“Well, it’s in the basement.”
“What is?”
“The strange thing. The thing we found. In the basement.”
Laurel feels a surge of adrenaline. She looks at the boy with the sweet face sitting opposite her.
“I’d totally understand if you don’t want to go down. I wouldn’t if I were you. Probably seen too many scary movies—you know, the ones where you godon’t go down into the basement, you bloody idiot!”
He smiles and he couldn’t look more like a nice young man over from Ireland to do a degree.
“I could just describe it if you like. Or I can go down and take a photo on my phone for you? Would that be a better idea?”
She smiles. “It’s fine. I’ll go and have a look.”
“Text someone,” he says, still looking anxiously at her. “Text someone to say where you are. That’s what I would do.”
She laughs. “Just show me,” she says.
The door to the basement is in the kitchen. Joshua takes a torch from a drawer and leads her down a set of wooden steps. At the bottom is a door. He pushes it open into a small square room, completely clad in the same heavily varnished pine as the living room and the kitchen. There’s a small window set high into the wall that frames the thin bare branches of the cherry tree in the front garden. There’s a small sofa pulled out into a bed, a TV set, and a chair. And there’s a series of what looks like hamster cages piled up one on top of the other on a table against the far wall.
Joshua sweeps the torchlight across them. “There were, like, twenty-odd hamsters in those when my uncles came. And they were all dead, you know, on their backs with their little legs in the air.” He mimes a dead hamster lying on its back with its legs in the air. “Some of them had eaten each other apparently. We couldn’t work it outat all. We thought maybe she’d been breeding them, y’know? Selling them to kids? But we couldn’t find any evidence of that. It’s just, like, why would you have all those animals? In your basement? And then just leave them to die?”
Laurel looks at the cages and shudders. Then she looks around again. In spite of the honey-colored cladding, the room feels bare and cold. And there’s something else, something chilling and unnerving in the very air of the room.
“What do you think this room was for?” she asks, turning to examine the locks on the door, three of them in total, then turning again to look at the high window, the bare branches of the tree, the open sofa bed, the TV.
“A guest room, I suppose.”
“It’s not very homey, is it?”
“No. I don’t suppose she had many guests. From all accounts she was a bit antisocial.”
“So why would she have kept a sofa bed down here? And the TV? And all the animals that she left to die?”
“I told you, didn’t I? I told you it was weird. To be honest, I think my aunty Noelle was probably all round weird, full stop. We think losing her sister at such a young age damaged her, y’know.”
Laurel shivers again. She thinks of Hanna losing Ellie. She thinks of Hanna’s dark, soulless flat. She thinks of her humorless persona, her awkward hugs. She feels a surge of panic that her daughter might end up like Noelle Donnelly, hoarding hamsters and then disappearing, leaving behind nothing but shadows in her wake. And as she thinks all this her eye is caught by something poking out from under the sofa bed. Something small and plasticky. She reaches down to pick it up. It’s a lip balm in a bright pink and green casing. It’s watermelon-flavored.
She turns it over in the palm of her hand and then she puts it into her pocket. For some reason she feels that it belongs to her.
Laurel’s hands shake against the steering wheel as she drives home. She can still smell the basement room at Noelle Donnelly’s house, the damp wood, the rotting carpet. Every time she closes her eyes she sees the ugly sofa bed, the piles of hamster cages, the dirty window set high in the wall.
When she gets home she goes to her spare room and pulls out Ellie’s box from under the bed once again. She rakes through pens and badges and rings and hair clips. Ellie’s toothbrush is in the box, and Ellie’s hairbrush, along with tangles of elastic bands and key rings and face creams. And there, in the mix, is a selection of lip balms. Three of them. One is papaya-flavored, one is mango-flavored, and the other is honeydew melon. She pulls the watermelon lip balm from Noelle’s basement from the pocket of her coat and lines it up with the others.
It forms a set.
31
Yes, it’s true that I told you I’d gone on the pill when that wasn’t strictly the case. In all honesty I thought I was too old anyway and did not expect to get pregnant literally two months after we stopped using condoms. It was all over the papers at the time how your eggs all dried up and fell out on your thirty-fifth birthday and—genuinely—when my period was late I thought that was it, thought I’d had my menopause. It wasn’t until my jeans started getting a little tight that it occurred to me to check. So I bought a test and got the little pink lines and sat there on the toilet in my house rocking back and forth and having a little cry because suddenly I thought I didn’t really want a baby after all. Suddenly I realized I’d been an idiot and a fool. How could I raise a child, me with no maternal instincts, me with my baby-scaring face? And how did I know that you’d even want it? Yes, you’d said the thing that you said but I had no idea how you’d react. Not really.
But when I told you, you were happy. At least, you weren’tunhappy.
“Well, well,” you said, “that’s a curveball.” And then you said, “Do you want to keep it?” as though it was a necklace I’d bought myself that I might just take back to the shop. I said, “Well, of course I want to keep it. It’s ours.” And you nodded. And that was that. Except you also said, “I can’t ask you to live with me, you know that?”
That hurt me, but I didn’t show it. I just said, “No. Of course not.” As though the thought had never occurred to me. And to be truthful I did think you’d change your mind once you met the baby. So I never said what I really thought, which was that I couldn’t possibly raise a baby by myself.
I’d missed two periods but wasn’t sure how far along I might be. You came with me for my scan. I remember that day; it was a nice day. You held my hand in the waiting room. We were both a little giddy, with nerves, no doubt, but also I think with excitement. It felt like one of those days that you have sometimes in life, where you feel like you’ve reached a branch in the road, that you’re setting off on a new journey, suitcases packed, full of trepidation and anticipation. The day felt clean and new, disconnected to the days that had come before and to the days that would follow. I have never felt as close to another human being as I felt to you that day, Floyd. Never.