Whistle in the Dark

by Emma Healey

  Numbers game

  Two condoms were worse than one. That much was obvious. Two condoms meant two men or one man twice. It meant a longer ordeal, it meant more pain, it meant witnesses, but not the helpful kind, or it meant somehow keeping Lana confined so she could be hurt again.

  Jen stood at the sink, scrubbing burnt sausage fat off a roasting tin, and rubbing the instep of her foot over her lower leg, as if trying to get something off. A tight sock, perhaps, or a piece of rope. The smell of the fat mixed with washing-up liquid was off-putting, but it was also familiar, domestic, safe. And although she was tired and could have let the tin soak overnight, she didn’t want to leave the brightly lit kitchen; it was familiar and domestic and safe, too.

  They’d all ended up in there after the police officer had gone; even Lana had renounced the solitude of her room for once, and sat through Hugh’s long-winded account of his most recent (and nail-biting) piano exam. For Grade Two.

  It was Jen who couldn’t concentrate and who would ask later what ‘I’m an Old Cow Hand’ meant, earning a tortuous and stilted recital of the piece. Instead, she was doing a terrible kind of maths in her head. Because it was about probability, wasn’t it? It was about how likely you were to meet anyone in the countryside. How likely that the few people you did meet would be mad or bad. How likely that those mad or bad people would attack you. Or it was statistics: how many mad or bad people per hundred thousand? How many hundreds of thousands of people in that part of the country?

  She had played this game at night when her daughters were small. How many child-snatchers in the population? How likely that they would live in London? How likely that they would live in her family’s part of London? How far might a child-snatcher travel? How much time would they need to snatch a child? How long, therefore, would a child need to be accidentally left alone for all these things to converge?

  The roasting tin was finally clean but, as Jen turned from the sink, Lana caught sight of her face.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ she asked, her jaw hard. ‘What are you thinking about me?’

  ‘I’m not thinking,’ Jen said. ‘Or, at least, I’m trying my best not to think.’

  ‘Good, because everything you think is wrong.’

  That could be the tagline for their relationship, Jen thought with a grim smile as she made her way upstairs to bed.

  Temptation

  She must have slept with her face pressed hard into the pillow because the next day Jen felt as if some surface were pushing back at her, as if the blood were only gradually returning to her skin. Her eyes were dry, and blinking was painful; she kept them closed on the train to work and found they were watery when she stepped on to the platform. She didn’t recognize the promotions girl on the station concourse at first.

  ‘Tortellini!’ she was calling out, ‘tortelleeeeni!’ her voice like a little bell ringing among the shuffling feet and platform announcements. ‘Free tortellini.’

  ‘Bethany,’ Jen said, reading the sign above the stacks of pasta boxes: Give into temptation and a taste of Italy.

  ‘Jen,’ Bethany said. ‘Have a pack. They’re new, and they’re actually really good – well, we got to take some home last week, and my mum liked them, anyway. I’m only supposed to let people have one each, but do you want two? That’ll be dinner sorted, then, won’t it?’

  ‘Thanks, yes. I won’t have to go to the shops now.’ Jen slipped the plastic-wrapped pasta into her bag. ‘Shouldn’t you be at school?’

  ‘I’ve dropped French, so I’ve got a free period until eleven thirty, and this is, like, not bad money? I only work weekends, normally, but my boss offered me a couple of hours extra. I’ve been here since seven. Nearly killed me getting up that early, to be honest.’ She turned to take a breath and give her ringing call again (‘…a taste of Italeeeee’), and to hand out more pasta to the rushing commuters.

  Jen watched for a moment, absorbed by the various reactions of the passers-by: delight at an unexpected freebie, hawkish in their determination to get something for nothing, irritated at the obstacle on the concourse, angry to be asked how they liked their pasta at 9 a.m. on a Wednesday morning. She tried to find the child Bethany in this woman, with her perfectly painted face, her long, carefully buffed nails, the way she smiled and smiled again at each person, unfazed by their grabbing hands or bad-tempered brush-offs. She wondered if Bethany’s mother ever asked herself who this spotless young lady was, whether she could connect her with the crisp-eating, knee-scraping girl she’d been only five minutes ago.

  ‘Sorry, but I can’t really give you any more,’ Bethany said, looking around to find Jen still there. ‘I’d get into trouble.’

  ‘No, I know. I wasn’t expecting…’ She walked towards the Tube, calling back, ‘Nice to see you!’ But at the steps down she stopped. Here was Bethany, without Lana. Here was Bethany, thrown into her path. Here was Bethany, grown up and sensible. And if she had any information, if Lana had told her anything important, then it might be enough to convince the police to test the blanket, to look again, to persuade Lana to tell them what really happened.

  Heroine

  Jen was a little late to work, but it hardly mattered, as the company’s summer newsletter was a skeleton edition and there wasn’t much for her to do. She spent the morning retrying the broken link to the article on Farmer Crossley, before flicking from Instagram to Facebook to Instagram again, feeling slightly nauseous. Somehow, she ended up scrolling through the comments section under an op-ed piece on Mexican drug lords. People kept spelling ‘heroin’ wrong, so that there seemed to be some other character, some heroine, in the struggle against corruption, some woman who would sweep in and solve everything.

  ‘Tea, anyone?’ Rupert called, waving a cup and a sachet of rooibos.

  Jen shook her head, looking at the mug on her desk. It wasn’t her mug, just one that had hung about the office kitchen for years, left behind by a long-forgotten colleague. But, somehow, it had become Jen’s mug; people assumed it was hers because she apparently fitted the description. Supermum. It felt like a nasty joke, considering everything she’d been going through with Lana. In fact, it was probably more of a comment on her and her family’s taste. If the creatives in her team ever bought their mothers gifts (she suspected they didn’t have mothers but had been constructed by a team of designers just like themselves), they certainly wouldn’t choose anything as tacky as a Supermum mug.

  On Monday she had filled it with water to keep her stolen passionflower in, though the water hadn’t helped much. The flower had quickly closed its outer petals and wilted. There was a metaphor in there somewhere, she thought, about outside appearances and failed nurturing. And Jen felt something inside herself curl up in the same way when she saw Lana’s school’s number appear on her phone in the mid-afternoon.

  She was missing from classes. They hadn’t noticed at first. It had been several hours. Jen hung up and ran to the Ladies as nausea turned to actual vomiting, then dialled Lana’s number, then Hugh’s, then Lana’s again.

  At the sinks, she washed her mouth and began to splash water at her face, her head, her hair, letting it drip down her shoulders and over her chest. There was a part of her that saw how mad and exaggerated these movements were, that regretted the soggy, rat-tailed woman in the lighted mirrors, but another part relished her appearance because it matched the way she felt inside. Walking about with great stamps, she weaved in and out of every cubicle, tapping Lana’s name, listening to the rings, hearing the first few words of the voicemail greeting, ending the call, tapping Lana’s name again.

  ‘I’m sitting under a bridge,’ Lana said, finally accepting the call. ‘Or, no,’ she corrected herself. ‘It’s like a flyover or whatever.’

  Jen felt a dizzying relief at hearing her daughter’s voice but the emotion that came out was anger. ‘What the hell is going on? Why haven’t you been picking up? Why aren’t you in school?’

  There was a pause, filled with the heavy sound of
traffic.

  ‘I wanted to go for a walk.’

  ‘Why? What’s happened?’ Jen asked, knuckling her left eye and feeling the make-up working its way into the delicate skin. ‘Where exactly are you?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I can send you a screenshot from the maps app.’

  Jen gazed at her reflection in the mirror. She had been grabbing at her hair, though she’d hardly been aware of that. Now, the damp, dyed-dark strands stood away from her scalp, scarecrow-like. Her phone buzzed and she opened the image. ‘I’ll call you when I get near,’ she said.

  There must have been a reaction as Jen ran through the office, hair in a mess, make-up smeared. Worse, she had banged her knee against Rupert’s desk as she ran and had exited limping slightly from the pain, but she’d been too intent to care, not knowing how long she had before Lana would move, would disappear again. The uncomfortable glances she got on the Tube gave her some idea of the way her colleagues might have looked at her, though, and by the time she reached her stop Jen was beginning to understand how she would feel once the drama of the situation had dissipated. It would be embarrassing (more than usually embarrassing) to walk back into work tomorrow.

  Outside, Jen’s appearance went unnoticed because it was raining hard. Lots of people had been caught without a coat or umbrella so she looked almost normal among them. An old woman handed her a plastic bag as she hurried past a bus stop, which was kind, but her clothes were completely soaked by the time she got to the flyover.

  Lana was sitting on a small, dry patch of grass with her head down, not looking at anything. Jen didn’t wait for the lights to change but ran across the road and in a moment of levity thought of herself swooping in to help, like her fantasy heroin heroine. Like a real Supermum. She sat down, too, folding awkwardly on to the ground, and watched the cars bump or zoom or sail up the ramp, the noise of them bouncing off the concrete surfaces and rumbling over their heads. It wasn’t long before she felt trampled by them, slighted. Thick fumes, suspended in the damp air, engulfed her and Lana, coating the inside of their mouths and noses. Jen held her sleeve to her face. It was an unhealthy place.

  She tried not to say anything to Lana, of course; talking wasn’t allowed: all the books told you to become an ear, not a mouth. If Jen spoke, her daughter might get up and walk off, and this process would begin again at some other location. But the wet clothes hung heavily on her, the damp layer already making her skin buzz and itch, and she was cold now that the glow from her run across the road had faded. Taking off her jacket, she spread it over her knees, hoping to air it a little, and found Lana watching her, frowning at the jacket, as if she were offended by its style. It was denim, and buying it had been a mistake. Jen had known it was a mistake when she bought it six years ago, but she’d worn it anyway, and she’d carried on wearing it, because it hung on a peg in the hallway, because the pocket held a pack of tissues and her Oyster card, because it existed.

  ‘Shall we go?’ she asked, her voice shivering.

  ‘You can go.’ The standard response.

  ‘Why did you disappear like that? Didn’t you think we’d be worried?’

  ‘I just wanted to be on my own.’

  ‘But why? And why do it without telling anyone?’

  ‘Why do you think? I mean, you’re asking my friends to spy on me, and then you say you don’t know why I need to get away.’

  ‘You mean Bethany? I only asked if you’d said anything to her, I only asked her because you won’t talk to me, you won’t tell me what’s wrong.’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell!’

  ‘Yes, that’s what she said, too.’ The conversation had been frustrating, broken by the call of ‘Tortellini!’ and full of shrugs.

  ‘Look, I’m not stupid,’ Bethany had said. ‘The police questioned me, too. They thought someone might have taken her or, like, lured her somewhere. I told them I didn’t know anything, and I wouldn’t have lied. And, anyway, Lana’s got, like, depression, right? So just because of that, even without everything else that happened, just because of that I’d tell you if she’d said anything weird or did something weird or whatever. I promise.’

  Jen sat and wondered about that promise. Whether she could trust it. There was a mysteriously growing puddle in the wasteland beneath the flyover. It spread, despite no raindrops hitting it, fed, perhaps, from underground. Plane trees and nearby houses were reflected in the water, the houses no one could want to live in, not this close to the noise and the dust. One tree in particular loomed over the puddle and seemed to reach for her and Lana where they sat, its mirror-self drifting under the road’s barriers, feeling for them, sliding up their trouser legs. She leaned further back, on to the concrete wall, and brought up her feet, curling tightly away, and still she felt as if the watery branches were touching her.

  Lana’s limbs were loosely open, her body too soft, too close to the puddle, and Jen wanted to fold her into the position she usually sat in on the settee, twisted against the corner; she wanted to bundle her into an unbreachable package.

  The hiss of the hard rain became a rhythmic tap as the weather began to clear up. Jen concentrated on this until a motorbike with its unbelievable crescendo roared along close to them.

  ‘That tree is worrying me,’ Jen said, and this made Lana turn and look at her. It was a small victory, eye contact never normally won so easily. ‘It seems sinister.’

  ‘Sinister? The tree?’

  ‘I know. Silly, I know.’ She should feel sorry for it, really, trapped in a tangle of concrete. She was reminded of the straggly tree in the hospital courtyard. ‘I can’t help feeling that growing here would make any living thing evil.’

  Lana stared at her for quite a while, her mouth moving, as if she might say something, or was working out how to say something.

  ‘Do you think it’s possible for trees to be evil?’ she asked at last.

  ‘No, of course not. I said I was being silly.’

  ‘Even the really old trees?’

  ‘I don’t know. That one’s not very old, anyway. London planes grow fast.’

  ‘But, like, those oaks that are all fat and rough,’ Lana said. ‘The ones with cracks in the trunks and branches that touch the ground. What about those?’

  ‘I suppose they do look sinister,’ Jen said, ‘and like they contain ancient secrets, doorways into other worlds – fairy worlds, perhaps.’ She was warming to the subject. ‘There are stories, too. Did we ever read “The Tinderbox” when you were little? In that, a witch asks a soldier to retrieve a magic box from the hollow of a tree.’

  ‘Did you read that thing about the drug smuggler who put cannabis inside Christmas trees?’

  ‘Less romantic,’ Jen said, ‘although, to be fair, there’s an alarming amount of cold-blooded murder in the Hans Christian Andersen story.’

  ‘I think they did it with heroin, too.’

  ‘Did what?’

  ‘Hid the heroin in the trees.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ Jen said, thinking back to the comments she’d been reading before the phone call and unable now to get rid of the mental image of a female superhero being concealed among branches. And there was something else that her mind kept going back to. A myth about a tree. She and Lana had sat like this, on a patch of ground, in the Peak District, and talked about it. Jen looked up at the London plane and just stopped herself from asking Lana if she’d ever heard the trees rustle in an enticing way.

  Legend

  ‘This walk is especially good for sketching,’ the tutor said on the third day of the holiday, ‘because we get a good view of Mam Tor. And then the church itself is particularly interesting because there’s a ruin attached to it. We will be working in the tradition of Turner and Caspar David Friedrich.’

  There was an appreciative murmur at the names of ‘real’ artists as everyone got out of the minibus, laden with boxes of ink and fold-up stools. Jen, who had the same urge every morning to stay huddled in the musty minibus and have a sleep, was pleased
to find that the day was already warm, and by the time they’d reached the churchyard they’d all tied their jackets around their waists and rubbed extra sun cream into their noses.

  There was no point waiting for Lana, who was busy talking to Stephen, her voice quiet and then loud as she argued with him, so Jen knelt in the grass and began to draw the craggy half-arch of what must have been a bit of cloister when the church was still a monastery. It was a perfect view, too perfect to get much out of it. No matter what Jen did, the picture came out looking sentimental or contrived. The sun shone too brightly on the weather-darkened stone and the frothy heads of the hogweed batted the buttresses too playfully; even the local wildlife conspired to make the place painfully picturesque, with a butterfly landing just where a spot of alizarin crimson would suit the composition.

  Jen gave up and packed away her things. Lana’s voice was drifting towards her again as she opened the door of the church; it echoed, somehow, through those skeleton rooms, even though there were no walls left to bounce the sound around.

  ‘God is the ultimate mood-lifter,’ Stephen was saying.

  ‘I think you’re getting Him confused with Prozac,’ Lana replied.

  ‘Very funny, Lana. But that’s exactly my point. If people had more faith, they wouldn’t need Prozac.’

  Jen closed the door on them and their voices and the bright light, and smiled at the small, elderly woman in a tabard who was stacking pamphlets on the history of the church and rearranging leaflets about their missions abroad. Perhaps she should have stayed outside to follow Lana about and eavesdrop, rather than leaving Stephen to it, but a moment later Lana was shoving the door open again. She walked straight past the tabarded woman, sat down in a back pew and shut her eyes. She could have been praying, Jen supposed, but it seemed unlikely, and in fact it felt rather unseemly to pray in such an obvious way, to make a show of herself, especially in a church. The old woman certainly looked a little surprised. Jen bought a pamphlet from her.