Whistle in the Dark

by Emma Healey

  ‘Because, I used it in Derbyshire, too, and smelling your perfume, well, sometimes it’s the only thing that makes me feel better.’

  The shop assistant called them then, and Jen got out her card and typed in her pin and refused a bag, and found she’d fallen straight back into the hole, that once again, she felt she needed to know everything.

  Knickers

  ‘Oh, Jesus Christ!’ Lana yelled from her room the next morning.

  This is it, Jen thought, whatever has been coming, whatever has been lurking, waiting for a time to strike, it’s finally here. She snatched her dressing gown from the end of the bed and ran across the landing.

  ‘What is it? What? What’s happened?’ she said, shoving Lana’s door open and not worrying for once that she was asking questions.

  ‘These,’ Lana said, turning, ‘were in the sleeve of my hoodie.’

  She held a pair of Jen’s knickers in her fingers, touching only a tiny section of fabric, as if they were diseased.

  Jen said nothing while she tried to get her breath back.

  ‘I mean, it was so weird, putting my arm in and feeling something else in there.’

  Jen took the knickers from her hand. They were slightly stiff from having been washed and then dried inside the jumper. But they were clean, so Lana could stop looking revolted. ‘Is that it?’ Jen said. ‘I thought something terrible had happened.’

  ‘Er, yeah.’ Lana gestured to the knickers. ‘Something terrible has happened. But I’m going to be late for meeting Bethany so I’ll just have to try and get over it.’

  Her feet had rumbled down the stairs and she’d slammed the door before Jen had thought about putting on clothes and following her. She slipped on the knickers and tied the dressing gown more tightly around her waist. Although Lana had left her in the room, although Jen hadn’t entered deliberately, she felt guilty being there alone.

  She shouldn’t stay a minute longer, she shouldn’t flick through the exercise books on the desk, she shouldn’t rummage in the gym bag or open and shut every drawer in the bedside table. And if she did, it was her own fault when the words in the books were confusing or the empty plastic sachet seemed ominous or the box of condoms made her uncomfortable.

  The board of newspaper clippings seemed less sinister today, and Jen lifted up the various scraps of translucent paper, reading some of the sentences again:…so smart and always there for me…my best friend in the world…a truly beautiful person…Jen could understand why Lana might enjoy reading the tributes, even though they did make her sound like a dead person, but most of the sentiments seemed empty to Jen: they could have been about anyone.

  As she flattened the cuttings back against the cork, she felt another thin scrap of paper and uncovered it, unpinned it from the board. It was a receipt printed in pale blue ink. The items were all listed in an indecipherable code: BK Fir Con 14.99, BK Ant End 9.99, BK Vis Joh 5.50, BK 23 Min Hel 6.99, BK Sin Ang God 4.00, BK Dan Div Com 4.99, GF Bib Bea 15.99. The list meant nothing to her but, when she looked at the date at the bottom, she saw it had been issued the week before, that the things had been bought during the hours Lana was supposed to be at the cinema.

  Bless us Lord, every day

  Jen went to sit down on Lana’s unmade bed, still puzzling over the receipt, and knocked her anklebone against the sharp corner of a pile of books. The stack was half hidden under the bed, the spines facing away from the light, and Jen felt a flicker of anxiety as she knelt down to get a better look.

  The top book was called 23 Minutes in Hell, a memoir of one man’s experience of the afterlife; the next book, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, was an eighteenth-century sermon with extensive notes. BK 23 Min Hel and BK Sin Ang God. Jen had begun to check through the others when Hugh came home to pick up a file he’d forgotten.

  ‘Have you seen it?’ he shouted up the stairs. ‘My meeting’s in an hour. Where are you?’

  She thought about scrambling out of Lana’s room, but her legs were stiff and Hugh was there before she could do more than brace her hands on the carpet.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he said, finding her kneeling on Lana’s floor.

  ‘There are all these books, Hugh, about Hell. Describing it, explaining it.’

  ‘You’ve been searching her room? I thought we were supposed to respect her privacy and everything.’

  ‘I’ve had enough of that.’ She held the books in her hands and read the titles. ‘The Fire that Consumes. Look, Anticipating the End Days, and this one, Visions of John Bunyan. Hugh, I know there’s a chapter on suicide in this one.’

  ‘Well, I’m assuming the book’s against suicide,’ he said. ‘Surely that’s sort of positive. And I see she’s got Dante’s Divine Comedy there. I mean, that’s a little precocious perhaps, but it’s not damning.’

  ‘Damning?’ Jen repeated.

  Hugh had kicked off his shoes at the bottom of the stairs, and Jen watched him wiggle his socked toes as he thought what to say. ‘How d’you know the books aren’t for school, for RS or RE, or whatever it’s called now?’

  ‘She dropped RE last year. Where did she get them, do you think? Why did she get them? I wondered if, perhaps, someone might have bought them for her. Stephen…’

  ‘Jen, whatever questions we ask now, they’re pretty meaningless without Lana here to answer them. And she’s not going to be all that happy to explain if she finds we’ve – or you’ve – been searching her things.’ He fluttered a hand about as if to indicate the insubstantiality of a teenage girl’s possessions. ‘Try to put everything back where it was and then we can go downstairs and talk properly.’

  ‘There are condoms in her drawer,’ Jen said, naming the one item that might shock him. ‘I think she’s had someone up here. Doesn’t that concern you?’

  ‘Do you mean she’s been sneaking a boy in for sex? Yes, I suppose it does concern me, though it also seems reassuringly normal.’

  ‘Is that all you have to say?’

  ‘Put the books and everything back.’

  Jen looked up at him for a moment then down at his toes. Even his toes were sensible, reassuring. She pinned the receipt back on the corkboard and shoved the books about Hell under the bed.

  ‘But we should talk to her about this, don’t you think?’ Jen began, only to fall silent as Hugh shushed her.

  A voice was coming from under the bed, a murmuring, male voice, the words not yet discernible. Jen immediately imagined a man lying on his belly like a lizard. She could picture his eyes, shining in the dark, his mouth open, his lips almost kissing the floor. He had stayed flat and still while Jen had searched the room and found the books and talked to Hugh. Waiting, hiding, spying.

  Hugh knelt carefully, wincing as his knee cracked, obviously regretting the noise more than any pain. He tilted to the side, trying to get a better look.

  ‘I told you she’d got someone up here,’ Jen whispered, getting on to all fours.

  Hugh shushed her again as he got hold of the bed frame and, breathing hard, tugged it suddenly away from the wall.

  There was no one there.

  ‘Bless us Lord, every day,’ the voice said. It was the teddy bear from the Christian bookshop. ‘Amen.’

  ‘What the hell?’ Hugh said, his voice loud as he let the air in his lungs escape.

  ‘Bible bear,’ Jen said, reaching for it. She took a long breath in and then out, making dust balls float about. There was a smell of shoe leather and damp, a monkish sort of smell, and Jen felt as if it were coming from the bear. ‘Lana joked that she was going to get it as a gift for Meg’s baby.’

  Hugh didn’t make any comment and they sat side by side on the floor for several minutes, as if waiting for the voice to continue, or for some other voice to begin.

  Not everything is about sex

  Lana’s voice wasn’t heard that evening. She was tired, she ate a bowl of cereal at the kitchen counter, she went to bed.

  Hugh had made Jen promise not to say anything about th
e books. He didn’t want her to admit searching Lana’s room until they knew that the books weren’t for school or some other legitimate activity. Jen argued because she felt she must but, after the unexpected affection Lana had shown her while they were shopping, she was reluctant to do or say anything that might push her daughter away again.

  She had been worried Lana would notice that her things had been moved, and when Jen went to wake her daughter the next morning her gaze darted about, checking that she hadn’t left anything out of place, left any clue. The books were hidden, the talking teddy bear had been sent back into the dark and dust beneath the bed, the cuttings on the corkboard lay flattened over the receipt. Lana didn’t seem to suspect anything. Instead, it was Jen who was suspicious.

  She would have missed it if the washing woman hadn’t been hanging the contents of her basket, if Jen hadn’t been so keen to watch the calming domestic scene, if the curtains hadn’t been half closed, if Lana hadn’t got out of bed to pee as soon as Jen entered the room, if the curtains hadn’t puddled on the bedclothes.

  It was the way the bottom of the curtain dragged across the mattress that caught her attention. Something in the hem was weighing it down. Jen felt along the fabric and found an oblong lump and a tuck held together by a clothes peg. When the peg was released a phone tumbled on to the bed. The toilet was flushing as Jen picked it up. The water in the basin was running as she walked out of Lana’s room, and Jen was downstairs in the kitchen by the time the bathroom door was unlocked.

  ‘Will you bring my tea up here?’ Lana called down the stairs.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Great. I’m going to have five minutes more sleep, then.’

  Jen put the kettle on and turned the phone in her hand. It was a small thing, a cheap thing, not like the all-singing-all-dancing model Lana usually used. A secret phone. A burner phone, they called it on the television. Hidden in the curtains. No wonder the rings were always rasping along the pole or clacking together. But what did Lana need a burner phone for?

  There was no password, and no wallpaper; the background was the one that had been set at the factory. And when Jen opened the messages app, there was nothing there, either. Deleted, perhaps. The call log was the only thing that showed the phone had been used at all. One number repeated over and over: missed, received, made, twenty minutes, forty-five minutes, an hour and twelve minutes. It was a landline, not a mobile number, and although there was no name attached to it, the area code was familiar.

  Jen found the laptop and typed the number into Google. A website was suggested. The New Lollards Fellowship. Stephen’s face was just appearing, above a web form and a jolly Contact us!, when Lana came in. She’d pulled on a fleece dressing gown and scraped her hair into a bun. She picked up the last stroopwafel and bit into it. ‘Go on, then,’ she said.

  ‘Have you had sex with him?’

  ‘Oh, Jesus. I knew that’d be your first question. No, Mum, I haven’t. Not everything is about sex, you know.’

  ‘But you were with him. When you were missing.’

  ‘Again, no.’

  ‘So. What, then? What’s going on?’

  ‘We’ve been talking, over the phone.’

  ‘Just talking? Just on the phone? He hasn’t been here? You haven’t met him?’

  Lana sat down heavily, the chair squeaking on the tiled floor. ‘He got in touch after we came home. He emailed me and said if I wanted to talk about anything…He said he thought he knew what I’d been through.’

  ‘What you’d been through?’

  ‘I mean, obviously, he didn’t know anything, but I suppose I thought it would be funny to stay in touch, because he’s kind of mad. But then it turned out he’d had a breakdown when he was younger, he knew about depression. And it was just nice, I mean, it’s nice to talk to someone who wants to talk to you.’

  Jen felt herself start to pant. ‘But I want to talk to you.’

  ‘You say that, Mum, but you don’t want to listen.’

  ‘Yes, I do. I’ve asked you so many times to tell me what you’re thinking, what you’re feeling, what’s happened.’

  ‘Ugh. That’s what I mean. You don’t listen. You just want me to answer a bunch of questions. And maybe I don’t want to answer your questions, maybe your questions hurt and make me feel bad, maybe I want to talk about something else.’

  ‘Okay. So tell me. What have you been talking to Stephen about? What’s been so interesting?’

  ‘If you’re going to be like that…’ She tied the dressing-gown belt tighter, about to get up.

  ‘No, Lana, really. Please. I am listening.’

  ‘Fine. It was all, like, religious, and you’ll get annoyed, but fine.’ The ends of the belt were dropped. ‘We talked about the cutting and stuff. He said maybe God was, like, making the marks on my arms, like working through me. Like stigmata.’

  ‘Oh God. I knew it.’

  ‘Don’t freak out. I’m not stupid, I told him he was mental. Like I said, it was kind of funny. I mean, you and Dad and Dr Greenbaum, you’re so bloody reasonable. All trying to work me out, trying to manage me like I’m crazy. Sometimes, it’s nice to talk to someone you know is madder than you. Like, however weird I might be, I know I’m not as weird as Stephen. Right?’

  One corner of her mouth lifted in a smile, and Jen tried to smile back.

  ‘But, Lana, what I don’t understand is, how could any of this help?’

  ‘Well, right back at you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘All that crap Grace talks. You complain about it, but you keep meeting her, buying shit, reading dumb books on mindfulness or whatever. Drinking water with, like, a molecule of nothing in it. You know it’s rubbish, and you tease her, but you like it. You like the way she gives you a solution to every problem, and you like feeling superior.’

  ‘But Grace is kind, and she doesn’t take herself too seriously, and her ideas aren’t dangerous.’

  ‘Well, Stephen is kind and his ideas aren’t dangerous, either.’

  ‘How can you say that? He told you God made you self-harm.’

  ‘But I didn’t believe him. So it doesn’t matter.’

  Jen felt stiff from anger and rolled her shoulders to calm herself, to make sure her voice came out evenly.

  ‘Why the burner phone?’

  ‘Burner phone? I’m not cooking meth.’

  ‘You know what I mean. Why all the secrecy?’

  She shrugged and stood up. ‘You get sent my phone bill for my proper phone. And I knew you’d be weird about me talking to him. He told me you accused him of wanting to molest me with holy water or something.’

  ‘That was in the restaurant. He was here. Did you meet him? Did you tell him to come?’

  ‘No. He really did have a nutcases’ conference. But I think he might have planned to bump into us. I told him I had therapy that day and that we usually go for pizza afterwards. I didn’t think he’d just show up. I was kind of pissed off about that because it stressed you out.’

  ‘So, when you hung back…’

  ‘I was worried he would say something, that you’d guess we’d been talking.’

  Jen nodded. ‘I can’t say I don’t feel betrayed. So many lies.’

  ‘Okay, if you’re going to start with the emotional blackmail, I’m going for a shower.’ She was at the kitchen door.

  Jen gripped hold of a mug. ‘I found the books about Hell.’

  Lana turned back. ‘You searched my room?’

  ‘No, not really. I just came across them. Are you going to tell me you bought them because they were funny?’

  ‘Stephen said he’d pay me back, if that’s what you’re worried about. I just have to send him the receipt.’

  ‘Well, that’s very generous, I’m sure.’

  ‘When did you find the books?’

  ‘Yesterday.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Your dad was there, too.’

  She nodded again.

  ‘So,
why do you have them, Lana?’

  She took a deep breath. ‘Because I was in Hell,’ she said.

  Something collapsed inside Jen. Her daughter was lost, she thought. She could pretend Stephen hadn’t influenced her, hadn’t persuaded her, but really, she had been taken in by these fanatics. This is what happened to vulnerable people: cults took advantage, sold them lies, cut them off from their families.

  Then there was that smile again. ‘That’s what Stephen thinks.’ Lana had deliberately left a pause, Jen realized, for maximum effect. She genuinely thought it was funny.

  ‘His weirdo church all believe that children can visit Hell. And, even though you think I’m shagging my way around the country, Stephen still counts me as a child and tells me that’s where I’ve been.’

  ‘Yes, and he told a newspaper that, too. He talked about you in the press. You were annoyed. You said he was cashing in.’

  ‘I wasn’t really annoyed. I mean, who cares? It’s stupid. I’m going to keep the article to scare my niece with.’

  ‘And the books?’

  ‘He said I might recognize something from one of the books.’

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘No, obviously.’ Her look asked Jen if she were mad. ‘Although I haven’t read any of them all the way through.’

  ‘So, you’ve been – what? Pretending to go along with it? Why?’

  ‘Well, it was comforting in a way, to imagine I’d experienced something meaningful, something significant.’

  ‘Why? What did you experience, Lana? Tell me. Tell me now. What did you experience?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Lana said, suddenly shouting. ‘That’s the point, Mum. Nothing.’

  Woman of spirit

  Nothing was supposed to be good. Nothing was what you were aiming for in the meditations Grace recommended. A state of oblivion, which allowed you to engage in deep self-care. So said Grace. Grace who had sold Jen lies about cats’ tails, and made her perform rituals, and tried to persuade her to come on retreats away from her family. Perhaps it was she and not Stephen who was the truly sinister one, and only Lana had noticed.