The Astonishing Return of Norah Wells (21 page)

Sai goes red. ‘Hey, Ella —'

Ella laughs. ‘It's not mine, stupid. It's Fay's. I found it in the bathroom. She's pregnant. If Mum finds out, maybe she'll leave them alone.'

‘Fay's pregnant?'

‘And there's something else.' She takes a photograph out of the drawer. ‘I found this in Mum's purse.'

Sai looks at the picture. ‘I don't understand.'

‘I reckon Mum's got another family stashed away somewhere. She's probably run away from them too. Anyway, with this and with Fay being pregnant, I reckon I can make her leave.'

‘You're going to blackmail her?'

Ella shrugs. ‘She needs to know that she's not welcome here.'

There's a knock on the door. ‘Ella?'

‘Shit, it's Dad.' Ella snatches the photograph out of Sai's hand, stuffs it in her back pocket and shoves the pregnancy test under her duvet.

Dad walks in.

‘Things are ready downstairs —' he says. And then he sniffs the air. ‘Is that smoke?'

‘Wow Dad, you should be a private investigator.'

Sai leaps forward. ‘It's mine. I'm sorry, Mr Wells.'

Ella looks at Sai. He's the only one in her life right now who's on her side. Stuff family and all that blood is thicker than water crap, it's the people you choose to have in your life that matter. Dad doesn't get to criticise him.

‘It's not his cigarette, Dad. Sai's got asthma – and a heart condition, the one his dad died of. Do you really think he's going to smoke? And in case you're wondering, he doesn't drink either, which is more than can be said for you. Sai isn't the one who gets me in trouble – I do that all by myself. In fact, he's the one who tries to stop me. Take a good look, Dad, this is me:
I
smoke.
I'm
the fuck-up.' Ella draws on the stub and then puts it back down on the windowsill.

Dad stares at her. ‘We'll talk about this later. Let's not spoil your sister's birthday.' He turns to go.

Suddenly Ella feels the urge to tell Dad everything. About Fay being pregnant. About the photograph. About how she doesn't want Willa to know about Mum.

‘Dad —'

Sai comes over to her and squeezes her hand. ‘Not now, Ella,' he whispers.

Dad turns round. ‘What is it?'

Through the window, Ella sees Willa come in from the garden.

‘Nothing, Dad. It's nothing.'

Fay locks herself in the kitchen, leans against the door and breathes out.

You can do this,
she tells herself.

Ella's in her room with Sai and Louis.

Norah's tidying the lounge.

And she's sent Adam down to the basement to sort out his camera for the birthday party.

She looks around the kitchen. Twenty-four hours and already the untidiness has crept in. Everything that Fay's built is slipping away.

Adjusting the pieces of paper on the fridge, her eyes scan the chores rota, her shifts at the hospital, Adam's busy periods at the recycling plant, the girls' timetables. Time neatly parcelled. She lifts dirty mugs out of the sink and places them in the dishwasher. Then she gets out the bottle of Dettol and sprays the counters, wiping away the smears of butter and the crumbs and the trails of milk. She scrubs and scrubs until the surfaces shine, until her hands are raw and red. And as she scrubs, she repeats the refrain:
they're my family now.

When she first moved in, she told herself that she was doing it for the girls. They needed her; Adam wasn't coping. As soon as Norah came home, she'd step aside and pick up her old life.

But that had been a lie, hadn't it?

Sure she cared about the girls – really cared – but that's not why she'd moved in. She loved Adam, that's why. She'd always loved him.

A wave of nausea sweeps over her. She grips the counter.

They're the worst lies, aren't they,
she thinks,
the lies you tell yourself.

A tune presses in from outside. And odd tumbling-together of instruments. Fay looks out of the window and sees the man with dreadlocks playing the guitar next to the rainbow-jumper guy with his trumpet. It's Norah's song. ‘What a Wonderful World'. A wonderful, messed-up world.

Dear Willa, who wants these people to come to her birthday party. If it were down to Willa, she'd have everyone she'd ever met living with them at Number 77 Willoughby Street: one big happy family. Is that the reason she'd accepted Fay so easily as her mum? Would she have accepted anyone?

Music leaks down through the ceiling from Ella's room. No matter how many changes Fay has made to the house, its bones have stayed the same: brittle and hollow and ready, at any moment, to betray the movements of the people who live here.

She's glad that Adam called Sai; Ella needs him right now.

I'm going to keep hold of them,
the words from last night echo in her head.
No matter what happens, no matter what Norah tries to do, I'm going to keep hold of them, and I'm going to stay.

A knock on the kitchen door.

Fay puts down the cloth she's been using to scrub the counters and goes over to open the door.

Norah walks in.

‘Can I help?' Norah asks.

Help?
Fay wants to shout at her.
You abandon your baby girl and then waltz back into her life and expect to pick up where you left off? Blow up a few balloons and wait for everything to slot back into place?

‘If you don't mind…' Norah adds.

Yes, I mind. I want you to turn round and go back to whatever life you've been living for close to a decade now and let us get back to how things were before.
 

Fay hands Norah a jute bag containing paper plates and napkins and cups.

Norah empties the contents onto the kitchen table. A cup rolls to the floor.

Fay holds herself back from going to pick it up, turns away and busies herself with the cake.

‘Everything's red,' Norah says, peeling off the cellophane wrappers.

Fay nods. ‘Red for Willa's foxes.'

‘Ah yes, her foxes.' Norah puts down a paper plate in front of each seat.

‘Ella loves blue,' Fay blurts out. She can't help herself from sharing the details of the girls' lives. And then she remembers that Norah's favourite colour was also blue, the colour of jazz.

Fay pushes seven candles into the cake. As far as Fay knows, Norah's never baked a cake in her life. But baking a cake doesn't make you a mum, does it? Norah gave birth to them; Fay could never trump that.

Norah comes over and opens her hand. ‘I found this.'

Willa's milk tooth sits in Norah's palm. Fay feels light-headed.

‘She must have dropped it in the lounge,' says Norah.

Fay turns it over between her fingers. ‘It's her first one.'

‘I thought you might like to deal with it.' Norah pauses. ‘I imagine you've planned something special.'

She's mocking me, thinks Fay, like she used to:
my friend the organiser, the planner, the chart-list-graph-maker. Always marking moments.

‘Something special?' Fay asks.

‘I guess you'll get her to put it under her pillow or something.' Norah picks up the tooth and holds it out to Fay. ‘Here, take it.'

Of course she'd made plans. She was going to ease the tooth from under Willa's pillow and replace it with a five-pound note tied in a red ribbon, along with a note from the tooth fairy.

‘Thank you.' Fay puts the tooth in an eggcup on the counter.

‘I need to ask you something, Fay.'

Fay pushes the final candle into the fox's nose, the wax carved into the shape of a number seven.

‘Fay?'

Breathe
, Fay says to herself. Whatever it is, you can cope.

Fay looks up at Norah and waits for her to speak.

‘How much did you find out, when you had me traced?'

Fay had hoped Norah wouldn't come back to this.

‘Not much.'

‘How much is not much?'

‘The appointment in London, that's the first bit of information the detective gave me.' The light-headedness gets worse. Fay holds on to the counter.

‘I'd only just had Willa. I couldn't go through with it, not again.' Norah pulls one of the candles out of the cake and scrapes at the wax. ‘Adam and I had barely slept together since her birth. I didn't understand how it had happened, how my body could respond so quickly.'

So she wants a biology lesson now? Following pregnancy, the female body is more fertile, is primed to create a new life.

‘I didn't go through with it. I couldn't get rid of him.'

‘I know.'

‘You know?'

‘The trail went cold for a while – well, for about nine months. Then I found the record of a birth in Glasgow hospital.'

Norah goes over to the kitchen table and sits down. Fay keeps standing where she is. She's worried that, if she moves, she'll be sick.

‘Did you tell Adam?' asks Norah.

‘No.' She'd thought about it, of course, but what good would it do? He was starting to get himself together again. And if Norah wanted him to know she'd come back, wouldn't she? That's what Fay had told herself.

‘What else did you find out?' Norah asks.

‘After that? Not much. Only that you moved to Berlin.' Fay wonders whether she's got any better at lying since Norah's been away. She picks up Willa's wooden fox from the windowsill and traces the edges with her fingertips. Then she looks out of the kitchen window. The wind has picked up and, above them, the tarpaulin has worked itself loose and is flapping against the side of the house.

‘You knew I was in Berlin?' Norah asks.

It had taken Fay a good ten days to pluck up the courage to return the private investigator's call. It had been so long since she'd heard from him that she thought he'd given up the case.
She's too good at covering her tracks,
he'd said
.
And then he found Norah's patient records in a Berlin hospital. Willa was four, Ella eleven, and although Fay hadn't forgotten about Norah, life had moved on.

‘I came to visit the hospital,' Fay says.

‘So you found out.'

‘Yes, I found out.'

When Fay didn't return the investigator's voicemail he'd called again:
I have some important information, I think you'll want to know this.
So she'd met him at the Holdingwell Café and they'd sat on the plastic chairs, drinking coffee, and had heard the word cancer drop from his lips.

‘Did you see me?' Norah asks.

‘I found your room. You'd just had the mastectomy.'

Fay had stood outside the door, watching Norah asleep in the hospital bed. She was hooked up to a drip, her skin transparent, her long red hair spread out on her pillow like that painting of Ophelia floating in the river. A thick bandage pushed up under her hospital gown, along her chest.

Why hadn't she come home when she found out she was sick? Why hadn't she trusted her best friend, a medic, to help?

‘You didn't come to speak to me?'

‘I was going to.'

But then a blond man holding a little boy by the hand had stepped past Fay and walked into Norah's room. The little boy ran to Norah's bed and jumped up.

Mama!
he'd squealed
. Mama!

Langsam,
said the man. Slowly.
Sie sanft.
Be gentle.

The man walked over and took Norah's hand.

Norah had opened her eyes, looked at them and smiled.

Fay moved away from the door.

‘But you didn't, you walked away?' Norah asks.

Fay stares at Norah. ‘Yes. And the truth is, Norah, when I came to Berlin I didn't want to find you. And when I saw you had a new family I had an excuse to walk away. You had people who loved you, a new life; you were going to be okay. And yes, I had a family to go home to, a family I'd been living with for years. A family that needed me. I loved them – I
love
them.' She takes a breath. ‘You'd been gone for years, Norah. What did you expect? For everything to stay the same? For everyone to just wait for you?'

Norah hangs her head and presses her thumb along the folds of a paper napkin.

Fay looks at Norah's chest hanging unevenly under her jumper. It was just like her not to have reconstructive surgery, not to wear a bra. No trace of vanity. Clumsy as a child and no grasp of how beautiful she was, no matter what clothes she wore, no matter how damaged her body was.

‘You're clear now, right?' Fay asks.

Norah tugs at her collar and smiles. ‘I might live.'

‘What the hell does that mean?'

‘We have to talk, Fay. Without fighting. I have to tell you why I came home.'

‘You
might
live?' Fay yells.

Before Norah has the time to answer Adam strides in, his camera around his neck. He snaps a picture of Fay and then comes over, takes her by the waist and kisses her.

She pulls away. She doesn't like how much of a show he's making of his affection. And she can't do this, not now that Norah's told her she's sick again. Damn Norah. Damn all of them for coming into her life.

‘Camera's all set up,' he says, a false jollity in his voice. ‘I've come to help.' Whenever his eyes fall on Norah he jerks his head. Norah's not looking at him either. Fay feels a thud in her chest. What did he do when he came home last night? Did they talk? Did she tell him that she
might live
? Did he get drawn in by her, like he always did?

‘You can finish making up the party bags,' she says, pointing to a pile of toys and sweets on the counter.

He holds his hand to his head in mock-salute.

Norah goes over to the table and finishes putting out the napkins. Fay comes to stand next to Adam and passes him the tiny model foxes to put in the party bags.

‘The cake looks amazing,' Adam says. ‘You're a genius.' He tries to take her hand but she pulls it away. ‘Thanks for looking after Ella…' he whispers. ‘Thanks for coming home.'

She nods but doesn't look at him.

‘Fay?' he whispers. ‘What's wrong?'

What's wrong? I'm losing you, just like I always knew I would.
 

They watch Norah walk across the room to the window and the three of them stare out across the street.

…
red roses too
…
The tune floats in through the open window. Norah's favourite song and she doesn't even like bloody flowers, thinks Fay.

‘You look tired. Why don't you have a break before the party,' he says. ‘I can do the rest.'

‘I'm fine.' Fay takes the cake out of the box and carries it over to the table. She looks at the red stains on her hands from dying the icing.
I'm just fine.