Then She Was Gone(46)

But I should have tried harder. I should have been nicer. And if there’s any share of the blame that I’ll take, it’ll be that. I turned you against her. I did. We demonised her, the pair of us. We bonded over our mutual dismay, our mutual powerlessness. And the more you turned against her, the more you turned towards me. I became the normal. I became the sane. And I embraced the new dynamic. One hundred per cent.

And now, Floyd Dunn, now look at me, look me in the eye and tell me it wasn’t you. Go on. I dare you. Tell me it wasn’t you who said it first, who turned to me in the bed one night, after we’d made love, and took both of my hands inside yours, who kissed those hands hard and long and said: ‘Maybe if you and I had a child, maybe it would like me.’





Thirty


Laurel drives straight from King’s Cross to Hanna’s flat where she cleans harder than she’s ever cleaned before. When there’s nothing left to clean she goes into Hanna’s horrible back garden with its stench of disappointing summers and she hacks everything off with a pair of secateurs, leaving behind blackened arboreal skeletons and mud and a rusty barbecue that Hanna has never used. She doesn’t wear gloves and afterwards her hands are ripped and raw, but she doesn’t care. She rubs some of Hanna’s hand cream into her hands and enjoys the rasp of it as it seeps into her flesh.

There are no flowers today. But, frankly, Laurel no longer cares about her daughter’s secret love life. Let her have a secret love life. Let her have a girlfriend, a boyfriend, an old man, a young woman, two young women and a dog for all she cares. Let her have whom she wants. Hanna will tell her when Hanna is ready.

All the things that had seemed important yesterday are important no longer. All that matters now is for Laurel to massage the essence out of the huge knot of new information that is currently blocking up her mind. It’s all tangled together and she’s sure it all means something but it’s so unlikely and so bizarre that she cannot find the place to start.

She tucks Hanna’s thirty pounds into her purse, locks Hanna’s flat behind her, gets back into her car and drives home fast.

Typing Noelle Donnelly into Google doesn’t offer her much to work with. The world is surprisingly full of Noelle Donnellys and Laurel is sure that if Noelle had deliberately disappeared and then come back to life as a physiotherapist in Chicago, she wouldn’t be shouting to the world about it all over the internet. She types in Noelle Donnelly Maths Tutor. This bears more fruit; a few listings on sites with names like FindMyTutor.com and MyPerfectTutor.com. But in all cases the listings have run dry and there are no new testimonials.

She tries Noelle Donnelly Ireland. There are many, but none of them are her Noelle. Finally she tries Noelle Donnelly Disappearance. The world, she concludes half an hour later, did not care much about the disappearance of Noelle Donnelly. No one seemed to notice. There is nothing.

She shuts down her laptop and scratches at her wrists. She tries to recall who recommended Noelle to her in the first place. It was a neighbour. She can see the woman’s face. She can see her dogs, a pair of Irish setters, always jumping up at her, leaving muddy paw-prints on her jeans. But she cannot remember her name. She goes to the wardrobe in the spare room and she pulls out a box of things she still hasn’t unpacked from the house move. In here, she hopes, is her old address book, a relic from the days when people had address books, when you wrote numbers down instead of typing them into a phone.

She finds it halfway down and flicks through the pages feeling slightly appalled by the amount of people she once knew whom she now no longer thinks about.

It’s Susie. Or Sally. Or Sandy. Something like that. She flicks faster and faster. And then she suddenly stops. A pink Post-it, clinging to the ‘S’ page. Her own scratchy, hurried writing on it. And the words Noelle Donnelly. And a number. And then she remembers. Sally – yes, it was Sally – she remembers calling her one morning, saying, ‘Ellie wants a tutor. You had a good one, didn’t you? Have you got her number?’ Scribbling it down, pulling it off, sticking it down. ‘Thanks, Sal, you’re a star. See you soon!’ The sound of her dogs barking in the background.

She phones the number. Remarkably, someone answers. It’s a young man with an Irish accent.

‘Hello,’ says Laurel, ‘sorry to disturb you. But I’m looking for someone who used to be on this number? Noelle Donnelly?’

‘Ah, right, yeah,’ says the young man. ‘Noelle’s my aunty. But no one knows where she is.’

Laurel is speechless for a second. She’d expected an unavailable tone. At the most she’d expected someone who’d never heard of Noelle Donnelly. But here was a blood relative.

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Right. Yes. She disappeared, didn’t she?’

‘So they say,’ says the boy. ‘So they say.’

‘I wondered …’ Laurel begins. ‘I’ve become quite friendly with Noelle’s daughter. And Noelle’s ex. And there’s …’ How could she phrase this? ‘There’s things I’m not sure about. About her leaving. Could I come and see you?’

‘Who are you, did you say?’

‘I’m a friend of Poppy’s.’

‘Ah, right. The girl she had. My grandma talks about her sometimes.’

There’s a brief silence and Laurel wonders if he heard her asking to come over, but then he says, ‘Sure. Why not? It’s number twelve Harlow Road. Just off Stroud Green Road.’