‘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 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 towards 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 theorised 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 misdemeanours 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, so I 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 demonised 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 towards me. I became the normal. I became the sane. And I embraced the new dynamic. One hundred per cent.
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.’
Thirty
Laurel drives straight from King’s Cross to Hanna’s flat where she cleans harder than she’s ever cleaned 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 secateurs, leaving behind blackened arboreal skeletons and mud and a rusty barbecue that Hanna has never used. She doesn’t wear gloves and afterwards 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 neighbour. 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.