The Girl Below (27 page)

Up ahead, a grim-looking ferry called the
Achilea
honked its departure horn, and the gangplank swung away from the dock as we drew alongside. Harold waved frantically at the shipping steward, who was methodically fastening a small metal gate, and started shouting at him in a mishmash of English and Greek. For a tantalizing moment, the gangplank shivered while the steward decided our fate.

“Please, please!” begged Harold. “My mother is dying!”

“Your mother?” said the steward, his English perfect.

He lowered the gangplank and showered us with condolences while we filed past, silent with gratitude. The main ferry cabin was stuffed with squeamish tourists and rowdy locals whose grandmothers, children, and breakfasts were spread out on every surface. Already it smelled as though the toilets were overflowing, and we ventured outside to the aft deck and a row of wooden benches. But after so little sleep, I couldn’t stand the idea of sitting upright for six or seven hours on a plank of wood, and when I moved to a shady corner of the deck and collapsed against a funnel, Caleb followed. Harold was giving us the silent treatment and remained on the bench, inspecting his ankle where the strap of his orthopedic sandal had rubbed a blister.

The ferry chugged out into the harbor, and I closed my eyes and sank into my suitcase. A few minutes later, a warm weight fell against my shoulder, and a swatch of hair tickled my neck. Caleb had fallen asleep on me, though who knew if he had meant to. With bright sunlight burning an orange pattern on the inside of my eyelids, I tried to imagine how we’d look to strangers, or even to Harold, but I lost consciousness before I could make a decision about what if anything to do about it.

Some time later, I woke with a jolt and Caleb rolled off my shoulder and onto the deck. “Ouch,” he said, sitting up and noticing the patch of drool on the shoulder of my T-shirt. “Did I do that?”

I was surprised by how little I minded. “It’ll dry out soon enough.”

He looked around at the sun-blazed ship. “How long was I out for?”

“An hour maybe? I don’t know. I’ve been asleep too.”

The ferry swung round unexpectedly, and the change in direction threw us out of the shade. “There’s still ages to go,” said Caleb, pulling a sweater out of his knapsack. He scrunched the sweater into a ball, placed it in the crook of his neck, and leaned against my shoulder again. “I’m going back to sleep,” he said.

Where his bare arm fell against mine, my skin goose-bumped. He sighed a couple of times and relaxed into sleep. To lean on me once had been careless, but to do it twice was something else, and before I could stop it, my pulse quickened, and a warm feeling spread over me. It was followed by an ugly jolt. What was I doing? Caleb was barely sixteen—a half-formed newt who drank and smoked but didn’t yet shave. Nothing could come of this, nothing good.

I needed a bathroom, but not so badly that I was prepared to get up and look for one, and soon fell into a clenched half sleep. The ferry chugged on and on, and periodically I gazed across the railings to the edge of the sparkling sea but saw no land. The hours started to sag and lose all shape, until it seemed we had spent our entire lives at sea on this crusty ship. Next to me, Caleb’s legs were folded girlishly underneath him, and his wrists hung limply in his lap. He looked vulnerable, like a child who had fallen asleep on an adult he trusted, and I felt ashamed of the path my thoughts had taken, the way my body had reacted.

An hour or so later, it was Caleb who walked unsteadily to the railing and stared out across the frothing wake. After hours of inertia, my own legs were stiff and uncooperative, and my contact lenses were like sandpaper against my eyes. I joined him at the railing, feeling queasy and dehydrated and terminally zonked. He pointed toward the starboard side at a cluster of blue-black fins on the horizon.

“That’s Skyros,” he said. “We’re almost there.”

Chapter Seventeen

Auckland, 2001

I
hadn’t seen or heard from Ludo in months when he called out of the blue inviting me to lunch. He said he was coming to Auckland on business, and maybe I’d like to meet him at one of those new al fresco places on the Viaduct Basin that were springing up to cater to the Americas Cup. Ever since securing the prestigious event, the city had gone all St. Tropez, or tried to, and in the formerly industrial quarter next to the harbor a miniature gin playground was hastily being built. To cope with the expected influx of seafaring Eurotrash, thousands of Aucklanders had upped their intake of champagne and oysters, while women, single and married, had been enthusiastically taking French lessons to better seduce any incoming Eurosailors.

I had been doing neither. In fact, I could hardly bring myself to go down to the harbor and look, such was my contempt for anything to do with the enterprise.

A hundred yards out from the restaurant I identified Ludo, sitting on the terrace in a beige linen suit. The restaurant he’d chosen was all white, even the floor, and at midday already full of red-faced gents sucking oysters from their shells and trying to chat up their waitresses. I’d come straight from the office, where we spent all day on the phone, and felt scruffy and incongruous in sneakers and an ill-fitting shirt. As I approached my father, the jerks at the next table openly appraised me, and I tossed my hair and scowled at them to let them know how little I appreciated it.

“You look different,” said my father, shaking my hand, formal as ever, and pulling back my chair in a show of chivalry. “Have you had your hair cut?”

“I dyed it. Supermarket red. You look younger. Have you had work done?” Hard as I tried to temper it, my sarcasm was always out of control around Ludo.

He ordered a dozen shucked oysters and ate them in front of me, washed down with champagne, pausing at regular intervals to ask if I was sure I didn’t want one.

“No thanks. They taste like snot to me.”

He didn’t like it when I was vulgar, but I enjoyed the look on his face when I was. “Order whatever you like,” he said. “It could be a taste of things to come.”

“What does that mean?”

He sipped his champagne and winked. “You’ll see.”

That sounded ominous, and I perused the menu while waiting for the charade to come undone. Unless I’d done something wrong, or they needed collecting from the airport or a last-minute babysitter when they were in town, I never heard from Ludo or Rowan. I’d received no invitations to spend Christmas with them since the time four years earlier when I had failed to turn up with Lily’s present and arrived the next day with such a foul hangover that I’d passed out at the dinner table after one too many of my father’s aperitifs (apparently, Rowan had held my head over the toilet while I spewed, though I did not remember, or subscribe to, that part). When I came round, Dad and I had a huge row over the past, a continent he refused to revisit, and the argument had ended with me hurling a framed photograph of his children at the wall. The frame had smashed, and I had left the house immediately, hitching all the way into Hamilton at two in the morning. Ludo had gotten in touch with me a few months later to say we ought to meet on neutral territory from then on, which I understood to mean that Rowan had finally banned me from the ranch. So this was how it was: a few times a year he took me to lunch. Once or twice I’d seen my father cruising the streets of Auckland in his late-model four-wheel drive—he came up for business all the time—and though I’d thought about waving to him I never did.

The restaurant menu was convoluted seafood, and I ordered something prawny with pink lobster mousse that said it came in a basket with fish-egg decoupage. Waiting for this impossible creation to arrive, I asked politely after Rowan and the children and my father’s business and listened to the latest installment of their mishaps and triumphs. Rowan had fallen from her horse in the last round of dressage at an event in Christchurch—she was competing again—and Simon had taken up rowing and was already trying out for the New Zealand under eighteen team. Lily apparently had developed “weight issues” and did nothing all day except sit in her room and listen to “God-awful head-banging music.” Out of all of them, she was the one I could most relate to.

Ludo wanted to know what I’d been up to, and I gave him the abridged version: work was the same, but someone on the community newspaper I worked for was leaving, and I hoped to get a promotion by the end of the year.

“Good for you,” he said. “It’s great to have a taste of a career before you settle down. That way you can pick it up again later if you get bored.”

I had long suspected that my father measured my worth, if he measured it at all, in the proximity of wedding bells and booties, and even though I knew his attitude was deeply sexist, it still hit me where it hurt. His frequent attempts to matchmake for me with blockheads he worked with only made things worse. During dessert, he even hunched his shoulder toward the jerks at the next table and with a wink said, “Gee, there sure are a lot of hunks at this place.”

“Dad,” I said, as one of them turned and looked in our direction. “Please don’t.”

But he either hadn’t heard me, or was determined to humiliate me, and before I could stop him, he was waving at the men and smiling in my direction. “You see?” he said, when they waved back. “It’s the easiest thing in the world to meet a guy.”

“I’ve already met someone,” I said, quietly.

“Great,” said my father. “What’s his name? What does he do?”

“You won’t know him,” I said. “So there’s no point in telling you.” I traced a pattern on the tablecloth with my finger. “What did you want to talk to me about?”

Ludo tried to refill my glass from an empty champagne bottle, and even though I protested, he insisted on ordering another one. “We’re going to need a toast,” he said.

“To what?”

“All in good time.”

The champagne arrived and was opened with ceremony. Dad put his briefcase on the table and took out a checkbook. On the top line he wrote my name, then he started on the figures and kept adding zeros. When he was finished, he handed it to me. “Voilà!” he said.

At first I thought it was a joke, that you couldn’t write personal checks for that much, but when I looked at Dad his expression was too expectant for it to be fake.

I said, “What did you do—rob a bank?”

He looked bashful, almost as if I’d guessed the truth, and said, “Of course not. It’s only what you deserve.”

“So
I
robbed a bank and forgot about it?”

He chuckled, as if he was stalling, and carefully folded his napkin. “It’s something I’ve wanted to give you for a long time, but haven’t been able to until now. I think I told you business is booming.”

I put down the check on the white linen tablecloth and stared at it. Underneath my father’s signature was printed
PIPER ENTERPRISES LTD
. The check had my name on it and was crossed in the top-right-hand corner so no one else could cash it, but I left it on the table while I picked at dessert, a pot of creamy white stuff that smelled sort of fishy.

“You don’t seem very excited,” said Ludo, pouring more champagne into my already full glass.

“I’m just in shock. That’s five times what I earn in a year.”

“Really? But you’re a journalist.”

“Exactly.”

Ludo went over to the till to pay and came back and put his briefcase on the table. “There’s just one thing—I almost forgot.” He laughed. “My accountant needs you to sign this document confirming that you received the money as a gift.” He handed me the document, printed on the legal letterhead of a large firm of city solicitors. I tried to read the first paragraph.

“Even I don’t understand the details,” said Ludo. “But the gist of it is that I’m not trying to tax dodge.” He handed me a pen and pointed to the dotted line at the bottom, the place where I should sign.

“I’m too tipsy,” I said. “Can I sign it later?”

“Wouldn’t you rather bank the check straightaway?”

Scanning the letter for a phrase that made sense, I stumbled upon the words, “In lieu of legacy.” I read them again. “What does that mean?” I said, showing the phrase to Ludo.

He looked closely, or pretended to. “Well,” he began carefully, “I suppose it means I’m giving you something you’re owed.”

“But isn’t a legacy what you get when someone dies?”

“It can be, but a person can give it to you while they’re still alive.”

“Why would they do that?” I said, feeling dim, and wishing I hadn’t drunk so much champagne.

“Maybe they think it would be more useful to you now.”

“I see,” I said, but didn’t at all, and picked up the check and the document to try and make sense of it. Instead I got a queasy feeling, the same one I had when I discovered a mistake in the galley of an article just after it had gone to print. “I really don’t think I should sign anything when I’m drunk.”

“Please, Suki,” said my father. “I really want to give this to you. And I know you need the money.”

I was folding the document to put in my handbag when Ludo took it from me.

“What’s there to think about?” he said. “It’s a windfall.” But the way he made it sound as if I’d just won the lottery without even buying a ticket was what finally stopped me from signing.

“I can’t do it,” I said. “It’s too weird.”

On the way back to the office I passed by my favorite clothing store, where the new summer range was on display in the window, and regretted my decision. I was up to my neck in debt, had three credit cards and a student loan. Why hadn’t I just signed the damn document and run away to Paris with the check? Was I that much of an idiot?

That night I had a date with the new guy I was seeing, Edward. I hadn’t told my father his name because I didn’t want to jinx anything. Since breaking up with Scott I had suffered a long drought of unrequited obsessions broken only by the occasional desperado one-night stand. Edward was the first guy in five years who looked at me and saw something more than either an unsexy friend or a late-night opportunity, and for that reason I ignored what I otherwise might have considered a series of early warning signs. I was too delighted, too relieved, that at last someone liked me, and well before the point at which a relationship is deemed to have legs, I had thrown out caution and eagerly gifted him my heart.