The Girl Below (9 page)

“Well, I suppose you’re old enough to know.” She sounded sad, wistful. “We did start to wonder why you hadn’t found out.”

“Found out what?” My stomach flipped a pancake. “What do you mean
found out
?”

“You caught him once, barging into your room with the pillowcase—he tripped on something and woke you up—and the next day you were convinced you’d seen Santa. We couldn’t believe it.”

“But I did see Santa.”

Mum laughed. “I thought I saw a ghost once, but that doesn’t mean it was real.”

“Santa is a ghost?”

“No, weenie, Dad is Santa.”

I was inconsolable, but she hugged me as I wept, and promised to take me to the natural history museum, and to the movies, and wherever else I wanted to go to cheer me up. I told her I didn’t want to go anywhere, and probably never would. But there was worse to come. That Christmas, I woke at six out of habit and crawled to the end of my bed to marvel at the bulging pillowcase. For a moment I forgot and was filled with the old exhilaration. I sniffed the air and waited for the intoxicating fragrance to fill my lungs. But there was none. Instead I smelled wrapping paper, sticky tape, walnuts, and orange peel, stuff you could buy at Woollies or any other store. And even though I noticed that the sack was a little more bulging than usual, it was hours before I had recovered enough from the blow to open it.

Christmas vanished that year, and so too did my father, who went on a business trip and never came back.

The first sign of real absence was a box of clothes and shoes that Mum dropped off at the Westbourne Park branch of Oxfam. We often went there to look for unusual fabrics and outdated castoffs, which my mother miraculously recycled into fashionable outfits, but we never donated anything unless it was falling apart, practically in rags. So I was immediately suspicious when she placed a box on the counter and in it were a new pair of brogues, along with a selection of immaculate business shirts and ties.

“Won’t Dad be needing those when he gets back from Frankfurt?” I said.

“He isn’t in Frankfurt,” said Mum, pushing the box across the counter.

The way she said Frankfurt—like it was a type of poisonous snake—made me too scared to ask where he was. Besides, I was used to Dad being away for weeks or months at a time, working as some kind of businessman, and he always came back eventually, his arms bulging with last-minute presents still in their airport plastic bags: colored pencils and pens from Switzerland, chocolate blocks the size of my leg. I looked forward to his return for all the wrong reasons, and this time was no exception.

But the box of clothes didn’t add up. Standing by the Oxfam counter, a wobbly sensation spread through my stomach. I’d felt it before, when I left my favorite teddy bear at the newsagent’s and he was gone when we went back to get him. Whatever I was feeling must have been written on my face because Mum asked me if I wanted to get an ice cream. I didn’t really feel like one but didn’t want to miss out on a treat either, so when we went to the newsagent’s, I burrowed in the freezer for a Mini Milk. Out on the street, I pulled the ice cream from its sleeve, and straightaway, the long, thin tube fell off its stick and nose-dived to the pavement, but when Mum came out of the shop, I pretended to her that I’d already eaten it.

“That was quick,” she said as I covered the milky mess with my foot.

We walked home in silence, and the maisonette seemed bigger and emptier when we got there, as if Mum and I were rattling around in our old life, without a husband, without a dad, not enough of us to fill up the space.
Dr. Who
was on TV, and I watched the opening credits from behind the couch, frightened by the mind-bending music and swirling spiral of doom. When the Daleks bleeped, “Exterminate, exterminate!” I switched off the set and wondered if I’d ever be able to watch shows like that again without Dad’s knee to sit on. He’d let me stay up to watch
Jaws
with him once, and every time the shark attacked—or there was even a hint of jaggedy music—I had burrowed into the safety of his chest.

A week after Oxfam, Mum still hadn’t told me where Dad was, but by then it seemed too late to ask, so I made do with clues. Mum spent a lot of time on the phone after I’d gone to bed, and I struggled to piece together the missing side of the conversations I heard. There was one, late at night, that was so loud it woke me up. I was wondering if I should get out of bed to see what was wrong, when Mum went very quiet, and then I heard mewling, like a locked-out cat. That got me up, and I hovered in the hallway outside the kitchen without her seeing me.

When she spoke again, she said, “But, Mum, they’ve already left the country.”

She’d said “they.” Which meant Dad wasn’t alone. I guessed Mum was talking to Granny and she sounded exasperated with her. “He’s wanted to leave England for years. We argued about it all the time because I didn’t want to go.” For a while, she didn’t say anything and I thought she’d hung up. Then she hissed, “Because
she’s
from there.”

I held my breath and waited for her to say more. I waited a long time, imagined Mum winding the cord around her fingers like she did when the person on the other end was waffling. In a feeble voice, she said, “What are you suggesting? That I go all the way to New Zealand just to beg? I don’t even know his address.”

The names of all the capital cities of the world swirled in my head—we’d been learning them at school—but none matched with New Zealand. I was pretty sure we’d skipped it because the country was too small, just an island, like Corsica or the Isle of Wight.

“That’s not going to happen,” was the last thing I heard her say before the kitchen door flew open and she came out holding a ball of colored party napkins to her face. “Suki! Why aren’t you in bed?”

Too late, I leaped to my feet and scrabbled for the door to the bathroom, waiting to be told off. But Mum didn’t say anything, she just stood in the hallway staring at me.

“Sorry, Mum,” I said.

“It’s not your fault.” She sounded waterlogged, upset. “Go to bed.”

I hesitated. The right course of action was to do as I was told but instead I threw myself at her. When I squeezed her round the waist, she seemed to give way, as though her bones had only been made of sand. I squeezed tighter, but that made it worse and I fancied she was disintegrating. I choked back a sob and then she was comforting me, picking me up and putting me to bed, stroking the hair behind my ear until I fell asleep.

That night I dreamed the house was on fire and Mum was trapped inside. From the air-raid shelter in the garden, I could see her standing in the hallway, paralyzed. She kept shrinking to the size of a doll, small enough for me to pick up, but I couldn’t get out of the air-raid shelter to rescue her. The house became a furnace and she vanished, or burned, or both.

Dad wasn’t the only thing to disappear around that time. A few weeks after he left, I went into the living room one Saturday morning to watch cartoons but the television wasn’t there. On the shelf where it usually sat there was a clean space in the shape of a television set, and around it, an oblong of dust. I ran my finger through it and yelled out, “Mum! What have you done with the TV?”

There was no answer, so I padded downstairs to the kitchen, where Mum was at the table, studying a plate of toast. When I asked her where she had moved the TV, she looked confused. “I didn’t move it.”

“Well, someone has. Did Dad take it?”

Mum looked at me, puzzled, and we went upstairs to the living room. There was still no TV on the shelf, only the dust with a finger mark through it. Mum ran round the maisonette, checking all the rooms and opening windows to look outside. She opened the front door, but the TV wasn’t sitting in the communal hallway like I guessed she hoped it might be. Watching her anxiety escalate made me queasy. When she arrived at the guest cloakroom on the ground floor, a new addition to the maisonette that didn’t yet have bars on the windows, her shoes crunched on shards of broken glass and she held her hand out behind her to prevent me from rushing in. I stared at the broken window, the pieces of glass on the floor. The window was just big enough for a television to fit through, along with a small person, a midget or a child.

I didn’t go into the garden much after the burglary, just in case the midget was still around. I thought perhaps he or she lived in the air-raid shelter and was down there watching cartoons on our TV.

In the spring, we got a state-of-the-art alarm system installed. You had to punch in a long sequence of numbers when you switched it on and another long sequence when you switched it off. Mum wrote the numbers on the back of a five-pound note she kept in her wallet, reasoning that if her wallet was stolen, no one would think to examine the note for an alarm code or suspect that’s what the numbers related to. Just in case, she added a couple of extra digits to the sequence. She also stapled the five-pound note to the inside of her wallet to stop herself from accidentally spending it.

Each time we opened the front door, Mum grappled with the entire contents of her bag, trying to locate her wallet and the long sequence of numbers before the thirty-second grace period ended and the siren went off. Plenty of times she couldn’t decipher her own handwriting and punched in the wrong code, so I learned the sequence of digits by heart and would recite it to her as she attacked the number pad. I don’t know what she did when I wasn’t there. But then, I was never not there.

At night, we slept with the alarm on. Once inside my room, I had to stay there because otherwise one of the flashing green sensors would spot me creeping around the house. Mum had a red panic button installed by the bed, which alerted an army of security guards and policemen if anything terrible happened. As far as I knew, she used it only once, when a black-and-white tomcat broke into our house and pissed all over the kitchen bench. The cat set off the alarm and Mum pressed the panic button. I always thought it was the sudden, piercing shrill of the alarm that’d made the cat wet itself, but Mum said cats didn’t pee when they were frightened, only humans did that, me especially. When she discovered the cat in the kitchen, Mum tried to call the security guards to tell them not to come round, but she couldn’t reach anyone on the phone. Once you pressed a panic button, it turned out you couldn’t unpress it.

While we waited for the guards to arrive, Mum changed out of her nightdress and into jeans and a sweatshirt. She seemed embarrassed when she opened the door and explained to them what had happened. One of the men patted Mum on the shoulder and asked her if she was going to be okay. He offered to stay the night on the couch, but Mum pulled away from underneath his hand and soon after the guards left.

When they had gone, I climbed into Mum’s bed and snuggled next to her. Since Dad left, I had often slept there, but this was different. Usually, I drifted off within minutes, drawn quickly into oblivion by the reassuring presence of my mother, but this time I was seized by the notion that I was the one soothing her toward sleep. I even considered stroking her head but was worried she might think it weird. Once or twice I thought she had finally nodded off, only for her body to jerk violently, as it sometimes does on the cusp of sleep, with that peculiar sensation of falling off a cliff.

To pass the time, I stared at the ceiling, and watched in awe as the dimensions of the room began to distort. One moment the ceiling was a few inches above my head, bearing down on me like the lid of a tomb; a few seconds later it was mile-high open sky. To make it stop, I turned and focused on Mum, but she was shifting too—one moment her head colossal, the next a fragile sparrow’s egg attached by a spindle to her body. I closed my eyes, but that just made me dizzy, so I opened them again and watched the show. Was I causing the peculiarities, being tricked by my eyes, I wondered, or were the room and my mother really changing shape? I considered the question for quite some time before realizing, abruptly, that the distinction was meaningless. Whatever I could see in front of me was the reality I was stuck with, regardless of whether it was real or not.

Chapter Seven

London, 2003

T
he morning after the rat-poison spliff, I woke to shameful recollections of Dutch elves and flash floods and my own appalling behavior. My limbs had been stretched all night on a medieval rack, and my head throbbed like it had been thrown through a plate-glass window. It was almost midday and I had just enough time to shower and dress and catch a bus to Holland Park (extravagant in the extreme since my last forty quid had mysteriously become twenty overnight).

The park seemed unnecessarily crowded, its paths clogged with tourists and baby strollers, the sandpit crammed with juicy, dribbling toddlers—God, I was thirsty—and I sprinted over them and round them as if they were an assault course I had to get through. Pippa and Caleb were already at the café, seated by the window, and even from a distance, I could see that Pippa had been trying to cajole Caleb, with little success. He clearly didn’t want to be there any more than I did—perhaps even less—and as I approached the table, he pushed back his chair and attempted to do a runner.

Pippa caught him by the sleeve. “There you are, Suki,” she said, brightly. “Caleb’s been so looking forward to meeting you.”

“That’s total crap,” Caleb said, and flicked me a look of such unbridled hostility that I actually flinched.

“Caleb,” chastened Pippa. “Remember our deal?”

Whatever the deal was, it held some power, for Caleb groaned but sat down obediently and looked out the window. In the flesh, his expression was more devilishly sullen than it had been in any of the photos, but confusingly, it was grafted to the features of a seraph.

“Well, it’s lovely to meet you too,” I said.

Pippa fished out her purse and stood up. “Like I said on the phone, Caleb’s been in a lot of trouble lately, and I’ve explained to him that he might find it helpful if you shared your experiences.”