Then She Was Gone(49)

‘I told you, didn’t I? I told you it was weird. To be honest, I think my aunty Noelle was probably all round weird full stop. We think losing her sister at such a young age damaged her, y’know.’

Laurel shivers again. She thinks of Hanna losing Ellie. She thinks of Hanna’s dark, soulless flat. She thinks of her humourless persona, her awkward hugs. She feels a surge of panic that her daughter might end up like Noelle Donnelly, hoarding hamsters and then disappearing, leaving behind nothing but shadows in her wake. And as she thinks all this her eye is caught by something poking out from under the sofa bed. Something small and plasticky. She reaches down to pick it up. It’s a lip balm in a bright pink and green casing. It’s watermelon-flavoured.

She turns it over in the palm of her hand and then she puts it into her pocket. For some reason she feels that it belongs to her.

Laurel’s hands shake against the steering wheel as she drives home. She can still smell the basement room at Noelle Donnelly’s house, the damp wood, the rotting carpet. Every time she closes her eyes she sees the ugly sofa bed, the piles of hamster cages, the dirty window set high in the wall.

When she gets home she goes to her spare room and pulls out Ellie’s box from under the bed once again. She rakes through pens and badges and rings and hairclips. Ellie’s toothbrush is in the box, and Ellie’s hairbrush, along with tangles of elastic bands and key rings and face creams. And there, in the mix, is a selection of lip balms. Three of them. One is papaya-flavoured, one is mango-flavoured and the other is honeydew melon. She pulls the watermelon lip balm from Noelle’s basement from the pocket of her coat and lines it up with the others.

It forms a set.





Thirty-one


Yes, it’s true that I told you I’d gone on the pill when that wasn’t strictly the case. In all honesty I thought I was too old anyway and did not expect to get pregnant literally two months after we stopped using condoms. It was all over the papers at the time how your eggs all dried up and fell out on your thirty-fifth birthday and – genuinely – when my period was late I thought that was it, thought I’d had my menopause. It wasn’t until my jeans started getting a little tight that it occurred to me to check. So I bought a test and got the little pink lines and sat there on the toilet in my house rocking back and forth and having a little cry because suddenly I thought I didn’t really want a baby after all. Suddenly I realised I’d been an idiot and a fool. How could I raise a child, me with no maternal instincts, me with my baby-scaring face? And how did I know that you’d even want it? Yes, you’d said the thing that you said but I had no idea how you’d react. Not really.

But when I told you, you were happy. At least, you weren’t unhappy.

‘Well, well,’ you said, ‘that’s a curveball.’ And then you said, ‘Do you want to keep it?’ as though it was a necklace I’d bought myself that I might just take back to the shop. I said, ‘Well, of course I want to keep it. It’s ours.’ And you nodded. And that was that. Except you also said, ‘I can’t ask you to live with me, you know that?’

That hurt me, but I didn’t show it. I just said, ‘No. Of course not.’ As though the thought had never occurred to me. And to be truthful I did think you’d change your mind once you met the baby. So I never said what I really thought, which was that I couldn’t possibly raise a baby by myself.

I’d missed two periods but wasn’t sure how far along I might be. You came with me for my scan. I remember that day; it was a nice day. You held my hand in the waiting room. We were both a little giddy, with nerves, no doubt, but also I think with excitement. It felt like one of those days that you have sometimes in life, where you feel like you’ve reached a branch in the road, that you’re setting off on a new journey, suitcases packed, full of trepidation and anticipation. The day felt clean and new, disconnected from the days that had come before and to the days that would follow. I have never felt as close to another human being as I felt to you that day, Floyd. Never.

And then there was the screen, with the tadpole, and I felt your hand tighten around mine and you were thrilled, I know you were. There was your child, inside me, a human being who would come into our lives and who would never tell you that they hated you. A chance to start again. A chance to get it all right. You were happy in that moment. You were, Floyd. You were.

But there was no noise. No noise. I had never been pregnant before. I thought maybe the heart hadn’t been formed yet. Or that maybe it was my heartbeat that kept the tadpole alive. I didn’t know that even at this size – ten weeks along the clinician said – there should be a heartbeat. How was I supposed to know? But you looked at the clinician as she moved the monitor around my belly, the smile fading from her face, and you said, ‘Is there a problem?’ And she said, ‘I’m having a little trouble locating a heartbeat.’

And then I knew, too. I knew that there should have been a noise and that there wasn’t.

Your hand came away from my hand.

You sighed.

And it wasn’t a sigh of sadness. It wasn’t even a sigh of disappointment. It was a sigh of annoyance. A sigh that said, You couldn’t even do this properly, could you?

More even than the lost baby, that sigh virtually killed me.

After that you made it clear that this could be our chance to walk away from each other, no hard feelings. But you weren’t strong-minded enough just to end it and I took advantage of that. I lingered on, yes, I’ll admit that. I overstayed my welcome. I reverted 100 per cent to the person I’d been before I was pregnant. I came to your house at your command for sex. I even moved in for a few months when they were doing the damp in my house. I knew you didn’t really want me there. ‘Have they said how much longer?’ you’d ask. ‘The builders. Do you have a date yet?’