Ninepins (24 page)

 

Psychiatric hospitals reminded Willow in many ways of children's homes. They shared a particular kind of forced informality, a disorder which meant that it was hard to tell residents from visitors or staff. Of course, the chaos was only surface deep; neither place could ever quite shed the odour of the institution. Here, beneath the sunshine and floor polish, lurked the sour tang of vomit.

At least in the bin you could tell the kids – or, anyway, the younger ones – because they were kids. And most of them washed themselves, sometimes compulsively, even the boys. Cheap supermarket aftershave, on the whole, she decided, was a better smell than armpit stains.

The ward which housed her mother was hardly a ward in the usual sense at all, but a low, single storey building set apart from the main complex. It was quite a walk from where the bus dropped her, past chess squares of car park and lawn, where skinny trees were lashed to stakes with bands of orange plastic. Willow had imagined rows of metal-framed beds, or at least shared rooms and a hospital feeling, as there'd been on the acute admission ward where she and Vince had left her mother on Sunday afternoon. But inside Stanforth House, opening off the central television lounge, were corridors of single rooms behind unnumbered doors.

‘Marianne Tyler?' A woman who might or might not work there had checked a chart on the wall. ‘She's in room 8. Down the end, turn right, second door on the left.'

Maybe the numbers were removed in some hopeless attempt to create a family atmosphere – or perhaps to confound the enemy, in paranoid delusion. The most it was likely to do, in reality, was further disorientate the already confused. At the bin, they'd all had numbers.

In room 8 her mother was asleep. She was fully clothed, including boots, and a dressing gown over her jeans and jumper in spite of the overheated room. The bed was pushed up against the wall and she was curled on her side, knees tucked and face to the pale yellow paintwork, where scuffs and scrapes suggested the moving of furniture, making Willow think vaguely of barricades. There was almost no furniture in the room now: just the bed and a tiny chest of drawers. On the back of the door hung a red dress that Willow thought she might remember. Everything else was strange.

She looked completely out of it. Willow wondered if the drugs always made her tired in the daytime, or whether they might have changed her medication since Sunday's jaunt, or upped her dosages. The doctors might tell her, she supposed, if she could find one to ask – even though she wasn't eighteen yet, nor living with the patient. She didn't really know; she didn't want to know.

There was no chair, so she sat down on the scratchy carpet and crossed her legs. That was how Mum used to sit sometimes when she was all right, cross-legged by Willow's bed with the story book on her lap like any ordinary mother. It was always the same book, at least in Willow's memory: the
Bumper Book of Fairy Tales
, bound in stiff board, with a grinning green dragon on the front. The stories Willow remembered were anything but ordinary. They twined and tangled round her bed like real, live witchcraft, thick with fantastical creatures, and transformations, and shifting, formless terrors. Willow was too young to read, then. It was only later that she came to know that the angels and demons her mother had summoned, the smoke and fire and ice and flood, lay nowhere in the pages of the book.

It was later, too, much later, that she saw how her mother was not like other children's. She was extraordinary. Often she was wonderful, magical, intoxicating. But there was one thing she never was, there was one thing that Willow had never felt with her, not once. She'd never just felt safe.

Beth remained subdued and uncommunicative all that week and the next, spurning suggested half term outings and sticking largely to her room, or Willow's. Quite unprecedentedly, she even ducked out of her scheduled visit to Simon's house at the weekend, pleading stomach cramps which Laura was convinced were psychosomatic, if not entirely fabricated. She might have bounced her into going, but decided to take pity on the child. Give her more time, she told herself. Vince stayed away, too; he neither rang nor dropped round to the house. No doubt he was giving them all some time and space – though Willow saw him as usual, on Friday at his office. Laura was surprised how much she missed having him to talk to.

Given her daughter's fragile state, Laura didn't like to raise the question of inviting Alice for supper again. But on the Tuesday after half term, the issue was swung for them by Mrs Farrell, the science teacher, who decreed that the class should prepare PowerPoint presentations on the life cycle of the woodlouse for their homework, and that for this purpose they should work in pairs.

‘Alice says, can we do it at ours, please? Her brother always hogs the computer at their house, stuck in the World of Warcraft.'

They were there already when Laura arrived home on Wednesday, having taken the bus together. The old desktop PC that was kept for Beth's use lived on a side table in the sitting room; she heard the giggling from that direction as soon as she entered the hall.

‘Hello, love. Hello, Alice. Sounds as if you're having fun with those woodlice.'

‘Hello, Mrs Blackwood.' Alice was always polite.

‘Look at them when they've just hatched, Mum. We got this off Google images. Isn't it
gruesome
?'

Something almost transparent, with an orange head and fragile spindly legs, stared out at Laura from the screen, like a cross between a maggot and an uncooked prawn. Underneath, one of the young biologists had typed the helpful words: BABY WOODLOUSE.

‘Not ‘‘hatched'',' said Alice, the literalist. ‘It's just come out of its mother's pouch. Like a kangaroo. And they grow by shedding their skins.'

‘Yeah. Like snakes.' Beth was examining the screen again, with prurient pleasure. ‘They're disgusting. Look, you can actually see their insides.'

Laura ruffled her daughter's hair. ‘Shrimps for supper, then. Hope that's all right with you girls?' She left the room to the sound of two very gratifying squeals.

In fact, they had spaghetti Bolognese. They called Willow, who emerged from upstairs with her nose in a paperback and spoke scarcely two words during supper. Afterwards she disappeared again with her book, while the kids headed back to the computer, and Facebook. It was a mystery to Laura, who had grown up with strict limits on midweek telephoning and no other communication medium to hand, how girls who spent all day at school talking to their friends, could yet feel the need to chat to them again all evening online.

Laura made a coffee for herself using the small Italian percolator that she rarely had out. At the back of the cupboard she found a bar of chocolate-coated marzipan left over from Christmas, which she unwrapped and cut into slices. With the marzipan in one hand and her coffee cup in the other, she returned to the sitting room.

The PC was still switched on, but the screen had reverted to an energy-saving blank. Social networking abandoned, Beth and Alice had also reverted: in their case to the age of six, by all appearances. They lay side by side on their stomachs on the carpet, emitting strange, snuffling, snorting noises, interspersed with volleys of laughter.

‘What on earth …?'

‘We're baby woodlice.' Beth wriggled her feet gleefully in the air behind her.

Alice was humping and writhing like a dyspeptic sea lion. ‘I'm shedding my skin. Only it's got stuck.'

‘I'll help!' cried Beth, and flung herself upon her friend and began to tickle her, and soon they were rolling in a helpless, giggling heap.

Laura stood over them, smiling. ‘Do woodlice like marzipan?'

They drove Alice home soon afterwards, through Elswell village and out the other side to the cluster of whitewashed buildings on the Longfenton road where Mr Seabourn farmed.

‘Thank you for having me,' said Alice, then, over her shoulder, ‘Bye, Beth,' and she ran towards the door, where her mother raised a hand from the step.

All the way back in the car, Laura listened with satisfied half-attention to her daughter's jabber, about Mrs Farrell and school and marsupial bugs and tomorrow's packed lunch. It gave her quiet pleasure to hear her talk that way, without self-consciousness – and laugh again, as she'd been laughing with Alice on the sitting room floor – for the first time in more than a fortnight.

It was nearly nine when they reached the house. Laura mentioned the bath, but didn't press the point in the face of Beth's protestations.

‘I just want to go back on Facebook a minute. Please, Mum – I won't be long, I promise. I only want to say g'night to Alice. And I thought of something I forgot to say to her.'

So Laura subsided into the settee and flicked on the TV news. A car bomb attack in Karachi flooded the surface of her mind. The unimpassioned voice of a translator only half masked the hand-wringing wail of a headscarfed woman: her sister and two nephews, missing in the mêlée. But presently, in another layer of consciousness, Laura registered a silence behind her. The tapping at the keyboard had ceased. She glanced round, saw Beth's rigid back, and knew instantly that something was amiss.

‘What is it?' she asked, rising to move across the room. There was no reply. But as she neared the computer, Laura caught a glimpse of the screen before her daughter hit ‘delete'. Next to the box containing the short, illegible message was the photograph of the sender. With the hard shell of make-up and the glamour model pout, she would pass for twenty-five, but the steely blonde hair was unmistakable. Rianna.

‘Beth, what was that? What was she saying to you?'

‘Nothing.'

‘But then why did you delete it, love? Why not let me see?'

‘Honestly, it's nothing. Just a stupid wall post. No big deal.'

Laura strove to master her fury against Rianna, and her own impatient curiosity. She spoke gently, one hand on her daughter's shoulder. ‘Was she saying something nasty to you – or about you? You know you can tell me, sweetheart.'

Beth shot her an agonised, sidelong glance. ‘Mum, please don't. I told you, it's stupid, it doesn't matter.'

‘Of course it matters. It matters to me. If anyone is picking on you, or being mean, then – '

‘Shut up!' Shrugging the hand from her shoulder, Beth stood up, the movement so violent that her chair toppled and fell backwards on to the carpet, bashing Laura's shin on the way down. ‘Stop it, Mum, for God's sake. Just leave it alone, OK? You always have to bloody interfere. Why can't you ever just leave things alone?'

She kept her face averted, so that Laura couldn't see if there were tears, but there was something blind about her progress as she stumbled from the room.

Righting the chair, Laura sat down at the monitor and stared at it for a long moment, her mind as empty as the blank, grey screen. Then she pressed the space bar to kick it back to life. Up came the screensaver: an oceanscape, the glistening wall of water topped with leaping dolphins, chosen by Beth last summer during a craze for marine mammals. Laura clicked the Safari icon, and selected ‘history'.

 

Home-made pizza was the solution that Laura hit upon. Beth had never been able to resist the allure of the floury work surface, pounding two-fisted at the squidgy dough, then stretching it out into rounds in the air, as she used to love to watch them do behind the counter in Pizza Express. She was persuaded to brave the overdue visit to her father's house at the weekend by the promise of pizza-making for Sunday supper on her return. They would make a party of it; they could all do with some cheering up. Alice was invited but had to turn them down, having a great-aunt's seventieth to attend over near Bury St Edmunds. Then Ellie was going to come, until her mother rang on Sunday morning to say she was down with a nasty cold, and shouldn't be spreading it about. Laura swore as she replaced the phone; Beth would be disappointed when she got home, if it was just the three of them after all. There was nothing for it but to call Vince; Beth was always pleased to see Vince.

Laura made the dough in the afternoon. She made a big batch of tomato sauce, and assembled all the toppings. Simon ran Beth home, for once, although his motives may not have been entirely altruistic, since it was just at the boys' bath- and bed-time. They were slightly later than he'd said – not unusual for Simon – and Vince had arrived before them. He had left his car behind for once and come by bus, bearing wine and declaring the intention of taking a taxi home. He and Willow were already aproned and scrubbed to the elbows when Simon and Beth came in. Laura was laughing and clattering pastry boards and heard neither the car nor Beth's key in the front door; she caught sight of Beth in the kitchen doorway, with Simon at her shoulder, just as Vince, in retaliatory action, was lunging at Willow with floured hands and dabbing her on the nose.

‘Hello, there. Are we interrupting something?' said Simon, with brows raised infuriatingly at Laura, who, vexed at herself for being flustered, effected the introduction.

‘Simon – Vince.' She wished she hadn't felt the need to add, ‘Vince is Willow's social worker.'

She felt uncomfortable, too, when he looked round her kitchen that way – the kitchen that used to be his, too. So she said, ‘How's Alfie?'

‘Absolutely back to normal now. You know how it is with kids. They're ill, but it leaves you more knackered than it does them.'

Beth circled the table, casting off coat and scarf and staring at the row of whitened boards on the worktop. ‘You started without me. Why did you start without me?'

‘Oh dear, I'm sorry, love. But we hadn't really got going, we were just getting things ready.'

‘Hmph.' She didn't sound ready to be mollified so easily, until Vince dabbed her nose, too, and said, ‘Here, we were just going to divide up the dough. Why don't you take a lump and show me what to do?'