Whistle in the Dark

by Emma Healey

  A play by Lana Maddox

  Down the Plughole

  ACT ONE

  SOPHIE (hands above her head):

  How did we get here?

  CLAIRE (looking up):

  We’re all wet. I think we came down the plughole.

  SOPHIE (covering her eyes):

  Well let’s go back. I don’t like it.

  CLAIRE (with hands on hips):

  Wait a minute. Let’s find out where we are first.

  CHARLOTTE (dreamily):

  Yeah, this bathroom is beautiful, I wonder whose it is.

  SOPHIE (pointing):

  Oh no! What are those?

  CHARLOTTE (kneeling down):

  What cute little doggies!

  CLAIRE (laughing):

  They are corgis. This must be the Queen’s bathroom.

  CHARLOTTE (hugging a corgi):

  Yes it is! Oh wow. Her toothbrush is red with a tiny crown on.

  SOPHIE (patting another corgi):

  I hope we don’t get in trouble.

  CLAIRE (holding on to the basin):

  I don’t think we’ll be here long enough. We’re being sucked down the plughole again.

  ALL (falling on to the stage):

  Here we go!

  Daphne

  After lunch, Jen and Meg went to see an exhibition. Meg was good at reminding Jen of the art shows she might otherwise manage to miss, at persuading her they were important, that the works were beautiful or meaningful rather than irritating or confusing. Mostly, Jen appreciated this; sometimes, she felt patronized.

  ‘I’m not a child,’ she said, as they walked through a knot of tourists. ‘You don’t have to monitor me.’

  ‘I’m not monitoring you, I’m waiting for you to catch up. I thought that was nice.’

  ‘Oh,’ Jen said. ‘Well, yes, that is nice.’

  She followed Meg off the long gallery staircase and breezed past the security guard after Meg’s membership card. They read the bit of the artist’s biography on the wall and looked at the first two early works, and Jen scrutinized the luscious brush marks with a sense of foreboding. She liked these pictures more than she knew she’d like the later ones. Artists always started, it seemed to her, to begin with beautiful paintings, pictures you’d love to have in your house, and end with incomprehensible and ugly monstrosities. She was careful to say none of this to Meg.

  Instead, wanting to look more closely at a tender detail in one of the pictures, she rummaged for her reading glasses. But between bag and head she somehow managed to get them stuck. She couldn’t move the glasses, she couldn’t move her head. The problem converged just out of her eye line and involved an earring and some of her hair. She struggled for a moment before Meg noticed.

  ‘I’ve got something tangled here,’ she told her. ‘I can’t see it. What have I done?’

  ‘What were you saying about not being a child?’ Meg said, freeing her mother.

  ‘Yes, well, apparently, I’m heading for my second childhood. Anyway, it’s good practice for you.’

  ‘In case my baby gets her earring and reading glasses tangled? What kind of a child do you think I’m having?’

  Turning back to the pictures, they followed the walls around into the next room, and the next. As Jen had suspected, her interest in the work decreased the further they got, the longer the artist worked, the more fame he found. Feeling rather pally with Meg after the tangle incident, and in the final room of the exhibition (the door had those blessed words printed on it: Exit and Shop), Jen risked commenting on a picture. Lurid and scribbly, it wasn’t even difficult to look at (she knew about art as challenge); it was, or it felt, meaningless. Perhaps she should have said that, but she didn’t. She couldn’t think quite how to begin.

  ‘What on earth is going on in this?’ She cringed as soon as the words were out of her mouth.

  ‘It’s meant to be Daphne,’ Meg said, moving closer to the painting, moving so close it looked like she might press her nose against the paint.

  The gallery attendant, a small, round woman, got up from her seat and came towards them, turning back when Meg moved away again. She always seemed to play this game of dare in galleries, a more sophisticated, less thrilling form of chicken. It made Jen very uncomfortable.

  ‘See, her hair is turning into leaves,’ Meg said, pointing too close now.

  The attendant got up again.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Jen said, putting a hand on Meg’s outstretched arm, ‘I can see. It was just the strange pose that confused me.’

  In the picture, Daphne seemed to be inside the tree, but she was bent over like a weeping willow rather than a laurel. Her head was upside down, her leafy hair spilling towards the floor. The painter had made an effort to show how the blood had run into her head, using lots of different shades of red, which contrasted with the green foliage. It looked uncomfortable, turning into a tree, not like the painting in the National Gallery, where the woman seemed to have suddenly sprouted branches in place of arms and was displaying them like jazz hands.

  ‘It’s interesting how there are these broad strokes throughout most of the picture but the bits where skin is turning into bark are really intricately depicted,’ Meg said.

  ‘Hmmm,’ Jen said.

  ‘It gives you a feeling of what it would be like to become a tree.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ Jen said again.

  ‘Although I already know what that’s like.’

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  Meg rolled her sleeve up in answer, showing the red, scaly skin on her inner elbow. The eczema did look a little like bark.

  ‘Oh, sweetheart,’ Jen said, horrified again by the similarity between Meg’s sore and cross-scratched skin and Lana’s careful, deliberately sliced forearms. ‘You must go back to the doctor about that. And you should keep your nails a bit shorter.’

  ‘I try, but my nails grow too fast. I didn’t know that could happen, but it’s because the baby is growing nails so there are extra nutrients, or something. Anyway, all the better to scratch with, huh?’

  ‘But darling, you’ve got to try not to scratch.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ Meg said.

  She moved on, continuing the game with the attendant, who sighed every time she got up from her chair. Jen stayed by the Daphne picture, trying to work out what it reminded her of, or why it made her think of Lana. It was the red face that was particularly unpleasant to look at, which made her feel anxious, hopeless. After a few minutes she joined Meg, giving the last few pictures a cursory glance, knowing, relieved, that they were about to stop for coffee and natas.

  The girl in the courtyard café was the final hint. She was running back and forth between her mother and some railings, shrieking and refusing to sit still. Eventually, she hooked her legs over the bar of the railings and let herself dangle upside down. Her hair hung just as the woman’s in the painting had, and the ends curled into a tangle of ivy, which grew along the edges of the courtyard.

  At first, she laughed and shouted to her mother but, after a few moments, she let the smile fade from her face and looked out at the people sipping their lattes and picking at their salads with a solemn expression. Her face went pink, then red, and her mother called to her to get down. And Jen remembered an afternoon, a week ago, when Lana had refused to get off the sofa, refused to move from a position which left her head hanging over the edge, refused even when her face was nearly purple.

  Jen felt the wail from earlier rise, like stomach acid, in her throat.

  Washing

  Wailing, in public or private, was becoming a compulsion, though one Jen rarely gave in to. Instead, she looked for ways to soothe herself: listening to her mother describe, in her sibilant, telephone-tinny voice, all the irritating things Peggy had said or done; pinching off the juicy, leggy stems of peppery nasturtiums; exfoliating and moisturizing her hands until they were pink. At about this time she became interested in a woman, two doors down, who still hung washing on a line. She was the only pers
on on the street to do this, as far as Jen could tell; everyone else presumably owned a tumble dryer. The garden, and the washing line, were partly visible from Lana’s bedroom window, and Jen had taken to slipping in there every morning to watch the woman with her peg bag and basket.

  She had first noticed the woman when she was checking on Lana in the days after they got back from the Peak District, making sure her daughter was still there and alive, and possibly, maybe, ready to talk. But now she couldn’t be sure what her priority was, looking in on Lana or enjoying the calm that the woman’s neat domestic actions inspired. The questions she asked the duvet-rolled lump in the bed had certainly taken on a routine tone.

  ‘How are you this morning?’ she said, while the woman pegged up a pair of men’s striped pyjama bottoms.

  Lana’s voice came though the bedding, low and muffled.

  ‘Do you want anything? Tea? Juice? Breakfast?’

  A series of tea towels was being hung. They were the kind that primary schools produce, with self-portraits of children on them, and they billowed bright and clean in the morning sun, making Jen forget the mustiness of Lana’s too-lived-in room.

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ Lana said.

  ‘Or thirsty?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And are you up to anything today?’

  She was rough with the line, the washing woman. It bounced and swung with each sodden addition and the pegs were pushed fiercely over the folds. She always held a peg in her teeth, which made her look, on first glance, as if she were smoking while she worked, and it gave her a grittier, roguish air, until she removed the cigarette and it became a peg again for a – what was it? A cotton handkerchief? Surely nobody used those any more.

  ‘I don’t know what I’m up to,’ Lana said. ‘What are you doing today?’

  ‘We could go shopping,’ Jen suggested.

  There was a groan, as if Lana were having trouble digesting something.

  The washing was nearly hung; the last task was to attach a central pole which changed the line from a shallow u to a shallower w. The woman was rough with this, too, and the washing trembled on its fastenings, the tea towels in particular. And then she was gone for the day.

  Somehow, Jen always missed the moment the woman came back out to collect the dried pyjama bottoms and tea towels and handkerchiefs. Occasionally, she missed the pegging-out, too, and was disappointed. She liked to keep a list of the items in her head: the blue-and-white bath towels, the fluffy oatmeal bathmat, the T-shirts with palm-tree prints and place names: Key West, Lanzarote, Sharm el-Sheikh.

  And once, hanging all day in the middle of the line, there were just two long grey socks, like a rabbit’s ears.

  A cavalier attitude to washing-machine programmes

  Jen’s own washing routine was less clockwork, less calming. She was always behind and, although Hugh did his own, he’d become queasy about touching Lana’s dirty clothes since she’d reached adolescence. So it was Jen’s job to plunge a hand into the depths of Lana’s laundry basket. She felt like a snoop every time she checked through the pockets of jeans and the pouches of hoodies to remove the tissues or sticks of gum or coins that had been forgotten.

  There were often receipts in the pockets, too, which she flattened and read. But cans of drink, cheap make-up and the occasional magazine didn’t amount to much. The worst thing she’d found was a receipt for and then the actual pair of nail scissors. Jen had tried not to think about the reason Lana had bought them, why she had been carrying them about with her.

  ‘Cutting her nails, perhaps,’ Hugh had suggested reasonably.

  On Sunday, Jen turned out a pound coin, four twenty-pence pieces and a pen with a charity logo on it. And then, in the zip pocket of a running T-shirt, she found a little velvet bag with a gold drawstring.

  Inside were the two stones Grace had given Lana: rough and smooth. And Jen realized that the stone she’d trodden on in Lana’s room, the one she’d been carrying around for nearly three weeks, was something else.

  ‘Craziness,’ Lana said, making Jen flinch. She’d come into the kitchen and opened the laptop while Jen was staring at the stones. ‘Mum, what have you been reading? You spend way too much time on the internet, you know that?’

  ‘You were using the computer last,’ Jen managed finally, dropping the velvet bag into the laundry basket and pressing any old button on the washing machine in the faint hope that it would start the wash cycle she was after, and regretting again the fact that she’d got the manual wet in the first week of ownership. Not that she’d have been likely to read it dry.

  ‘Er, no,’ Lana said, her voice sharp, ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Er, yes,’ Jen said, adopting the same tone.

  As she got up from her position, crouched by the collection of washing powders and detergents, she realized Bethany was standing in the kitchen. The blood rushed from her cramped and swollen legs to her face.

  ‘Oh, hi there,’ she said.

  Bethany lifted a hand and smiled.

  ‘We’re just going to watch this video of a baby polar bear,’ Lana said, ‘because we’ve both run out of data and Bets hasn’t seen it, and then we need to check when a film’s on.’

  ‘Like, a film at the cinema,’ Bethany added.

  ‘Oh, the cinema?’ Jen said, only slightly sarcastic.

  Lana gave a sigh-filled running commentary as she closed the ‘stupid’ amount of tabs Jen had apparently left open and found that the film would be starting in twenty minutes. So they left immediately, taking one of Maya’s fancy bars of chocolate with them, and Bethany missed out on the video.

  The washing machine had begun to make strange noises, and Jen, worrying in retrospect about her cavalier attitude to programme choice, asked Hugh, when he got home, what he thought.

  ‘Google the model number,’ he said, scrabbling through the pockets of his raincoat for something.

  Jen pulled the laptop towards her, but as she opened a new page she noticed the option to reopen all recently closed tabs and clicked on that instead. The pages that came up were on local newspaper websites, not local to them in London, but covering Derbyshire, Staffordshire and Yorkshire. And every article was about a child who’d been reported missing.

  ‘Have you been using the laptop to search the news?’ she asked Hugh, raising her voice over the clunk of the washing-machine drum.

  ‘That’s what I have an iPad for.’ Hugh’s voice was muted by the bag he was now rifling through.

  ‘So you haven’t been looking up missing children?’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, discovering whatever it was he’d been searching for. He looked at Jen for a minute, as if listening to the echo of her question. ‘No. And, for the record, I never read anything on the laptop because it’s plastered with debris from your cooking,’ he said. ‘Buttery fingerprints on the mouse pad, flour between the keys, dots of tomato sauce splattered on the screen. I don’t want to even touch it.’

  It seemed more likely then that Lana had been searching for coverage of her own disappearance, but those articles weren’t hard to find; they’d cluttered up the BBC news website and the national as well as local newspapers during the search and just after her discovery.

  Jen read through every article: there was a teenaged rock climber lost in bad weather, a boy who hadn’t been seen since he jumped into a river to try to save his dog, a young woman with a history of drug abuse who might have been spotted in Leeds, and a toddler who’d wandered off. None of them bore any relation to Lana’s circumstances.

  Hugh took the prize possession he’d unearthed upstairs (Jen still hadn’t understood what it was, and she suspected it was fictional, an excuse to duck any washing-machine dramas), and she sat thinking about the reasons Lana might have an interest in missing children. Had she met a child during those four absent days? Did she know where some of these missing children might be?

  Jen was still thinking, blank faced, in front of the computer, when Hugh came back downstairs in
his DIY-worn after-work jeans.

  ‘Stalking Lana again?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ Jen said. ‘I was looking up…’ She couldn’t remember what she was looking up, and the possibility of remembering vanished as she spotted the last tab open on the page. It was one of those articles written as a numbered list.

  7 Theories about Where Lana Maddox Went for 4 Days

  Lana Maddox is the girl from London who went missing in the Peak District during the half-term holiday in May. She turned up again four days later, disorientated, cold and covered in cuts and bruises and said she had NO MEMORY of the days she spent apparently lost in the countryside. Which begs the question: where did she go? Folks on the internet have been trying to work it out. Here are their theories.

  1. The mermaid got her

  Lana was really wet when she was found, despite the reasonably dry weather, so there’s been a lot of speculation about which lakes or rivers she might have fallen into, and it’s led to this great old myth resurfacing. There are lots of versions, some of which are listed on the Myths of the Peak website, but our favourite story tells of a pool which is the bathing site of a beautiful mermaid who lures her victims to the edge and drags them down into the water. Almost no one survives, but those who do are granted eternal life. I guess our great-grandchildren will find out the truth of this if Lana is still alive in a couple of hundred years.

  WHAT DO YOU THINK?

  VOTE

  Fantasy

  Reality

  See results:

  90% Fantasy

  10% Reality

  2. Satanic cult in the woods

  Okay, so this is a theory that crops up in nearly every list but, for once, there’s a lot of back-up evidence. There are the usual accounts of strange groups of weirdos in the woods, but one in particular is creeping us out. A cyclist was heading home at dusk around the time Lana was missing and he saw lights in the forest, got off his bike and went to see where they were coming from and found himself in the midst of a satanic ritual, hooded men and everything. He ran away and only just made it back to his bike before they caught him. Afterwards, he swore on his blog that a girl had been lying in the middle of the circle, but police never found any evidence of the gathering.