Whistle in the Dark

by Emma Healey

  The church smelled of lavender, which made Jen think of the south of France. At breakfast that morning everyone had talked about the weather being like the Mediterranean, but what was stranger was that it even sounded like the Mediterranean.

  ‘Can you hear cicadas?’ she asked, as she passed the pew where Lana was sitting.

  ‘That’s the radiator hissing.’

  ‘Oh, so it is.’

  The radiator was huge and brown and hot to the touch, despite the warm weather. Jen walked away from it, up the north aisle, and then down the south, looking at the monuments, reading bits of plaques, wishing she knew Latin. There was a rood screen which had been restored with Lottery funding, and she felt sorry for the scratched and bleached saints on the wooden panels. They looked rather surprised to be there, carrying their lambs and staffs and chalices.

  The notice on the wall explained who the figures represented and described medieval church services: the priests hiding behind the rood screen to bless the bread and the ecstasy of the congregation when the Host was revealed.

  A couple of other people came in, and there was a chink of coins as they bought postcards. Jen was enjoying listening to their muffled chatter when another voice began. ‘A–ma–a-zing Grace,’ it sang. ‘How sweet hmmm–hmmm.’

  Jen turned, but couldn’t see who might be singing. She supposed it could be a recording, but the voice was a bit rough for that. And wouldn’t a professional singer know all the words?

  ‘I once wa–as lost, but now a–am found. Was blind, but hmmm–hmmm–hmmm.’

  It was a flatish voice, breathy, slurring, and coming from the back of the church. Jen felt a chill descend over her. Could Lana be the one singing? Could she have found some strange voice within her? An unnaturally low and rasping voice? She moved around a pillar and flushed with relief. A large man with a sun-wrinkled face had his arms hooked over the back of the pew, one leg extended along the seat. He was drawing breath for the next line, but he didn’t finish ‘Amazing Grace’; instead, he switched to ‘Silent Night’.

  ‘Doesn’t he know it’s May?’ the course tutor said, catching up with Jen beside the tomb of some fifteenth-century grandee.

  Jen smiled. ‘Perhaps he’s practising for Christmas. Or testing the acoustics.’

  ‘Well, I wish he wouldn’t. What a terrible noise.’

  ‘I know. I think I’ll go and join the others outside.’ She looked back at Lana, who made a face and got up, too. They crept out, and she felt quite sorry for the old woman in the tabard, stuck in the church with the terrible singer.

  It was blinding to be outside again, and they didn’t go far but dropped on to the grass near a bench where some of the other painters were starting on an early lunch. They sipped coffee from the lids of their Thermoses and unwrapped rucksack-squashed sandwiches. The falling away of the greaseproof paper reminded Jen of the revelations of the rood screen, and she couldn’t help thinking of the bread-made-flesh. She left her own sandwiches where they lay in her rucksack.

  Stephen was sitting a little way off to do some reading, and Peny speculated that church grounds were difficult places to find potential converts.

  ‘What do you mean? There are plenty ready to be persuaded,’ said the lady who was painting her own coffin, and she swept a hand out to indicate the sheep bleating on the hillside.

  Jen laughed and flicked through the pamphlet so she wouldn’t have to watch the others eating their sandwiches. The font was from another church, apparently; a green-man boss could be seen above the western door, though she hadn’t spotted it; there was some ancient graffiti in the shape of a ship that had been carved into one of the pillars; and a tomb was adorned with a seventeenth-century depiction of a local legend. That last bit caught her attention, and she read it to Lana, who was lying down with an arm over her eyes.

  ‘The legend is about a child who went inside a tree and found a staircase down into Hell,’ Jen said, bending back the pages of the pamphlet.

  ‘Oh, yeah?’ Lana said, her hair tangling in the grass.

  ‘Isn’t that something Stephen was telling you about?’

  ‘Might be.’

  ‘Yes, it was something he told me, too,’ Peny said. ‘I didn’t much care for the idea. What else does your booklet say?’

  ‘In some retellings, it’s an oak,’ Jen said, ‘and in some it’s a yew. They think there was a great oak nearby but that it was felled in the eighteenth century.’

  ‘And why is the legend carved on a tomb in the church?’

  ‘Well, it was a kind of talisman against going to Hell, because in the story the child comes back and tells all the people in the village what sins they must abstain from in order to avoid eternal punishment.’

  ‘I thought all that sort of info was already in the Bible,’ said the coffin painter. ‘Thou shalt not what-not.’

  ‘There are several other instances around the church,’ Jen said, her back beginning to hurt from sitting on the ground. ‘A tree and a child in a section of stained-glass window, a tree with steps in the trunk on the end of a pew, and they think there’s a reference in the rood screen, too. We’ll have to go back and look, Lana.’

  ‘You go back and look,’ Lana said, her voice distorted by the crook of her arm. ‘I’ll wait here.’

  ‘Some people think the tale was a sort of anti-“Jack and the Beanstalk”,’ Jen said, still reading. ‘But rather than climbing up to steal from a giant, the child descends to bring back knowledge from Hell.’

  ‘I can see why the beanstalk one caught on better,’ Peny said.

  ‘And occasionally, there is a bit added to the beginning of the story, where the child hears the wind in the leaves and follows the sound to find the tree. But this might have been influenced by the popularity of “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”.’

  She closed the pamphlet.

  ‘Well, there we are,’ Peny said, though they didn’t seem to have got anywhere in particular.

  Jen joined Lana, and lay back, shifting to find a comfortable position. Creeping thyme had crept into the lawn and each movement was greeted by a warm, clean smell which made her hungry for Hugh’s roast lamb. Bees buzzed about the few tiny purple flowers, and the voices of the ladies on the benches took on the same lazy quality. Well, they could be lazy; they’d got the comfortable benches to relax on.

  She lifted the pamphlet, intending to carry on reading from this angle, but her arms felt heavy in the heat, and it wasn’t long before the cool pages were resting on her face, providing a square of shade for her to drowse under.

  In her dreams, she ran down and down a spiral staircase which had thick and gnarly tree roots for banisters; the steps were covered in moss and she realized she had bare feet. The feel of the moss on her feet was so pleasurable she hoped she’d never reach the end of the staircase but, somehow, she knew she was nearly at the bottom. It was hot, getting hotter, and her skin was tingling, especially on her chest and arms. She wanted to stop and press herself against the damp moss, but she couldn’t stop. The heat turned to a burn.

  ‘Mum,’ Lana was saying. ‘Mum? Everyone’s gone back to the minibus. They said you’ll get sunstroke if you stay out here any longer.’

  Jen struggled up, unsteady with sleep, and followed her daughter along the footpath to the car park. As she passed the church, she wondered if the singing man was still inside and if the woman in the tabard was still trapped there with him.

  Underground

  When Jen had first come to London she’d found the experience of getting the Tube faintly religious. The grey platforms were like long, whitewashed, blue-lit naves, with worshippers standing facing the imminent deity, waiting the way medieval laymen once waited for the moment the Host was raised above the rood screen. The rush forward for the train had a tinge of rapture to it, and those passengers who stood against the wall reminded her of the statues of saints set into shadowed wall niches.

  She didn’t know whether to say any of this to Lana as they went down the
steps into King’s Cross Underground station. There were so many things she might be able to share now, thoughts and feelings. Lana might listen, might try to understand rather than deliberately mistake her tone; she might laugh kindly, she might answer with examples of her own. They’d had a not-totally-hostile conversation. It was a brave new world. Or, perhaps, a return to a half-forgotten one.

  Smiling to herself, she was through the barriers and breathing the hot, dusty air of the Tube before she realized Lana wasn’t with her. She felt immediately panicked; her fingers pinched and scratched at the skin on her neck as she checked around her and went back to the ticket hall.

  ‘Lana?’ she called, retracing her steps along the tunnel.

  As Jen turned a corner, a plump, stylish woman came towards her, yawning extravagantly, not bothering to cover her mouth, and it seemed as if she were silently roaring at everyone walking past. Jen felt she was roaring, too, inside. But beyond the woman she caught sight of Lana’s anxious face, peering down from the top of the steps.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Jen said, making her way up and holding on to the railing, her balance impaired by the sudden relief. ‘You gave me a fright.’

  ‘I shouted after you,’ Lana said, ‘but you weren’t paying attention, as usual.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Jen stood against the wall to let a huge group of French teenagers go by. ‘I didn’t hear. You could have run after me.’

  ‘No. I couldn’t.’

  ‘Well, what’s wrong? We should get home before rush hour starts.’

  ‘You can go,’ Lana said, and the tone was so depressingly familiar Jen nearly wept. So much for getting back to their old relationship, so much for sharing her random thoughts with a receptive mind.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked again.

  ‘I don’t want to get the Tube. I don’t want to go down into it. I’m not going to. You can if you want, but I’m going to walk or get the bus.’

  She turned and stepped away, and Jen had to follow her quickly along the Euston Road, catching breaths of her own bright perfume as she hurried.

  ‘Why this sudden objection to the Tube?’ she asked, as some sort of music started up across the street. It sounded like an organ but surely couldn’t be.

  ‘I don’t like not being able to see the sky.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  She didn’t get an answer, but she walked with Lana, of course. And it was a sweet walk in its way, the air heavy and jasmine-scented, the passers-by appreciating the break in the weather with handholding and outdoor drinking. There were jugglers in Russell Square, and a homeless man’s two Staffordshire terriers, bright bandanas around their necks, ran back and forth on Kings-way, their tongues flapping with happiness.

  The sky, this sky that Lana was so desperate not to lose sight of, was lilac above them and colourless at the horizon, the sky of a foreign holiday. Everything looked better against it, the pale stone government buildings and the glass-veneered flats, the familiar red buses and the dark-leaved trees, and Jen was glad to have been made to stay under it for a little while longer.

  Double

  As they got closer to home, Lana took Jen’s arm and hung on it, as if she’d suddenly sustained an injury, or aged sixty years. Jen stiffened her body to take the weight, feeling her daughter’s hands crushing her through the damp jacket’s sleeve as they walked. She tried to enjoy the proximity, this permission to be close, but holding Lana up was exhausting after the dash to the flyover and the long walk from King’s Cross, and she was relieved when they got to their local high street and Lana let go.

  The hard rain had left puddles among the uneven paving stones, which reflected more of the lilac sky. And that after-rain smell filled the air, that grassy, soily scent, mixed with the petrol and tarmac of the city, and once, near the bus stop, some woman’s perfume, lingering long after she’d caught her bus and been borne away.

  A few minutes later they passed an unperfumed woman standing outside the chemist’s, or they almost passed her. She moved as Jen got level with her so that she walked in front of Jen for a few paces, seeming not to notice anyone, her shoulder just ahead of Jen, her bulk between her and Lana. This went on long enough that Jen got nervous and wanted to barge past, reclaim the space nearest her child. Before she could, though, Lana stopped.

  ‘What do you think the police think happened?’ She bounced on her toes to look at Jen, intent on her own question, as if this stretch of pavement held no special memory for her.

  Jen’s thoughts, in contrast, had instantly returned to that moment a year ago when she’d found Lana with the stash of painkillers, found her filling her mouth with them, her chin wet from tears and the water she was using to wash the pills down. After the appointments and meetings and interviews this had prompted, the doctors and social workers had told Jen to take a photo of Lana into all the local chemist’s, to take a photo and tell them never to sell her painkillers or anything she could use to harm herself. And Jen had done it, of course, but it was one of the worst days, the very, very, very worst days, admitting over and over that she couldn’t keep her own daughter safe without the help of these pharmacists and shop assistants.

  ‘I don’t think the police know what happened, Lana,’ Jen said. ‘I don’t think anyone knows except you. We’re waiting for you to tell us.’ They walked on, finding that the woman had stopped again at the corner.

  This time she turned to Jen with a half-smile but didn’t move aside to let them pass. The woman’s face looked odd in the low sun, her nostrils lit up, her eyes blank with shine, her teeth a white mass inside her mouth, like a fat piece of chalk for drawing on grey paper, or a tube of titanium-white paint for spitting on to a canvas. They were at the exact spot where Jen had been standing when, having completed her task and shuffled the remaining pictures of Lana into her handbag, she’d begun to cry, to weep, on the pavement, in front of passers-by. And Jen had the impression, she didn’t know how, that this woman was herself, a version of herself, nothing alike in looks but still a double, and that she had been waiting here, would always be waiting here, to remind Jen of that time.

  A moment later the woman had crossed the road and moved on, and Jen felt vaguely guilty. Perhaps she had just meant to ask for directions but, seeing Jen’s horrified expression, had decided against it. Somehow, though, she couldn’t quite rid herself of this sense of doubling, of a message, of a piece of herself standing guard at that spot.

  Fields

  ‘So, were you going to meet him today?’ Bethany asked that evening.

  ‘No, obviously. He lives, like, two hundred miles away.’

  ‘But he is your boyfriend? Have you told your mum?’

  ‘Obviously, I haven’t told my mum,’ Lana said, her voice full of hard vowels, ‘and he’s not my boyfriend.’

  ‘But you had sex?’

  There was a silence after this, and Jen could only assume her daughter had answered with a nod or shake of the head. Please, she thought, her muscles aching from the need to sit still, let it be the latter. She hadn’t opened the kitchen window, but it was open. She hadn’t pulled out the chair, but she sat in it. She hadn’t been trying to listen, but she heard. Was it someone innocent they were discussing? Matthew from the holiday? Or an older boy, a man? A bad influence, a creep, an advantage-taker?

  Bethany had come round to find out why Lana had missed double drama (‘You love drama, you never miss drama. I thought you wanted to be a director.’), and Lana had insisted they sit outside in the evening sun. The weather had turned nice just as the day was nearly over, and wasn’t that always the way? Their voices drifted in from the garden, competing with the buzz of the solitary bees which flew about the foxgloves near the greenhouse. There was a scent of sweet peas on the breeze, and Jen imagined it mingling with the girls’ breath as she sat quietly, her hands flat on the kitchen table.

  ‘And then what?’ Bethany was asking.

  ‘And then we walked up the road and went into a field –’


  ‘A field?’ Bethany interrupted. ‘What did you go to a field for? A field’s where you go to get fingered.’

  A bark of laughter startled the bees into silence. ‘There are other reasons you go to fields, you know,’ Lana said. ‘Planting crops, for example. Rearing livestock.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’ Bethany said, sounding sceptical.

  Quotation

  ‘Farmer, Richard Crossley, charged with leaving sheep carcass to rot.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Lily sounded slightly groggy, and Jen suspected she’d been asleep in front of the TV. Someone was talking loudly about Henry VIII while ‘Greensleeves’ played in the background.

  ‘That’s the full headline. I found it.’ It had been the mention of fields that had reminded Jen, set her back on the electronic trail. And she’d only had to scrutinize twenty-seven pages of Google to find the answer.

  ‘Congratulations, darling. Not what I was expecting, I must say.’ ‘Greensleeves’ was replaced with silence.

  ‘No, I know,’ Jen said. ‘This is the beginning of the article: A local farmer has been ordered to pay over £1,000 in fines and costs after a sheep was found to be rotting on his land. At the hearing, he pleaded guilty to the offence of failing to dispose of animal remains properly.’

  ‘Well. Rather unpleasant.’

  ‘And then this is an explanation: I want to give some context for this news story. This is actually a real shame, as what the inspectors from the Animal and Plant Health Agency failed to understand was that the carcass was being carefully monitored by our community and that it had been deliberately left to attract a red kite.’

  ‘You’ve lost me.’

  ‘Okay. Well, Mum, this second bit is from a birdwatching blog. It says red kites are rare in the area, but one was apparently spotted feeding on a deer that had been hit by a car. So they tried to lure it back again with a dead sheep. Red kites are sometimes known as the British vultures and, as such, feed on carrion. The sheep on Mr Crossley’s land had died after an attack by a dog and we asked him to leave the remains in the hope that the red kite would be attracted to it. Luckily, before the APHA forced the removal of the sheep, a young member of the club managed to get this photo. And there’s a picture of a red kite pulling the entrails from the sheep carcass.’