The Girl Below (8 page)

The instant they left, I realized how drunk I was, how far from home. Just thinking about the number of tube changes made me weary. I drifted toward a bald patch in the crowd next to the cigarette machine, and decided to at least sober up before I set off. I was standing there, a few minutes later, feeling self-conscious, when I noticed the Icelandic guy throwing glances in my direction—too many, and too lingering for them to be accidental. He did not look at me expectantly like Mike had. His look was direct, almost a challenge; he was daring me to resist looking back.

Before he even walked over to the cigarette machine and casually dropped in a few coins, I could tell he was a player, but there was something about those men that put me at ease. You always knew where you stood with them, what you were letting yourself in for: nothing.

“What happened to your pals?” he said, pressing the button above Lucky Strike.

“They went to get a curry, but I didn’t feel like going.”

He opened the cigarette packet before answering. “You made a good decision. These Englishmen, they meet a pretty girl, they have fun together . . . but they always ruin it by taking her for a curry on the way home. They don’t know what is sexy. Myself, I don’t know either, but I know it’s not curry.”

Putting down the opposition, false modesty: smooth, but I let him get away with it. He introduced himself. He was Dutch, not Icelandic, and his name was Wouter—the kind of name that only a confident man would admit to outside his homeland. He said he was a multimedia artist and I pretended to believe him, just as I pretended not to mind when he didn’t ask what I did or even what my name was. Nor did he offer to buy me a drink, perhaps realizing that he didn’t have to.

“How about we go outside?” he said when a surge of new people arrived in the bar. “This place is too crowded—don’t you think?”

I had to agree. In the tiny paved courtyard at the back of the bar, he took a small tin out of his jacket pocket and lit a giant spliff. When he handed it to me, I inhaled as lightly as I could and passed it to him, but my throat was still burning from the first toke when he handed it back to me. The joint tasted strange, like chlorine or Jif, but I put that down to London pollution, which often got up your nose just before you were about to eat and made everything taste like the end of an exhaust pipe. Soon, the thing was only a roach, and I remembered why I didn’t normally smoke: marijuana made me want to hurl, especially if I had been drinking. That was probably my last coherent thought.

Wouter put his arm around me, and without any warning, tongue-dived my ear. I leaned away, or thought I had, but all that happened was that the pint glasses on the table in front of us began to list, and the courtyard dipped and folded like swell on a rough sea.

I was way, way too old for this. “Last tube,” I slurred, into Wouter’s hair—he had dandruff, I noticed as I pushed him away and stood up, knocking something off the table that shattered into a million lethal pieces. Using him as a springboard, I launched myself across the courtyard, but he had attached himself to me seemingly with Velcro and was still trying to snog me when I reached the other side. He was still trying when I got to the tube station, and pushed me up against a wall, sliding a leg in between mine. He managed to undo a few of my shirt buttons, but he was so wasted it was like being mauled by a puppy, and when a tube rumbled toward the platform, I whipped through the barrier to catch it, and left him on the other side, looking hopelessly around for me.

Somehow, I emerged unscathed half an hour later at the Willesden Green tube station, five hundred meters from home, but in my condition, a distance of seven times that. Just before reaching my door, I fell sideways into a shrub that I swear hadn’t been there before I left that night. I hadn’t fallen over since I was a kid, and the shock of it was deeply insulting, like a punch in the face from a stranger, though I can’t say I felt any pain.

In the poky kitchen, I guzzled three pints of water and plundered the fridge for leftovers, finding a pink, three-day-old sausage—was it raw?—and something that had looked like pizza but turned out, when I bit into it, to be only its empty cardboard carton. I stumbled down the hallway, where one of the flatmates jack-in-the-boxed out of a bedroom and told me, in the voice of a mother superior, that the stock market had crashed and it had all gone white.

“What’s gone white?”

“Are you all white?” she repeated.

Something flew in the shadows behind her, a bat with a human face, and I ran away.

I should have known that I wasn’t going to be able to sleep, but I tripped over the sofa with hope in my heart. Normally when I was drunk or high, I could turn my head to the left on the pillow and the room stopped spinning, but this time I was so far gone it spiraled whichever way I faced. Soon, the wallpaper was rippling too, and I lurched off the couch and zigzagged down the hall to find the bathroom. But someone had moved it, and the next thing I knew, I had taken a tumble and was groping at hulks of ceramic and trying to swim the breaststroke across a deep, black puddle of water.

The bathroom was flooded, not just sprayed with water as if someone had taken a shower and forgotten to use a bathmat but drenched in an unpleasantly cold and glutinous liquid that was black but reminded me of thin, overcooked porridge. It took half a minute for me to recall what the stuff reminded me of: the water in the bottom of the bunker on the day we were trapped down there. In the next instant, as though I had bitten my lip, I tasted blood, but when I ran my tongue over my teeth and gums, there was only saliva.

The bathroom was windowless, and no lights were on in the hallway, but I made my way toward the pale hull of the toilet bowl, rising out of the water. It didn’t look far away, but when I tried to crawl toward it, my arms and legs were switched off, and wouldn’t do as my brain told them. My neck was weak too, and my head drooped into the cold, thick water. Soil and salt filled my mouth, and I tried to spit it out but couldn’t. Just as my neck collapsed, I managed to turn my head to one side and my mouth came to rest only millimeters clear of the foul liquid.

I had taken drugs before, in reckless combinations, but this was different. I wasn’t out of it, I was hyperpresent, and fighting for my life. Somehow I found the strength to turn over onto my back. I concentrated on breathing, listened hard to the rhythm of my lungs. Slowly the water receded, started to melt away as if it had never been there, and the tiles were soon only damp. I got to my knees and spewed into the toilet, emptied my stomach of whatever rank poison had been there.

Vomiting broke the spell completely, and I was surprised by how quickly strength returned to my body. I was still a little shaken, but I got up, turned on the light, and looked around the bathroom. It was orderly, solid, even homely, and I picked up my toothbrush and luxuriated in the ordinariness of cleaning my teeth.

I was so relieved that my powers of observation deserted me. Then, treading softly down the hall, I heard a squelching sound and looked down at my clothes. They were soaked through and covered in a kind of mulch. In the living room, I peeled them off, and some of the mulch got on my hands and gave off the odor of mold. I thought back to the shrubbery I’d fallen into, and decided it must have been muddy underneath, though I did not remember it being so. But after everything that had happened that evening, it was a feasible enough explanation, and I tried hard not to think of an alternative.

Chapter Six

London, 1981

I
n the months that followed my parents’ wild party, I waited, tense with anticipation, for my mother to confront me again over the whereabouts of her locket. I thought it was only a matter of time before she spoke to Esther’s mother and exposed the fib I had told about Esther breaking it, and each day I rehearsed my confession.

But autumn fell, and still nothing had been said. Mum simply acted as though there had been no locket. She never mentioned it, let alone my part in its disappearance. At first I was relieved, but as time went on, I was utterly bewildered and then finally just plain curious. Why did my mother seem not to miss the locket that had once been so precious to her? When enough time had passed that I was sure I would not be blamed for its disappearance, I found an opportunity to ask her about it. She was sitting at her dressing table, French-plaiting her hair, and I was going through the remains of her jewelry box when I found the silver catch that I had sliced off the locket. I held it up and contorted my face into what I hoped was a look of innocent puzzlement. “What do you think happened to the rest of it?” I said.

Mum abandoned the plait, midfold, and took the piece of silver from my hand. “Someone stole it,” she said. “After the party.”

“Who?” I said, my chest thumping. “Who stole it?”

“I don’t know. It was very dark.”

“You saw them take it?”

Mum put the catch back in the jewelry box and snapped the lid shut. “No,” she said, seemingly irritated by my question, “I couldn’t see well enough. It was late at night.”

Though I asked her again, once or twice, her answer was always the same, and soon enough, I forgot about the locket and became preoccupied with other momentous things, such as Christmas. That was the year I ruined it for myself, by myself. At nearly seven, I was far too old to still believe in Santa Claus, but believe in him I did, with a fervor that bordered on religious fundamentalism. Every year on Christmas morning, I woke at three or four
A.M.
—sometimes as early as midnight—and pounced on the pillowcase bulging with toys at the end of my bed. It wasn’t the toys I was after, but their supernatural smell: a sugary aroma of nutmeg, fresh snow, and reindeer fur that to me was the essence of magic. To try and preserve the perfume, I held off playing with my presents for as long as possible, and the same went for not eating the walnuts and satsumas that had been tossed into the sack alongside them. Those I would stow under my bed for safekeeping, where they remained until wizened and black with rot.

At home, no brothers or sisters were there to challenge my zeal, but at school I was forced to defend Santa by using all the skills at my disposal. I didn’t mind if other children voiced their doubts, but one day a boy named Charles Pycraft took things too far. He stood on a chair in the middle of the classroom and told us he’d seen his dad sneaking into his room at night with a sack full of presents, and what’s more, he’d taken a Polaroid. When he held it up for us all to see I launched myself at him—rather than look. At first Charles laughed, and so did the rest of the class, until he felt my teeth sink into the fat, juicy lobe of his ear. While I ripped his Polaroid into a thousand tiny shreds, he howled his lungs out. As punishment, I was sent to a small library off the assembly hall called the Quiet Room, and was told to stay there and read the illustrated King James Bible until I was sufficiently sorry and in the mood to apologize. At three o’clock, when that mood still had not arrived, I was frog-marched to the cloakroom where my mother stood waiting to fetch me.

“Suki, love,” she said, “you mustn’t take everything to heart or they’ll tease you even more.”

Mum often spoke of teasing—as in “Don’t cry, he’s only teasing”—but I didn’t understand why it was my fault for reacting, not theirs for being mean. That was one of the disadvantages of being an only child: you lived in your own head, played yourself at Connect Four, and developed a skin so thin it might as well not have been there.

At school, Charles became a hero because he’d needed stitches (“How many?” the other kids had squealed, ferreting in his hair) and I was called a ninny or a baby for believing in made-up things. After that, I saved my zeal for home, where it blossomed into an obsession. Midyear, I started sending letters to Santa, and by November I was writing daily to butter him up. According to a book I’d read, letters to Lapland didn’t need stamps, which is how I bypassed my mother, who always tried to sneak a look at what I was writing.

“Do you know what you want for Christmas this year?” she’d say.

“You don’t need to know what I want,” I’d tell her. “Only Santa needs to know.”

But I needed my mother for something, and devised a plan in which she’d finally give me the ammunition I needed. Mum could be relied on for the truth; she didn’t believe in God and said so. She was the one who could verify Santa.

It was a rainy Sunday when I asked her, and she was tackling the weekly mountain of Dad’s business shirts, carefully steering the iron round an obstacle course of collars and cuffs. I started out warily by asking if Lapland was a real place, and if it might be possible to go there on holiday, for instance, next Christmas for two or three weeks.

“It’s a real place, all right,” she said. “In the Arctic Circle, near the North Pole. But I don’t know about going there on holiday. That would cost an arm and a leg.”

The mere thought of Santa’s reindeer skidding about in all that snow made my heart thud, and I took a deep breath to ask my next question, the big one. “So if Lapland is a real place in the Arctic Circle, then Santa must be a real person too—right?”

“You know the answer to that,” said Mum, ironing on.

“I know he’s real, but the kids at school think he isn’t, and I want to prove them wrong.”

Mum looked up from the ironing board. “He’s real if you think he’s real, dear.”

“I know, I know, but is he?”

She studied me for a moment, searching for the right words. “If you believe in him, he is.”

That sounded like a trick, and I stamped my foot in indignation. “You always say that and I don’t know what it means. All you have to tell me is that he’s real!”

“I can’t do that,” she said. “I don’t want to lie to you.”

“I’m not asking you to lie to me. Just say it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes!” My excitement grew. Finally, I was going to have proof that Santa was real, and I could go to school and tell all the other kids they were dimwits.