The Girl Below (24 page)

I had been meaning to tell Caleb off, but his comment so threw me that I left his room without doing anything of the sort. After everything that had happened, how could he possibly think I was cool? And why did I even care? It was the answer to the second question that bothered me the most.

By early afternoon, Harold had returned with two cardboard boxes of books and papers he’d picked up from Peggy’s. He’d found the key to her flat on the same chain as the car keys and had gone for a spontaneous visit. I was in the kitchen when he got back, lethargically making myself an instant coffee—I had mainlined the last of the espresso that morning—and he saw what I was doing and said, “That’s it. We’re going to Holland Park Café. Now.”

I was too taken aback to refuse, and seven minutes later found myself scurrying after him up the steep cycle track to Holland Park. “There’s absolutely no point whatsoever in strolling,” he said, when we reached the café. “If your heart’s not racing, it doesn’t count as exercise.”

We sat in a fenced-off enclosure, on sturdy wooden furniture that was crusted in places with lichen. The day was crisp, with a breeze that flurried nearby leaves and blew my hair into my face. It wasn’t bright enough for sunglasses, but the light had a penetrating quality that made the pores on Harold’s nose stand out. I wished I had not looked at them so closely, for afterward the lunch felt too intimate. Harold had been talking about the visit to Peggy’s flat, how morbid it was, and I was only half listening until he mentioned that someone had ripped up the floorboards in his old room.

I told him I had seen them when I stayed there. “Do you think it was Peggy?” I asked. “I saw her cutting up curtains.”

“It could have been. But there were a couple of strange incidents a while back with her neighbor Jimmy.”

I was immediately intrigued, but at that moment our lunch arrived and Harold started banging on about his twenty-first birthday. He had found the old videotape at Pippa’s and watched it that morning. He told me that Peggy had taken out a huge loan to pay for the extravagance. “That was how she operated,” he said. “She handed you the moon and stars then expected you to spend the rest of your life being grateful.”

“She took out a loan just to pay for a party?” I said, shocked.

“It was the same with my education. She sent me to all the best schools and reminded me every day of her sacrifice.” Over the next thirty-five minutes I got an in-depth account of Harold’s Cambridge years—term-time escapades with what he referred to as “the sons and daughters of the ruling elite,” and interludes at home with his alcoholic mother. “She always wanted to know who I’d met and what I’d done with them, and when they were going to offer me a job—even when I was only halfway through my degree.” He said he would never have gone to Cambridge if Peggy hadn’t forced him. His education had been nothing but a burden, creating enormous expectations he couldn’t possibly live up to. And so it went on. He seemed to have a chip on his shoulder about almost everything. He didn’t fit into the upper echelons he had been educated alongside but had been rejected by everyone else for being overeducated, too posh. He was, he said, virtually unemployable. In his mind, all his misfortune, his sense of alienation, was Peggy’s fault and hers alone. At least those had been the bits I could follow.

While I digested what he’d said, it occurred to me that Harold was trapped in a version of his life story that had ended decades ago—or would have, if he’d let it. The thought of ending up like him when I was in my forties, still stewing over what my parents had or hadn’t done to me as a child, was dismal, and it struck me that there had to be a cut-off point, where it all stopped being their fault and started to become my own. “It’s definitely going to rain,” I said, standing up and feeling the first drops on my face.

Harold stood too. “Mind if we check out the old loggia before going back? I haven’t been there for years.”

I minded, but he was already halfway across the lawn, so I followed him. The rain began its promised assault, first in fat, cold droplets, then in squalling sheets, forcing us to take shelter on a stone bench in a secluded alcove. In different company, the circumstances might have been romantic, but as they were, I felt horribly trapped. Harold’s monologue had moved on to his divorce, the long, slow, ordinary breakdown of his marriage—the kids got older; they grew apart; had affairs; tried counseling, didn’t work—and as the tale went on, I had one of those terrible epiphanies in which you see an aspect of your own personality that has hitherto been hidden: I suddenly saw myself having swapped places with Harold, carrying on like he was, complaining about my life to Alana and a host of others before her. I didn’t have to worry about ending up like Harold in my forties; I had already been like him for years.

“Anyway,” said Harold, finally catching his breath. “Enough about me. Now it’s your turn.”

I was still cringing from the epiphany, vowing never to speak of myself again. “I think I’ll pass.”

“Tell me why you came back to London. I mean, isn’t everyone else trying to emigrate to New Zealand—the clean, green paradise of the Pacific?”

“New Zealand isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” I stood up, pulling my jacket over my head. “I don’t care if we get wet,” I said, and dashed across the boggy grass in search of the nearest crowd.

That evening, the three of us sat down to dinner. Harold had nearly burned down the kitchen cooking steak, but the result was surprisingly tasty. I told him so but got no reply. He was still sulking about my running away from him in the park. Sitting next to him, Caleb said very little either; he was still zonked from alcohol poisoning and ate like a trucker, then disappeared upstairs. After a second bottle of wine, Harold started to thaw, and by the time we loaded the dishwasher, he was whistling a medley of show tunes—
Evita
mainly, with a smattering of
Cats,
nothing post-1985.

It was then I remembered that I hadn’t found out about the incident with Peggy and the floorboards. “What happened?” I said, filling up the sink with hot, soapy water and preparing to attack the burned pan. “Was Peggy trying to find something?”

For a moment, Harold said nothing, and I thought he was still sulking.

“Maybe,” he said, finally. “The business with Jimmy really got to her.”

Even now, I was too nervous to say his name. “Was he as bad as everyone said?”

“Worse,” said Harold. “Much worse.” He told me that Jimmy had been waiting in line to be hanged on the day that capital punishment was abolished. Year later when he was released he came to live in Ladbroke Gardens with the woman who had been his barrister and who, for such treachery, was disbarred. On the whole, Harold said, Jimmy kept to himself, but he could be extremely intimidating when provoked. Harold’s abandoned bicycle had caused one such episode, after Jimmy got so sick of it being in the hallway that he began urinating on it. Harold never used the bike and didn’t even notice, but after a time, the urine began to leak through the floorboards and seep into the ceiling of our basement flat. When my mother worked out what had been causing the smell, she was livid and charged upstairs. Jimmy, apparently, had been meek. But about a month later, when my father was knocking down walls and clearing out rubble to convert our flat into a maisonette, Jimmy came downstairs with an ax to complain. At this point in his tale, Harold noticed a bottle of wine in the pot cupboard and took it out.

“I wouldn’t drink that if I were you,” I said, recognizing the bottle as the one I’d brought on my first visit to Pippa’s. “It was the cheapest in the off-license.”

He ignored my warning and unpeeled the stopper, then poured himself a healthy glass.

“Actually, can I have one too?”

“Sure,” said Harold.

“So wait a minute,” I said, trying to piece together Harold’s story. “Jimmy hacked the floorboards? I thought you said Peggy did it herself.”

“She did,” he said, grimacing as he swallowed a mouthful of the wine, followed by another. “Years later, after Jimmy died, the person who bought his flat decided to renovate. When their builders ripped out the walls and ceilings, they found hundreds of stolen wallets and credit cards—stashed there by Jimmy over a period of twenty years.”

“And that’s what Peggy was looking for?”

“Possibly, but she got done over by him in a different way. Just before my birthday one year, she got a phone bill so huge it would have bankrupted her to pay it. She complained to BT, but they didn’t believe she hadn’t made all those calls—especially when they found out she had teenage children.” Harold downed the rest of his glass and poured another. “Peggy read us the riot act, and the phone got cut off for six months while she paid off the bill in installments. But guess what the builders found?”

“That Jimmy had been using her phone?”

“He’d run wires up through the ceiling. The whole thing made Peggy really paranoid—and I guess she only got more so with age.”

It hadn’t been open for long, but the third bottle of wine was already half empty. “Hopefully I’ll sleep better tonight,” I said, finishing off my glass.

“Insomnia?” said Harold. “I get that too. Sometimes it’s so bad I can’t drive the next day.”

“Because you’re so out of it?” I said, thinking of all the strange things that had been happening.

He nodded. “There is one thing that helps though, I find.”

“What’s that?”

He gave me a bold look. “Well, sometimes not sleeping can be a sign that the body is trying to rid itself of certain energies—energies that can be destructive if we don’t release them.” He raised his eyebrows to see if I’d gotten his meaning—which I had, loud and clear.

“I’m not that drunk,” I said, quickly. “But thanks for the advice.” I drained the sink and turned on the dishwasher, a dinosaur of a thing that got loaded and unloaded and reloaded with the same dirty items until they eventually came out clean. Harold went into the living room, and I heard the late news come on.

Later in my room, I settled down to read, but it was a humid night and I found it hard to concentrate. Before attempting to fall asleep, I decided to take a cool shower. I’d been under the showerhead for several minutes when I thought I heard someone moving about in my bedroom. I had left the bathroom door open a fraction, as per Pippa’s instructions—to let the steam out so the bathroom didn’t go moldy—but I’d made sure the door from my bedroom out into the hallway had been shut. The noise wasn’t exactly loud, but I had sharp hearing, perhaps to compensate for my lousy eyesight. I listened again, but heard nothing, and continued rinsing my hair.

The faucet groaned when I turned it off, and water still dripped from the showerhead. I reached out from behind the curtain to grab a towel and heard the noise again. Looking through the gap in the door, I registered a glimmer of movement, but by the time I had wrapped the towel around myself and gone into my room, it was vacant. The door out to the hallway was closed, but when I listened carefully I heard someone thumping down the stairs, and not long after, a door slammed.

Chapter Fifteen

London, 2003

N
othing supernatural about getting spied on in the shower, but creepier in its own way than all the other stuff that had been going on, and I went to bed that night feeling deeply unsettled. Sleep eluded me, and I leafed through a copy of a trashy New Age novel I’d picked up off a bookshelf downstairs. In the early nineties, this book had been all the rage, and I remembered Alana reading it and raving about it and urging me to do the same. About a third of the way through the book, I had almost been lured in by its notion of meaningful coincidence when I turned the page and came smack up against a printing error. The whole middle section of the book had been printed twice, leaving the ending off altogether. My first thought was that it was some kind of joke—perhaps even a prank edition. What better way to poke fun at a book about synchronicity? But then, spurred on by the lateness of the hour, the gullible part of me took over and I began to see the misprint as part of a larger and more sinister puzzle. Stuff like this had been happening to me for weeks, and if the book was to be believed, I was fucked.

I made the mistake, then, of glancing over at the wardrobe door, the one in my room that had a hard time staying closed. Even now, it was open, but shouldn’t have been. Before getting into bed, I had placed a chair in front of it to keep it closed, but since then the chair had moved and the door was ajar. The only remedy would be to replace the chair with something heavier, so I got out of bed and began to slide the desk across the carpet. At first, the thing shifted easily enough, but one of its legs caught on the carpet and it came to a halt, sending a carefully balanced tower of notebooks crashing to the floor. The noise was thunderous in the quiet house, and I held my breath while I waited to see if it had woken anyone up.

When it seemed that it hadn’t, I shunted the desk free, and searched the carpet for the object on which it had snagged. My eyes fixed on what looked like an ivory trinket, its surface luminous against the carpet’s dull weave. I bent to pick it up and placed it in the palm of my hand, where the trinket transformed into something more organic, a small front tooth, its root tapering off at a strange angle.

I dropped the tooth immediately, but even so my hands felt contaminated and I ran to the bathroom to wash them. With the door shut, I scrubbed and scrubbed with warm water and soap until my hands felt raw, one scrub away from bleeding. In the mirror was a surreal cartoon of someone who’d just had a fright, eyes bulging in a pale moon face. Perhaps it hadn’t been a tooth, but a bead or a button. The bedroom had been dark, and I hadn’t taken a proper look before dropping it. Except that I had.

Someone was knocking on the bathroom door, I realized, and I opened it to Caleb’s sleepy face. “What’s going on?” he said. “I heard banging.”

“My books fell off the desk,” I said, stuttering.