Ninepins (37 page)

It was too hot to venture a hug; she was scared that Beth would find it uncomfortable, irksome, and shake her off – or, worse, might wish that she could. She made do with fishing a clean tissue from her pocket and passing it across. Beth blew her nose wetly and swallowed with a glug.

Through the open window, Laura thought she felt the first sigh of a slight breeze. It raised – or something else did – the fine hairs on the backs of her forearms. Somewhere off in the night, an unknown bird cried out its alarm. Laura, without intending to, strained her ears to listen. In the far distance, a car engine flared, then fell away; Beth's bedside clock ticked off the seconds. Otherwise, the silence was complete. Now at last, in the enveloping quiet, sleep seemed almost a possibility. Its lure settled over her; perhaps they might both sleep here, together, in the silence of her daughter's room.

‘She laughed.' Beth's words, hard and shocking, roused Laura from her reverie. ‘Rianna. She laughed about it.
Dougie the doggie
, she kept saying, and laughing like it was something funny.' Beth's voice ratcheted upwards through mimicking singsong until she was close to hysterical, caught between tears and a terrible, mirthless laughter. ‘
Dougie the doggie, Dougie the dead doggie, Dougie the dead doggie
.'

 

Laura stayed with Beth until she was calm; then she covered her over with the sheet and knelt by the bedside, stroking her hair until she fell asleep. By the time the slow, even breathing told her she was safe to leave, it was after one am by the bedside clock. The heat was not perceptibly less.

Taking a drink of cold water from her cupped hands at the bathroom tap, she noticed a pair of earrings, narrow twists of gold wire threaded with turquoise beads, which she recognised as Willow's. She must have taken them off to wash and then forgotten and left them on the tiled rim of the hand basin. They were so small, they looked as if they might quite easily fall down the plughole and be lost. Picking them up, Laura wandered back along the landing to the spare room.

Already, denuded of even half of Willow's things – the dressing gown from the back of the door, the trainers from next to the wardrobe – the room felt subtly more her own again, more how it had been when her parents had slept here. The duvet, in the black and grey geometric cover she had bought for Willow after the autumn's flood, was down with her in the pumphouse; its absence left the mattress looking tired and bare. The old bedspread that used to cover it, the rose pattern one that had been her mother's, was still in the linen chest. Lifting the lid, she took it out, shook it open and laid it across the bed, smoothing it out from centre to edges. Willow had left the window only slightly ajar, but now Laura threw it wide to the night air.

She had put the earrings down on the night stand, but now it occurred to her they were hardly safer there than in the bathroom. They really were so delicate; Willow might fail to notice them, and knock them off. Turning to the dressing table, she looked for a suitable receptacle. Beth had always had a magpie eye for trinkets; a hoarder of tiny pots and pretty boxes, she filled them up with beads and bangles, and buttons and hair clips, and pretty pebbles from the garden. Not so Willow. Apart from a jar of moisturising hand cream, the surface was almost empty. There was nothing else but the old blue shoebox, wrinkled and misshapen from its immersion in the flood. The only thing was to put the earrings in there.

Feeling slightly guilty as she did so, Laura took hold of the cardboard lid. It was wedged tight due to the distortion of the box, and came off only with some prising. The inside of the box was crammed with paper: private letters, no doubt, and photographs, at which Laura took care not to glance. On the top, however, where she dropped the earrings, lay something which unavoidably caught her eye. She couldn't help it; it was right there. It was a cigarette lighter. Slim and silver, smooth-cornered, slightly lozenge-shaped, it looked very much like the one she had last seen in Marianne's hand at the psychiatric hospital. Now that she saw it properly, she noticed the engraving. With all the swirls and curlicues it was difficult, at first, to make out anything figurative at all. But from among the flourishes, as she examined it more closely, there emerged the two looping, intertwined letters, each the mirror of the other. M and W.

Laura replaced the box lid carefully and drifted to her own bedroom. It wasn't so bad. The air temperature must have come down a good way since nightfall, logic, though not her senses, told her; at least her sheet, when she touched it with her hand, felt almost cool. She should undress and lie down, and soon she would sleep.

The pumphouse wasn't visible from her bedroom window, which faced east towards the gate and the cinder turning space, where the drove led away to the road. Was Willow asleep, down there in the darkness? Did she sleep curled tight the way Beth sometimes did, her knees hugged high beneath her chin, or straight out on her back with arms and legs flung wide? Restlessly, with much turning, or calm and still all night?

Suddenly, with a sharpness that surprised her, she wished that Vince were here. Vince would have the answers to her questions; Vince always knew. He hadn't called her since they parted company on the pavement outside his flat, when he leant to swing shut the taxi door. He hadn't called her, and she hadn't called him.

Dangerous, or vulnerable – which one was Willow? He would know. What would he tell her now, if she could ask him? As she stared out at the garden in its pool of black and the starlit fields beyond, she knew his answer with perfect clarity; she knew exactly what he would say. That the two were inseparable, that they were two faces of the same coin; that in Willow's case, at least, they were simply two ways of saying the same thing.

It was at supper on Friday – the night when Beth had been due to go to Rianna's – that Willow issued her invitation.

‘Why don't we have a sleepover here? Just you and me, in the pumphouse.'

‘Really?' Beth's eyes lit up at once.

‘Why not? It might be fun – and besides, it's cooler down there than in the house. When I leave the door open, it's nearly like being outside.'

‘Like camping? Oh, Mum, please, can I?'

Laura smiled, glad to see her daughter enthused again. Since her run-in with Rianna, she'd been looking dull and exhausted; Laura would bet she hadn't been sleeping much.

‘What'll I use for a bed?'

‘How about taking the cushions off the settee and pushing them together on the floor? Take your own pillows. And you can use my old sleeping bag, if you like, so you don't need to bother with sheets.'

‘Can we have some biscuits or chocolate or something, if there is any? In case we get hungry.'

‘I'll see what I can find. And don't forget to take your inhaler with you.'

They headed off straight after supper, leaving Laura to wash up. Before they left, she found the sleeping bag at the back of the airing cupboard, and a Battenburg cake and a bag of Maltesers. Willow took them from her with a grin; seventeen was apparently not too old for midnight feasts. The settee cushions looked enormous piled up in Beth's arms.

‘Can you manage those all right? Would you like me to come down and carry some things?'

‘No thanks, we'll be fine.'

When they were gone, the house jangled with silence. Laura banged on the radio for company while she gathered together the dirty dishes. Jonathan Dimbleby's voice was soothing to the mind, as he marshalled his feuding panellists with aplomb.
Any Questions?
Plenty, thought Laura as she ran the hot water into the bowl, but none that wouldn't keep.

When the kitchen was clear, she took the newspaper through to the sitting room and read for a while, but her thoughts kept scattering off at tangents. In spite of the continuing heat – tonight, if anything, seemed hotter than ever – she decided to go to bed early. She ran a tepid bath, barely warm enough to melt the lavender salts she swilled in, and soaked herself until the water was cold. With a shiver, she pulled herself out and rubbed quickly dry, before enjoying the rare luxury of walking naked to her bedroom.

Sleep claimed her almost at once. She surfaced at around midnight for long enough to glance at her watch and be surprised to have slept so well and so quickly, since when Beth was away she was often restless, and what with the heat as well. She was dimly aware of having been dreaming, and disturbingly so, but without knowing of what. The bottom sheet was rucked, and damp with her sweat. She rolled to the other side of the bed where the bedding was smooth and cool – the side where she never slept because it had been Simon's.

This time, as she drifted again beneath the layers of her consciousness, the dream came vividly alive. She was out of doors, walking naked across the fields behind Ninepins, which were not the wilted green of a hot early June but grown high with dry, ripe stalks of corn. Too high, in fact, for the ears reached almost to her waist, impeding her progress. Perhaps it was not the wheat that was taller but she herself who was shorter, perhaps a child. Sharp stones and ends of stalk jarred and jabbed at her bare feet. There was a strange light in the dream, which felt like neither night nor day, and the heat was harsh and hard-edged, as much a physical barrier as the impenetrable corn. It scorched her soles, it battered her head and shoulders, and beat upon her face with such intensity that she had to raise her hands to shield her eyes from the glare.

After a time, it occurred to her that something was wrong. The heat, the light, came not from overhead where the sun should have been, but from the ground, and all around her. The cornfield was on fire. As soon as her dreaming mind had grasped this fact, the smoke closed round her, too; or perhaps it had been there all along, accounting for the weird half-light, but now it choked her nose and throat and stung her eyes, which were soon awash with tears. Through the blur and the fumes she made out walls of flame, surging from every direction towards the sky, and, as she saw, she understood the truth: that the whole of the fens was ablaze.

She was coughing as she jerked awake. The scent of smoke still lingered in her nostrils; she rose and went to the window to drink in the night and dispel it, but it would not seem to shift. Her watch said five to three.

Without any conscious decision, she walked out on to the landing and along to Beth's room. The door was still wide open as Beth had left it. The bed was unmade from the previous night's occupation; now, without Beth and stripped of its pillows, it looked very empty. The curtains were not drawn across but open to the blackness beyond, which, however, was not as black as she would have supposed, but flickering with light, and the window was wide open, so that now, borne to her on rising air, the smell was unmistakable – as was the sound, the low, hissing, sputtering sound, the same as in her dream.

The pumphouse. The girls.
Beth
.

She didn't take the time to cross to the window and look out, but turned at once and ran for the stairs. She hardly knew how she made it down them, tumbling, two, three at a time; she was even half way to the door before she remembered she had nothing on, and grabbed her longest raincoat from the peg to wrap around herself. Shoes took too long, so she went without.

The heat of the fire hit her with a smack the moment she rounded the corner of the house. There were no flames immediately visible, but a dense, rolling pall of blue-black smoke engulfed the upper structure of the pumphouse, obscuring the chimney and half of the walls, and issuing in billows from the one exposed window. Even here, at the top of the dyke, the air was red hot and laden with soot and ash, smearing greasy where it touched her skin; her eyes blinked against the acrid smart.

As she descended the concrete steps, the heat, though it seemed impossible, grew greater. Raising one arm, she held it across her eyes and brow in an attempt to protect herself as she edged down the final few steps. She should have brought a scarf soaked in water – isn't that what you were supposed to have? And what use would she be without shoes? But it was no use, in any case. The fire was too well entrenched. The smoke was all round and inside her, congesting and clogging and burning; it poured in through her mouth and nose and seemed to soak even through the pores of her skin, until she felt so full of it that her chest might burst.

She should retreat. She should go back up the steps, go back in the house and phone for help. It was the best she could do. The only thing to do.

Too late
, drummed a distant voice in her head.
Too late, too late, too late
.

That was when she saw it. It was away to the right; not towards the pumphouse but the other way, off in the middle of the dark lawn, through the miasma she made out a darker shape, slumped on the grass. She ran towards it, dropped down beside it, leaned over it, dragged it up against her heart.

‘Baby. My baby.'

Beth was breathing, but with difficulty. Rapidly, Laura released her from her arms to give her space and air, manoeuvred her into a more conducive position for the single action by which she clung to life: the painful, scanty, all-consuming task of drawing in oxygen.

She was hovering somewhere between conscious and unconscious. Her face, in the starlight, was wholly without colour; her eyes were closed and underscored with darkening patches. Each breath was a struggle, racking her chest and arching her back, but, for all the effort, finally shallow and unsatisfactory. Not enough, Laura saw, with a shot of panic. Not nearly enough.

Beth's inhaler would be in the blazing pumphouse, but they kept a spare in the kitchen drawer.

‘Hang on for me, sweetheart.'

It was the hardest thing that Laura had ever had to do: to stand up and move away, to leave her daughter gasping on the grass and run to the house to fetch it, scrambling straight up the dyke to avoid the choking smoke by the steps. She was back in two minutes at most, clutching the inhaler in one hand and her mobile phone in the other. She knelt down and raised Beth up again, cradling her across her knees; her breathing seemed jerkier, less effective than ever, and she was barely aware. Laura pulled the cap from the mouthpiece, shook the inhaler and laid it between her daughter's lips, pressing down firmly on the button. Breathe, she beseeched her silently; please breathe. But Beth's lips lay slack around the mouthpiece. There was no improvement in her laboured breathing. It wasn't getting through.