Then She Was Gone

by Lisa Jewell

Laurel and Sara-Jade exchange a look. They have started a conversation that needs to be finished. But it will have to wait for another time.

‘Tell me more about Noelle,’ she says to Floyd that night over dinner.

She sees a muscle in his cheek twitch and there is a missed beat before he says, ‘Oh, God, must I?’

didn’t want to see her because I didn’t believe … I didn’t believe she was real.’

thought she was like a robot baby. Or an alien baby. I didn’t believe that Noelle had really given birth to her. I was scared of her. Terrified of her.’

‘I looked through the door of my dad’s bedroom, when Noelle was about eight months pregnant. I looked in and …’ She stops and her gaze drops to the table. ‘She was naked. And there was no bump. She was naked,’ she repeats. ‘And there was no bump.

But when that baby was born three weeks later, I was terrified. I didn’t see her until she was nearly one.’

My name is Noelle Donnelly and I did something bad.

I was at a disadvantage for being (a) the middle child, (b) a girl and (c) not the girl who had died. Michaela. That was who I was not. Michaela who was bonnier than me and nicer than me and yes, naturally, cleverer than me. And also much less alive than me. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that that would make me all the more precious to my mother and father. Well, at least we still have our lovely Noelle. But no.

that was me. The less bonny, less clever, less dead sister with the four horrible brothers and the mum and dad who judged more than they loved.

To say that I’d been stalking you would be an overstatement. We lived but two hundred feet apart after all.

It was the fourth time, a month after the Education Show, that you said, ‘Have you ever tried that Eritrean place? By the Tube?’

And there it came, your invitation to dinner. Yes, Floyd. Your invitation to dinner. I know you will try to twist this and rewrite it, like you try to twist and rewrite everything, but you know and I know that you started this. You saw me, Floyd. You saw me and you wanted me. You asked me to dinner. You turned up at that dinner on time and smartly dressed. You did not look at me and say, This has been a terrible mistake, and do a runner. You smiled when I walked in, you stood, you took my shoulders and you pressed your face against my face.

And I knew. I think I really did know from that point on that you and I were mainly about sex. And that was fine with me.

I never told you I loved you. You never told me you loved me. Some people would say that that was sufficient grounds to diminish everything else that happened between us. But I disagree. I disagree very strongly.

I first met Sara-Jade when you and I had been together for a year.

I was not pretty. I was not. Your daughter reminded me of that. After that, well, it was hard to like her. After that, for quite some time, it was hard to like myself.

She hated you; oh God, yes, she hated you.

should have tried harder. I should have been nicer. And if there’s any share of the blame that I’ll take, it’ll be that. I turned you against her. I did. We demonised her, the pair of us.

the more you turned against her, the more you turned towards me.

I became the normal. I became the sane. And I embraced the new dynamic....

And now, Floyd Dunn, now look at me, look me in the eye and tell me it wasn’t you. Go on. I dare you. Tell me it wasn’t you who said it first, who turned to me in the bed one night, after we’d made love, and took both of my hands inside yours, who kissed those hands hard and...

‘Noelle’s my aunty. But no one knows where she is.’

‘Right. Yes. She disappeared, didn’t she?’ ‘So they say,’ says the boy. ‘So they say.’

And there, in the mix, is a selection of lip balms. Three of them. One is papaya-flavoured, one is mango-flavoured and the other is honeydew melon. She pulls the watermelon lip balm from Noelle’s basement from the pocket of her coat and lines it up with the others. It forms a set.

‘I can’t ask you to live with me, you know that?’

to be truthful I did think you’d change your mind once you met the baby. So I never said what I really thought, which was that I couldn’t possibly raise a baby by myself.

‘I’m having a little trouble locating a heartbeat.’ And then I knew, too. I knew that there should have been a noise and that there wasn’t. Your hand came away from my hand. You sighed. And it wasn’t a sigh of sadness. It wasn’t even a sigh of disappointment. It was a sigh of annoyance. A sigh that said, You couldn’t even do this properly, could you? More even than the lost baby, that sigh virtually killed me.

After that you made it clear that this could be our chance to walk away from each other, no hard feelings. But you weren’t strong-minded enough just to end it and I took advantage of that.

You’d gone back to the condoms as I was clearly not to be trusted. So there would not be a baby for you and me, and I needed to accept that. I tried really hard to accept it, Floyd. Really hard. I tried for two years. I turned forty-three. And then I turned forty-four. And then you started taking chances, thinking, probably, that I was all out of eggs, and one night you ran out of condoms and said, ‘Never mind, I’ll just pull out.’ Well, clearly you did not pull out fast enough or early enough and it happened all over again.

But before I could even make it to the clinic your baby had died and fallen out of me. A small bleed. I’d have thought it was a heavy period if I hadn’t taken the test.

And it was that day, Floyd, it was that very day that I first went to the home of Ellie Mack. The same day your baby died inside me.

and I had to teach this spoiled pretty girl with a brain too big for her own good who already knew everything she needed to know when what I really wanted to do was sob and say, Today I lost another baby!

I walked slowly, relishing the darkness and the pain. And as I walked I felt this certainty build within me, a certainty that somehow it was all connected, the gone baby and the spoiled girl, that there was a conflation, that maybe one thing balanced out the other.

And I thought of the girl called Ellie Mack, of her big brain and her perfect features,

She was quite, quite lovely and quite, quite brilliant. And I have to confess, I became more than a little obsessed.

will see you next week, Mum. And if I don’t then I want you to know that you have been the best and most amazing mother in the world and I have been extraordinarily lucky to have you for so long. And that I adore you. And that we all do. And that you could not have been any better than you were. OK?’

Just imagine the babies that these two lovebirds could make, would they not be just spectacular. That might well have been the root of it, thinking about it now. But it was your fault as well: you with the dropped hand and the sigh of annoyance.

I liked our Tuesday afternoons. For those few weeks they were all that stood between me and myself. And I think I already knew even then that myself was not a place where I should be spending too much time.

And then came that phone call. The pleasant mother being not quite so pleasant.

told her that it was a great inconvenience. When it was nothing of the sort. It was a fucking travesty, that’s what it was. A fucking travesty.

I fixated on all the nice things I’d done for Ellie.

Everything had been better then, I told myself, when I’d spent Tuesday afternoons with Ellie Mack.

I thought, well, maybe if I could just see her, just see her face, maybe I’d feel a bit like I’d felt then.

There’s a word to describe what I did next. And that word is stalking.

And you know, Floyd, I swear that was all I wanted. I just wanted to see her.

I approached her and there it was, like a punch to the gut: Jesus Christ, she doesn’t know me. Not for the first second or two.

But it was too late. She had completely failed to verify my existence.

If only she had known, Floyd, if only she had known how much I’d needed her to do that, then maybe none of it would have happened. Maybe Ellie Mack would have gone to the library, got to sit all her GCSEs, got to marry Theo, got to live her life. But unfortunately that’s not the way it worked out.

And as she says it she drops a kiss on to the top of Poppy’s head, the way she used to do to all her children when they were small. And there’s a smell about her scalp, her hair, a smell that sends her reeling back in time: the smell of Ellie.