Ninepins (14 page)

Her grin widened. ‘Sharpen your pencil,' she said. ‘My daughter is a demon at Pictionary.'

They talked comfortably about Christmas and Wisbech and other nothings for some minutes, before Vince asked, ‘How is Beth?'

It was a strange question, on the face of it, because Laura had been talking about her fairly constantly, about her part in the school carol concert and what she wanted for Christmas. But something in the way he asked it brought her chatter to a halt.

‘She has a new group of friends.' Why was she telling him this? ‘Since she started at the village college in September, she's drifted away from her old primary school friends and got in with a new set.'

He nodded. ‘It happens.'

‘There are two in particular.'

‘The girls she was going out to meet that time? The other weekend.'

Surprised, she nodded back at him. ‘Rianna and Caitlin. They're … well, they're different. Not like the kids she used to play with – hang out with, I should say.'

‘And they frighten you.'

‘Frighten me?' The word was extreme, unexpected, making her bridle; but denial evaporated before it was spoken. She saw again the three of them, after school tonight: Beth dragging away from the triangle without looking at her mother and, as they walked away, the smothered, hostile laughter and the single, ugly, trailing word, ‘… 
slag
 …'

‘Yes,' she said simply. ‘I suppose they do.'

‘Invite them round.' Vince set down his glass and leaned towards her. ‘Have them round to the house. Talk to them. Get to know them.'

‘I'm not sure Beth would want – '

‘Of course she would.' He was robust. ‘Of course she wants her friends to see her home. If she's shy, then why don't you make it easy for her? Do the inviting. Come up with a reason, make it a date.'

‘I don't know.' She thought about the birthday: the unwanted party, the uneaten cake. ‘I don't want to interfere. And it's not exactly cool, is it? I can't be asking her friends round for tea and iced buns as if they're seven years old.'

Grinning, he sat back a little. ‘Maybe not quite that. But is there something they would enjoy? Something that would be ‘‘cool'', as you put it?'

‘Such as?'

‘Pity the pumphouse isn't ready to be painted. All kids love decorating.'

‘Beth can't.' She chewed her lip. ‘The fumes affect her asthma.'

‘Laura.'

She looked at him, and saw amusement in his eyes.

‘Whatever the image they like to throw out, these kids are just kids. They may act tough, but it's all defensive bluster. They're how old – twelve?'

‘Caitlin's twelve. I remember a birthday being mentioned.' She smiled, a little shame-faced, though still not entirely convinced. ‘I think Rianna might still be eleven.'

Vince lifted his beer glass, drained it, and replaced it firmly on the mat. ‘Get to know them and you'll see. They're just children.'

 

No candles, because of the fire risk. That's what Laura had told her on the first day. She was talking about the pumphouse, but no doubt it went for the spare room as well. It had been the same at the care home, so it didn't bother Willow that much. There, it had been nothing but rules. No candles; no drugs, cigarettes or alcohol; no Blu-Tack on the walls. Laura was much less interfering. She'd said no candles – but she hadn't said anything about incense.

Willow had found it in a little shop in Cambridge, in an alley midway between the Social Services department and the city centre. From the window display, it looked like the usual sort of Cambridge gift shop, cheap and tacky and old-fashioned, a hang-out for pensioners on coach trips. It wasn't the sort of place she'd ever go into normally, but she'd been lured by an eggcup and spoon. It was the height of naff, with a transfer of King's College chapel on the side, but Vince would laugh. They had a running joke about how she couldn't boil an egg.

Inside, the shop took on a different air. Almost literally so, with a smell quite other than what you'd expect: not lavender bags and old lady perfume, but something far more exotic, an Arabian souk or an opium den. It smelt, unexpectedly and intoxicatingly, of when Willow was small. She tracked down the scent to a table in a poorly lit corner to the rear of the shop. There were lacquered jewellery boxes, and silk batik purses on long, tasselled strings, and Indian trinkets of all kinds: brass elephants and Ali Baba lamps and wide-eyed goddesses with bare breasts and too many arms. The packets, when she found them, were of tissue paper, flimsy, with gold patterns stamped into them and Hindi lettering she couldn't understand.

‘Joss sticks,' said the man whose shop it appeared to be. ‘We used to sell a lot of these at one time.' His shirt was open two buttons at the front and his skin had an oiled look, all wrong for his pallid colour.

He opened the nearest packet and pulled out a few sticks, which looked like skinny sparklers. ‘Sandalwood or patchouli.'

Willow bent to sniff the wares.

‘This one, I think.' Yes, she was sure of it.

‘Patchouli,' said the shopkeeper, also sniffing, and standing a little too close.

‘Is it always in sticks like this?' she asked him as he dropped the packet in a bag, but he didn't seem to know.

On the way back to the bus station she stopped at a newsagent for matches.

The incense her mother burned had come in a cone: a tiny, solid cone of grey, like a minaret, or a miniature volcano. She never smoked that Willow could remember, not cigarettes, anyway, but she had a lighter. It was silver in colour and more diamond-shaped than square, the corners slightly rounded. One side, when Willow held it in her palm, was completely smooth. The other felt rough; when you looked closely, you could see it was engraved with a faint, twirly cipher that she used to trace with her finger. Like following the tangled lines in a puzzle book:
which one is Tommy's kite?
It might have been just a pattern, or intertwined initials she was too young to read.

She was allowed to hold the lighter, and open and close the metal lid which fitted so snugly you could hardly see the join, but never to flick the button that turned the little cogwheel and ignited the fire. Instead, she used to lie between her mother's sprawled legs and stare up in fascination. Over and over, the repeated, hypnotic action: the click of the switch, the light metallic scratch of the wheel, and the leap of flame, which gradually settled and became still, a perfect, pointed ellipse – until her mother released the catch and it died again.

Matches were not so satisfactory at all. There was only so long you could hold them, once struck, before the fire crept up to your fingers and the heat became intolerable. She worked the stem of a joss stick down into a join in the corner of the small desk, the one they'd brought up from the flood. It shed a film of greyish brown powder on the wooden surface and coated her fingers with the same dusty residue, which turned oily when she rubbed her fingertips together. But the smell was right: a smell of the past.

Sitting at the desk, she struck a match and held it vertical until the flame stilled, then applied it beneath the tip of the joss stick. After a moment, the single orange plume slipped sideways, distorting and fattening as the incense took light. She kept the match there until the last possible moment, before pulling it away and shaking it to put it out. For a while the stick continued to burn falteringly; a low, crimson flame dipped and stuttered and then died away, leaving nothing but a glowing tip of heat.

The smoke, she noticed, didn't begin all at once, but started as a trickle and then grew stronger; nor did it come from the single spot of red but spiralled up from the millimetre or so below, where the stick burned black like charcoal. Immediately above the tip it wove and twisted like a helix, made up of two of three distinct strands, but by the time it reached a level with her eyes it had merged into a single, slender column, so straight and smooth that it hardly appeared to rise at all.

For several minutes, Willow remained immobile, taking in the aromatic scent; she sat so still and inhaled so gently that her indrawn breaths made scarcely a kink in the liquid flow of smoke.

Then she reached for the matchbox, slid it open and took out another match.

 

Tuesday was the best day for it, when Beth had after-school choir practice and Laura was home early, stowing Christmas presents under the bed. She knew Willow must be in. There was no sound from the spare room, but when she came along the landing there was a soft smell of perfume clinging round the door, a familiar scent she couldn't quite place, reminding her of student bathrooms when she was at university. Now would be the time to go and talk to her.

Having hidden her carrier bags and the gilded rolls of wrapping paper, she returned to the landing and stood for a moment outside the door. The silence was complete; perhaps, after all, she had been in and gone out again. Laura knocked.

‘Hello.'

‘Can I come in?' she asked, pushing her head round the door. Willow was lying flat on her back on the bed. No book, no magazine; nor did she give the impression of having been asleep. The floor was empty and the desktop and dressing table clear – so different from Beth's habitual, comfortable chaos. It occurred to Laura that she hadn't been inside the room since Willow moved up here. It felt different, foreign.

Willow said nothing, but pulled herself up on her pillows and looked expectantly at Laura, who moved further into the room.

‘Are you warm enough in here?' she began, for something to say. ‘It's been so cold out, and this radiator's sometimes temperamental.' She walked over to it, cupped both hands round the ridged metal. It was scalding.

‘I'm fine,' said Willow, from the bed.

The curtains were open on to darkness, the bedroom light catching yellow flecks on the surface of the lode. Willow had her wish now: her view out over water. Laura shivered in spite of her burning fingers and resisted the urge to draw the curtains closed.

‘I still think of this as my parents' room.' She wasn't sure where this had come from; she had little idea of saying it until the words were out. ‘We call it the spare room, but I think of it as theirs, my mum and dad's. They always slept here when they stayed. Before they died.' Mum first, and Dad ten months later, when Beth was two. So unfair, she felt: two, three more years and Beth would have remembered them. ‘It was a long time ago,' she murmured, more to herself than to Willow. Ten years.

There was a sound of shifting behind her, a half cough.

‘Beth not back?'

‘No.' Laura turned, took a few steps closer to the bed. ‘She had another rehearsal, for the carol concert. I'm picking her up at six thirty.'

Willow nodded. Then, abruptly, she sat up, swinging her feet down to the floor. ‘Can I come?'

‘To pick her up?'

‘To the concert.'

Laura was surprised. ‘Yes, of course. She'll love to have you there. But it's only school carols, nothing exciting. Beth's duet is just one verse.'

‘Still.' Her glance slid down and away.

Thank you
, Laura wanted to say, but felt too foolish. Instead, she sat down on the foot of the bed.

‘I didn't tell her, you know,' said Willow.

Her voice was flat and toneless, so that, despite the chime with her own thoughts, it took Laura a moment to understand what she meant.

‘I didn't tell her where I live.'

‘Oh?' Unable to think of any other response, she waited to see what would follow.

‘No. And I'm sure no one at the care home would have said anything. They all knew. She used to turn up there sometimes, and make trouble, so they all knew not to tell her anything if she came round asking.'

Her
, noticed Laura. Not ‘Mum', or even ‘my mother', like that night; just ‘her'.

‘They have security there, anyway. Proper rules about not giving out people's details. And the staff all knew her. No.' She paused, staring at the carpet. ‘I think it must have been Janey.'

Laura sat still and upright. ‘Who's Janey?'

‘Foster carer. I stayed with her when I was first in care – while they decided what to do with me. We stayed in touch a bit, so I gave her my new address.

‘But surely … Would Janey tell your mother where you were?' A foster parent? Disclose to a woman in that state the whereabouts of her child?

Willow shook her head. ‘She has teenagers. That's who she fosters. Not babies or little ones at primary school. She does older kids who need respite care, or in an emergency. They don't stay long, most of them. Like me. They come and they go.'

Laura nodded, encouraging, but she wasn't sure if Willow saw this.

‘If she watched 'til Janey went out and then knocked, and one of the foster kids answered …' Her shrug filled in the spaces. ‘There was a pinboard in the hall. Names and addresses, phone numbers. Pizza deliveries, people's social workers. Kids who'd left.'

It seemed very casual to Laura, very hit and miss. Didn't they have some kind of system to keep them safe, these children they were meant to be protecting? Not to mention those around them.
Like Beth
.

‘Vince thought I ought to leave.'

‘Really?' He had seemed so adamant she should stay.

‘He thought I should find somewhere else, now that she knows I'm here. But I told him I wanted to stay here.'

‘Yes.' You're very welcome, she ought to tell her, as she'd told Vince in the pub. Instead, she said, ‘You think she'll come back, then?'

She used to turn up and make trouble
.

For a moment, Willow didn't answer, but frowned downwards, scuffing at the carpet with her stockinged feet.

‘ 'Course she will,' she said at length. ‘She always does.'