Ninepins (10 page)

The Cambridgeshire fens were the worst place in the world for an asthmatic child. Beth should have lived in Italy, in air that was dry and filled with sunlight – or even just fifty miles east, on the sandy coastal heaths of Suffolk, where rainfall was low and the wind held the snap of ozone. But the research grants were not in Suffolk or Italy. Here the damp was a constant factor. It hung on the breeze like smoke; it seeped under doors and soaked through clothing; it trickled invisibly underground and gathered to run in the lodes and drains and ditches, and rose as mist from the wet, black, chocolate-fudge soil. And with the rising water in the earth, as it seemed to Laura, rose also the fluid in Beth's lungs, narrowing her airways to a needle's width and leaving her fighting to breathe.

There was no attack that Sunday night, though Beth slept only fitfully, propped close to vertical on a stack of pillows, while Laura lay sleepless in her own bed, hearing – or imagining she heard – each wheezing inhalation through two open doors and across the short stretch of landing. She was well enough to go to school, though with a note about sitting out PE. It pained Laura to see how the short walk from the car to the double swing doors left her daughter gasping, head reared back to open her throat and snatch at the air.

It rained again every day that week, if not solidly then at least for prolonged spells. By Friday, the level in Elswell Lode was as high as it had been since the early spring; by Monday, it was higher than at any point last winter, or indeed the winter before. Beth's chest remained tight and her breathing laboured. She moved everywhere at a snail's pace, grasping at furniture and door frames like an old woman. At break times, at school, she stayed in the classroom.

‘It's all right. Rianna and Caitlin stay in with me. They're allowed. Mr Burdett said.'

Laura watched each breath with a practised eye, and waited. At the moment, it was manageable. Beth's first sharp suck on her inhaler drew in through the clogged bronchea just enough salbutamol to make a difference. If she could avoid a coughing fit from the effort of pulling in the first dose, then a minute's careful breathing brought marked relief; her tube walls released their stranglehold sufficiently to increase the flow of oxygen, and hence to allow absorption of the second puff of drug.

Wednesday brought a slight alleviation. The rain held off, replaced by a soft, pervasive mist which blanketed the house and dykes and wreathed each tree and telegraph pole, filming everything it touched with fine, clear droplets. Beth's lungs seemed to relax a little. She ate a better supper, with breath to spare at last for chewing and swallowing; she was coughing less and passed an easier night. Laura breathed more easily herself. It seemed they had turned the corner.

The respite, however, proved only temporary. On Thursday the clouds piled high again and on Friday morning as they left the house, the bloated sky was releasing a steady downpour. The phone call came at lunchtime, just as Laura was peering from her office window and wondering how wet she would get on a dash to the sandwich shop. It was Mrs Warhurst, the receptionist at the village college.

‘Mrs Blackwood? I've got Beth here with me.'

‘What's she forgotten?' At primary school, she'd always been running back over with something: packed lunch, PE socks, recorder book. But even as she joked, Laura's pulse quickened. It was what she'd been expecting. The crisis had come.

‘She's very poorly. We think she ought to go to the doctor's.'

‘Right. Yes.' Phone in one hand, she was already gathering up raincoat and car keys in the other as she said, ‘Tell her I'll be straight there.'

She was lucky with the traffic, which was light for the lunch hour, and in less than twenty minutes she was striding into the reception area and over to her daughter, where she sat by the wall on a solitary stacking chair.

‘It's all right, now,' she told her – although it quite obviously wasn't. Gone was this morning's loose, musical wheeze. Beth's breathing, in fact, was now silent for the first time in over a week: silent and almost completely ineffectual. Her chest rose and fell jerkily, accompanied at each inhalation by an involuntary hunch of the shoulders and the appearance of alarming hollows at either side of the base of her neck, just above her collar bone. But, evidently, little air was getting through. Dark smudges flowered beneath her eyes; her lips were open, stretched and blue.

Laura stood up and looked rapidly around.

‘Hi!' she called to a passing staff member whom she didn't recognise. ‘Excuse me. Could you help us, please?'

With an arm apiece they half-hoisted Beth through the rain to the waiting car, where she slumped in the passenger seat like a lifeless thing.

The doctor's surgery was no distance, just along the village high street, and Laura bumped up illegally on the pavement outside. The surgery staff knew Beth well. The practice nurse was summoned and soon had her in a consulting room, face mask on and plugged into the whirring compresser. Laura stood by and filled her own lungs with draughts of calming air. As the drug began to filter through, the colour seeped back into her daughter's face. Her chest moved in and out more smoothly. The sucked-in hollows at her neck grew less pronounced with each successive breath, and her eyes, which had held that intense, strained, inward-focused look, now sought Laura's. There was no panic in them, only exhaustion.

‘Back in a minute,' Laura told Beth, when the chamber of liquid was half empty. ‘I've just got to move the car.' At the door she turned back and forced a grin. ‘Don't run away, will you?'

After the treatment they sat for a while on the waiting room chairs, Beth leaning up against her mother's shoulder, until she could have the once over from Dr Harrington.

‘Her air flow seems to have stabilised now. I think we've caught her in time. But you'll need to watch her closely for the next twenty-four hours. Use her peak flow meter. If it drops below ninety, give us a call and someone will come out with the nebuliser. I think it's Dr Taub on call tonight.'

She'd found a space in the car park not far from the back door, but the walk was still an arduous one. The rain was lashing down; Laura draped her own coat over Beth's head and shoulders as she bundled her across the tarmac. She wanted to swaddle her round and scoop her close, and never let her out of her sight.

 

Home. An asthma attack and an afternoon off school gave not just Beth but Laura too the dispensation for idleness. She shelved the work she should have done today in favour of children's television. Beth was too weak to do more than sniff at the soup that Laura heated for her, but she nursed the mug and inhaled the steam. Air was the only sustenance she wanted.

After that, she dozed for a while on the settee cushions and at nine Laura helped her up to bed. They took it slowly, but the struggle from her clothes and into pyjamas left her gasping, open-mouthed. Laura fetched every pillow in the house and built a padded cave round the head of the bed. Beth crawled in and lay upright, her head tilted sideways.

‘Don't go.'

Laura stopped, her hand on the door handle, and turned back.

‘Stay with me. I don't want to go to sleep.'

It was the first whole sentence she had spoken since Laura's arrival at the school. The effort of it took too much breath; it had her in a spasm of coughing, and Laura back at her side, stroking her hand in useless soothing.

‘Of course I'll stay, sweetheart, if you want me to. I can stay all night, if you like.'

Beth gave a short nod, satisfied, and shut her eyes.

‘Don't want to sleep.'

She was regulating it better now, taking a small extra breath and releasing the words in a quick, staccato burst. Laura waited.

‘Dream.' Breathe. ‘Don't want the dream.'

‘What dream, love?'

‘Always the same.' Breathe. ‘Drowning.'

Oh, God
. Laura squeezed her daughter's hand, where it lay limp on the bedclothes.

‘Ditch. I'm in a ditch. Lying down. Head under water.' She took a longer rest and Laura wondered whether this was it, whether she should respond, or whether there was more to come.

‘Can't breathe. Stupid. It's only shallow. Should sit up. Just can't.' Another pause; more spacing breaths. ‘Drowning.'

A tear had formed itself at the corner of one of Beth's closed lids.

‘Don't cry, love. Please don't cry.' It wasn't a mother's empty comfort; Laura had always believed in letting her daughter cry. But now, in this condition, it would be disastrous. The extra fluid in her nose and sinuses, the tightening of the throat. She really mustn't cry.

‘You won't drown.' Casting around for what to say, she found as she said it that she knew the answer. ‘Don't fight it. Don't try to sit up, just lie still and relax. You won't drown in the water – the water is safe. Relax, and you'll find you can breathe the water.'

Beth snorted, swallowed, then opened her eyes. They swam with liquid, but it no longer threatened to fall.

‘Talk to me.'

Laura smiled. ‘What shall I tell you? Or should I read you a book?'

‘Dad and the tree house.' Breathe. ‘Tell me that.'

It was an old family story. Beth had demanded she recite it at bedtime almost every night, those summers when she was seven, eight, and lived in the tree house from dawn to dusk. She hadn't mentioned it in years.

‘It was when I was pregnant,' began Laura. ‘Expecting you. I was still at work, the last week before my maternity leave was due to begin. There was one day when we had a conference on, and I was helping organise. It meant I'd left the house early, before seven, and wasn't home before nine o'clock at night. I never looked in the garden when I came in. I didn't even glance that way – why would I? I was tired, I'd been rushing round all day.'

Beth's lids had closed again, but she was nodding, eased.

‘When I got inside, Dad was there to greet me in the kitchen with a cup of peppermint tea – I had a passion for it when I was pregnant – and he was acting all excited and mysterious. ‘‘Come outside,'' he kept saying, and I didn't know what he was on about. I just wanted to sit down with my feet up and drink my peppermint tea. But he wouldn't let me. He practically dragged me up and out again, and along the top of the dyke. It was pitch black out there. You were due very soon, so it must have been November. I thought your dad had gone crazy.' And she'd told him so, in no uncertain terms, as she recalled. ‘I didn't know what it was at first: just this great, dark bulk in the tree. It looked really peculiar. But then he stood behind me, and put his chin on my shoulder, looking where I was looking and nodding at it. ‘‘It's a tree house,'' he said. ‘‘For our baby.'' '

For me
, Beth used to repeat, when she was small.
He built it for me
.

‘There were so many other things needing doing, in the house.' This part of the story she'd never told before. But Beth was twelve now – and more than half asleep. ‘I wanted him to paint the nursery – your bedroom, I mean. And the garden gate was off its hinges. It was a struggle to get through, even without a buggy. But, no: he decided you needed a tree house.'

‘A boy.'

Laura started; she had thought Beth asleep.

‘Dad. D'you think he – ' breathe ‘ – wanted a boy?'

‘He adored you. Adores you. He was so delighted when you came.' If Beth could only have seen him, seen them both; if she could remember those first few golden weeks. ‘He was like a little kid on Christmas morning.'

‘Alfie,' said Beth. ‘Jack. Roly.' Her eyes were still shut, her breathing steady and even. ‘He hasn't. Built one. For them.'

Soon afterwards, she slept. The battle to stay awake had worn her out, and she slipped back under the water. Once asleep, her breathing was easier; Laura watched it slow and grow shallower, the struggle for oxygen reduced now her body was in repose. Laura rose, but she wouldn't go back to her own bed tonight. Watch her closely, Dr Harrington had said, and she took him at his word. She went to fetch her own duvet.

In the silence which settled on the room, her daughter's slender breaths measured out a lullaby. Huddled by the radiator with the duvet tucked under her chin, she heard it sigh to a soft, insistent drumbeat: the rain on the slates of the roof. Only now, in the quiet, was she conscious of it but, as soon as it registered, she knew it had been there all along. All day and all evening: non-stop rain. The level in the lode must be dangerously high. She didn't recollect noticing it when they came in; she'd been intent on getting Beth inside. Beth's window faced the other way, out over the garden to the rear. Even in daylight she would see nothing there but the waterlogged lawn. So instead of looking out she lay back on Beth's beanbag and listened. The sound was oddly soothing: the regular patter of the rain itself and the heavier, drizzling chute of run-off from the eaves. It lulled her, until she could no longer distinguish the rain, or her daughter's breathing, or her own.

Sleep claimed her, and she dreamed her daughter's dream of rising water. It was she, now, beneath the surface of the ditch; she who let herself be gathered into the arms of the flood.

 

Pale grey daylight wakened her, slanting across her closed lids. She had gone to sleep without drawing the curtains. The first focus of her sluggish mind was the sound of Beth's breathing. Shallow – she must be still asleep – but looser and with a throaty rattle, which was a definite good sign. The next thing she noticed was the silence beyond the room. The rain had finally stopped.

She dragged apart her eyelids, wincing at the smart of morning. It must be early yet since the light was muted and had an opalescent quality. Where it fell on the paintwork to the side of the window it shimmered and shifted and swam in a way which caused Laura a pinch of unease. Something was different; something wasn't right.