Ninepins (11 page)

Still with the duvet drawn round over yesterday's clothes, she stood and moved to the window. Even then, realisation was not immediate. The sun was barely up so that, although the clouds had finally lifted and parted, the gleam they let in was weak and watery; the garden for the most part still lay deep in shadow. The pumphouse was a featureless bulk, only its chimney sharply outlined against the dawn sky; the lawn was a dark blank. But as her eyes adjusted she knew that something was wrong. The relationships of shape and height were all awry. The pumphouse was too low, too squat; the trees and bushes appeared foreshortened, the earth too high. As she continued to stare at the lawn, the matt black of sodden turf took on a different character: glassy, insolid. Her stomach lurched. Where she should be seeing grass, there was nothing but water.

Willow. With a glance to check Beth's breathing, and careful not to wake her, she slipped from the room and ran downstairs to the kitchen, grabbing her fleece and raincoat and wellingtons.

The water of the lode was black and angry but its swirling surface lay six inches below the top of the dyke. If it had come over the top last night, the way it had in 1947, then the levels must since have subsided with the abeyance of the rain. More likely, the electric pumps at the station on the main road had failed to cope with the quantities of water that had fallen, which had either forced its way back through the old pipework of the pumphouse, or simply risen up from saturated soil which could no longer absorb its volume.

From the top of the concrete steps she squinted down, counting those still visible above the flood. Sixteen. How many more steps there should be, she wasn't certain. Three, four? If so, that meant the water was maybe two feet deep – not too deep to negotiate on foot. The sky was lightening all the time, and she could see her way clearly, and see, too, the extent of the flooding, which stretched out beyond the hollow of her garden and across the field beyond, a silver-black parody of solid ground.

She had underestimated, but not enormously so. The water, when she edged her way down from the final submerged step, swept over the top of her boots and flooded her feet in icy liquid; it rose above her knees and up to the middle of her thighs, drenching her jeans and leaving her breathless with the shock of cold. Grey-brown and almost completely opaque, it swallowed her legs from sight. Its smell was not vegetable as she would have expected but faintly mineral, like rust. She took another step forward and almost fell. Balance was difficult even with arms outstretched. As she moved, the rubber of her wellingtons billowed against her shins, heavy with trapped water; she would have been better in trainers. Another step, feeling for the contours of the invisible turf. It would have been easier, she decided, if the water were deeper, if it were up to her waist; that way it would have held her weight, like walking in the shallow end of a swimming pool – except immeasurably colder.

It was perhaps fifteen yards to the pumphouse – little more than the width of a pool – but progress was painfully slow. Half way, she wondered whether, instead, she should have walked further along the dyke and tried to slither down to it that way. The old brick building lay in a slight depression, so that over the final few yards her footing fell away treacherously under the concealing tide. Twice, again, she almost slipped over. By the time she reached the door she was waist-deep in the flood. She tried the latch. It wouldn't budge; it must be either locked from the inside, or else jammed: swollen and distorted by the soak of water.

‘Willow?' she called, pounding with her fist against the upper portion of the wood. ‘Are you all right in there? Willow!'

Silence.

Turning cautiously, she edged her way round to the far side of the building, hugging the brickwork with the palm of one hand. The only window to this side was rectangular and small, no more than two feet by eighteen inches. In order to see in, she had to hoist herself half up out of the water by clinging on to the narrow ledge: a precarious operation. The catch was loose, the window resting closed by only its own weight. When she pulled herself up, she saw in clearly, or as clearly as the early morning light allowed. The inside of the pumphouse was awash, as deep in water as the garden outside. The bed was submerged. A chair lay drunkenly sideways in the wash, half grounded and half afloat. The water was thick with flotsam: clothing and magazines and shoes. But of Willow there was no sign.

Letting herself back down as slowly as she could and managing to keep her footing, Laura turned and looked about her. Up to this point she had acted without much of a conscious plan; her one thought had been to get to the pumphouse, to get to Willow. It made no sense for the place to be empty. She was suddenly quite at a loss.

Fetch help? Set up a search? Get back, first, to check on Beth, then call the emergency services. And say … what? That her lodger was AWOL, missing in the flood?

The door was stuck solid. Willow must have climbed out of the window to escape the rising tide. She must be somewhere safe, somewhere dry. Somewhere on higher ground. She must be, because the alternative was unthinkable.
That she was somewhere beneath the sucking blanket of wet
.

The cold was beginning to permeate now, soaking right through, it seemed, to her bones. Her hands, she saw with detachment, were shaking convulsively. Her shinbones ached dully and she wasn't certain she could feel her feet at all. And was it imagined, or was the level higher now than when she entered the flood?

Some place higher, some place out of the water.

‘Willow!' Her voice surprised her with its loudness but it failed to carry, damping quickly to nothing in the heavy air.

She scanned the top of the dyke, looking for the shape that hadn't been there before, the shape she knew couldn't possibly be there now. As her eye ran along it reached a different shape, and her heart missed a beat. The tree house.

Forcing her way through the few yards of water in the shortest time, she half stumbled, half threw herself against the ladder.
Be here, be here, be here
, drummed her own voice silently in her head; but the mantra was more to soothe her numbness of body than any real anxiety of mind. Somehow, she already knew.

She mounted the ladder, freeing her legs from the pull of the water, and soon her head emerged into the interior of the tree house. There, sitting in one corner of the bare planked floor, was Willow. With hands clasped tight round upraised knees and elbows out at angles, she seemed to be all bones.

‘Hi,' said Laura gently. ‘You had me scared half to death. Are you OK?'

Willow raised her face, which was streaked with runnels of dirt from what could have been rain or floodwater or tears. Her eyes were blankly dark, focused inwards the way Beth's had been during the asthma attack.

‘You must be freezing.' Laura pulled herself up to sit on the rim of the tree house floor; she peeled off her raincoat to pass around the girl, who sat unmoving and quite silent.

‘What's that?' she asked, for now that she was closer she saw that Willow was clasping something between her chest and knees. ‘You managed to rescue a few things, then?'

With a slow collapse of the shoulders, Willow let out the breath she had been holding; her grip slackened slightly on the object she held. Laura could make it out now: blue, rectangular and cardboard. It was a shoebox with a fitted lid.

‘Come on,' she said. ‘We need to get you indoors into a hot bath. I could do with one myself, as well.' She moved back to the ladder and stepped down a few treads, then reached to lend an arm to Willow. ‘Looks like you'll be moving into the spare room.'

The following Saturday, Vince came over for lunch again. This time it wasn't unpacking he was helping with but salvage operations. Apart from one further expedition into the flood on that first day to save what they could of value and importance, they had not ventured down to the pumphouse again for almost a week. The water had taken an age to subside. For a day or so, although the rain had ceased, the flood continued to rise, and even when it began at last to ebb away, it did so with inexorable slowness. And it left behind wherever it had been a fine coating of silt, filthy black and stinking of ditches.

Beth's breathing had gradually trickled back to normal. She'd spent the weekend propped up in bed, or else installed in state upon the settee with Laura in hovering attendance. Willow had come through her own adventure apparently unscathed, but it entitled her to a blanket, too, and to keep Beth company watching daytime TV. After the one treatment, Beth didn't need the nebuliser again; with just her inhaler and a high-dose course of oral steroids, she seemed to have turned the corner. By Sunday afternoon she could make the walk to the sitting room window to gaze at the flooded garden without taking more than one rest. On Monday, Laura went in to work for half a day, and left the two of them together. On Wednesday Beth went back to school.

She still wasn't fit enough for lifting and carrying, but Laura allowed her down to the pumphouse to help retrieve and sift. All afternoon, or so it seemed, Vince and Willow had been hauling furniture and bedding up to the house, and black dustbin bags full of Willow's things, with Beth under strict instructions only to watch. Up at the house, Laura was on washing duty. The washing machine and dryer had been running constantly. Even on the hottest wash and with double the usual quantity of fabric softener, the clothes came out still reeking; she put them all through twice. By four o'clock, when dusk brought down a halt upon the work, the pumphouse was declared cleared. All round the house, every rack and radiator was draped with drying clothes and sheets and pillows, or propped with books, splay-paged. An odour of cloying damp pervaded the air. It couldn't be doing Beth's asthma any good at all.

As darkness fell beyond the windows, the recovery party, after a thorough wash and scrub up, gathered round the kitchen table for a mug of tea.

‘Is there much that can't be rescued?' asked Laura, as she placed their drinks before them and sat down.

‘A fair bit.' It was Vince who answered, with a glance at Willow. ‘We've bagged up five or six bin liners down there of stuff that's for the tip.'

‘Some of it's disgusting,' said Beth, with pleasurable satisfaction. ‘Just totally slimy and stinky and revolting. Seriously, you should see it. You should
smell
it.'

Laura grinned and wrinkled her nose. ‘I rather think I still can.

‘God, yes. Sorry about that,' said Vince, raising one sleeve to his nose. ‘I think we're all going to need a good shower.'

‘It's oozing out of the bottom of the bin bags,' continued Beth. ‘They're all squidgy underneath when you lift them up.'

‘I hope you haven't been lifting them,' said Laura quickly.

‘ 'Course I haven't!'

‘Has she?' She looked at Vince, who smiled at Beth.

‘ 'Course she hasn't.'

‘It's going to make a horrible mess in the car, Mum. Those slimy bags.'

‘Don't worry.' Vince waved a hand. ‘I'll do it. I can stick it all in the boot when I go, and take it to the tip in the morning.'

‘Oh, no. Really, I can easily – '

‘My car's filthy already. You've seen it – old rustbucket. And the inside's even worse. A bit more mud will scarcely make a difference.'

With a nod, Laura capitulated. Then she turned to Willow. ‘You must make me a list. For the insurance. A list of all the things you've lost or that are damaged and need replacing. It should be covered on the contents insurance – I've checked, and they seemed to think it was.'

Willow's nose was buried in her mug. ‘None of it's worth anything.'

‘What about your stereo?' said Vince gently. ‘And the CDs?'

‘She had
loads
of CDs, Mum. At least thirty.'

‘And I thought you'd lost your mobile, too?' added Laura.

‘Oh, she found that,' said Beth. ‘It was in the pocket of this pair of jeans, under the bed, but they were all wrecked and the phone was wrecked, too, even after Vince wiped it clean. Totally knackered.'

‘Clothes, too.' Laura was looking at Willow. ‘And shoes. We can claim for all of it, if you just make me a list.'

She didn't raise her eyes. ‘It was only old stuff.'

‘But it still costs money to replace, doesn't it? You'll need new things.' Willow had been wearing one hoody and one pair of jeans for a week; Beth had lent her a T shirt, and goodness knows what she was doing for underwear.

‘What about your box?' Beth indicated the shelf at the back of the Rayburn, where the blue cardboard shoebox had been slowly desiccating since it came down, with Willow, from the tree house. ‘Is it dry now, d'you think? What's in there, anyway?'

Laura looked at Willow and hoped her curiosity didn't show too much. She'd passed the box fifty times and resisted the temptation to lift the lid.

‘Oh, nothing much. Just some old photos and things.'

Beth stared at her. ‘Of before, you mean – when you were little?'

The dismissive shrug did not deter her.

‘Have you got pictures of your mum in there? Can I see?'

‘
Beth!
'

‘ 'S'OK,' said Willow. ‘Show you later, if you want.'

There was a short pause. Then Vince, who had been leaning back in his chair, sat forward and faced Willow. ‘I wish you'd let me make you a life story book. We could do it together.'

The girl's eyes slanted away; it was clearly a discussion they'd had before.

‘I'm not a child. I'm not some five-year-old you're preparing for adoption.'

‘It would still be – '

‘It's my life, Vince.' Her eyes rose, green and sharp. ‘I've lived it, remember? I'm still bloody living it. I don't need it sticking in some book.'

In the awkward silence which followed, Laura rose to refill the kettle in case anyone wanted a top-up.
But still
, she thought,
it was the shoebox you chose to save from the flood
.