Лайза Джуэлл - Then She Was Gone

Jake and Hanna had moved away too, of course. Faster, she suspected, and earlier than they would have if life hadn’t come off its rails ten years ago. She had friends whose children were the same age as Jake and Hanna and who were still at home. Her friends moaned about it, about the empty orange-juice cartons in the fridge, the appalling sex noises and the noisy, drunken returns from nightclubs at four in the morning that set the dog off and disturbed their sleep. How she would love to hear one of her children stumbling about in the early hours of the morning. How she would love the trail of used crockery and the rumpled joggers, still embedded with underwear, left pooled all over the floor. But no, her two had not looked backward once they’d seen their escapes. Jake lived in Devon with a girl called Blue who didn’t let him out of her sight and was already talking about babies only a year into their relationship, and Hanna lived a mile away from Laurel in her tiny, gloomy flat, working fourteen-hour days and weekends in the City for no apparent reason other than financial reward. Neither of them were setting the world alight but then whose children did? All those hopes and dreams and talk of ballerinas and pop stars, concert pianists and boundary-breaking scientists. They all ended up in an office. All of them.

Laurel lived in a new-build flat in Barnet, one bedroom for her, one for a visitor, a balcony big enough for some planters and a table and chairs, shiny red kitchen units, and a reserved parking space. It was not the sort of home she’d ever envisaged for herself, but it was easy and it was safe.

And how did she fill her days, now that her children were gone? Now that her husband was gone? Now that even the cat was gone, though he’d made a big effort to stay alive for her and lasted until he was almost twenty-one. Laurel filled three days a week with a job. She worked in the marketing department of the shopping center in High Barnet. Once a week she went to see her mother in an old people’s home in Enfield. Once a week she cleaned Hanna’s flat. The rest of the time she did things that she pretended were important to her, like buying plants from garden centers to decorate her balcony with, like visiting friends she no longer really cared about to drink coffee she didn’t enjoy and talk about things she had no interest in. She went for a swim once a week. Not to keep fit but just because it was something she’d always done and she’d never found a good enough reason to stop doing it.

So it was strange after so many years to be leaving the house with a sense of urgency, a mission, something genuinely important to do.

She was about to be shown something. A piece of bone, maybe, a shred of bloodied fabric, a photo of a swollen corpse floating in dense hidden waters. She was about to know something after ten years of knowing nothing. She might be shown evidence that her daughter was alive. Or evidence that she was dead. The weight on her soul betrayed a belief that it would be the latter.

Her heart beat hard and heavy beneath her ribs as she drove toward Finsbury Park.

7

THEN

Noelle Donnelly began to grow on Ellie a little over those weekly winter visits. Not a lot. But a little. Mainly because she was a really good teacher and Ellie was now at the top of the top stream in her class with a predicted A/A* result. But in other ways, too: she often brought Ellie a little something—a packet of earrings from Claire’s Accessories, a fruit-flavored lip balm, a really nice pen. “For my best student,” she’d say. And if Ellie protested, she’d brush it away with a “Well, I was in Brent Cross, y’know. It’s a little bit of nothing, really.”

She’d always ask after Theo as well, whom she’d met briefly on her second or third session at the house. “And how’s that handsome fella of yours?” she’d ask in a way that should have been mortifying but wasn’t, mainly because of her lovely Irish accent, which made most things she said sound funnier and more interesting than they actually were.

“He’s fine,” Ellie would say, and Noelle would smile her slightly chilly smile and say, “Well, he’s a keeper.”

GCSEs were now looming large on the horizon. It was March and Ellie had started to count down to her exams in weeks rather than months. Her Tuesday-afternoon sessions with Noelle had been building in momentum as her brain stretched and tautened and absorbed facts and formulae more easily. There was a snappy pace to their lessons now, a high-octane rhythm. So Ellie noticed it immediately, the shift in Noelle’s mood that first Tuesday in March.

“Good afternoon, young lady,” she said, putting her bag onto the table and unzipping it. “How are you?”

“I’m fine.”

“Well, that’s good. I’m glad. And how did you get on with your homework?”

Ellie slid the completed work across the table toward Noelle. Normally Noelle would put on her reading glasses and start marking it immediately but today she just laid her fingertips on top of it and drummed them absentmindedly. “Good girl,” she said. “You are such a good girl.”

Ellie watched her questioningly from the corner of her eye, waiting for a signal that their lesson was about to begin. But none came. Instead Noelle stared blindly at the homework.

“Tell me, Ellie,” she said eventually, turning her unblinking gaze to Ellie. “What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?”

Ellie shrugged.

“What?” Noelle continued. “Like a hamster dying, something like that?”

“I haven’t had a hamster.”

“Ha, well then, maybe that. Maybe not having a hamster is the worst thing that ever happened to you?”

Ellie shrugged again. “I never really wanted one.”

“Well, then, what did you want? What did you really want that you weren’t allowed to have?”

In the background, Ellie could hear the TV in the kitchen, the sound of her mother vacuuming overhead, her sister chatting to someone on the phone. Her family just getting on with their lives and not having to have weird conversations about hamsters with their maths tutor.

“Nothing, really. Just the usual things: money, clothes.”

“You never wanted a dog?”

“Not really.”

Noelle sighed and pulled Ellie’s homework toward her. “Well, then, you are a very lucky girl indeed. You really are. And I hope you appreciate how lucky you are?”

Ellie nodded.

“Good. Because when you get to my age there’ll be loads of things you want and you’ll see everyone else getting them and you’ll think, well, it must be my turn now. Surely. And then you’ll watch it disappear into the sunset. And there’ll be nothing you can do about it. Nothing whatsoever.”

There was a moment of ponderous silence before finally, slowly, Noelle slid her glasses onto her nose, pulled back the first page of Ellie’s homework, and said, “Right then, let’s see how my best student got on this week.”

“Tell me, Ellie, what are your hopes and dreams?”

Ellie groaned inwardly. Noelle Donnelly was in one of those moods again.

“Just to do really well in my GCSEs. And my A levels. And then go to a really good university.”

Noelle tutted and rolled her eyes. “What is it with you young people and your obsession with university? Oh, the fanfare when I got into Trinity! Such a big deal! My mother couldn’t stop telling the world. Her only girl! At Trinity! And look at me now. One of the poorest people I know.”

Ellie smiled and wondered what to say.

“No, there’s more to life than university, Miss Smarty Pants. There’s more than just certificates and qualifications. I have them coming out of my ears. And look at me, sitting here with you in your lovely warm house, drinking your lovely Earl Grey tea, getting paid a pittance to fill your brain with my knowledge. Then going home to nothing.” She turned sharply and fixed Ellie with a look. “To nothing . I swear.” Then she sighed and smiled and the glasses came up her nose and her gaze left Ellie and the lesson commenced.