Ellie sat straight and took the tray from Noelle. “Thank you.”
She began to eat in silence, aware of Noelle brewing and cogitating beside her.
Finally she heard Noelle take a deep breath and mutter, “I’m wondering, Ellie, what the heck this is all about. Aren’t you?”
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 alonehowshe 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. They’d studied it at school. 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.
44
Ellie was eight months pregnant when you ended it. Or in other words,Iwas 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 evenmean, 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.
45
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.
I had to answer lots of awkward questions but I had my spiel sorted: Didn’t know I was pregnant, thought it was my menopause, hardly changed shape, gave birth at home with my partner, all happened really fast, no time to call for an ambulance, wham bam there was the baby, so no, we never went to the hospital. No, the baby was not given an Apgar score. I told them that I’d been too nervous to bring the baby out of the house before now, that I thought it was OK as long as the baby seemed OK. I sat and took their telling off, let them slap my wrists good and proper. Oh, I said, I’m really, really sorry. But you know, I was a virgin until a few months ago (I used my strongest Irish accent for this), I’ve led a sheltered life, I don’t really know much about anything.
They sighed and looked appalled and made notes about me no doubt: “potential loony, keep an eye on this one.” But they gave me all the papers I needed to register the baby at the town hall and made me an appointment to come in five weeks later for my postnatal exam (I didn’t go, of course, but had I done, I think they’d have been very impressed with the pristine condition of my underneaths) and told me a midwife would be coming to interview me later that week. I just pretended I was out when she came and hid in the back room while she rattled my letterbox. She came again a few days later and she called me about a hundred times, but she gave up in the end. I duly took the baby to all the appointments at the clinic; she got her shots, she was weighed and measured. I did the bare minimum to keep them off the scent. But in social worker parlance, we slipped through the net. Worrying, really, when you think about it.
But the girl meanwhile... Well, I thought I’d done my best by her. I really did, but she didn’t seem well. It was one thing after another really. First an infection down below. That seemed to heal of its own accord but then she got an infection in one of her breasts, or at least that was my theory. I read up about it on the Internet. I told her she must feed the baby from that one breast, feed and feed and feed. She was very hot, then very cold. I gave her over-the-counter remedies but they didn’t work. She lost interest in the baby and I had to take over feeding her. Then she stopped eating. She called for her motherall the time. Incessant it was. All hours of the day and night. I couldn’t bear it for another moment.
Then one day, when the baby was about five months old, I shut the door to that room, and for a very long time I did not go back.
46
Joshua had given Laurel his grandparents’ phone number in Dublin. Henry and Breda Donnelly. They were both alive and both still working.
“They’re amazing,” Joshua had said. “Like really amazing. Scary as shit—you don’t want to cross them. But incredible people. Forces of nature, the pair of them.”