Then She Was Gone(28)

‘No,’ says her mum. ‘N … n … no one can.’

That afternoon, Laurel takes Poppy shopping. It’s raining, so she suggests Brent Cross as an alternative to Oxford Street.

Poppy greets her at her front door wearing smart trousers with a jade-green round-neck cardigan and a floral raincoat. Her hair is in two plaits, one on each shoulder. She loops her arm through Laurel’s as they run through the rain to her car across the street. Then she rolls down her window and waves frantically at her father, who stands in the doorway in his socked feet waving back at her.

‘How are you?’ Laurel asks, turning to glance at her as she pulls out of her road.

‘I’m super excited,’ she says.

‘Good,’ she says.

‘And how are you?’

‘Oh, I’m OK, I guess. A little the worse for wear after last night.’

‘Too much champagne?’

Laurel smiles. ‘Yes. Too much champagne. Not enough sleep.’

‘Well,’ says Poppy, patting Laurel’s hand, ‘it was your birthday after all.’

‘Yes. It was.’

The rain is ferocious and Laurel switches on her headlights and pushes the wipers up to the top speed.

‘What have you been up to this morning?’ Poppy continues in the precocious way she has that Laurel is quickly becoming used to.

‘Hm,’ she replies, ‘well, I’ve been to see my mum.’

‘You have a mum?’

‘Yes, of course! Everyone has a mum!’

‘I don’t.’

‘Well, no, maybe not one you can see. But you have a mother. Somewhere.’

‘If you can’t see something, it doesn’t exist.’

‘That doesn’t make any sense.’

‘It makes total sense.’

Laurel frowns at her passenger. ‘So, what about New York? I can’t see it. Neither can you. Does that mean it doesn’t exist?’

‘That doesn’t count. We could see New York on a thousand webcams right now. We could call someone up in New York and say please send me a photo of New York. But with my mum, well, I can’t see her on a webcam or in a photo, I can’t call her up, I can’t even go and look at her remains in a graveyard. So my mum does not exist.’

Laurel feels thrown for a minute and breathes in sharply. ‘Would you like her to exist? Do you miss her?’

‘No. I never even think about her.’

‘But she was your mum. You must think about her sometimes, surely?’

‘Never. I hated her.’

Laurel glances at Poppy quickly before returning her gaze to the road in front of her. ‘Why did you hate her?’

‘Because she hated me. She was mean and ugly and neglectful.’

‘She can’t have been that ugly, to have had a daughter as pretty as you.’

‘She didn’t look anything like me. She was horrible. That’s all I remember. Horrible and she smelled of chips.’

‘Chips?’

‘Yes. Her hair …’ She peers through the rain-splattered windscreen. ‘It was red. And it smelled of chips.’

Laurel can’t quite form a response. This awful woman with greasy hair sounds so far removed from anything she’d have imagined as a mother for this self-assured, groomed and brightly shining girl. Not to mention as a romantic partner for Floyd. But then she remembers the photos she’d found online of Floyd when he was younger and rather more seedy-looking and she remembers that everyone blossoms at a different point in their life: clearly Floyd is blossoming right now and maybe his life was once much, much darker.

‘Would you say that your father is happier now than he was then, Poppy?’

It’s a leading question but she needs an answer. She’s only known Floyd for a couple of weeks. He’s without context, a man who walked into a cake shop and changed her life from the outside in. She’d love a little insight from someone who’s been on the inside for a long time.

But what she gets is not what she expected. Instead of offering bland reassurances Poppy says, ‘What’s happy got to do with anything? Look, we’re here for absolutely no reason whatsoever. You do know that, don’t you? People try and make out there’s a greater purpose, a secret meaning, that it all means something. And it doesn’t. We’re a bunch of freaks. That’s all there is to it. A big bunch of stupid, inconsequential freaks. We don’t have to be happy. We don’t have to be normal. We don’t even have to be alive. Not if we don’t want to. We can do whatever we want as long as we don’t hurt anyone.’

Laurel exhales audibly. ‘Wow,’ she says. ‘That’s some philosophy you’ve got there.’

‘It’s not a philosophy. It’s life. Once you learn how to look at the world, once you stop trying to make sense of it all, it’s blindingly obvious.’

Laurel turns quickly to look at Poppy. ‘You’re a very unusual girl, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ says Poppy firmly. ‘I am.’

In the shopping centre they head straight to Nando’s for something to eat. Laurel skipped lunch after seeing her mother and now she’s starving.

‘How do you get on with SJ’s mum?’ she asks as they sit and wait for the food to be delivered.