by Lisa Jewell
“I’d totally understand if you don’t want to go down. I wouldn’t if I were you. Probably seen too many scary movies—you know, the ones where you go don’t go down into the basement, you bloody idiot!”
He smiles and he couldn’t look more like a nice young man over from Ireland to do a degree.
“I could just describe it if you like. Or I can go down and take a photo on my phone for you? Would that be a better idea?”
She smiles. “It’s fine. I’ll go and have a look.”
“Text someone,” he says, still looking anxiously at her. “Text someone to say where you are. That’s what I would do.”
She laughs. “Just show me,” she says.
The door to the basement is in the kitchen. Joshua takes a torch from a drawer and leads her down a set of wooden steps. At the bottom is a door. He pushes it open into a small square room, completely clad in the same heavily varnished pine as the living room and the kitchen. There’s a small window set high into the wall that frames the thin bare branches of the cherry tree in the front garden. There’s a small sofa pulled out into a bed, a TV set, and a chair. And there’s a series of what looks like hamster cages piled up one on top of the other on a table against the far wall.
Joshua sweeps the torchlight across them. “There were, like, twenty-odd hamsters in those when my uncles came. And they were all dead, you know, on their backs with their little legs in the air.” He mimes a dead hamster lying on its back with its legs in the air. “Some of them had eaten each other apparently. We couldn’t work it out at all. We thought maybe she’d been breeding them, y’know? Selling them to kids? But we couldn’t find any evidence of that. It’s just, like, why would you have all those animals? In your basement? And then just leave them to die?”
Laurel looks at the cages and shudders. Then she looks around again. In spite of the honey-colored cladding, the room feels bare and cold. And there’s something else, something chilling and unnerving in the very air of the room.
“What do you think this room was for?” she asks, turning to examine the locks on the door, three of them in total, then turning again to look at the high window, the bare branches of the tree, the open sofa bed, the TV.
“A guest room, I suppose.”
“It’s not very homey, is it?”
“No. I don’t suppose she had many guests. From all accounts she was a bit antisocial.”
“So why would she have kept a sofa bed down here? And the TV? And all the animals that she left to die?”
“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 humorless 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-flavored.
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 hair clips. 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-flavored, one is mango-flavored, 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.
31
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 realized 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 to 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 percent to the person I’d been b
efore 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?”
So I knew nothing had really changed and I didn’t pretend to lay any special claim to you and your time just because my womb had once hosted your tadpole.
And there was your terrible child, Sara-Jade, hating you and needing you in equal measure, confusing you and upsetting you, hitting you and spitting at you, then refusing to get off your lap for half an hour when you had things you needed to do. And there was my womb, touched so briefly by unexpected life, echoing with the unheard heartbeat of our dead baby. And I couldn’t make sense of it all.
You’d gone back to the condoms as I was clearly not to be trusted. So there would not be a baby for you and me, and I needed to accept that.
I tried really hard to accept it, Floyd. Really hard. I tried for two years. I turned forty-three. And then I turned forty-four. And then you started taking chances, thinking, probably, that I was all out of eggs, and one night you ran out of condoms and said, “Never mind, I’ll just pull out.”
Well, clearly you did not pull out fast enough or early enough and it happened all over again. I missed a period. I took a test. Two pink lines appeared. For three days I felt like I was sitting on the crest of a wave, the sun shining on my face, the wind in my hair, angels playing on harps wherever I went. I booked a scan, but this time I didn’t tell you: I could not have born the quiet room, the sigh of annoyance, the dropped hand. But before I could even make it to the clinic your baby had died and fallen out of me. A small bleed. I’d have thought it was a heavy period if I hadn’t taken the test.
I canceled the appointment.
I never told you about the second tadpole.
And it was that day, Floyd, it was that very day that I first went to the home of Ellie Mack. The same day your baby died inside me. I had to slap on a smile and a friendly disposition and sit in a room with a spoiled pretty girl and a hairy cat, surrounded by the paraphernalia of family life: the photos and the kicked-off shoes, the trashy paperbacks and the furniture all from Habitat no doubt, and I had to teach this spoiled pretty girl with a brain too big for her own good who already knew everything she needed to know when what I really wanted to do was sob and say, Today I lost another baby!
But I did not. No. I drank her mother’s lovely tea from a mug with the words “Keep Calm and Clean My Kitchen” on it. I ate her nice chocolate-chip biscuits made by Prince Charles himself. I taught her daughter a good lesson. I worked hard for my thirty-five pounds.
I felt calm when I left Ellie Mack’s house that evening. I walked the half-mile home and it was a cold, sharp evening, with drops of ice in the air that stung the backs of my hands. I walked slowly, relishing the darkness and the pain. And as I walked I felt this certainty build within me, a certainty that somehow it was all connected, the gone baby and the spoiled girl, that there was a conflation, that maybe one thing balanced out the other.
I got home and I didn’t call you or look at my phone to see if you had called me. I watched a TV show and I cut my toenails. I drank a glass of wine. I had a long, long bath. I let the water rush up between my legs, washing away the last traces of your baby.
And I thought of the girl called Ellie Mack, of her big brain and her perfect features, the honey of her hair tied so carelessly into a topknot, the socked feet tucked beneath her and elegant hands folded into her sleeves, the smell of her—of apples and toothpaste, of clean hair and girl—the keenness to learn, her gentleness, her perfection. She had a glow about her, a circle of light. I bet she never told her parents she hated them. I bet she never spat at them or pinched them or threw her food across the room.
She was quite, quite lovely and quite, quite brilliant.
And I have to confess, I became more than a little obsessed.
32
Later that day Laurel visits her mother, Ruby.
“Still here?” she asks, placing her handbag on the floor and slipping off her coat.
Ruby tuts and sighs. “L-L-L-Looks like it.”
Laurel smiles and takes her hand. “We drank a toast to you on Friday,” she says, “at the birthday party. We all missed you very much.”
Ruby rolls her eyes as if to say sure you did.
“We really did. And guess what? I met Bonny!”
Ruby’s eyes open wide and she puts her fingertips to her mouth. “W-Wow!”
“Yes. Wow. She’s nice. I knew she would be. Cuddly.”
“F-F-Fat?”
Laurel laughs. “No. Not fat. Just bosomy.”
Ruby looks down at her own flat chest, the same flat chest that she bequeathed to her daughter and they both laugh.
“Boyf-f-friend? All happy?”
“Yes!” she replies with more positivity than she’s feeling. Her mother has extended her miserable existence beyond the point of comfort to see her daughter happy. “Really happy. It’s going really well!”
She sees a question pass across her mother’s eyes and she moves the conversation along quickly, asks after her health, her appetite, if she’s heard anything from her hopeless brother, who moved to Dubai the same day Ruby moved into the home.
“I won’t see you again,” her mother says as Laurel puts on her coat.
Laurel looks at her, looks deep into her eyes. Then she leans down and holds her in her arms, puts her mouth to her ear and says, “I will see you next week, Mum. And if I don’t, then I want you to know that you have been the best and most amazing mother in the world and I have been extraordinarily lucky to have you for so long. And that I adore you. And that we all do. And that you could not have been any better than you were. OK?”
She feels her mother’s head nodding against hers, the soft puff of her hair like a breath against her cheek. “Yes,” says her mother, “yes. Yes. Yes.”
Laurel wipes tears from her cheek and puts on a smile before pulling away from her mother.
“Bye, Mum,” she says. “I love you.”
“I l-l-love you, t-t-too.”
Laurel stops in the doorway for a second and looks at her mother, absorbs the shape of her and the exquisite feeling of her existence in the world. Then she sits in her car for a moment afterward, in the car park. She allows herself to cry for about thirty seconds and then talks herself out of it. Wanting to die and dying are generally unrelated. But this felt like more than her mother simply wanting to die. This seemed to come from inside her, from the inexplicable place that thinks about an old friend moments before bumping into them, that can sense the approach of a thunderstorm before it’s broken, the place that sends dogs to dark corners of the house to die.
She picks her phone from her bag and stares at it for a while. She wants to talk to someone. Someone who knows her better than anyone.
She nearly calls Paul. But she doesn’t.
33
I’d had crushes on girls before. There were girls at the posh magazine where I used to work. Posh, posh, posh girls. I hated them all, really. But at the same time I yearned for them, particularly the fun ones, the friendly ones. The ones with sticks up their arses I could take or leave; they were just me, with better genes. But the fun girls, the lovely girls, the ones who thanked me if I held a door for them or made goofy faces if there was a problem with their expenses, God, I wanted them. Not in a sexual way, of course. But I wanted to know what it felt like to be them, to walk down the street with everything in exactly the right place, the sun shining down on their honey-colored heads, doors opening as they passed, men turning, parties starting at the precise moment that they arrived.
I was protective of my antisocial persona in many ways. It felt safe to be invisible. No one had any expectations of me, and after eighteen years living in my parents’ house it was liberating not to be expected to do anything or be anything. So it was ambiguous, this feeling. On the one hand
I wanted to be like these golden girls. On the other I felt far superior to them.
And Ellie Mack was possibly the most golden girl I had ever encountered.
It turned out that she was in love. She had this boy, Theo. I met him once. He was pretty golden, too. The sweetest, sweetest thing, he was, and handsome right off the handsome scale. He shook my hand and he made proper eye contact and he was clever, clever, clever and I found myself thinking, Just imagine the babies that these two lovebirds could make, would they not be just spectacular.
That might well have been the root of it, thinking about it now.
But it was your fault as well: you with the dropped hand and the sigh of annoyance. You and your I can’t ask you to live with me, you know that? You with your small girl sitting on your lap, an arm hooked around your neck, staring at me with her pale horror-film eyes as though she was a ghost and I was the one who’d murdered her.
And there was Ellie Mack, the highlight of my thankless weeks. I brought her gifts. I told her she was marvelous. I shared little snippets from my life and she shared little snippets from hers. The mother was a pleasant woman. I thought she liked me. I got my tea in the same mug every week. I came to think of it as my mug. The biscuits were always, always good.
It was a sort of cocoon at Ellie’s house: dark outside, cozy inside; me, Ellie, the cat, the sounds of her family all around, the tea, the biscuits, the reassuring solidity of the numbers on the pages between us. I liked our Tuesday afternoons. For those few weeks they were all that stood between me and myself. And I think I already knew even then that myself was not a place where I should be spending too much time.
I’d seen Ellie and me as riding a train together toward her GCSEs, toward triumph. I’d pictured myself on her doorstep in August with a small bottle of champagne and possibly a shiny balloon, her arms thrown around my neck, her pleasant mother standing behind smiling beneficently, waiting her turn to hug me too, words of thanks and gratitude, Oh, Noelle, we could not have done this without you. Come in, come in, let’s drink a toast together.
