‘I’ve been thinking,’ you said, ‘about Poppy. About arrangements. Going forward. And it can’t go on like this. And to be horribly, horribly frank with you, Noelle, I fear for her, living with you. I think …’
Here it came. Here it came.
‘I think you’re toxic.’
Toxic.
Dear Jesus.
‘And this is about much more than home-schooling, Noelle. This is about everything. Did you know that Poppy hates you? She’s told me that. Not just once. Not just when she’s cross with you. But often. She’s scared of you. She doesn’t …’ You looked up at me, eyes full of cool guilt. ‘She doesn’t like the way you smell. She’s said that to me. And that … that’s not normal, Noelle. A child should not be able to differentiate between their own smell and the smell of their mother at this stage. That, to me, suggests a terrible, fundamental disconnect between you both; it suggests a failure to bond. And I’ve been talking to a social worker about what my options are and she said that I should take Poppy out of the picture for now, just while we thrash this out, so she’s gone to stay with a friend. Just for a few days …’
‘Friend?’ I said cynically. ‘What friend? You don’t have any friends.’
‘It doesn’t matter what friend. But we really need to reach an agreement on this, civilly, before Poppy comes home. So I’m asking you, Noelle, as Poppy’s mother, could you …’
You struggled for the words here, I recall.
‘Could you let her go? Please? You could still see her. Of course you could. But it would have to be under supervision. It would have to be here. And it would have to fit in with Poppy’s education.’
I struggled for words then too. It wasn’t so much what you were saying – though that was bad enough – as the tone in which you were saying it. There was no oh, I’m terribly sorry, Noelle, but I’ve passed your child on to strangers and now I want you to fuck off away from us. There was no sense in the tone of your voice that what you were saying was anything other than entirely reasonable.
Finally I said, ‘No. No, Floyd. I won’t allow it. I want my child back. And I want her back right now. You have no right. No right whatsoever. She’s my child and —’
You put your hand up then. You said, ‘Yes. I know that. But, Noelle, you have to accept the fact that you’re not strong enough to be a parent. The way you’re raising her, the junk food and the TV on all day and the lack of physical affection. Not to mention leaving her alone in the house, Noelle. It’s verging on abuse, and that’s exactly how a team of social workers would see it. Poppy’s teeth are appalling. She has nits half the time that you simply don’t deal with. You’re not well in the head, Noelle. You’re not well. And you’re not fit to be a parent.’
And there. There it was. The defining moment of all the defining moments.
Everything in my head splintered. I saw that girl’s bones laid out in front of me on a dark road in Dover, my headlights shining over the bumps of them, my foot against the gas pedal. I thought of what I’d allowed myself to become, for you. I never wanted that bloody child. I only wanted you. And I looked at you then, so calm and reasonable, and I knew you hated me and you wanted me gone and I wanted to hurt you, I wanted to really hurt you so I said to you, ‘What makes you so sure she’s your child, Floyd? Did you never wonder why she looks so little like either of us?’
Your face was worth the horror of me showing myself to you, it really was.
‘She doesn’t belong to either of us, Floyd,’ I said, feeling the twist of my words into your heart. ‘I made her for you, with another woman’s womb and another man’s sperm.’
The words were falling from me uncontrollably. I’d nothing left to lose. ‘She’s a Frankenstein’s monster, Floyd, that child you so adore. She’s barely human, in fact.’
‘Noelle, I don’t—’
I spoke over you, desperate to answer your questions before you asked them, desperate to take control. ‘A girl called Ellie had that baby for me. I was never pregnant, you dumb idiot. How could you have thought I was, you with your big, brilliant brain? Ellie had that baby. She was the mother. And the father was some stranger on the internet selling his sperm for fifty pounds a shot.’
Oh come on now, Floyd. You didn’t honestly think that child could be yours, did you? That glorious golden thing? That she could be formed from your tired old genes? Really? Didn’t you wonder? Didn’t you think? No, Floyd. Poppy’s father was a young, young man, a PhD student. The website I bought his sperm from said he was under thirty, that he was six foot one with green eyes and dark hair. I pictured Ellie’s boyfriend when I picked him out. I pictured Theo. And then I came to you in my satin shirt and high heels and seduced you in a way that you’d be sure to remember. The whole thing was a total scam, Floyd. And you fell for it, you feckless, bollockless, soulless shit. You totally fell for it.
‘Well, you can keep her, you scumbag. Keep her and pay for her and know for the rest of your life every time you look at her that she’s nothing but a big bag of cells and other people’s DNA. Good luck to you both.’
I had my handbag by its strap. I was done. It was over. The splinters in my head were spinning so fast and so wildly I could barely remember my own name. But I felt euphoric.
And then I watched your face turn to stormy skies, saw your skin colour change from grey to seething purple. You leaped to your feet; then you threw yourself bodily across the table at me. You had your hands at my throat and my chair tumbled backwards with me still in it, my head hit the floor and by God I thought you meant to kill me, by God, I really, really did.
Fifty-three
Laurel drives past Hanna’s flat on her way from Floyd’s to work that morning. She’s hoping for a sneaky glimpse of Theo and Hanna leaving for work together. But it’s dark and quiet and at least now Laurel can picture where her daughter has been. She has been in Theo Goodman’s bed.
Theo is a schoolteacher now. Hanna had told her that, funnily enough, about a year ago. Said she’d bumped into him somewhere or other. Laurel couldn’t really remember the details. That must have been when it started, she supposed.
Laurel is unfairly horrified by this twist in the fabric of things.
Theo was Ellie’s. He’d belonged to her and she’d belonged to him. They’d inhabited each other completely, like a pair of gloves folded into itself. And now she is cross with Hanna. Cross enough to wonder what Theo even sees in Hanna, in comparison to Ellie. She imagines, in the warped threads of her irrational thought processes, that Theo chose Hanna as a consolation prize.
But then she remembers seeing that blonde girl coming out of the supermarket on Sunday morning, that smiling, golden girl who looked nothing like the sour-faced girl who greets Laurel at her door from time to time, the pinched child who never laughs at her jokes, the tired-looking woman who sighs down the phone at the sound of her mother’s voice.
And it occurs to her for the very first time that maybe Hanna isn’t intrinsically unhappy.