by Lisa Jewell
I disagree very strongly.
29
I first met Sara-Jade when you and I had been together for a year. Up until then she’d only been spending every other weekend at yours and it was easy to keep us compartmentalized. But then your ex got a job and suddenly she was dropping Sara on your doorstep all the time, quite often at short notice, quite often when you’d already invited me over for the evening.
Well, you’d told me that she was a difficult girl; she’d responded badly to the split, so you said. And like I said, I’d never really liked little girls. They have a way of looking at you sometimes, as though their hearts are full of hate.
And Sara-Jade, she barely looked human. Skin so thin and pale you could see the veins of her. And this shock of white hair. Not blonde, no; white, like an old lady. She was tiny too, more like a five-year-old than an eight-year-old.
I tried to be nice. I really did. You know that. You were there, remember?
“Oh, so you must be Sara-Jade. It is a pleasure to meet you.” I tried to shake her hand. I always do that with young children because you never know whether they’re the kind to appreciate adult attention or not. Some children thrive on it; their eyes find you and they reel you in: Look at me, find me impressive, tell me that I’m better than all the other children. Others could not give a sideways shit and just want to get away from you as fast as they humanly can. So I find that a handshake is a good compromise between fussing over them and ignoring them, and sometimes you’ll find you’re the very first person to shake their hand and that’s a nice thing however you look at it.
Sara-Jade did not take my hand. She turned and ran from the room sobbing.
Jesus Christ.
You ran after her and I heard your voices and stood there in your hallway, my hand hanging heavy at my side.
I felt like a monster. I remember looking at myself in the mirror that hung on your wall there, above the table by your door. I’d begun to look fondly upon myself at that point. I’d begun to focus on the positive rather than negative. If a man like you wanted to touch me, to behold me, then surely I could not be quite so bad? But the face in the mirror that day, as you soothed your sobbing girl behind a closed door somewhere, it was not a face I wanted to look at. I saw the darkness around my eyes, the pull of my skin away from my cheekbones and toward my chin, the hair that had dulled to rusty water and grown too long for my face. I was not pretty. I was not.
Your daughter reminded me of that.
After that, well, it was hard to like her.
After that, for quite some time, it was hard to like myself.
I should not have taken it personally, I can see that now. Sara-Jade was a highly strung child, scared of many things, not just the woman in her hallway. But I did take it personally and I could not bring myself to be kind to that child ever again. To be fair, you found her hard work yourself. She was an aloof child and prone to the most terrible, terrible tantrums. Tantrums is barely the word for it. If I’d been that way inclined, I might have theorized that she’d been possessed by the devil. She threw things, she broke things, she screamed that she wanted to kill you and stab you and cut off your head with a knife. She hated you; oh God, yes, she hated you. Other times she’d be regressive and needy, make you accompany her to the toilet because she was scared to go on her own, make you sit outside her room singing a particular song until she was asleep, sometimes for over half an hour.
We spoke about her a lot during those months, muttered softly across your pillows at night, wondered what to do and how to deal with it. I had nothing to offer. I knew nothing about small children. I had a thousand nieces and nephews back home, but I hadn’t seen a one of them. Not even vaguely interested. But I made the right noises. “What about therapy?” I suggested. “Have you thought about that?”
But no, apparently Kate, perfect little Kate, the world’s most annoying ex-wife (I’m sorry, Floyd, but she was and you know she was, with that breathy voice, her baby-doll eyes, the way her chin would drop when you told her about Sara-Jade’s misdemeanors and she’d say, “Oh, Jadey-Wadey. Poor little sugar bum. Has Daddy been putting you to bed too late again?” Christ, I wanted to slice her in half, I really did), no, Kate wasn’t having any of it. “Too much sugar.” “Not enough sleep.” “Hard week at school.” Blah blah blah. She couldn’t see that her own child was a virtual sociopath.
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 demonized 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 toward me. I became the normal. I became the sane. And I embraced the new dynamic. One hundred percent.
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.”
30
Laurel drives straight from King’s Cross to Hanna’s flat and she cleans her flat harder than she’s ever cleaned it 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 pruning shears, leaving behind blackened arboreal skeletons and mud and a rusty barbecue that Hanna has never used. She doesn’t wear gloves and afterward 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 neighbor. 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 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. Sh
e 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.”
“Now?” she confirms. “I can come now?”
“Sure,” he says. “My name’s Joshua, by the way. Joshua Donnelly.”
“And I’m Laurel Mack,” she says. “I’ll be there in about half an hour.”
Harlow Road is a turning off the high road, a section of the road that Laurel is more than familiar with after watching the CCTV footage from the day Ellie disappeared so many times on the news. It’s exactly opposite the spot where the car had been parked, the one whose windows Ellie had checked her reflection in.
Number twelve is close to the turning. It’s a tiny house, in a terrace of other tiny houses, with a small cherry tree in the front garden. The house is in a bad state. It looks almost as though nobody lives there.
Joshua Donnelly opens the door wide and steps aside. “Come in, Laura,” he says. “Come in.”
“It’s Laurel,” she says, “like the wreath.”
“Oh, sure, like the wreath, yeah.” He pulls the door closed behind her. He’s small and bouncy in oversized jersey joggers and a red and white football shirt. His hair is cut very short and has a small line shaved into it from the hairline. He has an appealing face, almost pretty, and very long eyelashes.
“You’ll have to excuse the state of the place,” he says, leading her into the tiny front room. “It’s just me and my brother here and we’re not very domesticated.”
The room is furnished with two brown leather sofas and lots of varnished pine furniture. On the walls are framed prints of modern art. Clothes are hanging to dry by the back door and over the backs of chairs. There are some mugs here and there and piles of what looks like college work. But it’s not so bad, considering.
“So, you’re the sons of Noelle’s . . . ?”
“Younger brother. Yeah. There’s four of them. Four brothers. And there were two girls but one of them died when she was tiny and the other one was Noelle and God knows what happened to her.” He takes some textbooks off a sofa and brushes some crumbs onto the floor with the side of his hand, gesturing to Laurel to take a seat. “Can I get you anything? Tea? A Coke?”
She sits. “No, no, I’m fine, thank you.”
“Are you sure? It’s no bother.”
“Honestly. Thank you.”
He clears space for himself on the other sofa and sits down, his knees spread wide, one leg jigging up and down.
“Did you inherit this place from Noelle?” she asks.
“Well, no, I wouldn’t say inherited. The family just kind of absorbed it, y’know? It’s like our personal little hotel for anyone in the family who needs a place in London. And right now that’s me and Sammy, my kid brother.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Since October. I’ve just started on a degree at Goldsmiths. I’ll be here for a few years yet. But there were others here before me. I mean, there are thirteen of us cousins. But we’re not allowed to move anything or touch anything, you know what I mean? We have to keep it as she left it. More or less.”
“In case she comes back?”
“Yeah, sure, in case she comes back. Exactly.”
“And do you think she will?”
“Ah.” He shrugs. “That’s a question. You know, I never met her? None of us did, us cousins. She was like a ghost member of the family. We’d hear things about her, that she was buying herself a house, that she’d got together with a famous writer, that she was expecting a baby, all of that. But we never, ever met her. Isn’t that crazy?”
He blinks at her, his mouth set into a wide smiling circle, and Laurel agrees. “Yes,” she says, “yes, that is crazy.”
She looks around the room at the pine shelves full of books and the sun-bleached prints on the walls. “So all this,” she says, “the furniture, and the books, this is all Noelle’s?”
“Yeah, yeah. All of it. I mean, upstairs, in the wardrobes, all her clothes are still there. Seriously. All her underwear and her bits and pieces.”
“And no one ever packed anything away? It’s all as she left it?”
“Yeah. Pretty much.”
Laurel feels a shocking urge to run upstairs now and rifle through everything, to upend drawers and search through paperwork. For what? she wonders. What is it she thinks she will find?
“What do you think happened to your aunt?” she asks instead.
“I genuinely don’t have a clue. I mean, she was supposed to be coming over to Ireland, that’s what I was told. And she took her things: her passport, her cards; she packed a bag, some photos. She was clearly going somewhere. But wherever it was it looks like maybe she never got there? Her passport was never used. She hasn’t used her cash card for years.” He turns his hands palms upward and then places them on his knees. “Strange shit.”
“You know,” Laurel says lightly, “my daughter disappeared.”
“Oh yeah?” Joshua sits forward, his interest piqued.
“She disappeared in 2005. And the last place my daughter was seen alive was there.” She points toward Stroud Green Road. “Just there. Opposite the Red Cross shop. On CCTV.”
He narrows his eyes at her and they sit in silence for a moment.
Laurel wonders how far she can push this personable young man before he goes on the defense. “Poppy,” she says, “your cousin. Have you met her?”
“No, none of us has. She’s the only cousin we haven’t met. And it’s a shame because I have another cousin about her age, Clara—she’s a laugh, she really is, such a character—and maybe they could have been friends. But that guy, the writer guy . . . ”
“Floyd?”
“Yeah, that’s the guy. He keeps himself to himself and he keeps her close to home. He didn’t want to know when we suggested we could help him out with her care. I think one of my uncles went round there, you know, about a year after Noelle disappeared, tried to make a friendship.” He shakes his head. “Apparently he was quite sharp with him, made it clear that we weren’t wanted.”
Laurel wonders if Poppy even knows about her Irish family.
“How do you know them then, Poppy and Floyd?” asks Joshua.
“I’m . . . well, I’m in a relationship with Floyd, actually. He’s my boyfriend.”
“Oh.” He raises his brow. “Right.”
“And fun
nily enough, Noelle used to tutor my daughter, Ellie. In fact, she was tutoring her in the weeks before she disappeared.”
“What—here?” He points at the floor.
“No. Noelle came to my house. About half a mile from here.”
“Right,” he says. “Right.”
Laurel gazes at him for a moment, willing him to provide her with the strand that will unfurl the knot of threads in her head.
“So, are you saying that something untoward happened?” he says eventually. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“I don’t know,” Laurel says. “I really don’t know.”
“It does sound a bit odd,” he says. “I’ll grant you that.” He puts his elbows on his knees and stares at the floor for a moment. “You’ve got me thinking now, got my brain ticking over.” He circles his temple with his fingertip. “You have a mystery, and I have a mystery, and you think that maybe the two mysteries are connected?”
“Have you ever been through Noelle’s things?” she asks. “Her private things? Diaries or such?”
“No. I never did. But there was . . . ” He pauses. “There was one thing. A really strange thing. We could never quite fathom it.” He looks toward the door and then back again. He sighs. “Shall I show you?”
“What?”
“You’ll have to trust me, because I’m a stranger to you and I could be anyone.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s in the basement.”
“What is?”
“The strange thing. The thing we found. In the basement.”
Laurel feels a surge of adrenaline. She looks at the boy with the sweet face sitting opposite her.
