Noelle refused to countenance any questions about the provenance of the baby inside Ellie over the following weeks. All Noelle did was smile and talk about ‘our miracle’ and swan into Ellie’s room clutching tiny sleep-suits from Asda and little knitted slippers from the Red Cross shop, a wickerwork sleep basket with a tiny white mattress and a gingham shade, a little book made of cotton that squeaked and crinkled and jingled when you touched the pages. She brought lovely cream for Ellie’s swollen feet, and sang lullabies to the bump.
And then one day, in very early spring, Ellie awoke in a strange mood. She had slept badly, been unable to find a position in which the baby wasn’t squashing some part of her insides. And in the moments that she had slept, she’d dreamed vividly and shockingly. In her dreams she gave birth to a puppy, hairless and tiny. The puppy had quickly grown into an adult dog, a hound from hell with bared teeth and red eyes. The dog had hated her, it had skulked outside the door to her room, growling and slavering, waiting for Noelle to unlock the door so that it could come in and attack her. She awoke from this dream three times, sweating and hyperventilating. But each time she fell back into sleep the dog would be there, outside her door.
She was keen to see Noelle that morning. The night had felt long, virtually endless. She wanted a human being to break the strange spell she’d cast herself under. But Noelle didn’t come at breakfast time and she didn’t come at lunchtime. With every passing minute Ellie became more and more anxious, more and more scared. When she finally heard the sound of Noelle’s key in the lock in the early evening she was ready to throw herself at her and sling her arms around her neck.
But immediately the door opened and she saw Noelle’s expression, Ellie recoiled into the soft cocoon of her bed.
‘Here,’ said Noelle, slamming a bowl of Coco Pops, a bag of Wotsits and half a packet of Oreos on the bedside table. ‘I haven’t had time to cook.’
Ellie sat cross-legged, her arms wrapped around her bump, looking at Noelle in surprise and fear.
‘Oh, stop with the big brown eyes. I’m not in the mood for it. Just eat your food.’
‘It’s not very nutritious,’ she ventured quietly. Noelle had been making a big effort to give Ellie vegetables and fruit since she’d become pregnant.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ she muttered. ‘One shit meal’s not going to kill you or the baby.’ She sat heavily on the chair, radiating fury.
Ellie waited a few minutes before speaking again. ‘Where’ve you been?’ she asked, pulling apart the packet of Wotsits.
‘That’s none of your affair.’
‘I was worried,’ she ventured. ‘I mean, it made me think, what would happen if something happened to you while you were gone? Like, maybe you were in an accident or you got ill. What would happen to me?’
‘Nothing’s going to happen to me, don’t be stupid.’
‘No, but it might. You might get concussion and forget your address. And I’d be locked in here with a baby in my tummy and no one would know we were here and we’d both die.’
‘Look,’ said Noelle, exasperated. ‘I am not going to get a concussion. And if anything else happened I’d tell someone you were here. OK?’
Ellie saw that Noelle was losing patience, that she should drop the conversation right now and eat in silence, but what she’d just said, that she would tell someone she was here, this was new and transcendental and extraordinary and thrilling. This couldn’t be ignored.
‘Would you really?’ she asked, slightly breathless.
‘Of course I would. You think I’d just leave you here to die?’
‘But what about …’ She picked her next words carefully. ‘Wouldn’t you be worried? That the police would come? That you’d be arrested or something?’
‘Oh, for crying out loud, child. Will you stop. Stop with all this nonsense. I’ve had enough filthy shit today already to last me a fucking lifetime. I do not need any more from you. All I do is spoil you and care for you and all you do is sit on your huge fat arse thinking up stupid things to worry about. I have put my life on hold for you and that baby. Now just stop whining and let me deal with everything. For God’s sake.’
Ellie nodded and stared into the orange rubble of the crisp packet, her eyes filling with tears.
‘Those animals stink, by the way,’ Noelle growled, tossing her head in the direction of the hamster cages. ‘Get them cleaned out or they’re going down the toilet.’
And then she was gone, and Ellie was alone. Outside the high window a sharp wind threw the tangles of the leafless foliage around like tossed hair while Ellie ate her Wotsits and prayed for a bus to bang into Noelle Donnelly next time she went to the shops, prayed for her to be hospitalised for long enough to have to tell someone about the girl in her basement with a miracle baby growing in her tummy.
Noelle didn’t seem to be excited about the baby any more. The bigger Ellie got the more disinterested Noelle became. The gifts stopped, the baby names stopped, there were no more little sleep-suits to admire or gentle palpations of the bump to see what position the baby was in. Noelle still came three times a day to visit Ellie, to bring her food – no longer the healthy, good-for-the-baby meals of the early months, no more boil-in-the-bag vegetables and uninspired arrangements of tomato and cucumber, just fried food in varying shades of white, pale brown and occasionally orange – and often she stayed to talk.
Sometimes these chats were mundane, sometimes they bore precious nuggets of information – the weather outside, for example, with its suggestion of the changing seasons, or the increase in her business as children in the world outside began their GCSE studies with its suggestion of the time of year. Other times these chats were a kind of catharsis for Noelle, an unburdening of herself. Ellie had found these mood swings terrifying at first, had never been quite prepared for whichever version of Noelle might come through her door that day. But as the time passed she started to get an instinct for Noelle’s psychology, started to sense immediately what their chat would be like before Noelle had opened the door, just by the rhythm of the fall of her feet on the wooden staircase outside, the sound of the key in the lock, the speed with which it opened, the angle of her hair across her face, the sound of her breath as she drew it in to form her words of greeting.
Today she knew immediately that Noelle was in a self-pitying mood.
Flop flop flop came her size eight and a half feet down the stairs.
Sigh before she put the key in the lock.
Creak as the door opened slowly.
And sigh again as she closed the door behind her.
‘Here,’ she said, presenting Ellie with her lunch: two slices of white toast cowering under the contents of a can of Heinz beans with mini-sausages, a film-wrapped pancake filled with chocolate spread and rolled into a flattened tube, a can of Lucozade and a bowl of jelly beans.
Ellie sat straight and took the tray from Noelle. ‘Thank you.’
She began to eat in silence, aware of Noelle brewing and cogitating beside her.
Finally she heard Noelle take a deep breath and mutter, ‘I’m wondering, Ellie, what the heck this is all about. Aren’t you?’