The Girl Below (15 page)

Mum didn’t say anything more or even look at me again, and a woman in a white coat fiddled with the tube that was taped to her arm. When she was done, Mum sighed, and her hand I’d been holding went limp. Her chest heaved and her eyes were still open, but her gaze was glassy, remote.

“We’re doing all we can,” said the woman in the white coat. “You should get some rest.” She signaled to an armchair in the corner of the room but offered no clues as to how I might sit in it without letting go of my mother’s hand. It didn’t occur to me to move the chair.

Parts of that night, I missed. Important parts, like the moment Mum died. I remembered things leading up to it: hushed voices, interludes of calamity followed by long periods of staring at the lino floor, so highly polished I could see up my own skirt. But however many times I sidled up to it from different angles, the part where she took her last breath remained stubbornly blank. To me it was a moment of failure, a lapse in concentration that cost me the game. I feel ashamed of the lapse, almost fraudulent, as though I have only been pretending I was there.

Other moments, other sights, couldn’t be gotten rid of, left behind pockmarks: Mum’s face set in a yellow, waxwork mask. The strange-smelling treacle that spread out on the sheet from beneath her until it was noticed and then covered by a nurse.

They let me sit with her for a long time. I was given a cup of tea and a biscuit, neither of which I touched.

Sepsis, the doctors said. After years of illness, her immune system was spent. They pumped her full of antibiotics, tried frantically to find something that would help her fight the infection, but even as they were pumping, I think the doctors knew that what they were doing was futile. It was all for show—a show for me, I supposed.

When it was over, a friend of my mother’s picked me up from the hospital. I didn’t know what day it was or how long we had been there, cut off from time in the bright, windowless rooms of the ICU. The friend drove me home but wouldn’t let me stay there on my own. By the door, we had a standoff. I didn’t want her to come in; she insisted. I gave in, but stubbornly ignored her, went straight to Mum’s room, shut the door, and climbed into her bed. The sheets felt clammy, earthbound, but the surrounding walls were sheened in silver, and I thought it was Mum, that she had manifested in the wallpaper as a kind of seraphim. I didn’t want to close my eyes on her, to abandon her, but I’d been up for days and was quickly mown down by an unstoppable freight train of sleep.

In the morning, the wallpaper seraphim had gone, and a little after nine Granny arrived to take care of the rest. I stayed in Mum’s room, wearing her clothes, while she attacked the flat, her grief masquerading as a cleaning hurricane. I found a hatbox that I thought had been full of Mum’s hats, but it was brimming with medication in brown plastic bottles, enough analgesics to relieve the whole street of pain. In the same hatbox were mementoes from my childhood: a lock of fine hair, tied with a ribbon; the plastic identity bracelet from around my newborn wrist; and wrapped in a tissue, a clutch of milk teeth. At the sight of the teeth, I felt a muted surge of adrenaline and tipped them out on the bed. There were a couple of tiny pointed fangs, and some flat, straight ones in varying sizes. I wondered if any of them were the ones I had brought up from the bunker in the folds of my dress, but I did not have the heart, that morning, to examine them, and I never saw them again.

I refused to let Granny hug me, but she was only the first to invade. Starting that morning and continuing for days, hordes of people arrived with casseroles and cards and flowers. So many bouquets arrived by courier van that they had to be flung in the bath. Who were all these people and where had they been for the last two years? I didn’t think, in that whole time, we’d had anyone over or received a single invitation to dinner. At first I tolerated the smothering, the condolences from strangers, but as the days wore on, I grew belligerent and locked myself in Mum’s room. That’s when I found her building society book, and a note that said: “For Suki: my password, just in case.” So she had known. She had made preparations. She had known I would come in here looking for a way out.

By the day of the funeral, I’d shut down completely. Why had everyone come to inspect my grief? And why did they keep trying to feed me? Didn’t they know I wasn’t hungry, that I might never eat again? When some relatives of my mother’s asked if I’d like to go and live with them in Edinburgh, I was openly rude. “Scotland,” I said. “Are you kidding?”

I had already bought my plane ticket with the money from Mum’s savings account. The flat we lived in was rented; I thought Granny could sort through the chattels.

Not long after Mum was cremated, I caught the Piccadilly line to Heathrow Airport with a single suitcase, no ashes. Briefly, as the plane wheels lifted off the tarmac, a shadow of regret passed over me, but I blamed it at the time on shifting air pressure, a moment of queasiness as my body adjusted to the change in altitude.

Chapter Ten

London, 2003

F
or five or six hours after I had seen the old garden from Harold’s bedroom window, I remained under the covers in a tight ball, coming down off the fear and confusion that had gripped me like a fever. Explanations came and went in that time, but none that made sense, and as light started creeping into the room I decided that the garden had been an apparition, an elaborate hoax on the part of my imagination. I had seen the air-raid shelter because I wanted to see it, not because it was there.

Still, getting out of bed that morning, I approached the window in a cautious mood. What if the apparition hadn’t gone away? I needn’t have worried—there was nothing out of the ordinary to see. The garden was back to the way it had been the day before, terra-cotta pots in two parallel lines reaching out from the back door, surrounded by paths made from chalk. The only thing there that I hadn’t noticed before was an ornamental orange tree, clipped into submission, in keeping with the garden’s unbending design. A few months ago I’d looked upon that symmetry and loathed it, but that morning I found it a reassuring sign that the world was, after all, a sane and rational place.

Just to be certain, though, I decided to go down and see the garden for myself. But first I put my head through Peggy’s door, and listened for reassuring sounds. Yes, she was out for the count, her breathing punctuated by something that was either a trembling snore or flatulence.

Pippa had left a note to say the keys to the garden were on a small rack in the kitchen, and I took them and went down the communal staircase, meaning to let myself out through the back door. Only, where I had remembered there being a back door, there was none. The communal stairs stopped at ground level, and the end of the hallway was blocked off with a wall. To get out into the garden, I’d have to use the main gate on Kensington Park Road. It was inconvenient to have to walk along the street and around the corner just to get into the garden, and I realized why I’d hardly ever seen Peggy or Pippa out there.

The morning was crisp, not at all summery, and as I crossed the lawn to find a patch of sun, I recalled the strange humidity in the night—so different from the current dry atmosphere. At that early hour, the garden was empty save for a man smoking a cigarette while his dog squatted at the base of a tree. He wore pajamas under his jacket and looked both surprised and displeased to see me. When the dog stood up, he stubbed out his cigarette on the tree trunk and quickly moved on.

I hadn’t visited the communal garden since childhood and was surprised by how small it was. Running wild and unsupervised around it with the other children who lived on our street, it had seemed enormous, a continent of jungle and grassland with areas we’d mapped out, prosaically, as Big Wood, Small Wood, and the Dark Forest, where none of us dared to go. I’d played uneasily with the other children, their savage games shocked me—and I was equally fearful of being left out. One of the boys always had matches to set fire to anything that wasn’t sopping wet, and both boys and girls had taken turns to squat under the drooping willows of Big Wood to see who could do the biggest shit. I’d not told my mother about those games in case she forbade me to play in the garden, but I once came home with a scorch mark on my dress and she had wheedled it out of me, while I cried, that we had been lighting fires.

I stood on the communal lawn and viewed our old flat from the garden side. The patio gate was invitingly open, but I walked past it a few times before working up the nerve to go in. In the few days I’d been staying at Peggy’s, I’d seen no one coming or going from the basement, and that morning all the windows and doors at the rear were heavily curtained and shut. It was impossible to tell if the people who lived there were away or just sleeping, but I told myself I wasn’t really trespassing because it had once been my home. I decided to make my visit a quick one though, just in case, and slipped through the gate and walked hastily over to where the entrance to the air-raid shelter had once been. I ran my foot through what was now a chalk path. Some of the gravel displaced, and I saw that it was only ornamental, a thin layer of white stuff spread over concrete. Unconvinced that I had been searching in the right area, I rubbed away the chalk in a few more patches, but found no metal plate underneath, just a continuation of what appeared to be newly laid concrete. Satisfied the hatch was no longer there, but also slightly disappointed, I smoothed over the chalk as best I could and made my way over to the French doors, still in place, but freshly painted in chic gunmetal gray.

“Excuse me,” said a sharp voice from above. “But can I help you?”

I looked up to where a woman leaned out of the first-floor window—what had been my parents’ bedroom after the flat was turned into a maisonette. Her hair was wrapped in a fluffy white towel, and she wore a matching robe.

“I’m sorry,” I called up. “I’m staying upstairs with Peggy.”

She frowned. “We don’t know anyone upstairs.”

“I used to live in the basement flat. There was an air-raid shelter in the garden. Do you know if it’s still here?”

“An air-raid shelter?” she repeated. “I don’t think so.”

“Do you know if it was filled in?”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“Never mind.” I made my way toward the gate, and tried to end the encounter on a friendly note. “I like what you’ve done with the garden. It looks really smart.”

“We haven’t touched it,” she said. “We’re renting.”

I promptly left the garden and decided to walk down to the delicatessen on Chepstow Road to grab a takeaway coffee. The place thronged with people in suits grabbing breakfast on their way to work, their sense of urgency palpable. Next to them I felt tranquilized, and realized I hadn’t left Peggy’s flat for more than two days, nor seen or spoken to anyone other than the old woman or her daughter. My world had reduced to the size of a dot, and the shrinkage felt permanent, irreversible.

When I returned to Ladbroke Gardens, I found Peggy in her room, down on her hands and knees and wielding a large pair of dressmaking scissors. In the other hand, she held a necklace, a long string of pearls with a diamante pendant. She appeared to be trying to unpick the curtains, but had so far succeeded only in cutting a large hole. The scissors she was using were serrated, and the curtain, where she’d hacked at it, had a manic, toothy grin. She hadn’t heard me calling out her name after I let myself into the flat, or even coming into her room, and when she finally saw me standing next to her, she dropped the scissors in fright.

“Hillary!” she exclaimed. “I forgot you were here.”

“I wasn’t,” I said, not bothering to correct her. “I went out to get a coffee. Do you need a hand? Those scissors look rather sharp.”

“No, dear, I’m quite all right,” she said, stuffing the necklace into the pocket of her dressing gown and casually moving the scissors out of sight. “But I would so love a cup of tea, if you wouldn’t mind?”

“Sure.” I lingered, hoping she would explain what she was up to, but it was clear she was waiting for me to leave.

No wonder I was losing it, spending all my time with an old bat who had taken to secretly chopping up her own curtains. Then and there, I resolved to try harder to reestablish myself in London, to rebuild a normal life, but before I could take even the first step toward doing so, Pippa came round that afternoon with another offer she was adamant I should accept. She wanted me to stay in their flat for the month of August while the family was in Greece. I thought it odd that she had left it so late to arrange a house sitter, but, delighted to be able to put off paying rent or asking for favors from long-forgotten friends, accepted right away. Then Caleb, who had come along reluctantly to visit his grandmother, piped up, “Don’t we normally just put the alarm on?”

“We don’t normally go away for such a long time,” said Pippa, resolutely. She went to give Peggy her bath, leaving Caleb and me alone in the kitchen. He had a black eye, quite a shiner, the kind that you really only got in a fight.

“I’d hate to see the other chap,” I said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Only that I bet you roughed him up for doing that.”

“Fuck you,” he said, so aggressively that I guessed the opposite was true. Pippa hadn’t been specific about the trouble Caleb was in at school, but I wondered if he was being bullied.

“You must be looking forward to getting away,” I said. “Having a break from school.” And so ended our conversation.

“Going away with the family isn’t a break,” he said. “It’s a fucking nightmare.”

I was surprised and relieved when the rest of my stay at Peggy’s passed without incident. Amanda returned to resume her duties, ruby red after a week in Marbella, and Pippa came to fetch me and my suitcases in her green Citroen 2CV, a car whose nearest mechanical relative was the tin can. When we arrived at their place, Ari hardly looked up from the TV and Caleb was nowhere in sight. Without fanfare, Pippa showed me to my room on the top floor, on the same landing on which, on my first visit, I had been tantalized by a glimpse of the ladder to the roof. That day the ladder was stowed, which intrigued me even more.