Whistle in the Dark

by Emma Healey

  ‘Okay,’ Lana said, choosing the opposite option to the one Jen had been hoping for. ‘It starts with a girl.’

  Another pause. There was a stifled giggle from Meg, but Lana either didn’t hear or chose to ignore it.

  ‘She was just an ordinary girl with normal comfortable shoes,’ she said. ‘She lived with her family and went to school and everything, but one day she woke up with a song in her head. It wasn’t a song she knew very well, though she must have heard it before, in a film or on an advert or something, but it was catchy and it turned out she could remember all the words, though she usually couldn’t remember the words to songs, even the ones she really liked.’

  ‘Sounds like Mum,’ Meg said.

  ‘Ha, yeah,’ Lana said, her sheets whispering as she got into a better storytelling position. ‘Anyway, this girl, she couldn’t get rid of the song. She tried to distract herself with games and shopping and seeing her friends, but she kept finding herself singing the lyrics or humming the tune. She listened to other music, but as soon as she turned it off the song was there underneath, waiting.’

  ‘It’s called an earworm,’ Meg said.

  ‘Are you going to keep interrupting?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Fine. Anyway, it wasn’t an earworm, because it seemed more like she was hearing, rather than remembering, the song. Like it was the light, bright, real thing, rather than a shadowy mental version. And it didn’t go away, even at night. Weeks passed, and the song got louder, growing inside her head. She couldn’t sleep, or concentrate on reading, and when she spoke she said the wrong words a lot, substituting the lyrics for the sentences she meant to say.

  ‘Her parents thought she was being difficult and her friends thought she was mocking them or not listening, and people began to avoid her because she seemed weird. This was kind of a relief, because the song eventually drowned out all other sound. When her teachers asked her something in class, she couldn’t understand them, and she ended up in detention every day. The sound of traffic was deadened and she had to be careful crossing the road. She was cut off from everyone, in her little bubble of music, in the middle of a constant loop. Her head was heavy with it, and it felt like it would burst open from the pressure.

  ‘Then she was walking home from school one day, hardly able to see because of the insane volume of the song in her head, when she stepped off the pavement and was hit by a bus. Her head cracked open on the kerb and, as her blood leaked out, the music leaked out with it, and finally everyone else could hear the song.

  ‘That’s it,’ Lana said. ‘The end.’

  There were a few seconds of quiet, and then Jen sat up and switched on the lamp. ‘Is that how you feel? Is that what life feels like to you?’

  Lana looked caught in the sudden light, her eyes puffy and squinting. She shrugged and wriggled down under her covers. ‘I don’t know.’ Her voice was muffled by the duvet. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You’re not supposed to analyse it. It’s just a story.’

  ‘A pretty freaky story, though,’ Meg said.

  Lana flipped a corner of the duvet away from her face. ‘Did it freak you out?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good,’ Lana said. ‘Night night.’

  Visitor

  Jen, lying in her own bed, in her own house (and with her own ball of mozzarella downstairs in the fridge), found she had a song stuck in her head. Something from the eighties, or possibly two somethings that her mind had blurred together. She twisted about, trying to untangle the lyrics, to work out where one tune became another, but it was no good. At last, after determinedly recalling a third song, the phrases seemed to fade (and, thankfully, without the need to crack her skull open).

  But when she thought she might actually finally sleep, she realized there was someone – something – in her bedroom, crouched by the curtains. Jen could hear breathing, could feel a stare cutting through the dark. She tried to focus on the figure, decide how – why – it should be there, but her mobile was buzzing, distracting her. It was strange to feel it buzzing there, against her face. She shifted slightly on the pillow, coming out of sleep but not quite ready to open her eyes. Why was the phone slightly wet, she wondered, and how was it tickling her cheek? She gazed into the shadows around her, finding a little pink nose hovering over hers, a set of whiskers feathering her skin, a cat dipping itself towards her as it purred.

  ‘Hello,’ she mouthed, wavering a hand up to stroke it, her eyelids heavy. There was something cosy and calming about waking to a cat, even if it wasn’t your cat, even if it was imaginary. There was an unfamiliar smell, slightly composty, rich and warm.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked, with a sleep-stuck tongue. ‘Where did you come from?’

  The cat put out its tongue and licked her nostril with a rough stroke that made Jen hold her breath.

  ‘Hello,’ she said again, as if the lick had been a greeting.

  The cat turned and jumped down from the bed with a thud, trotting across the floor. It hadn’t left the room, but it had slipped into the shadows. There was a heavy rustle of curtains and Jen was suddenly, properly awake. She slid out from under the covers quickly and almost fell on to the floor. Lana was kneeling in the corner of the room, looking as though she couldn’t decide whether to run at, or away from, her mother. The cat had curled its tail around her hips.

  ‘So it is you,’ Jen said, ‘who’s been letting the cat in.’

  Have you got the bag?

  They had each gone back to bed, Jen feeling this discovery couldn’t be dealt with in the dark and silent hours. She didn’t want to wake Hugh, and she felt she was likely to attribute some extra significance to Lana’s actions among the shadows and unfamiliarity of night-time.

  But in the morning, it seemed almost indelicate to raise the subject. And she had become so used to second-guessing herself that she wondered if she hadn’t dreamed the incident, dreamed the cat entirely, and she was reluctant to make a fool of herself.

  She watched the woman hang out her washing. She waited for Lana to shower and dress, she made coffee and poured it away and made it again. She walked through each room, looking for a good place to talk, a neutral space, but unsurprisingly, there wasn’t one. So they went out to lunch.

  ‘If you wanted a cat, you could have said,’ Jen told Lana, when they’d sat down. She kept her eyes on the menu so her daughter would understand that nothing about this exchange would be accusatory.

  ‘It’s not that I really want a cat.’

  ‘So why have you been letting it in?’

  Lana lined up the salt and pepper shakers, spun the cornflower in its little vase, tugged at the bandana over her hair. ‘Someone at school saw my scars.’

  ‘On your head?’ Jen kept her voice low, because another customer, a man, was reaching for something behind his chair and looking at them as he did so.

  ‘No, the scars on my arms. The ones I did, you know.’

  The man got up and walked out of the café, with a big paper parcel, turning his face away as he sidled past their table.

  ‘Have you still got that shopping bag?’ Jen said suddenly, feeling sure that the man was a thief rather than a real customer. ‘The grey one?’ She tried to look under the table, but passing waitresses kept getting in her way.

  ‘Yeah, it’s by my feet,’ Lana said. ‘So, anyway, this boy – his name’s Simon – he asked me how I’d got the scars, and when I said I didn’t want to talk about it he started telling everyone to check out my arms.’

  Jen looked around the café to see if anyone else had noticed the man, or lost a bag, but they were all tucking into their pulled-pork buns and smashed avocado on toast.

  ‘I thought about saying I’d been gardening,’ Lana said, ‘but, like, no one is really going to believe that…’

  ‘But I can’t see the bag, Lana,’ Jen said, knowing she shouldn’t be focusing on that, knowing she would anger her daughter, b
ut not able to help herself. ‘Are you sure you’ve got it?’

  ‘Yes, Mum. Here, look.’ She lifted the bag up over the table then dropped it back down between her knees. ‘Happy?’

  ‘Thanks. Make sure you hold on to it, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes, Mum.’

  ‘Can I take your order, ladies?’ the waitress asked, appearing next to their table. They both tried to speak at once but, as they were ordering the same thing, it hardly mattered. ‘Like peas in a pod,’ the waitress said, not seeming to notice the gritted teeth behind their smiles.

  Lana continued to look down at the table, even after the menus were taken away. She spun the cornflower again.

  ‘Go on,’ Jen said. ‘Tell me what happened.’

  Lana didn’t look up, she didn’t speak.

  ‘Please, Lana, I’m sorry.’

  No answer.

  ‘I really am sorry, but I don’t see why you’re quite so upset, I only wanted to check –’

  ‘I’m upset,’ Lana said, ‘because you asked me to explain something difficult, but you don’t really want the explanation. I’m upset because you assume I’m incompetent, you can’t imagine I’m capable of holding on to a bag and not losing it or having it stolen.’

  ‘That’s not true, it’s just that I’ve been with people when they’ve had bags nicked in cafés, and it’s done so easily, believe me. I don’t think you’re incompetent. It’s silly, I know, but I do the same thing with your father.’

  ‘That doesn’t make me feel much better. The way you talk about Dad like he’s hardly got two marbles to rub together.’

  ‘Two marbles?’ Jen said. ‘I’m not sure that’s the expression.’

  ‘Seriously? This is what you’re going to focus on?’

  ‘Sorry, it just sounded funny. I know that’s not the point. I knew what you meant. And I don’t think your father is incompetent either. Oh, here comes our soup.’

  Two big bowls of goulash were put down in front of them and they ate in silence for a while, the steam clinging to the lower half of Jen’s face.

  ‘So, if you can’t say you’ve been gardening, what can you say?’ Jen asked, halfway through her bowl. ‘How did you explain the scars?’

  Lana stirred the chunks of beef and potato, apparently considering. ‘You were listening.’

  ‘Of course. Was this Simon bullying you, Lana? Because we can talk to the school about that.’

  ‘He isn’t important enough to be a bully,’ Lana said. ‘He’s just such a low life that he has to find stuff to tease you about. I wouldn’t have cared but it’s, like…some boys find it weirdly…’ She looked at Jen, as if she were trying to decide whether to finish her sentence. ‘Sexy,’ she said finally.

  ‘That’s rather disturbing,’ Jen said, wondering if Lana meant boys or men, wondering if there was a particular boy or man she was thinking of.

  ‘Yeah. So I told this idiot that the scars were scratches from my cat.’

  ‘Good thinking.’

  ‘Only Bethany let slip I didn’t have a cat. It wasn’t her fault; she didn’t know I’d lied or why I’d lied. But Simon was going to have a field day, so I thought if I lured a cat in and got a photo of it, with me, then I could say Bethany didn’t know or, like, I think of it as my cat but, really, it’s my grandma’s or whatever.’

  Jen looked at her daughter, amazed at the level of subterfuge, pleased somehow that she could make these sorts of plans, worried that she could make these sorts of plans. How many schemes might she have used to throw her parents off?

  ‘Honestly,’ Lana said, ‘it made me wish I’d never done it. Cut myself, I mean. I know you and Dr Greenbaum are always telling me it’s terrible and everything, and to be honest, that’s never had any effect on me.’

  ‘Good to know. Thanks.’

  ‘But having to, like, cover it up is a proper deterrent, you know?’

  ‘Are you ashamed of the scars?’ Jen asked, quietly. ‘Stephen said you’d told him you were ashamed.’

  ‘Stephen? You mean on the holiday? I don’t know. I don’t know about ashamed. Embarrassed, maybe. I didn’t want everyone knowing. Is that the same as shame? Anyway, then the cat started coming round all the time. I was feeding it at first and I guess it wanted more food. I couldn’t get it to go away, or I would think it had gone out into the garden and then I’d find it under my bed, or it would be outside miaowing and miaowing and I was worried it would wake you and Dad, so I’d have to let it in again.’

  ‘But did it work? I mean, you put pictures up on Instagram, didn’t you? Did this boy believe you?’

  ‘On Instagram, right,’ Lana said, narrowing her eyes at Jen. ‘And, yeah, basically, it worked. I don’t think he believed me, but he’d look like a weirdo going on about how I’d cut myself when I could show everyone the cat.’

  ‘Well, that was, I mean, I don’t condone…I mean, I’m glad you sorted it out,’ Jen said.

  ‘Me, too. Only then the stupid fucker asked me out. Crazy, huh? As if I’d touch him with a…cat’s claw.’

  Heartfelt words

  After lunch, they went shopping and, despite the fact that most of her questions hadn’t even been asked, let alone answered, Jen felt as though the air was clearer between Lana and herself. One step at a time, one query a day, perhaps one every other day, perhaps one each week; the important thing was not to fall out again. She would just talk about frivolous things in the meantime, and not choose each word carefully; she would be honest and foolish and let Lana make fun of her if she wanted.

  ‘Is it a sign of age, do you think,’ she said, as they queued in a clothes shop with too loud music, ‘that I find myself admiring an elderly woman’s tidy moustache?’

  Lana stared at her. ‘Admiring it how?’

  ‘The way it fits neatly between the lines at the corners of her mouth. The way it lends her an air of capability.’

  ‘Capability?’ Lana looked about the shop, her arms dropping and dropping until the ruffle-sleeved top she held brushed the floor.

  ‘Or wisdom, perhaps.’ Jen guided her daughter’s hands up again so she didn’t get dust on the silky hem.

  ‘I don’t think it’s a sign of age,’ Lana said, still trying to locate the moustache and its venerable wearer.

  ‘Oh, good.’

  ‘Insanity, though…’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Jen waved her comment away. ‘Is my lipstick bleeding?’

  ‘As in wounded?’ Lana asked carefully.

  Various bags knocked together as Jen turned to her. ‘No, Lana. I am not concerned for the welfare of the tube, I am worried that the colour is making its way along the lines at the edges of my lips so that I’ll look like an old lady who can’t apply her make-up properly any more. Okay? Reassured? Cancelling the psychiatrist?’

  Lana nodded, and Jen tried not to smile too heartily, her insides squeezing with relief, with pleasure, at their silly, teasing, normal conversation. She’d managed to climb out of the hole of suspicion and desperate anxiety she’d been digging for months. She realized that, as long as they were getting on, no questions were necessary – there was nothing she needed to know.

  ‘Actually, I would much rather be the sort of person who thought her lipstick had been injured in some gory way. That would be less depressing than finding it in my wrinkles.’

  ‘Can I help?’ The girl behind the till leaned out to peer at the queue of shoppers and Jen counted the number of people who were ahead of them: three.

  ‘Where’s – where’s the woman?’ Lana whispered to her mother.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The woman with the moustache.’

  ‘She’s not here – she was at the exhibition I went to last week. I just suddenly thought of her because of that poster.’ She pointed to the image of a lizard advertising a range of desert-inspired clothes.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘It’s a bearded dragon. And it made me think “bearded lady”, and that made me think of the woman with the moustache I’d a
dmired.’

  ‘Oh, perfectly logical when you put it like that.’

  ‘Who’s next?’ another shop assistant called.

  They were two places from the front now.

  ‘Do you really think this is the right thing?’ Lana asked, shaking the top and making the sleeves flutter.

  ‘Yes,’ Jen answered, in the tone of someone who has answered the same question in the same way many times before, and very recently.

  ‘You’re right,’ Lana said, not in the tone of someone who’d repeated this phrase many times over the last hour, though she had done just that. ‘I think it’s the smell that puts me off. That chemical they soak the clothes in to stop them getting moth-eaten or whatever.’

  She wafted the top towards Jen’s face, coming rather close to swiping her with it.

  ‘Watch out. I wanted you to tell me if my lipstick was running, I wasn’t expecting you to blot it with your new shirt.’

  ‘It smells, though, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I’ll wash it when we get home.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Can I help?’ the first shop assistant said, and the young woman in front of them shuffled forward with two armfuls of clothes.

  ‘It’ll be us next.’ Lana stood up on her toes for a few seconds then let herself sink down again. This meant some heartfelt words were about to be said, Jen knew. ‘You never look like you can’t apply your make-up properly,’ Lana said, rushing the sentence, her voice breathy. ‘And you don’t have lines around your mouth.’

  ‘That’s kind of you. Thank you.’

  ‘And you shouldn’t think about age all the time, and you shouldn’t feel depressed about it.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And I’ve been using your perfume.’

  ‘Oh,’ Jen said, surprised at the sudden confession. ‘Yes, I know. I’d noticed.’

  ‘I thought you had. I’m sorry.’ She rolled the sleeve of the top around her wrist then let it unfurl again. ‘Actually, I’m not sorry.’

  ‘Right. Okay.’ Jen laughed a little, not sure what to say.