The Girl Below (36 page)

Behind me, the door closed with a satisfied thud, and I froze, too stunned even to breathe.

I stood in the center of the patio looking straight out toward the white picket fence and the narrow gate to the communal lawn. I had not come out of the service door this time, but had walked out through the French doors—straight out from our old flat. When I turned around, I could see into my parents’ old bedroom, and farther, all the way through to the living room beyond, where dim lights and laughter flared. The sight of the impromptu party in full swing was too much for me, and I hurried toward the service entrance to make my way out.

But the door there was shut—literally painted into its frame, unopened since the paint had been applied. As my fingers scrabbled at its edges, desperate to find an opening, I heard a man’s footsteps land on the stone patio and turned around, my own feet betraying me with a shuffling noise. The man—my father—looked over in my direction just as I ducked behind the barbecue and waited, chest sucked in, paralyzed, for him to walk over and find me. But he didn’t, and after a time I peered over the brick ramparts and searched for him in the garden. He was weaving in the direction of the air-raid shelter, tripping on uneven flagstones and flowerpots and I could tell he was drunk. The hatch was open, and he bent loosely over the heavy iron trapdoor and tried to lift it. When it didn’t budge, he wedged something long and thick underneath it—a branch perhaps—and the familiar scrape of metal on concrete sounded out across the yard.

The hatch moved a few inches before the branch snapped and my father tossed it aside and gave up. He turned around and stomped across the patio, this time kicking aside whatever got in his way.

I knew what had to happen next, had been over it in my head a thousand times. I had ten minutes, perhaps fifteen—the length of time it would take for my father to round up Jean Luc and Henri.

The open hatch was about ten meters away, and I crossed that distance in no time at all. I got down on my knees, peered into the hole, and braced myself against the side. A waft of cold air reached my face, followed by a faint whine, and I got to my feet and shook off the soil that had already stuck to my hands. Balancing my weight on one leg, I slowly lowered the other foot onto the top step and pressed down on it to make sure the surface was as solid as it looked. Though the stairs appeared to be made of concrete, I half-thought they might be an illusion that would give way and swallow my foot, then the rest of me. But the step held my weight, and I placed both feet on it and stared squarely into the dark cavity in front of me. I thought of all the candles burning so brightly in Peggy’s room, how useful they would have been for what lay ahead.

The staircase was narrower than I remembered, and when I passed beneath the opposite side of the hatch I had to duck my head. Once I had gone under the hatch, it became harder to see, and I remembered how the time I had been down there as a child, it had at least been daylight outside. This time, only a pale wash of moonlight filtered down, and after a few more steps even that was gone—when I waved my hand in front of my face, I sensed the air displace but could not see my fingers. Without visual bearings I was forced to use the wall to steady myself, even though I cringed each time my fingers touched the cold, wet surface. With every step, I fought the urge to turn back, but when some moist thing writhed under my palm, and I cried out, my short yelp was answered by a soft whimper from farther down in the bunker. Someone was definitely down there—a child who needed my help.

The stairs seemed to go on forever, though I’d been too frightened to count them, and when I finally reached the bottom my leg jarred as it tried to continue down another step. I was standing in a puddle an inch or two deep; ice-cold water sluiced the soft skin between my toes.

The child, or whoever it was, was sobbing again, a wretched whine that would curdle milk. It sounded like a girl, and I thought she must be somewhere in front of me. I stepped in what I thought was her direction then stopped. If I went any farther, I wasn’t sure how I would find my way back to the foot of the stairs. I could only hope that once I was really in the pit of the chamber, the stairs, dipped in that faint wash of moonlight, would appear fractionally less dark than their surroundings.

I took another step forward, and another, until I hit a hard lump that gave way under my foot and made a sickening squelching sound. I hoped it was nothing more than a beetle or a snail, but remembered the grisly textures that had been in the bottom of the bunker when my hand had closed around the shoe. My breathing quickened to a shallow rasp, and I moved forward another ten or so steps before stopping abruptly. I could see no boundaries, had no idea of the bunker’s dimensions, and I felt suddenly disoriented, as though I were standing on a tiny fragment of rock in some deep undersea cavern. No sounds issued from the chamber, and I wondered if the child had been nothing more than a decoy to lure me down here. But who would play such a joke? Was some malevolent force really out to get me, or was this all my own creation—an elaborate manifestation of the list?

I’d read somewhere once that if you died in a dream you died in real life too, and I wondered if that was what was happening to me now. All the visions, hallucinations, whatever they were, of a decaying body in a watery hole had been leading to this: my own grave. I had been the one buried here, the one who did not get out alive.

In perfect despair, I dropped to my hands and knees and felt myself give in to the self-destructive thoughts I had tried for so long to resist. Released from its bindings, the list unfurled with violent force. I was stuck inside a dream that wasn’t a dream, but there was no exit and no way to wake up. For several minutes I crouched there in the muck, lacking the courage even to turn around and crawl for the stairs. But then something kicked in, not self-preservation exactly, but the threat of a terror more prolonged than any other I had known. I did not want to become the diabolical soup of hair and teeth, to rot in a place where no one would find me.

I meant only to turn around, to search for a haze of light, but in so doing, my hand swept forward and hit human skin so warm it burned my fingers. My hand closed around a slender ankle, perhaps a wrist, and traveled up to find a swatch of fabric, a cotton dress, sopping wet. Enfolded in the dress was a girl, motionless. She was all arms and legs, a spidery tangle of limbs, but I managed to feel my way toward her head. Her hair was wet, with blood or water I could not tell. Nor did I stop to check if she was breathing—her warmth was enough. Moving fast, I linked my arms behind her slim waist and pulled her to me in a loose bear hug. She was heavier than I expected—roughly half my size—but the fact that I had found her, and that she was alive, boosted my strength. I was no longer alone in this dungeon and, feeling my spirits soar, I hauled us both to our feet.

As I’d hoped, the darkness was less concentrated at the other end of the bunker. With the girl hoisted under one arm and bolstered by the other, I made my way toward the grayish haze. Halfway across the flooded chamber, one of my flip-flops got hooked on something under the water and came off, but I wasn’t about to waste time trying to find it. Instead I limped on with one bare foot, trying not to slip in the soft, buttery mulch.

At the foot of the stairs, I leaned on the wall to rest for a few moments. In my arms, the girl stirred, and coughed once or twice. Even though she felt hot to the touch, she was also shivering, and I guessed she had some kind of fever. Pulling her closer to my body, I began the ascent, each step slow and torturous. The girl’s head lolled at an impossible angle, hiding her face from me, and I worried that her skull might scrape against the narrow stairway, or worse, that I would drop her.

But I didn’t drop her, at least not until we had climbed out of the bunker and I had stumbled a few feet across the grass. My arms literally gave way then, and she slid down the length of my body and landed in a pile at my feet. The jolt must have roused her, because she started to cough again—a little more violently this time—and I crouched next to her and rubbed her back. She was turned away from me, and long strings of wet hair covered her face, but I finally had enough of my wits about me to notice what she was wearing: a simple dress, made from a cotton printed with strawberries. The dress was soaked and stained, but I recognized it immediately. It had been my favorite, a dress made for me by my mother. I had been wearing it the day after the party.

I stopped rubbing her back, and sat down heavily on the grass, watching her. She lifted her head and I caught her profile—her nose had a small bump from wearing spectacles, and her full lips turned down in a sulk. A thin line of blood trickled from one corner of her mouth, but what took away my breath was her big mole eyes, the way she was straining to see me without her glasses on; the way she gave up trying and looked away, frustrated. My whole life, I had been doing that, been blind when I most needed to see.

There was no mistaking who the girl was, but what was this other Suki doing out here? I recalled being rescued from the bunker by my father—in which case she should have been safely tucked up in bed, like I had been. So why wasn’t she? What strange glitch had occurred that the two us could coexist?

For a second or two she squinted at the garden before fixing her eyes on the French doors, the brightest, and only, source of light. Too dazed to move, I looked in the same direction, until the doorway swarmed with the silhouettes of a trio of men who were walking toward us, coming out into the garden.

Though I did not understand why this other Suki was here, I did not think it would be a disaster if the men stumbled across her in the garden—whereas if they stumbled across me it would be catastrophic.

The nearest cover was a small holly bush to the right of the patio—in the opposite direction from the service door—and I dived for it, hoping the leaves would be dense enough, and the men drunk enough, that the plant would hide me. It did, but only just, and I noticed, once I was stuck behind it, that I was shivering, I supposed in shock.

None of the strange and irrational events leading up to this one had prepared me for the strangeness and irrationality of meeting myself as a girl. And I couldn’t work out what I had just done, or how it was even possible. How had she been left in the bunker, while I remembered being carried out by my father? Where were her glasses and why did blood trail from her mouth, while I had made it to the surface with my spectacles and teeth intact?

From behind the holly bush, I had a clear view of the men, and I watched intently as they made their first, failed attempt to lift the hatch then stopped to regroup. I wondered why they hadn’t noticed Suki sitting on the grass, but I did not have a clear view of her myself, and thought perhaps they had missed her because they were drunk.

The sequence of the men’s actions was familiar to me by now, but on other nights I had not been close enough to hear what they were saying. From my new vantage point, I could hear each word as though it were being piped directly into my ear.

They were talking about sex, and Henri was miming a recent encounter. “The rail for the bath was at just the right height,” he said and smacked his lips. “
C’était parfait,
” he said. “
Parfait
.”

Jean Luc held two hands in front of his chest and squeezed a pair of imaginary breasts. “And what about these?”

“
Parfait aussi,
” said Henri.

“
Merde,
” said Jean Luc, laughing. “I chased the wrong chicken.”

“Yes,” agreed my father. “Lulu’s what around here we call a cock tease.”

“But not Pippa,” said Henri, almost singing. “She is wonderful!”

Jean Luc turned to my father. “And she likes an audience,
n’est-ce pas
?”

A low, dirty laugh went round the men and Ludo put a finger to his lips. “Shhhhh, you’ll get me in trouble,” he said.

“With which one?” said Jean Luc, and the three of them laughed some more.

They had not so much as bent over the hatch yet, but stopped talking and laughing for a moment to concentrate on their task. So it had been Henri and Pippa having sex in the bathroom, and my father had been a spectator—which he didn’t want either his wife or his mistress to find out about. I felt a familiar flare of anger toward him. Not just for cheating on my mother with Rowan or for watching the babysitter have sex, but for having no conscience about any of it.

When their work was done—with much huffing and puffing and swearing in both English and French—the men left the garden, just as they had on previous occasions, with Jean Luc staying behind to water the potted geraniums. I’d been right about the zipper—halfway up it got stuck, and he struggled for some time to close it.

Once he had gone, I came out from behind the holly bush and stopped dead in my tracks. The patch of grass where I’d left the young Suki was empty, though in the spot where she’d been sitting there was a slight indentation. No wonder the men hadn’t seen her. But where was she? I looked around the garden, then again at the patch of grass. Something was there, partly hidden, and when I got a little closer I recognized the locket, on its chain. The locket part was blackened and gritty, as though it had been submerged in silt, and I wiped it clean with my T-shirt and settled it, tenderly, around my neck.

I thought Suki must have gone inside—though I wasn’t sure how she could have done so without anyone seeing her. My childhood bedroom overlooked the patio, and I tiptoed to the window and peered in. Bars in front of the glass made it hard to see, but enough light filtered through from the hall that it was just possible to make out the bed and a figure sleeping in it: Suki.

Was this the same Suki I had rescued from the bunker? I realized there was no way of knowing, but I saw that there might be a way to return the locket—to right the mistake I had made so long ago.

The French doors were open, but at the threshold I hesitated, wondering what would happen if I stepped through them. I had gotten as far as putting my foot in the door, experimentally, when I heard movement inside the flat. Someone was heading straight for me, then at the last minute they veered off to the right, toward Suki’s room. In the light of the hall, I recognized Hillary, my mother, and froze, not knowing what to do.