“Yes. Wow. She’s nice. I knew she would be. Cuddly.”
“F-F-Fat?”
Laurel laughs. “No. Not fat. Just bosomy.”
Ruby looks down at her own flat chest, the same flat chest that she bequeathed to her daughter and they both laugh.
“Boyf-f-friend? All happy?”
“Yes!” she replies with more positivity than she’s feeling. Her mother has extended her miserable existence beyond the point of comfort to see her daughter happy. “Really happy. It’s going really well!”
She sees a question pass across her mother’s eyes and she moves the conversation along quickly, asks after her health, her appetite, if she’s heard anything from her hopeless brother, who moved to Dubai the same day Ruby moved into the home.
“I won’t see you again,” her mother says as Laurel puts on her coat.
Laurel looks at her, looks deep into her eyes. Then she leans down and holds her in her arms, puts her mouth to her ear and says, “I will see you next week, Mum. And if I don’t, then I want you to know that you have been the best and most amazing mother in the world and I have been extraordinarily lucky to have you for so long. And that I adore you. And that we all do. And that you could not have been any better than you were. OK?”
She feels her mother’s head nodding against hers, the soft puff of her hair like a breath against her cheek. “Yes,” says her mother, “yes. Yes. Yes.”
Laurel wipes tears from her cheek and puts on a smile before pulling away from her mother.
“Bye, Mum,” she says. “I love you.”
“I l-l-love you, t-t-too.”
Laurel stops in the doorway for a second and looks at her mother, absorbs the shape of her and the exquisite feeling of her existence in the world. Then she sits in her car for a moment afterward, in the car park. She allows herself to cry for about thirty seconds and then talks herself out of it. Wanting to die and dying are generally unrelated. But this felt like more than her mother simply wanting to die. This seemed to come from inside her, from the inexplicable place that thinks about an old friend moments before bumping into them, that can sense the approach of a thunderstorm before it’s broken, the place that sends dogs to dark corners of the house to die.
She picks her phone from her bag and stares at it for a while. She wants to talk to someone. Someone who knows her better than anyone.
She nearly calls Paul. But she doesn’t.
33
I’d had crushes on girls before. There were girls at the posh magazine where I used to work. Posh, posh, posh girls. I hated them all, really. But at the same time I yearned for them, particularly the fun ones, the friendly ones. The ones with sticks up their arses I could take or leave; they were just me, with better genes. But the fun girls, the lovely girls, the ones who thanked me if I held a door for them or made goofy faces if there was a problem with their expenses, God, I wanted them. Not in a sexual way, of course. But I wanted to know what it felt like to be them, to walk down the street with everything in exactly the right place, the sun shining down on their honey-colored heads, doors opening as they passed, men turning, parties starting at the precise moment that they arrived.
I was protective of my antisocial persona in many ways. It felt safe to be invisible. No one had any expectations of me, and after eighteen years living in my parents’ house it was liberating not to be expected to do anything or be anything. So it was ambiguous, this feeling. On the one hand I wanted to be like these golden girls. On the other I felt far superior to them.
And Ellie Mack was possibly the most golden girl I had ever encountered.
It turned out that she was in love. She had this boy, Theo. I met him once. He was pretty golden, too. The sweetest, sweetest thing, he was, and handsome right off the handsome scale. He shook my hand and he made proper eye contact and he was clever, clever, clever and I found myself thinking, Just imagine the babies that these two lovebirds could make, would they not be justspectacular.
That might well have been the root of it, thinking about it now.
But it was your fault as well: you with the dropped hand and the sigh of annoyance. You and yourI can’t ask you to live with me, you know that?You with your small girl sitting on your lap, an arm hooked around your neck, staring at me with her pale horror-film eyes as though she was a ghost and I was the one who’d murdered her.
And there was Ellie Mack, the highlight of my thankless weeks. I brought her gifts. I told her she was marvelous. I shared little snippets from my life and she shared little snippets from hers. The mother was a pleasant woman. I thought she liked me. I got my tea in the same mug every week. I came to think of it asmymug. The biscuits were always, always good.
It was a sort of cocoon at Ellie’s house: dark outside, cozy inside; me, Ellie, the cat, the sounds of her family all around, the tea, the biscuits, the reassuring solidity of the numbers on the pages between us. I liked our Tuesday afternoons. For those few weeks they were all that stood between me and myself. And I think I already knew even then thatmyselfwas not a place where I should be spending too much time.
I’d seen Ellie and me as riding a train together toward her GCSEs, toward triumph. I’d pictured myself on her doorstep in August with a small bottle of champagne and possibly a shiny balloon, her arms thrown around my neck, her pleasant mother standing behind smiling beneficently, waiting her turn to hug me too, words of thanks and gratitude,Oh, Noelle, we could not have done this without you.Come in, come in, let’s drink a toast together.
And then came that phone call. The pleasant mother being not quite so pleasant. Christ, you know, I can barely remember what she said now. I wasn’t really listening. All I could think was no, no, no. Not my Tuesdays. Not my Tuesdays. So I was curt, verging on rude, most likely. I told her that it was agreat inconvenience. When it was nothing of the sort. It was afucking travesty, that’s what it was. A fucking travesty.
I dropped the phone afterward and I screamed out loud.
I fixated on all the nice things I’d done for Ellie. The gifts I’d bought her. The special papers I’d found for her, printed off for her. The extra ten minutes I’d sometimes tag on to the end of our lesson if we werein the zoneas I called it. I bubbled and fermented with resentment.
That phase went on for a week or two and then I entered the nostalgia phase. Everything had beenbetterthen, I told myself, when I’d spent Tuesday afternoons with Ellie Mack. My relationship with you had been better, my teaching had been better, my life had been better. And I thought, Well, maybe if I could just see her, just see her face, maybe I’d feel a bit like I’d felt then.