Whistle in the Dark

by Emma Healey

  ‘Bit grizzly.’

  ‘Beautiful, though.’ Jen could see why they’d sacrifice a sheep to it, why they’d want to lure the bird down, to wait with cameras poised. ‘Anyway, I clicked on the picture and found Matthew’s Instagram account.’

  ‘Matthew? That’s the boy Lana had a little romance with?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Excellent.’ There was a sigh on the line and the Henry VIII commentary started up again. ‘That’s all tied up rather neatly, then. Are you feeling better?’

  ‘No. The red-kite photo had a comment underneath, from Lana: I should have fatted all the region kites with this slave’s offal. Bloody, bawdy villain! Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain! O vengeance!’

  ‘Hamlet, if I’m not mistaken.’

  ‘Lecherous villain. Does she mean Matthew, d’you think? And vengeance,‘ Jen read again. ‘What does she want vengeance for?’

  ‘It’s Shakespeare, darling. All teenagers quote Shakespeare. They think they’re the first ones ever to do it.’

  Birds

  Now Jen had another chequerboard of Instagram pictures to scroll through in the evenings. Matthew’s photos were all of birds, close-ups on trees, wide shots in fields, occasionally a whole flock in the sky and, once, a picture of taxidermied birds in a glass case.

  It’s a real pity to think of these wild creatures being shot and stuffed and preserved with arsenic and other toxic chemicals. But on the other hand, these museum collections have been invaluable to those of us who are fascinated by birds.

  What kind of sixteen-year-old wrote like that beneath an Instagram post? The spelling was standard, he’d used commas and full stops, and there weren’t even any hashtags or emojis. Only four people had liked it. One of those four was Lana. This was the image Lana had shown Jen a few weeks ago, the one she’d chosen as a starting point for her Dr Greenbaum-sponsored analogy, her fluttering feeling. It was Matthew who’d put the idea in her head. Perhaps that’s what she wanted vengeance for.

  Jen remembered the way Lana had shaken her head in pity at the memory of Matthew’s posts. But it turned out she’d commented under lots of them.

  Always looking for a shag, huh, Mattie? she’d written under a photo of a cormorant. This was followed by a laughing crying face, which, Jen assumed, was meant to take the sting off the words. She could imagine how embarrassed Matthew would have been at this sort of joke. A boy who blushed at the mention of a kiss. Unless that was an act. Might he always be looking for a shag? And not the bird variety? She’d thought Lana’s tone was slightly bullying, but perhaps it was recriminating instead.

  Jen thought about contacting Matthew. Would Lana object to that? Would she run off again if she found out? Would she run further this time? Jen dithered but kept an eye on Matthew’s Instagram, kept an eye on the comments Lana wrote under his posts. A couple of days later she revisited the picture of the cormorant and found Lana had added another comment: Satan now in prospect of Eden…sits in the shape of a Cormorant on the Tree of Life…to look about him.

  ‘There, that’s Milton not Shakespeare,’ Jen told her mother when she phoned.

  ‘Well, they have Google now,’ Lily said, refusing to be impressed. ‘That’s an unusual advantage.’

  ‘Vengeance and Satan. A bit concerning, isn’t it?’ Jen said to Hugh at lunchtime.

  ‘I always rather liked cormorants,’ he said. ‘We used to go and look at them standing on the rocks by the bay, holding their wings out to dry.’ She left him to reminisce about idyllic childhood summers and tried Meg.

  ‘You’re reading too much into it, as usual,’ she told Jen. ‘You need some context.’

  ‘Is Matthew supposed to be Satan?’ she asked Lana that evening.

  ‘You’re spying on Matthew now? Is no one safe?’ Lana asked, with a dramatic flourish which Jen nearly smiled at. ‘I’m just winding him up, that’s all. Butt out or I’ll block you.’

  Jen promised she’d stop checking Instagram. She promised even as she scrolled back through Matthew’s entire photo history.

  One evening, she stopped on a picture of a buzzard. Lana hadn’t commented under this, but something about the image gave Jen a chill. The shot Matthew had taken was wide, showing the foot of a tor behind. And in the background was what looked like a dark figure, crouching slightly.

  Jen stared at it for a minute, wondering why it was not only frightening but familiar, then she switched to Lana’s Instagram and scrolled through her photos until she found the one hashtagged rapture. Here was the same tor near the holiday centre and, in the distance, the same figure.

  Mr Crossley, perhaps, watching Lana, watching Matthew, creeping about in their wake.

  Alibi

  Not Richard Crossley. He had been visiting his son in Edinburgh when Lana first went missing. But the police would look into the photos, they said, in case anyone remembered a stranger hanging about in the area or recognized the figure (unlikely, they thought, as he or she was just a tiny silhouette). In the meantime, Jen dug out the list of email addresses she and the other sketchers had exchanged and wrote to them, asking if they remembered anything, if they had any photos with a strange man in them, if they’d painted him into any of their pictures. She looked through her own paintings again, too, staring at the marks her hands had made, wondering if a bit of charcoal shading here or a blot of ink there was really a menacing miscreant or sneaking psychopath.

  Framing device

  Between two mismatched rectangles of greyboard, a church crouched, drawn too squat, and a river, heavy with brushstrokes, refused to run. A charcoaled cave had more darkness than depth, and the Nine Ladies were dowdy without their green moss coats, but butterflies, not yet pin-caught, provided a red splash.

  The tors were unflattened, the trees unfolded, as the framer removed paper dividers, cut mounts, glass, coloured woods, and a week later gave the landscape, ennobled, distinguished, back to Jen.

  But at home, the necessaries couldn’t be found: brass wire, hooks, nails and a hammer. The tool drawers and boxes wouldn’t deliver, so no pictures were hung on the wall. Instead the church sidled beneath the sofa, a silk fringe sweeping its pencil roof, a butterfly met a carpet moth, and standing stones were propped against the coffee table.

  Copyright

  One of the pictures was Lana’s; Dr Greenbaum had insisted that something of hers be framed. Jen slid it out from under the bookcase and held it up to the light. Not the hint of a figure marred the surface. But in a corner, washed over with watercolour, and hardly readable, was a signature.

  Breach of contract

  ‘Hugh?’ Jen whispered. ‘Hugh?’

  It was four in the morning – 4.23, the clock on the bookcase flashed dimly at her. She had woken to find she couldn’t move her head and had immediately assumed it was paralysis. But after a moment or two of absolute panic, she discovered she could wiggle her toes and feel the broken spring in the mattress against one shoulder blade. Still, dark drowsiness kept the answer from her for a while longer and it was only slowly that she realized her hair was trapped beneath her husband.

  She twisted her body about in an effort to wake Hugh, but her caught position left her weak, and he slept the way she used to: heavily, with no prospect of being woken before that inner clock had counted up enough hours. So, giving up, she relaxed back into the dip in the bed that her weight had been working on since midnight.

  ‘I never told you about the man on the train, did I?’ Jen said. ‘I never told you who made me commit to the name Lana.’ She spoke into the warmth of Hugh’s back, telling him the story of her own Rumpelstiltskin. ‘And I know you’d probably laugh if you were awake, but I really did feel I’d made a bargain with him. I really did feel I had to stick to the name Lana, that if I changed it something terrible would happen. Anyway, tonight I looked again at Lana’s drawings, and found that the pictures in her sketchbook were signed Alma. She must have marked them all with that name, even the pages she let scatter
to the winds. That gave me a fright. She’d changed her name, you see, Hugh. She broke the pact. And I thought, He knows, he found the pictures, he came to claim her.’

  ‘That’s bloody creepy,’ Hugh said, in a hushed voice.

  ‘You’re awake,’ Jen said.

  ‘I don’t know how you expect me to sleep with you rambling on behind me.’

  ‘If you’re not asleep, you can get off my hair.’

  ‘And you’ve told me about old Rumpelstiltskin of the Railways before.’

  ‘Have I? Well, it’s a good story.’

  ‘You just like frightening yourself. What exactly do you think he’d want with Lana? It’s not like she can spin straw into gold. What are you worried about? What does he symbolize? Is it something sexual?’

  Something sexual

  That was the question. It plagued Jen day and night. She thought about the ripped condoms, discarded along a stony track, she thought about the shredded and sodden T-shirt, caught on a hawthorn tree, she thought about the blood-stained blanket spread over sheep-dung-dotted grass.

  She studied the silhouetted man watching from the edges of photos. The police hadn’t found anyone, or even heard of any other sightings. ‘To be honest, it’s so unclear,’ the liaison officer had said, ‘we’re not even convinced it’s a person in the photos. It could just be the shadow of a tree or something.’

  She pictured the marks around Lana’s ankles where something must have been tied tight, and she remembered the refused rape kit. She imagined Lana saying no to the nurse because she was ashamed, and then imagined Lana saying yes to a man. Saying yes and saying yes and saying yes and then saying no, but too late. One of the detectives had been convinced that Lana had gone to meet someone, seemed to expect to find an email exchange, a persuading message from a boy, or a man pretending to be a boy. She imagined Lana squirming in pain.

  Somehow, it was all too easy to see her as vulnerable. When she pictured Meg, sturdily beautiful women came to mind – the Łempicka driver whipping along in her Futurist car, or a Judith holding a bloodied sword in one hand and a severed head in the other. But she couldn’t help seeing Lana as an Egon Schiele drawing, one of those skinny and ragged girls, twisting and hungry and showing their vulvas.

  Nude collection

  ‘I think I’ve seen more naked men with you than I have alone,’ Meg said.

  Jen, waiting just inside the café door, was startled out of her reverie by the sentence. She suspected this had been Meg’s intention.

  They met for lunch on Mondays whenever they could manage it and, since Meg had broken up with Kayla, they’d been going to a chain. The furniture matched and the baristas were fast and you could pay by card even if you were only buying a cup of tea for £1.60. It was full of people dashing about in suits. Her friend Grace wouldn’t be seen dead there, and it was a relief not to be dragged to a chilly ‘characterful’ café with chipped tin mugs and white, dreadlocked waiters.

  ‘I mean, not counting television, films, etcetera,’ Meg said. ‘In real life. I’ve only seen two men naked on my own. Tom and, well, someone else. Oh, and Dad, I suppose, but he doesn’t really count. And anyway, that would have been with you, too, probably.’ She eyed a Brie baguette, sighed and picked up a chicken salad. ‘I had goat’s cheese at Henri’s last week and a woman told me off.’

  ‘Really? The cheek. Though you shouldn’t really be eating soft cheese.’ She shuffled out of the way of huffing customers reaching for sparkling grape juice and hot wraps. ‘So what other naked men have you seen with me?’

  ‘Well, when I was about nine, we went to stay with your friend Monica, and you spotted a man in the window across the garden. He’d been showering and was sort of silhouetted against the bright light.’

  ‘Hardly graphic, then.’

  ‘I know, but I remember the rest of the evening being filled with whooping and laughing.’

  Jen smiled as she followed Meg into the café queue, not at the memory, which was missing from her mind, but at the idea of her and Monica getting some childish thrill from a half-glimpsed naked man. She missed Monica, who’d got a job in Glasgow and occasionally sent postcards but rarely visited.

  ‘If you want something more graphic, well, d’you remember you used to take Lana on the train to get her to sleep? I came with you a few times. And once, we were stopped at a station for ages, and there were three shirtless men on the opposite platform. They were holding cans of beer.’

  Jen shrugged. She couldn’t remember Meg ever coming on those train trips with Lana.

  ‘You don’t remember? We looked away and, when we looked back, they’d turned around, undone their trousers and bent over.’

  ‘Had they?’

  ‘Yes. Their beers were in a neat row on the yellow line. You told me off for making a gesture at them.’

  ‘What gesture?’

  Meg demonstrated, pushing her tongue into the side of her cheek.

  ‘Well, I can see why I told you off,’ Jen said, looking about to check if any of the other customers had seen. ‘Where did you learn that? You must only have been eleven. Good Lord.’

  ‘And then, we walked Scampi for Grandma once when I was about fifteen, we took him round the estate, and a naked boy leaned out of the window of a second-floor flat. You said it looked like he’d been about to take a piss.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘Yes. He had his knob in his hand. Anyway, he saw us and shrank back into the room.’

  ‘That rings a bell. Didn’t he have a dog, too? I mean, wasn’t there a dog in the window as well?’

  ‘With a waggly tail?’ Meg asked, with a raised eyebrow. ‘I don’t know, I wasn’t looking at the dog.’

  A woman on a phone tried to push through the queue and stopped inches from Meg’s bump. ‘God, sorry,’ she said, blushing. ‘I didn’t see you were…When are you due?’

  ‘Early October,’ Meg told her.

  ‘Your first? Good luck.’

  Meg thanked her and turned to roll her eyes at Jen.

  ‘Okay. So what’s that? Five naked men,’ Jen said, moving aside to let an unsteady coffee-carrier past. ‘Not such a great number.’

  ‘Six: a couple of years ago, we were on the top deck of a bus, and d’you remember that man suddenly hunching over as he realized all the passengers, including us, could see into the first-floor bedroom of his gated mansion?’

  Jen laughed. ‘I do remember that. The hunching didn’t do him much good, it just made his genitals hang further between his legs.’

  Meg turned to the counter as the barista called her forward. ‘And then there was your colleague the other night,’ she said. ‘Bottom half only.’

  Dick pic

  Jen thought of Rupert’s bare legs as she got home that evening, and was surprised to find she couldn’t picture his penis. She’d definitely seen it, but then her mind had apparently wiped the image. It seemed especially peculiar, then, to be confronted, in her kitchen, with a photo of a large erection.

  ‘Lana!’ she said, peering over her daughter’s shoulder at her phone screen.

  ‘Oh!’ Lana turned and nearly fell off the chair. ‘It’s not what it looks like. Well.’ She laughed. ‘Actually, it is what it looks like.’

  ‘Whose penis is that?’

  ‘I don’t know. Some random dude’s.’

  ‘And why do you have it?’

  She shrugged. ‘It just popped up on my messages. Bethany gets them all the time.’

  ‘So you don’t know this person. You haven’t met him?’

  ‘What’s going on?’ Hugh asked, pulling a pack of chicken from the fridge and stabbing it open.

  ‘Lana has been looking at a strange man’s penis.’

  ‘Mum! Jesus Christ. You make me sound like a pervert.’

  ‘Is the man a stranger or strange?’ Hugh asked.

  ‘A stranger,’ Lana said.

  ‘He’d have to be pretty strange to send a photo of his genitals to a fifteen-year-old.’

&nb
sp; Lana shrugged again. ‘Like I told you, it happens all the time. People are always freaking out about it on the internet. But it’s kind of interesting. Men’s things are pretty weird-looking, aren’t they? Bethany’s got a collection on her hard drive. I’ve promised to delete it if she dies in a car crash, so her mum won’t find the pictures.’

  ‘Good to know you plan ahead,’ Hugh said, grating ginger for a marinade.

  ‘A collection?’ Jen said, thinking of Meg’s mental collection of nudes. At least some of those sightings had been accidental. ‘Can you report the men who send these images?’

  ‘Yeah, we always do. I mean, you don’t want little kids to end up seeing them, or whatever.’ She switched to another app and held her phone up. ‘Here, this is what Bethany got yesterday.’

  The large belly of a man filled most of the screen and at the top was a slightly curved, not especially impressive, member. Underneath, Bethany had written, Hey Alma, some sugar for my sugar. And then there was a series of winking faces and aubergines.

  ‘Alma,’ Jen said. ‘Who’s Alma?’

  ‘It’s just a name I made up when I was a kid. Bethany and Ash and me, we worked out anagrams of our real names when we were in primary school.’

  ‘I’ve been wondering about that, because you signed the pictures in your sketchbook with that name, too.’

  ‘I always sign my art Alma, it’s like a private joke. And we still use our anagram names when we message each other sometimes. Bethany is Annette Shybib, and I’m Alma Axodd.’