The Astonishing Return of Norah Wells (20 page)

Ella finishes her tweet and bangs shut her bedroom door.

‘What the hell did you think you were doing down there, telling everyone who Mum was?' she asks Sai.

‘I thought everyone knew.'

‘Willa doesn't.'

‘She doesn't know who her mum is?'

‘She thinks it's Fay.'

Sai shakes his head. ‘What happened to the Ella of
tell the truth at all costs and damn the consequences
?'

‘This is different.'

‘I don't see how —'

‘I didn't have a choice. Fay and Dad said it would upset her, that she was too little.'

‘And now that your mum's come home?'

‘She's not our mum. She walked out on us.'

‘She's still your mum, Ella.'

‘Give it a rest, Sai,' Ella snaps.

Sai reaches past Ella to open the door.

‘Where are you going?'

‘I think you need some space, I'm going home.'

Ella puts her hand on his arm. She can't cope with him walking out on her. ‘I'm sorry,' she says. ‘It's just a bit much, that's all.'

He doesn't move.

She prises his fingers off the door handle and kisses his hand. ‘I like the suit.' She strokes the shiny blue sheen of the fabric.

His muscles relax under her touch.

‘I thought I should make an effort – impress your dad.'

From the way Dad looked at him, Ella wonders whether it might have been better for Sai to wear jeans and a T-shirt, but she doesn't say anything.

Sai looks up at the damp patch on the ceiling. ‘So the roof's still not fixed then?'

‘I don't think it'll ever be fixed. All the roofers to do is sit in their van and eat sandwiches,' says Ella.

‘Maybe the hole will get bigger and you'll be able to see the stars. That would be cool for summer.'

Ella shrugs. ‘Maybe.'

Sai, the eternal optimist. But the summer feels ages away. Getting through this bank holiday weekend is all Ella can think about right now.

He walks around the room touching the loose chunks of paint where Ella has ripped off her posters and the photographs of Mum.

‘What happened in here?'

Sai has only been in her bedroom once before, a few months ago when Dad took Fay off for a romantic stay in the country for her birthday. They had a babysitter who was too busy watching TV to notice Ella sneaking Sai into the house.

‘I decided to redecorate,' Ella says.

He flicks his nail down the empty CD rack. ‘And where's all your music?'

‘I had a clear-out.'

‘You binned your best friend, Louis Armstrong?'

‘You're my best friend.'

Sai smiles. ‘Your musical best friend.'

‘I've grown out of him.'

Ella goes to the window that looks out onto the back garden and watches Willa run across the sunlit grass with Louis.

‘It's always been sunny for Willa's birthday. Even on the day she was born.'

Sai comes over and puts his arm around her. ‘Do you remember that day?'

She nods.

Ella had waited at the school gates for ages. Mum had turned up pink-faced, out of breath, with small beads of sweat covering her forehead and wet patches under her arms. Louis walked beside her. Every few seconds he looked up at her and made small, growling noises. And he wouldn't leave Mum's side.

‘She kept saying
I'm fine, I'm fine
, but I knew something was wrong. It turned out that
fine
meant going into labour.'

‘How did you know – I mean, you were pretty young.'

‘I went to ante-natal classes with Mum.'

‘You did what?'

‘Dad was too busy. At work, he said.' Ella rolls her eyes. ‘And he said he already knew all that baby stuff from when I was born. We couldn't afford a babysitter so Mum took me along. Some of it really grossed me out – the stuff about birthing positions and breastfeeding.' Ella wrinkles her nose. ‘Put me off having kids for life.'

‘That's a shame.' Sai kisses Ella's cheek. ‘You'd make a good mum.'

She bats him away. ‘Yeah, right.'

No one should get to be a mum until they've passed like a million tests, thinks Ella. There are too many mums out there who haven't got a clue what they're doing. It's not fair on the kids.

‘So what happened?' Sai asks.

‘By the time Mum got home her face was red and sweaty and she was struggling to breathe, and then she told me to call Dad and tell him to come home. That's when I knew it was serious.'

Music and laughter and cheering and the sound of a TV blared through the mobile. Ever since Mum got pregnant with Willa, Dad had spent his evenings at the Three Feathers.

Dad?
 

No answer.

Dad, it's Mum. She needs you to come home.
 

Still no answer. He must have answered the call and then got distracted.

Another cheer. And a laugh, which sounded like Dad's laugh. And then the music got louder and after that the phone went dead.

‘So he came home and took care of her?' asked Sai.

‘Not exactly.'

Ella went back into the bedroom.

Mum propped herself up.
Did you get through to Dad?
Her voice was small and frayed.

‘He was at the pub,' Ella tells Sai. ‘But I didn't tell Mum; she didn't need to hear that, not with the baby coming.'

So he's on his way?
Mum asked.

Ella nodded again.

Mum fell back against the pillows and closed her eyes. She pulled her mouth over her teeth and held on to the big mound of her stomach.

‘So what did you do?' asks Sai.

‘I told Mum I wanted to call the ambulance. The woman in the antenatal class said that if we couldn't drive to the hospital and if we couldn't afford a taxi, we should call 999. But Mum said she wanted to wait for Dad.'

Mum had tears in her eyes, which made Ella think of all the other times Mum had cried in the last nine months. When Ella asked Dad why Mum was so upset all the time he said it was the hormones, that babies did that to you. When Ella asked whether Mum had cried when she was in her tummy, Dad had scratched his chin and shrugged.
Don't really remember.

Sometimes, Ella wondered whether Dad would have been happier if she and Willa had never come along. Maybe if had just been the two of them, he'd have been a better husband and Mum wouldn't have left.

‘I got out my toy trumpet, stood at the foot of the bed and played a tune, hoping it would make her feel happier. But she covered her ears and shook her head and said,
Not now, Ella.
'

‘I guess being in labour's pretty intense,' says Sai.

‘Yeah.'

When playing the trumpet didn't work, Ella had gone to the bathroom to get the heart monitor Mum had bought when she was pregnant with Ella. When Ella asked Mum why there were two sets of earphones she said it was so that both she and Dad could listen to Ella's heartbeat, but Dad didn't seem like the kind of person who'd want to sit there listening to a baby's heartbeat and she'd never seen him listening to Willa's.

Ella put the first set of earphones in Mum's ears, the second pair in her own, and placed the probe on Mum's tummy. Sometimes it took a while to find the heartbeat, which always made Ella a little scared in case the baby's heart had stopped without telling anyone, but this time they heard it straight away – beat, beat, beating like a galloping horse.

Mum closed her eyes and lay back and her limbs relaxed, and Ella felt glad that she'd found something that helped.

‘She seemed to calm down and I thought she was okay,' Ella tells Sai. ‘But then I realised that her skin had gone grey and when I shook her, she wouldn't wake up. Louis barked at the end of the bed.' Ella remembers the red flower spreading across the white sheets under Mum's thighs. ‘So I called the ambulance. And went to get Dad.'

Sai raises his eyebrows. ‘You went to the pub?'

‘Yep.'

The pub was so full that people spilled out onto the pavement; they stood clutching their beers and smoking in the late afternoon sunshine. It took a while to find Dad. He was sitting at the bar, holding his glass up to the TV screen and cheering a goal. Ella ducked between all the men and women crowding around Dad and then tugged at his blue overalls.

As he looked down at her his eyes glazed over. He pushed his glasses up his nose and laughed, a smelly, beer-breath laugh.

Ella
– what are you doing here?
 

It's Mum. She's having the baby.
 

He took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes and stood up. The bar stool crashed to the floor. A few people looked over.

Steady on there, Adam.
A man with a massive red spider vein on his nose slapped Dad on the back.

Dad stumbled out onto the pavement and blinked as the sunlight shone on his face.

‘I found him at the Three Feathers. He took me home on his motorbike; I sat in front of him holding on to the handlebars. He was so pissed he couldn't drive straight.'

‘God.'

‘Yeah. Responsibleparenting.com. When we got to the house, the ambulance was already there. They let us get in with Mum. And a few minutes later, Willa was born.'

‘In the ambulance?'

‘Mum passed out. Dad threw up. So the paramedic handed me the baby.'
Looks like you're going to be the first to meet your baby sister
, she said.

Ella took the baby in her arms. ‘Look, Dad,' she said, holding Willa to him, but Dad didn't hear her; he was too busy worrying about Mum.

She looked into the baby's big blue eyes and at her small hands and tiny fingernails and at the way she sucked her mouth in and out as if she was trying to smile and, from that moment, she knew that Willa was hers to keep safe.

‘Must have been pretty special,' says Sai.

‘Kind of. Special and scary.'

‘You've done a good job – looking after Willa.'

Through the window, Ella watches her little sister crouching under the gooseberry bush. She isn't so sure about having done the right thing by Willa. By letting her believe that Fay was her Mum, hadn't she lied to her like everyone else?

Sai wraps his arms around Ella. She lets her body fall into his and wishes time would stand still and that she could stay up here with him, away from everyone and everything.

He lets go and points out of the window. ‘Willa's really into her fox thing, isn't she?'

‘She thinks we've got the entire cast of
Fantastic Mr Fox
living in the back garden.'

‘I got her the soundtrack, to go with the piece you're playing later.' He looks over at the music stand.

‘I'm not playing any more.'

‘But you've been practising for weeks.'

‘I'm crap at it.' She'd wanted so badly to be good at the trumpet, but now she was relieved that she was rubbish. One less thing of Mum's to get rid of.

‘No you're not —'

‘You think I'm going to play my trumpet with Mum listening?'

Ella takes a cigarette from the pack on her bedside table, lights it and goes over to the window.

Sai comes over, takes it out of her hand and stubs it out on the outside windowsill.

‘I don't think you should smoke before the race.'

With everything that's happened in the last two days, Ella had put the 10k out of her mind.

Sai draws her in by the waist and holds her close. She presses her ear to his chest and listens to his heartbeat. She forgets, sometimes, how his asthma makes it hard for him to breathe.

‘It's okay, Ella,' he says and lifts her chin. ‘I get it: families are complicated.'

He kisses her forehead and then the top of her nose and then her mouth. For a second, all the tension floats out of Ella's body. She's glad Sai is here, with his floppy hair, wearing his silly suit, holding her and kissing her.

He takes a breath and looks into her eyes. ‘But Willa's going to find out, you know that, right? I mean, it's not the kind of secret you can keep.' He looks down through the scaffolding. ‘Especially with your troops gathering down there.'

Ella pushes Sai away. ‘No, she's not. Not if we find a way to make Mum leave. And the guys down there are loons. I should never have started that stupid campaign.'

‘I don't get it, Ella. You've spent so long looking for your mum and now she's here —'

Ella goes over to her desk and picks up the only picture she hasn't thrown out. It's a poster of Mum with
MISSING
written in big letters across the top. She'd drawn it in thick wax crayon. Mum's long red hair and her big smile and a trumpet in her hand.

‘Look!' she says, holding it up to Sai. ‘I drew this when I was eight – a year older than Willa. I didn't know about photocopiers, so I made dozens. Stayed up all night. And I covered Holdingwell in them. I thought Mum had been abducted or that she'd had an accident and was lying in a ditch somewhere. Or that she'd died.' Ella gulps. ‘And now it turns out she chose to leave.' The crow pecks and pecks. ‘So she doesn't get to come back and to play happy families. She doesn't get to come between Fay and Dad – and Fay and Willa.'

‘I didn't think you liked Fay.'

‘I didn't. But that's only because I was too stupid to understand. I get it now: Fay's Willa's mum, her real mum. And Willa loves her. And I'm not going to let anyone get in the way of that.'

Sai comes over to Ella, takes the poster out of her hands and puts it down on the desk. ‘So how do you plan to make her go away?'

Ella goes to her desk, pulls out the pregnancy test stick and holds it up.