Then She Was Gone(54)

‘So,’ says Joshua, his hands in his pockets, bouncing up and down and beaming, ‘so you’re Poppy. Wow! Sit down, Poppy. And Laurel. Sit down. Please. Tea? Coffee? Anything?’

Poppy sits primly and shakes her head. ‘No thank you,’ she says. ‘We just had tea and cake,’ and Sam and Joshua look at each other and hoot and Joshua says:

‘An English cousin! We finally have an English cousin. We already have a Canadian cousin, two American cousins and a German cousin. And now we finally have an English one. Wow. And look at you. I can see my grandmother in you, so I can.’

Poppy smiles grimly, slightly overwhelmed.

‘So, this used to be your house? Is that right?’

‘Maybe,’ she replies, looking around herself. ‘I can’t remember.’

‘We should give you a tour, wouldn’t you say? What do you think?’

Poppy glances again at Laurel, who nods, and they follow Joshua and Sam through the house. Poppy is uncharacteristically quiet at first, peering nervously around doorways.

Joshua pushes a door at the top of the landing, ‘This must have been your room. Look, it still has the wallpaper.’

Poppy falters for a moment on the threshold and then she steps in, her eyes wide, her hands running across the wallpaper. It’s pale grey with a repeated pattern of pink rabbits and green tortoises on it, engaged in a running competition. The tortoises are all wearing sweatbands and the rabbits have on running shoes.

‘I remember this wallpaper,’ she says breathlessly. ‘The hares. And the tortoises. I used to see them running in the night. I’d stare at them and then I’d shut my eyes and they’d be running. Hundreds of them. Through my dreams. I remember it. I really do.’

‘You want to see some more?’ says Joshua, giving Laurel a knowing look. ‘There’s another room downstairs. I wonder if you’ll remember that, too?’

Quietly they descend back to the ground floor, through the kitchen and then down into the basement.

Poppy stops once more on the threshold, grips the outside of the door with her fingertips. She gasps and says, ‘I don’t want to go in there.’

‘Oh, but it’s fine,’ says Joshua. ‘It’s just a room.’

‘But … but …’ Her eyes are wide and her breathing is audible. ‘I’m not allowed in there. My mum told me never to go in there.’

Laurel touches her shoulder softly. ‘Wow, that’s an interesting memory. Why do you think that was?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Poppy, sounding vaguely tearful. ‘I don’t know. I just remember thinking there was a monster down there. A big, scary monster. But that’s just silly, isn’t it? There was no monster down there, was there?’

‘Did you have pets?’ asks Laurel. ‘When you were tiny? Do you remember having some hamsters?’

Poppy shakes her head slowly and walks out of the kitchen and towards the front door.





Thirty-five


Laurel takes Poppy home after their visit to Noelle’s house. They walk in silence for a while. Laurel has never known Poppy to be so quiet.

‘Are you OK?’ she asks as they wait at a crossroads for the lights to change.

‘No,’ she says. ‘I feel all weird.’

‘Why do you think that is?’

‘I don’t know.’ She shrugs. ‘Just remembering things I haven’t remembered before. Thinking about my mum when I haven’t thought about her for so long. Meeting cousins I didn’t know I had. It’s been a bit overwhelming.’

‘Yes,’ says Laurel, cupping the crown of Poppy’s head with her hand. ‘Yes. I bet it has.’

Laurel swallows away the lump in her throat. She needs to stay focused. She cannot jump to fantastical conclusions. In the scheme of things it is far more likely that the monster in Noelle’s basement was actually twenty dead hamsters, not Ellie. She needs to assume that this was the case and then find the evidence that it was not. She needs to stay sane.

Floyd is there when they get back. Poppy starts to babble immediately about cake and tea and then disappears very quickly to her room before, she assumes, Floyd can ask her anything else.

Laurel watches Floyd unpacking carrier bags of shopping. For a moment, as he reaches for a tall cupboard to slide in a box of teabags, his shirt slips from the moorings of his waistband, flashing a slice of pale flesh, and she feels herself sliding back through time again, as she’d felt in Nando’s the week before last with Poppy. She’s back in her own kitchen in Stroud Green. In front of her is Paul. He’s wearing the same shirt, it tugs itself briefly from his waistband, he slides the teabags into the cupboard, he turns to face her. He smiles. For a second the two moments blend in her mind, the two men merge into one.

‘Are you OK?’ Floyd asks.

She shakes her head once, to dislodge the glitch. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I am. I’m fine.’

‘You looked like you were miles away.’

She smiles as widely as she can, but she suspects it is not wide at all. She knows she should say something about her visit to Noelle’s house with Poppy but she can’t. And she can’t ask him any of the questions she wants to ask him – Did you know that Sara-Jade claims to have seen Noelle at eight months pregnant without a bump? Do you never want to find out what happened to Noelle? Would you not like to find her? Do you never ask yourself questions about the strangeness of everything? – because then everything about them, about Floyd and Laurel, all of it would be squashed and remade, like a clay pot on a wheel. And it’s such a lovely pot and she’s worked so hard on it and so much depends on it staying exactly as it is.