Then She Was Gone(52)

Then came the half-term and I no longer knew where she was going to be. So I had to become a little sneaky. It was tricky because obviously I was working all the hours with my other students, and seeing you too, servicing your sexual requirements like a good girl. But I worked out that she was at the library a lot, and that she passed my road on her way there and that if I put myself in the window of the café on my street corner I’d be able to see her when she passed by. So whenever I wasn’t teaching I’d be there, in the café on the corner, looking for a glimpse of that waterfall of dyed gold hair. And you know, Floyd, I swear that was all I wanted. I just wanted to see her.

But for some reason that day, I found myself rising from my chair. There she was standing between two parked cars, waiting to cross the road. Her blond hair was tied back and hidden somehow inside her hood or the back of her jacket and I wanted … I swear, I just wanted her to see me, to acknowledge me in some way. And I approached her and there it was, like a punch to the gut: Jesus Christ, she doesn’t know me. Not for the first second or two. I watched the memory slot into place like a slide in one of those carousels from the olden days and then of course she was all smiles and kindness. But it was too late. She had completely failed to verify my existence.

If only she had known, Floyd, if only she had known how much I’d needed her to do that, then maybe none of it would have happened. Maybe Ellie Mack would have gone to the library, got to sit all her GCSEs, got to marry Theo, got to live her life.

But unfortunately that’s not the way it worked out.





Thirty-four


Poppy serves dinner for Floyd and Laurel on Friday night. She lights candles, wraps a bottle of wine in a linen napkin and pours it from the base, like a sommelier. She doesn’t eat with them because that would ruin the role play, merely hovers at a discreet distance, clears the table between courses, asks how their food is. Her hair, Laurel notices, is in a topknot, rather than the more formal hairdos she normally favours, and she has a tea towel tied around her waist in an approximation of a waiter’s apron. She looks very grown up. Very pretty. More like Ellie than ever. Laurel can barely tear her eyes from her.

She makes love to Floyd that night.

She is wrong, she concludes, lying in his arms afterwards. She is wrong about it all. The lip balm means nothing. Maybe Noelle bought herself fruity lip balms. Maybe her whole house was full of fruity lip balms. The fact that Poppy looked like Ellie was also neither here nor there. People looked like people. That was a simple matter of fact. And maybe SJ had imagined Noelle’s flat stomach.

And this man, this man right here with his lovely jumpers and his gentle touch, this man who sends her smiley-face emojis and cannot live without her, why would he have invited her into his life if he was somehow involved in Ellie’s disappearance? It makes no sense at all.

She falls asleep in the crook of his arm, her hands entwined with his, feeling safe.

‘I love you, Laurel Mack,’ she thinks she hears him whisper in the middle of the night. ‘I love you so much.’

The uncertainty returns the following morning. She is the first up and the house ticks and creaks as all Victorian houses tick and creak. The kitchen is filled with cold white morning light and last night’s candles and background music are a distant memory. She quickly makes two cups of coffee and takes them upstairs to the warm cocoon of Floyd’s bedroom.

‘I have to go somewhere today,’ he says.

‘Somewhere?’ she says. ‘That sounds mysterious.’

He smiles and pulls her to him. They sit up side by side in the bed, their feet and ankles entwined. ‘Not really,’ he says. ‘I’m meeting my financial advisor.’

‘On a Saturday?’

He shrugs. ‘I always see him on a Saturday. I don’t know why. But I’ll only be a couple of hours. I wondered if maybe you’d be able to stay here and sit with Poppy? While I’m gone?’

‘I’d love to,’ she says and they drink their coffee. From upstairs they hear the sound of Poppy rising. They hear her footsteps on the stairs and then her knocking on the bedroom door. Laurel pulls Floyd’s dressing gown tighter across her breasts and Floyd calls out for her to come in. Poppy runs in and throws herself between them, right on to the sex-scorched bed sheets, against the pillows that Laurel had gripped last night and buried her face into.

Poppy rests her head against Floyd’s shoulder and then she finds Laurel’s hand and grabs it and Laurel feels oddly wrong, braless and unwashed, holding the hand of a young girl inside this nest of adult yearnings.

‘I’m popping out later. Laurel’s going to stay with you,’ says Floyd.

‘Yay!’ says Poppy. ‘Let’s go somewhere.’

She presses her face against Laurel’s shoulder now and Laurel nods and smiles and says, ‘Yes, that would be lovely.’

And as she says it she drops a kiss on to the top of Poppy’s head, the way she used to do to all her children when they were small. And there’s a smell about her scalp, her hair, a smell that sends her reeling back in time: the smell of Ellie.

‘We’ll go out for cake,’ she says, a particular café coming immediately to mind. ‘We’ll have fun.’

The café is on the corner of Noelle’s road. Laurel noticed it when she was here on Thursday. It’s called the Corner Café and it’s been there forever; she’s sure she once took the children there for tea when they were tiny after a swimming lesson or a visit to the dentist.