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 way 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.
Thirty-two
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 afterwards, 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.
Thirty-three
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-coloured 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 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 well, you know I can’t ask you to live with me, don’t you? 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.