The Girl Below (28 page)

I had never been out with a lawyer before, or anyone even remotely professional, and I noticed that my friends took the relationship more seriously after I told them what he did. However, I was more interested in his passion for films. He followed only the work of what he called “true auteur directors,” and he delighted in educating me on all that I’d missed (which was nearly everything). One of Edward’s favorite things to do was to invite me over for curated movie marathons. These he took very seriously, and once one had begun, there was no question of it finishing early, even if I was tired. One night, it was after midnight when he took the final DVD out of its box and put it into the player. Five minutes into the film, the subtitles blurred into a hairy black line, and my eyelids tanked.

I remember Edward tried to prise them open, but to no avail. When we got into bed, I found that I couldn’t pass out like I had on the couch. Edward was lying too close, and my limbs found ways to slide in his direction. He had his back to me, and I caressed his slim, smooth hips.

“I thought you were tired,” he said.

“So did I.”

“Then what are you doing?” His voice was flat, and my hand retreated. I had not known what I was doing, but whatever it was, I kept doing it, like a puppy that returns to the owner who beats it. One night he asked me to name my top five albums, and when I had picked the
Dirty Dancing
sound track, which I had liked very much growing up, he’d laughed, unkindly. I should have laughed too, at his pretension, but instead I doubted my taste.

My hope was kept alive by the times he would soften and take me to bed, where he would whisper intimate confessions about his life. As an eleven-year-old he had been sent to boarding school, where an older boy had raped him with the handle of a cricket bat. He had never told a soul, and the secret had almost devoured him. When he was sixteen, he had tried to kill himself. He was only telling me these things, I reasoned, because he trusted me, because he loved me, and on the promise of that, I trailed around after him for another few weeks.

Sometime around then, a letter arrived from Rowan.

Dear Suki,
it began,
It’s not my thing to write letters, so that should tell you how upset I am by what’s happened.

I knew I should stop reading, tear up the letter and throw it away, but I couldn’t help myself.

Your father and I have worked bloody hard to provide for our children, and we don’t want you to take it away from them. Considering your past behavior toward us, Ludo’s offer was extremely generous, and it just shows your selfish attitude that you turned it down. The money is more than you’re owed, given what your parents’ flat sold for in the eighties. You probably don’t realize this, but houses in London weren’t worth much then. If it had been up to me, we would have offered you less. Don’t think that by holding out for more, the amount will go up. It won’t. Ludo doesn’t know about this letter, so there’s no use ringing him up to talk to him about it. He said he was going to try giving you the check again, but I don’t know why. I know you’re too greedy and won’t take it.

There was more, but it was more of the same. I had to read the letter a few times to work out why she was so angry. From what I understood, my father had taken more than his share from the sale of the London flat and there was some kind of deficit that she was worried I was angling to take back from them.

When I showed the letter to Edward to ask for his legal opinion, he agreed. “She’s trying to buy you out of Ludo’s will.”

“But I don’t want any of that,” I said, thinking of the ugly ranch and muddy paddocks and the stables full of twitching horses. “And besides, he’s still alive.”

“She must think you’re waiting to make your move.”

“I have a move?”

“You’d be surprised by how many people do.”

That was one of the last sane conversations I ever had with Edward. That same week, he started accusing me of fucking his friends, and the more strenuously I denied it, the more proof he seemed to find of my guilt. I had always thought jealousy might be flattering, but the look in Edward’s eyes when he accused me of cheating was sheer lunacy, not affection. A few weeks later he dumped me, though it should have been the other way round.

Breaking up with Edward took me to a level of devastation I had never known before. Not because he had been a great love—we had been together barely two months—but because I believed it was the end of love, that he had been my last chance, my last shot. I was not yet twenty-seven, which I knew was hardly old, but I felt worn out. On the day we broke up, I experienced what felt like a power outage in the region of my heart. It was done with being battered, had decided to shut down for good.

I went to Wellington for a week to get away from it all. The capital was in the grip of an Arctic wind when I arrived, and I stayed in a dreary self-contained studio on the tenth floor of an industrial concrete block. It had a tiny balcony shaped like a cage, and a view of an abandoned building site that had been turned into a car park. When I had “settled in,” I picked up the phone and worked my way through a short list of phone numbers. I had hoped to see Becky, but a message told me her cell phone had been deactivated, and when I tried her home number, a flatmate told me she had moved out long ago. When I couldn’t reach anyone, I decided to go out on my own.

The city was jammed with after-work drinkers, and I fought my way through them in bar after bar, pretending to look for someone who was never there. I found a pub where hundreds of blokes and their girlfriends were crowded in front of a rugby match on a giant screen, but the boisterousness of the crowd unnerved me, and I left without ordering a drink. It was too early to be out alone, though, when everyone was just getting started, so I went into a liquor store that was next door to an Irish pub. The girl at the counter had pink shiny skin and ginger hair, and chirped at me in a thick Irish accent when I handed over my money. I had not understood a word of what she’d said.

“Excuse me?”

“Can I see year eye dee?” she repeated.

“My eye what?”

“Your eye-dentification,” she mouthed, slowly, as though I were retarded. “So I can check you’re over twenty?”

I held up my driver’s licence, which had a picture of me taken when I was at university. She looked from me to the photograph and scowled. “You need a new picture, love,” she said. “That one looks nothing like you.”

Maybe it wasn’t me. I certainly didn’t feel like the girl in the photograph anymore.

I bought cigarettes and hurried back to the gray box of my studio room to smoke them with wine. As I fumbled with the swipe card, I heard the phone ring on the other side of the door. I missed the call, but when I got in, a red light was flashing on the telephone. There were no instructions about what to do, how to retrieve the message or make the flashing stop, so I ignored it and went outside to smoke in the cage of a balcony, sitting cross-legged on a metal grate. Cars and bits of pavement were visible through the gaps and for a split second I imagined what would happen if the cage came unattached from the wall. The wine had been supposed to act as a heater, but my feet and hands were frozen, and I ran inside and, seeing a
NO SMOKING
sign propped up next to the empty fruit bowl, smoked with my head hanging out of an open window. I’d already downed most of the bottle, but instead of getting me drunk, the wine had combined with the nicotine to cause my nerves and thoughts to race unrelentingly.

I had the strangest sensation then that I had somehow left the real world behind, and had gone to a place that didn’t exist. I had taken annual leave, and it would be weeks before anyone realized I was missing. Starting to panic, I tried to call friends in Auckland to tell them where I was, but it was Friday night and none of them was home, not even my best friend Susan, who had a young baby and never went out. I even started calling my father, but remembered Rowan’s letter, and stopped in the middle of dialing his number. Desperate to talk to another human, I rang a pizza delivery chain and ordered whatever was on special. They said it would take forty-five minutes, so I switched on the TV and flicked through random images. Then, in the middle of taking a pee, the phone rang again, and I ran to answer it with my jeans half zipped.

“Hello?” I said, eagerly, hoping Becky had somehow tracked me down.

“It’s me.” His voice was robotic.

I felt sick. “How did you find me?”

“I was worried about you and I called your work. They said—”

I held the phone away from my ear and stared at the tiny plastic holes where Edward’s voice was leaking out. Maybe if I didn’t put the phone back to my ear, I could pretend he wasn’t there. Maybe he wasn’t there. Right from the start, the phone had been playing tricks on me. I followed the cord to the wall and pulled it out at the socket. The flashing red light finally extinguished and the rest of the phone went dead.

Had I really talked to Edward? It seemed unlikely that he would have found me here. But if not him, then to whom had I spoken? I scanned the studio’s gray walls for clues, but found none—nothing in here reminded me of anything. Even the clothes in my suitcase did not look like mine. My driver’s license showed a picture of a familiar young woman, but the girl in the liquor store had been right not to recognize her. Neither did I.

The pizza arrived. On it was pink and yellow goo that had fused with the gray cardboard box it had come in. I wasn’t sure that it was really food. I was out of wine; had three cigarettes left, then two, then one. I emptied the ashtray on top of the fake pizza and the ash stuck to the topping like fine black pepper. I tried not to think of Edward, but he surrounded me. The walls of the room were his skull, and I was sitting inside his head.

I lay down on the bed to go to sleep and that’s when it started. Without prelude, my mind became fixated on a list of ways to kill myself. I thought at first that I must be the one writing this list, but soon after, I realized I wasn’t in control of it, that the list was writing itself. It had invaded my thoughts like a virus.

Whether I had my eyes open or closed made no difference. The list kept scrolling, demanding that I pay attention to its methods, perhaps ten or twelve in all: strangulation by hanging; an overdose of pills; falling from a tall building or bridge, like the one that spanned Auckland Harbor. Nothing very original or creative, just the basic methods, brutal and efficient. These unfolded step by step like the safety instructions at the start of a flight, only the attendant (who was me) had gone rogue and was demonstrating death instead of self-preservation.

As time went on, I found I was no longer simply a passive bystander watching myself carry out the methods, but was experiencing a set of corresponding physical sensations: the vertiginous urge to jump; the long, slow trapeze of falling.

Fifteen feet away, the open apartment window beckoned. From there it was only a matter of stepping off a metal bar, of surrendering to the open arms of gravity. Why had I left the window open? I wanted to shut it but could not risk getting close enough. Instead, I gripped the mattress with both hands and closed my eyes so I wouldn’t be able to see it.

But the list was not so easily thrown off course. Just down the road, it announced, was an open-late supermarket where boxes of aspirin and razors were stacked prettily on the shelves. It reminded me that a speeding bus would also do the trick; or a train if one was at hand.

I tightened my grip on the mattress. I had thought, before this, that when people committed suicide they had done so by choice, that they’d
wanted
to kill themselves. But I saw now that suicide wasn’t something you chose. It chose you. It was a compulsion, a command, and the margin for survival was narrower than a pin.

In the end, my own probably came down to luck: I was good at insomnia, at wakefulness, at hanging on to consciousness when I should have been asleep. Nodding off or even just zoning out for a minute, in this case, would have been fatal. That’s when the list would have pounced.

Sometimes, when I have gone over the events of that night in the gray box, I have seen another outcome very clearly. I have imagined myself losing awareness for a second or two and walking to the window and climbing up on the cage and jumping off without hesitation. Mid-fall, I come to, and the last thought I have before I hit the pavement is that no one will ever know I didn’t want to jump.

Chapter Eighteen

Skyros, 2003

“W
atch this,” said Caleb, crossing the ferry to where Harold was napping on a wooden bench, his head resting on his camera bag, his leg tied to his suitcase by a garish silk tie.

“Don’t,” I said. “He’s fast asleep.”

But Caleb picked up the suitcase and made to run off with it, so that Harold’s leg jerked in the same direction and he rolled off the bench. “Stop!” he called out, landing awkwardly on all fours. “Stop, thief!”

Caleb laughed hysterically, “It’s me, you knob. Can you look after our stuff while we get something to eat? Seeing as how your security system rocks.”

“You little toad,” said Harold, still half asleep, but Caleb dumped his bag there anyway, along with the fish, which had started to reek after basking all day in the Aegean sun.

“Sorry,” I said, and was about to take my suitcase with me, but realized how heavy it was and put it down next to Caleb’s. “Actually, do you mind?”

“Just get me a fucking coffee,” Harold said through clenched teeth.

For breakfast or lunch, or whatever meal it was, we bought cans of thick chocolate milk and a packet of dry, sugary biscuits that tasted, well, foreign. After sucking on diesel fumes for seven hours straight, everyone in the canteen had turned into zombies and stared in our direction without seeing anything.

“I’m still hungry,” said Caleb when the biscuits were all gone, and the ship answered him with a booming honk.