The Girl Below (34 page)

With everyone on a round-the-clock vigil by Peggy’s bedside, we ate and slept in irregular patterns, and household routines disappeared. Shortly after Pippa got home from her walk, I went to bed while it was still light and fell into a feverish sleep. Later on, I woke to the sound of voices chattering, plates clunking, but felt too tired to get up and eat. The crypt was particularly hot and airless that night and I stripped down to just my knickers and covered myself with a sheet. The events of the day were a blur and sleep came on strong, blitzing all thoughts and replacing them with crooked nightmares of fishing for bullets in a flooding cave.

I was in such a deep sleep that later on, when a hand tapped me gently on the shoulder and a voice whispered softly in my ear, I thought I was dreaming. I couldn’t make out any of the whispered words, but the delicate breath they were carried on sent a secret voltage to the base of my spine. From there, the current spread to my arms and legs then fizzed to the ends of my fingers and toes. I had never experienced a dream quite like this, and then I realized it wasn’t one.

“Why did you run away from the beach?” said the whisperer.

I opened my eyes halfway, enough to confirm his outline, kneeling by the bed. I was lost without my glasses but didn’t reach for them; absurdly, I didn’t want him to see me in spectacles. “You can’t be here,” I said. “You have to go.”

He took off his T-shirt and put a finger to my lips. “Shhh.” He smelled of the sea, of sunscreen, and I knew he hadn’t showered since he’d been in the ocean. He lay down next to me on the mattress and, very carefully, as though either one of us might detonate, he rested one hand lightly on my shoulder. Next to my ear, he exhaled, a tiny puff of air that was a fuse to my nerve endings. His body next to mine was molten, too pliant, and on the other side of the sheet, I floundered.

“I’m serious,” I said. “Your parents will kill me.”

“No one saw me coming in here,” he said. “They’re too busy with Peggy.”

He shifted his weight, slid a hand under the sheet and down past my shoulder blade. When he reached the rise of my breast and an attendant nipple, he timidly went around it. For a moment his mouth hovered in front of mine, awaiting permission, and in that second or two of sweet, urgent breath, everything was written, and everything came undone.

“Please,” I said, on a sharp inhale. “Please don’t.” But his mouth inched forward, and my hand sought the downy cleft on the back of his neck, and finally his lips settled on mine. He tasted of summer fruit, nectarines and cherries, all the joyous, uncomplicated times in life that I had forgotten about, and rolling toward him on the stiff, horsehair mattress, I was a girl of sixteen again, having my first kiss—finally—with the boy of my dreams.

It was the presence of a firm, insistent nub that, moments later, brought me back to earth. Caleb’s breathing had quickened, and I pulled back to listen while he nuzzled my neck. I knew that sound, what it meant. My knickers were still on, and so were his boxers, but the sheet was no longer between us, and on the crest of my hip bone, where the skin is taut and sensitive, a dot of moisture landed. Instinctively, I shrank from it, twisted away, just as an animal, guttural sound escaped from Caleb’s throat.

He sprang back, as shocked as I was, and cringed next to me on the mattress. At the same time, blinded by darkness but senses burning, I registered a slow, trickling stickiness close to my hip, and covered it with the sheet.

In the silent, airless crypt our shame was mercilessly amplified, and for something like a full minute, neither of us moved or spoke.

There were so many things I could have said to patch his crushed ego and make it all better for him, but the magnitude of my own folly had hit me like a wrecking ball, and I needed reassuring as much as he did. “It doesn’t matter,” I managed. “You should go.”

For once obedient, Caleb put on his T-shirt and pulled it down to cover his boxer shorts. Under his breath, he said, “You’re not going to write about this in your diary, are you?”

“Of course not,” I said, thinking that would be the last thing I’d do. “Just go back to bed.”

So caught up was I in the mood of reckless humiliation that a few moments passed before I realized the implications of his plea. “What diary?” I said, already dimly aware of an approaching apocalypse.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m just going to go.”

I couldn’t see his face. It was too dark. But I already knew the answer to my question. It was written in my own handwriting in all those notebooks and journals that I had left behind in London under the bed. They went back years, to the very beginning, when I’d had my real first kiss in Ladbroke Gardens under a cloud of marijuana smoke. Caleb was worried he’d end up in them, another specimen in my collection. “You read my journals, didn’t you?”

He said nothing.

“So that’s a yes?”

A sigh of defeat signaled Caleb’s confession.

“How could you?” But of course he had. Who wouldn’t? Diaries were written to be read. If not now, then in a hundred years’ time. If you really wanted to keep something secret, you kept your mouth shut and your pen capped. “They were private,” I said, my final attempt to make Caleb feel bad.

“Private?” he said, scoffing. “You mean like the stuff in Dad’s shed?”

“That’s not the same—and you know it.”

“Dad’s shed was locked,” Caleb said. “I’d call that private, wouldn’t you?”

I didn’t respond. Like any hypocrite, I wasn’t about to admit that I was one.

Caleb was right, though. On the moral low ground, we were about even. But a sheet was stuck to my leg, and before another word was said, I needed to clean myself up without anyone seeing.

Chapter Twenty-One

Skyros, 2003

W
hen grilled, Caleb admitted he’d accidentally unearthed the first installment of my journals while I was out shopping for groceries one afternoon, and had gone back to read the next by torchlight while I slept on the bathroom floor. To make sure I stayed put while he read, he’d tried to make me more comfortable by propping up my head with a towel and covering me with a quilt. Then, once he discovered the diaries had “sexy bits,” and episodes involving booze and drugs, he confessed he’d gotten addicted to reading them and had even risked going into my room one night while I was in the shower.

“I remember that night,” I said. “Only I thought it was Harold in my room.”

“That was me,” he said. “But I didn’t look at you in the shower.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” he said, and a second later: “No.”

We had moved from Elena’s crypt to the courtyard by then, and were huddled under the fig tree, whispering like fugitives. Caleb showed zero remorse about the snooping, and I found that I couldn’t really blame him for it. (After all, had I shown any?) All he wanted to know was if everything he’d read in the diaries was true, particularly the stuff about his mother “shagging” some guy in a bathroom.

I said I wasn’t sure what had happened that night, that he’d have to ask her.

He screwed up his face. “No thanks.”

I noticed that all the tension had gone from our conversation, just as I noticed that a dusting of fine black hair had appeared, seemingly overnight, on Caleb’s top lip. Had I really been even a little bit in love with this downy adolescent, this presumptuous boy who had bowled into my room to seduce me without even taking a shower? Alone on the sleeping platform after he’d gone to bed, I felt like a prizewinning idiot, with only myself to blame. How daft of me to think Harold had been the shower spy when it was Caleb who’d lurked and gone AWOL and generally behaved appallingly from the start. Or had he? What if he had followed my journals like a manual for delinquency? Certainly it was their contents that had given him the confidence to appear in my room late at night in his boxer shorts, the knowledge he needed to play me—that, and perhaps,
Lolita
.

I would not write about Caleb in my journal, but I saw already how he fit into the sorry narrative they outlined. He was only the latest in a long line of futile attractions—and yet he was also the zenith. With Caleb, I had finally set my sights on a beau so inappropriate that the folly of the whole scheme had been made obvious, even to me.

I thought of Arthur the therapist, who had tried through kindness to get close enough to cure me. At the time, I’d supposed it was his methods that had failed, that I was too smart to get sucked in by transference, but in actual fact, transference had worked so well on me that the second he invoked it I had run for my life.

Arthur would have known that was a risk. It was why he had taken his time, hoping that would make a difference. It would all be written down in his notes: “This girl has been neglected and then abandoned by her father. Withheld affection is what she has come to think of as love. Discomfort will arise from any other kind, and she will bolt.”

If only he had been meaner, I might have stuck around.

While I had been cogitating, the crypt had turned from black to gray without my noticing. I started to doze, but only a short while later Pippa pulled back the curtain of my sleeping platform and tapped me on the shoulder. I started awake and, seeing her face, my first thought was that she’d found out about the tryst with Caleb and had come to give me a roasting. But what she said was, “The doctor thinks there isn’t long, and I thought you’d want to be there with us.”

I followed Pippa into Peggy’s room, thinking that I ought to have taken a proper shower, and not just sluiced myself down. I was too grubby—both literally and spiritually—to sit by anyone’s deathbed. My only consolation—and I felt like a crook even admitting it to myself—was that Caleb would be far too ashamed to mention the incident to anyone, especially his mother.

I was the last to arrive in the sickroom. Harold, Ari, Elena, and Caleb were already there, seated in a horseshoe around the bed where Peggy lay unconscious. Caleb wouldn’t look at me, and all I saw when I looked at him was a skinny little boy with bags under his eyes. I couldn’t even remember what it was about him that had so bewitched me. I caught Harold’s eye, and realized how badly I’d behaved toward him, when he’d been right about me all along.

But it was time to put all that aside because Peggy was about to die. The air around us was weighed down with the anticipation of it, and everyone was watching her, not really breathing, unsure how we’d react when it finally happened.

Like all solemn occasions, however, it wasn’t without bursts of comedy. Against family wishes, Elena had summoned the local priest, a man so vast he might have smuggled in half the village under his cassock. When he leaned over Peggy to administer the rosary, she woke up, saw the antique gold pendant around his neck, and lunged for it. “That’s mine, you rotter!” she shrieked, refusing to let go. “I know you—you’re the dirty thief from downstairs.”

Pippa explained to the priest—who was no doubt used to such nuttiness—that Peggy had mistaken him for her old neighbor Jimmy, who had in fact been a thief, but I noticed that from then on, to avoid a repeat performance, he discreetly maintained his distance.

Unfortunately for the gathered family, Peggy’s outburst turned out to be the last coherent words she would utter. Soon after, she began to shout out random names and objects, like a baby does when it first learns to talk but without any of the delight a baby expresses, just fury and agitation. Slowly, horribly, even the names and objects deteriorated until they were simply grunts and moans.

“The brain shuts down first, but patients can remain very vocal during that process,” explained the village doctor, who had done his medical training in Hull and spoke with a queer northern accent. He tried to reassure us that Peggy wasn’t suffering at all, even though it sounded that way. In fact, he said, she wouldn’t be aware of anything. I wanted to ask how such a thing had ever been proved, but sat still and said nothing.

Instead, I watched from the end of the bed and thought of my mother, of the only other death I’d seen. Except that I hadn’t seen her die. For hours and hours, I’d held her hand in the ICU, had watched the machines and pumps do their work, had prayed, and talked, and even eaten, but then, in the end, when she had taken her last breath, I had not been paying attention.

Not long after the doctor’s reassurances, Peggy’s grunts and moans declined to the most distressing noise I had ever heard: a high, sharp intake of breath, followed by a long, low, drawn-out cry of agony on each exhale. Despite what the doctor had said, I pictured Peggy being dragged into hell one fingernail at a time. After we had endured it for close to half an hour, the doctor purposefully opened up his medical bag. “I am going to make her more comfortable,” he said, quietly. He held up a series of glass vials to the light to better read their labels. He selected two, and showed them to Pippa. I didn’t hear what he said to her, but whatever it was, she nodded emphatically, and put her hand over her mouth and started crying. The doctor took out two syringes from his bag and filled them from the vials, flicking each needle to get rid of air bubbles. Holding one syringe in his teeth and the other in his hand, he reached under the sheet of Peggy’s bed and rolled her over slightly, discreetly injecting the vials into what was left of her backside. The indignity went unnoticed by Peggy, and the doctor gently repositioned her before smoothing down the sheet.

Almost instantly, her groans became softer, less anguished, as if someone had turned down the volume. No more than five minutes later she skipped an inhalation, and her mouth froze open in an expression of surprise—her pupils fixed upward, staring at a view she didn’t much seem to like.

Pippa climbed onto the bed and cradled her mother, weeping. Ari moved to his wife’s side and stroked her arm, tight mouthed but blinking. Harold looked at the doctor, who gave him a benign smile and said, “Yes,” very quietly, as though someone in the room was asleep and he didn’t want to wake them. Timidly, Harold went to the bed and leaned over Peggy’s rib cage. His back shuddered, but he made no sound, and when Pippa looked up and saw him standing across the bed from her, quaking, she leaned over to pat his shoulder. Her touch released a series of violent spasms, and he flailed for his sister’s hand and pulled it to his face. Mumbling to themselves but not to each other, they voiced pet names and regrets, while the priest and doctor discreetly left the room.