The Girl Below (5 page)

Next to me, Ari sighed. “Bet you wish you hadn’t come to dinner.”

“Are you kidding?” I said, trying to be bright. “This food is delicious.”

Ari had finished eating and went into the kitchen, where he took his frustrations out on various pots and pans. Then he too disappeared upstairs, leaving me on my own.

I was on my third helping by the time Pippa reappeared, puffy-eyed, Caleb’s plate of food demolished. “Sorry about that,” she said. “Caleb’s not himself at the moment. We think something’s going on at school—we’re not sure what exactly—but we’re going to see out the term there and rethink over the summer hols.”

“How old is he?”

“Sixteen.”

“That’s a difficult age,” I said.

“Do you think?”

“It was difficult for me,” I said, trying hard to think of an age that wasn’t. “And not just because my mother got sick.”

Pippa held up her hands. “That reminds me!” she exclaimed. “The other day I found something you’ll absolutely love.” She went over to the TV and rifled through a stack of VHS tapes that looked like they had been accumulating for years. She put one of the tapes into an antique VCR machine, and gray dots swarmed on-screen, followed by occasional flashes of big hair and talking shoulder pads. “Is that
Dynasty
?” I said, recognizing Alexis.

“Wrong tape,” said Pippa, taking it out and tossing it into the dead zone behind the TV. “How frustrating, I had it yesterday.” She began to sort and stack dozens of unlabeled and scribbled-on cassettes. “Sorry, this might take a while.”

I excused myself to go to the bathroom, but really it was a pretext to be by myself and explore the house. On the landing, I looked into one of the bedrooms and saw an unmade bed—probably Pippa and Ari’s. No one seemed to be around, but noises were filtering down from upstairs, not just the loud bass line but something with guitars. At the foot of the stairs I tilted my head toward the muffled noise and saw another landing, and a stepladder leading to what must be the roof. Through an open trapdoor, I could just make out a patch of starless London sky, and, if I listened hard enough, the faint warble of a country and western singer joining the guitars. Was Ari listening to music on the roof?

In the bathroom, I flicked on the lights, and came face-to-face with a giant baby boy, smiling widely under thick black curls, enough for a clown wig. The edges of the photograph were blurred, but in the center his eyes were sharp green constellations. The eyes of Pippa and her mother. Another photo next to it showed the same boy as a toddler, staggering toward the camera on plump bowlegs. Above it, and below it, hung more photos of the same boy, Caleb, I guessed, some black-and-whites, some color, and the pictures continued in a ring around the room. Closer to the loo, the boy was older, and above the bidet, he was thirteen or fourteen, a snapshot taken at a soccer match amid a scrum of other lads. In one, Pippa had her arms in a noose around Caleb’s neck, and he looked like he was trying to pull away. The most recent pictures hung on the opposite wall, past the bath, near the door. In these he was a teenager, but utterly androgynous, his translucent skin a canvas for delicate, girlish features. He stared into the camera, sulky and contemptuous. When I sat down on the toilet to pee, his scorn almost put me off.

Just as I emerged from the bathroom, Pippa called from downstairs, “I’ve found it! Come and see this!”

She was crouched in front of the VCR, stabbing at the volume button. The images on-screen were high contrast and grainy, taken with a prototype video camera, and zoomed giddily around a party. The venue was magnificent, a ballroom of some sort with chandeliers and ornate molded ceilings. I recognized Pippa’s brother, Harold, crammed into a white shirt and bow tie, a red cummerbund looped around his alarmingly high-waisted pants.

“Harold’s twenty-first,” said Pippa. “Mummy hired a ballroom on Exhibition Road to impress his Cambridge chums.”

Jiving toward the camera, Harold twirled around, the birthday boy showing off. So he did like to participate, I thought, but only if he was the center of attention. In the next shot, he inhaled helium from a balloon and passed it round to his friends, who took turns speaking goblin. In the middle of a friend’s spot-on Monty Python impersonation, Harold snatched the balloon and pushed himself in front of the camera. “My turn, my turn!” he shouted, while his friends looked away politely.

The tape cut to dancing after that, and Pippa sashayed into the frame, cutting a rug with Peggy, queen of the party in peacock-feathered headdress and emerald kimono. The two of them jittered back and forth like birds, moving toward the camera when it appeared to be moving away from them. My mother appeared in a shot, unaware that she was being filmed. The bloom of a teenager was still on her cheeks and she wore no makeup, or none that I could see. Around her neck was the locket, a perfect match for her simple navy shift. She leaned toward Peggy and they shared a joke that was drowned out by loud music. When she saw the video camera she jerked away from it, putting a hand in front of her face. But the more she retreated, the more whoever was filming seemed determined to follow her.

“I’d forgotten she was so shy,” said Pippa. “The rest of us were so desperate for attention, but she always got it without even trying.”

My father came into the shot and put his arm around her, creating a barrier for my mother to hide behind. She rested her head against his neck and his hand floated up and casually brushed through her hair. Seeing them together, the way they touched each other so naturally, so lovingly, shifted a tectonic plate deep inside me. My jaw contracted painfully, the precursor to tears, and in a lame bid for privacy, I turned away from Pippa and tried to shield my face with my hand.

Pippa, however, had a mother’s keen sense of impending distress and drew closer to me, attempted to shush and pat me on the shoulder. At her touch, I reflexively shrank away, and we both saw me doing it but pretended we hadn’t. For a second, she hovered with her hand outstretched to try again before withdrawing it for good. The TV erupted in static, startling us both, and Pippa leaned forward to eject the tape.

“Forgive me,” she said. “I should never have put it on. Seeing your mother again must have been quite a shock.”

She said more, but I was so flooded with emotion that I heard none of it, and a few minutes later, when I found myself outside on the dusty street, I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten down the stairs—or even if I’d said good-bye.

Chapter Four

London, 1981

F
or as long as we’d lived in Ladbroke Gardens, I’d been as scared as I was drawn to the trapdoor that marked the entrance to the air-raid shelter. Even though Dad had explained to me that, forty years ago, it had been the only place safe from trawling Luftwaffe, I couldn’t imagine why anyone had willingly gone down there. On the few occasions I had run—nervously, experimentally—across the trapdoor’s pitted metal surface, my footsteps had echoed with a hideous boom, and I sometimes worried that at any moment, the entire garden might collapse into the hole. One night, very late, a tapping sound had awakened me and I had looked out into the garden and seen Jimmy over by the air-raid shelter. He had trespassed onto our patio, and was poking at the hatch with a long metal stick, trying to open it. On his head was a miner’s lamp, and when he switched it off, he disappeared along with the light. From then on, I thought of the bunker as his domain, that he was its guardian or gatekeeper.

“We can’t go down there,” I said after Jean Luc had asked, but no one listened.

Dad fetched a crowbar, along with the metal tools he used for basic plumbing and fixing the car. He oiled and coaxed the ancient bolts of the air-raid-shelter hatch, which had rusted shut after years of being trampled and rained on. It took all of Dad’s strength plus the wiry disco muscles of Jean Luc and Henri to lift the iron lid, and even then it scraped across the patio paving stones like a car without tires. Once the hatch was out of the way, they stepped back from the cavity and peered inside.

“We need a torch,” said Dad, flicking Mum an expectant glance.

“Do we have one?”

“In the laundry,” he said, looking down into the hole.

She went inside to fetch it.

Gripping Dad’s hand, I sidled closer to the hole. I wanted to peer over the edge, to see inside the bunker, but the thought of going down there made my stomach pitch. I was imagining how dark and cold it was when the path went out from under me and I was jerked upward and swung out over the hole. I felt myself falling and screamed, and fell some more, and screamed again before my father returned me to solid ground, and I stood next to Jean Luc, who was laughing.

“Boo!” he said, his French accent cartoonish. “The little one is afraid,
n’est-ce pas
?”

Henri slapped him on the back. “
Ben oui!
” Of course.

I glared at my father and let go of his hand. His foot hovered above the hole. Was he going to jump in? “Dad! No!”

“Don’t worry, there’s a staircase. Stone steps leading down.”

“Wait for the torch,” I pleaded. “Mum won’t be long.”

A bank of clouds unfurled, turning the garden gray. Mum appeared from the back door carrying a small cardboard box, and held it up to show us. “Candles,” she said. “I couldn’t find the torch.”

Dad opened his mouth to speak but frowned instead. Henri handed him a lighter and Mum opened the box of candles and gave one to each of the men, who passed around the flame and cupped it with their hands.

Mum passed me a candle, but I didn’t take it. “Are you really going down there?”

“It’ll be fun,” she said, as though trying to convince herself. Then her expression changed. “Maybe you should wait up here?”

Being left on my own was the only thing worse than going down there, and I took the candle from Mum’s hand.

“It’s the last one,” she said. “We’ll have to share.”

Dad went down first, with Jean Luc and Henri behind him. I insisted that Mum follow behind me with the candle, which meant that I was next in line. The staircase was narrow and steep, and we edged down it in single file, my knees wobbling more with each step. By candlelight, it was hard to see much, but the walls on either side were wet and slime grew in the gaps between stones. As we got farther down, the air became dank and wintry and my feet splashed in shallow puddles. I was wearing my school shoes, round toed, with a buckled strap, and the water quickly breached their leather sides and seeped between my toes.

In front of me, Henri turned around and pulled a face, but even with some daylight filtering down from behind me, his features were murky, indistinct. Only he must have seen how scared I was because he didn’t try to tickle me or make any more wisecracks—he just turned around and kept going forward. It was very quiet on the stairs, quiet enough to hear the flickering of candle flames and my own breath. I’d counted nine steps when Dad’s voice called up from below.

“Bottom!” he said.

“Anything down there?” Henri called to him.

Dad didn’t answer straightaway. In front of Henri, I heard Jean Luc land on the bottom of the shelter and splash about in water. I could just make out their candle flames, disjointed from their bodies, fireflies flitting around in the dark.

“Fucking hell!” It was Dad, his voice booming in the echo chamber. “It’s like a swimming pool down here.”

“Pardon your French,” said Mum, tut-tutting behind me.

“You probably shouldn’t come any farther,” called Dad. “The bottoms of my jeans are soaked.”

“Hold my hand,” said Mum, and I reached out but couldn’t find her.

Jean Luc exclaimed something in French, but it was lost in a long, groaning, scraping noise coming from above, the sound of iron grating against concrete, followed by a dull metallic clang. On the clang, a thick cloak of darkness settled over us. I blinked furiously, willing my eyes to find light, but there was none, only the faint orange bruise of a candle flame deep in the chamber.

Mum called out first, to let the others know the hatch had been shut, and a terrible racket followed, the grown-ups shouting a torrent of rude words and abuse, whatever they could think of to will the hatch open. When that didn’t work, there was a scramble of limbs on the narrow staircase as the men swapped places with the women. Dad pushed past me to get to the top, followed by Jean Luc and Henri, which left Mum and me to shuffle backward, and downward, farther into the hole. Someone shoved a candle in my direction and told me to hold on to it, and though a spray of hot wax scalded my fingers I didn’t dare let go.

After we had exchanged places, Mum was above me on the stairs, and I was at the bottom of the group, closest to the water and whatever else was down there. I swung round to face the chamber and breathed in air that was thick and smelled of the earth, as if my face was being pushed into garden soil. Not wanting to take my eyes off the black space, I stepped backward up the stairs toward Mum, but lost my foothold and slid in the opposite direction. The candle flew from my hand and blew out, and for a few seconds, I too was airborne before landing in a puddle of freezing-cold water. From my mouth came a crunching sound, as if I’d bitten down on gravel, and a second later, my jaw exploded with pain. Hot liquid pooled in my throat, and I tried to breathe but gagged. The surrounding water was gritty with sediment and I shivered as it rose over my limbs. I reached for the glasses that should have been on my face, but they had come off in the fall.

I screamed then, a shrill gargle that ricocheted around the stone chamber and echoed back to me, louder and disembodied, as though the sound had come from two people, not just me. I could hear Mum groping toward me down the stone steps, but she had no candle and splashed around in the dark, as good as blind.

“Suki!” she called out. “Where are you?”

Her voice was coming from too far away. Something was wrong. I was on the opposite side of the bunker from my mother, a long way from where I should have fallen. I had been standing right next to her, had only slipped from the bottom step, yet a cavernous space now separated us. I reached for her anyway, and called out—only my words were treacle, slow and thick. The pain that had started in my jaw was growing to fill my whole head and I realized I was panting but getting no air. I thought perhaps it was the locket chain that was choking me, but even after I’d loosened it, I couldn’t breathe.