The Girl Below (14 page)

On the art department photocopier at school, we made River Phoenix wallpaper and used it to cover the walls of the common room. A competing group tried to do the same with Keanu Reeves, but they got as far as wallpapering the Coke machine before the art department started charging for photocopies and their commitment faltered.

I talked to Mum about boys, but only enough so she thought I was normal, not a lesbo like the PE teachers at school. Any more than that and I risked getting “the lecture,” the one that began with “boys only want one thing.” But as my seventeenth birthday approached, the lecture began to grate in a new way, for it only served to remind me of what I wanted too but wasn’t getting. I’d had enough of talking on the phone about hypothetical movie star boyfriends and their noses; the stuff of my mother’s direst warnings was what I most craved.

For that, I turned to my only other friend, Jo. As eleven-year-olds, we had shared a passionate interest in dressing up as pop stars and had videotaped each other miming with tennis racket guitars to Madonna and A-ha, but Jo had moved on since then. Not only was she on the pill, but her boyfriend Adam practically lived with her in the attic of her parents’ Notting Hill mansion.

It was Jo who introduced me, that summer, to Adam’s best friend, Leon. I had seen him before from a distance, a solid brick wall of a boy, definitely no RP, but my friends thought he was good looking, and their opinions mattered to me as much as my own. One afternoon after school, still in uniform, Jo and I caught the bus to Kensington Park Road, and she let us in through the gate of the communal garden across the road from her house, near where I had once lived. After Dad left, Mum and I had moved to a rented flat in Shepherd’s Bush, a small two-bedroom place with a bathroom but no proper living room, only a carpeted extension of the kitchen (stunning view, also, of a slice of railway and the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout).

Once inside the garden gate, Jo and I made straight for a thicket of mulberry bushes in the center and Jo parted the leaves with both hands. “Have you ever gotten high?” she said, smiling her dreamy smile.

A fleet of nerves spread through me. Keen as I was for experience, I had read that taking drugs even once was enough to set you on the path toward becoming a junkie—one of those walking skeletons I had seen huddled under the Westway as a kid. “Will I be all right for school in the morning?”

“Of course, silly, it’s only hash,” said Jo. “Me and Adam do it all the time, practically every day. You’ll just feel relaxed, that’s all.”

Jo was so relaxed that she often spent the entire day in the common room with a hot water bottle on her lap to ease menstrual cramps. She was in the bottom class for French and math, her brain muddled by all that sex and whatever this hash thing was. “Okay,” I said.

We found Adam and Leon reclined on their school bags in a circle of grass, fiddling with scraps of paper and something brown and crumbly in a shoe polish tin.

“I love this place,” said Jo. “It reminds me of a fairy circle.”

When Jo said things like that, it was best not to reply. She went over to Adam and nibbled his lip. “Sweetheart, I missed you so much today.”

Adam ruffled her hair and continued with his paper work while I sat on the grass and watched Leon. His fingers were short and stubby, like raw chipolatas, and from the way he smiled at me but said nothing, I gathered he knew this was a setup.

On the first puff nothing happened except that I coughed after trying to smoke it like a cigarette. Jo let the smoke curl out of her mouth in wisps and reclined on the grass, opening her eyes to gaze at the sky. The next time it was my turn, I copied her. Was the sky a more intense shade of blue than it had been five minutes ago? Or was it just that I was looking at it from directly below, and the shift in perspective had made me dizzy?

I tried to concentrate, to note every nuance of the experience so I could write it down later and cross it off my list of things to do that were grown up and deviant, but my senses were unusually dulled. If anything had changed it was that I felt boxed in, paralyzed by a second-by-second sense of déjà vu. Lying there on the grass, I got the strangest idea in my head that I had moved without actually moving. Leon was suddenly in a patch of grass to my right and when he asked me a question, my reply was so muffled I couldn’t be sure if he’d heard me.

He tried again, speaking slowly, as though I didn’t understand English. “I said, ‘How are you feeling?’ ”

I blinked at him and tried to form a sentence, a simple one that expressed my displeasure that he was lying so close, but my tongue had expanded until it was a tennis ball, jammed into my mouth and glued there with peanut butter. My contact lenses had also dried up and were coming unstuck from my eyeballs, which made me think they were about to pop out. I shut my eyelids against their escape. “Go away,” I mouthed, but heard nothing.

Leon’s hand landed softly on my thigh, the chipolatas searching for the hem of my gray wool skirt. I tried to roll away from him but must have rolled in the wrong direction because soon, his lips were on mine, his tongue forging ahead, slimy with saliva, past teeth and gums, toward the tennis ball and the peanut butter. Someone was kissing him back, and for a second I felt sorry for her, until I realized it was me.

I tried to clamp my mouth shut.

“I’ve liked you for ages,” Leon said, clawing at my striped school shirt, only to be foiled by a white Cure T-shirt underneath.

“Hmuh,” I said, as discouragingly as I could, but not really doing anything to stop him. The part of me that wasn’t repulsed was curious to see what he’d do next.

Leon climbed on top of me. He didn’t seem to mind that I wasn’t kissing back, and several times kissed the side of my face as passionately as if it were my mouth. With one hand under my Cure T-shirt and another on the grass for balance, he floundered away on top of my skirt, pushing his hips backward and forward in a rhythmical motion as if I were a pencil mark he was trying to rub out.

After a long sigh, he fell on me. For a minute or two I stared at the greasy hair near his part and then he abruptly stood up and walked off into the bushes. He had his back to me, but I watched him grab a handful of hydrangea leaves and unzip his pants. When he turned around to see if I was watching, I pretended to be asleep.

The next day at school, Jo rushed up after assembly and congratulated me for giving Leon the best hand job he’d ever had.

“The best what?”

She needled me in the ribs. “You’re a dark horse, aren’t you?”

Whatever a hand job was, Leon must have wanted another one, because the next night he rang me after getting my phone number from Jo. He made me do all the talking, as though he’d already done the hard work by dialing my number. For the next two weeks, he rang me every night at the same time, until one night I accidentally invited him over.

We smoked hash on the tiny balcony off the kitchen, leaning back against the wall and burying the roach in one of Mum’s plants. In my bedroom, I played Leon the new Cure record, even though he said he had already heard it on the radio. We listened to the first side lying on the carpet between the two speakers, the volume turned up so loud it made the windows rattle.

When Leon tried to kiss me, I rolled away. “Wait until we get to side two. It’s more romantic.”

“Yeah, side two blows my mind,” he said.

But when side two came on and Leon tried again, I found I preferred listening to the music without his tongue in my mouth. He started tugging at the hem of my shirt and I was petrified he would expect another hand job that I didn’t know how to provide. “I’m starving,” I said, pulling the needle off the record halfway through a song. “Would you like a ham sandwich?”

Having a boyfriend felt more like homework, a thing to get through and endure rather than the state of nirvana I had imagined. Most of the time Leon was there, I daydreamed about being by myself. I wondered if other girls felt the same way, or if I had just picked a dud.

I wanted to ask my mother if it was normal to be asked out only by boys you didn’t like, but before I did that, I’d have to admit to her that I had gone out with one. It was a conversation that felt long overdue, and I made up my mind to tell her on my next visit to hospital. She had been in for ages this time, but had reassured me this was a good thing, that she was finally getting the right sort of treatment. On that next visit, I was peering at Mum through the door to the oncology ward, thinking of the best way to tell her, when I was blindsided by the odor of rotting fish. Mum was sitting up in bed, waiting for me, and when she saw the look on my face she reached for a can of room freshener that was on the cabinet next to her. “I’m sorry about the smell,” she said, spraying her cubicle so much that particles of the stuff settled briefly, like a sleet shower, on our heads. “It ought to be gone in a day or two.”

I thought the smell was her leftover dinner, that she’d had something unappetizing to eat, but a few minutes later a nurse walked in with a tray and removed a plastic dome from over a plate of steaming roast meat and vegetables. While Mum was eating it, the fish smell came back, and put me off telling her about Leon. I felt disgusted by her, then ashamed of those feelings, then angry and frustrated at her for not being a normal, healthy mum. Round and round the feelings went, driving me from her bedside.

On subsequent visits, I tried to be more sensitive, but I was hopeless at gauging how ill she really was. I was so used to her puffy, sallow complexion, her bloated thinness, that I couldn’t tell if she looked better or worse than the day before—if she was deteriorating or on the mend. What had she even looked like before she got sick? Would she ever not have cancer? Once or twice my mind roamed forward to another possibility, to a future without Mum in it, but the concept was so alien that I couldn’t even hold the thought. So long as my mother was in front of me and breathing—however labored or wheezy that breathing was—she had vitality enough to anchor my world.

I turned seventeen then eighteen, stumbled through A levels, finished school. Mum got better then worse then better again. A pile of university prospectuses, still in their envelopes, crowded the side table in the living room. I had decided to take a gap year, but as the summer ended, nothing came along to fill it. I thought about getting a part-time job but didn’t know where to start looking.

Autumn arrived, and the pavement outside the cinema filled up with dry, brown leaves. I still spent an unhealthy amount of time there, soaking up the atmosphere, living for Thursday when the new releases came out. One Friday night, Mum and I went to the Shepherd’s Bush Odeon to see
Sneakers,
starring River Phoenix, my choice. By then, my crush on him had waned, but like a lapsed member of some brainwashing cult, I still went to see all his movies. Halfway through the film, Mum said she had to leave and would meet me afterward in the lobby. I thought it was because she didn’t like the movie, and wished, after she had slipped out, that I’d let her choose something better.

But I was wrong. The film wasn’t it. She didn’t feel well; she had chills. She’d had that symptom before, but I should have known something more was up from the way she behaved, later that night, as if she was packing to leave the country. She made lists of bills that needed paying—the electricity was on its final red warning—and signed a couple of blank checks. She inventoried the fridge, threw out everything that had gone off, or was about to, and started to tidy the kitchen cupboard. Midway, she gave up, leaving packets of rice and noodles in disarray on the table. Lazy and distracted by a breakout of pimples, of all things, I remember that I watched all this but didn’t help. We went to bed early. Mum said she was tired.

She must have called the ambulance sometime in the night, but because she had called it herself, I was lulled into thinking it wasn’t an emergency, just an easier way to check in routinely to the hospital. I climbed into the vehicle next to her, half asleep, while Mum surrendered to the gurney as if she was sinking into her seat on the last flight out of town. The ambulance pulled out onto the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout. There was no traffic, but the siren switched on, loud and urgent, and that’s when I was gripped, finally, by a funguslike dread.

For most of the next day, which we spent in the ICU, Mum was delirious one minute and lucid the next. The last unequivocal conversation we had was about some dry cleaning she wanted me to pick up, then later on, breathing rapidly, her forehead slick with sweat, she stopped making total sense. My father got a mention—“he left you with nothing, the prick”—but so did her childhood cat, who had been run over by the milk truck. “It happened all the time. They smelled the milk.” She would form sentences then reject them, as though trying out a new foreign language—the language of the dying. When she did get her words out, she left gaps that I had to sew up. “You’ll see,” she began at one point, before a long pause, “me again.”

“See you where?”

“In the garden.”

I assumed she meant heaven, that we’d be reunited there, until I remembered she was an atheist. “But, Mum, you don’t believe in God.”

“I don’t.” She laughed—phlegmy, jarring—and batted the skin near her neck. “After the party,” she said. “You were wearing the locket.”

I wondered if she was out of it, free-associating, or if this was my last chance to confess—or try to. “The morning after the party,” I began, “I was fiddling with it when it accidentally broke. I was wearing it when we went down in the bunker but afterward it wasn’t around my neck. I think I left it down there—it must have come off.”

“No, no, no,” said my mother, adamant. “You kept it.”

“I didn’t,” I said. “I really don’t know where it is.”

Mum hadn’t been sad up till then, but quite unexpectedly, her eyes filled with tears, and she turned her head away from me to speak. “But I know you have it. I saw you wearing it.”

I was devastated. For more than a decade, Mum hadn’t said a word about the locket, but it turned out that all along she’d known I took it—and worse, thought I’d been hiding it from her. “I swear I don’t have it,” I said, hoping she’d believe me.