The Girl Below (23 page)

When I stepped out of the shower, the bathroom was opaque with steam, and I opened the window to a gust of cold air, the first sign of summer’s end. I was in the downstairs bathroom, had forgotten to bring a towel, and the only thing at hand, apart from the pajamas I’d had on the night before, was a flimsy satin dressing gown of Pippa’s. I’d just put it on when I heard the doorbell ringing, not serenely like it normally did, but a crazed
bing-bong bing-bong bing-bong
. Caleb must have forgotten his key and gone bonkers from waiting on the doorstep for so long.

I ran to the intercom and buzzed him in, saying, “Thank God you’re home.” Caleb made no reply over the receiver, but I heard the downstairs door click shut behind him. His feet on the stairs were slow, deliberate, as if he had on lead boots and was very tired.

Pippa’s satin dressing gown was now wet through, transparent, and I grabbed Ari’s gabardine raincoat off a hook and put it on. Then, when I opened the door, I thought I really was going berserk. Caleb stood in front of me—only he had aged overnight and was forty years old.

He stepped into the living room, looked up and down at my wet hair and raincoat, and it was then that I recognized the scowl, the imperious look directed at me. “Harold?” I said. “I thought it was Caleb.”

“And you are?”

“Suki. I’m house-sitting.”

He repeated my name to himself, as though trying to remember where he’d heard it. “Where is everyone?” he said. “I’ve just come from Peggy’s, but the place was deserted. It struck me that I might be too late.”

“Too late?” I pulled the raincoat more tightly around me.

“That the old biddy had already croaked.”

“She was alive this morning when Pippa called from Skyros.”

“Skyros?”

“She fell over in the courtyard or something. I don’t think it’s serious.”

“Fuck.” He sat down heavily and sighed. “You’re telling me they’re in bloody Skyros?”

“Were you expecting them to be here?”

“Rather. Peggy called me last week to say she thought the end was near and that she’d cut me out of the will if I didn’t make it over. Of course, she was being overly dramatic and has nothing whatsoever to pass on, but I got it that she needed to see me.”

“And you didn’t check in first with Pippa?”

He got up. “I thought Pippa didn’t want me to come at all—at least that’s what Mummy told me over the phone.”

In photos, I hadn’t really noticed Caleb’s resemblance to Harold—or maybe I hadn’t wanted to—but in person, it was uncanny. They even had the same rebellious expression, only on Harold it had set into a sneer.

“You look familiar,” he said, scrutinizing me. “Were you one of the au pairs?”

“I used to live in the basement of Ladbroke Gardens, with my parents, the Pipers.”

He frowned. “No, I don’t remember you.”

“I looked different then. I wore pink glasses.” I mimed the spectacles, because it always seemed to help. As I did so, the raincoat drifted open and I hastily pulled it closed.

It was open for only a second, but it seemed to make all the difference to Harold’s powers of recollection. “Oh yes, now I remember—your mother was an absolute doll!” he exclaimed and shook my hand vigorously. “And your father—wasn’t he something of a cad?”

Though it was true, I couldn’t possibly agree with him. “My mother passed away,” I said, feeling flustered. “She had cancer.”

“Christ,” said Harold. “What a terrific waste.”

“Yes, I suppose it was.”

I excused myself and went upstairs to my old attic room to get dressed. On my way down again I saw that Harold had put his suitcase in Pippa’s room and strewn his clothes across their bed. I went in to retrieve a book I’d left on the bedside table, and my pajamas, which were screwed up in a heap on the bathroom floor. By the time I got downstairs, Harold had made a pot of coffee, and was connecting the telephone line to his laptop, so that if Caleb tried to call, or the police, they wouldn’t get through.

“I’m expecting a call,” I said. “Do you mind doing that later?”

“I won’t tie up the line for long,” he said, powering up his computer. “Where’s my nephew? Still asleep?”

“Soccer practice,” I said, spreading the lie a little further.

Not long after, I set out to look for Caleb. I had gone as far as his school in Holland Park when I realized what a futile search I was on. He could be anywhere in London, or, by then, anywhere in the world. I exited the park by the gate opposite the Kensington Odeon, and went into the cinema foyer for the sake of nostalgia. Every Thursday on our way home from school, Alana and I had taken a detour past here to see what new films were on. We’d pored over the posters in the lobby, really studied them, got up close and rubbed our fingers on the glass. We had even kissed one once. Only this time when I remembered it, the memory had changed: I saw myself kissing the poster and Alana hanging back a few feet, thinking I was weird. I had never realized before how unstable the past was, how easy to color and revise.

Harold was out when I got home, and I went straight upstairs to my room intending to write in my journal, but got sidetracked by the book I’d been reading, a trashy bestseller I’d found by Pippa’s bed. So engrossed was I that when my right arm and leg went dead from the strange position I had been lying in, I ignored the numbness until I was wracked with pins and needles. As the spasms hit, I rolled on the bed, gasping and groaning in pain—which was exactly the moment Harold chose to appear in the doorway.

“Sorry to interrupt,” he said, drinking in the scene and also my bungled attempts to cover what I was doing—the book, but also the writhing. “Jilly Cooper,” he pronounced with emphasis. “Always a racy read.”

“I found it in Pippa’s room.”

“Oh, you needn’t convince me,” he said. “We all read that in the eighties. It was compulsory.”

I stood up from the bed and tried to laugh. “Yes, I think my parents had a copy.”

“My mother had half a dozen. She used to give them away at dinner parties.” Harold scratched his chin and looked about the room, apparently stalling. “Look,” he said, finally. “The thing is, I’m dying for a pint. And I thought you might like to join me.” He looked briefly at his feet and laughed. “It’s a terrible habit, but I find getting drunk is the best way to get over jet lag.”

I vehemently did not want to go, but no excuse came to mind. “I’m not really dressed for an outing,” I said, pulling, rather stupidly, at my rag of a T-shirt.

“I was thinking of the local pub,” said Harold. “You’ll fit right in with the junkies and hobos who hang out there.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything, and then, when the awkward silence had gone on for too long, we both tried to speak at once.

“I didn’t mean—”

“I don’t want to—”

Harold cleared his throat. “Well then,” he said. “Another time.”

“Yes. Another time.”

He went off to the pub on his own and I stayed at home to wait for Caleb. If he hadn’t returned by the following morning, I decided, I’d have to call the police, then Pippa, in that order. But at a little after midnight the phone rang.

I thought no one was on the line at first, then a male voice in the background barked: “Is that your parents? Give it here.” I thought I heard a tube train shunting into a station, then a voice closer to the receiver said, “Suchi? Zatchoo?”

“Caleb?”

Ten minutes later, I was shown into the guard’s office at the Ladbroke Grove tube station, where Caleb was slumped over a desk, his bloodshot eyes at half-mast, his face pale green and bloated. One side of his nose was crusted with blood from a cut.

On the other side of the desk, a hulking man looked up from his crossword. “I don’t usually bring them in here, but he was about to get beaten up. Someone shoved him off the train then got out after him, and he spewed on the other guy’s trainers. That’s when they started kicking him. They took off but I think they knew him—he was calling out their names.”

I was horrified. “I’ll get him out of your way,” I said.

“And you are his—?”

“Sister.”

He looked surprised. “There’s a fine to pay, of course.”

“What for?”

“Traveling without a ticket and damage to LTA property.”

At that moment, Caleb looked up from the desk and winced at the harsh fluorescent lighting. He tried to speak but couldn’t manage it, and a torrent of pale yellow liquid poured unobstructed from his mouth, like water from a tap. When it stopped, I hoisted him up from the waist and dragged him to the door. Ribbons of slime decorated his shirt and pants and he weighed so little it was like picking up a chopstick.

“You can’t just leave,” said the guard, torn hopelessly between running after us and salvaging what he could from the floodplain of his desk.

Out in the station foyer, Caleb puked again. I tried fervently not to record the lurid egg yolk yellow of his vomit, but knew it was likely now embedded in my brain forever. On the hundred-meter stretch between the station and home, he kept himself together, then a dollop escaped on our way up the communal stairs. In the living room, I propped him up on the couch, and fetched a glass of water and a bucket.

“Take small sips,” I advised, helping him hold the glass upright and guiding it toward his lips. Chips of gravel were stuck in the gash on his nose, and I wondered how they had gotten there and how to get them out. “Jesus, how much did you drink?”

He did not reply, but before I could stop him he gulped down the glass of water.

“Nother one,” he said.

Filling up the glass at the kitchen sink, I heard what sounded like the whoosh of a bath overflowing, but by the time I got back to Caleb, it was too late.

“How could you have missed?” I said, taking the empty bucket from him.

Searching in the kitchen for a mop, I heard Harold’s voice, and got back to find him, in a pair of threadbare pin-striped pajamas, surveying the scene with baffled amusement.

“Don’t just stand there,” I said, trying not to look at his hairy potbelly. “He’s your bloody nephew.”

I made him hold the bucket while I mopped up and I made him help me carry Caleb upstairs, and it all took much longer than it should have. Harold was fussy about who should go at the front and recoiled from the slime on Caleb’s clothes. Halfway up, Caleb revived and looked at Harold and burst out laughing, then turned to me and said, “What’s my cock of an uncle doing here?”

In the attic bathroom, I told Harold I’d take it from there, and held Caleb’s head over the toilet until I was sure he had finished spewing. Manhandling him into bed, I felt like a boarding school matron doing what needed to be done, but as I peeled off his soiled shirt and trousers, I hesitated, as though I really ought not to be doing it. With only his boxers on, Caleb’s limbs were thinner and more childlike than I had expected, and his arms were covered in bruises. Looking more closely, I saw they were only smudges, that he’d been drawing on his arm with a felt-tip pen. Next to a girl’s face, her mouth fixed in an enthusiastic O, I could just make out the ruined sketch of a spurting penis.

As best I could, I recovered my matronly outlook and flipped him over onto his side so that if he vomited in the night he wouldn’t choke, and I pulled the duvet right up to his chin. After that, I went downstairs and drank a mug of Ari’s cooking wine. The bottle had been standing next to the stove for months and it tasted like vinegar, but at least it took the edge off, and washed away the smell of all the puke I had just cleaned up.

That night I was so tired and so relieved to have Caleb home that I went up to my old attic room and slept like the dead. The next morning I felt more refreshed than I had in weeks, and even sang to myself as I made a pot of coffee. Harold had gone out early—he’d asked to borrow Ari’s car keys—but had left his laptop and papers strewn across the dining table. I remembered Pippa had told me Harold wrote screenplays, and, deeply curious, I picked up a few pages and gave them a cursory read. The formatting was hard to follow at first, but I was able to pick up the gist of the scene. A masked crusader rushed into a burning building to rescue a woman who wore nothing but stilettos and a transparent wet raincoat . . .

I dropped the papers immediately and tried in vain to unread what I’d read. How much had Harold seen under Ari’s raincoat when it had gaped open? And had he asked me to the pub because of it—not as a friend but as a date?

By midday, there was still no murmur from Caleb, and I carried up to his room a tray of sugared black tea and dry toast. My knock on his door went unanswered, and his room, when I went in, smelled strongly of alco-sweat. When the tray landed on the bedside table, he finally stirred. “Ouch,” he mumbled, touching his nose. “What happened?”

“I think you got the shit kicked out of you.”

“Yeah, I remember that part. But how did I get here?” Struggling to sit up, he noticed he wasn’t wearing a shirt. Then he peered under the covers to see what else he had on. “Who undressed me?”

“You were unconscious.” I pointed to his crumpled clothes. “And there was vomit on everything except your underpants.”

He pulled the duvet up around his shoulders. “I threw up?”

“You really don’t remember?”

A startled expression crossed his face. “Did anything else—did someone—?”

“Did someone what?”

“I don’t know.” He looked grave. “Maybe you should tell me.”

I told him about fetching him from the tube station, about all the spewing, and about Harold being there, and he listened intently, as if hearing it all for the first time. When I got to the part about missing the bucket, he chuckled.

“You can’t laugh at that,” I said. “You didn’t have to clean it up.”

“You’re right. Sorry.” His face fell. “Wait, did you say my uncle’s here?”

“He arrived yesterday.”

“Shit,” he said. “Mum’s going to kill me when she finds out I got wasted.”

“You think Harold will tell her but I won’t?”

“You wouldn’t tell her,” he said, with absolute confidence.

“What makes you think that?”

“Nothing.” I was sure there was something but couldn’t guess what it was. “You just seem cooler than that,” he said.