Then She Was Gone(41)

‘No, not really. I used to come and stay with Dad quite a lot when I was small and sometimes she’d be here, but not always and she acted like she hated me.’

‘In what way?’

‘Oh, you know, cutting remarks about my behaviour. That I was out of control. That in her family she’d have been belted black and blue for such cheek. And the minute my dad left the room she’d just ignore me, act like I wasn’t there. She called me “the girl”. You know, “Will the girl be there?” “When is the girl going home?” That kind of thing. She was fucking vile.’

‘Oh Lord, how horrible. You must have been horrified when she got pregnant.’

‘I cried.’

‘I’m not surprised.’

They move apart for a moment to allow the waiter to put down their dishes. They thank him and then they glance at each other, significantly.

‘How did you feel about Poppy when she was born?’

Sara-Jade picks up her cutlery and slices through the middle of her fishcake. Steam blooms from it for a second or two. She puts the cutlery down again and shrugs. ‘It was, I don’t know … whatever. I was twelve. She was a baby.’

‘But as she grew, became a little person? Did you feel close to her?’

‘I guess. Sort of. I didn’t see her all that much at first because … well, basically because I didn’t want to.’

‘Oh,’ says Laurel. ‘Was that because you were jealous?’

‘No,’ she says, firmly. ‘No, I was too old to be jealous. I didn’t want to see her because I didn’t believe … I didn’t believe she was real.’

Laurel looks at her questioningly.

‘It’s hard to explain, but I thought she was like a robot baby. Or an alien baby. I didn’t believe that Noelle had really given birth to her. I was scared of her. Terrified of her.’

‘Wow,’ says Laurel, ‘that’s a really strange reaction.’

‘Yes. Kind of freakish.’

‘Why do you think you felt like that?’

Sara-Jade picks up her knife and turns it between her fingertips. ‘There was a thing—’ she begins, but then stops abruptly.

‘A thing?’

‘Yes. An event. A moment. And to this day I don’t know if I imagined it or not. I was kind of a weird kid.’ She laughs wryly. ‘Still am. I do know that. I had a special assistant at school for a while, because of emotional difficulties. I was prone to insane outbursts of anger. Tears sometimes. And this, this thing, it happened right at the height of all this, when things were peaking for me in so many ways. Puberty, hormones, social anxiety, I was still fucked up over my parents splitting up, all that shit. I wasn’t a pretty sight. I wasn’t an easy kid, either. I was a total nightmare, to be honest. And right in the middle of all this I thought I saw something.’ She places the knife gently down on the table and looks straight at Laurel. ‘I looked through the door of my dad’s bedroom, when Noelle was about eight months pregnant. I looked in and …’ She stops and her gaze drops to the table. ‘She was naked. And there was no bump. She was naked,’ she repeats. ‘And there was no bump.

‘And I don’t know what I really saw. I have never been able to process it. Never known if it was just me being a nutty little kid freaking out about a new baby or if it really happened. But when that baby was born three weeks later, I was terrified. I didn’t see her until she was nearly one.’

Laurel hasn’t moved a muscle since SJ’s pronouncement.

‘Did you tell your dad?’

She shakes her head.

‘Did you tell anyone?’

‘I told my mum.’

‘What did she say?’

‘She told me to stop being a crazy person.’

‘Where was the baby born?’

‘I don’t know. I never thought about it.’

Laurel closes her eyes and suddenly the face of Noelle Donnelly flashes to the forefront of her consciousness, clear and precise as if she’d seen her only yesterday.





PART THREE





Twenty-seven


So, it’s my turn, is it?

OK then. OK.

Shall we do it like an AA meeting? My name is Noelle Donnelly and I did something bad.

I’m not about to make excuses, but I had a tough time growing up. Two horrible brothers above me. Two below. And a sister who died when she was only eight. My mother and father were unforgiving of the limitations of children. They believed that a child should be a grown-up in every way apart from the way of having an opinion you could call your own. Not that religious, which was strange for the times and the place. Church on a Sunday was a good opportunity to find out that everyone else’s children were doing better than their own. The Bible had some good quotes that could be used to sow a seed of terror here and there. We all believed in hell and heaven, even if we believed in nothing else. And sex was something that only disgusting people did, married or not. We never asked after our own provenance, imagined a kind of chaste communion across a brick wall somehow. Because they had separate bedrooms, my mother and father.

Home was a ten-bedroom villa on a hill, sheep all around, a mile and a half to school, downhill going there, uphill coming back. My parents took in orphans sometimes, in emergencies. They’d arrive bleary-eyed in the small hours, huge sets of siblings that they housed in the dormitory room in the attic. We called it ‘the orphan room’ long after there’d been an orphan in it. So they can’t have been all bad. But mainly, on the whole, yes they were.