The Girl Below (6 page)

“Wait there, Suki,” said my mother, her voice growing shrill. “I can’t see. I’ll come back for you, stay where you are.”

“No!” I yelled. “Don’t leave me here. Please.” But my voice made no sound. I was mute, trapped in silence behind thick glass at the far end of a long, dark room. My head grew heavy, then leaden, and rolled to one side and sank in a halo of cold water. The pain fanned out from my head, my chest, pinning down my limbs, but at the center of it, I was shrinking, becoming a wisp. Then the wisp wasn’t there at all, only a chill.

When I came to, a candle quivered somewhere overhead, and I saw my dad’s face, his worried eyes searching through the murk. I was near the bottom of the stairs. I managed a whimper, the noise an injured puppy might make, and he found me and scooped me into his arms.

Up on the surface, daylight blinded and stung my eyes. I put my hand to my face and touched my glasses. I did not understand how they’d found their way back to me. My father, I supposed, must have picked them up. A while later I realized that the pain had gone. I wasn’t even crying, though I was sure I had been right before I passed out.

Dad carried me inside over his shoulder, and with his other not-quite-free hand, tried to comfort my mother, who was shaking uncontrollably. When he put me down on the bed, she started weeping. “I thought it was the end,” she said through tears. “I thought I’d finally made it happen, that I’d killed her.”

My father laid a steadying hand on her arm. “It was an accident,” he said, wearily. “She fell off the step, that’s all.”

“Nobody pushed me,” I said, hoping to clear things up. “I just slipped.”

“I know, dear,” said Mum. “I know.” She attempted a smile. “We’ve all had a terrible fright, but the main thing is, you’re okay.”

Dad left me alone with Mum, and she helped me out of my wet clothes.
Was
I okay? I certainly didn’t feel it. Everything around me looked familiar but I wasn’t sure if I was seeing any of it through my own eyes. My bare skin too felt like borrowed clothes and under my ribs was a growing, hollow patch of hunger for something that wasn’t food.

“What is it, weenie?” said Mum, using the nickname she’d given me as an infant, when I’d been small and weak and often sick. “Do you feel unwell? I hope you haven’t caught a chill.”

I wanted so much to tell her what had happened down in the bunker but when I opened my mouth to speak, I burst into tears, and anything I might have said was swallowed up by long, unruly shudders. Mum pulled me to her chest, and rubbed my back and made hushing noises. “I should never have let you go down there,” she said. “This is all my fault.”

After a time I stopped crying, but I felt no better, nor was I ready to speak. A hundred horrible images crowded my head but they were too muddled to put into words. “I’m thirsty,” was all I could manage.

Mum led me to the kitchen, where she took a box of pineapple juice out of the fridge, left over from last night’s punch. “By the way,” she said, pouring me a glass, “have you seen my locket? It isn’t in my jewelry box, and I know that’s where I left it.”

She had taken me by surprise—wasn’t I still being comforted?—and I guiltily put my hand to my neck, but the locket wasn’t there. The last time I remembered wearing it was down in the bunker. What if someone made me go down there again to look for it? “No,” I said, quickly. “I haven’t seen it.”

Mum stopped what she was doing. “Are you sure?”

“I haven’t seen it since last night.”

She fished around in the pocket of her jeans and held something out in the palm of her hand. “That’s odd,” she said, “because this morning I found this.” She showed me a tiny nugget of silver, the broken catch.

“Oh,” I said, feigning surprise. “It’s broken.”

“Yes, it is.” Mum paused. “I found it in your room, Suki. Next to the carving knife.”

Blood surged through my head, deafening me. Then, over the noise, squeaked a voice that didn’t sound like mine, “It was Esther.”

“I beg your pardon?” said Mum.

“Esther did it. We played with your jewelry box when you were asleep.”

Mum eyeballed me for a long time, and I stood in front of her, dumbstruck by my audacity.

“And you don’t know where the rest of it is?”

I shook my head.

“I knew I shouldn’t have taken it off,” she said, sounding disappointed. “Even with the other necklace on, I looked nothing like Mae West.”

We went to join the others on the lawn of the big garden, and I was given a sandwich but couldn’t do more than nibble at it. The adults around me were unusually animated, running over the highlights of last night’s party and laughing loudly. Two men who lived across the garden had joined us and it was they who confessed to closing the air-raid-shelter hatch while we were down there. The men had been at the party too, and shutting it had been a hangover prank. It was only once the hatch was shut, they explained through tears of laughter, that they realized what a devil of a time they’d have getting it open. Jean Luc, Henri, and my father hooted at the prank, but my mother, in a private glance, made sure to let my father know just how unfunny she thought it was.

While the adults talked, I sat rigid on the blanket with a tumbler of juice in my hand. I couldn’t drink it, nor eat any of the black forest gateau—my favorite—that was handed round at routine intervals, the slices getting smaller and the cream curdling as the afternoon wore on. Every so often, Mum would lean over and stroke the hair out of my eyes or ask if I was okay, and I would nod or smile to mask what was really going on.

Not very far away, in the middle of the patio, the bunker hatch was open, and the magnetic pull of that square black hole made me think I was going to throw up.

I would have run into the flat, but I didn’t want to leave my parents’ side, even though the later it got, the less often they looked at me, and my mother stopped asking how I was. When night fell, Dad dragged the stereo speakers out through the French doors and someone arrived with fish and chips wrapped in newspaper. They had not long been eaten when a neighbor leaned out of his window and told us off for making a ruckus, and the adults staggered inside with the picnic rug and laid it out on the floor of the living room. I tried to tell Mum and Dad they had left the hatch open and that my Wendy tent was still out on the lawn, but they said to stop fussing and that it was high time I went to bed.

I was sent to my room, where I put on my pajamas. By the window, the clothes I had changed out of earlier were soaking in a bucket, and I peered in at the stained pattern of my strawberry dress. Something was bobbing on the surface of the water, what looked to me like treasure, two pretty white pearls, and I fished them out and in the palm of my hand examined them. Only on closer inspection they turned out to be not pearls, but teeth—a small pair, perfectly formed, very clean. Staring at them, I tasted iron, and a stab of pain echoed in my jaw—the same sensation I’d felt in the bunker, after the fall. I reached for my mouth, frightened to think what I might find, but my teeth, all of them, were still in place.

I began to shake anyway, and the teeth fell out of my hand. One landed in the bucket, where it floated lazily on a fold of the strawberry dress, but the other tooth flew off in a wild direction and disappeared. I half-heartedly looked for it on the floor and under the bed but soon gave up because it wasn’t something I really wanted to find.

For what seemed like hours, I lay awake in bed, distressed by the day’s events and unable to make sense of them. A lonely feeling had settled over me and I wished that I had told someone what had happened. I worried now that I had left it too late, that I wouldn’t remember all the details. But that wasn’t all. I had never lied to or kept secrets from my mother before, and doing so made me feel separate from her in a way I didn’t like.

When she came in later to check on me, I pretended to be asleep. Watching her cross the room to look in the bucket, my heart thumped so loudly I was surprised it didn’t give me away. I ruffled the bedclothes a little, willing her to notice me, to come to me, but she didn’t, she just picked up the bucket and left with it.

The night was very still, the air so close it was hard to breathe, and later, when someone went out into the garden to try to close the hatch, the sound of it scraping on the path was jarring, like a skill saw starting up. The noise stopped and, for a short while, all was quiet. I was about to go to the window when I heard male voices, chattering and laughing, before, with a satisfying
thunk,
the hatch found the groove it had been in for decades, maybe even since the last air raid, and finally, it was shut. I waited to feel relieved, but instead all that gripped me was the strange hunger I had felt earlier, as if there was less of me than there had been that morning. And then, under the spell of approaching sleep, I thought of the locket and how, if I had left it in the bunker, it was going to be down there for a very long time.

Chapter Five

London, 2003

A
hair dryer, vacuum cleaner loud, sucked me from sleep, and I realized the flatmates were up before me, eating breakfast in the kitchen and getting ready for work. After leaving Pippa’s around eleven the night before, I had walked the three miles back to Willesden Green, stayed up to write in my journal, then collapsed into a deep sleep. Now I realized I’d slept through my alarm clock as well as all the others in the flat. I didn’t have my own room but was sleeping in the living room, and had been for almost three months. For the last two, I had perfected the art of invisibility, waking early and going out before everyone else got up; sneaking in late after they’d all gone to bed. Only this morning I’d fucked all that up, and was stretched out in the open like the hobo that I was.

A pair of high heels clacked their way toward me and paused near my suitcase. I’d been too tired to stow it the night before, and was pretty sure I’d left my journal out on top. I winced at the thought of it being exposed, but rather than risk a confrontation I rolled over and pretended to be asleep. From the shoes, I had a pretty good idea of which flatmate it was, and if she wanted to snoop, let her snoop. Only she didn’t. Instead she kicked the suitcase hard, a really fierce kick that I supposed she would have liked to aim at my head—a kick that must have hurt her more than it hurt my suitcase.

Half an hour later, the last of them had left for work, and I got up and surveyed the scene. My journal was out in plain sight, which was careless, but it didn’t look like anyone had read it. Watching the video of my mother the night before had unleashed a frenzy of long-forgotten memories, and I had tried to scribble down as much as I could remember about the old days when my parents were still together. I had been doing that a lot lately, writing down events from my past. The present was so empty, so dull, that I didn’t have much to say about it.

Ahead of me, my workless day unfurled, a replica of yesterday and the day before it, lethally empty until I filled it up. The easiest way was to shorten the day with sleep, so I closed my eyes again and slept until eleven, when I got up feeling terminally exhausted. In the poky flat kitchen, I stole three teaspoons of instant Gold Blend and pretended the resulting sour mulch was espresso. It tasted so disgusting that it woke me up enough to check my e-mail on Belinda’s laptop, my second hit of shame for the day.

Belinda and I had worked on the same community newspaper in Auckland. The office had been short on kindred spirits and we had clung to each other more to keep others away than out of genuine affinity. Soon after moving into her London flat, I’d realized that without common enemies, we had little in common, but by then I needed the friendship more than she did and had tried like hell to keep it going. Lately, I had been feeling more like a parasite. At first she’d encouraged me to use her laptop when she was at work, but after a while she started putting it away in the top drawer of her dresser, forcing me to take it out in secret and erase my tracks after using it. I felt crummy the whole time I was doing it, but was careful never to look at her files, and reasoned that I was doing it for her own good. Without e-mail, I couldn’t apply for jobs, and until I had a job, I couldn’t move out of her flat.

Progress was inert. So far, I’d e-mailed out hundreds of résumés to HR departments and recruitment agencies without getting a single response. In the beginning, fresh off the plane and brimming with faux Kiwi enthusiasm, I’d actually rung people up, but they’d been so insulted by the interruption of a live voice that I’d given up doing it and now stuck to impersonal e-mails. The London job market was a fortress, and the harder I tried to get in, the more impenetrable it became. All I wanted was a humble temping assignment—office flunky, receptionist, wallpaper—but as August neared, and London shut down for the summer, even that was beginning to seem wildly beyond my reach.

For the third or fourth time that week, I took out my passport folder and considered my last traveler’s check, a crisp sheet of paper worth fifty quid if I cashed it. But I was worried that cashing it would signal the beginning of the end, that the second after it became real currency it would be taken from me. Just a few days earlier, I’d left the flat with a twenty-pound note in my jeans pocket, feeling flush, only to reach the tube station and find it had vanished into thin air. I had searched the pavements for an hour, mistaking leaves and lolly wrappers and even a condom packet for the lost note, to no avail, and had had the keenest sense that I had been fucked with, that someone had pinched my money and was hiding nearby, watching me and laughing.

With all the flatmates at work, there was no one to tell me to hurry up and save hot water, so I drained the boiler with a long, scalding shower, and sampled the comprehensive range of salon shampoos and conditioners lined up along the bath. Somewhere in the apartment, a phone trilled, but I’d just squeezed out the last blob of organic seaweed and jojoba frizz-control elixir, and left it unanswered.