And there was Ellie Mack, the highlight of my thankless weeks. I brought her gifts. I told her she was marvellous. 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, cosy 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 towards her GCSEs, towards 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.
And then came that phone call. The pleasant mother being not quite so pleasant. Christ, you know, I can barely remember what she said now. I wasn’t really listening. All I could think was no, no, no. Not my Tuesdays. Not my Tuesdays. So I was curt, verging on rude, most likely. I told her that it was a great inconvenience. When it was nothing of the sort. It was a fucking travesty, that’s what it was. A fucking travesty.
I dropped the phone afterwards and I screamed out loud.
I fixated on all the nice things I’d done for Ellie. The gifts I’d bought her. The special papers I’d found for her, printed off for her. The extra ten minutes I’d sometimes tag on to the end of our lesson if we were in the zone as I called it. I bubbled and fermented with resentment.
That phase went on for a week or two and then I entered the nostalgia phase. Everything had been better then, I told myself, when I’d spent Tuesday afternoons with Ellie Mack. My relationship with you had been better, my teaching had been better, my life had been better. And I thought, well, maybe if I could just see her, just see her face, maybe I’d feel a bit like I’d felt then.
There’s a word to describe what I did next. And that word is stalking. I knew where Ellie was at school, of course I did; not too far from my home, as it happened, so it was easy to pass by at 9 a.m., at 3.30, to watch her coming and going, the boy with his arm slung around her shoulders, the glow coming off the two of them so fucking bright and golden it’s a wonder they could see where they were going. They were the culmination of every teen romance movie ever filmed, right there, in real life.
Then came the half-term and I no longer knew where she was going to be. So I had to become a little sneaky. It was tricky because obviously I was working all the hours with my other students, and seeing you too, servicing your sexual requirements like a good girl. But I worked out that she was at the library a lot, and that she passed my road on her way there and that if I put myself in the window of the café on my street corner I’d be able to see her when she passed by. So whenever I wasn’t teaching I’d be there, in the café on the corner, looking for a glimpse of that waterfall of dyed gold hair. And you know, Floyd, I swear that was all I wanted. I just wanted to see her.
But for some reason that day, I found myself rising from my chair. There she was standing between two parked cars, waiting to cross the road. Her blond hair was tied back and hidden somehow inside her hood or the back of her jacket and I wanted … I swear, I just wanted her to see me, to acknowledge me in some way. And I approached her and there it was, like a punch to the gut: Jesus Christ, she doesn’t know me. Not for the first second or two. I watched the memory slot into place like a slide in one of those carousels from the olden days and then of course she was all smiles and kindness. But it was too late. She had completely failed to verify my existence.
If only she had known, Floyd, if only she had known how much I’d needed her to do that, then maybe none of it would have happened. Maybe Ellie Mack would have gone to the library, got to sit all her GCSEs, got to marry Theo, got to live her life.
But unfortunately that’s not the way it worked out.
Thirty-four
Poppy serves dinner for Floyd and Laurel on Friday night. She lights candles, wraps a bottle of wine in a linen napkin and pours it from the base, like a sommelier. She doesn’t eat with them because that would ruin the role play, merely hovers at a discreet distance, clears the table between courses, asks how their food is. Her hair, Laurel notices, is in a topknot, rather than the more formal hairdos she normally favours, and she has a tea towel tied around her waist in an approximation of a waiter’s apron. She looks very grown up. Very pretty. More like Ellie than ever. Laurel can barely tear her eyes from her.
She makes love to Floyd that night.
She is wrong, she concludes, lying in his arms afterwards. She is wrong about it all. The lip balm means nothing. Maybe Noelle bought herself fruity lip balms. Maybe her whole house was full of fruity lip balms. The fact that Poppy looked like Ellie was also neither here nor there. People looked like people. That was a simple matter of fact. And maybe SJ had imagined Noelle’s flat stomach.
And this man, this man right here with his lovely jumpers and his gentle touch, this man who sends her smiley-face emojis and cannot live without her, why would he have invited her into his life if he was somehow involved in Ellie’s disappearance? It makes no sense at all.
She falls asleep in the crook of his arm, her hands entwined with his, feeling safe.
‘I love you, Laurel Mack,’ she thinks she hears him whisper in the middle of the night. ‘I love you so much.’
The uncertainty returns the following morning. She is the first up and the house ticks and creaks as all Victorian houses tick and creak. The kitchen is filled with cold white morning light and last night’s candles and background music are a distant memory. She quickly makes two cups of coffee and takes them upstairs to the warm cocoon of Floyd’s bedroom.
‘I have to go somewhere today,’ he says.
‘Somewhere?’ she says. ‘That sounds mysterious.’
He smiles and pulls her to him. They sit up side by side in the bed, their feet and ankles entwined. ‘Not really,’ he says. ‘I’m meeting my financial advisor.’
‘On a Saturday?’
He shrugs. ‘I always see him on a Saturday. I don’t know why. But I’ll only be a couple of hours. I wondered if maybe you’d be able to stay here and sit with Poppy? While I’m gone?’