Whistle in the Dark

by Emma Healey

  In order to replace milk that had been unexpectedly finished, or buy something in a can which she couldn’t find anywhere else (dolmades, perhaps, or haggis), Jen would go to the corner shop. The man at the counter was always friendly, smiling and nodding as though he recognized Jen, and asking how she was, but Jen felt she didn’t shop there enough to deserve this and tended to assume he had mistaken her for someone else.

  Thinking she would take this opportunity to try and bribe Lana with chocolate (though what the bribe might achieve was undefined), she went to the shop between episodes of Say Yes to the Dress. There was the familiar bleep, set off by opening the door, there was the friendly man, at his till, raised above the shop floor, and suddenly there was Lana, coming in behind her.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Jen asked. ‘I thought you weren’t dressed for outside?’

  Lana shrugged and looked down at her slippers, and Jen glanced at the man, feeling rather embarrassed. He was still smiling.

  ‘Milk-and-chocolate run,’ Jen told him. ‘Shouldn’t, really. Diabetes and’ – she struggled to think of the other detrimental effects of sugar ‘– cavities.’

  Despite these disadvantages, they grasped at the chocolate bars in front of the till, piling them on to the counter alongside the replacement milk.

  ‘Aren’t you going to have a KitKat?’ Jen asked when she saw Lana’s choice. ‘I thought that was your favourite.’

  ‘I’ve gone off them. What’s it to you?’

  Jen admitted it was nothing to her and handed the man the money. He carefully placed the change on a little plastic tray.

  ‘You are back,’ he said to Lana. ‘It is good to see.’

  Lana dropped the change as she was gathering it up, and his smile fell. Jen realized they were both staring at him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘All the newspapers…there were photos.’ He waved at the wide shelf where the last of that day’s unsold newspapers lay. ‘You are okay?’ he asked, raising a thumb at Lana.

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘My favourite customers,’ he said.

  Jen felt unbelievably flattered and nearly tearful, which was surely a sign that they should leave quickly. But Lana nodded at the man and raised her thumb before they left. She looked frustrated, as if this gesture had been a last-ditch effort to communicate, and Jen realized, as they walked away, clutching their haul, that Lana’s voice sounded different not because of that cracked tooth but because she had begun to hesitate over words, to repeat the beginnings of sentences, to stutter.

  Echo

  ‘Is that what you meant,’ Jen asked Hugh, ‘when you said you thought her voice was different?’

  She had been listening more carefully to the way Lana spoke and had decided it wasn’t quite a stutter. Rather, Lana now began her sentences twice, adjusting the volume of her words, as if she were testing the resonance of her voice every time she opened her mouth.

  ‘I suppose so,’ Hugh said, ‘but I couldn’t put my finger on it.’

  Sometimes, Lana started quiet, tentative, and restarted loudly. Other times, she began loudly and then began again with a softer tone. And Jen wondered what had caused her to become her own echo.

  Research

  In case this was some new symptom of depression, Jen went to the library during her lunch break on Thursday. Lana had agreed to go to school, had agreed to be dropped off, had been safely seen inside the gates, hugged to Bethany’s side. And Jen had sat blindly in front of her computer all morning, hoping everything was okay, expecting a panicked phone call, waiting for a chance to leave the office so she could let the anxiety show on her face.

  She had been going to the library during her lunch breaks for some time. Partly to get away from the young people in her office but mostly to read self-help books and health manuals on adolescent depression and deliberate self-harm (or DSH, to those, unfortunately, undesirably, in the know). She didn’t want to bring the books home, where Lana might see them, she didn’t want to borrow them and have the titles come up on her loans record, announcing to the librarians what a failure she was as a parent, so she found the darkest corner of the library and skim-read in a panic.

  A year ago, she’d walked into Lana’s room to discover her sitting on the floor with a glass of water and a carrier bag of painkillers. She had already begun to scoop them into her mouth (though she’d insisted since that she hadn’t really been going to swallow), and the sight had made Jen feel as though her body had been whittled down to a painful core.

  Lana could be grumpy and argumentative, she could be lethargic, headachy and uninterested in food, but Jen had never thought it was something clinical.

  ‘That’s just what teenagers are like, isn’t it?’ she’d said to Hugh.

  There had followed a series of GP visits, and sessions with a social worker, and then Dr Greenbaum, the psychiatrist. Awful, draining hours in a khaki-painted adolescent centre where Lana sat with her head down and seemed not to hear any of the questions she was being asked. Jen felt there’d been some kind of trick performed on them, some switch. Lana had been replaced by another child, or told to behave strangely, for some sinister reason. Jen even looked for hidden cameras in the consulting room, realizing that this might mean she’d gone insane herself.

  After months of this, she still had no idea how to react, so she went to the library, where she wrote lists of life events and triggers and biological connections, filled in and scored emotional-discomfort questionnaires, kept a mood summary and a sleep diary and an activity log and watched Lana for symptoms. She monitored herself for Unhelpful Thought Cycles (which always began with I’m a failure), and practised conversation openers in front of the mirror in the Ladies: ‘I’ve noticed that you’ve been feeling frustrated recently,’ and, ‘Do you think you feel sad or angry more than you feel happy?’ They sounded so reasonable in the quiet of the library bathroom, but she knew the message would get lost in the crackling atmosphere of Lana’s bedroom.

  One book had pages full of pencil marks, and Jen felt she was tracing the faint path of some other worried mother, a guide, a trailblazer, a Sherpa for her own personal Everest. Every time cognitive behavioural therapy was mentioned, a star had been scribbled in the margin, and Jen read the reference more closely. The sections warning readers about the dangers of medication – addiction, increased risk of suicide – were underlined and the corners of those pages turned down, and Jen could imagine this other mother, trying to make an argument for CBT, ready for a conversation with someone else, a doctor, perhaps, or the father of the child.

  This other mother had ringed the challenge to praise your child five times in twenty-four hours, and Jen wondered what she’d said and how this had gone. Home-schooling was obviously something she was trying to avoid, as every time it was mentioned as a last resort the words ‘last resort’ were bracketed. There were marks against the sections about letting your child sleep in your bed and not forgetting that children copy their parents’ thought patterns, and Jen found she had created a picture of this woman with her worries and prejudices, felt close to her, whoever she was, and was disappointed when her pencil marks didn’t feature for a few pages.

  But then, two thirds of the way through, she found a big tick against the diet section. Regular meals, healthy snacks, fruit and vegetables, plenty of protein, no caffeine. This woman obviously thought she’d nailed that already, and Jen suddenly felt irritated by her smugness, and very alone.

  Rehearsal vs performance

  JEN (at lunchtime, facing the mirror in the library toilets):

  Do you think you feel sad or angry more than you feel happy or optimistic?

  LANA (in Jen’s expectant imagination, hugging her mother):

  I don’t feel sad more than happy, but I think I do feel sad a lot. I’d really appreciate you helping me work through this.

  JEN (in the doorway of Lana’s room that evening):

  Do you think you feel…um…like you want to say anything? Or what
would make you happy or not make you happy?

  LANA (outside Jen’s head; in reality):

  What the hell are you talking about? Can you get out of my room, please, and stop trying to spy on me?

  Getting it wrong again

  Jen would have denied the charge of spying but, without cooperation from Lana, she had had to find other ways of acquiring the information needed to fill out the boxes in the altered-thinking log and the altered-behaviour log and the sleep diary and the self-harm-triggers questionnaire. She wrote down the times Lana got up or went to bed, noted the light in her room being on at four in the morning, counted the number of hours she spent on her phone in the evening. This monitoring made her feel guilty, and she tried to quietly compensate Lana with treats (there would be no big pencil ticks against the book’s diet section for her).

  On the way home that evening Jen couldn’t resist buying Lana a KitKat, hoping it would make her more open to a proper conversation. She weighed it in her hand in the shop, as if gauging the effect it would have on their relationship, and she patted the shape of it through her canvas bag as she stood crushed against a door on the Tube. It was only as she got to their street that she remembered Lana didn’t like KitKats any more.

  When had that happened? she wondered. What had caused the change? Lana had definitely eaten a lot of them when they’d been in the Peak District. The vending machine at the holiday centre had been nearly cleared out. There was something she half recalled from one of the helping others books, about depressed children losing interest in favourite foods. Perhaps that was it, she thought, as she let herself into the house and tiptoed up the stairs.

  Feeling compelled to destroy the evidence of her mistake, she consumed all four fingers of the bar in a few swift bites.

  Body image

  Jen ended up eating Meg’s treats, too, during their trip to the cinema on Saturday evening.

  ‘I got three different ice creams because I couldn’t choose: salted caramel, chocolate and coffee,’ she told Meg, balancing the little pots on the armrest between them. ‘Which one – or two – do you want?’

  ‘Ugh,’ Meg said. ‘Even the thought gives me heartburn. I’m going to stick with water.’

  And so Jen barely noticed the film because she was so caught up in the pleasure of eating and the guilt of eating and the pleasure of eating and the guilt…

  ‘Do you mind coming with me to the Ladies?’ Meg whispered as the credits rolled. ‘I need you to look at something.’

  ‘Oh. Isn’t it something you can ask your midwife about?’

  ‘No. It’s not exactly medical.’

  The auditorium lights hadn’t come on yet, so Meg guided Jen out using the torch on her phone. The shoes and lower legs of other viewers were briefly highlighted as they went: trainers and jeans, brogues and chinos, lace-up leather ankle boots and mustard-coloured tights. Some of the shoes darted ahead of them as they got to the thick-carpeted corridor.

  ‘I think I have a stretch mark,’ Meg said, leading her mother into the too bright toilets and shutting them both into the disabled cubicle. ‘But I can’t see properly. I mean, it’s under my bump and I can’t get close enough with a mirror.’

  ‘Oh.’ Jen watched as she started to roll down her leggings. ‘Are you sure you want to know right now?’

  ‘I’m not going to freak out, so don’t worry. I just want to be prepared,’ Meg said. ‘Is it really there?’

  Jen bobbed down to look at the underside of Meg’s belly. There was a smell of coconut oil, and a pink line left by the seam of the leggings, but that was all. ‘Can’t see anything.’

  ‘You didn’t have a proper look.’

  Jen bobbed down again and saw through the gap under the cubicle wall a pair of lace-up leather ankle boots and some mustard-coloured tights.

  ‘There’s somebody next door,’ she whispered to Meg.

  ‘So?’ Meg said, not lowering her voice. ‘We’re not doing anything wrong.’

  Jen nodded and looked again at the taut skin. A thin, silvery line glistened above Meg’s pants.

  ‘I think there is one there. But it’s very, very faint.’

  ‘I knew it. Damn.’

  The toilet in the next cubicle flushed.

  ‘Damn, damn, damn,’ Meg said.

  There was a sound of tights being snapped back into place, of a lock being slid open.

  ‘I thought I’d get away with it. I thought I’d have a tiny, perfect bump and no one would ever be able to tell. But I’m going to be fat and scarred and saggy and permanently exhausted, aren’t I?’

  ‘No, darling. I doubt you’ll even notice the mark after you give birth. And the rest of you will bounce back, too.’

  ‘I’ll have to have plastic surgery. I can’t afford plastic surgery, but I’ll have to have it.’

  ‘No, you won’t. Meg, is something else going on? This isn’t like you.’

  It was more like Lana, she thought. Last year, Jen had found a list of plastic-surgery procedures among a pile of Lana’s homework. A price had been written next to each body part, and underneath was the total cost, the amount of money she’d need if she got everything she wanted. It came to £15,350 and included labiaplasty. The list had been discussed with Dr Greenbaum, and Lana had insisted it was just something she’d created out of curiosity, but Jen had noticed her since, staring at her reflection, pulling her skin about and looking as though she loathed the girl in the mirror.

  Meg put the lid of the toilet down, sat and closed her eyes. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Sorry. I was being stupid. It must be the hormones. I’m fine now.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  She nodded, eyes still closed. ‘I need to wee.’

  ‘Okay.’ Jen let herself out of the cubicle. The woman with the ankle boots and mustard-coloured tights was leaning over a sink, peering into a mirror while she flicked mascara on to her lashes. She smiled at Jen, amused, embarrassed. Jen smiled back, rueful, embarrassed. Meg came out and washed her hands, and they left.

  The sky was nearly dark and it had begun to drizzle but, when Jen tried to pull her coat more closely around herself, she found it didn’t fit. She’d picked up one of Lana’s, and the joy and amazement of finding she could actually get her arms in it (if only her arms) was overshadowed by the fact she was now out in the rain in inadequate clothing. She pulled up the hood and tucked it close around her face, hoping to keep the edge from falling over her eyes.

  ‘Haven’t you got a jacket or an umbrella?’ she asked Meg.

  ‘No, and I’m finding the rain refreshing.’

  ‘You can’t afford to catch a chill in your condition.’

  ‘I’m not going to catch a chill from a bit of summer drizzle. Oh.’ She’d been swishing her head about and now put a hand to the side of her face. ‘My earring’s come off.’ She went back the way they’d come, looking along the kerb.

  Jen followed and copied her, shining her phone light at the paving stones. Someone was whistling somewhere down the street, and it was haunting. She was peering vaguely through the railings of a house at the end of the road when her colleague Rupert walked around the corner.

  ‘Shit, Jen!’ Rupert said. ‘I didn’t see you there. What are you doing, hiding out, waiting to scare people?’

  ‘I’m not hiding out.’

  ‘You’re dressed all in black. With a hood. Is it some kind of ceremony?’

  ‘I’m dressed in navy blue, actually, and I’m looking for my daughter’s lost earring.’

  ‘Ah,’ Rupert said, pulling his shoulder bag round so it made a barrier between them. ‘Surely you need some candles and a pentagram or two for that?’

  Jen laughed.

  ‘D’you want a hand?’ He moved his bag again, pushing it on to his back, wearing it the way cycle couriers wore them.

  ‘Thanks,’ Jen said, ‘but there’s no point in us both getting cold and wet. What are you doing here, anyway?’

  ‘I live just over there.’ He pointed.

&nb
sp; ‘I never knew. We’re practically neighbours.’

  ‘Fancy that. Well, good luck finding the earring. See you on Monday.’

  Jen felt the light from Rupert’s hallway flash across her face as he opened his front door and went inside, and when the light was gone she felt a new appreciation of her own invisibility. It was definitely the superpower she would choose, despite knowing it was the wrong answer, the answer that made you a coward, unable to deal with the real world, not free enough in your soul to want to fly. She took a few steps along the pavement and stooped to look under a bench.

  ‘Found anything?’ Meg asked, catching up with her.

  ‘No, sorry.’

  She stepped between two parked cars and pulled at the too small sides of Lana’s jacket, trying to cover the lighter-coloured jumper, acting on the desire to blend into the night. When a lamp was switched on in one of the sitting rooms opposite, she turned her pale face away. The light bounced over the car bonnets and glinted in the puddles of rain, one of which she had a foot in.

  ‘Shit,’ she said, like Rupert’s long-delayed echo.

  ‘It doesn’t matter about the earring,’ Meg said. ‘You’d better get home and dry.’

  A shadow flitted across the puddle, once, and again. Jen looked up to see a pair of legs, visible below the blinds in a lit-up room. A man’s legs, Rupert’s legs, naked legs, blue against the yellow light, hairs curling shaggily from his skin. The ankles were reddish purple and Jen wondered if he was allergic to his socks. Then, as he moved, she saw he was completely naked, crouching slightly, as if he knew he could be seen and was trying, ineffectively, to shield himself.

  Meg turned and caught her mother’s eye.

  ‘I work with him,’ Jen told her.

  ‘Not really?’