The Last Winter of Dani Lancing: A Novel (12 page)

“Dad.” Dani hugs him tight. Father and daughter seem to become a single being for a few seconds, and then release.

“I’ll take your bag in.” He lifts the backpack over a shoulder and walks it inside.

“Mum.” Dani embraces Patty, but it doesn’t have the same warmth or urgency. Patty can’t help but feel that old jealousy. They break their embrace, or is it that Dani tries to break free but Patty holds on? She looks her daughter in the face. Dani looks tired around the eyes and her face is fuller. Patty can tell her daughter has completely given up on training, less lean than she has been for years, even a little tummy forming. Student diet is a killer.

“I am so looking forward to bread sauce,” Dani says with a huge grin. She firmly twists from her mother’s grip and heads inside.

“Do you remember this?” Dani holds up the treasure she has unearthed.

“Do I?” says Patty, laughing. “That’s Hoppy Bunny. I bought her for you when I was pregnant. I’d only just found out. We were living in Clapham and I went to Arding and Hobbs. Three shillings
she was.” Patty smiles, thinking she’s finally connecting with her daughter, that whatever is going on with Dani will come out. Instead, she watches a cloud sweep across her daughter’s face as she closes off once more. Patty watches her go through the old boxes for a while longer and then leaves her to get on with it. In the kitchen she makes coffee and wonders for the millionth time what is up with her. She’d been home two days and was so morose. Even Tom and Izzy coming over hadn’t cheered her up. Patty lights a cigarette, opens a window a crack and blows the smoke out.

She remembers the absolute joy she had felt when she bought Hoppy, her first real acknowledgment that a life was growing inside her. And she can remember so clearly how Dani’s eyes had lit up the first time she saw it and how she squirmed as Patty bounced the bunny on her tummy.

“Hoppy loves Dani, hop, hop, hop.”

As a child Dani had loved her mother best of all but the older she got the closer she and Jim became, until one day Patty felt an outsider in her own family. Maybe it was puberty; the teen years were tough. She finishes the cigarette and flicks the butt out of the open window, staring out into …

“Mum.”

“Christ.” Patty jumps at her daughter’s voice. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

“I’m not going back to uni. A year—”

“Don’t be stupid.”

And the row strikes like a tsunami.

“It’s Christmas Eve,” Jim pleads with them, but he knows it’s futile. They’re both too stubborn to back down now.

“I’m going.” Dani is adamant.

“Stay till after Christmas Day at least,” he asks.

“Let her go. She can think about how stupid she’s being,” Patty almost spits.

“Don’t worry, I’m not staying here.”

“Dani, please, sweethe—”

“I’m sorry, Dad. Bye.”

There was no goodbye for Patty.

That was the last time they saw her.

Alive.

Tuesday, February 14, 1984

Dani and Tom sit back-to-back, leaning against each other. He has the cigarette, takes an amateur pull on it, does not inhale and passes it back to her. She takes it from him like a precious relic and in a gracious sweep brings it to her mouth. She drags the smoke deep into her lungs, holds it there and then, with a practiced pucker, releases a perfect smoke ring. It sails away, slowly breaking down until it dissolves. She wonders if she could blow a smoke ring over an erect penis. She takes another deep draw on the cigarette and aims at an imaginary erection.

“Good smoke ring,” Tom says looking round. She doesn’t tell him what she was aiming at.

He casually drops his eyes to his watch. “I think we need to get back, Dani.” He stands, making sure she doesn’t tip backward.

She looks down at the cigarette, knowing he’s right but feeling resentful. Geography and chemistry will never be as useful to her, in real-life situations, as being able to smoke with style. She imagines she’s Julie Christie as she takes the cigarette up to her mouth and draws softly but intensely on the tip, the end glowing powerfully red. She rolls the smoke around her mouth like she’s seen her dad do with wine, then pushes the smoke out through her nose, a perfect dragon drag. Satisfied, she flicks the butt into the corner. It bounces underneath the spare pommel horse.

Inside their corrugated metal smokehouse it was dry, but outside the air is damp—as close to rain as you can get without it actually raining. Both feel their hair start to curl slightly at the ends and their school uniforms dampen. They walk back to the main building
in an uneasy silence. He’s dying for her to mention the card—the one he delivered to her house at five o’clock that morning. He hadn’t signed it, of course, but desperately wanted to hear about it from her. Was she excited? Who could her mysterious admirer be? How did she feel about what was inside the card—a ticket for Siouxsie and the Banshees at the Apollo the following week. E4, upper circle.

Dani was thinking about the card. Of course she knew it was from Tom, just like she knew he had the ticket next to hers. If he’d said, “Let’s go see the Banshees,” she would have gone, probably would have let him buy her ticket. But this romantic bullshit made her feel uneasy. She should never have kissed him. He’d caught her a little upset, more than a little drunk, on the rebound and easy prey. It had been stupid. She didn’t want to lose him, he was her best friend, but she’d let him imagine something he couldn’t have. He wasn’t someone she could have fun with—at least, not just fun. With the athletes and sporty-boys it was easier; they didn’t ask any searching questions and had no real feelings to hurt. She could talk to Tom; they both had issues with their mothers and had dreams of the future. Tom was cool … but not cool enough. Not for a boyfriend. And he wasn’t sexy, and Dani was starting to appreciate sexy.

“Are you training later?” he asks. She doesn’t respond right away. The answer’s “no,” but that didn’t mean she was free to hang out. Instead, she was going to take the Tube into town and mooch around the pub opposite Goldsmiths in the hope that she’d see
him
again. She knew very little about him; they called him Bix and he did something with Lego and dog shit. He was tall and arrogantly, jaw-droppingly handsome. He was a friend of Toni’s brother and they had all met up on Saturday. Bix hadn’t talked to Dani directly, but she’d watched him as he dominated the group, talking with passion about art and sculpture as he drank cider and smoked his
short, stubby roll-ups, which he made look fucking sexy. In part, this was why she was smoking at lunchtime—to get good enough to smoke with him. The other part was that she wanted to get stoned very soon, and knew you had to be a smoker or it didn’t work.

“Yes, I’m training. My sprinting needs some work,” she says into the air, not catching his eye. She hates lying to Tom. If it had been anything else she’d have told him. In the last year he’d become her closest friend, even listening as she droned on about her mum and bloody Greenham Common. Not even her dad was so attentive, but she knows Tom wants boyfriend/girlfriend. No matter how selfish her mum says she is, she will not screw Tom over and make him listen to her moaning about love stuff.

“We could get together after training.”

“No. No idea how long I’ll be.” She keeps her eyes ahead, trying not to blush at the lie.

He nods like he agrees, but feels disappointed. He had wanted this to be their first Valentine’s together. They carry on, walking in silence, until the school gates come into view.

“The careers fair is on Friday. Ha—”

She groans. “God, Tom, I have no idea what I want to be when I’m a grown-up. Not dead and not a journalist, that’s about it.”

“Okay,” he says, trying to sound upbeat.

They reach the school gates and push inside. This is where they part. He knows she’s off to geography. He has her timetable memorized.

“Tomorrow, seven thirty at the bus stop?” she asks.

He nods. She squeezes his arm and walks off. He watches her cross the playground. His stomach tightens when she finally disappears. He knows something is happening, changing. Over the last six months he’s seen how she’s slipped out of her training regime, started to wear make-up and think about what she’s wearing, but
he doesn’t know what it means. In his pocket the Siouxsie and the Banshees ticket burns a hole. They often spend their evenings together, sometimes studying but mostly just talking, but there is nothing about these evenings that could be called “romantic” and he wants a real date. He can still feel the adrenaline of their kiss, even after more than two weeks. It’s like some super battery, revving him up. He wants more, wants everything. He wants Dani. From inside the closest building he can hear the bell ring. He runs to class.

Saturday, December 18, 2010

“Maybe we should go to her house,” Dani suggests.

Jim shakes his head. “If she was there she’d answer the phone.”

“Unless …” Dani realizes her mistake and stops. Jim switches the radio on and they listen, but can only bear it for a few minutes. Everything is closed, cut off, trapped, lost, buried, worst since records began. The end is nigh. He’s called Patty five times over the last few hours, and of course he’s imagined her lying on the floor unconscious but … deep down he knows his fear isn’t really about Patty being hurt.

“I need to get in touch. Tom might …” But he’s afraid to call Tom. For some reason he needs to talk to Patty first. And …

“The Lost Soul.” He suddenly realizes there is someone who might know where Patty is, or at least have a mobile phone number for her. Jim runs upstairs.

“Dad?” Dani calls after him.

“I’ll be down in a minute.”

He stands before her door. He hasn’t been in there since the day she left. He puts his hand to the door and … push. A rush of stagnant air, the slight sweetness of damp hits him. The room is empty. The wall is gone. The pictures and endless reports, the questions—all gone. The desk is empty but he hopes he’ll find a leaflet in the drawer. Yes.

“But it’s miles, Dad.”