Laurel disappeared to the kitchen to make Noelle a cup of tea. Noelle stopped at the sight of the family cat, sitting on the piano stool.
“Well,” she said, “he’s a big lad. What’s he called?”
“Teddy,” she said. “Teddy Bear. But Teddy for short.”
Her first words to Noelle. She would never forget.
“Well, I can see why you call him that. He does look like a big hairy bear!”
Had she liked her then? She couldn’t remember. She just smiled at her, put her hand upon her cat, and squeezed his woolly fur inside her fist. She loved her cat and was glad that he was there, a buffer between her and this stranger.
Noelle Donnelly smelled of cooking oil and unwashed hair. She wore jeans and a bobbly camel-colored jumper, a Timex watch on a freckled wrist, scuffed brown boots and reading glasses on a green cord around her neck. Her shoulders were particularly wide and her neck slightly stooped with a kind of hump at the back and her legs were very long and thin. She looked as though she’d spent her life in a room with a very low ceiling.
“Well now,” she said, putting on the reading glasses and feeling inside a brown-leather briefcase. “I’ve brought along some old GCSE papers. We’ll start you on one of these in a moment, get to the bottom of your strengths and weaknesses. But first of all, maybe you could tell me, in your own words, what your concerns are. In particular.”
Mum walked in then with a mug of tea and some chocolate chip cookies on a saucer that she slid onto the table silently and speedily. She was acting as though Ellie and Noelle Donnelly were on a date or having a top secret meeting. Ellie wanted to say, Stay, Mum. Stay with me. I’m not ready to be alone with this stranger.
She bored her eyes into the back of her mother’s head as Laurel stealthily left the room, closing the door very quietly behind her: the soft, apologetic click of it.
Noelle Donnelly turned to Ellie and smiled. She had very small teeth. “Well, now,” she said, sliding the glasses back up to her narrow-bridged nose, “where were we?”
6
The world looked loaded with portent as Laurel drove as close to the speed limit as she could manage toward the police station in Finsbury Park. People on the streets looked sinister and suggestive, as if each were on the verge of committing a dark crime. Awnings flapping in a brisk wind looked like the wings of birds of prey; billboards looked set to fall into the road and obliterate her.
Adrenaline blasted a path through her tiredness.
Laurel hadn’t slept properly since 2005.
She’d lived alone for seven years—first in the family home and then in the flat she moved into three years ago when Paul put the final nail in any chance of a reconciliation by somehow managing to meet a woman. The woman had invited him to live with her and he’d accepted. She’d never worked out how he’d done it, how he’d found that healthy pink part of himself among the wreckage of everything else. But she didn’t blame him. Not in the least. She wished she could do the same; she wished she could pack a couple of large suitcases and say good-bye to herself, wish herself a good life, thank herself for all the memories, look fondly upon herself for just one long, lingering moment and then shut the door quietly, chin up, morning sun playing hopefully on the crown of her head, a bright new future awaiting her. She would do it in a flash. She really would.
Jake and Hanna had moved away too, of course. Faster, she suspected, and earlier than they would have if life hadn’t come off its rails ten years ago. She had friends whose children were the same age as Jake and Hanna and who were still at home. Her friends moaned about it, about the empty orange-juice cartons in the fridge, the appalling sex noises and the noisy, drunken returns from nightclubs at four in the morning that set the dog off and disturbed their sleep. How she would love to hear one of her children stumbling about in the early hours of the morning. How she would love the trail of used crockery and the rumpled joggers, still embedded with underwear, left pooled all over the floor. But no, her two had not looked backward once they’d