Ellie peered at her and then moved her gaze back to her beans on toast. She knew better than to offer any input when Noelle was like this. Her role was simply to be a human sounding board.
‘Everything we do, every day. The effort it takes just to get out of your fecking bed every morning. Doing the same goddam things every day. Switch on the kettle …’ She mimed switching on a kettle. ‘Brush your teeth.’ She mimed this too. ‘Choose your clothes, comb your hair, cook your food, clear up your food, take out the rubbish, buy more food, answer the phone, wash your clothes, dry your clothes, fold your clothes, put your clothes away, smile at all the cock-sucking bastards out there, every day, over and over and over and there’s no opt-out. I mean, you can see why some people take to the street, can’t you? I see them sometimes, the homeless, lying there on their cardboard mattress, dirty old blanket, can of something strong, and I envy them, I do. No responsibility to anyone, for anything.
‘And you know, I must have been mad thinking I could do this.’ She gestured around the bedroom, at Ellie and her bump and the hamsters in their cages. ‘More mouths to feed, more drudgery to add to the workload, more money to find to pay for more things that will need to be washed and cooked and folded and put away. I don’t know what I was thinking. I really don’t.’
She sighed deeply and then got to her feet. She was about to leave but then she turned and glanced at Ellie curiously. ‘Are you OK?’ The question was an afterthought. Noelle didn’t really want an answer. She didn’t want to hear that Ellie had barely slept in days because she was too uncomfortable at night. She didn’t want to know about Ellie’s sore tooth or the fact that she’d run out of clean underwear and was washing her pants by hand in the basin or that she needed a new bra as her breasts were now the size of watermelons or that she missed her mum so much her insides burned with it and that she could smell summer approaching and could feel the days growing longer and that she cried when she thought about the smell of fresh grass and barbecues in the back garden and Jake on the trampoline and Teddy Bear the cat stretched out in the pools of light that fell upon the wooden floorboards. She didn’t want to know that Ellie no longer knew what Ellie was, let alone how she was, that she had bled into herself, become a puddle, a pool, plasmatic in form. That sometimes she felt as though she loved Noelle. Sometimes she wanted Noelle to hold her in her arms and rock her slowly like a baby, and other times she wanted to slit Noelle’s throat and stand and watch as the blood spouted out, slowly, magnificently, running through Noelle’s fingers, the collapse of her, then the death of her.
Ellie knew what Stockholm Syndrome was. She’d read about the Patty Hearst case. She knew what could happen to people kept in captivity for prolonged periods of time. She knew that her feelings were normal. But she also knew that she must not let those feelings of affection, those moments when she yearned for Noelle’s attention or for her approval, she mustn’t allow them to dominate. She needed to hold on to the parts of her that wanted Noelle dead. Those were the strong, healthy parts of her. Those were the parts that would one day get her out of here.
Forty-four
Ellie was eight months pregnant when you ended it. Or in other words, I was eight months pregnant.
I just feel for the sake of the baby, we should draw a line in the sand now.
You fucking bastard. You said that the relationship had run its course and that you wanted to play a part in the baby’s life but that you thought it was for the best if we went our separate ways as a couple. That we should work out ‘how to be apart’ before the baby came.
How to be apart. Ha! What does that even mean, Floyd?
I don’t think you really knew, to be honest. I think you were just sick of not getting any sex, I think you wanted to be able to go off and screw someone else. That’s what I think.
I managed not to beg. I managed not to plead. And I still had my trump card. The baby. I was very calm, remember? I went up to your room to pack up the belongings that had migrated there over the years. My toothbrush, my deodorant, my hairbrush, spare pants. That kind of thing. I dropped them all into a carrier bag; they made a sad sight when I peered in at them. I was wearing a top of yours, an oversized T-shirt that skimmed my fake bump. I thought about stealing it but then I thought it would have more poignancy if I left it draped across your bed for you to come upon that evening as you climbed into bed, for you to maybe think, Oh Noelle, what have I done? When I left the room, your horrible daughter was standing there on the landing, looking at me as she did with those horror-movie eyes. Fuck you, I thought as I swanned past her. Fuck you.
Because I knew what I had in my basement. And I knew that it was better than her. And if it was better than her then it could still bring us back together.
I had not lost hope.
Forty-five
Well, I wouldn’t say it was a textbook birth. No. I wouldn’t. I’d read everything there was to read on the subject of home birth and there was no eventuality I wasn’t prepared for. Apart from the really, really awful ones that would have taken us to a hospital I suppose (I had my story all lined up: a desperate niece, too ashamed to tell her family back in Ireland – well, you can guess the rest). But it didn’t come to that. I got that baby out of her without any medical intervention. I’m not saying it was pleasant. It was far from pleasant, but out that baby came, alive and breathing. And that was all that mattered at the end of the day.
She was a sweet baby. Full head of brown hair. Little red mouth. I let the girl choose a name for her. It was the least I could do after what she’d been through.
Poppy, she said.
I’d have preferred something a bit more classical. Helen, maybe, or Louise. But there you go. You can’t have everything your own way.
I left the baby with the girl those first few days. Well, there was not much I could be doing now really, was there? And then when the baby was two weeks old, I took her to the baby clinic to get her weighed and checked, get her on the system so that she would be a real person and not just a tiny ghost in my basement.