The Downstairs Neighbor

by Helen Cooper

  Freya’s image flooded Chris’s mind. Her confident posture when she drove. The healthy glow of her skin, which always made him feel flabby and light-deprived. He saw her vividly for a moment, eclipsing Jess as she sat six inches taller, shoulders relaxed, blonde ponytail fanned over the headrest. Infuriatingly confident, sometimes. Like she thought driving was no big deal.

  “She hasn’t turned up?” he said. “I saw her mum last night . . .” He recalled Steph at his door, hunched inside an oversized man’s jacket that had made her look somehow diminished. A different woman from the one who’d had the gall to challenge him in the street about her daughter’s lessons.

  “It’s not like Frey to go off without saying anything,” Jess said. “She’s so on it with her training. Even with her schoolwork, though she doesn’t admit it. She gets better grades than me every time, you know. We’ve got business coursework due Monday . . .”

  Seeing she was getting teary again, Chris patted her arm. She stiffened and he wished he’d stuck with his earlier decision not to touch her. It was hard to know what to do with a crying seventeen-year-old girl. Impossible to console her without overstepping the mark. Next month he’d be turning forty, yet in some ways he felt the same as he had at Jess’s age. It was only the things and the people around him that had altered. Circumstances. Life.

  “Her parents keep calling me.” Jess sniffed. “But I really don’t know where she could be.”

  “Does she tell you everything?” Chris asked, then wondered if it was a weird question. He was suddenly conscious of the intimacy of being in a stationary car together, the usual conventions of a driving lesson stripped away. He stabbed at the button to roll down his window, air rushing into the car with the clamor of the street, a smell of petrol.

  “I thought so. Maybe not so much lately. She’s seemed a bit . . .” Jess made a mysterious, looping hand gesture, then turned to him. “Did she say anything to you?”

  “Me? Like what?”

  She blinked, her eyes almost opaque with held-back tears. “I don’t know. Like, anything.”

  “No, I . . . She seemed . . . normal.”

  “In an hour she’ll officially be a missing person. Frey! This can’t be real, can it?” She shook her head and slumped forward, her forehead meeting the wheel, red hair cascading either side. It felt wrong just to watch her cry. She had confided in him after all. Driving lessons were so often full of mind-numbing small talk in between “Left here . . . Check your mirror . . . Try not to flatten that pedestrian . . .” And Vicky was so closed off these days. Sometimes Chris fantasized about letting one of his students crash into the back of a bus, just to shake things up, just so he could phone Vicky from hospital and say, Get down here. I’ve been in an accident.

  His hand hovered over the bumps of Jess’s spine, visible through the thin white school shirt. She lifted her head and he withdrew.

  “I . . . I’ll drive you home,” he said. “If you don’t feel up to carrying on.”

  She sniffed again. “Thanks for being nice about it.”

  “No problem.” He forced a smile. “And try not to worry. Freya will be home before you know it.”

  They swapped places and he drove back through Kingston, past upmarket pubs painted slate gray and olive green, coming to life with after-work drinkers sitting outside as if it were a carefree summer’s day. As Jess became absorbed in her phone, Chris seemed to see and hear police sirens everywhere. But actually it was the flash of sun on a sapphire-colored scooter; the wail of a car alarm; the bright blue hair of a woman he realized was his other neighbor, Emma, standing outside a vintage clothes store with a for sale sign flapping beside her.

  7.

  EMMA

  The fire-wave of anger caught her by surprise. It was the starkness of her empty shop that brought on the white-hot rush. She’d been calm up to this point, packing up swathes of gauzy scarves, hand-sewn purses, dresses imbued with the earthy smell of vintage clothes. Even when a rail had toppled over and buried her beneath a mound of faux-fur coats, she’d just lain there, blinking. But now that her shop was stripped, ready for its new owners and new identity, Emma felt the air whoosh out of her lungs.

  “Jesus,” she murmured, pressing her fist against her breastbone. It was anger snatching her breath this time, rather than that wearying sadness. She escaped into the fresh air, only to be confronted by her livelihood sitting in taped-up boxes on the pavement.

  As she loaded her rented van, reversing the process she’d gone through with such excitement six years before, the door to the neighboring café jangled and its owner, Lina, emerged. Emma had watched Lina tidy away her one outdoor table and best vegan scones this side of the thames! sign on countless evenings. She observed her swishing through the routine now, untying her apron, her braided hair gathered inside a scarf. When Lina glanced over, Emma smiled. “Hey!”

  It was unmistakable. Lina froze. A look of wariness glazed her features. Emma felt a hole open in her stomach as her business neighbor smiled thinly and darted back inside, flapping her closed sign into place. A blind unfurled over the café window, juddering as it got stuck and Lina seemed to yank at its cord.

  And how could Emma blame her? She’d behaved so badly on her last proper day in business, over a month ago now. Had forgotten her professionalism and let her personal life erupt in the street. Maybe Lina’s customers had objected to having their afternoon coffees disturbed by drama from next door. Drama was something Emma tried to keep consigned to her outfits and hairstyles these days. She liked to think they deflected it. But it seemed her armor was flimsy.

  She dragged her eyes to her own shop, to the name, Threads, hanging over the door. It no longer evoked that tingle of pride. She felt she should apologize to the sign she’d designed herself, and the unsold treasures squished into boxes, and the regular (and in many ways irregular) customers who’d kept her afloat and enlivened her work. It had never been easy to stay in business, had taken most of her energy, her focus, her self-belief, but until recently she’d seemed to have just enough of all those things.

  * * *

  —

  She steered the van through Kingston’s tight streets, half enjoying the looks of surprise on people’s faces when they saw that White Van Man was actually Blue-Haired Woman. The vehicle gave her a temporary feeling of height and breadth, as if she was in control of a parade float. There was nothing to fanfare about, though, as she crammed the van’s contents into her tiny flat, which coughed up disgruntled clouds of dust in protest.

  How could a place feel cluttered and empty at the same time? The more of Zeb’s things she had to nudge aside to make room for her stock, the more she was forced to acknowledge that his left-behind sneakers and toiletries had been in the same positions for a month.

  Don’t wallow. There’s far worse suffering going on inside this house. Her thoughts lurched back to Freya and her gut did a somersault. She’d been missing for more than twenty-four hours now. All was silent above. Normally she’d smell the Harlows’ dinner (always something super-nutritious, she’d imagine, trying to guess the ingredients from the scent), and hear them moving around, transitioning into their evening, pipes humming with showers and baths. She never sensed the same hubbub of activity from the basement flat, never felt anything like it inside her own anymore. It was as if all the warmth and energy of the building rose to the top two floors. Or had done, before Freya’s disappearance had extinguished it.

  Emma went to her kitchenette and poured an Aldi gin with enough ice to anesthetize her brain. Crunching the cubes between her teeth, she perched on her sofa and felt the silence bear down. She’d had to move some furniture to fit more boxes in, so the light and shade in her living room now pooled in different places, adding to the sense that everything was out of kilter.

  The sound of an engine outside grabbed her attention. She rushed to the window and saw Steph unfurling from the back of a
police car, looking more disheveled than Emma had ever seen her, then running toward the house with her hand over her mouth. Paul followed, pausing to say something to the police officer in the driver’s seat before hurrying to catch up with his wife. Emma’s stomach knotted tighter. It was futile to keep watching, hoping Freya would bounce out of the same car and overtake her parents on the stairs, but she realized that was what she was doing, her hands gripping the sill, her face inching closer to the pane.

  Only her video-call ringtone pulled her from the window. A ray of hope shone through and she dived toward her laptop. Her eagerness drained when she saw it wasn’t a Skype from Zeb. Instead her mum’s image filled the screen, nightly wine in hand, the other waving in an exaggerated fashion as though to catch the attention of someone a hundred meters away.

  “Hi, Mum.” She tried not to sound deflated.

  “How are you?” Lately there was a tilt to Julie’s head whenever she asked this question. “Just thought I’d give you a quick call while our dinner’s in the tagine.”

  “What are you having tonight?” Emma asked dutifully. Her mum had attended cookery courses based around every major national cuisine.

  “Kefta mkaouara with Moroccan bread,” Julie reeled off. “Have you had your hair cut?”

  Emma touched her newish fringe. “About a week ago.”

  “Good to have a change,” Julie said. This made Emma feel like a breathing cliché, when in fact the restyle hadn’t really signaled a fresh start. She’d asked for a fringe that shadowed her eyes and heavy layers around her cheeks and jaw, as though to hide as much of her face as possible.

  Emma knew her mum wanted her to open up more. But she was afraid of what might pour out if she allowed herself to begin. Her tactic was to offer something early on in the conversation: something her mum could help with but that Emma could stand to talk about.

  “D’you think you could store some stock for me?”

  “’Course, darling. Have you been clearing out the shop?”

  Emma nodded. “We’re exchanging contracts on Friday.”

  Julie’s head-tilt returned. Emma knew her well enough to guess she was deciding not to comment that things would have been much easier if Emma had leased a shop rather than bought one. Something she was only too aware of.

  “And have you heard from Zeb?” her mum asked.

  Emma still got that feeling whenever she spoke about him. Like a trapdoor had opened beneath her feet. “Not for a while.”

  “You’re not still doing weird things, are you?”

  “I haven’t done any weird things!”

  “You almost suffocated yourself spraying aftershave around your place.”

  “I just like the smell.” Emma’s own scowl drew her eye, trapped in the mini camera-image in the corner of the screen.

  “It’s got to be dangerous in those amounts.”

  “All right, Mum!” Emma resorted to a diversion tactic. She picked up her laptop and spun it outward, moving to the cupboard to show Gilbert camped between a box of kimonos and a bucket of vintage walking sticks. She froze as a shout reverberated from above: “Stop pushing me on this, Steph!”

  “What was that?” her mum asked.

  “The neighbors . . . their daughter . . .” But her screen was buffering, chewing up her words.

  “Sounds like they’re having a barney,” Julie was saying, oblivious, as the connection resumed. “Remember those neighbors we had in Clapham? Always screaming at each other. And didn’t they keep some kind of iguana as a pet?”

  “It was a snake . . .” Emma couldn’t focus on her mum’s chatter now that a storm seemed to be brewing overhead. “Maybe I should call you back. I’m struggling to hear you.”

  Julie needed to add the finishing touches to her Moroccan feast anyway, so she signed off in an unidentified language—had she restarted Mandarin lessons?—and the screen blanked.

  The room darkened without the spill of blue light from the laptop. It was pin-drop silent until Steph soared into earshot: “Don’t you know how serious this is, Paul?”

  Paul responded with something Emma couldn’t make out. Heavy footsteps paced back and forth. She pictured Paul stomping from one end of their apartment to the other, and Steph with her back against a wall, as pale as when she’d been lying on the stairs. Emma slipped into the cupboard, hardly thinking about what she was doing or why. She twined her fingers around the bars of Gilbert’s cage and heard him stir.

  “I’ve never asked you about any of it,” Steph was saying. “But now . . .”

  “I will fix this.”

  “Freya—”

  “I know! God, do I know, Steph.”

  “If she’s in any danger—”

  “I said I KNOW—”

  There was a bang. The sound of shattering glass. Before she knew it, Emma had thrown herself onto the floor with her hands over her head. A second later she unfurled, hot with embarrassment at her own jumpiness, still with her after years of trying to be fearless. She saw she’d knocked Gilbert’s cage and he was awake and glaring at her. The noises above were suspended. Then Paul was saying, “Shit . . .” and there was movement, footsteps.

  Nothing from Steph until her voice returned laced with tears: “Where are you going?”

  Another slamming door. Another tremor through the spine of the building. Emma crept out of the cupboard and to the window. It was Paul who’d left. She watched him stride off down the darkening road, coat on and hood up, the pale wash of the streetlamps gliding over him.

  More footsteps drummed down the exterior staircase. Emma saw Steph burst out of the main door, glance both ways and yell something after Paul. She surged forward as if to chase her husband, but stopped dead and floundered in the road, already seeming like an unraveled version of the neighbor Emma had observed and envied. Steph’s posture collapsed and she trudged back to the house. Emma strained to see if she looked injured from whatever had been smashed. Steph was stooped, crying, but Emma couldn’t tell whether she was physically hurt.

  She wondered again if she should reach out to her neighbor. How could she just sit there, knowing she was upstairs? What kind of person watched, listened, but didn’t try to help?

  She was edging toward her door, fizzing with nerves, when she heard an unexpected knock.

  8.

  STEPH

  Steph no longer felt as if she was in her body. The sleepless night and nightmarish day had taken her to pieces. Part of her was still in the street, shouting, “Where are you going?” as Paul charged into the night. Another part was trapped in the surreal motions of registering their daughter as a missing person. Reciting her date of birth and her blood group, handing over her smiling photograph to be sealed inside a clear plastic bag.

  Now, standing at Emma’s door, Steph seemed to sway, untethered. None of this should be happening. She should be catching up on The Apprentice with Freya, discussing how irritating all the contestants were, Freya’s feet lolling across her lap.

  Panic swept her as she tried to remember the last time they’d actually sat like that on the sofa, actually watched an episode together. It had once been their never-missed thing, but for the last few weeks Freya had claimed homework and disappeared into her room, leaving Steph to press Record and feel bereft. She imagined episodes stacking up on their cable box, waiting for Freya’s return, and the thought made her want to howl.

  The door opened in front of her and she struggled to reset her face.

  Emma’s outfit was more subdued than usual: knee-length gray sweater over mustard-colored tights. A closer look revealed that her collar and cuffs sported tiny jeweled pineapples. Steph had never been sure of Emma’s age. She was petite, with a youthful face and fashion sense, but sometimes there were glimmers of maturity. Once, for example, they’d seen each other in the street when Freya had just sprinted off for her bus, Steph was doing
up the fiddly buttons on her long coat, and Emma was folding polythene-wrapped dresses into the boot of her battered car. Emma and Steph had swapped the usual pleasantries. Then Emma had nodded toward Freya, flying down the road with her phone at her ear, and said, She’s full of life, isn’t she? Steph remembered how it had made her pause, surprised and pleased at this insight into how others saw her daughter. But also, Emma’s observation had seemed to place her closer to Steph’s age bracket than Freya’s.

  “Steph,” Emma said now, “I . . . Freya . . .”

  “She’s gone missing,” Steph said, and the words enclosed her in dread.

  Emma nodded, blinking. “I’m so sorry. You must be so worried.”

  You have no idea, Steph felt like saying. She wasn’t exactly sure why she’d knocked on Emma’s door. She’d had a thought that her neighbor might have seen something. Steph got the impression she was home during the day, more than she used to be: Her Corsa was constantly parked in the street. The police would talk to all the locals but Steph had the chance to act sooner, faster, to find her, find her, find her.

  More than that, though, she couldn’t face being alone. Couldn’t let herself think about the way Paul had reacted, where he might have gone, and how all the things they’d never properly talked about might somehow be linked to this, the worst day of their previously unspoiled family life.

  Emma beckoned her into her flat. It was less than half the size of theirs but seemed to have twice the amount of stuff. Steph often wished for more storage space for all Freya’s sports equipment, Paul’s vinyl that he never listened to, her own books she never gave away. But Emma’s living room heaved with boxes, as if she’d never unpacked or was preparing to move, as well as an old sewing machine, scattered piles of fabric and thread, and what looked like a giant wine rack full of shoes. There was a noise just audible in the background, like a turning wheel . . . A hamster?