the changing seasons, or the increase in her business as children in the world outside began their GCSE studies with its suggestion of the time of year. Other times these chats were a kind of catharsis for Noelle, an unburdening of herself. Ellie had found these mood swings terrifying at first, had never been quite prepared for whichever version of Noelle might come through her door that day. But as the time passed she started to get an instinct for Noelle’s psychology, started to sense immediately what their chat would be like before Noelle had opened the door, just by the rhythm of the fall of her feet on the wooden staircase outside, the sound of the key in the lock, the speed with which it opened, the angle of her hair across her face, the sound of her breath as she drew it in to form her words of greeting.
Today she knew immediately that Noelle was in a self-pitying mood.
Flop flop flop came her size-eight-and-a-half feet down the stairs.
Sigh before she put the key in the lock.
Creak as the door opened slowly.
And sigh again as she closed the door behind her.
“Here,” she said, presenting Ellie with her lunch: two slices of white toast cowering under the contents of a can of Heinz beans with minisausages, a film-wrapped pancake filled with chocolate spread and rolled into a flattened tube, a can of Lucozade, and a bowl of jelly beans.
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 alone how she 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