by Emma Healey
‘I haven’t been creeping into your room,’ Jen said.
‘Who’s been switching off my light, then?’
‘Oh, yes, sorry. That was me. But you need to stop leaving the light on all night.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s a waste of electricity. It’s bad for the environment.’
‘It has an eco-friendly bulb, but if you’re worried about money, I’ll pay for it.’
‘I’m not worried about the money,’ Jen said, squeezing the remains of the satsumas to see if any were still edible.
‘Then leave it alone.’
Jen sighed. ‘I just don’t like it, okay?’
‘Well, I don’t like the dark.’
This admission seemed to have taken Lana by surprise, too, and she pulled the hood of her jumper up around her face.
‘You said that in hospital. That’s over two months ago. You’re still finding the dark frightening?’
‘Not frightening, exactly. I’d just rather not wake up in the dark.’
‘Have you been waking up a lot?’
‘No, not really. I like knowing the light’s on when I go to sleep. I like knowing it’s going to stay on.’
Jen tipped the satsumas into the bin, their brightness immediately dimmed by the dusty black bag, and decided to risk it. ‘Did something happen in the dark, Lana?’ she asked, thinking of the broken condoms and the shredded T-shirt the police had found.
‘I was lost at night, Mum. It was unpleasant, okay? I don’t think that’s so hard to understand.’
Imaginary friends
It wasn’t hard to understand. People had always been scared of the dark, of the things hidden by it, of the infernal imaginings which could be projected on to it. So, now when she lay awake, Jen had lots of choice. She could lie and worry that Lana had her light on all night, she could lie and worry that Lana had her light off and was frightened by the dark, or she could lie and worry that Lana was asleep and having nightmares.
The recurrent sound of the curtain rings shifting along their pole, clacking together, shifting again, became familiar, as Lana seemed not to be able to get the curtains wide enough to satisfy her. There was something else, too. Another noise, a murmur, that Jen wasn’t sure if she was imagining. She was almost relieved when the murmuring carried on into the day and she could stand in the kitchen and catch the familiar rhythm of Lana’s voice. Almost relieved.
‘Who were you talking to just now?’ Jen asked, when Lana came downstairs to make a raid on the fridge.
‘No one.’
‘But you must have been talking to someone.’
‘Must I?’
Jen moved the fridge door to get a clearer view of her daughter. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I heard you.’
‘Did you?’ Lana’s tongue lapped the creamy residue from the lid of a yoghurt pot, the smell of apricots on her breath.
‘If you weren’t talking to someone, what were you doing?’ Jen asked. ‘Reading aloud?’
The lid was completely clean, but Lana continued to lick at it, keeping eye contact with Jen. There was something disturbing, sexual, about the action, and Jen was forced to look away. A few seconds passed, during which the neat, wet sound of Lana’s tongue against plastic filled the room. Then the yoghurt pot bounced into the recycling box. When Jen looked back, Lana’s gaze was fixed somewhere over her shoulder and Jen had to contain a shiver, convinced suddenly that there was someone standing just behind her. Lana smirked, as if she could tell Jen was afraid, and then turned to run back up the stairs, but the feeling of another presence in the house didn’t lessen, especially when the murmuring began again.
Jen was still rattled hours later, as she and Hugh walked around the supermarket. She’d tried to rationalize the incident, had taken refuge in Google and looked for explanations, read simplistic descriptions of child psychology and waded through the comments of other worried mothers. There was one suggestion that kept appearing, and she mentioned it to Hugh.
‘You think our fifteen-year-old daughter has an imaginary friend?’ he asked, clasping a soil-covered, brain-like lump of celeriac in both hands.
Jen didn’t say anything while she thought about her answer. She leaned on the push bar of the trolley until the front wheels began to spin.
‘Or is she perhaps hallucinating?’ Hugh asked. ‘Because I have a feeling that might run in the family.’
‘Oh, shut up,’ Jen said finally. ‘I’ve got a headache.’
This wasn’t quite true. What she really had was a strange, stretching feeling inside her skull, as if her head had expanded into a resonance chamber, a chamber which had been trying to catch the low sound of Lana’s voice and bounce it about until it resolved into something understandable.
‘Do you want some painkillers?’ Hugh said, pulling the trolley away. ‘Should we get some?’
‘I’ve taken two,’ Jen said, lying again. She didn’t like to have any in the house now, and she didn’t want her senses dulled.
All day, she had been certain that Lana was talking to someone in that constant murmur, pacing back and forth in her bedroom, pausing only to listen to whoever it was on the other side of the conversation. But whenever Jen went to the bottom of the stairs, the sound had stopped. She’d tried lifting the receiver to the landline quickly but had heard only the hollow noise of the dialling tone and, to make it more worrying, Lana’s mobile had been charging by the microwave since breakfast.
Jen added a box of porridge sachets to the trolley and said the words ‘sandwich bags’ to herself several times, in the hope she’d remember them when they got to that aisle.
‘I thought at first she’d sneaked someone upstairs,’ she said, unable to help carrying on the discussion. ‘But if she had, he must have been there all night.’
‘He?’ Hugh was laying a cardboard container of yoghurt pots against the celeriac but, seeing her expression, he paused. ‘What’s the matter? I thought you liked these apricot yoghurts.’
‘I just think we should cut back a bit,’ Jen said. ‘They’re very sugary, you know. Bad for us. And yes, he. Lana would hardly need to sneak a girl up there, would she?’
‘Depends on the girl.’ Hugh put the yoghurts back on the shelf. ‘And we made that mistake with Meg. Anyway, I thought you only heard Lana’s voice.’
‘That’s what it seemed like.’
‘And you couldn’t hear a single actual word?’
Jen opened a carton of ‘happy’ eggs and checked each one for cracks.
‘Jen?’
‘No, okay, I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but it was hours, Hugh, she must have been saying something.’
The eggs were all perfect and golden, and one had a soft, downy feather attached, as if to prove some sort of authenticity. She placed them on the plastic-wrapped toilet rolls for extra cushioning. The smell of the bakery drifted towards them, and Jen eyed a bag of doughnuts for a minute before picking up a loaf of brown reduced-carbohydrate bread.
She stopped as she was turning a corner, and Hugh walked into the trolley.
‘What now?’ he said.
Jen looked at him carefully. A jar of passata had been smashed nearby and the thick smell of tomatoes surrounded them; she wondered briefly when Hugh had last made Bolognese. ‘I can’t get rid of the idea that Lana brought someone back with her,’ Jen said. ‘From wherever it was she went. Someone or…something.’
Hugh stared into the trolley for a second, tapping on the thin metal bars. ‘I know what we’re missing. Wine. We definitely’ – he looked up at her – ‘definitely, need some wine.’
He dragged the unwieldy trolley after him and piled several bottles next to the vacuum-wrapped trays of mince and pork steaks. Imagine if one of our children became a vegetarian, he used to say with horror.
Coming out
MEG (her willowy body very still, an exotic-looking young woman smiling at her side):
Mum, Dad, I want you to meet Raffaella. She’s my girlfriend. I’m gay.
HUGH (leaping off the sofa to hug her):
Oh, thank God for that. I thought you were going to say you were a vegan.
Spectrum
Jen called her mother while Hugh loaded the car. Could she tell her she was frightened of her own daughter and, if she could, what response was she hoping for?
‘Jennifer,’ Lily said, picking up. ‘What’s wrong?’
The craggy grey stone from Lana’s bedroom floor had fallen from her pocket as she pulled out her mobile, and she bent to retrieve it. Suddenly, in the middle of a car park full of Saturday shoppers, Jen was explaining that something wasn’t right with her daughter. She squeezed the stone tight as she mentioned the creeping about, the talking, the strange things on Lana’s Instagram account, the cat in the house, but even as she listed everything she could tell they amounted to very little.
Opening her fist, she looked down at the stone and the red mark it had made on her palm. How typical, she thought, that she’d be the one who ended up carrying Grace’s faddy meditation aid around with her, and how perfect, how symbolic, that she would only have the rough one. No smooth for her.
‘Oh, sweetheart, teenagers are hard work,’ Lily said. ‘All they want to do is get a reaction, and they don’t care which reaction it is. Frightening a person is as good as impressing a person. You were the same; your brothers were the same. Graham once got up on the roof and threatened to throw the tiles at us. And look at him now – hardly terrifying, is he?’
Jen laughed, thinking of her softly spoken, fastidious brother.
‘Also, dear, you do have a tendency to worry unduly, don’t you?’
‘Do I?’
‘Well, I sometimes think other people’s emotions frighten you. You know, I was listening to a thing on the radio about how many women with autism have gone undiagnosed.’
‘Mum, I do not have autism.’
‘Don’t get annoyed. We’re all on the spectrum, darling.’
‘Okay. I have to go.’
‘Wait a minute. I was just going to say, don’t you remember when you were, oh, nine or ten, I smashed a lot of plates? It had been a frustrating day – most of my days were frustrating, then – and I got to the end of my tether and I threw a plate at the wall, and then a couple more, and you ran to the telephone and called your dad at the office. “Mum’s gone mad!” you shouted. And you sounded so frightened your dad left work early to make sure everything was all right at home.’
‘I don’t really remember,’ Jen said, thinking of the glasses and mugs she had let tumble to the floor. Had she frightened Lana? She hadn’t considered that.
‘No, well, by the time Robert arrived, we were fine. I had let off steam and then put the kitchen right. I was feeling much happier. A little sorry to have scared you, but pleased that I’d found such an easy way to get over my frustration.’
‘What’s your point, Mum? I really have to go.’
‘Sometimes,’ Lily said, ‘you have to let someone act a little strangely, a little madly.’
Second skin
Jen thought about this advice on Sunday when Meg came round to go through the baby clothes in the loft. After all, wasn’t it a little mad to get pregnant at twenty-six?
‘You were twenty-six, Mum, when you had me.’
And wasn’t it a little mad to end things with your girlfriend and ask for your friend’s sperm?
‘It was Kayla who ended things. And Tom has always wanted to be a dad. We talked about it for a long time. It’s not like I just surprised him with a yoghurt pot.’
And wasn’t it a little mad to hide the decision and the process and the early pregnancy from your (loving) parents?
‘I’m sorry about that,’ Meg said.
‘I know lots of people wait till the end of the first trimester.’ Jen dropped a black bag through the loft hatch and let it tumble down the stepladder. ‘But five months, that’s an awfully long time to keep a secret.’
‘I said I’m sorry.’ Meg’s voice drifted up to float about in the dark with the cobwebs and the insulation fibres and the smell of damp cardboard boxes. ‘I wanted to tell you I was pregnant as soon as I knew,’ she said, ‘but I waited a week, and then another. I wasn’t sure what you’d think, how you’d react, and I was exhausted. I’d known it would happen, the tiredness, but it still hit me hard. I had to have afternoon naps and everything.’
‘How did you manage that at the gallery?’
‘Sonya let me sleep in her office during lunch.’
‘Really?’ Jen thought of the extremely thin and rather hard-looking South African woman who ran the gallery. She’d always been frightened of her, couldn’t imagine her taking pity on a pregnant employee. ‘So you told her before me?’
‘Only out of necessity.’
‘You mean you didn’t need me.’
‘Of course I need you.’
Jen carefully backed down the ladder, blinking the loft’s dust from her eyes. Her hands were grimy, and she left a blackish print on the hatch cover when she replaced it. ‘Are you sure? I mean, what do you need me for?’
Meg, sitting on the landing carpet with her back against the wall, sighed and scratched her shoulder under the bra strap, releasing the smell of some honey-scented cream into the air. She’d been tired, but she hadn’t had morning sickness, didn’t get swollen feet, or nosebleeds or dizziness (so far as Jen knew); it was just the eczema that seemed to plague her. ‘You gave me the name of that cream,’ she said. ‘And it’s really helped my skin.’
‘That was your grandmother’s suggestion.’
‘Okay, well, you reassured me that it was normal: you told me you got eczema when you were pregnant.’
‘Was that helpful?’
‘It made me worry less,’ Meg said, scratching her shoulder again.
Jen nodded and wiped her hands on her jeans and picked up the bag of clothes. ‘You know, in some ways, the worst part of this whole thing with Lana is the feeling of being so useless.’
‘I get that, Mum. But you’re not useless. I mean, look, you’re about to give me a load of stuff for the baby,’ Meg said, her nails whispering against the roughened skin of her inner elbow.
‘If any of them are suitable. They might have disintegrated in there, or be covered in mould.’
‘Well, you’ll just have to take up knitting if they have.’
Jen laughed. ‘I’ve tried that before. I’m not sure you’d want to dress your baby in anything I’d managed to create.’ She thought of the piles of crooked squares she’d painfully produced while pregnant with Meg, full of dropped-stitch holes and places where the wool had been pulled too tight.
‘Actually, Dad said he might take it up.’
‘Knitting? Did he?’
‘He read an article about some film star who knits. It’s cool for men nowadays, he told me.’
‘Ah, so I’m relieved of that responsibility, at least.’ She wasn’t sure how she felt about the idea of Hugh clicking away with a pair of needles in the evenings. It conjured up an image of the woman in the hospital, hunched over her work and handing out unwanted wisdom.
Meg pulled the bag towards her and broke the plastic apart. A cold smell rose up, a muted sort of smell, like spices that have been sitting too long in their jars; nutmeg and cinnamon well past their shelf life. But the old clothes were intact, the flannel babygros and corduroy dresses, the soft cardigans and tiny cotton dungarees. Meg seemed quite moved by the sight. She was feeling through the bag with her right hand, Jen noticed, but her left arm was being surreptitiously scraped against the edge of the stepladder.
The reddened skin, covered in scratch marks, made her think of Lana’s arms, of those similar scratches she had made on her otherwise perfect skin. How had both her daughters ended up with matching wounds?
‘That cream doesn’t seem to have been such a success as we thought,’ Jen said.
Meg dropped a gingham sunhat on to her lap and looked at her hands. ‘Was I scratching?’
‘Didn’t you know?’
Meg shrugged, still looking at her hands. ‘I remember at school, or nursery maybe, thinking I had grazed my wrists and that the skin was flaking off, and then the teacher found I’d just got PVA glue on them and it had dried and begun to rub away. I was embarrassed, about the mistake, because I’d gone crying to her, but I was relieved, too. Sometimes, I wonder if I couldn’t just rub this away as well.’
‘You won’t try that, though, will you?’
‘No. I mean, it’s tempting. When I look at the patches of eczema, I can imagine the skin underneath is perfect.’ She groaned suddenly. ‘I have to pee again.’
‘Shall I help you up?’
‘No, don’t worry,’ she said, inching up the wall and pushing herself off it.
Jen slid down on to the floor, replacing Meg. The sun was low in the sky and birds were flying into the tree beyond the landing window. Their sweeping movements made Jen think of crops being scythed, as if each bird were gathering something to it. The leaves shimmered in the light and could, just for a moment, have been a skin, shivering in a cold breeze.
‘There are two new packs of condoms in a bag on the door,’ Meg said, coming out of the bathroom.
‘Snooping?’
‘Well, I thought I’d be helpful and put away your shopping.’ Meg was rarely daunted by any accusation of wrongdoing. ‘Whose are they?’
‘Er, well.’
‘Surely there isn’t much risk of you getting pregnant now.’
‘Because I’m too old, you mean? Thank you very much.’
‘Well, you’ve been through the menopause, haven’t you? So what do you want condoms for? Are you having an affair?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘Is Dad having an affair?’
‘You’d have to ask him.’
‘So they’re Lana’s, then?’
‘Not exactly.’ Jen watched a squirrel dangle awkwardly by its back legs and chew at something on the branch below it, before curling into the dense, concealing leaves of the tree. She could hear a shuffling on the stairs, the shaking of leftover sugar in a paper doughnut bag. Lana was listening.