THEN
Her stomach was stretched as taut as a spacehopper, laced with bluish veins and dissected by a long, brown line. She could sometimes see the vivid outline of a small foot pressing at the paper-thin skin, elbows and knees; once she even saw the delicate pencil shading of an ear. The person inside her rolled and roiled and danced and kicked. The person inside her pressed hard against her lungs and her esophagus, then the person turned over and pressed hard against her bladder and her bowels.
Noelle bought her pregnancy books to read and medicine to counteract the indigestion and the constipation and the backache. She bought her a special pillow, shaped like a banana, to keep her knees apart at night. Ellie liked the pillow: it felt like a person; sometimes she spooned herself against it, laid her cheek upon it. Noelle bought a book of baby names and she’d sit and read them out to her. She bought a doctor’s stethoscope and together they listened to the baby’s heartbeat. Noelle would run her hands around the bump and talk about what she could feel. “Ah, yes, that baby’s on the move,” she’d say. “It’s turning beautifully. It’ll be engaged before we know it.”
Ellie had suspected she was not fat but pregnant a few weeks after she’d first felt the baby moving. She couldn’t pinpoint the precise moment; it just became increasingly obvious, day by day. She’d stared at Noelle one afternoon, trying to think of a way to ask the question while simultaneously not wanting to know the answer. Eventually she’d said, “Something’s moving inside my stomach. I’m scared.”
Noelle had put down her cup of tea and smiled at her. “You have nothing to be scared of, sweet thing. No, no, no. You just have a little baby in there, that is all.”
Ellie gazed down at her belly and stroked it absentmindedly. “That’s what I thought,” she said. “But how could it be?”
“It’s a miracle, that’s what it is, Ellie. And now you know. Now you know why I chose you. Because I couldn’t have a baby of my own and I asked God to find me a baby and God told me that it was you! That you were special! That you were to have my baby!” Noelle looked rapturous, elated, her hands clasped together in front of her heart. “And look,” she said. “Look at you now. An immaculate conception. A baby sent from the Holy Father. A miracle.”
“But you don’t believe in God.”
Noelle moved fast and Ellie was too big to move swiftly enough to get out of her way.
Whack. Noelle’s hand hard across the back of her head.
Then Noelle was gone from the room, turning the locks hard behind her.
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Noelle refused to countenance any questions about the provenance of the baby inside Ellie over the following weeks. All Noelle did was smile and talk about “our miracle” and swan into Ellie’s room clutching tiny sleep-suits from Asda and little knitted slippers from the Red Cross shop, a wickerwork sleep basket with a tiny white mattress and a gingham shade, a little book made of cotton that squeaked and crinkled and jingled when you touched the pages. She brought lovely cream for Ellie’s swollen feet, and sang lullabies to the bump.
And then one day, in very early spring, Ellie awoke in a strange mood. She had slept badly, been unable to find a position in which the baby wasn’t squashing some part of her insides. And in the moments that she had slept, she’d dreamed vividly and shockingly. In her dreams she gave birth to a puppy, hairless and tiny. The puppy had quickly grown into an adult dog, a hound from hell with bared teeth and red eyes. The dog had hated her, it had skulked outside the door to her room, growling and slavering, waiting for Noelle to unlock the door so that it could come in and attack her. She awoke from this dream three times, sweating and hyperventilating. But each time she fell back into sleep the dog would be there, outside her door.
She was keen to see Noelle that morning. The night had felt long, virtually endless. She wanted a human being to break the strange spell she’d cast herself
under. But Noelle didn’t come at breakfast time and she didn’t come at lunchtime. With every passing minute Ellie became more and more anxious, more and more scared. When she finally heard the sound of Noelle’s key in the lock in the early evening she was ready to throw herself at her and sling her arms around her neck.
But when the door opened and she saw Noelle’s expression, Ellie immediately recoiled into the soft cocoon of her bed.
“Here,” said Noelle, slamming a bowl of Coco Pops, a bag of Wotsits, and half a packet of Oreos on the bedside table. “I haven’t had time to cook.”
Ellie sat cross-legged, her arms wrapped around her bump, looking at Noelle in surprise and fear.
“Oh, stop with the big brown eyes. I’m not in the mood for it. Just eat your food.”
“It’s not very nutritious,” she ventured quietly. Noelle had been making a big effort to give Ellie vegetables and fruit since she’d become pregnant.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she muttered. “One shit meal’s not going to kill you or the baby.” She sat heavily on the chair, radiating fury.
Ellie waited a few minutes before speaking again. “Where’ve you been?” she asked, pulling apart the packet of Wotsits.
“That’s none of your affair.”
“I was worried,” she ventured. “I mean, it made me think, what would happen if something happened to you while you were gone? Like, maybe you were in an accident or you got ill. What would happen to me?”
“Nothing’s going to happen to me, don’t be stupid.”
“No, but it might. You might get a concussion and forget your address. And I’d be locked here with a baby in my tummy and no one would know we were here and we’d both die.”
“Look,” said Noelle, exasperated. “I am not going to get a concussion. And if anything else happened, I’d tell someone you were here. OK?”
Ellie saw that Noelle was losing patience, that she should drop the conversation right now and eat in silence, but what she’d just said, that she would tell someone she was here, this was new and transcendental and extraordinary and thrilling. This couldn’t be ignored.
“Would you really?” she asked, slightly breathless.
“Of course I would. You think I’d just leave you here to die?”
“But what about . . .” She picked her next words carefully. “Wouldn’t you be worried? That the police would come? That you’d be arrested or something?”
“Oh, for crying out loud, child. Will you stop. Stop with all this nonsense. I’ve had enough filthy shit today already to last me a fucking lifetime. I do not need any more from you. All I do is spoil you and care for you, and all you do is sit on your huge fat arse thinking up stupid things to worry about. I have put my life on hold for you and that baby. Now just stop whining and let me deal with everything. For God’s sake.”
Ellie nodded and stared into the orange rubble of the crisp packet, her eyes filling with tears.
“Those animals stink, by the way,” Noelle growled, tossing her head in the direction of the hamster cages. “Get them cleaned out or they’re going down the toilet.”
And then she was gone, and Ellie was alone. Outside the high window a sharp wind threw the tangles of the leafless foliage around like tossed hair while Ellie ate her Wotsits and prayed for a bus to bang into Noelle Donnelly next time she went to the shops, prayed for her to be hospitalized for long enough to have to tell someone about the girl in her basement with a miracle baby growing in her tummy.
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Noelle didn’t seem to be excited about the baby anymore. The bigger Ellie got, the more disinterested Noelle became. The gifts stopped, the baby names stopped, there were no more little sleep-suits to admire or gentle palpations of the bump to see what position the baby was in. Noelle still came three times a day to visit Ellie, to bring her food—no longer the healthy, good-for-the-baby meals of the early months, no more boil-in-the-bag vegetables and uninspired arrangements of tomato and cucumber, just fried food in varying shades of white, pale brown, and occasionally orange—and often she stayed to talk.
Sometimes these chats were mundane, sometimes they bore precious nuggets of information—the weather outside, for example, with its suggestion of the changing seasons, or the increase in her business as children in the world outside began their GCSE studies with its suggestion of the time of year. Other
times these chats were a kind of catharsis for Noelle, an unburdening of herself. Ellie had found these mood swings terrifying at first, had never been quite prepared for whichever version of Noelle might come through her door that day. But as the time passed she started to get an instinct for Noelle’s psychology, started to sense immediately what their chat would be like before Noelle had opened the door, just by the rhythm of the fall of her feet on the wooden staircase outside, the sound of the key in the lock, the speed with which it opened, the angle of her hair across her face, the sound of her breath as she drew it in to form her words of greeting.
Today she knew immediately that Noelle was in a self-pitying mood.
Flop flop flop came her size-eight-and-a-half feet down the stairs.
Sigh before she put the key in the lock.
Creak as the door opened slowly.
And sigh again as she closed the door behind her.
“Here,” she said, presenting Ellie with her lunch: two slices of white toast cowering under the contents of a can of Heinz beans with minisausages, a film-wrapped pancake filled with chocolate spread and rolled into a flattened tube, a can of Lucozade, and a bowl of jelly beans.
Ellie sat straight and took the tray from Noelle. “Thank you.”
She began to eat in silence, aware of Noelle brewing and cogitating beside her.
Finally she heard Noelle take a deep breath and mutter, “I’m wondering, Ellie, what the heck this is all about. Aren’t you?”
Ellie peered at her and then moved her gaze back to her beans on toast. She knew better than to offer any input when Noelle was like this. Her role was simply to be a human sounding board.
“Everything we do, every day. The effort it takes just to get out of your fecking bed every morning. Doing the same goddam things every day. Switch on the kettle . . .” She mimed switching on a kettle. “Brush your teeth.” She mimed this, too. “Choose your clothes, comb your hair, cook your food, clear up your food, take out the rubbish, buy more food, answer the phone, wash your clothes, dry your clothes, fold your clothes, put your clothes away, smile at all the cock-sucking bastards out there, every day, over and over and over and there’s no opt-out. I mean, you can see why some people take to the street, can’t you? I see
them sometimes, the homeless, lying there on their cardboard mattress, dirty old blanket, can of something strong, and I envy them, I do. No responsibility to anyone, for anything.
“And you know, I must have been mad thinking I could do this.” She gestured around the bedroom, at Ellie and her bump and the hamsters in their cages. “More mouths to feed, more drudgery to add to the workload, more money to find to pay for more things that will need to be washed and cooked and folded and put away. I don’t know what I was thinking. I really don’t.”
She sighed deeply and then got to her feet. She was about to leave but then she turned and glanced at Ellie curiously. “Are you OK?” The question was an afterthought. Noelle didn’t really want an answer. She didn’t want to hear that Ellie had barely slept in days because she was too uncomfortable at night. She didn’t want to know about Ellie’s sore tooth or the fact that she’d run out of clean underwear and was washing her pants by hand in the basin or that she needed a new bra as her breasts were now the size of watermelons or that she missed her mum so much, her insides burned with it, and that she could smell summer approaching and could feel the days growing longer and that she cried when she thought about the smell of fresh grass and barbecues in the back garden and Jake on the trampoline and Teddy Bear the cat stretched out in the pools of light that fell upon the wooden floorboards. She didn’t want to know that Ellie no longer knew what Ellie was, let alone how she was, that she had bled into herself, become a puddle, a pool, plasmatic in form. That sometimes she felt as though she loved Noelle. Sometimes she wanted Noelle to hold her in her arms and rock her slowly like a baby, and other times she wanted to slit Noelle’s throat and stand and watch as the blood spouted out, slowly, magnificently, running through Noelle’s fingers, the collapse of her, then the death of her.
Ellie knew what Stockholm syndrome was. They’d studied it at school. She’d read about the Patty Hearst case. She knew what could happen to people kept in captivity for prolonged periods of time. She knew that her feelings were normal. But she also knew that she must not let those feelings of affection—those moments when she yearned for Noelle’s attention or for her approval—she mustn’t allow them to dominate. She needed to hold on to the parts of her that
wanted Noelle dead. Those were the strong, healthy parts of her. Those were the parts that would one day get her out of here.
