Ninepins (33 page)

Still working at the wet wool, Laura said, ‘Hand washing is one of those jobs, I suppose. I always put it off, too.'

‘No.' Willow sounded impatient, almost angry. ‘That's not what I mean. I mean she really didn't wash things. She hardly washed clothes at all. They weren't things you kept and looked after and had for years, until they wore out or got too small for you. Not like you do, with Beth's stuff, here.'

Laura was puzzled. ‘What, then?'

There was a short pause, and Laura wished she dared turn round. Then Willow said, ‘It was just baggage, and she hated baggage. Things weighed you down, she once said. I don't know what happened to it all, really. Given away, I suppose, or left behind when we moved on. She always just bought more stuff – jumble sales, charity shops – or else people gave us things. If she had money she spent it; she'd buy me new shoes, new dresses. But she never had money for long. And then we'd up and leave and the new shoes would be gone.'

It was hard to imagine that life, for a child. Laura pressed out the snowflake jumper on the draining board and tried to bridge the gulf of empathy; tried, and failed.

‘Stupid loser.' Willow spoke with sudden venom: a bitterness that Laura had rarely heard in her voice. Once before:
useless bloody hippy
.

Of course then Laura had to stop what she was doing; wiping her soapy hands on a tea towel, she came and took a seat beside Willow at the table. But she couldn't think of anything to say.

After a moment, Willow asked, ‘How was she when you went up there? What sort of state was she in?'

‘Well …' Laura hesitated. ‘We talked a bit, about this place, and you. But, you know, with the medication …' What was it Willow had said?
Flatter, hollow
. ‘She's not herself, I suppose.'

‘Useless junkie.'

The cold fury was almost shocking.

‘Prescription drugs,' Laura reminded her gently. ‘That hardly makes her a junkie.'

Willow, listless, stared at the table. ‘Now, maybe. And what's the difference, anyway?'

‘She needs the medication, you must see that. You know how she was before, without it. She wasn't exactly coping.'

‘What – and now she is? Now her life's so great, is that it?'

Laura felt the weight of her impotence.
You shouldn't blame her
, she wanted to say.
You shouldn't blame yourself. It's nobody's fault, the way she is
. But what did she know about Willow's life, or Willow's pain?

‘She's sick.'

‘Bloody right, she is.' But then the anger seemed to ebb away as quickly as it had come. Willow picked up her glass and took a sip of her water. ‘Sick,' she said quietly. ‘Yes.'

It appeared to signal the close of the conversation and, awkwardly, Laura stood up again, glancing back to the draining board and the bundled, wet sweaters. She should get the water wrung out properly, and hang them up outside on the line.

‘Better get on,' she said. ‘Unless … you don't have any jumpers you'd like washing, do you?'

 

A quarter of an hour later, Laura was back upstairs at her desk. She had booted up the computer and opened the file containing the half-finished draft on which she ought to be working. She scrolled to the end.
Rotational cutting
, she read,
has the effect of letting in varying levels of light to the understorey layer. This makes for a diversity of microhabitats, encouraging
– But what did it encourage? She found she had very little idea, nor the inclination to try to recall.

What must it have been like, growing up with Marianne? Washing, clean linen, the provision of meals: these might seem like trivial or mundane matters, but for her they represented a solid physical core, which lay at the heart of her notion of parenthood. If Willow at times seemed older than her years, this might be the reason. If the mother could not be a mother, how should the child be a child?

Rather than go back to her report, she clicked to open her e-mail inbox. A dozen new messages, most of them university or departmental circulars, but one was different and caught her attention. It was a Facebook alert – a novelty for her.

Punita Chand sent you a message on Facebook. To reply to this message, follow the link below.
The message itself was just a quick hello, no doubt sent round to all and sundry, but it invited Laura to visit Punita's profile page and there to view her wedding photographs. This she did, and was entranced. The young woman who in Cambridge she had only ever seen in the student uniform of jeans and T shirt, appeared here resplendent in scarlet and gold, and garlanded with flowers. She looked like a princess from the
Thousand and One Nights
. Clicking back to Punita's message, she moved her mouse to the reply box. ‘
You both look so beautiful
,' she typed, ‘
and happy
' – then pressed ‘send'.

After that, she idly selected her own home page, still with the anonymous white silhouette in place of a photograph and just two listed friends: Punita, and Beth. She clicked on Beth's page almost without thought. The profile picture her daughter had chosen brought a smile at once to Laura's lips; taken last summer on Laura's camera, it showed Beth in the garden, sitting astride her old spacehopper with a grin as wide as the one on the spacehopper's painted face. They had found it in the shed, beneath some old packing cases that Laura had been sorting for the tip, and Beth had insisted on fetching the car pump and restoring it to full size, before pounding up and down the lawn on it until she was breathless with exertion and laughter and Laura had had to warn her to be careful of her asthma.

The wall posts, when she scanned them, were innocuous enough; there was nothing here to raise alarm – except, perhaps, among grammarians. ‘
heeyy, im good n you? yeah i know :)
' read one, presumably in reply to some earlier post of Beth's. ‘
i's well bored lol but drama @ 2
' said another, beside a photo of a girl whom Laura didn't recognise. Scrolling down a page or so, she found what she was looking for: the glamour model image with the straight blonde hair. There were two messages from Rianna; one read ‘
hey there bethy babe you ok?
', the other simply ‘
hiiaaaa!!!!
'

In a side bar on the left, a box informed her that Beth had two hundred and eleven friends. Pictures of a handful were visible immediately; curious, she selected ‘see all' to reveal the rest. The faces included few she recognised. Here was Alice, and Gemma, and her own anonymous silhouette. And boys, she noticed, as well as girls. Feeling suddenly conscious of intrusion, she thought of Vince:
like listening at keyholes
. She was about to close the page when her eye fell again on Rianna's photo, and on impulse she moved onto it and clicked the mouse.

She saw it straight away. Beneath the box for friends was one marked ‘photos', and in the box was just one photograph. It was a casual snap, the quality less than pristine, doubtless taken on a mobile phone. In it, three girls were standing on a river bank, which Laura recognised as being the Cam, somewhere in one of the Cambridge parks, perhaps Jesus Green or Midsummer Common. The girls were leaning towards one another, arms linked and clutching shopping bags, the three laughing faces pressed close together. The one on the left was unfamiliar. A dark girl, but not Caitlin; this one was taller and more broad-faced. In the middle, unmistakable, was Rianna, daring the camera with a cool, unflinching eye. And on the right was Beth.

When had they been to Cambridge? The swathe of daffodils that flanked the river showed the picture to be recent; they'd come late this year, after all the frost. But it was weeks since Beth had been shopping in town without Laura. The last time must be when she went in on the bus with Alice – four, five Saturdays ago. She wouldn't, surely, go off with her friends while she was at Simon's for the weekend, would she? Or if she had, he would have mentioned it. But, anyway, at a weekend she would have been wearing jeans and not her black school trousers, the legs of which were clearly visible beneath her coat. In fact, when she looked closely, the three girls were all in their uniform trousers, though Rianna's were tucked into fake fur boots, and the dark girl wore a purple hoodie and matching purple beanie hat. This was clearly no class outing.

Round and round Laura turned the conundrum, while she stared at the photograph on the screen. There had to be an explanation. There had to be a reason why Beth should be in Cambridge, and recently, in her school uniform and without Laura's knowledge. There must be; there simply must. Otherwise …

Otherwise, Laura would have to face the truth, would have to accept the only obvious and rational explanation for the evidence that lay before her in the picture. Her daughter was playing truant.

 

At twenty to five, Laura shut down the computer and went downstairs. Her afternoon had yielded almost no productive work; for more than an hour she had stared at her file of text but seen only the photograph. It was almost a relief when the waiting was over and it was time to go and fetch Beth. The traffic in Cambridge was Saturday heavy and it was quarter past by the time she reached Simon's house. The party guests had all gone home, and Tessa invited her in for a coffee and to pick at the ruins of the birthday cake.

‘I won't, thanks. I know you'll have all the clearing up to do and I don't want to be in the way. We'll get straight off, if that's all right.'

In the car, she drove to a soundtrack of Beth's oblivious chatter. ‘The new paddling pool is massive. I swear you could actually swim in it. But it took forever to fill up even a tiny bit, and then Roly got excited and wee'd in it and no one wanted to go in after that so we mainly just played football. But the pool takes up nearly all the lawn so there wasn't much space and loads of the flowers got flattened …'

It would be so easy to forget about it, to forget the photograph and what it meant; to have her daughter here with her – her open, funny, affectionate daughter – and not embark on the inquest that would drive her away.

‘… and the cake was totally gorgeous, except Dad had put the buttercream in the middle before it was cool and it had all melted into the cake, but it just made it gooey and delicious. And I've brought a piece home for Willow in a paper napkin, because lots of them were taking a bit home for their brothers or sisters, and Tessa said it was OK …'

They could go home and have a comfortable, uncomplicated evening. Laura could make them beans on toast, because Beth was always still hungry after party food, and they could watch a DVD or play Scrabble and pretend that everything was just as normal, as it had been at lunchtime before Beth went out.

In fact, she waited until they were home and the car parked and Beth upstairs putting on clean jeans in place of her muddy ones. She gave her time to get changed and then knocked on the bedroom door.

‘Hi, Mum. Where's Willow – in her room? What have you been up to this afternoon? Done loads of work, I bet. Honestly, you should have seen Jack with his pile of presents, he got them all in a heap on the floor and ripped off the paper in this total frenzy. And three people had given him the exact same Zoob robot kit.'

‘Beth.' The best thing, she decided, was to sit down on the bed. But the signal for a conversation went unheeded; Beth was still on her party high.

‘I wish I could have stayed and helped clear up. There was such a mess everywhere – seriously, it was a disaster area. At one point they were all chucking chocolate mini rolls at one another from behind the sofas in the sitting room. It was Alfie's idea. Some sort of battle thing, with spacemen on one side and aliens on the other – '

‘Beth.'

This time, at last, she stopped and looked at Laura. ‘What?'

‘Sweetheart, I'm going to ask you something, and I need you to tell me the truth. All right?'

‘ 'Course.' Beth bristled. Stupid: the wrong start.

‘I need you to tell me whether you have been into Cambridge without my knowing.'

‘When?' The reply, and the slide of the eyes, were evasive. The effective admission of guilt, oddly, came almost as a relief. Laura's resolve hardened.

‘Tell me,' she repeated, ‘whether you have been to Cambridge when you were meant to be at school.' Was it for Beth's sake or her own that she avoided the unyielding phrase:
playing truant
?

Beth's eyes narrowed; clearly, she was not going to make this easy. ‘How d'you know?'

‘I saw a picture.' She swallowed. Complete honesty: it had to be the best course. ‘A photograph of you with the other girls. On Rianna's Facebook page.'

There was a silence, while a variety of emotions battled for ascendancy in her daughter's face. The expression that won out looked very much like fury.

‘Why were you looking? Why would you be looking at my friends' private space, poking through their photos? Spying on me, of course, that's why, like you always do.'

‘Sweetheart, it wasn't like that. I didn't mean to pry.' How did she come so quickly to be on the back foot? She wished now that she hadn't sat down – or else she wished that Beth would sit down, too. She pulled herself up straight and took a breath. ‘But I saw the photograph; I can't help that now. And we need to talk about it – about what you were doing there.'

There was a softening, then, or so she thought, if not a chastening; some of the tautness faded from Beth's face, and her shoulders dropped a quarter-inch, but she didn't speak.

‘I think you need to tell me about it.' She indicated a space on the bed next to her, but Beth didn't move.

‘Nothing to tell,' she muttered. ‘We went into town, that's all.'

‘When was this?'

‘Last week. Friday.'

‘What time on Friday?'

A shrug. ‘Afternoon some time.'