Ninepins (7 page)

Finally, after an hour or so, she achieved immersion, so that nothing had been done about either kippers or pasta sauce and her mind was spinning with native woodland ecosystems when the front door banged again. Just a bang – no voices.

‘Hi, there,' she said, as her daughter appeared in the doorway. ‘No Willow, tonight?'

‘I asked her. But she said she wasn't hungry.'

Laura hid a smile in her notes as she stacked them away. Beth might well sound mystified: hunger, for her, was a given.

‘Just the two of us, then.'

‘Yeah.' Beth stood in the middle of the floor, arms hanging. Then she seemed to shake herself and there was the flicker of a grin. ‘Bor
ing
.'

‘Well, since we have no guest to impress, how about we slum it for once and eat in the other room?

‘What – in front of the TV?' It was, admittedly, a rare concession. Supper on a tray usually meant Wimbledon or the aftermath of asthma. ‘Brilliant. It's
Hollyoaks
.'

It was a companionable meal. Laura needed to seek clarification about a number of plot points, and Beth took satisfaction in offering the necessary explanations, through mouthfuls of kipper, egg and brown bread.

As the final credits rolled, Laura drew in a breath and said, ‘What about your birthday party?' They'd fixed on the date for the party weeks ago, but Beth was proving singularly evasive about finalising the details. ‘It's getting close – less than a fortnight, now. We ought to be getting the invitations out.'

‘Mm.' That was the reaction she'd been having every time she brought it up.
Mm
.

‘Who are you thinking of inviting? I think any number up to fifteen or sixteen should be manageable. How many did we have last year?'

No reply at all this time: just a shrug.

‘Alice, for one, I assume? And Gemma and Ellie – they always come.'

‘Mm.'

‘What about Joanne who we used to take to Brownies? Are you still mates with her?'

‘Not really.'

She took the plunge. ‘And I expect you'd like your new friends to come, too? Rianna and Caitlin.'

But even this produced only another non-committal grunt.

‘Come on, love, let's make a list. And then we can think about the food – whether you want party food like sausage rolls and crisps and cakes, or whether you'd rather have a proper sit-down meal, now that you're bigger.'

Beth's eyes were fixed on the television screen. Laura felt herself growing a little desperate. ‘I could do you a really sophisticated birthday menu. Those chicken breasts with the creamy garlic filling, or something from the River Café. It could be like a grown-up dinner party.' Too much: she was trying too hard. ‘I assume you're too old for party games, now, but what about music? Do you think your friends will want to dance?'
Did
they dance, at twelve, in the absence of boys? Should there, in fact, be boys? And why wasn't Beth saying anything?

When she did speak, it was flatly and without looking round. ‘Nobody has parties.'

Just as, presumably, nobody has kippers. Perhaps ill-advisedly, Laura took the bait. ‘Alice had a party in August. You went to that – and enjoyed it, I thought.'

Silence. Evidently, Alice was no argument against that ‘nobody'.

‘Well, what do people do instead? We don't have to have something here. It's too late to book the village hall for a disco, but you could invite a few friends and we'll go out to the cinema, or bowling, and out for a pizza. Or even to Peterborough, ice-skating. I could fit four of you in the car – you and three friends.'

Her daughter had picked up the TV remote and was fiddling with the battery cover, sliding it backwards and forwards.
Don't do that, you'll break it
.

‘I just want to go into town.'

‘Right. Great, then – we'll just go into Cambridge and do something there. So, what do you think – movie or bowling? Shall I see what's on at the multiplex? Or there's that new Laser Quest place – I think they'll do the meal afterwards, too, for birthday parties.'

With a theatrical moan, Beth flung herself lower on the settee.

‘What?'

‘Can you imagine? It'd be like having a kiddies' party in McDonald's or something. I bet they bring you balloons and the staff all sing Happy Birthday at your table. I'm not five, y'know, Mum.'

Laura felt her face heating. ‘Adults go to Laser Quest. Some people from the department went in the summer, for a team-building day.'

Not the right line. Beth assumed an expression of pain.

‘OK. So then, what? The cinema?'

‘I just want to go round the shops. Just hang out.'

‘That would be nice. We can spend your birthday money.' Simon always sent her a cheque. Fifty pounds, the same every year, and a hundred at Christmas. ‘But we can do that as well, another time.' They always had a lovely afternoon of it, trying things on in Top Shop and sharing the earphones in the HMV music section.

‘I thought I'd go with Rianna and Caitlin. And Willow.'

‘Well, all right, if that's what you want. We can make the shopping trip your birthday treat. We'll go into town, or to the Grafton Centre, and have lunch out. And why don't we see a film as well, in the afternoon?'

Possibilities for the expedition began to suggest themselves. It might actually be rather fun: a girls' day out shopping. And they could all come back here for birthday cake afterwards, before she dropped them home.

‘We can get the bus.' Beth was fidgeting with the remote again, turning it over and over in her hand. ‘I meant just us. Shopping in town on our own, on the bus. Without you.'

Willow clutched her breath tight within her chest and prepared to open her eyes. It was the next step she had promised herself to take: on the count of three she would open them.

One … two …

Maybe just a bit longer, though; she had come so far already, she deserved a little longer. The water slapped softly against her forehead so she knew she had ducked down far enough this time, that her eyes and nose and mouth were all under water. Without the motion, caused by other bathers, it would have been hard to tell; the water and the heavy, heated air were both blood-warm and equally oppressive. Her lungs burned; she imagined them shrunken, squashed flat by the water. Next time: next time she would open her eyes. But now she needed to breathe.

With a burst of released tension, she straightened her spine and broke the surface, opening her mouth to gasp in oxygen and shaking off water like a dog. Eyes still closed, she pressed her knuckles into the sockets, screwing away the wet; her nostrils felt blocked, and she dragged down a pinched finger and thumb, wringing the taste of chlorine from her nose and mouth.

Again. She reared up and filled her lungs to their fullest extent, taking in air through her mouth before closing it with a snap. This part she was good at, the holding of the breath; she had trained herself well. Then she plunged down, knees bent and neck curved forwards, immersing her head once more.

The strangest thing was what happened to sound. Above the surface, the air was alive with the jagged shouts of children, amplified and bizarrely fractured by the moisture and the high, glass roof. But as soon as the water covered her ears, everything went dead; it was as if a switch had been flicked to cut the world off. It wasn't just that the noise was muffled or distorted or more distant than before; the sounds weren't merely different – it was as though they weren't sounds at all. Her eardrums seemed to experience them as compaction or movement rather than anything to be heard. Nor was it at all the same as putting your head under the bathwater. There was something about the pressure; she had the unnerving impression that the water was entering her head through her ears, that it was filling her skull, cutting off normal perception.

Nevertheless, she must take the next step forward: it was time to open her eyes.
One … two … three
.

At first no image registered at all but only the alien sensation of water against her eyeballs. It didn't sting, exactly, as she'd thought it might – all those chemicals and God knows what – but her eyes felt strange and invaded and sort of stretched. She wanted to blink the feeling away and couldn't: it was like having someone pull your eyelids back and not let go. But when she waited, the underwater world took shape, and it was bigger and brighter than she'd expected, wobble-edged but lit by arcs of broken light from above; she took in magnified squares of turquoise tile and snatches of legs, palely swollen, before her chest hurt and she had to come back up for air.

The pool was Saturday busy. She'd thrown away the leaflet Vince had given her: she wasn't ready for classes. All around her in the shallow end people chatted and bobbed and splashed and laughed, none of them paying her any attention. It was mainly mums with toddlers or groups of younger children of nine or ten. Anyone her own age was down the other end, ignoring the warning notices about bombing and diving, or else not in the pool at all but sitting on the edge in gaggles, preening and chatting, with their feet and ankles in the water.

Down again. This time she would open her eyes straight away and try to stay under longer, testing her lung capacity to its limit. She wanted to bob right down, but some weird reverse gravity pulled her back towards the surface. If she tucked her arms around her bended knees she might hold herself low in the water – but instead she found herself toppling forward, her feet leaving the floor so that she began to float and drift, upended and unanchored. In a flurry of panic she let go and splashed out into the air, her feet scrabbling for the tiles, arms flailing, shedding water in fat gobbets. A small boy of about eight glanced at her curiously for a moment, and then away again.

On the next immersion she lowered herself more cautiously, a few inches at a time, into a broad squat. Curiously, she examined the way the liquid made her own body foreign: the skin tinged oddly greenish, the lines of her thighs foreshortened and pulled out of shape. She could see quite well now, as her eyes adjusted to the unaccustomed medium: she saw the tiny bubbles of air still trapped in the fine hairs of her wrists, and the piping on the swimsuit she had borrowed from Beth, the logo leaping and dancing in the underwater currents. It must have been expensive – the kind you buy from a sports shop rather than the supermarket – and it wasn't her only one. Willow had chosen it in preference to the pink one when she'd brought them down to the pumphouse, as being the more businesslike. Two costumes meant Beth could have joined her, if she hadn't been going to her father's this weekend. But, on the whole, Willow was glad she hadn't had to ask her. The kid was all right, but she'd probably been swimming like a porpoise since the age of four; besides, her mother would probably have come as well, all watchful and overprotective. Vince would have been here if Willow had suggested it, even though Saturday was his day off. That might almost have been OK, except he was a man, after all, and they'd be nearly naked; she didn't want him looking at her in a swimsuit. Maybe another time she would bring Beth along. But for this – for now – she needed to be alone.

One more trip up for air and, instead of ducking down, she bent her knees and then launched herself blindly forwards with her head beneath the surface, arms outstretched like a parachutist in free fall. She wished she could have kept her eyes open for this, to witness it, to maximise the exhilaration. Some reflex shut them tight, however, so that as she surged through the water, feet lifting of their own accord to kick against nothing, the sensation of detachment was complete. For those brief moments she was nowhere; she was loosed from her earthbound self; she was free and adrift. It was terrifying and wonderful all at once.

I am swimming
.

 

They were lucky compared with many divorced couples, reflected Laura, as she screwed the car by jerking degrees into the last available residents' parking space in Simon's street. Though perhaps it wasn't down to luck, or only partly so; they made the effort, for their daughter's sake, and what had begun as conscious endeavour seemed to have fallen at some point into amicable habit on both sides. Whatever the reasons for it, picking up Beth from a weekend at her father's house was no kind of hardship.

She leaned across to reach in the glove box for a pen and the strip of guest permits, filling in today's date in the next available box and propping it prominently inside the windscreen. Tessa helped matters, of course; outspoken, but warm and completely non-judgmental, Laura sometimes thought she would have been easier to be married to than Simon.

Climbing out and clicking the lock, she walked along the terraced row to the tall, Edwardian townhouse which Simon had bought with the equity they'd managed to release from Ninepins – something, besides Beth, to show for eight years of married life. Property in Cambridge was far from cheap, and most of Tessa's savings had been sunk into the purchase, too; the rest, she had no qualms about disclosing, was dwindling fast, being called upon at frequent intervals to bridge the gap between the mortgage and Simon's unreliable earnings. Simon, who used to be private about such things when he and Laura were together – even sharply defensive, at times – just shrugged helplessly and grinned along.

It was Simon who opened the door tonight, stepping back on to a pair of Fireman Sam wellingtons to let her into the hall. The mess was very much as usual: the coats heaped on the floor beneath the overladen hooks, the siding of plastic railtrack extending from the sitting room door. It was the silence that was a surprise.

‘Are they out?'

‘Thank the Lord.' He passed a hand across his brow in a gesture which, she suspected, was only partly theatrical. ‘Come and have a drink, while we've got the chance.'

He took out two beers from the fridge; Laura, who would have preferred tea, took one with a sympathetic smile. At least he remembered to fetch her a glass; Tessa, she had no doubt, swigged hers straight from the bottle, as Simon now proceeded to do.