Whistle in the Dark

by Emma Healey

  ‘Very suitable,’ Hugh said to Jen, nudging her with an elbow, as his hands were covered in yoghurt. ‘She certainly acts odd.’

  ‘Yeah, really clever, Dad. That is the joke, though.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘What about Ash?’ Jen asked. ‘What’s her other name?’

  ‘Well, she doesn’t use hers. She doesn’t like it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s Ada Hianus.’

  ‘Hi…Oh, I see.’

  ‘You can understand why she’s reluctant to hang on to that epithet,’ Hugh said.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Jen said. ‘Where’s the n? Lana Maddox, Alma Axodd. You’ve missed out the n.’

  ‘Ugh, Mum. Trust you to notice that.’

  Hand-wringing

  ‘Have you ever been sent a dick pic?’ Jen asked Meg a week later. She’d decided she would be the one to say something surprising this time.

  ‘No,’ Meg said. ‘I’m pretty careful with my privacy settings, and there are no dicks on my Tinder account. Were no dicks, I should say. I’ve deleted the app, as I’ll probably never go on a date again.’

  Jen gave her a sympathetic pat and followed her from the counter, carrying their drinks. As they made their way between tables, a movement caught her eye.

  Or perhaps not a movement, but a shape, a tableau. A man and girl were kissing on the small, hard settee at the back of the café, really kissing, their faces flushed, their flesh pressed out of place. The man was older – old, in fact – fat and bearded, and the girl was young, tiny, half his size, and her skin was painfully taut. When the man drew back, the girl coughed, and her cough, a thin sound which made its way through the café’s chat and clatter and milk-steaming hiss, was young, too. It made Jen think of rubbing Vicks on Meg’s and Lana’s chests when they’d had infections as children, and a phantom eucalyptus smell rose in her nostrils.

  Jen sat down and saw that the man had leaned back a little way and was meeting the other customers’ stares, as if waiting for their applause.

  ‘That’s disturbing, isn’t it?’ she said, passing Meg her decaf tea. ‘What should we do?’

  ‘What can we do? I mean, public displays of affection, even repulsive ones, aren’t against the law.’

  ‘I wouldn’t call that affection. How old is she, d’you think?’

  ‘Could be any age.’

  ‘She’s thirteen, if she’s a day.’

  ‘She might just look young, Mum.’

  The couple began to kiss again and Jen looked around the café, hoping someone would come in and cause the scene to stop, hoping, she realized, for the girl’s parents to storm through the line of caffeine-craving customers and drag the girl to safety. As if parents had the ability to do that. The next hope was that the baristas would stop it, but they were too busy, too efficient at their posts, to notice; the line of customers never thinned to fewer than three people and, once drinks had been served and money taken, their responsibility was at an end.

  The girl’s hands and feet were small and she leaned into the man, lying against him, as if she couldn’t hold herself up. When the kiss was over, he had to hold her away from him. She coughed again.

  ‘How do you think they met?’ Jen said. ‘Do you think he sent her a dick pic?’

  ‘I doubt it. Where’s this obsession with dick pics come from, anyway?’

  ‘Lana got sent one. She says it happens all the time. Can you believe that? Perhaps you can help her with her privacy settings.’

  ‘I can try, but I doubt she’ll listen.’

  The back wall of the café was lined with maroon leather and the lights were dim; this should have hidden the couple, but somehow it made them glow brightly against the gloom. Jen was aware of them all the time she was getting through her too-bitter cappuccino, and the conversation with Meg was fragmented.

  ‘Stop staring, will you?’ Meg said. ‘If the girl’s over sixteen, then there’s nothing anyone can do.’

  That high cough sounded again, a lamb-ish bleating. The couple went back to kissing, the man’s swollen hands on the girl’s upper arms.

  ‘But she looks like a runaway,’ Jen said. ‘And he’s obviously taking advantage. Maybe we should call the police?’

  They didn’t call the police, though, and no one else stepped in. The image of the small girl and the bulky man would haunt Jen for weeks; she couldn’t help putting Lana in the girl’s place, frightening herself with the thought. And she went back to checking Lana’s Instagram again.

  It showed the usual plates of food and feet on grass, but there were more worrying things, too. That evening, she found a new post, a few lines of text over a faded black-and-white photograph of a Parisian street: I like red wine that stains my mouth and men who leave bruises on my body.

  ‘It’s just teenage posturing,’ Lily said, when Jen read it out over the phone.

  But it terrified Jen. She thought of the bruises Lana had come back with after her disappearance; her daughter might have been a runaway, even if only for a few days. Could she have been with a man like the one in the café? It was an unbearable idea.

  Fall on deaf ears

  Also unbearable was Lana’s attachment to her earphones. A new pair had arrived with the new mobile, so the ones she’d tied to the oak tree hadn’t been too great a sacrifice.

  ‘I thought you were going to go without them from now on?’ Jen said, reminding her of the promise she’d made at the stone circle.

  ‘I only meant until the end of the holiday. Obviously.’

  Jen had a feeling this wasn’t quite what Lana had meant but, either way, she was sorry that the things existed, as they allowed Lana to shut her out, refuse to engage in conversation, pretend she hadn’t heard requests for cups of tea or explanations.

  Her daughter often put the buds into her ears as soon as Jen got back from work, the wires like thick, white strands of hair announcing some past shock. The sight made Jen’s shoulders slump, but what really disturbed her was the fact that, several times, she’d seen the end of the wire swing wide as Lana moved; no phone, no iPod in sight. The earphones weren’t plugged into anything. And yet Lana seemed so completely absorbed, as if she were listening intently to a set of instructions.

  Clip-clop

  Jen wished she could have worn earphones to the interview with Tori in Human Resources on Tuesday morning. Her absences had become worrying, apparently. Tori said they understood that it had only been two months since the incident with her daughter, but she’d left work unexpectedly too many times. They (who were they? Jen wondered) had noticed that her concentration at work had slipped, that some projects had had to be completed by other members of the team, and that she’d seemed distant in meetings.

  ‘She asked me if there was a before me and an after me,’ Jen said, sitting down to watch Hugh heat up some black bean and pastrami soup that evening.

  ‘Pardon?’ he said, over the whirr of the microwave.

  ‘She meant, do I think of the time before Lana went missing differently?’

  ‘And do you?’

  ‘Not really. How could I?’ But even as she said this Jen remembered pulling her suitcase towards the train station on the way to the holiday. The sound of the wheels as they clicked over the paving stones had made it seem like there was a little horse trotting behind her. She remembered indulging this fantasy until she began to suspect that passers-by might be able to guess what she was imagining from her expression. And she’d stopped and waited for Lana to catch up. Lana, who wasn’t talking to her that day, wasn’t talking to her in an ordinary teenage way, or perhaps wasn’t talking to her in a troubled teenage way. How were you supposed to tell?

  ‘Who was this meeting with?’ Hugh said, managing to send several airy boxes of Italian herb seasoning skidding out of the cupboard and on to the floor.

  ‘A girl at work.’

  ‘You always say that.’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘A girl.’

  ‘Oh, sorry, a w
oman, then, a young woman,’ Jen said. ‘It’s a habit, that’s all. I know it makes me a bad feminist.’

  ‘I don’t have an opinion on that,’ Hugh said, replacing the boxes. ‘It just gives me the impression that everyone at your workplace is school age.’

  ‘They practically are all school age.’

  Hugh laughed and transferred the defrosted soup into a pan.

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘Well past school age, I’m afraid,’ he said.

  ‘No, I mean, is there a before you and an after you?’

  ‘Can I have a third option? Can I have a during me? Because I’m still during, I think.’ He cut some limes into wedges and called up to Lana.

  ‘God, I wish I’d thought to say that,’ Jen said. ‘Although she’d probably just have insisted I choose one of the two.’

  ‘What’s the name of this person who was asking you foolish questions?’

  ‘Tori,’ Jen said, taking the dish of limes and enjoying the clunk the thick china made on the scrubbed wood of the table. ‘She’s in HR and is supposed to assess people who’ve had a lot of time off.’

  ‘And you didn’t pass muster?’ Hugh said.

  He was joking, she knew he was joking, but she felt her face mismanage the smile and instead crumple into tears.

  ‘Oh, Christ, Jen,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, that was stupid.’

  She tried to answer him, but the words were too soggy or high-pitched and, in the end, the confused face he pulled as he tried to decipher her sentences sent her into fits of laughter.

  ‘I think there might be an after me,’ she said, trying to catch her breath. ‘Only I think the after me might be a little bit cracked.’

  She’d expected him to say something like That’s nothing new, but instead he slid into the chair next to hers, pulled her into his arms and began to rock her. One of their chairs was a little unstable and a spindly wooden leg tapped on the floor tiles again and again with the movement. It sounded like a pony clip-clopping across the kitchen.

  At home

  Tori had suggested Jen take a proper leave of absence. ‘Give yourself some time,’ she’d said. ‘Look after yourself for a bit, get your family issues sorted, and let us know when you’re ready to come back.’

  Jen imagined Tori rehearsing the phrases in front of the mirror in the same way Jen had rehearsed the phrases from the books on teenage depression, and she wondered if Tori had been as disappointed by the real conversation as Jen had always been by her exchanges with Lana.

  Lana’s summer holiday had just started, so the next day neither of them left the house. The isolation seemed sudden, reminded her of those first few months after Meg’s birth, when she was unprepared to leave the adult world behind, and she might have been half pleased when Lana refused to look for a summer job, or go out with friends or get out of bed. It was true that having someone else in the house pierced the claustrophobia, having someone to check on and worry about made her days feel less purposeless.

  But she’d already found projects for herself: repainting the bookshelves in the sitting room, taking the kitchen equipment they never used (two blenders, a sandwich toaster, a salad spinner, a coffee grinder and three inexplicable pineapple slicers) to the charity shop and vacuuming into the corners of every room. And with Lana around, which she frequently was, despite the arguments and threats and cajoling, Jen couldn’t do anything creative. There were lots of thoughts about paints, but no paints were ever brought out; there were plans to sit in the garden and sketch, but no sitting out and sketching happened. Grace told her she was frittering away her opportunity for creative work, that she should be taking the time to ‘drop into the self’, but all her energy was taken up with worrying about Lana or distracting herself from worrying about Lana. The hours alone together began to weigh on Jen.

  Several times, she’d looked around while she was hoovering, to catch a glimpse of Lana as she darted away, or she would be vinegar-washing a path along the corridor to find her daughter sitting on the stairs, as if she were waiting for Jen, waiting to give her a fright.

  ‘What are you doing there?’ Jen would say, her heart heavy in her chest.

  ‘Nothing,’ was always the reply.

  Within a couple of days, this had turned into a constant menace. Either Lana was there, behind her as she loaded the dishwasher or changed the bedclothes, or Jen felt she was there, a prickle on her skin, which might or might not be from the scratchy linen tunic, a rash of goose bumps, which could or could not have been caused by the draughty hardwood floors. Sometimes, she deliberately didn’t look round, not wanting to know whether it was Lana or her imagination that was causing this sensation.

  Question

  ‘Do you think I could be a violent person?’ Lana asked.

  Jen didn’t jump, because she’d suspected her daughter was behind her, but the dull tone of her voice was frightening, and when Lana’s breath tickled the back of her neck Jen was filled with dread.

  Rough with the smooth

  On what would have been the day of the annual dinner (if she’d been at work), Jen crept barefoot along the landing, a washing basket bumping her hip. She held her breath, listening for Lana, trying to work out where she was in the house. The shower hissed as she passed the bathroom, but this didn’t mean her daughter was in there (she’d made that mistake before), so she pushed Lana’s door open with trepidation, and the flat of her free hand. She paused. She listened. She stepped inside. And gave a shriek.

  A sharp stone had been left in the doorway, just where someone might place a foot, where a mother might place a foot, where a mother already nervous and trembling might place a foot. Jen backed out of the room, hobbling, and threw the washing basket down the stairs in a rage. The sudden pain made her feel violent and she wished Lana was there so she could scream at her.

  A moment later, she was calm again and she was glad no one had been nearby. Still out of breath from the faded emotion, she bent to pick up the stone. It was familiar.

  Last year, Grace had given Lana two stones about the size of plum kernels. One was a craggy sort of rock, grey, the other a polished white pebble, both nestled in a little velvet pouch with a gold drawstring. Grace hadn’t given them to Lana in person but had entrusted them to Jen with a farcical formality.

  ‘Tell her,’ Grace had said, closing her eyes and closing Jen’s fingers around the pouch, ‘to keep them in her pocket. Tell her these are a meditation aid, they are powerful because they are symbolic. Tell her they symbolize life.’

  ‘Right, I see, sort of accepting the rough with the smooth,’ Jen had said.

  ‘Oh, Jen, you love your clichés, don’t you?’

  ‘Absolutely. You can’t judge a book by its cover, you know, Grace, especially as actions speak louder than words, and you’re better safe than sorry, because what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and, as I always say, there’s no time like the present, when the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but the grass is always greener on the other side, and love is blind, but ignorance is bliss.’

  ‘Enough! Enough!’ Grace had said, laughing.

  ‘Well, I hate clichés,’ Jen had told her. ‘But I will use them against you. Consider yourself warned.’

  She passed the stones on to Lana and thought, Who knows, it might be the idea that works, that gives Lana focus, that helps her gain perspective, that keeps her grounded (it turned out Jen had become reliant on a lot of clichés from self-help books). As far as she knew, though, the stones hadn’t yielded any results, they’d just sat collecting dust on a bookshelf in Lana’s room. Until that morning, when the craggy one had been turned into means of injuring her mother.

  Pulling teeth

  Or perhaps the stone had fallen innocently from the shelf. Jen was aware of the hum of paranoia beneath her thoughts, a hum that rose in pitch whenever Lana and she were alone together. It became important to get out of the house while Hugh was at work, to get them both out, to find a different setting where
other people would dilute the strange feeling that grew and grew each day.

  A trip to the dentist was as good an excuse as any. Lana certainly needed to get her canine fixed but, as they waited in the reception, Jen began to feel she was taking her daughter to be punished, that this was an appointment made to serve her right, rather than serve her well.

  ‘Do you want me to come in with you?’ she asked, when Lana’s name was called. She kept her voice low, because every sound seemed louder at the dentist’s: the rolling of chair wheels towards a patient, the opening and closing of plastic boxes, the tapping of an implement on the rim of a metal bowl.

  ‘Up to you.’

  ‘But what would you prefer?’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘Well, will you feel better if I’m there?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘So shall I stay here, then?’

  ‘If you want to.’

  Jen sucked in a breath, getting a mouthful of that dentist smell: mint and disinfectant and something sweeter, the traditional oil of cloves, perhaps.

  ‘I don’t want you to be on your own, Lana.’

  ‘I think the dentist will be there with me.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. Okay, yes, please, come in with me.’

  ‘Right, great,’ Jen said, wondering if it would always be this hard to get a straight answer from her daughter, about even the simplest things.

  And sitting through the procedure, she wished she hadn’t offered. Especially as she didn’t much enjoy watching as Lana had her mouth probed by latex-covered fingers. It was unpleasantly reminiscent of the sorts of things she’d imagined Lana might already have experienced while she was missing. And she couldn’t shake the idea that she’d brought Lana there for interrogation, that she was squatting like some toad in the corner of the room, waiting for a torturer to soften up the victim and make her ready to talk.