that had held us together all those years was starting to crumble, like mortar between bricks. I could feel us coming loose from each other and I didn’t have a clue what to do about it.
The only hope I had was that when the baby came you’d fall in love with it, that you wouldn’t be able to live without it and that we’d be inextricably linked. Forever.
43
THEN
Her stomach was stretched as taut as a spacehopper, laced with bluish veins and dissected by a long, brown line. She could sometimes see the vivid outline of a small foot pressing at the paper-thin skin, elbows and knees; once she even saw the delicate pencil shading of an ear. The person inside her rolled and roiled and danced and kicked. The person inside her pressed hard against her lungs and her esophagus, then the person turned over and pressed hard against her bladder and her bowels.
Noelle bought her pregnancy books to read and medicine to counteract the indigestion and the constipation and the backache. She bought her a special pillow, shaped like a banana, to keep her knees apart at night. Ellie liked the pillow: it felt like a person; sometimes she spooned herself against it, laid her cheek upon it. Noelle bought a book of baby names and she’d sit and read them out to her. She bought a doctor’s stethoscope and together they listened to the baby’s heartbeat. Noelle would run her hands around the bump and talk about what she could feel. “Ah, yes, that baby’s on the move,” she’d say. “It’s turning beautifully. It’ll be engaged before we know it.”
Ellie had suspected she was not fat but pregnant a few weeks after she’d first felt the baby moving. She couldn’t pinpoint the precise moment; it just became increasingly obvious, day by day. She’d stared at Noelle one afternoon, trying to think of a way to ask the question while simultaneously not wanting to know the answer. Eventually she’d said, “Something’s moving inside my stomach. I’m scared.”
Noelle had put down her cup of tea and smiled at her. “You have nothing to be scared of, sweet thing. No, no, no. You just have a little baby in there, that is all.”
Ellie gazed down at her belly and stroked it absentmindedly. “That’s what I thought,” she said. “But how could it be?”
“It’s a miracle, that’s what it is, Ellie. And now you know. Now you know why I chose you. Because I couldn’t have a baby of my own and I asked God to find me a baby and God told me that it was you! That you were special! That you were to have my baby!” Noelle looked rapturous, elated, her hands clasped together in front of her heart. “And look,” she said. “Look at you now. An immaculate conception. A baby sent from the Holy Father. A miracle.”
“But you don’t believe in God.”
Noelle moved fast and Ellie was too big to move swiftly enough to get out of her way.
Whack. Noelle’s hand hard across the back of her head.
Then Noelle was gone from the room, turning the locks hard behind her.
Noelle refused to countenance any questions about the provenance of the baby inside Ellie over the following weeks. All Noelle did was smile and talk about “our miracle” and swan into Ellie’s room clutching tiny sleep-suits from Asda and little knitted slippers from the Red Cross shop, a wickerwork sleep basket with a tiny white mattress and a gingham shade, a little book made of cotton that squeaked and crinkled and jingled when you touched the pages. She brought lovely cream for Ellie’s swollen feet, and sang lullabies to the bump.
And then one day, in very early spring, Ellie awoke in a strange mood. She had slept badly, been unable to find a position in which the baby wasn’t squashing some part of her insides. And in the moments that she had slept, she’d dreamed vividly and shockingly. In her dreams she gave birth to a puppy, hairless and tiny. The puppy had quickly grown into an adult dog, a hound from hell with bared teeth and red eyes. The dog had hated her, it had skulked outside the door to her room, growling and slavering, waiting for Noelle to unlock the door so that it could come in and attack her. She awoke from this dream three times, sweating and hyperventilating. But each time she fell back into sleep the dog would be there, outside her door.
She