Someone from up the street had recommended her. Noelle Donnelly was her name. Ellie stood up at the chime of the doorbell and peered down the hallway as her mum opened the door. She was quite old, forty maybe, something like that, and she had an accent, Irish or Scottish.
‘Ellie!’ her mum called. ‘Ellie, come and meet Noelle.’
She had pale red hair, twisted up at the back and clipped into place. She smiled down at Ellie and said, ‘Good afternoon, Ellie. I hope you’ve got your brain switched on?’
Ellie couldn’t tell if she was being funny or not so she didn’t smile back, just nodded.
‘Good,’ said Noelle.
They’d set up a corner of the dining room for Ellie’s first lesson, brought an extra lamp down from her room, cleared the clutter, laid out two glasses, a water jug and Ellie’s pencil case with the black and red polka dots.
Laurel disappeared to the kitchen to make Noelle a cup of tea. Noelle stopped at the sight of the family cat, sitting on the piano stool.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘he’s a big lad. What’s he called?’
‘Teddy,’ she said. ‘Teddy Bear. But Teddy for short.’
Her first words to Noelle. She would never forget.
‘Well, I can see why you call him that. He does look like a big hairy bear!’
Had she liked her then? She couldn’t remember. She just smiled at her, put her hand upon her cat and squeezed his woolly fur inside her fist. She loved her cat and was glad that he was there, a buffer between her and this stranger.
Noelle Donnelly smelled of cooking oil and unwashed hair. She wore jeans and a bobbly camel-coloured jumper, a Timex watch on a freckled wrist, scuffed brown boots and reading glasses on a green cord around her neck. Her shoulders were particularly wide and her neck slightly stooped with a kind of hump at the back and her legs were very long and thin. She looked as though she’d spent her life in a room with a very low ceiling.
‘Well now,’ she said, putting on the reading glasses and feeling inside a brown leather briefcase. ‘I’ve brought along some old GCSE papers. We’ll start you on one of these in a moment, get to the bottom of your strengths and weaknesses. But first of all, maybe you could tell me, in your own words, what your concerns are. In particular.’
Mum walked in then with a mug of tea and some chocolate chip cookies on a saucer which she slid on to the table silently and speedily. She was acting as though Ellie and Noelle Donnelly were on a date or having a top-secret meeting. Ellie wanted to say, Stay, Mum. Stay with me. I’m not ready to be alone with this stranger.
She bored her eyes into the back of her mother’s head as Laurel stealthily left the room, closing the door very quietly behind her: The soft, apologetic click of it.
Noelle Donnelly turned to Ellie and smiled. She had very small teeth. ‘Well, now,’ she said, sliding the glasses back on to her narrow-bridged nose, ‘where were we?’
Six
The world looked loaded with portent as Laurel drove as close to the speed limit as she could manage towards the police station in Finsbury Park. People on the streets looked sinister and suggestive, as if each were on the verge of committing a dark crime. Awnings flapping in a brisk wind looked like the wings of birds of prey; hoardings looked set to fall into the road and obliterate her.
Adrenaline blasted a path through her tiredness.
Laurel hadn’t slept properly since 2005.
She’d lived alone for seven years; first in the family home and then in the flat she moved into three years ago when Paul put the final nail in any chance of a reconciliation by somehow managing to meet a woman. The woman had invited him to live with her and he’d accepted. She’d never worked out how he’d done it, how he’d found that healthy pink part of himself amongst the wreckage of everything else. But she didn’t blame him. Not in the least. She wished she could do the same; she wished she could pack a couple of large suitcases and say goodbye to herself, wish herself a good life, thank herself for all the memories, look fondly upon herself for just one long, lingering moment and then shut the door quietly, chin up, morning sun playing hopefully on the crown of her head, a bright new future awaiting her. She would do it in a flash. She really would.
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 backwards 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 centre 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 centres 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.