The Girl Below (17 page)

“Thanks, it smells great.”

When I sat down at the table, she put a plate of scrambled eggs in front of me and told me to eat up. Dressed in his soccer kit, Caleb stomped in from somewhere and devoured his own plateful of eggs in about three mouthfuls. When Pippa went into the kitchen to fetch the coffeepot, he briefly looked over at me. “You were sleeping in the bathroom again,” he said.

“Did you put the quilt over me?”

“Don’t be stupid.” I thought he looked a little flustered when Pippa came back, but I didn’t challenge him. I was too tired, too shamed. Caleb got up, left his dirty plate on the table, and tied a sweatshirt round his hips, preparing to leave.

“Are you playing on Wormwood Scrubs again?” said Pippa.

Caleb ignored her.

“Please don’t go near the prison,” she said, as if he had responded. “And don’t hang about afterward smoking—even if that’s what the other chaps do.” Caleb rolled his eyes, but Pippa continued, still undaunted, “And if it starts to rain, shelter in a bus stop until it passes.”

“For God’s sake, Mum, it’s the middle of summer.” Caleb was already in the doorway, but he paused there and smiled sweetly. “Can I have a fiver for lunch after the game? A bunch of the guys are getting burgers.” He picked up Pippa’s purse from the hall table and handed it to her.

“I wish you’d get something healthy,” said Pippa, passing him a tenner, and gratefully receiving her reward, a peck on her cheek. When he’d gone, she said, “He’s a little sod, but I can’t bring myself to say no to him. One day, when you’re a mother, you’ll understand.”

She seemed sad, resigned, and I felt ashamed at having behaved so childishly the evening before. “I’m sorry about last night,” I said. “My best friend dumped me.”

While Pippa listened, I recounted my conversation with Alana, and began to understand a little of what Alana had been trying to tell me. The epiphany was an uncomfortable one; a glaring blind spot had been shown to me, and my first thought was that I wanted to see Alana and behave in a different way. Only it was too late for that. Even if she agreed to meet up, it would be futile to try to get her to change her mind about me. I could be different in the next friendship, but that one was history.

Pippa thought so too. “Not all friendships last. Do you remember Lulu? Impossibly long legs, and a gorgeous face to go with them . . .”

“Of course,” I said. “She came to a party at our flat. I think my dad had a crush on her.”

Pippa laughed. “Everyone had a crush on her—she was exquisite, and a total nightmare to be best friends with. If you ever fancied a bloke, you couldn’t let her within a hundred miles of him.”

And yet it had been Pippa who’d scored at my parents’ party. “That was a wild night,” I said. “Or at least it seemed that way to me.”

Pippa drummed her fingers excitedly on the table. “Oh yes!
That
party. Lulu was a little minx that night.” She blushed. “And so was I.”

“I suppose she’s married now too, with kids?”

“I don’t know,” said Pippa. “I haven’t seen her for about ten years.”

I was surprised, and then sad. “How did that happen?”

“Lulu always had men hanging off her—miniskirts and stilettos were invented for girls like her—but she could never make anything last. I don’t even think she liked men all that much. When we were young, it didn’t matter, it was all just fun. But we got older, and everyone settled down except her. She kept on partying, not just at the weekends but all the time. I think she started doing lots of coke, and fell in with a crowd in King’s Cross who were into hard drugs. Whenever I bumped into her, she asked me for money, and if I didn’t give her any, she’d take off. The last time I saw her she was sitting outside a tube station—I went up to talk to her—and she was so out of it she didn’t even recognize me.”

“And that was the last time you saw her?”

Pippa was rueful for a moment, lost in reminiscence. “I think she might have overdosed, but I’d rather not know.”

We began to reminisce about the babysitting days, and Pippa’s description of me was one I hardly recognized. “You were very high spirited,” she said. “Always dressing up and entertaining everyone with your imaginary worlds.”

I wondered what had happened to her, this other, more charming me, whether she was gone for good or if it was possible to revive her—if she was in fact waiting patiently to be brought back to life.

Not two days later, Caleb decided to exert his will on a larger scale. The first sign of trouble was his persistent uncooperativeness in packing, even though the family was leaving in three days and would be gone for a month. At first Pippa thought he couldn’t be bothered, but when she started doing it for him, he sabotaged her efforts and hid all the clothes she had packed. Then, when his passport went missing, Caleb said he knew nothing about it, but after turning his room upside down, Ari found the missing passport tucked into an old comic. When they confronted him about what he was up to, Caleb announced he wasn’t going to Greece. Ari was furious and took a swing at Caleb before Pippa got in the way and tried to calm things down. Then Ari exploded at both of them.

I heard nothing more about it until Pippa knocked on my door, late, two nights later. She said she hadn’t discussed it yet with Ari but she had been thinking that it might not be so bad if Caleb stayed in London with me. I thought it was a terrible idea, but I just said, “Does Caleb know about your plan?”

“It was his idea,” she said. “At first I thought it was too much responsibility to put on you. But then I came round to the idea. You might be a good influence on him—he might open up once we’re not around.”

“And Ari?” There was no use trying to talk Pippa out of it—I could tell she had already relented—and I was grabbing at the only straw I could think of.

“He’ll get over it. The second he sits down to an ouzo with his brother.”

Two days later, with Ari in a funk, they left without Caleb. I took them to the airport, and drove the car back on my own. I had never driven before in London and it took me twice as long to get back as it had to get out there; I followed the wrong lane out of a roundabout, and wound up south of the river in a suburb that might have been Putney or Barnes. By the time I got back to the flat, it was dark, and Caleb was hunched in front of the TV in the living room with the lights off, frantically pushing buttons on a gaming console. On the screen, a lone high school jock was fighting off an army of bloated, pale green Samurai warriors. I picked up the box next to the console. “Samurai Zombies?”

“Promise you won’t tell Mum. She thinks it’s too violent.”

“I expect I’ll tell her right away—the instant she calls.”

“What?” he said, losing concentration long enough to meet a grisly end. “Fuck!” he said. “I was nearly on the next level.”

“I’m not going to promise anything.”

“What?” He looked at me again—shocked that I had disagreed with him—but I had decided, on the way back from the airport, that the only way I could survive the next month was to show him who was boss.

“You heard me,” I said, and went upstairs.

Ari had told me I could use the car while they were away, but in Central London there was no point in driving, so I went into their bedroom to leave the keys there. Their room looked like a rogue tornado had passed through, and I wondered if I ought to tidy up, just a little. I hadn’t really been in their bedroom before and couldn’t resist looking round and trying out the bed, which was an enormous king-size futon, of the kind I hadn’t seen since the late nineties. The futon hadn’t been made, and the bedding smelled a little funky, but after all the sleepless nights I’d had, it was devilishly inviting, and I lay down on it, meaning to rest only for a moment. But once I was lying down, all the exhaustion of the last few weeks arrived at once, and I succumbed to a kind of half coma. Must get up, I told myself as I relived the day as a sequence of increasingly wonky moments—getting squashed by Peggy’s antique trunk in the back of the car, catching a plane with no wings, driving off the side of Putney Bridge . . . and then, as I got really woozy, I imagined someone was lying next to me on the futon, a man who smelled of Christmas morning—that delicious aroma I remembered from when I was a kid. I didn’t know who the man was, but he smelled so good that when he rolled over and started to kiss me, I put my hand on the small of his back and pressed my mouth into his. All at once the man’s back narrowed, and the bones shrank under his skin, and I realized he was a boy, that it was Caleb I was kissing–Caleb who tasted so good.

It was such a vivid, startling dream that it propelled me out of sleep and off the bed in the same instant. My pulse raced as I looked around the room, but it was empty, static. No one else had been in the bed except me. The door was still closed, and beyond it I could hear the steady click, click, beep of a gaming console downstairs. It was nothing more than a dream, I told myself, just a man morphing into a boy who happened to be Caleb.

I was tired, and losing it—nothing that couldn’t be fixed by a good night’s sleep. I went downstairs to make a cup of milky cocoa to help me nod off, and walked past Caleb, who was sitting in front of the TV, engrossed in his game. He didn’t look up, but I thought he was going to, that somehow he knew about the dirty dream but was pretending he didn’t.

Standing by the kettle, waiting for it to boil, I tried not to look at him, but he seemed always to be at the edge of my field of vision. Without Ari and Pippa there to act as a buffer, the flat seemed smaller, too intimate, and I wasn’t sure that Caleb and I should be in it alone.

The kettle pinged, and I jumped as though I had been caught in a compromising act. I had been meaning to offer Caleb a cup of cocoa but changed my mind in case he read more into the gesture than was meant. Instead I fled upstairs with my drink in hand, spilling a little on the carpet, and not even wishing him good night.

Chapter Eleven

London, 1993

T
he flight to New Zealand was long but not long enough to account for the shock of how different it was from England. I hadn’t prepared myself for arrival in a strange country—had thought of nothing but fleeing—and the only thing the same was the language. Auckland was a wall of moisture, bright and hot, and I sleepwalked through customs, where men in short shorts and long socks inspected my bags for insects. I wheeled my trolley out from behind a screen and emerged in the arrivals hall, where a crowd of eager faces intently scrutinized my features before passing me over, for the next new arrival.

The ugliness of Auckland shocked me: suburb after suburb of sand-colored bungalows, their newness punctuated by short, spiky plants and an occasional outburst of trees. It was drizzling and sunny at the same time, and on the backseat of the minibus, I broke into a sweat without lifting a finger: I couldn’t, it was stuck to the seat.

In downtown Auckland I checked into a backpacker hostel on a street with massage parlors and strip joints at one end, banks and law firms at the other. I asked for a single room and was shown to a shoe box on the sixth floor with a window overlooking a ventilation shaft, down which people had thrown Coke cans and cigarette butts that were impossible to retrieve. Outside my window, an air-conditioning unit sounded like it was trying to take off, and the air was thick with insects.

Time slipped through the cracks. I woke and thought I’d wet the bed, but it was only sweat. I took a shower but had no soap, I couldn’t get clean, couldn’t wake up. I lay in bed trying not to think about either Mum or food, but ended up alternating between the two until I had a headache. Laughter burst from the corridor, British and Swedish accents, the sound track to international sex. I drank a whole liter of water and went back to bed.

When I woke, my eyes were gummed together. Cramps squeezed my stomach, and I felt light-headed. Dressing in whatever was close at hand, I went outside. The pavement was melting tarmac, and when I looked into the distance, objects shimmered as if they were underwater. The sun was so bright it obliterated the edges of things, and my eyes squinted shut in protest. I found a small supermarket and bought cheese, chocolate milk, and a loaf of bread, and when I paid with a hundred-dollar note from the airport exchange, the man at the counter commented in a language I didn’t understand. Back in my room, I stuffed the bread and cheese into my mouth in pieces, washed down with milk from the carton.

For another two days, I stayed in my room: dozing, thinking, sweating, eating, until I started to feel as if I had fused with the bed. On the third day, I got up in the late afternoon, took a hot shower, dressed in decent clothes, and went downstairs to find a phone book. Dozens of Pipers were listed in the Auckland directory, but none with the first name Ludwig. My father, whose grandparents were German, had been named after the famous composer, but only official documents used the elongated version.

The discovery that his name wasn’t listed was more crushing than it ought to have been, and I realized that looking him up in the phone book had been the extent of my plan to find him. I had no idea what to do next, so I went into a bar and ordered a Mexican beer. The barman wouldn’t give me one; he insisted I drink New Zealand beer instead. “It’s the best in the world,” he said.

Unwilling to make a scene, I handed over a ten-dollar bill and went to sit by the window, as far away from him as I could get. The brown beer was foul, with a heavy, bitter aftertaste, but it was cold and I drank it thirstily. A tall man with angular shoulders and dark hair was in the bar, and as soon as I saw him I knew he would come over. He had heard me talking to the barman and asked what part of London I was from.

“West,” I said. “I went to school in Hammersmith.” Even then, I knew better than to mention Notting Hill.

“That explains your posh accent.”

“I’m not posh.”

“ ‘I’m not posh,’ ” he said, mocking me.

I stood up to leave. I was way too tired to have a sense of humor.