The Girl Below (3 page)

I thought of the Frenchmen always as a pair, but around Jean Luc in particular, I felt strange. I wanted his attention, but when he gave it to me, I just needed to pee. I think Mum felt something of the same thing because around him she smiled too much and fiddled with the curls on her wig. When Jean Luc came out of the bathroom in a pirate waistcoat—bare chested and exposing a trail of tiny hairs that disappeared under the waistband of his leather pants—she spilled red wine on her dress and rushed off to make sure the chicken vol-au-vents hadn’t caught fire in the oven.

Henri was dressed as a crash victim, with a bandage wrapped round his head that oozed tomato ketchup. He didn’t make Mum blush, but I think she liked him better, especially after he spent the afternoon polishing our mismatched wineglasses and poking skewers of cheese and pineapple into an orange. The evening before, Mum and I had stayed up late making crudités and a vat of pink taramasalata. But overnight in the fridge the taramasalata had formed an orange crust. When Mum tried to fix it with lemon juice, it curdled, and she had burst into tears before throwing the whole lot out. She was worried there wouldn’t be enough to eat almost as much as Dad was worried there wouldn’t be enough to drink. Five minutes before the party began, he dashed to the off-license for more supplies and was still out when the first guests arrived.

Pippa brought Lulu, her friend from the polytechnic, who would babysit sometimes if Pippa was busy. Lulu was a stunner. Dad was dressed as a pilot and the minute she arrived he made an embarrassing fuss over her and frisked her French maid outfit, which ended at her bottom in an outbreak of frills. Pippa came dressed as the singer from Blondie, her spiky black hair covered by a platinum wig, and the change made her act in a way that was sassier than usual. When Dad patted
her
on the rump, she cuffed him round the ear and he smiled a little too warmly.

Esther and I had been told we were allowed to stay up until ten o’clock, but when it got that late no one told us to go to bed, so we sneaked around the kitchen taking sips out of abandoned paper cups. Out of revenge for upstaging my costume, I handed Esther a cup of red wine with a cigarette butt in it, but when she didn’t see the butt and drank from it, I worried she might die, and told her it was there.

Trying to get all the wine out of her mouth, she had just about choked. “No wonder you don’t have any friends at school,” she said, adding, “four eyes,” to drive home her point.

Tears pricked my eyes. “Four eyes are better than two,” I said, even though the retort made no sense. I wasn’t clever at being friends with people and always said dumb things and got teased. Mum said I had a thin skin because I was an only child, but I didn’t see how having brothers and sisters could stop other children from being mean.

After the cigarette-butt incident we gave up on sneaking drinks and hung out in the disco room. It was dark in there—the floor lamp glowed from under what looked like Mum’s dressing gown—and the music was so loud it hurt my stomach. We crept in near the back and hid behind the sofa, where we had a good view but were largely invisible. On the improvised dance floor, adults collided with each other in time to the music, while others bunched together on couches as though trying to keep warm. Surrounded by attentive men, Pippa and Lulu formed a nucleus at the center of it all. The whole night, Dad had been pitching drinks into their hands, with Jean Luc and Henri rushing in to fill the gap when he wasn’t around. Now the Frenchmen leaned in with their hips and whispered secrets into the girls’ hair.

“What the devil are you doing behind there?”

It was Dad, his pilot hat on back to front. He picked us up, one under each arm, and carried us, kicking, from the room. When he put her down, Esther looked stunned—even more so when he shooed us out the back door and closed it behind us. “My father would never treat me like that,” she said, her whisper outraged.

“At least my parents are still together.”

In the garden, Mum had put up the Wendy tent, and laid out cushions and sleeping bags. I gave the one with the broken zipper to Esther, and snuggled into the other but didn’t feel sleepy. It was dark in the tent, and we were soon telling spooky stories and squealing, which led after an hour or two to a thrumming noise inside my head and then a pinching headache.

“You’re taking up too much room,” I said, kicking Esther for the umpteenth time.

She fought her way out of the musky sleeping bag. “I need to pee.”

“You can’t go by yourself, you’ll fall into the bunker.” I stood up too quickly, and hit my head on a tent pole.

Esther laughed. “Spastic.” She was still dressed as Snow White.

I couldn’t tell her that I was the one who didn’t want to be left outside by myself because of the bunker, so I followed her across the dark patio in my clown suit. We had no torch, and stumbled on a stack of clay pots, which clattered over and broke. At first I thought the French doors at the back were locked, but after an extra-hard pull they came open. Inside, it looked like an elephant was asleep on the bed, and I was startled before remembering it was only the coats. We took turns going to the toilet, then heard giggling from the adjacent bathroom. I told Esther to keep quiet and squinted into the keyhole to get a better look. Behind me, Esther tugged at my clown suit, and tried to peer over my shoulder.

“Don’t stand so close. You’re making it all wobbly.” I shoved her away. Through the keyhole, all I could see was the mist on my glasses—steam from the bathroom had made them fog up. I wiped the lenses and looked again. One corner of avocado bathtub was visible and a gold tap, or half of it. If I closed one eye, I could see a bit more of the wall and a bit more of the taps. Disappointed, I pulled back to let Esther have a look.

“I can’t see anything,” she said after a spell at the keyhole.

“Maybe they’re taking a bath?”

Esther frowned. “In the middle of a party?”

We skulked away from the door, but hadn’t gotten far when a groan sounded from the bathroom—followed by a tidal wave of water hitting tiles. We rushed for the keyhole at the same time but I got there first, grabbed the door handle, and elbowed Esther out of the way.

“It’s
my
bathroom,” I spat. “You’re just a guest—remember?”

She shrank back and I looked through the keyhole but couldn’t see the tap—a tangle of buttocks and legs was in the way. Briefly, a gap opened up and I glimpsed what looked like a golf ball in a sock, then the whole lot slammed together as though powered by pistons. I was mesmerized, and wanted to look through the keyhole forever, but a dark shape fell across it, as if someone had pulled down a blind.

“What is it? What can you see? Let me look!” Behind me, Esther grew frantic. She yanked the yellow pom-pom on top of my clown hat until I fell backward, clutching at my neck where the chin strap dug in like a garrotte. Esther leaned forward and spied through the keyhole then recoiled in shock, screamed, and sprang from the door. She gave me a fright, and I screamed even louder than she had. A lumbering, splashing sound came from the bathroom and we hurtled from the door, tripping over each other to be the first to get away.

We made it as far as the bed, and hid behind the coat elephant. In the scramble, my glasses came off, but I couldn’t see well enough to find them. I clutched at Esther. “Can you see where my glasses went?”

“Shhhhh,” she said. “Someone just came in.”

Whoever it was knocked on the bathroom door, then when he or she wasn’t let in, they left.

“Let’s go back to the Wendy house,” said Esther.

I stuck my head above the coats just as a lock turned in the bathroom door. “Wait,” I said. “They’re coming out.”

A vast hulk walked out of the bathroom then split in two—one half tall and thin, the other short and curvy.

“Who is it?” said Esther.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t have my glasses on!”

The two halves rejoined and made a sucking sound.

“They’re kissing,” said Esther. “It’s disgusting.”

I tried to shut her up with a sharp look that was more of a cross-eyed squint and stuck my head over the ramparts. I willed the two figures to come into focus, or better still, to turn on the light. The short figure was a girl in a miniskirt. She held what looked like a cat—which she put on her head.

“Is that Pippa?”

“I think so,” whispered Esther.

The cat was a wig. I had glanced away at Esther for only a second but in that time the two figures had become three—Pippa and two men. I grabbed Esther’s hand in surprise. I wasn’t sure if the other man had come out of the bathroom or if it was the same one who’d knocked on the door. They huddled together and laughed, and I thought I saw the outline of a pilot’s hat. Trying to make out if that’s what it was, I strained my eyes to the point of popping—but to no avail. By daylight the world was a blur without glasses, and by night I was legally blind.

“Did you see who it was?” I asked Esther when they’d gone.

She didn’t answer.

“Who was it?”

“Not telling,” she said, her smile smug. She was getting back at me for the cigarette butt, and I hated her more than ever.

Ten minutes later of fumbling on all fours, I found my glasses but it was too late to identify the people in the bathroom—they were long gone. Before trundling back to the Wendy tent, I stuck my head into the room where the party was still going on. It was a few shades darker than it had been earlier and everyone moved in slow motion. More of them were sitting down than standing up, and the ones on their feet were leaning against each other so as not to fall over. I searched for Pippa and Jean Luc and Henri, but while I was looking, I accidentally caught Mum’s eye and she stood up and staggered toward us. Not taking any chances, I grabbed Esther’s arm and hauled her to the Wendy tent, where we lay still and squinched our eyes closed, pretending to be asleep. When no one came to tell us off, what I’d been trying so hard to fake became real, and the next thing I knew, it was light outside and my sleeping bag cover was wet with dew.

When we got up and went inside the flat, it was eerily quiet. Bodies lay stacked on couches and the floor—Jean Luc was slumped against Henri—but there was no sign of Lulu or Pippa. We ate Coco Pops and waited for the adults to stir, and when they didn’t we sat down in a gap and watched cartoons on TV. But even that didn’t wake them up.

“I’m bored,” said Esther. “Don’t you have a VCR?”

I didn’t even know what that was. “We could try on my mum’s jewelry?”

Esther waited reluctantly on my bed while I crept into Mum and Dad’s room, past their sleeping bodies, and lifted Mum’s jewelry box. Back in my room, I meted out the various trinkets, allowing Esther to try on all but the locket. That one I saved for myself.

“It’s very plain,” said Esther. “What’s inside it?”

“It’s a secret.” I wasn’t lying. Mum had refused to open the locket—she said it was bad luck—and I’d never been able to work the catch. I assumed it had pictures of her and Dad inside it, but the one time I’d asked her to confirm it, she’d smiled and said, “What makes you think I love him the most?” Of course she loved him the most, he was her husband.

I put on the locket and admired my reflection in a scratched mirror that was stuck to the back of a wardrobe door. When Esther’s hand appeared in the glass, I thought she was going to swipe it, but instead she closed her fingers around the skin of my neck and pinched it so hard I felt sick. For a few seconds, we simply stared at each other in the mirror, then I lunged for her ponytail and tried to yank it from her head. She flailed for a moment, striking air, then twisted around far enough to claw at me. Naturally, I clawed right back. I don’t know who burst into tears first, but before long I was lying on the bed, sobbing into my pillow, while Esther stood, rigid, in front of the mirror, howling at her reflection.

Not long after that, Esther phoned her mother to be picked up, but it was the Filipino nanny, in a Volvo, who arrived to collect her. When Esther saw the nanny, she started to cry again.

The second she had gone, I went into the kitchen to find our sharpest knife, the blade of which was as long as my forearm. Back in my bedroom, I pushed the blade between the two halves of the locket and tried to prise it open, but it wouldn’t budge. In a fit of frustration, I put the locket down on a side table and began to hack at the catch mechanism until eventually I sliced it off. This was precisely what I had been trying to do, yet it was only when I saw the snag of broken silver that I realized how awful and irreversible was the thing I had done. I picked up the locket, at least hoping I’d be able to see inside it, but by breaking the blasted thing, I had also somehow cinched it shut.

My first impulse was to return it, damaged, to the jewelry box, and deny all knowledge of the incident. But I felt too guilty and instead put the locket around my neck and resolved to confess just as soon as Mum woke up.

Only later that morning, after calling me into the bedroom, she straightaway asked me to run to the kitchen to fetch a stainless-steel bowl from under the sink, and I did as I was told and forgot about the locket. Mum put the bowl in front of Dad, who thrust his head inside it as though he was about to lick out the remains of a delicious cake mix. Seeing the top of his head, I remembered what I’d seen outside the bathroom the night before, how one of the shapes had been wearing his hat.

“Dad,” I blurted out. “Did you take a bath last night, in the middle of the party?”

He looked up from the bowl. “A bath?” he said, his voice in ruins. “Why in God’s name would I do that?”

I looked at Mum, who was looking at Dad as though she didn’t want him to eat the cake mix. “I don’t know,” I said. “But some people were taking a bath and I thought maybe—”

“He didn’t take a bath,” said my mother, shooing me out with uncharacteristic force. “No one did.” When the bedroom door had closed behind me, I heard a surge, and Mum exclaiming, “Oh no, the bowl isn’t big enough!”

By lunchtime, most people had gone home, but Jean Luc and Henri were still there, smoking cigarettes and coughing while they slugged down small cups of coffee that they’d made in a funny machine on the stove. In the communal garden, they played a rowdy game of hide-and-seek, running between plane trees and diving into bushes, but their rules were haphazard and they didn’t seem to care whether they found each other or not. When they tired of that game, they progressed to wrestling, puppylike, on the lawn, rolling and grabbing at each other’s pants and untucked shirts. In the early afternoon, they discovered the hatch to the air-raid shelter and Jean Luc asked if we could open it up and go down.