“Oh, I dare say it is. I can’t say that I’ve been looking.” She shrugged dismissively as though the world taking an interest in a missing teenage girl was all a lot of silliness. “Anyway, I suppose I should be getting off to the shops, stock up on all your bits and pieces. Christ, you’re going to bankrupt me, young lady, you really are!”
She turned to leave. Before she turned the handle she looked back at Ellie and said, “I’ve got a lovely surprise for you. Later on. A really lovely surprise. Just you wait. You’re going to love me.”
She left with a lighthearted flourish.
Ellie stared at the back of the door, listened to the three locks, heard Noelle’s baby elephant footsteps up the stairs, stamp stamp stamp.
She took the chair to the window and stood on it, balanced on her tiptoes.
She waited until she heard the front door slam shut and then she began pounding at the glass, pounding so hard that her hands hurt. She pounded and she pounded and she screamed, “Help me, help me, help me!” Then she pounded on the walls on either side of the room, the walls that must surely divide her from neighbors, neighbors who might, right now, be in their cellars, searching for batteries, maybe, or a bottle of wine.
Ellie pounded on the walls and the windowpane for over an hour. By the time she heard Noelle return from the shops the sides of her hands were black and purple.
“Are you ready?”
Ellie sat up straight at the sound of her captor’s voice behind the locked door.
“Yes,” she replied.
“Are you sitting on the bed? Like a good girl?”
“Yes.”
“OK, then! I’m coming in and my goodness me do I have the best surprise for you! You are going to love me!”
Ellie sat on her hands and watched the door with held breath.
“Ta-da!”
It took a moment for Ellie to fully understand what she was looking at. A small plastic box with metal bars, pink on the bottom, white on the top, a handle. In Noelle’s other hand was a cardboard box, the type you might be given to take away a salad from a health-food shop.
Noelle took the plastic box to the table across the room and then returned with the cardboard box. She sat next to Ellie on the bed and she pulled open the lid of the box and there was a sudden blast of farm smell, of warm manure and damp straw. Noelle parted the straw with her long fingers and said, “Look at the little souls. Just look at them!”
And there, peering up at Ellie, were two small animals with honey-colored fur, black beads of eyes, two pairs of nervously twitching whiskers.
“Hamsters!” said Noelle triumphantly. “Look! You said you always wanted hamsters! Remember? So I got you some. Aren’t they just the dearest little things you ever saw? Look at their sweet little noses. Look!”
Ellie nodded. She had no idea how to react. None whatsoever. She had not said she wanted hamsters. She had in fact said that she had not ever wanted hamsters. She did not understand why Noelle had bought her hamsters.
“Look,” said Noelle, taking the box to the cage on the table and carefully unlocking the door. “Let’s put them in here. They must be fed up being scrunched up together in that box. And my goodness, they’re not a cheap undertaking, these things. The animals themselves are virtually given away for free. But all the kit and caboodle. My word.”
She picked one from the box and carefully freed it into the cage. Then she did the same with the other. “Now you must name them, Ellie. Come. Come and have a look at them and find them some nice names. Though I’m not sure how you’ll tell one from the other, to be honest. They’re identical. Come here, come.”
Ellie shrugged.
“Oh, come along now, Ellie,” Noelle chided. “You don’t seem terribly excited. I thought you’d be jumping up and down at the sight of them.”
“How can you expect me to be excited about anything when you’re doing what you’re doing?”
Noelle appraised her coolly. “Oh, now, it’s not so bad. You know, Ellie, it could be so much worse. I could be a man. I could be a big sweaty man coming in here to do God knows what to you at all hours. I could keep you tied up all day. Or in a box under my bed. Christ, I read a book once about that. A