abuse, and that’s exactly how a team of social workers would see it. Poppy’s teeth are appalling. She has nits half the time that you simply don’t deal with. You’re not well. In the head, Noelle. You’re not well. And you’re not fit to be a parent.”
And there. There it was. The defining moment of all the defining moments.
Everything in my head splintered. I saw that girl’s bones laid out in front of me on a dark road in Dover, my headlights shining over the bumps of them, my foot against the gas pedal. I thought of what I’d allowed myself to become, for you. I never wanted that bloody child. I only wanted you. And I looked at you then, so calm and reasonable, and I knew you hated me and you wanted me gone and I wanted to hurt you, I wanted to really hurt you so I said to you, “What makes you so sure she’s your child, Floyd? Did you never wonder why she looks so little like either of us?”
Your face was worth the horror of me showing myself to you, it really was.
“She doesn’t belong to either of us, Floyd,” I said, feeling the twist of my words into your heart. “I made her for you, with another woman’s womb and another man’s sperm.”
The words were falling from me uncontrollably. I’d nothing left to lose. “She’s a Frankenstein’s monster, Floyd, that child you so adore. She’s barely human, in fact.”
“Noelle, I don’t—”
I spoke over you, desperate to answer your questions before you asked them, desperate to take control. “A girl called Ellie had that baby for me. I was never pregnant, you dumb idiot. How could you have thought I was, you with your big, brilliant brain? Ellie had that baby. She was the mother. And the father was some stranger on the Internet selling his sperm for fifty pounds a shot.”
Oh come on now, Floyd. You didn’t honestly think that child could be yours, did you? That glorious golden thing? That she could be formed from your tired old genes? Really? Didn’t you wonder? Didn’t you think? No, Floyd. Poppy’s father was a young, young man, a PhD student. The website I bought his sperm from said he was under thirty, that he was six foot one with green eyes and dark hair. I pictured Ellie’s boyfriend when I picked him out. I pictured Theo. And then I came to you in my satin shirt and high heels and seduced you in a way that you’d be sure to remember. The whole thing was a total scam, Floyd. And you fell for it, you feckless, bollockless, soulless shit. You totally fell for it.
“Well, you can keep her, you scumbag. Keep her and pay for her and know for the rest of your life every time you look at her that she’s nothing but a big bag of cells and other people’s DNA. Good luck to you both.”
I had my handbag by its strap. I was done. It was over. The splinters in my head were spinning so fast and so wildly I could barely remember my own name. But I felt euphoric.
And then I watched your face turn to stormy skies, saw your skin color change from gray to seething purple. You leaped to your feet; then you threw yourself bodily across the table at me. You had your hands at my throat and my chair tumbled backward with me still in it; my head hit the floor and by God I thought you meant to kill me, by God, I really, really did.
53
Laurel drives past Hanna’s flat on her way from Floyd’s to work that morning. She’s hoping for a sneaky glimpse of Theo and Hanna leaving for work together. But it’s dark and quiet and at least now Laurel can picture where her daughter has been. She has been in Theo Goodman’s bed.
Theo is a schoolteacher now. Hanna had told her that, funnily enough, about a year ago. Said she’d bumped into him somewhere or other. Laurel couldn’t really remember the details. That must have been when it started, she supposed.
Laurel is unfairly horrified by this twist in the fabric of things.
Theo was Ellie’s. He’d belonged to her and she’d belonged to him. They’d inhabited each other completely, like a pair of gloves folded into itself. And now she is cross with Hanna. Cross enough to wonder what Theo even sees in Hanna, in comparison to Ellie. She imagines, in the