The Girl Below (11 page)

Sitting on my suitcases at the Barbican station a couple of hours later, I looked so forlorn, so raggedy, that a businessman threw fifty pence at me with an admonishment not to spend it on grog. Not for the first time, I thought of the check my father had offered me, and how different my situation might be if I’d accepted it. Then again, it was entirely possible that I would have frittered it all away on clothes by now, and I’d be no better off.

Alana arrived an hour later than we had arranged, and didn’t apologize, though she did help drag one of the suitcases along three blocks of crooked pavement to her flat. “I haven’t had a roommate since I moved here,” she said. “Living by myself is the best.”

I was surprised to find that Alana lived in one of those sixties council towers that you see on TV being detonated before they collapse one day on top of their inhabitants. At least she lived on the ground floor, far below the suicidal balconies crammed with washing lines and dustbins.

“I was on the waiting list for years before I got this place,” she said, letting me in. “It’s nicer on the inside than it is from the street.” She was right, it was nicer, cozy even, and I envied the amount of space she had for herself, space she evidently wasn’t too keen on sharing.

I handed her a plastic bag of groceries I’d salvaged, not stolen, from Willesden Green, and she inspected the contents warily and stuffed them into a low cupboard. The bottle of wine I’d bought got a better reception, and I opened it while she put a frozen pizza in the oven. I told her about Mike and his flurry of texts, though I’d meant not to. Alana picked up where she’d left off outside the toilet stall, demanding to know how I was so sure I didn’t like him when I didn’t even know him. “Because there hadn’t been a spark,” I told her, but she wouldn’t let it go, and I sensed she was annoyed with me in a more general way that had nothing at all to do with Mike.

After a few glasses of wine, she seemed to relax, and we sank back into the old routine of recalling the most recent dramas of our lives in amusing and elaborate detail. She finally got it out of me that I had given up on men only because the latest in a long line of destructive breakups had been such a train wreck that in the aftermath, it had hurt too much to have hope.

“You went out with a bunch of assholes,” she said a little dismissively when I had finished explaining. “It was a bad run, that’s all.”

She didn’t understand, and I knew I could never explain, how a bad run left its mark—that at the end of it, you were not the same person you had been at the start. Every time you went through a breakup, it took something from you, leaving less of you to give to the next one, and the longer the bad run went on, the harder it was to offer up what little was left.

When I was done with talking about men, I moved on to my family (which took us through another bottle of wine) and to being broke and unemployed—out came a bottle of foul coffee liqueur her great-aunt had given her for Christmas—and for good measure, I doubled back and added in those final messed-up months in Auckland—hard to leave out—at which point it was half past eleven and Alana announced that she was spent. She went to tip her glass of coffee liqueur down the sink, and I told her not to waste it, that if she didn’t want it, I’d drink it—but she must not have heard me.

“The couch folds out,” she said, fetching sheets and a blanket from an airing cupboard. “It’s a bit lumpy, but I shouldn’t think that’ll bother you much.”

While I was trying to work out if that was an odd thing to say, I was swamped by a wave of nostalgia for the after-school phone marathons and sweet delusions of our girlhood friendship—a wave I needed to share. “There’s something so great about old friends who really know you, who understand you,” I began, with a lump in my throat. “Living in New Zealand, I really missed that. I always had to make new friends, and we didn’t share any history. Not like I do with you.”

“Yes,” she said, matter-of-factly. “We used to have a lot of fun.”

She was tired, she said, shutting the door to her bedroom, and so was I. So tired that my second hangover came early, while I lay on the lumpy sofa bed, staring at the ceiling and worrying about how many flats, how many lives, were stacked on top of that thin piece of particle board.

Scanning over the evening’s conversation, it struck me that I couldn’t remember a single thing Alana had told me about her life. Not because drunkenness had wiped out my memory, but because she hadn’t told me anything. Then, with a mix of horror and shame, I realized that was because I hadn’t let her get a word in, that I’d done all the talking—
all
of it. I had been rabid, had frothed at the mouth. But it was too late now to go back and put a stopper in the bottle. I could only apologize, and try not to do it again. Over breakfast, I would make amends.

But by the time I woke up, Alana had gone. She hadn’t left a note, but I wrote one to her saying thanks for the bed, and then I called Pippa.

“I’m so pleased you’ll do it,” she said, the relief clear in her voice. “I think Peggy took a shine to you, and we had so much trouble finding a nurse she liked. Most of them weren’t posh enough and she complained about their ‘dreary accents’ when they were reading to her.”

“I have to
read
to her?” I hadn’t meant to sound rude, but reading aloud was the pits.

“Only if you feel like it. But it’s either that or listening to her stories, which can get a little . . . repetitive. You know what old people are like.”

“Not really,” I said. “My grandmother was more interested in telling people what to do than in boring them to tears.”

“I met her once, I think,” said Pippa. “Is she still alive?”

“I don’t know,” I said, truthfully. “So, can I start straightaway?”

“If you want.”

Pippa made arrangements for me to pick up a key from her place, and I was about to hang up when she said, “By the way, what on earth did you say to Caleb?”

Oh dear. Had he told her about my bunking advice? “Nothing much,” I said, tentatively. “We hardly spoke.”

“Are you sure?”

“I asked him a few questions, but he wasn’t exactly chatty.”

“Really?” she said, sounding surprised. “Because on the way home, instead of renting a game, he insisted on going to the library and getting out a stack of books. When we got home he went straight to his room and we haven’t seen him since—well, hardly, except for dinner, which he wolfed down in five seconds.” She paused. “He’s never wanted to read books before. I’m a little freaked out.”

It did seem like strange behavior, though I could guess what book he’d gotten out—along with a few decoys. “Did you see what he was reading?”

“He wouldn’t show me.”

Making my way to Notting Hill that night with my suitcase and a key, I felt like a gypsy. My sense that London owed me something had vanished. Maybe if I’d been born in another part of the world I could have returned there and felt like a native, but London wasn’t like that. It was too full to take back a stray who had carelessly given up her place.

And yet, for now, I had a key to our old building. It was shiny, freshly cut, and turned easily in the well-used lock. The heavy front door had a rubber skirt and shushed across the carpet in a satisfying, moneyed way. When I stepped into the lobby, a bright chandelier lit up overhead, and the brass central heating grille gleamed like a new Rolls-Royce.

I climbed the wide staircase one flight at a time, and just before I reached each new level the landing would be illuminated, the lights triggered by an invisible sensor. At first I was grateful for the ease—my hands were full with heavy suitcases—but as I climbed higher up the building, my pace slowed, and the lights began to time out before I reached the next floor and the next sensor. For half of every flight—then gradually more—I was plunged into a darkness that my eyes found hard to adjust to and was forced to walk blind up the stairs. I looked for a switch but found none. To keep abreast with the lights, I tried to pick up my pace, but the more I tried to rush with my heavy bags, the more out of sync I seemed to get. Finally, when I arrived at what I thought was Peggy’s floor, the lights didn’t come on at all.

In the dark, I put down my suitcases and groped in my bag for the key. It fit easily enough into the lock, was only a little sticky, but when I tried to turn it, the thing wouldn’t budge. For almost a minute, still in darkness, I persisted, twisting the key back and forth and trying to shift the door slightly in its frame to see if that would help. I looked up and down the shadowy staircase and out the window at a stand of muscular oak trees, their wide trunks dappled in the moonlight, and that was when I realized something was wrong. From Peggy’s floor you looked above oak canopies at the sky. Once more, I studied the door. It had no number, just a tiny metal eyehole in the center.

It wasn’t Peggy’s door. This was Jimmy’s floor. A spasm of fear radiated from my stomach and I tried to pull out the key, but I must have already turned it too far in one direction, and the jaws of the lock had clamped around it. Jimmy’s name hadn’t been on the list next to the buzzer and I had taken it for granted that he had moved out—but what if he hadn’t? My fingers plucked uselessly at the key as voices issued from the belly of the flat behind it, quiet at first, then shouting. Loud music started up, as rowdy as a fairground ride, and I jumped back, letting go of the key. It sat in the lock, reproaching me. I was being a scaredy cat, but knowing that didn’t help.

The music then changed abruptly to classical—the sound track to an ad I recognized. It was only the TV, rocking through a commercial break. Of course Jimmy didn’t live there anymore. The realization calmed me enough to have another go at the key, to tweak it with more patience until it released.

Halfway up the next set of stairs, the blessed lights came on, and stayed on until I reached the landing outside Peggy’s flat. My hands on the key chain were shaking, but I found the right key and turned it in the lock.

Chapter Eight

London, 2003

O
nce I had gained entry to Peggy’s apartment, what came over me first was relief. The lights worked, and the tatty interior was comforting, lived in. A hearty soup or stew had been warming in the kitchen, and the aroma of it was still in the hallway, canceling out the usual unpleasant smells. Pippa’s instructions had been to call out to Peggy as soon as I arrived, in case the old woman thought someone was trying to break in. Peggy was expecting me, but she had a leaky memory for comings and goings, and Pippa said it defaulted to paranoia if she was taken by surprise.

I put down my suitcases and called out her name once or twice, first in a quiet voice, then a little more loudly. When there was no answer, I assumed Peggy had gone to sleep. The door to her bedroom was closed, and I carried on down the hallway in search of a room that was empty—Pippa had told me to sleep in whichever one I could physically get into. Some rooms, she’d warned me, were entirely full of boxes. First, I came to what I thought had once been Peggy’s bedroom, and pushed open the door, or tried to, but something was blocking it, a small trunk or a piece of furniture. The door gave a little, but I didn’t want to force it open. I made my way down the hall and crossed the drawing room to get to Harold’s room, switching on as many lights as possible along the way. I meant not to look at Madeline, nor to think of her, to focus only on where I was heading, but before I could stop myself, I had looked in her direction—and looked again, because she wasn’t there. In the place she normally sat there was only a dark square on the floorboards where her dais had prevented the wood from fading.

Instead of relief that she wasn’t in her usual spot, however, I was transfixed by the idea that she had learned how to move and was following stealthily behind me, gliding even, just outside my line of vision. But when I looked behind me, the apartment was deserted.

I told myself to buck up, and carried on to Harold’s room. It was, as Pippa had predicted, almost impossible to fight my way through the abundant boxes, but I found too that most of them were stacked by the door, as if someone had gone a little way into the room, hurriedly dumped the cartons, and left. Once you got past them, the room was quite sparsely furnished, with a dresser and a double bed, sagging in the middle but heavenly compared to the couch I’d been sleeping on for months. At first I meant only to test the mattress before getting up to clean my teeth and undress, but once I was lying down I didn’t want to move, and despite the strangeness of the situation, and all that was lurking outside, I pulled the eiderdown up around my shoulders and fell into a deep, untroubled sleep.

It was only the next morning that I saw the dust, lying thick on every surface of the room, including, I noticed with dismay, on the adjacent pillow. Some of it had gotten into my throat in the night, and the first thing I did when I sat up was cough. It was very early, only a gray film lit the morning, and I crept through the flat to get a glass of water. Peggy’s door was still closed and everything else appeared undisturbed since the night before.

In the kitchen, after pouring myself a drink from the tap, I poked around in the cupboards for a vacuum cleaner. I found one of those old-fashioned ones that resembled a set of bagpipes, and wheeled it down the long hallway to Harold’s room—far enough away that I didn’t think Peggy would hear it. Plugged in, the volume was impressive, but it had no suction, and its metal head was so huge that it was beyond maneuvering, especially through the death valley of Harold’s books and junk. Still, I gave it my best shot, and only came to a halt when the vacuum cleaner fell into a pothole. On closer inspection the hole turned out to be more extensive than I’d thought—in fact, a whole section of parquet floorboards was missing. Under the desk by the window, and along one wall, perhaps two dozen blocks of it had been pulled up and stacked to one side, leaving exposed an adventure playground for mice. When I went around the room a little farther, I saw that other patches of floor had been pulled up and replaced, but badly, so that pieces of parquet jutted out here and there at hazardous angles.