more recent ones, taken a few days before: Lana on the holiday, caught looking happy and brightly dressed.

  But it seemed ‘happy’ wasn’t what they wanted and, apparently, the school uniform would remind the public that she was a young girl, vulnerable, deserving of special attention. And the resolution, sharpness and colour balance were better in the school photo, they said. Insulting Jen’s camera work on top of everything else.

  ‘What’s your mum going to say when she comes back in?’ Hugh asked, as Jen hid the final picture.

  She shrugged, looking about the room. Yes, okay, it was definitely noticeable, the room suddenly blank where it had been full of watching eyes, of the energy of early childhood, of the angst of teenage years.

  ‘Why on earth does she have to put out quite so many?’ Jen asked.

  ‘Making up for having only two grandchildren?’ Hugh suggested. ‘She’s often seemed a bit jealous of Peggy’s seven.’

  ‘If only David and Graham had had children,’ Jen said. ‘They’re so selfish.’

  ‘Well, she’s going to be a great-grandmother soon.’

  ‘God, don’t remind me.’

  ‘I thought Meg would want to be here to tell her.’

  ‘No, she has a good instinct for self-preservation. And anyway, someone had to stay with Lana.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Lily said, coming back into the room. ‘That was the nurse about my warfarin test. Oh.’ She stopped and looked at the dresser, the top of the piano, the bookcase, at the flattened or swivelled photo frames, but she didn’t mention them. ‘Where are we going for lunch?’ she asked.

  ‘There’s the pub on the Longton Road, or the garden centre.’

  ‘Let’s go to the garden centre, then, but we’d better go now, otherwise all the tables will be taken by old women.’

  Hugh smiled.

  ‘What about Peggy?’ Jen asked. ‘Isn’t she coming?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Just no?’

  Lily pulled on some fingerless gloves, despite the heat, and picked up her handbag. ‘I told her last time I wouldn’t stand for it.’ She led them towards the door and began the complicated procedure of locking the house. ‘I said, if she said it again, that would be it.’

  ‘Said what?’ Jen asked, losing patience.

  ‘What she said about my granddaughter.’ Lily backed into the car’s front passenger seat and leaned back as Jen reached across to buckle the seat belt. ‘Lana is attention-seeking, she said. That’s not true, I said, and I won’t hear it, and if those words come up again it will mean the end of our friendship.’ She began to smile and then tugged her top lip down with her fingers. ‘I called her a troglodyte. Well, she might as well live in a cave, she knows nothing about the world.’

  Jen made a face at Hugh, who was sitting patiently with his hands on the steering wheel, and shut the door on the speech. But when she slid into the back of the car she found the monologue was still going on.

  ‘To be honest, I’m glad. It’s been coming for a while. I’m surprised we stayed friends for so long, I never could stand her.’

  Jen had instantly, shockingly, thought of her friend Grace, and couldn’t help speculating about what it would take to end their friendship in such a definite way. She’d never realized that she might be interested in ending the friendship and felt something like a head rush at the idea. If Jen spent less time under Grace’s guidance, half-heartedly being lulled by recorded meditations or trying to sync her menstrual cycle with the moon (surely it was a bit late for this, anyway), then she might have time for more useful activities. She might even go to the gym.

  A man was jogging past in neon-yellow Lycra as Hugh pulled the car out on to the main road. To Jen, his presence made the day seem fresher, healthier, but Lily groaned.

  ‘Oh, what do they look like? Rushing about, dressed like that.’

  ‘Like people who exercise?’

  ‘Is that so?’ Lily said. ‘Don’t drive down the road by the Christmas-tree farm this time,’ she told Hugh.

  ‘Why not?’ Jen asked, bundling all their rain jackets and bags together on the back seat beside her.

  ‘Can’t stand the smell.’

  Jen caught Hugh’s eye through the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Not a fan of Christmas now?’ Hugh asked.

  ‘Nothing to do with Christmas. It’s just those trees. They smell like sweaty old animals. They smell the way that runner chap back there probably smells.’ She pointed a thumb over her shoulder and pulled at the seat belt.

  ‘I don’t think you’d be able to smell the trees from this side of the road, or from inside a car,’ Jen said.

  ‘But I’d be able to see them, and the sight would remind me.’

  ‘Surely talking about them reminds you?’

  ‘But not as strongly.’

  Jen sat back, defeated.

  ‘I’ve never really liked the way they look either,’ Lily said after a moment. ‘The way the needles grow directly out of the trunk, you know? It seems normal on the branches, but on the trunk? Quite horrid.’ She shivered. ‘Deformed hairs, they look like, or some sort of disease. I can’t describe it properly, but do you know what I mean?’

  Hugh moved, trying to catch Jen’s eye again, but she kept her focus on Lily’s head, partly obscured by the headrest in front of her. The truth was she did know what her mother meant, though she could hardly articulate it any better. What kind of tree allowed its lea
ves to sprout directly from the trunk, with no branch to act as a conduit? It was like hair, like pubic hair growing somewhere it shouldn’t, on the inner elbow or the back of a knee; it seemed obscene and made Jen feel itchy.

  Itchy inner elbows reminded her of Meg, and she asked Lily for the name of the cream she’d recommended before.

  ‘I knew you’d forget,’ Lily said, ‘so I wrote it down. Here you are.’ She held a scrap of paper through the gap between the front seats. ‘Why’s Meg got eczema again all of a sudden, anyway? Have you told her to change her washing powder?’

  ‘It’s not her washing powder,’ Jen said. She took a breath in. Hugh was shaking his head in the mirror, but why wait? ‘Meg’s pregnant.’

  ‘Pardon?’ The seat belt snapped back into place. ‘Does that mean…? Has she…? How could she…? How?’

  ‘As far as we understand it, she’s come to an arrangement with her friend Tom.’

  ‘An arrangement,’ Lily echoed, her voice small.

  ‘Yes. They’re not romantically involved, but they’d both like to be parents.’

  ‘So she’s still a lesbian?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And she’s not getting married?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And it was all test tubes and artificial insemination and whatnot, was it?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Well.’ Lily tugged off her gloves and put them away in her handbag. ‘That’s something to tell Peggy.’

  ‘I thought you weren’t talking to Peggy.’

  ‘I didn’t have anything worth talking about before.’

  Lily was still speaking when they got to the garden centre, where sprinklered water droplets balanced on the car park’s shrubs and the smell of petrol mixed with the honey scent of yellow azaleas.

  ‘I suppose it’s a generational thing,’ Lily said, ‘keeping up a friendship like this. People just ghost each other now, apparently. Have you heard of that, Hugh? Ghosting? What you do is you stop taking your friend’s calls and stop answering their messages and hope they give up on you altogether. There was a programme about it on Radio 4.’

  As they walked into the restaurant, Jen realized she had brought one of the framed photos of Lana with them, clutched against the foldable walking stick and the spare cardigan. Lily, flicking the stick into shape as if it were a police baton, and pulling the cardigan around her shoulders, took the picture from Jen and slipped it into her handbag. They both gazed at Lana’s face for a second, lying among crumpled tissues and empty chocolate wrappers, and then Lily tugged the zip shut and looked at Jen instead.

  Deception

  At the garden centre Lily pointed out the flowers that had bloomed early this year, and on the drive home Jen realized that, while she’d been distracted, all the magnolia trees in London had come into blossom. Worse than that, they had laid most of their fat, blushing petals on the sodden pavements. She felt they had gone behind her back.

  The curious incident of the cat in the night-time

  The feeling that things were happening just out of her sight was growing. That night Jen felt she could smell the damp creeping into the brickwork of their house, could hear the leaves of the plants outside uncurling, could see the office interns and assistants plotting her demise.

  But a moment later she realized she couldn’t sense any of those things. Something had woken her, a screeching which could have been inside her head, and though she clenched and released all her muscles from toe to neck, she knew she wouldn’t get back to sleep. Hugh’s face was turned towards her and she kept checking to see that his eyes were shut. Somehow, finding him staring at her in the half-light was the most frightening thing she could imagine.

  Which was ridiculous, because it was Hugh, and surely she should be able to think of something scarier. Masked men breaking into the house, a fire beginning in the hallway beneath their bedroom, the ghost of a murdered former resident rising from the floorboards. But no, it was only the image of Hugh’s eyes shiningly open when they should be closed that had the power to make her breath catch. She got out of bed.

  There was no raging fire in the hall and no masked men. Lana’s light was on, and Jen put a hand around the slightly open door to turn it off, listening to her daughter’s puffs of breath, grateful, consciously grateful, that she could stand here, near her, where she was asleep and safe.

  The kitchen was full of the muffled, wet sounds of the boiler and the dishwasher, ordinary and reassuring. But as she left the kitchen, carrying her glass of milk, she noticed the looming quality of the stairs at this angle, at this time of night: a thrilling, frightening aspect, an ominous promise of horrors one floor up. The clinical, unmerciful white of the walls seemed ready for the shadow of something to glide over it, the silhouette of a hand with long fingernails. Beneath were the broken lines of the banister spindles and behind them a dark shape that looked like a cat sitting on the stairs.

  Jen moved slightly to the left and swallowed some of the milk, sweet against the sour taste of sleep in her mouth. The shape stayed where it was, still dark, still cat-like. It was an actual cat, Jen realized, its head tilted towards the first floor, as if it were looking at someone on the landing.

  ‘How did you get in?’ she whispered, moving to the bottom step and sniffing the air in case the cat had sprayed somewhere, or worse. The cat turned and miaowed at her, a quiet miaow, a feline sort of whisper, as if it understood that people were sleeping upstairs. Jen put a hand out and felt the hard head bump her knuckles, felt the soft fur push through the gaps between her fingers, felt the skin above her wrists groomed by a rough tongue. A low purring echoed in the hall. The chilly night suddenly seemed full of warmth.

  ‘I’d better let you out,’ Jen said. ‘You shouldn’t be here.’

  But instead she sat on the step and let the cat push into the crook of her arm. It was white with black ears and reminded her of a Hiroshige picture she’d had on her wall as a student. This is what she’d woken early for, she thought. This is what her mind had pushed her out of bed for, this furry reward, these few minutes of peace. ‘Where have you been hiding, eh? How did you get in?’

  She put her glass on a newspaper, letting a drop of milk run down the outside, and the cat licked at it. The tiredness Jen thought she’d lost returned and she leaned against the wall, rubbing the cat’s cheek. It closed its eyes; she closed her eyes. Perhaps this was just what happened at this hour every night, perhaps she just missed it by sleeping, perhaps it had let itself in somehow, despite the lack of opposable thumbs…she was too sleepy for questions. Slowly, and without grace, she slumped on to the floor and let the cat fill the gap between her limbs.

  And that was how she woke, hours later, curled around a cat-shaped space on the carpet, Hugh standing over her. It was still dark.

  ‘What on earth?’ he said.

  ‘There was a cat,’ she answered.

  ‘Which is why you slept on the stairs?’

  ‘I couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘I beg to differ.’

  ‘No, I mean I couldn’t sleep earlier, and then there was this cat, and…that’s the last thing I remember. Did you let it out?’

  ‘No. There was no cat. Just my wife giving me a fright by lying at the bottom of the stairs and looking like she’d fallen down them.’

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ Jen said. ‘I wonder where it went, then. We’d better have a look. It must be somewhere. I hope it hasn’t weed on anything.’

  She let Hugh help her up, groaning at the stiffness in her spine, and they walked about, checking under furniture and behind curtains, opening cupboards and lifting the lids of laundry baskets. The glass of milk (lukewarm and yellowish) was still standing on the newspaper, but there was no cat.

  ‘Are you sure you didn’t imagine it?’ Hugh said. ‘Perhaps you were sleepwalking.’

  ‘I wasn’t sleepwalking. A cat definitely got in somehow.’

  Hugh yawned.

  ‘Well, what do you think?’ Jen asked.
/>   ‘I think there are still two hours before I have to be up and I’m going to bed, imaginary cat notwithstanding.’

  Her Indoors

  People had a habit of accusing Jen of imagining things: she hadn’t told Meg she could meet her for lunch, Hugh hadn’t said he’d get the car cleaned, and Lily had never promised to give her that fondue set from the seventies. There was no point in arguing, even though she knew very well what she’d said and heard and been promised.

  And then there was Meg’s girlfriend, ex-girlfriend now, apparently, though Meg had still not said much about that to her mother. Kayla had a round face, a small quiff, a septum ring and deep dimples in her shining cheeks. She smelled of cocoa butter and wore checked shirts, carefully ironed and buttoned up to the top, and she worked at a café near Meg’s gallery, one of those places with school desks instead of tables and clanging metal stools instead of chairs. She had an easy smile for everyone. Except Jen.

  Meg had taken Jen to the café a few times to have coffee and toasted banana bread while they waited for Kayla’s shift to be over, and Jen had always had the impression that Kayla wished her away. Not that she was ever unpleasant, but her behaviour was unsettling. Kayla seemed to bring Jen her coffee and cake with a solemnity, a formality, that she didn’t display when serving anyone else. Her voice was lower when she spoke to Jen, and she held her head tilted further to one side when Jen spoke to her. There was a sort of reverence, or mock-reverence, in her manner that made Jen smile too broadly at her, ask too many questions, be too enthusiastic about everything Kayla said.

  ‘You’re imagining it,’ Hugh would say when Jen mentioned this to him.

  ‘She really likes you,’ Meg always said when Jen hinted that Kayla might be uncomfortable around her.

  ‘Ah, the girlfriend,’ Lily tended to say, with a small smile and a deep nod, but never had anything else to add.

  ‘Who the hell’s Kayla?’ Lana asked, the only time Jen brought it up with her. Of course, Lana knew who Kayla was, but she was irritated at being spoken to when she was typing something on her phone.