The Girl Below (30 page)

She was talking about my father; he had bought flowers from the shop she worked in. Why was she talking about that? “He wasn’t fussy about blooms, but they had to be specific colors: oranges and reds, really quite garish,” she continued. “Over time, the arrangements got bigger, more expensive.”

“Mum hated cut flowers,” I said. “She must have thrown them out before I even saw them.”

Pippa bit down on her lip. “They weren’t for her, darling.”

An attack of dimwittedness came over me, and I pictured a bouquet left on the wrong doorstep, flowers getting pelted with rain. “Who were they for?”

“I feel so bad about it now,” she said. “But at the time—I suppose I was too preoccupied with myself. And your father was so charming. He used to take us all out for drinks—not just me but my friends too. Champagne cocktails at Annabel’s, the works. Once or twice she came too. We all knew what was going on, but no one told your mother.”

I suddenly understood. Rowan had been in the background all along. In a blink my childhood was reshuffled, all the hidden cards revealed. “How long did this go on for?” I said. “The flowers and all the rest?” I couldn’t bring myself to say her name.

“A few years, perhaps.”

“A few
years
?”

“None of us ever thought he’d leave your mother,” said Pippa.

Then, with utter clarity, I saw the ace of spades that had been in the deck all along. “She was pregnant,” I said. “Simon, their son, was born not long after they left.”

“Yes,” said Pippa. “I wasn’t sure if you knew.”

“I knew the timing was close, but I didn’t know how close.” I was quiet for a moment, thinking things over. “I can’t believe you knew Rowan, that you had drinks with her.” I hadn’t meant it accusingly—I was merely astonished—but to Pippa it sounded that way.

“If I could go back and change my part in it, I would,” she said.

I wanted somehow to reassure her that it hadn’t been her fault. “All you did was make up bouquets, have a few drinks.”

“I did more than that,” she said. “I helped to deceive your mother while your father went out and had fun. I didn’t see it that way until I had a child of my own. Then I deeply regretted all the lies.”

“Well,” I said, choosing my words carefully, and scarcely able to believe what I was about to say, “telling the truth isn’t always possible. You did what you thought was the best thing—at the time. Telling Mum might have made things worse.”

“I know,” said Pippa, and smiled. “I suppose that’s ultimately why I didn’t tell her.” She rubbed her eyes and leaned toward me. “Anyway, good night,” she said, giving me a warm hug. “I’m so relieved to have that off my chest.”

“It’s nothing, really,” I said, hugging her back.

After she left, I lay awake, grappling with the implications of what she’d told me. I had been lying when I’d said it was nothing. For some reason I had always felt that my father had cheated on me and not just on my mother, and now I understood why. By starting a family with someone else, he had cheated on the one he already had. All the feelings of resentment I had tried to deny suddenly bloomed inside me. No wonder Rowan had been paranoid that I was going to take them to the cleaners, for she knew I had every reason to. For a few minutes, I let my blood boil with righteous indignation, but then I just felt worn out and sad. Fleecing Rowan was no use to my mother, and it couldn’t deliver me a childhood with my father in it.

I drifted off to sleep, only to wake abruptly some hours later from a feverish dream set in a vast mansion haunted by unspeakable horrors. I sat up in bed, thinking that an overload of fear had woken me, only to realize, a few moments later, that what had actually roused me was a noise: a blunt, metallic scraping sound that was still there—iron dragging on concrete.

I was sleepy, and it didn’t click at first that I’d heard the noise before. Then I remembered
where
I’d heard it, and all the air went out of my lungs. It was the same noise I’d heard that night at Peggy’s flat, when I’d looked out the window and seen . . . what had I seen that night, exactly? In the weeks since, I’d tried not to analyze it because each time I had, nothing became any clearer.

But there was the sound again: a metallic scrape coming from the courtyard, as clear as if I were dragging the hatch open myself. I reached next to the thin mattress for my glasses. My hand was shaking, and they wouldn’t settle properly on my nose. There was no lamp on the sleeping platform, only a candle, but I didn’t have any matches, hadn’t noticed any in the room. But perhaps I didn’t need to turn on the light—after all, what I wanted to see was outside, not in the crypt. I was wearing only knickers and a singlet, and quickly pulled on a pair of jeans. My flip-flops were at the bottom of the ladder, and I climbed down slowly. Shuffling across the pebble floor, my foot caught on one of Elena’s knotted rugs, and I briefly pitched forward, taking fright. Over by the shrine, the old woman’s pink and white bedding heaved, but it wasn’t true about the snoring, she made no sound at all.

I reached the door, which was slightly ajar, and pushed on it with my hand. At my feet, through the door, was a short flagstone path and clipped grass, Notting Hill green. The door swung shut again, and I remained still, with my hand on the wood. Behind me was Elena’s room—the faded rugs and Jesus and Mary, their halos glowing faintly, neon lit. But in front of me, on the other side of the door, was what? Not the courtyard, not Elena’s villa. Not what ought to be there.

Once again, I pushed the door open, and held it open with my hand. I took a step forward so that one foot landed on soft grass. In front of me was a homemade brick barbecue, a small, square lawn littered with empty wine bottles, and the discarded red slip of a Wendy tent. Everything I’d seen that night at Peggy’s, but right here, within arm’s reach. I put my hand up in front of me and moved it forward, waited to meet resistance, but felt none, only a different kind of heat; the air through the door was swampier, like just before a downpour.

I lowered my hand and inched my right leg forward, leaving the other behind so that I straddled the doorway. The temperature on either side was subtly different, but both places were warm, summery, strangely inviting. Without thinking, I shifted my weight onto the front foot, and swung the other leg forward so that all of me was outside in the garden—
my
old garden from when I was six years old.

Not trusting what I was seeing, I stepped back through the door, into Elena’s room. But the garden was still there on the other side. I crossed the threshold another four or five times and then, satisfied that I wasn’t going to be shut out, I stepped resolutely into the garden. At first, being there felt like coming home, but as I walked a little farther my legs began to shake, and after a meter or so I stopped and looked behind me.

The door I’d come out of was an old servants’ entrance that I’d forgotten was there. It went nowhere, had been blocked off long before we’d lived in the basement flat. This was the same door, I now realized, that had confused me when I was staying at Peggy’s and had imagined a direct exit from the communal lobby to the garden.

Only then did I have the wherewithal to examine my surroundings more closely. The area immediately around where I stood was perfectly solid, tangible even. When I bent to feel the grass, it was springy to the touch, and slightly damp. I walked onto the patio and crouched down. The flagstones were smooth, and the grooves between them were gritty with soil fragments and dust that adhered to the ends of my fingers.

But looking across the communal garden, and beyond that into the distance, I noticed that the trees and masonry had soft edges, that they melted into one another, became indistinct. The waxiness of it unnerved me, and I had the sense that at any moment it might all collapse, taking me along with it if I was still there.

The thing I most wanted to see—but was also afraid to look at—was over to my right, on the other side of the flagstone patio. When I finally had the courage to glance over, I could just make out the edge of it—of the hole—and next to that, the hatch of pitted iron. The bunker was open, the same as it had been that night at Peggy’s, only this time I was at ground level, close enough to feel the vertigo that insisted I was going to fall in.

Pulled by that irresistible force, I moved a little closer, near enough to see moss growing around the edge of the iron plate. I moved closer still, until the top step that led down to the chamber of the air-raid shelter came into view. Seeing the step below that one sent a shiver through the hairs on my head, and I thought of the horrors that were down there. Not just the teeth and the T-bar shoe, but the lingering smell of decay, and the soup of hair and bones.

As if replying to my thought, a soft whimper sounded from the pit of the bunker—such a tiny sound that it was almost negligible, and I wondered at first if I had imagined it. To better hear, I dropped to my hands and knees, and lay down next to the hole with my fingers curled around its mossy edge. Cautiously, I put my ear to the cavity and listened. For half a minute, I remained stationary but heard nothing, and then a piece of soft moss crumbled off in my palm. Beneath it the soil churned with earwigs, squirming in all directions and wriggling blindly toward my hand.

Mice and rats I could tolerate, but insects were another case entirely, and I got up and shook the dirt from my hands, danced around on my tiptoes as if I was infested with the things. At that exact same moment a high, desperate wail escaped from the bunker, followed by a heartbreaking moan that sounded like a child in pain crying out for its mother. Halfway through, the moan was cut off, as though the creature making it had been strangled or plunged underwater.

So disturbing was the combined effect of the moan and the earwigs that I found myself mechanically stepping away from the hole, first walking backward in slow, deliberate strides, then turning around and legging it toward the service entrance. In the doorway I paused, and turned round to face the bunker. Someone, a child, was trapped down there, and I had to go back for her. Was that why I kept returning to this place?

I had retraced my steps almost to the service door when a sharp guffaw tore through the air and a man stepped through the French doors of our old flat and out into the garden. Two other men followed, also in raucous hysterics, snorting with abandon. Among the voices, I recognized my father’s low chortle, and for a moment or two I simply listened in a kind of trance, before it clicked that my presence in the garden was an unthinkable anomaly. I was trespassing across space and time. What would happen if they saw me? My nerves caught up with me and my heart began to pound. Whatever blip was occurring, I did not wish to cross paths with a giddy, young version of my father. I wasn’t ready to have that experience, not now, or ever.

I resolved to return to Elena’s room, and as I crossed the threshold of the service entrance and found myself back on her hard, unforgiving pebble floor, relief flooded through me. I was back in Skyros, back in the present. But when I turned around and looked back through the door, the view of our old garden was still there. I could even put my hand through the doorway, touch the humid, pre-storm air. I leaned on the doorjamb and peered into the garden. Some ten or fifteen meters away, the shadowy figures of Jean Luc, Henri, and my father were heading toward the air-raid hatch. They bent down and each took one side of it and tried to heave it a few inches off the ground. Mere seconds later they dropped it again, and the sound of clanging iron reverberated around the garden. The three of them fell about laughing—the gleeful, irrepressible hysteria of wine-addled youths—so intoxicated that they seemed unable to continue with their task. But a few minutes later they had recovered enough to try again. On the third try, they finally succeeded in placing the hatch over the hole. They didn’t bother fastening the bolts, just staggered off toward the flat with linked arms—all except Jean Luc, who loitered by my mother’s prize geraniums. I realized after a time that he was relieving himself, though the procedure seemed to take him longer than necessary. His elbows stuck out at odd right angles and he was struggling with something, perhaps a zipper. After what seemed like an age, he got it sorted, went inside, and the garden was deserted.

For a short while longer—perhaps only ten seconds—I stared at the apparition in front of me, until I had the sense that my vision was failing, that the scene was rapidly going out of focus. Gradually, like a windscreen demisting, the distortion lessened, but as it did so I realized the scene in front of me had changed. Instead of the old garden, I could make out the dark outlines of a stooped fig tree and a low wall, the solid features of Elena’s courtyard. The evening light was a little bluer than it had been a few minutes earlier, but the time of night I judged to be approximately the same—give or take twenty years.

I felt shattered—not just physically exhausted, but mentally done in, as though I’d been trying to figure out complex algebra that was far beyond my ability. I managed to climb the ladder to my sleeping platform, to lie horizontally on the small, firm mattress, and the instant my head connected with the pillow I was out for the count.

Chapter Nineteen

Auckland, 2002

W
hen after six months the suicide list still hadn’t gone away, I paid for sessions with Arthur, a Jungian psychoanalyst who had been recommended to me by my doctor. Before that, I had gone to see a psychiatrist who had offered me a choice between two brands of psychotropic drugs. I’d told him I didn’t want either, that I thought perhaps drugs were what had gotten me into this mess in the first place, and he had sent me on my way with a condescending look and a flyer for group counseling.

Arthur was fiftyish, with a beard and sad, suffering eyes that made me think of paintings of Jesus with nails through his hands. He worked out of a small room with obscured glass windows at the front of a weatherboard villa, where I sat on an overstuffed couch next to a jumbo box of man-size four-ply tissues. Only once did I reach for the tissues, when I’d come to my session after a particularly grueling day at work, but Arthur reached for them often, whenever a story I told made him cry.