Ninepins (12 page)

Presently, Beth headed off upstairs, announcing her intention of having a bath.

‘Can you wash my jumper, please, Mum, if I stick it in the basket? It stinks like toilets, and fish, and old cabbage.'

When she'd gone, Laura found a torch and they went down into the dark garden to load the rubbish into Vince's car. As Beth had warned, foul black liquid had soaked its way to the bottoms of the bags, which left a glittering trail when moved, like some kind of monstrous slugs. Laura brought old newspapers to line the car boot, but they were quickly sodden.

‘It's going to leave an interesting smell,' said Vince, as he banged the boot shut. ‘When I have clients in here, they're going to think I have issues with personal hygiene.'

Another cup of tea, and Vince had twice said he ought to think about getting on the road, when Beth came back down. Laura had expected her dressing gown, at least over her clothes. All week, she'd been treating her convalescence as an excuse to wear it at any hour: after school, before supper. But she was fully dressed in her favourite skirt, and even wearing tights.

‘Hello, love. You look nice. Good to feel clean again?'

‘Mm.' Her eyes were fixed on her feet. But she always did hate compliments, especially public ones.

‘Very chic,' said Vince, making it worse.

‘What do you fancy for supper? Willow, I assume you're staying for supper? And Vince, are you sure we can't persuade you?'

He smiled and shook his head. ‘Stop tempting me. It's much too comfortable here. At this rate it'll be me moving into your spare room next.'

‘Chilli,' she suggested. ‘That will warm us all up. I've got some mince I can defrost.'

‘Devil,' said Vince. ‘Begone with your wicked lures.'

‘Why don't you help me, Beth? And Willow, too, if you like? Beth is a dab hand at chilli.'

‘I'm not really hungry.'

Laura frowned. Her daughter's voice still sounded scratchy; using the inhaler frequently over a prolonged period always left her throat strafed and sore.

‘Are you feeling all right, sweetheart? Maybe you ought to go and have a sit down in the sitting room, while I cook?' She hoped Beth hadn't overdone it today. Her face was pale, even after the hot water. But, oddly, it looked as if she had put on mascara. And some of her raspberry lip gloss.

‘No. It's all right. I'm going out.'

She said it with perfectly rehearsed casualness; the effect was weakened only by her gaze fixing not on Laura but on the wall somewhere behind her right shoulder.

‘You're doing what?' Laura, conscious of playing a part in turn, wished her voice hadn't risen at the end on that shrill tone.

‘Going out, if that's OK.'

So many objections crowded into Laura's head; she focused upon the most immediate. ‘Without anything to eat?'

‘There isn't time. I'm meeting Caitlin and Rianna at seven, and I've got to get the bus. There's a party at this boy's house in Longfenton. There'll probably be something there, crisps and stuff, if I'm hungry.'

So many questions, too. ‘What boy?'

‘Oh, just a boy in Year 9. He's called Joe, I think.'

‘Joe, you
think
.' The shrill note again. ‘And do you even have his address?'

‘Rianna does.'

‘Oh, great. So, Rianna will know where you are. But I won't.'

‘I'll take my mobile. I recharged it.'

‘And are you invited to this party? Does Joe's mother know you're coming?'

The eyes rolled, just a little. ‘It's not that sort of party. He doesn't mind – Rianna said. Anyone can go.'

‘
No.
' She didn't say it loudly, she certainly didn't shout, but all three of them looked at her: Vince, Willow and – now, finally – Beth. ‘You're not well. You've been really sick, and you're still weak, still not back to normal. I don't want you going out on a cold evening, on the bus by yourself, without my even knowing where you're going or if you'll be welcome there. If you want to go out, you ask me beforehand. We arrange it. I could have driven you in – if you'd been well enough to go, that is.'

Beth's focus had dropped back to the floor and she was looking truculent. ‘I didn't know beforehand. Rianna only texted me this afternoon.'

‘Well, I'm sorry, but you're not going out. You'll have to text Rianna back and apologise. Tell her that you can't come.'

‘It's not fair.' Beth was kicking her toe against the corner of a kitchen unit. ‘You never let me do anything. Like come home on the bus, or go out, or have any fun. Just because of my stupid asthma.'

‘It isn't just because – '

‘You treat me like a little kid. And anyway, I've
told
them I'm going. So now they're going to think I'm a baby who's not allowed out.'

‘I'm sorry, love, but my mind's made up. You can't go.'

A brief silence descended on the room. Trying to forget about Vince and Willow, Laura kept her eyes determinedly on her daughter.

Then, quietly, Beth spoke. ‘You can't tell me what to do.'

It was said neither in open defiance nor for effect, exactly, in spite of the audience. It was more as if she were trying it out for sound. Experimenting.

There were a lot of answers Laura might have given.
My house, my rules. You're twelve
. But she just kept silent and held her ground.

It was Beth who turned away first. ‘C'mon, Willow. Let's go to your room. You can show me your photos.' She went across to the Rayburn, reached behind and picked up the blue shoebox, then headed for the stairs.

With a glance at Vince but not at Laura, Willow rose and followed her from the room. Under the table, Laura steadied her hands by wrapping them tightly together.

‘Leave her.' Vince's voice was gentle. It ought to feel good, having another adult for reinforcement, to validate her decisions. Instead, she found it unexpectedly irksome to be told what she already knew.

‘Yes. She always comes round quickly enough. She's a good girl.'

‘She is.' He was nodding seriously, seeking her eye. ‘She's a sweet kid. Open and spontaneous, and friendly and helpful. Clever, too.'

Laura blinked at him. Of course she never tired of hearing her daughter praised, but … she sensed there was a ‘but'.

‘Doesn't mean it isn't hard, though.'

For a moment she stared, attempting to locate her own feelings. Then she unwound a notch, unknotted her hands. ‘It is. Sometimes it's bloody hard.'

‘It must be. On your own.' He did this thing, this earnest thing, where he looked from one of her eyes to the other. It made her feel strangely exposed. ‘Laura, I hope you don't mind if I say something?'

He paused; she frowned and waited.

‘Do you think maybe, sometimes, you might let go a bit?'

She did mind. It was a damned cheek.

‘Not on this one, perhaps. I'm not saying you weren't quite right, this time. But there's nothing wrong with cutting some slack – for yourself as well as her.'

Laura stared at him. Who was he, to butt in on her life? A stranger. Worse than that, a professional stranger, with a head full of social work textbooks. What right had he to assume he knew anything about her – about her and Beth?

As she continued to stare, she felt, to her horror, a dry prickling invade her eyes. She closed them, swallowed, tried to pull herself together. When she opened them again, Vince was still regarding her steadily.

Weary all at once, the abdication of responsibility was suddenly an attractive proposition. She let her chin slump into cupped palms.
Cut some slack.
Let go
.

‘You're probably right,' she said.

 

By the following weekend, friendly relations between Laura and Beth were restored. On Friday night, Beth went to Simon's straight from school, and Laura picked her up and brought her home on Sunday afternoon to tea and home-made mince pies – the first of the season.

‘Seriously good pies, Mum,' said Beth through a mouthful of rich butter pastry. ‘Really – they're legendary. Can I have another?'

December having begun, there was a perfect excuse for such indulgences, and then to spend the evening cutting sheets of paper from Laura's printer tray into snowflakes for the windows. Willow, who had joined them for supper, stayed to help, and her snowflakes were the best of all: meticulous confections of fine filigree. By nine, the kitchen looked as if it had witnessed the passing of a ticker tape parade.

Beth was almost off her inhaler, now, during the day, but she still wasn't sleeping well, so Laura packed her off to bath and bed while she and Willow swept the floor. All round the downstairs, she left the curtains open wide, to set off the clustering white circles against the night outside. The effect was striking; it should have been festive, but instead it set her shivering and sent her upstairs in search of her daughter's bedroom and story-time warmth.

She was already in bed, sitting up, with the duvet tucked round concertinaed knees.

‘I've had pie twice today,' she announced. ‘Except, the first time it wasn't, exactly.'

Laura shifted Beth's feet over a little and perched herself beside them.

‘Tess was making chicken pie for lunch and she left the top on the table, all rolled out ready, and went off to the loo because Roly had got himself in a mess, and when she came back Dougie had grabbed it was eating it on the floor. She must have left it near the edge, or he climbed up on a chair. He's very clever.'

‘So you had pie without the top? A sort of chicken tart?'

‘Worse than that.' Beth's eyes narrowed and her top lip curled in disgust. ‘Dad got it off him and picked the bits off. He said it looked OK, and he got Alfie and Jack to cut circles from the best part with a cutter, like for jam tarts. Then he sort of arranged them on the top to cover up some of the filling. He called it a gobbler or something.'

‘Cobbler,' said Laura, smiling. Simon's mother used to make blackberry and apple cobbler; she made one the very first Sunday he'd taken Laura home for lunch.

‘Honestly, they're so unhygienic. I'm amazed they don't all get dysentery and diarrhoea and yellow fever.' She hunched the duvet up higher round her shoulders and closed her eyes. ‘It was really nice, though. And we had sprouts with it.'

Laura went to bed herself at half past ten. It cannot have been long afterwards – it felt like mere moments – that she woke to the sound of her daughter's coughing. Dragging on her dressing gown, she padded along the landing in bare feet, stopping at the bathroom cabinet for the bottle of throat linctus. It was always this way in the weeks following an attack, the same vicious circle: the coughing which left her short of breath, the inhaler which settled her breathing but inflamed her cough.

‘Here. Sit up a bit, sweetheart. Don't spill it.'

First the syrup to settle the coughing, then the inhaler to open her lungs.

‘Were you asleep, Mum?'

‘Not really,' she lied. ‘Shall I bring you some cough sweets to suck?'

‘What sort are they?'

‘The green ones. Menthol and eucalyptus, I think.'

Beth grimaced. ‘No, I'm fine.' She took the inhaler from Laura and had her second puff, then lay back against the pillows. ‘Drama tomorrow. We're starting these sketch things and we have to be in pairs. Rianna said she'd be with me, but then Caitlin was in a horrible strop about it, so now I don't know. Do you think he'll let us go in a three?'

Laura blinked but didn't answer. Her attention had switched, and Beth's switched presently, too, to a noise from downstairs. A banging at the front door.

‘What's that?' said Beth.

Laura looked at her watch: almost eleven forty-five. ‘Probably just the wind,' she said, tucking the duvet closer about her daughter's legs. Beyond the paper snowflakes, the night had been frosty, clear and still. But nobody came calling at Ninepins unannounced, and certainly not at night. They had heard no vehicle.

A moment later the banging resumed, now with some urgency.

‘I'd better go and look,' said Laura. ‘You stay here.'

Tightening the cord of her dressing gown she descended the stairs in semi-darkness, suppressing a bubble of fear. Surely bad news came by telephone, not knocking on the door? There was no police car, no blue flashing light. And Beth was here safely with her.

She clicked on the hall light. The knocking had stopped for the moment and, in the space it left, she caught the sound of movement on the landing. Beth stood at the top of the stairs, pale and squinting.

‘I told you to stay in bed,' said Laura, half-heartedly, but her daughter was already on her way down.

‘I want to see who it is.'

Just as they drew near the door, it came again: three abrupt, insistent thuds. Laura pulled back the catch.

The woman who stood on the step was unknown to her. Not very old, early thirties or so, she was oddly dressed – at least for a chilly winter night – in a cotton shift dress, red, with a bold, hippy print. The sleeves of a loose-knit sweater were pushed back and emphasised the thinness of her arms, one of which was still raised, knuckles clenched, towards the doorway. Below the hem of her dress, bare shins emerged from a pair unlaced biker boots that looked several sizes too large.

‘Hello?' said Laura. When the woman did not respond, she tried again. ‘Can I help you?'

Slowly, the caller lowered her arm, until it hovered at waist height, still awkwardly extended. ‘Ninepins.' She pronounced the word cautiously, as if she were speaking a foreign language, though her accent was neutral, south-east. Then she lapsed back into silence.

Laura smiled an encouragement she didn't feel. ‘That's right. This is Ninepins. This is my house. Who were you looking for?'