The Girl Below (22 page)

“Just don’t sleep with him again, okay?” she said. “He’s a scumbag.”

I smiled at her. Since breaking up with him, everyone had told me what Scott was really like, but while I was with him, no one had said a thing.

When I got to Dagger, Scott was surrounded by his cronies, but he left them to settle in a corner booth with me. He went to the bar and came back with a bottle of champagne—the French stuff, he refused to ever buy fake—and two plastic flutes, like you’d find in a picnic set or on a boat.

“Kind of ruins the effect, don’t you think?” he said, pouring out the bubbles, which smelled of freshly baked bread.

“What are we celebrating?” I asked, my voice flat because the speed had worn off.

Scott leaned in closer and put his hand on my knee. “You look tired,” he said. “I’m worried about you.”

“Why?” I said, defensively. “I’m fine.”

“Suki,” he said, gently cupping my chin in his hand and forcing me to look at him. “I know you better than that.”

I took a huge gulp of champagne and said nothing. Scott put his hand around mine on the plastic flute stem, gripping me with warm fingers. With his other hand, he brushed the hair from my face and swept it behind one ear. It was so easy to respond to his touch, to forget the hurt and turmoil of the preceding months, to surrender to my longing for intimacy. Involuntarily my body leaned into his, reacting to the familiar pull of his closeness.

“We should just get married,” he said, settling back into the seat and scooping his free arm behind my back.

“What?”

“We should get married.” His words hung surreally in the air.

“You’re joking—right?”

“Why would I joke about that?” he said.

Scott’s proximity and the mellow warmth of the champagne had me intoxicated, but from five fathoms down came the voice of unwavering reason. “We can’t get married,” I said. “We’re not even going out.”

“Being married would fix that.”

His sureness threw me into turmoil. Some of the happiest times of my life had been with Scott, early in our relationship, when I’d tasted the first sweet sip of reciprocated love, but so had some of the worst, all the mornings I’d woken up to find him missing, only to have him come in a few hours later reeking of booze and lousy excuses. “Being married wouldn’t change anything,” I said.

Scott shrugged. “It might make me good.”

“I’m not marrying you to find out,” I said.

Scott laughed. “Then there’s nothing more to talk about.” He drained his champagne glass and stood up, looking at his watch. “I’m supposed to be meeting Anton in a minute.”

Following him out to the pavement, I wondered how he could offer to spend the rest of his life with me and snatch it away moments later. While he had been proposing, I’d felt sure of myself, in control, but now that he was walking away, I was overcome with wild emotions. “Wait,” I said. “You just said we should get married. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“You said you didn’t want to.”

“So that’s it—either marriage or nothing?”

“That’s it,” he said, adjusting the lapels of his jacket.

I had begun to sob, quietly at first, but then with real despair. He tried to quiet me down, to prevent a scene, and when that didn’t work he started to back away, to disown me. I clutched at his clothing, half blind from the flooding in my eyes. “That isn’t what I want,” I said, pathetically.

“What
do
you want from me?” he said.

The question was so insulting, so belittling—as though I didn’t even have the right to want anything from him—that I finally let go of the jacket and watched him walk away.

Seven minutes later, I pushed past the doorman at Kuzo and stumbled down the long staircase into the basement. They were having a drum ’n’ bass night and the place was decked out in camouflage netting strewn with orange emergency tape. Sweat dripped from the ceiling and huge speakers shook from the effort of spitting out bass. I fought my way past heaving shoulders and found Becky, sitting on her friend Justin’s lap in the corner by the bar. We didn’t speak to each other—we couldn’t, it was too loud—but she saw I’d been crying and put her arms around me, enveloping me in a damp hug. She pulled me into the bathroom, where we shoved our way into an empty stall and hunched over a small plastic bag of wet brown crystals. “Lick your finger,” she ordered. “This shit is too sticky to snort.”

At the bar, we demanded flaming Quaaludes, and washed them down with vodka and tequila shots, toasting, “Fuck you, Scott,” with each one. There was only eighty dollars in my account to last until next week’s payday, and I had spent it within twenty minutes. The brown speed was good and strong, but it made me thirstier than I had ever been in my life and I was relieved when we ran into Guy, a regular at the restaurant, and his mate Rupert, who had a face like a potato but was rich and liked to buy everyone drinks. I didn’t care who they were or what they looked like, I just wanted them to pay for it all and they did, round after round of shots, vodka, tequila, and schnapps. When I took speed, I could drink as much as I wanted without falling over or suffering the calamity of a hangover, and before long I felt dazzling and witty. Guy and Rupert were my new best friends, and the night opened up in front of us, a Christmas cracker of possibilities. Getting into the festive spirit, we raised our glasses to Jesus Christ and sang him happy birthday. Then I overhead Guy saying something to Rupert about Charlie and I said ugly things and flattered and lied until I got some.

I took Becky with me into the toilet stall, where we laughed and fell into each other as we poured out a tiny cloud of the white powder. “Just a bit more,” I said to Becky, shoving her elbow so that a teaspoon of cocaine fell onto the toilet seat.

“Shit!” she said, laughing. “We better leave some for Guy.”

We tried to get the powder back into the packet, but our coordination was off and most of it drifted across the seat in white puffs, which we chased and licked with our fingers. “Don’t worry, he’s loaded,” she said, cutting up what was left and inhaling it greedily through a ten-dollar note. “Merry fucking Christmas, Suki!”

We stared at our wide, sparkly eyes in the dimly lit bathroom mirror and I was sure I had never looked so beautiful. “I feel like dancing,” I said.

“Me too,” said Becky, and we jumped in the air and kissed.

Hours and a lifetime later, a dull glow filtered through the glass bricks of the skylight above the back bar of Kuzo. Outside it was daylight, but I had convinced myself that the bar was still suspended in the night before. I lit a cigarette and looked in the packet: only two left. Apart from the barman, Lewis, the place was deserted. Becky had gone home with Rupert and Guy to their flat in Saint Heliers, but at the last moment I’d changed my mind about going with them. It was a long taxi ride there and I’d had an unlovely vision of how the hours after that would unfold, especially with the kind of deficit Becky and I had racked up. Everyone would sit around on the patio with their sunglasses on, drinking and smoking pot until they came down enough to sleep or at least lie horizontally in a dark room. When that happened, there would be sex, or the expectation of it, and even though I was wasted, that was the part I shrank from the most. It was never a question of being forced to put out, but if you didn’t, you had to be prepared for the hostility that followed. Rich young lads didn’t take girls home for company—they had guy friends for that—and after the deed was done, they happily left you on the bed with your knickers round your ankles, feeling like you should have gotten paid. Except that we had already been paid, at Kuzo, in large amounts of booze and fags and coke.

Staying in the bar with Lewis seemed like a simpler option. He was the bar manager, and like everyone in the district, knew Scott, and knew about our messy breakup. When he offered me another line, I took it, even though I was already shaking so much that my coffee cup rattled on the saucer when I put it down. The new line of speed wiped away the effects of the alcohol and instantly sharpened my focus, but when I looked around at the objects in the shadowy bar, they formed a surreal jigsaw that held no meaning. The longer I stared at a chair or a table, the less I was able to recognize it as either of those things.

“I’m hungry,” I said, even though it wasn’t my stomach that was empty.

Lewis had closed up the bar and there was no avoiding the bright glare of the pavement any longer. When we walked out onto Vulcan Lane, the buildings looked to me like cardboard scenery.

At the corner, Lewis hugged me and said good-bye. Through his thin shirt, I felt a ragged heartbeat and was overcome with an urge to cling to him. “Do you want to come up for tea?” I said, trying to sound light, but hearing the desolation in my voice.

He held my hand for a moment. “I can’t.” He tipped his cap and let it settle back on his head. “Merry Christmas though.”

“You too.”

When the lift doors opened, the painted scenery of the apartment I shared with Becky and two of the chefs at the restaurant gave way and let me in. There was a ringing in my ears that I hadn’t noticed in the bar, where there had been low music playing, or in the street, where there had been traffic. The door to my room was wide open, and a boy was standing by the window. I was startled at first to see him and then I remembered: his name was Liam, he was the brother of one of my flatmates, staying with us until he found his own place. He was much younger than me, fresh out of school, but he had kind eyes and this sagelike quality that made him seem older.

He was embarrassed at getting caught in my room, but I told him not to leave. I didn’t want to be on my own. “Are you okay?” he said, and looked at me with such gentle concern that I had to tell the truth.

“I feel like a ghost,” I said, through chattering teeth. “Like I’m not really here.”

Liam reached out for my hand, the one nearest him, and tried to warm it. “You’ll be okay in a couple of hours.”

“You think so?”

“I know so.”

I wanted to believe him, but the stickiness of his palms was making me think of a schoolboy who hadn’t washed his hands all day. When my amphetamine-fueled gaze zeroed in on the skin on his face, it was oily and caked in zits. Sagelike qualities? What was I on? “I think you better go,” I said.

I went into the bathroom with my contact lens case and stood in front of the sink to remove them. The first one came out easily enough, but my eyes were dry and I struggled with the second. When I finally got it out I put on my glasses, which had broken across the bridge and were stuck together with masking tape. I was ashamed of them but couldn’t afford another pair, and made do by never wearing them in public.

“You look different with your glasses on,” said a voice behind me, and I looked around to see Liam standing in the doorway. I didn’t know how long he’d been there, but his posture was relaxed, as if it had been a while.

Mortified that he had seen me in my glasses and had apparently been watching me without my knowledge, I shrieked, but he didn’t move. So I shoved him out of the bathroom, hard. “Don’t look at me, you fucking creep!”

His kind eyes buckled, then his legs. He landed clumsily on one knee and I realized, a little too late, that I’d behaved like a total bitch.

“Please,” I said, more gently. “I want to be alone.”

I got into bed and pulled the duvet over me, trying to get warm. It was the middle of summer, but my bones were cold. Sticking out from the end of the bed, a swatch of candy pink wrapping paper caught my eye. The pinkness of it didn’t make sense; it was way too bright, an insult of color. I stared at it for a whole minute before I remembered what it was. Lily’s present.
Fuck
. It was Christmas morning. How could I have forgotten? I looked at the bedside clock. It was not quite ten thirty but my bus to Hamilton had left an hour before. Rowan and Ludo were expecting me for dinner. Or was it lunch? Was dinner at lunchtime on Christmas Day? I had never known the rules. Maybe another bus left later. Or maybe it didn’t. I would worry about that after I’d had some sleep. I closed my eyes, but they continued to dart about, and the cogs in my skull whirred ceaselessly, so that every thought I had seemed to double back on itself and play in a loop. The fibers of the mattress absorbed me and tendrils of it grew up and over my body, weaving me into a sleep pod out of which there was no escape.

Chapter Fourteen

London, 2003

O
n the morning after I put my hand through the strange curtain in the closet, the phone rang in the living room, and I answered it through a fog of sleep, taking a moment to recognize Pippa’s distressed voice on the other end. I had been dozing on the couch, and didn’t remember at first how I’d gotten there. Then I tasted bittersweet tea, saw the half-empty cup I had made in the small hours, and the events of the night before played back in a delirious slide show. By the time I tuned in to what Pippa was saying, she was telling me about a fall in the courtyard, that they would have to take Peggy to the mainland for X-rays. They’d be out of reach for a few days and she wanted to speak to Caleb before they went. That was when I remembered that Caleb was still missing.

“He’s not here,” I said, fumbling for an excuse. “Soccer practice started early.”

“At half past seven?”

“I know. Must be a big match this week.”

“Wow,” she said. “Your influence is working already.” She told me to make sure he cleaned the mud off his soccer boots when he got home instead of leaving them in the sink to fester. I was also to give him a hug from her. I promised I would, and felt terrible for lying. If Caleb really was missing, I’d just made matters worse.

To make amends, I resolved to spend the day looking for him, and got in the shower at once. Under piping-hot water, I planned my search route: first, Wormwood Scrubs, followed by his school, then the local cinema—where I’d go, but, realistically, he wouldn’t. I’d call his cell phone at regular intervals throughout the day and also ring home in case he’d returned while I was out.