The Girl Below (21 page)

Before going to bed, I checked Caleb’s room for signs of his whereabouts, but found no appointment diaries or wall calendars, or evidence of any advance planning. At sixteen, as long as you knew what parties were happening on the weekend just ahead—and as long as you were invited to them—life was as organized as it needed to be. The same went for washing. In the corner of Caleb’s room was a pile of his clothing, and I started to sort it, until I came across a stash of crumpled, matted tissues. With a jolt, I realized what was gluing the tissues together and dropped them, along with the washing, vowing never again to set foot in his room.

I tried Caleb’s cell phone one more time before calling it a night and going upstairs to sleep in Pippa and Ari’s room. I slept okay at first—it was after one, and I was tired—but as the night wore on, I woke at regular intervals, imagining that the front door had opened and I’d heard Caleb staggering in. But always, straight after the initial noise woke me, the house was silent, and I realized I’d been tricked.

So preoccupied was I with the routines of insomnia that I failed, at first, to notice that the closet door was open about a foot. I was positive I had closed it before going to bed. I didn’t like leaving any cupboard doors open—not this one or the one in my room. Once the lights were off, that dark space always seemed to take on a life of its own.

I was about to succumb to the usual fit of anxiety when I remembered Caleb’s admonishment not to be such a wimp.

Feeling emboldened, I grabbed my glasses and got out of bed and strode to the closet to show the damn thing who was boss. I put my hand on the wardrobe door, near a simple wooden handle, and pushed, using a regular amount of force, not too violent, not too gentle. But the door stayed where it was. I pushed again, a little harder this time, and the door recoiled by a fraction, then settled back on its hinges. There was an odd springiness to the movement, unlike if the door had been jammed open by an object.

When I tried the other door, it swung open without obstacle, which only made its twin seem more perverse, more unchained from the laws of physics. If the door hadn’t been open in the first place, I wouldn’t have gotten out of bed, so I reasoned—if that was the correct term—that the closet had been trying to get my attention. That it wanted me to go in.

In the event that it should change its mind, I propped a chair against the wide-open wardrobe door, and walked two steps into the closet, far enough that I was really inside it, and not standing half in the bedroom. On either side of me, clothes hung on parallel steel rails, which pointed to the back of the closet. When I’d been in a few days earlier, I was sure a third rail had been there, positioned low against the back wall for suits and shirts, but I found this time that I couldn’t see that far, that the back of the closet was obscured by a heavy gray curtain.

Thinking that’s what it was, I put my hand straight out in front of me to determine what fabric it was made of, expecting it to feel like a kind of heavy velvet. And at first it did feel velvety, or perhaps a little softer, like the fur of a rabbit’s pelt, only the surface of it had no resistance. It allowed me to put my hand in it, then through it, until my arm was invisible below the wrist. I felt a pressure on the tips of my fingers, as though they’d been fitted with tiny suction cups. This tension was gentle but irresistible, slightly ticklish, and I let it pull my hand forward, reassured by the downy warmth of the substance it was passing through. At a certain point, when my arm had disappeared up to the elbow, the pulling sensation stopped, and I found I was able to move my hand around in an open space on the other side of the curtain. This hand then came into contact with something, a knot of fabric, and I toyed with it for a moment before a wave of recognition hit me. The knot of fabric was a bow, and whatever it was attached to was moving and very much alive.

As though bitten by something with very sharp teeth, my hand withdrew with such force that it sent me reeling backward into the wardrobe, where I lost my footing in a wreckage of sneakers and tennis rackets.

I fell sideways, grabbing a handful of dresses on the way down, and the sheer gracelessness of the movement snapped me out of whatever spell I’d been under just moments before. Flooding with adrenaline, I scrambled from the floor of the closet and didn’t stop running until I reached the kitchen, where I turned on every light and the wireless, to hear if the rest of the world was still there. First to escape from the tuner were atmospheric farm noises, a pastoral program about raising pigs. The broadcaster had gotten right inside the pen and held the microphone almost up the pig’s snout as it snuffled and rooted in a pile of rotting vegetables. He described the scene in great detail, but the more I listened to the program, the less like real life any of it sounded. I switched off the radio and tried the television, but that too was stuck on late-night filler, infomercials and Bible clowns talking about the end of the world, nothing that was reassuring. The loudness of it blocked my senses, and I worried that if anything crept up behind me, I wouldn’t hear it approaching. I thought of what was upstairs, and a quiver ran down my neck.

Chapter Thirteen

Auckland, 1997

B
y the late nineties, I had lost my way so thoroughly that I was beginning to think I would never find it again. I was still in New Zealand, which I had neither planned on nor could account for, and the longer I stayed there, the more remote and unreachable London seemed. Partly it was the plane fare, too princely a sum for my meager restaurant wages, and partly it was a state of mind. After that first nonreunion with my father, I had simply hung about in Auckland, found a flat and drifted through university, then become too useless to save up enough to leave the country. I understood what everyone meant about being stranded in paradise, that if you couldn’t get out, it turned into a prison.

At twenty-two, I was working in a faux-French restaurant on Christmas Eve when Scott, my first love and nemesis, walked back into my life and asked me to marry him.

The evening had not begun well. When I arrived at six for my shift, the place was packed with red-faced office workers who’d been drinking buckets of chardonnay and eating nothing since lunchtime. Anton, the maitre d’, was already in a state of high agitation—too much speed, too early on, I supposed—and the second I appeared in the kitchen, he threw an apron at me and told me to get straight out on the floor.

“But I’m early,” I protested. “Can I at least have breakfast?”

“Babe,” he said, tossing the remains of a steak béarnaise into the scraps bin, “it isn’t my fault you fucking just got out of bed.”

Lately, I had been keeping vampire hours, going to bed sometime around dawn and getting up a few hours before work started at five or six. That afternoon, I’d slept in and had had just enough time to shower, dress in my waiter’s uniform, and race down to a department store on the main street to pick up Lily’s Christmas present. Rowan had already paid for the present and had given me detailed instructions on where to pick it up. The next day, she was expecting me to arrive in Hamilton with the gift in time for Christmas lunch. It was the first time in years that I’d been invited—the year before they had flown to Rarotonga without telling me—and I was trying not to believe it was only because they’d needed a courier.

For dinner I had two short black coffees and a sneaky cigarette on the kitchen fire escape, where I hoped Anton wouldn’t find me. I was still out there, sneaking a second, when I glanced into the restaurant and saw a familiar figure heading for the men’s toilet: Scott. The scoop of his neck, the quiff at the front of his hair, the slope of his nose—his features were as familiar to me as my own, maybe more so. And that brief sighting was all it took for my mood and confidence to plummet.

The last time I’d seen Scott was a few weeks after we broke up, at least a month before. He had summoned me to his flat on a Sunday morning with no explanation other than that he had something to tell me. I had gone eagerly—I still wasn’t over him—and had stood on the porch with a swelling of hope in my heart. With barely a greeting, he had guided me to the living room, and told me to sit down on a wooden dining chair that had been placed in front of the stereo.

“What’s going on?” I said.

Scott kneeled on the floor next to my chair and pressed play. “Listen carefully to the lyrics,” he said, then put his head in my lap.

I recognized the opening bars immediately. It was Elvis, his favorite, my least, and a track that was slow and saccharine.

The first line, “Maybe I didn’t treat you . . . quite as good as I should have,” had been a doozie. But as the song went on, I became confused. When Elvis pleaded, “Tell me that your sweet love hasn’t died,” I wondered, did Scott want me back? Or did he just want
me
to want him back? I wasn’t even sure, now that it seemed to be on the table, if that’s what I wanted. Which had been the problem all along. When I wasn’t with Scott, I pined for him, like a lost limb, but when he was in the same room, as he was now, I felt nothing—not just for him but full stop. My emotions went blank, along with my mind. The longing was gone but his being there erased me, turned me into a cipher, and I didn’t know which of those two things was worse.

At the end of the song, Scott had stood up and I saw that he had been crying. “Now you know exactly how I feel,” he’d said, apparently proud of having expressed himself so clearly. But I was baffled. I had been about to ask him what he wanted to do about these feelings he had, when he announced that he had to go into the office, but he could give me a lift somewhere seeing as it was raining. That was it, and that was Scott: chivalrous and cold in equal measure.

Since then we had not even bumped into each other, even though I lived less than two blocks from his apartment.

I stayed out on the fire escape a little longer, defying Anton, delaying the moment when I’d have to go back out to the restaurant and face Scott.

As if on cue, Becky sailed into the kitchen carrying an armada of dirty plates. “Fuck, it’s busy,” she said, putting down the plates and rubbing a red indentation on her arm. She looked at my face. “Shit, doll, are you all right?”

I swept her into an alcove and whispered, “Scott’s here.”

Becky’s eyes widened. “Are you sure?” But she could see from my face that he was. She reached under her apron and pulled out a tiny piece of folded paper, which she pressed into my hand. “Save some for later,” she said, and winked.

I went into a stall in the ladies’ toilet and closed the door. Usually, we waited until toward the end of the shift to have a line, but occasionally, in emergencies, we had one early.

The speed was bitter, and hung in a lump at the back of my throat, but soon after taking it, I felt the familiar rush of clarity, and the aftertaste was easily fixed by a slug of vodka behind the bar. When I stood up, Scott was heading toward me, smiling the alligator smile that early in our relationship I’d mistaken for debonair.

“Suki Piper,” he said, enunciating every syllable in a proprietary way. He leaned on the bar and looked me up and down for a moment, as if he was appraising goods in the window of a shop. He liked to use silence to his advantage, and was waiting for me to speak, I knew.

“Would you like a drink?” I said.

He nodded. “And I wanted to see you.”

We were still standing like that on either side of the bar when Anton came up behind Scott and slapped him on the back. “Scottie, my boy. You’re up early. Got any samples for us to try?”

“I’m off duty,” said Scott. “But I’m sure we can find something else to do.” Scott was a wine rep who preferred to conduct business at night when he could most enjoy his customers’ hospitality. He smiled roguishly at Anton and an understanding passed between them, an understanding I recognized all too well.

“Suki,” said Anton, “look after table five. They just ordered coffee, but try the dessert menu one more time. I think the fat chick’s about to cave.” He drummed Scott’s arm with a series of friendly punches and led the way to the staff room. I knew where they were going; it was where Scott always went on a Friday night, where he had taken me about a month into our relationship to induct me into his shady world of rolled-up banknotes and powder. He had cleverly waited until I had fallen in love with him before revealing his habit, before taking me to the staff room to lovingly chop up my first line. He was proud of being the one to initiate me, and even more delighted when I turned out to be a fiend.

When Anton returned to the restaurant floor, he reeked of cigar smoke and peppermints, his favorite amphetamine
digestif
. Scott was heading for the door, about to leave, when he turned back and walked to the coffee machine where I was standing. “I’m heading to Dagger,” he said. “You should come up for a drink when you finish.”

I hated how he did that, made a suggestion but didn’t ask outright. I also knew that I would go meet him, that I couldn’t help myself.

He leaned over the counter and whispered in my ear: “I miss you, Sukes.”

After he left, the restaurant got busier and louder before starting to empty out as people went home to wrap their Christmas presents and stuff them into stockings or hide them under trees. The store had already wrapped Lily’s present in garish pink paper; all I had to do was get it, and myself, to the bus stop.

After putting all the chairs up on the tables and polishing the last piece of cutlery, Anton poured us all cheap fizz to celebrate Christmas and the end of the shift, which irked because the week before we’d asked for, and had been denied, a monetary festive bonus. I drank the champagne thirstily and poured another glass. I was nervous about meeting Scott. Becky had offered to come along for moral support, but I told her I preferred to go alone. “Okay,” she said. “But I’ll be at Kuzo if you need me.”

“I’ll be fine,” I reassured her.