by Lisa Jewell
“Thank you. I must have needed it. Morning, Poppy.”
“Morning, Laurel!”
She’s back in a classic Poppy outfit: pink cords and a black polo neck, hair clipped back at both sides.
“Let me get you some breakfast,” says Floyd, rising to his feet.
“You know, actually, I’m going to head home, I think, and let you two get on with your day. I need to catch up with myself before I head over to Hanna’s.”
Floyd sees her off from his door with a long kiss and a plan for her to come back that evening. “I’ll make you something delicious,” he says. “Do you like veal?”
“I do like veal.”
“Great,” he says, “I’ll see you later.”
Laurel feels curiously relieved as she slides into her car and starts the engine. She’d thought that Floyd might try to guilt trip her into staying longer and was pleased when he didn’t. Now she feels a sense of escape. The discovery that Poppy’s mum used to teach Ellie maths, Hanna’s comment about Ellie finding Noelle Donnelly creepy and weird, and her conversation last night with Sara-Jade have all left her feeling shaky and full of holes. She needs to get home and breathe in her own space. And she needs to do something else, something she hasn’t done for a very, very long time.
Laurel makes herself a mug of tea and takes it into the spare room. She sits on the edge of the bed and reaches down to pull a cardboard box toward her. Ellie’s box. She remembers filling it in the old house. She’d been numb and drained and taken too long over it, a full day, touching and caressing, holding and smelling. She’d read Ellie’s diaries. They were sporadic things that leaped about over the years, making it hard to work out what she was writing about half the time as she rarely dated the entries. Some of it Laurel had skipped over and she’d thrown one notebook bodily away from herself at a reference to giving Theo a hand-job.
There’d been nothing in those diaries then, nothing to indicate a secret life, a secret friend, unhappiness of any sort. She hadn’t looked at them since.
But she pulls some out now, flipping through them to find the entries written in the months before she disappeared. They were messy records. Doodles and cartoons, homework and revision notes here and there, dates and numbers and lists of things to buy on a trip to Oxford Street:
Nice moisturiser
New trainers (not black or white)
Books: Atonement, Lovely Bones
Trainer socks
Birthday card for dad
There were lipstick kisses and smudges of ink and glittery stickers. And, scattered in between, loose records of her days. And in those days and weeks before she ran away there were only two things going on in Ellie’s world. Theo and revision. Theo and revision. Theo and revision.
Laurel peers closely at an entry from what seems to be January. Ellie is bemoaning her result in a maths test. A B+. She’d wanted an A. Theo had got an A. Laurel sighs. Ellie had constantly aligned herself with Theo, as though he was the only benchmark that mattered.
“Asked Mum for a tutor,” she wrote. “Fingers crossed she says yes. I am sooooo shit at maths . . .”
And there, a few entries later: “Tutor came! She’s a bit weird but a great teacher! A* here I come!”
Laurel turns the pages faster and faster. She’s looking for something but she doesn’t quite know what, something to tie all the loose fragments of her dreams together with the reality of the last few days’ revelations.
Tutor today. I got 97% in the paper she set me. She gave me a set of lip balms. So sweet!
Tutor 5 p.m. She brought me a scented pen. She’s so sweet!
Tutor 5 p.m. She said I’m the best student she’s ever had! But of course!
Tutor 5 p.m. Bit weird today, asking me strange questions about what I want in life. Think she’s having a midlife crisis!
Tutor 5 p.m. 100%!! I literally just got 100%!!! Tutor says I am a genius. She is 100% right!
Tutor 5 p.m. Think I’m over this now. She really freaks me out sometimes. She’s so intense. And she smells. Am going to ask Mum to cancel her. I can do this by myself. Don’t need bunny boilers in my life.
There’s no more mention of the tutor after this entry.
Ellie simply slots back into her life. She sees Theo. She studies. She looks forward to the summer. Nothing more.
But Laurel’s fingertip stays poised against the last entry, against the words “bunny boiler.” What does that mean? Her understanding of the term is a woman who stalks and torments a man who has discarded her, unable to deal with the rejection. Clearly that is not the definition that Ellie was alluding to here. So if not that, then what? Had Noelle been overly fixated on Ellie? Obsessed with her, maybe? Maybe even physically attracted to her? Had she tried to touch Ellie inappropriately? Or maybe she was jealous of her, of her youth and beauty and unquestionable intelligence? Maybe she belittled her and made her feel bad? And if any of these scenarios was the case, what did this mean?
She squeezes her eyes tightly shut and her hands into fists. There’s something in there, but she can’t get to it. And what could it possibly be anyway?
The darkness lifts after a moment and life returns to its normal proportions. She slowly puts Ellie’s books back into their box and slides it under the bed.
“Tell me more about Noelle,” she says to Floyd that night over dinner.
She sees a muscle in his cheek twitch and there is a missed beat before he says, “Oh, God, must I?”
“Sorry. I know she’s not your favorite person. But I’m curious.” She rests her cutlery on her plate and picks up her wineglass. “I looked at Ellie’s old diaries today. I wanted to see what she wrote about Noelle. And she called her . . . I hope you won’t be offended, but she called her a ‘bunny boiler.’ ”
“Ha, no. That about sums it up. She was a very needy woman. Very intense.”
“How did you meet her?”
“Urgh.” He swallows a mouthful of wine and puts down his glass. “Well, yeah. I don’t come out of this too well. But she was a fan.”
“A fan? You have fans?”
“Well, maybe it would be fairer to call them fervent readers. Maths groupies. That kind of thing.”
“Well I never,” says Laurel, sitting back in her chair and appraising Floyd teasingly. “I did not realize that I was facing such stiff competition.”
“Oh, don’t worry, those days are well and truly over. I had my moment in the sun with one book. My ‘pay the bills book,’ as I call it. Maths for dummies you could say, except we weren’t that honest about it. I got to be a bit playful with that book and it got me a little fan club of slightly peculiar, maths-obsessed women. Wasn’t my style at all. I soon went back to the big heavyweight tomes that no one with romantic yearnings would touch with a barge pole.”
“So, Noelle, she was one of your groupies?”
“Yeah. I suppose so. And I’d just split up with Sara’s mother and I was lonely and she was a bit crazy and a bit determined and I let her have her way with me and then spent the next few years repenting at leisure. She was like a leech. I couldn’t get shot of her. And then she got pregnant.”
“By you?”
He sighs and casts his gaze over her shoulder. He doesn’t answer her question. “I didn’t even really find her that attractive. I was just . . . I was just trying to be nice, I suppose.”
Laurel laughs drily. She has never done anything “just to be nice” in her life. But she knows the type. Paul is the same, will go against all his basest instincts and feelings to make someone else feel good for five minutes.
“And then you were stuck with her?”
“Yeah. I was indeed.” He runs his fingertips around the bowl of his wineglass and looks uncharacteristically pensive.
“Who ended it? Eventually?”
“That was me. And that was where the bunny-boiler bit came into it. She wasn’t prepared to let me go without a fight. There were some bad nights. Really bad nights. And then one day she just said
she’d had enough, dumped Poppy on my doorstep, and disappeared off the face of the earth.” He shrugs. “Sad, really,” he says. “Really sad. Sad woman. Sad story. You know.”
The mood of the evening has become somber and slightly uncomfortable.
“I’m sorry,” says Laurel. “I didn’t mean to make you feel sad. I just . . . it’s an odd little connection, that’s all. Between you and me. And Ellie. I just wanted to understand it a bit more.”
He nods. “I get that,” he says. “I totally get it. And of course it’s Poppy I feel bad for, being abandoned like that. No child wants to feel that they weren’t wanted, even if they don’t care much for the abandoner. But”—he brightens slightly—“now Poppy has you. And you are quite a tonic. For us all. Cheers.” He tilts his glass toward hers and their glasses meet and so do their gazes.
She returns her focus to the meat on her plate, to the pink-gray flesh of the slayed baby calf. She cuts into it and a rivulet of wine-colored juices run across the plate.
She finds she has lost her appetite, but she doesn’t know why.
26
The following day, Laurel parks her car in a multistory car park in Kings Cross and heads to St. Martin’s school of art in Granary Square. Floyd had told her that SJ was working there today when she’d asked nonchalantly over breakfast.
It’s a bland day, newspaper gray, lifted by the Christmas lights and decorations in every window. Granary Square is wide and quiet as she approaches it, a scattering of pigeons across its surface, a few people braving the cold outside to smoke a cigarette with their morning coffee.
At reception she asks for Sara-Jade Virtue. She’s told that Sara is working until lunchtime, so she sits in the restaurant next door and she eats a second breakfast and drinks two coffees and a peppermint tea before returning at twelve thirty and waiting for her outside.
Sara-Jade finally appears at ten past one. She’s wearing a huge pink fake-fur coat and boots that look far too big for her. She starts when she sees Laurel.
“Oh,” she says. “Hi.”
“Hi! Sorry for, you know, turning up unannounced. I was just . . . Are you hungry? Can I take you for lunch?”
SJ looks at her wrist and then up at the sky. “I was supposed to . . .” but she trails off. “Sure,” she says. “Fine. Thank you.”
They go to the pub across the way. It’s brand new with plate-glass windows on every side giving views all across the square and the canal. It’s buzzing with business suits and students. They both order fishcakes and fizzy water and pick at the bread basket halfheartedly.
“How are you?” says Laurel.
“I’m OK.”
“How was work?”
“Yeah, it was OK. Bit cold.”
“Yes, I don’t suppose this is a great time of year for nude modeling.”
“Life modeling.”
“Yes. Sorry. How many students are there? Drawing you?”
“About twelve today. But sometimes it can be thirty or forty.”
“And what do you think about? All those hours, in one position?”
SJ shrugs. “Nothing, really. Just what I need to do when I get home. Things I’ve done, places I’ve been. I do this thing sometimes where I let my head just sort of bounce around from place to place; I find myself in places I haven’t thought about in years, like a bar near my old college, or a restaurant in Prague I went to when I was eighteen, or a railway track I used to walk down when I visited my grandparents and the smell of cow parsley there . . .” She tugs off a small piece of bread and puts it in her mouth. “Those birds, what are they called? Wood pigeons. That noise they make.” She smiles. “It’s kind of fun.”
“And then you suddenly remember that you’re naked in front of a group of strangers?”
SJ throws her a look of incomprehension. Her mouth opens as though trying to form a response but then closes again. Laurel remembers what Poppy said about her being humorless.
“So, did you see him today? Simon?”
SJ looks nervously from left to right and raises a hand warningly.
“Sorry,” says Laurel, “indiscreet. And, to be honest, not why I came here to see you. I just . . .” She recrosses her legs. “What we were talking about the other night. About Ellie . . .”
“Yeah. I’m really sorry about that. It was a bit insensitive of me. I can be a bit like that.”
“No. Really. I didn’t mind. I don’t mind. It’s not anything I haven’t thought about before. There’s not one aspect of the whole thing I haven’t thought about a million times already, I promise you. Including the rucksack. But you were about to say something, the other night, something about Poppy’s mum. About Noelle.”
SJ looks up at her through her thick eyelashes and then down again. “Oh yeah,” she says.
“So?” Laurel encourages her. “What was it? What were you going to say?”
“Oh, nothing much. Just that she was a bit strange. A bit freaky.”
“You know,” Laurel says, “I read Ellie’s old diaries last night. And she wrote about Poppy’s mum. She called her a ‘bunny boiler.’ And she also wrote that Noelle used to bring her gifts and call her her best student. And it all just struck me as a bit . . .” She struggles for the next thread of her commentary. “Did you have much to do with her?”
“No, not really. I used to come and stay with Dad quite a lot when I was small and sometimes she’d be here, but not always and she acted like she hated me.”
“In what way?”
“Oh, you know, cutting remarks about my behavior. That I was out of control. That in her family she’d have been belted black and blue for such cheek. And the minute my dad left the room she’d just ignore me, act like I wasn’t there. She called me ‘the girl.’ You know, ‘Will the girl be there?’ ‘When is the girl going home?’ That kind of thing. She was fucking vile.”
“Oh Lord, how horrible. You must have been horrified when she got pregnant.”
“I cried.”
“I’m not surprised.”
They move apart for a moment to allow the waiter to put down their dishes. They thank him and then they glance at each other, significantly.
“How did you feel about Poppy when she was born?”
Sara-Jade picks up her cutlery and slices through the middle of her fishcake. Steam blooms from it for a second or two. She puts the cutlery down again and shrugs. “It was, I don’t know . . . whatever. I was twelve. She was a baby.”
“But as she grew, became a little person? Did you feel close to her?”
“I guess. Sort of. I didn’t see her all that much at first because . . . well, basically because I didn’t want to.”
“Oh,” says Laurel. “Was that because you were jealous?”
“No,” she says firmly. “No, I was too old to be jealous. I didn’t want to see her because I didn’t believe . . . I didn’t believe she was real.”
Laurel looks at her questioningly.
“It’s hard to explain, but I thought she was like a robot baby. Or an alien baby. I didn’t believe that Noelle had really given birth to her. I was scared of her. Terrified of her.”
“Wow,” says Laurel, “that’s a really strange reaction.”
“Yes. Kind of freakish.”
“Why do you think you felt like that?”
Sara-Jade picks up her knife and turns it between her fingertips. “There was a thing—” she begins, but then stops abruptly.
“A thing?”
“Yes. An event. A moment. And to this day I don’t know if I imagined it or not. I was kind of a weird kid.” She laughs wryly. “Still am. I do know that. I had a special assistant at school for a while, because of emotional difficulties. I was prone to insane outbursts of anger. Tears sometimes. And this, this thing, it happened right at the height of all this, when things were peaking for me in so many ways. Puberty, hormones, social anxiety, I was still fucked up over my parents splitting up, all that shit. I wasn’t a pretty sight. I wasn’t an easy kid, either
. I was a total nightmare, to be honest. And right in the middle of all this I thought I saw something.” She places the knife gently down on the table and looks straight at Laurel. “I looked through the door of my dad’s bedroom, when Noelle was about eight months pregnant. I looked in and . . .” She stops and her gaze drops to the table. “She was naked. And there was no bump. She was naked,” she repeats. “And there was no bump.
“And I don’t know what I really saw. I have never been able to process it. Never known if it was just me being a nutty little kid freaking out about a new baby or if it really happened. But when that baby was born three weeks later, I was terrified. I didn’t see her until she was nearly one.”
Laurel hasn’t moved a muscle since SJ’s pronouncement.
“Did you tell your dad?”
She shakes her head.
“Did you tell anyone?”
“I told my mum.”
“What did she say?”
“She told me to stop being a crazy person.”
“Where was the baby born?”
“I don’t know. I never thought about it.”
Laurel closes her eyes and suddenly the face of Noelle Donnelly flashes to the forefront of her consciousness, clear and precise as if she’d seen her only yesterday.
PART THREE
27
So, it’s my turn, is it?
OK then. OK.
Shall we do it like an AA meeting? My name is Noelle Donnelly and I did something bad.
I’m not about to make excuses, but I had a tough time growing up. Two horrible brothers above me. Two below. And a sister who died when she was only eight. My mother and father were unforgiving of the limitations of children. They believed that a child should be a grown-up in every way apart from the way of having an opinion you could call your own. Not that religious, which was strange for the times and the place. Church on a Sunday was a good opportunity to find out that everyone else’s children were doing better than their own. The Bible had some good quotes that could be used to sow a seed of terror here and there. We all believed in hell and heaven, even if we believed in nothing else. And sex was something that only disgusting people did, married or not. We never asked after our own provenance, imagined a kind of chaste communion across a brick wall somehow. Because they had separate bedrooms, my mother and father.