THEN
Another night passed. It was Saturday morning and Ellie had just remembered that her period was due tomorrow.
“Good morning, dear girl,” said Noelle, quickly relocking the door behind her and standing with her hands on her hips, appraising Ellie with an unsettling smile.
Ellie jumped to her feet and Noelle backed away slightly, crossing her arms in front of her. “Now,” she said. “Now. Remember what we said yesterday. I want no trouble from you.”
“I’m not going to do anything,” Ellie said. “I just needed to tell you something. Something important. I’m going to need some towels. Or something. My period is due to start tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” Noelle narrowed her eyes.
“Yes. And I have really heavy periods. Really heavy. I’ll need loads.”
Noelle tutted and sighed as though Ellie had somehow deliberately arranged to have a heavy period while being held prisoner in her cellar. “Do you have a preferred brand?”
“No,” said Ellie, “anything will do as long as it’s extra-absorbent.”
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll bring you some. And I suppose you’ll be needing new underwear. Deodorant. That kind of thing.”
“Yes,” said Ellie. “That would be good.” And then she sat on her bed, on her hands, and she looked up at Noelle and asked, “Why am I here?”
Noelle smiled. “Well, as it happens,” she said. “I have a plan. A fabulous plan. I’m just waiting for a couple of things to slot into place.” She mimed an object slotting into place and laughed. “So, you just be patient and all will be revealed.” Her eyes twinkled as she spoke. Ellie wanted to bite her.
“Is it on the news?” she asked.
“Oh, I dare say it is. I can’t say that I’ve been looking.” She shrugged dismissively as though the world taking an interest in a missing teenage girl was all a lot of silliness. “Anyway, I suppose I should be getting off to the shops, stock up on all your bits and pieces. Christ, you’re going to bankrupt me, young lady, you really are!”
She turned to leave. Before she turned the handle she looked back at Ellie and said, “I’ve got a lovely surprise for you. Later on. A really lovely surprise. Just you wait. You’re going to love me.”
She left with a lighthearted flourish.
Ellie stared at the back of the door, listened to the three locks, heard Noelle’s baby elephant footsteps up the stairs, stamp stamp stamp.
She took the chair to the window and stood on it, balanced on her tiptoes.
She waited until she heard the front door slam shut and then she began pounding at the glass, pounding so hard that her hands hurt. She pounded and she pounded and she screamed, “Help me, help me, help me!” Then she pounded on the walls on either side of the room, the walls that must surely divide her from neighbors, neighbors who might, right now, be in their cellars, searching for batteries, maybe, or a bottle of wine.
Ellie pounded on the walls and the windowpane for over an hour. By the time she heard Noelle return from the shops the sides of her hands were black and purple.
 |
“Are you ready?”
Ellie sat up straight at the sound of her captor’s voice behind the locked door. “Yes,” she replied.
“Are you sitting on the bed? Like a good girl?” “Yes.”
“OK, then! I’m coming in and my goodness me do I have the best surprise for you! You are going to love me!”
Ellie sat on her hands and watched the door with held breath. “Ta-da!”
It took a moment for Ellie to fully understand what she was looking at. A small plastic box with metal bars, pink on the bottom, white on the top, a handle. In Noelle’s other hand was a cardboard box, the type you might be given to take away a salad from a health-food shop.
Noelle took the plastic box to the table across the room and then returned with the cardboard box. She sat next to Ellie on the bed and she pulled open the lid of the box and there was a sudden blast of farm smell, of warm manure and damp straw. Noelle parted the straw with her long fingers and said, “Look at the little souls. Just look at them!”
And there, peering up at Ellie, were two small animals with honey-colored fur, black beads of eyes, two pairs of nervously twitching whiskers.
“Hamsters!” said Noelle triumphantly. “Look! You said you always wanted hamsters! Remember? So I got you some. Aren’t they just the dearest little things you ever saw? Look at their sweet little noses. Look!”
Ellie nodded. She had no idea how to react. None whatsoever. She had not said she wanted hamsters. She had in fact said that she had not ever wanted hamsters. She did not understand why Noelle had bought her hamsters.
“Look,” said Noelle, taking the box to the cage on the table and carefully unlocking the door. “Let’s put them in here. They must be fed up being scrunched up together in that box. And my goodness, they’re not a cheap undertaking, these things. The animals themselves are virtually given away for free. But all the kit and caboodle. My word.”
She picked one from the box and carefully freed it into the cage. Then she did the same with the other. “Now you must name them, Ellie. Come. Come and have a look at them and find them some nice names. Though I’m not sure how you’ll tell one from the other, to be honest. They’re identical. Come here, come.”
Ellie shrugged.
“Oh, come along now, Ellie,” Noelle chided. “You don’t seem terribly excited.
I thought you’d be jumping up and down at the sight of them.”
“How can you expect me to be excited about anything when you’re doing what you’re doing?”
Noelle appraised her coolly. “Oh, now, it’s not so bad. You know, Ellie, it could be so much worse. I could be a man. I could be a big sweaty man coming in here to do God knows what to you at all hours. I could keep you tied up all
day. Or in a box under my bed. Christ, I read a book once about that. A married couple. Stole a girl from the side of the road and kept her under their bed for twenty years. Sweet Jesus. Just imagine.” She clasped her throat gently. “No, you’ve got it good here, missy. And now”—she turned to the hamster cage—“you have it even better. Now come along, let’s name these little monsters. Come along.”
Her voice had lost its singsong tone and was hard and immovable.
Ellie peered into the cage and stared at the two dots of fur. She did not care.
Name them One and Two for all she cared. Name them A and B.
“Come on. Two nice names for girls, or I’ll be taking them away and flushing them down the toilet.”
Ellie felt her breathing pitch and stall, a wash of light-headedness. She let her thoughts loop violently back and forth inside her head, rush headlong into moments from the past, and grab blindly at things they found there. Her thoughts found a doll. It had pink hair and a gingham dress and huge pink cloth boots.
“Trudy,” she said.
“Ha!” said Noelle, tossing back her head. “I love it.”
Then there was a girl at nursery school, so, so pretty. All the girls used to circle her and try to touch her ice-blonde hair, try to be her friend. Ellie had not thought of her in years. She was called Amy.
“Amy,” she said, breathlessly.
Noelle beamed. “Oh, oh, that is superb. Trudy and Amy. Just perfect. Good girl! So, I’ll keep you supplied with everything you need, all the straw and toys and nibbles and what have you. Your job will be to nurture them. You will need to keep them clean and loved and fed.” She laughed. “A little like I do for you. Do you see? I keep you clean and fed. You keep them clean and fed. A lovely little circle of caring we have here.”
She put her hand to Ellie’s crown and caressed it. “Oh dear,” she said, quickly removing her hand. “You’re getting a little grim up the top here. You’ll be needing a shampoo, I suppose.” She sighed. “I think I have one of those attachment things somewhere, those things you put over the taps with a little showerhead. I’ll see if I can find it.”
“You know, Noelle, I’m missing my GCSEs.”
Noelle tutted sympathetically. “I know, lovely girl, I know. Terrible timing for you, and I’m sorry for that. But you know, there’s always next year.”
Next year. Ellie grabbed on to the concept. She saw herself, next year, at home, legs crossed, sitting on her bed, notebooks spread around her, the sounds of her family floating through the walls and the floors, the sun picking out the sequins on her favorite cushion. She would be one year older. But she would be home.
“You know,” Noelle was saying, “I did see a little story in the papers today. About you. And you know what they’re saying, Ellie?” She looked at Ellie, sadly. “They’re saying that you’ve run away. That you couldn’t face the possibility of failing your exams because you are an overachiever. They’re saying that you ran away from home because you were stressed, having a breakdown.”
Ellie felt a huge wash of anger pulse through her, and then crash to the pit of her stomach when she thought of the implications. No one had seen her walk down Stroud Green Road with Noelle Donnelly. No one was following any Noelle Donnelly–related leads. Everyone was flailing around with nonsense theories because they had nothing else to go on. “But . . .” she began. “But that’s not true! I was enjoying my exams. I wasn’t stressed about them at all!”
“I know, love, I know. I know what a tremendous student you are. But clearly other people don’t know you as well as I know you.”
“Who said it? Who said I was stressed?”
“Well, it was your mother, I think. Yes. It was your mother.”
Ellie felt a wail of fury and injustice and grief building inside the walls of her chest. How could her mother think she’d run away? Her own mother? Her mother who knew her better, loved her better than anyone? How could she just have given up on her like this?
“Don’t give it too much thought, dear girl. Just you focus on these two.” She gestured at the hamster cage. “Dear little Trudy and Amy. They’ll take your mind off it all, I guarantee you.”
Noelle left then, on the hunt for the shower attachment, and the room fell silent as her footsteps receded up the stairs. A moment later the silence was broken by the metallic, round-and-round creak of the wheel turning in the hamsters’ cage. Ellie threw herself onto her bed and clamped her hands over her ears.
