The following day, Laurel parks her car in a multistory car park in Kings Cross and heads to St. Martin’s school of art in Granary Square. Floyd had told her that SJ was working there today when she’d asked nonchalantly over breakfast.
It’s a bland day, newspaper gray, lifted by the Christmas lights and decorations in every window. Granary Square is wide and quiet as she approaches it, a scattering of pigeons across its surface, a few people braving the cold outside to smoke a cigarette with their morning coffee.
At reception she asks for Sara-Jade Virtue. She’s told that Sara is working until lunchtime, so she sits in the restaurant next door and she eats a second breakfast and drinks two coffees and a peppermint tea before returning at twelve thirty and waiting for her outside.
Sara-Jade finally appears at ten past one. She’s wearing a huge pink fake-fur coat and boots that look far too big for her. She starts when she sees Laurel.
“Oh,” she says. “Hi.”
“Hi! Sorry for, you know, turning up unannounced. I was just . . . Are you hungry? Can I take you for lunch?”
SJ looks at her wrist and then up at the sky. “I was supposed to . . .” but she trails off. “Sure,” she says. “Fine. Thank you.”
They go to the pub across the way. It’s brand new with plate-glass windows on every side giving views all across the square and the canal. It’s buzzing with business suits and students. They both order fishcakes and fizzy water and pick at the bread basket halfheartedly.
“How are you?” says Laurel. “I’m OK.”
“How was work?”
“Yeah, it was OK. Bit cold.”
“Yes, I don’t suppose this is a great time of year for nude modeling.”
“Life modeling.”
“Yes. Sorry. How many students are there? Drawing you?” “About twelve today. But sometimes it can be thirty or forty.” “And what do you think about? All those hours, in one position?”
SJ shrugs. “Nothing, really. Just what I need to do when I get home. Things I’ve done, places I’ve been. I do this thing sometimes where I let my head just sort of bounce around from place to place; I find myself in places I haven’t thought about in years, like a bar near my old college, or a restaurant in Prague I went to when I was eighteen, or a railway track I used to walk down when I visited my grandparents and the smell of cow parsley there . . .” She tugs off a small piece of bread and puts it in her mouth. “Those birds, what are they called? Wood pigeons. That noise they make.” She smiles. “It’s kind of fun.”
“And then you suddenly remember that you’re naked in front of a group of strangers?”
SJ throws her a look of incomprehension. Her mouth opens as though trying to form a response but then closes again. Laurel remembers what Poppy said about her being humorless.
“So, did you see him today? Simon?”
SJ looks nervously from left to right and raises a hand warningly.
“Sorry,” says Laurel, “indiscreet. And, to be honest, not why I came here to see you. I just . . .” She recrosses her legs. “What we were talking about the other night. About Ellie . . .”
“Yeah. I’m really sorry about that. It was a bit insensitive of me. I can be a bit like that.”
“No. Really. I didn’t mind. I don’t mind. It’s not anything I haven’t thought about before. There’s not one aspect of the whole thing I haven’t thought about a million times already, I promise you. Including the rucksack. But you were about to say something, the other night, something about Poppy’s mum. About Noelle.”
SJ looks up at her through her thick eyelashes and then down again. “Oh yeah,” she says.
“So?” Laurel encourages her. “What was it? What were you going to say?” “Oh, nothing much. Just that she was a bit strange. A bit freaky.”
“You know,” Laurel says, “I read Ellie’s old diaries last night. And she wrote about Poppy’s mum. She called her a ‘bunny boiler.’ And she also wrote that Noelle used to bring her gifts and call her her best student. And it all just struck me as a bit . . .” She struggles for the next thread of her commentary. “Did you have much to do with her?”
“No, not really. I used to come and stay with Dad quite a lot when I was small and sometimes she’d be here, but not always and she acted like she hated me.”
“In what way?”
“Oh, you know, cutting remarks about my behavior. That I was out of control. That in her family she’d have been belted black and blue for such cheek. And the minute my dad left the room she’d just ignore me, act like I wasn’t there. She called me ‘the girl.’ You know, ‘Will the girl be there?’ ‘When is the girl going home?’ That kind of thing. She was fucking vile.”
“Oh Lord, how horrible. You must have been horrified when she got pregnant.”
“I cried.”
“I’m not surprised.”
They move apart for a moment to allow the waiter to put down their dishes.
They thank him and then they glance at each other, significantly. “How did you feel about Poppy when she was born?”
Sara-Jade picks up her cutlery and slices through the middle of her fishcake. Steam blooms from it for a second or two. She puts the cutlery down again and shrugs. “It was, I don’t know . . . whatever. I was twelve. She was a baby.”
“But as she grew, became a little person? Did you feel close to her?”
“I guess. Sort of. I didn’t see her all that much at first because . . . well, basically because I didn’t want to.”
“Oh,” says Laurel. “Was that because you were jealous?”
“No,” she says firmly. “No, I was too old to be jealous. I didn’t want to see her because I didn’t believe . . . I didn’t believe she was real.”
Laurel looks at her questioningly.
“It’s hard to explain, but I 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.”
“Wow,” says Laurel, “that’s a really strange reaction.”
“Yes. Kind of freakish.”
“Why do you think you felt like that?”
Sara-Jade picks up her knife and turns it between her fingertips. “There was a thing—” she begins, but then stops abruptly.
“A thing?”
“Yes. An event. A moment. And to this day I don’t know if I imagined it or not. I was kind of a weird kid.” She laughs wryly. “Still am. I do know that. I had a special assistant at school for a while, because of emotional difficulties. I was prone to insane outbursts of anger. Tears sometimes. And this, this thing, it happened right at the height of all this, when things were peaking for me in so many ways. Puberty, hormones, social anxiety, I was still fucked up over my parents splitting up, all that shit. I wasn’t a pretty sight. I wasn’t an easy kid, either. I was a total nightmare, to be honest. And right in the middle of all this I thought I saw something.” She places the knife gently down on the table and looks straight at Laurel. “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.
“And I don’t know what I really saw. I have never been able to process it. Never known if it was just me being a nutty little kid freaking out about a new baby or if it really happened. But when that baby was born three weeks later, I was terrified. I didn’t see her until she was nearly one.”
Laurel hasn’t moved a muscle since SJ’s pronouncement. “Did you tell your dad?”
She shakes her head. “Did you tell anyone?” “I told my mum.” “What did she say?”
“She told me to stop being a crazy person.” “Where was the baby born?”
“I don’t know. I never thought about it.”
Laurel closes her eyes and suddenly the face of Noelle Donnelly flashes to the forefront of her consciousness, clear and precise as if she’d seen her only yesterday.
