Whistle in the Dark

by Emma Healey

‘Why don’t you give me a hand?’ Jen asked.

  ‘Maybe in a sec, I just want to read this,’ Lana said, making herself one of the protein shakes she’d been given at the hospital, and already absorbed in something on her phone.

  Jen tried not to be disappointed, tried just to be glad that Lana was prepared to be in the same room as her for a while. The oily spatula glistened in the light, and Jen stared at it. When had it come to this? she thought. Since when was having her own daughter in the same room an achievement?

  Lana gave a cackle of laughter, her canine teeth flashing at the corners of her mouth.

  ‘What’s funny?’

  ‘Oh, nothing.’

  Jen went back to her cookbook, wondering if she really had to remove the chops or if she could just leave them in the pan while the other things simmered around them. A note had been written, in her own handwriting, long ago, but it was faded and gravy-spattered and illegible. She screwed her eyes up and held the page under the window and was still none the wiser. She wished she could go back in time and tell her younger self to write more clearly, but, she speculated, might that be a waste of the time-travelling process? If she got the opportunity to go back and give herself some advice, was there not something more useful she could say? It was worrying not to be able to think of anything more momentous than handwriting tips.

  There was another grating cackle.

  ‘Really, what’s so funny?’ Jen said.

  ‘It’s just something on Buzzfeed. Parenting wins-type thing.’

  ‘Parenting wins,’ Jen repeated. ‘Can I see?’

  Lana passed her the phone and yawned and shook her protein shake while Jen peered at the screen. She seemed always to be peering at things now. Cookbooks, computers, the pores on her nose; she sometimes felt like a modern version of that Rembrandt painting of an old woman reading. She couldn’t remember the title.

  ‘“People who are nailing this parenting thing,”’ she read out loud.

  Although she chuckled through the list, she felt more and more despondent the further she got. Had she ever ‘nailed’ the parenting thing? Had she even tried to nail it? She’d certainly never deliberately embarrassed her children, and this seemed to be important. Accidentally embarrassed them, yes, but that wasn’t nailing anything, that was just sad. Trying not to embarrass them and still managing to embarrass them was even worse. Perhaps she should get her face printed on a T-shirt, or start calling Lana a loser in texts – that certainly went down well on the internet. She couldn’t imagine it going down well with Lana, though.

  ‘Can I have my phone back?’ Lana said.

  ‘Hold on.’ Jen quickly looked up the Rembrandt painting she’d been picturing. She’d remembered how dark it was, and the way the woman rested her hand on an open page, but the subject was less bent-backed than she’d thought and there was a beautiful highlight on the cloak, a shine on the headdress, which her memory had left out. ‘An Old Woman Reading,’ she read. ‘Disappointingly literal. Probably the Prophetess Hannah.’

  ‘What are you going on about?’

  ‘Does this remind you of me?’ Jen asked, turning the screen to face her daughter and holding it next to her face.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  The rich smell of the protein shake was on Lana’s breath, and Jen had to turn her head away when she leaned towards her.

  ‘Well,’ Lana said, considering, ‘maybe when you’re trying to use Dad’s iPad.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No, not really. Can I have my phone now?’

  Jen went back to her cookbook, brushing her hand over the page with that vague handwritten note.

  ‘Oh. Right, then. You looked like that picture right then, when you did that,’ Lana said. ‘Oh, weird. Do it again, I’ll take a photo, Instagram it.’

  ‘No, thank you,’ Jen said, shutting the cookbook. There was no need to go back in time, she decided; she’d deciphered the note: Lana doesn’t like chops.

  This was something else her memory had left out. And just at this moment when they were getting along, when she was beginning to feel she knew her daughter again, she had set them both up for a disappointment and proved she didn’t know her at all. Her confidence left, her feeling of competence, and when Lana popped upstairs to the loo, Jen let herself slide on to the floor.

  Do you believe in ghosts?

  Jen’s sudden lethargy, the severity of her disappointment, shocked her. She didn’t remember giving up so easily before, or being so apprehensive, so instantly frightened. Was there, could there be, something else in the house with them, or was it just Lana who changed the atmosphere? Sometimes, Jen felt as though her daughter’s emotions hung about in the air. Irritation, exhaustion or despair lingered like a cloud of perfume, waiting to be walked through, the particles clinging to whoever passed by.

  Grace had given her a book which suggested that moods – moods that couldn’t be explained by other circumstances – were really caused by supernatural beings. It was based on T. C. Lethbridge’s theory that ghosts were just traumatic memories stored in stone or brick and projected later, and Jen went about the house running her hand over the scratched paintwork in the hall and the bubbling plaster in the utility room, knocking at the skirting board and the doorframes.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Hugh said, finding her on all fours, her head in the under-stairs cupboard.

  ‘Looking for something,’ Jen called back.

  ‘I guessed that. What is it you’re looking for?’

  Jen backed out, shaking the dust from her hair and coughing the damp from her lungs. ‘A resonance, a change in temperature, an emanation. I thought I might know it when I came across it.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘No luck yet.’

  ‘Shall I get the Hoover out while you’re there?’

  Jen nodded and went to make a banana pudding (something she knew Lana liked). She stared at the bowl turning round and round in the microwave and then, when that became dizzying, she opened the laptop and scrolled through the thumbnails of other Rembrandt pictures on Google. She stopped at The Shell, though she wasn’t keen on the picture, having always found shells uncanny; they were like empty houses, she thought.

  When she was a child, she’d been sure they were haunted by the ghosts of the gelatinous creatures who’d once lived in them, and that the whooshing sound she could hear when she held one to her ear was the voice of the dead creature, moaning like ghosts do in stories. Rembrandt’s shell was cone-shaped and spotted with pale teardrop markings. It sat, ominous, looming, with something eye-like about its coiled end, in a dark space full of cross-hatching, looking more like a haunted house than any image of an actual house Jen had ever seen.

  Wrinkles

  ‘I do look like that old Rembrandt woman,’ Jen said that night. ‘Even my eyeballs have wrinkles. I didn’t think that was possible, but when I rub them like this, look…It’s grotesque.’

  ‘Don’t rub them, then,’ Hugh said, ‘and get some sleep.’

  ‘I’m trying! Do you think I’m not trying? I want to sleep, Hugh, I really do. I just can’t.’

  ‘Getting into bed might help. You can’t sleep at your dressing table.’

  ‘Hmmm.’ She rubbed her right eye one more time in order to study the wrinkle again, a yellowish pleat of membrane near the iris which appeared and then smoothed itself out as she watched in the mirror. When it had gone, she packed away her lavender neck cream and verbena hand cream and honey lip balm and got into bed.

  Hugh turned out the light and Jen shifted about, trying to get comfortable. She pressed play on one of Grace’s audio-guided meditations, but concentrating on each part of her body in turn just made her skin prickle.

  She stopped the recording and rolled over. ‘Okay, forget the eyeball wrinkle,’ she said. ‘But do your joints creak? I mean, audibly?’

  ‘No.’ Hugh’s voice was sharp in the clear dark of their bedroom.

  ‘Oh. Mine sort of groan w
henever I move. My shoulders especially.’

  ‘Groan?’

  ‘Yes. I only notice it at night, but it’s disturbing. Sometimes, the way the sound reverberates through the mattress, I think I’m hearing voices in the room below. People murmuring to each other.’

  Hugh turned the light back on.

  ‘And you say Lana is trying to worry you,’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t say she was trying to. And I didn’t mean to worry you. Sorry.’

  His breathing was strangely quiet for a moment, and when Jen turned to look at him she realized he was listening out for something. She was about to ask what it was, but he threw the covers off before she could.

  ‘It’s no good,’ he said. ‘I’m going to have to go downstairs and check now, aren’t I?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘People who might be in the room below. Murmuring people.’

  Heavy-footed with fatigue, he walked from the room and she heard him trudge down the stairs. The door to the sitting room opened, the light switch was clicked on and then off, the door was shut and then his steps creaked back up to the landing.

  ‘All okay?’ she asked, as he came back in.

  ‘There’s a cat on the sofa.’

  ‘Again, please.’

  ‘On the sofa in the sitting room. There is a cat. Asleep.’

  ‘Ah ha!’ she said.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Well, I told you, didn’t I?’

  He leaned forward, resting his fists on the mattress. ‘You told me you heard murmuring voices, not a miaowing cat.’

  ‘No, weeks ago, I told you about the cat. I found it on the stairs in the middle of the night.’

  ‘Did you?’ he asked. ‘How did it get in?’

  ‘That’s the question. I mean, in general, but also for Lana.’

  ‘And did you ask her?’

  ‘Since when does asking Lana a question result in a comprehensible answer? She told me I was seeing things.’

  ‘Great,’ Hugh said, getting back into bed.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Well, that suits me. If the cat’s imaginary, I can leave it where it is and go to sleep.’

  ‘But it’s not imaginary, is it?’

  Hugh took a moment to think. ‘I’m inclined to believe it is,’ he said. ‘I only saw it for a second, after all. It might just have been a vision.’

  ‘A vision?’

  ‘Yes. A wrinkle on my eyeball, if you will. Good night.’

  The light went off again and after a few minutes Hugh’s breathing became snuffly and regular. Jen lay picturing the cat curled up directly below her; she wondered whether to go down and let it out. All night, she listened for a miaow, but heard nothing, and in the morning the cat was nowhere to be seen.

  Red-faced

  Jen brought up the imaginary cat the next morning at their family-therapy session with Dr Greenbaum.

  ‘Ah, but cats are like that,’ he said. ‘They sneak in where they’re not wanted.’ He told them to google People who don’t actually have a cat. ‘It’s a series of photos, for instance one of a fluffy tabby in a kitchen sink, and the text reads something like: Came home to find this, oh and by the way I don’t own a cat, and so on. So, you see, you are not alone. I doubt you are imagining it.’

  Afterwards, Jen and Hugh and Lana went to a pizzeria, their customary treat after a session, where Lana inevitably chose to sit at one of the high tables with bar stools so they had to eat with their feet dangling in the air. Some students had crowded into one corner, dragging chairs across the floor and shouting to friends as they came in, and a chef kept throwing discs of pizza dough into the air to the customers’ applause.

  Usually, the buzz of the place made Hugh cheerful, but he seemed distracted while he ate his Fiorentina, and he absent-mindedly put chilli flakes on his garlic bread, even though he disliked spicy foods.

  When Lana went off to the Ladies, Jen asked what was wrong.

  ‘There’s a man staring at you,’ Hugh said.

  ‘Which man?’ Jen didn’t look, but sat a little straighter, as if her back could feel for eyes.

  ‘Blue shirt, sitting with a woman.’

  Jen made a show of adjusting the cardigan on the backrest of her bar stool, managing to catch a glimpse of the man Hugh had indicated.

  ‘No, he isn’t,’ she said. ‘He’s just facing this way, we’re in his line of vision.’

  ‘He has caught my eye approximately sixteen times in the last twenty minutes.’

  ‘Well, maybe he thinks you’re staring at him.’

  Hugh used a pizza crust to mop up some egg yolk while he thought about that. ‘No,’ he said finally, ‘it’s definitely you he’s got his eye on. And he’s a bit odd.’

  ‘I suppose he’d have to be, to be eyeing me.’

  ‘I don’t think that. You know I don’t think that.’

  ‘How’s he odd, anyway?’ Jen said. ‘Just because he looks around the room? It would be odder to keep your eyes shut throughout lunch.’

  ‘Why are you taking his side?’

  ‘I’m not taking his side.’

  They sat quietly for a few minutes, the smell of basil filling the space, the vinegary tang of the wine the only thing that passed between them. Then, unable to resist any longer, she swivelled on her seat to get a proper view of the man.

  She felt immediately that he couldn’t have been staring at her. He had a swollen and blistered face and was nearly deformed by some skin condition. This convinced Jen of his innocence. No one, she thought, with such an inflamed and unattractive face, would draw attention to himself by staring. She ate the last few bites of her pizza in peace, her fingers oily and her lips sore from the salty tomato sauce.

  ‘Ah, now, that’s interesting,’ Hugh said, as he folded his greasy napkin. ‘I mean, I thought it was funny he wasn’t talking to his wife.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, she obviously wasn’t his wife. She just paid and left, not a word, not a look. They were just strangers, sharing a table.’

  ‘It is very busy in here.’

  ‘Or…he was using her as a front. A decoy.’

  ‘Hugh, why would he do that?’

  ‘So he could stare without making us suspicious. Oh.’ Hugh smoothed his shirt front and peered out of the window. ‘He’s coming over.’

  Jen turned just as the man got to their table.

  ‘Hello,’ the man said.

  It was Stephen. He said hello, but Jen heard him badgering Lana about Intelligent Design on their holiday, heard him telling Lana that Jesus could cure depression, heard his words in the newspaper article, calling for Lana to ‘speak out’. Her fists curled involuntarily, a rush of anger made her breathless.

  ‘You probably didn’t recognize me just then, did you?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she admitted.

  ‘Hogweed.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Hogweed’s what did it. My face, my hands.’

  ‘How did hogweed do that?’ Hugh asked.

  ‘I brushed against the broken stems when I was clearing litter from the side of the road, and of course I was in the sun. The blisters came up within a few hours. They were the size of conkers, but they’ve gone down quite a bit. I’ll have the scars for months, the doctors say. I’m having to wear a hat when I go outside now.’

  ‘Dreadful.’

  ‘Yes, so you mind what you touch in the countryside.’

  ‘Well,’ Hugh said, obviously at a loss as to how to respond to this advice.

  ‘Were you doing some sort of community service?’ Jen asked. ‘Was it punishment for a crime?’

  ‘I’m not a criminal, Jen, I just like to try and do my bit. It’s disgraceful how most people treat our environment. God’s green Earth. Is this your husband? We met on holiday in the Peak District,’ Stephen explained to Hugh.

  ‘It’s Stephen who believes that Lana visited Hell while she was missing,’ Jen said.

  ‘I
see.’ Hugh shifted off his bar stool. Jen had the impression it was a masculine move, rather than a polite one, that Hugh was measuring himself against this man. ‘Did you want to join us?’

  ‘Thank you, but I should be getting back. I’m here for a conference, New Lollards from all over the world. Atlanta, Chelyabinsk, Monrovia, Copenhagen. We’re certainly growing. To think, when my great-great-great uncle was a member, there was only the one congregation. It’s wonderful, really. Before I go, though, tell me, Jen, how do you think Lana is doing?’

  Jen felt herself flush, and thought this must give them a resemblance. She pictured them red-facing each other across the table, and thought of those videos of exasperated atheists, making themselves look unreasonable next to placid believers, arguing until they were purple, with unmovable opponents. Lana had been drawn into arguing with Stephen. Jen wanted to avoid that.

  ‘I ask,’ he said, ‘because we developed quite a rapport on holiday, and I took a particular interest in her.’

  ‘I know that. I saw that. All the other people in our group saw that. There are witnesses.’

  ‘Witnesses to what? To my talking to her? Have I done any harm?’

  ‘Harm? Of course you’ve done harm. Where do I even start? You tried to lure my daughter into joining your cult, you’ve encouraged her to cut herself, and on top of that you’ve talked to the press about her, told everyone she’s had a supernatural experience. You’ve opened her up to internet trolls and cyber-bullying. Made her a target of any nutcase who might google her in the future.’

  Stephen nodded, as though he were listening to a list of grievances against another person, as though he were moderating rather than being accused. ‘I have to say, I wish I hadn’t talked to that reporter. I’ve had unwanted mail myself since the article was published – people suggesting that I have mental-health problems, or that I’ve been brainwashed. It hasn’t really had the effect I’d hoped it would. Perhaps we could ask the newspaper to take the article down?’

  ‘I’ve already asked the newspaper to remove the article.’

  ‘Well, good. What else can I say? I’m sorry.’