Ninepins (29 page)

‘Oh, she thought it was hilarious. She's convinced it's only for people under twenty. But she made me a Friend. She said otherwise I'd have no mates and look like a loser.'

‘Ah – sweet, innocent child.'

Laura looked at him. ‘Why?'

‘I see she isn't the only one who's sweet and innocent. Because Friends have access to everything on one's Facebook page. You'll be able to see all her embarrassing ramblings, her seditious slanders, her debauched photographs.'

Debauched?
‘Vince, she's twelve.'

‘And twelve-year-olds don't have anything they wouldn't want their mother to see?'

No doubt she was frowning, because he said, ‘Don't worry. I can't imagine Beth with any terrible, dark secrets. I expect it's all about question 12 in the maths homework and how big the art teacher's bum is. At the very worst, it'll be which boy they're all fancying this week.'

‘I suppose so.'

‘There is one thing, though.' He rose from his chair. ‘It's like listening at keyholes. Not everything you discover may be to your advantage.'

With a guilty lurch she thought of the spare room door.

‘Come on,' he said, ‘let's go and put on that coffee.'

Installed at the breakfast bar, and with a cup to occupy her hands, things became easier again. While she speculated about the girls, and what magpie pickings they would come back with from town, he pulled the other stool round opposite her, elbow to elbow across the laminate. His coffee was good, strong and smoky.

When smalltalk lulled, Vince laid down his cup and said, ‘Marianne was undiagnosed.' He was looking unwaveringly at Laura, who held her breath and said nothing. Was this the apology? The concession to friendship? ‘When Willow was living with her, she wasn't known to the mental health services. Her condition hadn't come to light.'

He stopped there, so she edged her way gingerly to a question. ‘Does that mean she wasn't so ill then, perhaps? When Willow was little, she may have been all right?'

But he shook his head. ‘Unlikely, as I understand it. Not with her symptoms the way they are now. They're likely to have been with her always – probably since she was a teenager herself. There are blanks there unexplained by bipolar disorder, suggesting long-term damage. Drug use, perhaps, when she was young.'

‘Well, then, how – ?' She hesitated, but his face signalled encouragement, so she said, ‘It's hard to imagine how she'd have managed, that's all, with a child, and her illness. With no support, no medication. How she'd cope.'

He smiled faintly. ‘It's surprising how people do manage.'

‘But also,' she persevered, ‘it's so strange that nobody noticed how things were. I don't know … the school, the GP?'

‘They moved around a lot. Willow may not have been in schools for long at a time – or sometimes not at all. And I don't think Marianne ever went to the doctor. Willow was seen, for the usual childhood things – earaches, rashes, minor ailments. Marianne took her to the surgery or other people did. Friends. She seems to have had a lot of friends, and stayed with them. Maybe they helped her with Willow, even took her off her hands for spells. But Marianne never saw a doctor herself.'

‘But that's awful. Someone as sick as she is, I mean, slipping through all the nets like that.'

‘It happens,' he said simply. ‘Marianne and her friends were mobile, probably suspicious of authority, a lot of them. Hard to pin down. An alternative lifestyle will cover a multitude of sins.' Then he grinned. ‘Bloody hippies.'

But Laura wasn't ready to laugh. ‘What about the child? What about Willow? With children, there should be tabs kept, surely? The health visitor, for a start, when she was a baby.'

‘I think …' He was frowning now, no longer making that training-manual eye contact of his, but staring down at her hands where they circled her coffee cup. She wondered if, as she did, he saw the newspaper photographs, the litany of names: Victoria Climbié, Baby P. ‘I think,' he resumed at length, ‘you can never underestimate the resource of a mother in shielding her child. It's amazing what even the most apparently dysfunctional parents can do, if think their child may be taken away. Perhaps when there were visits from the health visitor or the practice nurse, or headteachers to talk to, Marianne managed to get her act together. For all we know, in fact, she may have done a pretty good job of looking after Willow, even while she was neglecting herself.'

‘Is that what Willow says?'

He didn't reply at first, and she was afraid she had pushed too hard. But then he looked up at her, and his answer had the ring of candour. ‘She doesn't say much. She's very loyal.'

‘I bet she is,' she said, surprised by an upsurge of anger. ‘So basically, Marianne hid from the doctors who could have helped her, and Willow was left to run wild and play truant.' Reminded of the abandoned courses at the Regional College, she felt a twinge of guilt towards Vince, but rapidly suppressed it. ‘To play truant,' she repeated, ‘and worse than that, in the end.'

But something of the old, guarded manner had come back over Vince; he became again his professional self. ‘It's hard to judge these things from the outside,' was all he said; then, signalling an end to further confidences, ‘More coffee?'

As he was pouring it, the entryphone buzzed and he put down the percolator to go to the door. Hellos in the hallway, Vince's and Willow's, and then they were in the kitchen. Beth swept past Vince to deposit a carrier bag in front of Laura on the breakfast bar.

‘Willow got a T shirt,' she announced. ‘A black one, with long sleeves and a hood and it was only ten pounds. Show her, Willow. It's really cool. And I got some sparkly bangles from Accessorize. They came in a set, six of them for eight pounds.' She pulled them out, still joined by the plastic tag, and slid them up her wrist, jingling them in evident satisfaction.

‘And look.' She rummaged in the bag and drew out a flat parcel of white tissue paper, folded to a square and sealed with Sellotape. ‘This is just the best. Willow bought it for me with her own money. She really wanted to – that is OK, isn't it, Mum? It was on this stall in the Grafton Centre, next to that African one that's always there, where I got my wooden elephant.' As she spoke, she was carefully unfolding the tissue paper, layer by layer. ‘It was mostly a bit New Agey for me – crystals, you know, and CDs of whales moaning and stuff. Though they did have some nice dolphin earrings. But then Willow spotted this, and said I had to have it, and she was right. It's perfect.'

‘This' was revealed to a necklace; or rather, it was a pendant on a fine string of plaited red cotton. The pendant itself was small, about the size of a ten pence piece, and resembled a blazing sun.

‘It wards off evil spirits, apparently, the lady said. That's what the mirror's for. She had loads of things with little mirrors on – bags and purses, as well as jewellery – and all of it's for getting rid of spirits. It reflects back the evil, she said.' Beth twisted the pendant round so it caught the light, like ice in car headlamps. ‘Isn't it gorgeous?'

Around the perimeter of the mirror were tiny tongues of wire-framed glass in orange and red and gold. As Laura watched, they trapped the light and seemed to come alive, curling and licking outwards like so many dancing flames.

‘Mum, can I bike to school tomorrow?'

Laura, who had half her mind on the benefits of sustainable woodland management for the local economy and the other on the pan of water coming up to the boil behind her, adopted the parental default position of equivocation. ‘Why?'

‘Because I've hardly used my new bike since I got it because it was winter, but now it's spring, and it'll be fun and
everyone
cycles.'

Putting down her pen, Laura looked up properly at her daughter and smiled. ‘Not many reasons at all, then?'

It was true that since a couple of weekend try-outs soon after Beth's birthday, the much-coveted bicycle had scarcely been out of the shed. And the weather had been fine this week, the few clouds mobile and high-riding, sharp-edged as in a child's drawing, white against a sky of brilliant blue.

‘I thought I'd ride along the lode. It's much shorter than by road.'

‘Really? Won't it be filthy? Everything's still so wet out there – the garden's a bog. You don't want to arrive at school all covered in mud, do you? Or the bike either, for that matter, when it's so new.'

‘I meant the path on the top of the dyke. It's not too muddy up there.'

‘Well, I don't know.' The pan was boiling now; Laura rose from the table and picked up the packet of spaghetti, sliding out a fat handful. She slipped it into the rolling water, pushing down on the ends until it disappeared beneath the foam. ‘It's pretty slippery,' she said, ‘and the banks are steep.'

‘Mum, I'm not eight. I'm not going to wobble off my bike and fall in the lode.'

Laura, who had been picturing more or less exactly that, shot Beth a grin through the cloud of starchy steam. ‘All right. But it's pretty lonely along there, too. Suppose you had an asthma attack?'

It wasn't a fanciful fear; Beth had sometimes had attacks triggered by exercise or exertion. In a public place, on the road, there would always be someone who'd stop and help, someone with a car.

‘I'll have my inhaler with me, won't I? And my mobile.'

‘What good is a mobile, along that footpath? The ambulance couldn't – '

‘
Ambulance
? Mum – seriously. You make it sound like I'm some kind of old lady or cripple or something. I'm sure I can manage to bike three miles to Elswell without having to be carted off on a freaking stretcher. It'll only take, like, fifteen minutes.'

The spaghetti, revolving slowly under Laura's wooden spoon, was starting to yield and soften. ‘Go and give Willow a shout, could you, please, love?' she said.

They were back before she'd drained the pasta.

‘What's in the sauce?' asked Beth, lifting saucepan lids.

‘Bacon and mushrooms. And I've done some runner beans. Now wash your hands – and could you get the knives and forks, please?'

‘Willow'll do that. I'll grate the Parmesan.'

When they were all seated and served, a brief silence reigned. But Beth seldom let go of a bone for long once her teeth were in it.

‘It doesn't get dark now 'til six o'clock. I'd be home ages before that. I could stay at school 'til half past four or something, be home a bit before you, and it would still be daylight.'

Laura nodded. The longer evenings certainly made things easier.

‘And biking's good for you. They're always on at school about kids not getting enough exercise because they're guzzling snacks in front of the computer.'

‘Doubly bad,' said Laura, choosing the side alley. ‘Crisp crumbs in the keyboard – fatal.'

Beth refused to be diverted. ‘And that asthma doctor, at the hospital last summer, said exercise was good, didn't she? ‘‘Regular gentle exercise'' is what she said. So if I bike every day, there and back, that's regular. And along the lode I'm not exactly going to be zooming along, am I? It's too lumpy.'

There was nothing here Laura could easily disagree with, so she focussed on wrapping spaghetti round her fork.

‘Might be good for my flabby thighs, too.'

‘What nonsense,' she said. ‘Your thighs are just fine.'

She'd seen Beth through the open bathroom door, sitting on the linen basket with her legs pressed flat, prodding censoriously at the pale, splayed flesh. But somehow her daughter, now shovelling spaghetti and sauce like a brickie's mate, did not seem a high risk for anorexia nervosa.

‘Is your old bike still in the shed?' They were the first words Willow had uttered since she came down. Laura and Beth, battle lines momentarily abandoned, both turned their eyes to her.

‘Think so,' said Beth. ‘Unless Mum's chucked it.'

‘No, it's still there. I keep thinking we should find some younger child who'd like to have it, and then not getting round to doing anything about it. Why?'

‘Thought I might have a go on it sometime, that's all. If you don't mind?'

‘Of course not, but it's very small. Beth had outgrown it.'

‘It's teeny weeny. I had it when it was about seven or something.'

‘Well, nine, maybe. Nine or ten.' Beth had been riding it around quite happily in the early autumn, and now she made it sound like a relic of infancy. ‘But it is small.'

Willow shrugged. ‘I'm not very big.' And indeed, sitting across the table in her skinny black T shirt, there looked to be nothing of her. The half-inch spurt that Beth had put on since the end of the old year might, in fact, have taken her past Willow, though they were still very much of a height.

‘Try it, then, by all means. The saddle and handlebars will already be up at their highest.' She refrained from asking Willow whether she had a helmet.

‘Thanks. So, Beth, d'you mind if I come along the lode with you in the morning? Just for the ride?'

‘Yeah – that'd be great.'

Thus it was settled between them, and Laura knew herself outmanoeuvred. Gracious defeat seemed the only option. She arranged her face in a genial smile. ‘Would anyone like more Parmesan?'

 

Willow was twelve years old when she learned to ride a bicycle.

It wasn't her first. There had been an earlier bike – actually a tricycle with pink plastic wheels and white tyres that smelt like rubber bands. Her mother had brought it home one day, tied all over with big pink ribbons and shiny foil streamers. It might have been a birthday or it might not; nothing was said. She sat on the moulded pink saddle, and her mother pushed her down some long, uncarpeted hallway; the pedals turned so fast that it was all she could do for her legs to keep up, and now and then her feet spun off and the pedals clattered her shins. They left that house with people after them and no time to pack. Willow never knew if the chasing demons were real or only in her mother's head, but either way, the trike was left behind.