The Girl Below (7 page)

I was used to the phone ringing and it not being for me, so I was surprised when I listened to the message and it was from Pippa, something garbled about Caleb bunking off school that had been cut off midway by an electronic pip. I considered calling her back, but doing nothing all morning had resulted in a strong inclination to do more of the same, and instead I sat down on the couch and idly flicked on the TV. Daytime soaps and infomercials were in full swing but the screen was so sun bleached that it was more like listening to the radio. For longer than was healthy, I watched dust particles drift across the living room, staring through them into space until I felt drowsy, too lethargic even to move. A familiar emotion welled inside me, not fulsome like sadness, but a dragging sensation, like the tide going out. In its wake, I felt canceled out. Almost patiently, I waited for the compulsions to begin, and when they did, I was relieved to find them weak, easy to tune out. Even so, I reminded myself to be vigilant, that I could not afford to slip any further off the grid.

The phone rang again, snapping me back to reality, and this time I answered.

“Thank God you’re there,” said the voice on the other end. “I know you’re busy and you’ve got better things to do, but I’ve run out of ideas and something you said last night made me think you might be able to help.”

“Pippa?” I said. “Is that you?”

Her voice was more anxious than in the earlier message. “Caleb’s really in a bad way. I’m worried he’s going to do something stupid—harm himself in some way. I desperately want to help him, but he won’t talk to me about what’s going on. I thought . . . well, I thought he might talk to someone closer to his own age.”

“I’m not that much closer,” I said, wondering how to convey the fact that I was the last person he ought to talk to, that I needed a little help myself. “If I say the wrong thing, it might be dangerous.”

“Please,” she said. “I’ve tried everything else. I know you’ve been through a lot, and I thought that maybe if you just talked to him about how you’d gotten through it then he’d be able to get through it too. That’s all I want—for him to make it out the other side.”

“But I’m not out the other side,” is what I should have said, but instead I capitulated to her air of desperation. That and the offer of a free lunch, in return for attempted counseling, were I to meet Caleb the next day in the Holland Park Café.

After she hung up, my cell phone beeped—a noise I hadn’t heard in weeks—and I discovered a text from my old school friend Alana, inviting me for after-work drinks in three hours’ time. I had been trying to see her since I first arrived in London, but she had been away on holiday, then busy at work, and it was only now just happening. In a matter of moments, my week had gone from fatally empty to socially overwhelming.

I set out almost immediately in sneakers and jeans with the idea that I’d walk to Old Street tube station, where Alana and I were to meet, no matter how far away it was. But after an arduous hour of motorway avoidance and sprinting across arterial routes, I limped onto Camden High Street, cashed the last traveler’s check, and splurged on an off-peak bus pass. If only I’d bought one at the outset . . .

By the time I got to Old Street to meet Alana, I was a disheveled wreck but bang on time. In the station foyer, I eagerly scanned the thousands of surging commuters for a wistful schoolgirl in gray skirt, blazer, and pumps, her long hair swept artfully to one side. I was still scanning when a sharp-suited woman with a blunt, practical bob approached me and said, “Suki, is that you?”

I couldn’t believe this woman was Alana. She looked old, her worn face making it seem like more than a decade since we had last seen each other. “Wow,” I said. “You look so grown up.”

“And you still look like a student.” She looked me up and down. “I’m so jealous.”

She couldn’t be. Looking scruffy at almost thirty was nothing to be envious of.

An awkward hug ensued, during which Alana’s briefcase swung round and thumped me on the back. “Well, I can tell
you
haven’t been living in London for long,” she said, stepping back to examine me. “You still have a tan, and you seem sort of athletic, like someone who goes to the gym.”

“I can’t think why,” I said, keeping mum about the tramps across London to save tube fares and that I’d subsisted for weeks on a diet of chickpeas and rice. “Do I really still have a tan?”

“Maybe more of a healthy glow,” she said. “There’s a girl at work from New Zealand who has the same thing. Australians have it too.”

“Oh that,” I said. “That’s from having no ozone layer. You get so fried in the summer that your skin basically never recovers.”

On the way to a bar in Hoxton, Alana filled me in on her post-school life, and I listened, enchanted by her private school accent, still as high and fluty as mine must once have been. After A levels, she’d studied economics at Bristol, and gone back to do a postgrad diploma in number crunching when a research job didn’t come her way. Since then she’d worked for a multinational accounting firm, but not as an accountant, and although she explained it well, and I tried hard to understand, I failed to grasp exactly what it was she did. She was single, she added, but had her eye on some bloke from work. When she asked if I had a boyfriend, I told her I was happily unattached. We were making excellent small talk, I thought, until halfway down a cobbled side street she exclaimed, “What happened to you after you left? You just sort of disappeared off the face of the earth.”

“I went to live in New Zealand. And I ended up staying.”

“I know where you went, but apart from a few postcards I never heard from you again.” Her tone was reproachful. “I didn’t even know if you were still alive.”

“I wanted to keep in touch,” I said, fumbling for an excuse. “But after a while, everyone seemed so far away. The longer I left it, the harder it was to write. And then it seemed like too much time had passed and I didn’t know where to start.”

“I thought that’s what must have happened,” she said. “But it seemed so unlike you to be silent.”

There was a note almost of contempt in her voice that I didn’t understand. “I know. I’m useless, and by the time e-mail came along I didn’t have anyone’s address.” I’d been lucky to even find Alana again. Her parents still lived in the same house they’d lived in when we were at school and their number was listed. But other friends had been untraceable. “I’m sorry,” I said. “After my mother died, it was a weird time.”

“I’m sure it was,” she said, a flicker of sympathy in her eyes. “Anyway, it’s all ancient history now.” She grinned. “But you’re buying the first round.”

And just like that, I was down to my last forty quid.

The bar was hidden down an alley and decorated with mismatched velvet furniture and draped antique shawls, enough touches to suggest a 1920s speakeasy but not so many that it could ever be accused of being themed. At this hour, it was crammed with suits and noisy with the furor of after-work relief.

“I hope you don’t mind, but we’re meeting some friends of mine here, colleagues, actually,” said Alana as we elbowed our way to the bar. Then she yelled out, “Chris! Over here!” and disappeared behind a ridge of corporate shoulders.

Alana’s friends—Chris, Mike, and Steve—materialized in identical navy blue suits and one second after they were introduced to me, I forgot which of them was which. The one who made Alana blush I guessed was the bloke from work she fancied, but that didn’t tell me his name, and soon I was left to entertain the other two when she and her beau drifted away. Of the two left behind, one was taller and heavier, with a wider chin, but both had cropped brown hair, clear skin, and pale eyes—clean, good-looking blokes, the kind you took home to mother, if you had one.

Next to them I felt like a backpacker who’d been dragged off the street and charitably given a beer, but they seemed to find me fascinating, and raised their eyebrows in amused surprise at everything I said, no matter how inane. It took me a while to realize they were partly laughing at my accent, an odd combination of deep Kiwi and West London posh that flummoxed almost everyone. Partly laughing at me, but not wholly. The taller one soon announced that he’d been to New Zealand and had “totally fallen in love with the place”—a line I’d heard before from a dozen English kids on their gap year. Because I didn’t know them, and it was easier, I played along with the version of New Zealand they had in their minds and found myself banging on like a tour guide about black-water rafting, tandem skydiving, nude bungee jumping, and a host of other extreme activities I had never participated in. I didn’t tell them I preferred bars to beaches, that I had never been to the South Island, except for a night in Christchurch, or that my experience of the beautiful, unspoiled landscape was that in a nanosecond it could switch to empty and oppressive—a Gothic cathedral without a congregation. At other times, the cities seemed so new they were barely there.

On one of my last mornings in Auckland, I had gotten up early and gone for a drive before the sun came up. It was a Sunday, and the streets near where I lived were still asleep, bathed in weak gray light, everything hazy, undefined. As I drove it looked to me as though all the buildings and cars were slowly fading out, and I remember thinking the time had come to depart from this place, that if I didn’t leave, I’d fade out too.

Someone bumped me from behind and spilled beer down my top, and I realized Alana’s colleagues were smiling at me in a keen way, undeterred by my sudden silence and oblivious to the gap between what I had been saying earlier and what I had been thinking.

“You should come with us,” one of them was saying. “Steve’s got a massive tent—big enough to sleep twelve people—and last year we got a wicked campsite near the main stage.”

“Yeah, mate, I’m still deaf,” said the other one, laughing. He pointed to my empty glass. “Fancy a refill?”

“Sure,” I said, and he went to the bar, leaving me alone with his friend, who was the shorter of the two. An awkward silence followed while I tried to think what to say.

“Reckon you’ll stay in London once the summer’s over?” he said.

“That was the plan,” I said. “I don’t have a return ticket.”

“Brilliant,” he said. “So you’ll be able to come to Glastonbury with us then?”

I hesitated, not wanting to tell him that I couldn’t afford to go, even if I wanted to.

“Go on,” he said. “It’ll be such a laugh.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

I hadn’t seen Alana for what was beginning to seem like hours, and I looked around the bar for her, at the same time checking out who else was there. Fewer suits; more art school types; and one or two who looked like they were in bands, or wanted to be. My eye caught on a guy who looked Icelandic—pointed elfin features, blond hair—and just as I thought he was about to turn and look in my direction, someone passed in front of him and he vanished.

“If you like, I can get you a ticket when I get mine. It’s cheaper if you get in early.” His smile was too expectant, like he wanted me to do more than just go to Glastonbury with him, and when I registered his eagerness and what he was trying to communicate, something changed in me, a switch flipped, and I took an involuntary step away from him, as though repelled. “Thanks, but I’m not sure if I can go.”

“Where’s Chris got to with our beers?” he said, his face falling briefly before becoming jovial once more. “He must be getting them from a pub down the road.”

I laughed, but it didn’t quite come off sincerely. So the other one was Chris, and he must be Steve or Mike. He was still smiling at me, a big warm-hearted smile, and the longer he grinned, the more I started to feel like a cat with its hackles up, getting ready to swipe or bolt. “Excuse me,” I said, trying to hide the fact that he was the cause of my violent reaction. “But I need to go to the bathroom.”

I found Alana in the queue to the ladies’, her cheeks and lips restored to their schoolgirl rose by a few pints of beer.

“There you are!” she said. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

“I was by the bar, with your friends from work—right where you left me.”

If she noticed my sardonic tone, she ignored it. “I’m so glad you’re hitting it off with Chris and Mike,” she said. “They’re such top blokes.” She winked at me. “And single too.”

“I’m not looking for anyone,” I said. “I told you I was happy on my own.”

“Bollocks,” she said. “You were always so obsessed with boys. You haven’t changed that much—surely?”

“They’re not my type,” I said, wishing she’d change the subject.

“Oh, that’s right,” she said, a little archly. “I forgot about you and your types.” We had reached the front of the queue, and Alana ducked into a vacant stall. She locked the door and shouted through it, “What about Steve? You have to admit he’s a bit of all right!”

I didn’t think he was, but she wanted to hear otherwise. “Steve’s hot,” I said, shouting back. “And he obviously thinks the same thing about you.”

Over a flushing toilet, I heard her giggle—had she forgiven me?—then I went into a stall and when I came out she was gone. Fighting my way back, the bar swarmed in front of me, an impenetrable scrum. I considered going home, but didn’t want to leave things on a sour note with Alana or the others. Pushing my way through the crowd, I collided head-on with some guy before we sprang apart, both clutching our heads in pain. “I’m very sorry,” he said, in a strange, jerky accent, and I looked up and saw it was that Icelandic guy. Up close, he was even more striking, with eyes that could cut through glass. He brazenly looked me up and down before asking, “Which way were you trying to go?”

“Over there,” I said, pointing toward where I thought the others were.

“Well,” he said, slowly. “This is really a shame.”

I returned to the others and tried to act relaxed, like I had when we’d first arrived, but I couldn’t think of what to say to Mike that would put things right between us without also leading him on. Perhaps there was nothing, and I ought to just leave. When one of the blokes suggested going for a curry, I saw my out and quickly declined, saying I was tired. Alana seemed less disappointed than Mike, who tried to persuade me to go with them by offering to pay, then, when I wouldn’t, insisted on collecting my phone number on the pretext of making sure I got home safely. When we said our farewells, he gave me a crushing bear hug that tried very hard in its pressure to communicate more than just good-bye. I told Alana I would call her the next day, and whispered in her ear, to make amends, that I thought she and Steve would make a cute couple. “Thanks,” she said, squeezing my hand as they tumbled from the bar, the boys arm in arm and already belting out “Wonderwall,” the hooligan version.