“I don’t really like them,” says Poppy. “I think they were Mum’s. You can have them if you like.”
“No,” says Laurel, putting it back on the shelf, her stomach churning over and over. “No. They’re yours. You keep them.”
49
THEN
Ellie lay on the bed. The moon shone down on her, waxy blue; the foliage outside rustled in a sharp breeze, crackling and popping like distant fireworks. She tried to swing her legs off the bed, but they were too weak. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten. Six days ago? Maybe seven?
She was partway to delirium, but still aware on some subliminal, terrifying level that she had been abandoned. She could hear her baby crying upstairs from time to time and an ache would emanate from her heart to every point on her body. But she had no voice to call with and no will to live. Her head was pulsing, aching, sending her strange pictures, flashes of imagery, like scenery lit up at night by strikes of lightning. She saw her mother, stirring a teabag in a mug. She saw her father, zipping up his jacket. She saw Theo, throwing a ball for his little white dog. She saw Noelle, turning over her homework, sliding her glasses up her nose. She saw a house they’d rented in the Isle of Wight one summer. She saw the pale brown pony that stood in a field at the bottom of the garden, eating apples from their hands. She saw Poppy, lying on her back on Ellie’s bed, making Os with her tiny red mouth. She saw Hanna, twirling her head around and around, her waist-length ponytail spinning above her head like a propeller. She saw her own funeral. She saw her mother crying. Her father crying. She saw the corpses of her dead hamsters sprinkled on top of her coffin like sods of earth.
She saw herself floating above her coffin.
She saw herself floating higher and higher. Below her she saw her room. Her sofa bed. The grimy, unwashed bedsheets, the tangled knot of duvet. The plastic cages filled with death. The bin overflowing with empty crisp packets. The blocked toilet bowl streaked brown with rust and bacteria.
She crossed her arms across her chest.
She closed her eyes.
She let herself float higher and higher until she could feel the clouds against her skin, until she could feel her mother’s arms tight around her, her breath against her cheek.
50
When Poppy was around two or three years old I decided to put my house on the market. You were giving me a little money here and there for her upkeep but I was too proud to ask you for more and, besides, it had never been about money, none of it. But I was poor then, Floyd. Like properly poor. I could only work when Poppy was with you and she was only with you half the time. So I decided to release some equity. We didn’t need a big house on three floors. We’d make do in a small flat.
But then of course I remembered the spanner in the works.
That girl. That bloody girl.
She’d passed over at some point. I don’t know when exactly. It was for the best, I’d say. Yes, it was for the best. According to the papers they’d scaled back the search for her. That to me said they had her as a runaway. So I decided to make it look that way.
I’d kept the bag she’d been carrying when she first arrived. Which shows, doesn’t it, that I’d been half intending to let her go at some point, that I wasn’t entirely bad. I took the keys from her bag and when I saw the mother leaving the house with her swimming kit I let myself in through her back door and I took some things that I thought the girl would have taken if she was heading out of the country: a scruffy old laptop, some cash, a pair of candlesticks that she might have wanted to sell. I’d always liked those candlesticks—they’d sat on top of the piano by the table where we worked. I’d admired them once and the girl had said something about taking them on to the Antiques Roadshow one day to find out how much they were worth.
I also took a cake. I was reminded when I saw it there of a day when the pleasant mother had brought us two slices of still-warm chocolate cake instead of the