Once, at one of Peggy’s especially raucous parties, there’d been dozens of adults in the drawing room, dancing, drinking, laughing, and I was there too, up past my bedtime, and giddily lost in the forest of their legs. For a brief moment, those limbs had cleared, and there was Madeline, motionless but hunting me through the trees. My screams had been so hysterical that I had been taken home immediately—the party over for me and my parents.
On the sofa opposite Madeline’s dais, I sat down to observe her from a safe distance. I was curious to know if she’d still have any power over me at twenty-eight years old.
To begin with I was fine, in control, but then outside, clouds passed overhead, casting Madeline’s features into shadow. She had not moved, but my first thought was that it was Madeline who had taken all the light out of the room, and before I could reason against it, a sensation of quickening vertigo came over me. When I stood up to move away from her, I felt dizzy and also that I was physically shrinking. Around me, the room seemed to waver, but in a way that was too subtle to grasp. I looked down at my scuffed and ill-fitting trainers, bought in a size too big because I’d meant to use them for jogging but never had. The shoes appeared familiar, but I was sure that the feet inside them weren’t mine—that these feet were tiny impostors. I held my hands out in front of my face, spread the fingers and wiggled them, but even these looked counterfeit, rogue hands on the ends of absurdly slender limbs. My perspective had shifted lower down, and for a few seconds, I was a child again—a child who was pensive and scared.
I bit down hard on my tongue, and one by one, the walls of Peggy’s drawing room regained their density, and the weight of my adult feet sank into my shoes. Once more, I stood on solid ground, in a London apartment I had not been in for almost twenty years. An apartment so like a museum that briefly, I rationalized, it had pulled me back with it into the past.
That I’d imagined the whole thing was plausible but that didn’t change how unsettled I felt—especially when I turned to leave the drawing room and had the uncanny sensation that I was being watched.
Too late, I realized I had turned my back on Madeline, and when I swiveled round to face her, I fancied she was gloating. This amounted to nothing more than a dead-eyed stare—but then again, it never had. The year after next I’d turn thirty, but Madeline still had it over me. Her power was intact, had perhaps even grown. In the old, cowering way, I turned and walked out backward, hoping to catch the very last rays of that untimely summer evening.
Chapter Two
London, 1981
Madeline was not the only little friend to dwell behind the stucco facade of Ladbroke Gardens. Downstairs in the basement flat, the boiler cupboard outside our bathroom was home to a hand.
This hand was just a hand—no body attached—and it liked to come out of the cupboard and untie the bows on the backs of my dresses. That was the only thing it liked to do: untie bows. If I was wearing dungarees, or a dress without a bow on the back, the hand did not come out. It did not come out for pajamas, or when anybody else was with me, and it especially did not come out when I wanted it to—though many were the times I climbed into the cupboard and looked for it. Where the hand went when it wasn’t in the cupboard, I never knew, but I do know that if it had been attached to a body, it wouldn’t have fit in there—the boiler took up too much room.
I was not afraid of this hand without a body. Never had it occurred to me to be afraid of it. The hand untied my dresses; that was the game it played and the sole reason it existed. Perhaps it helped that the hand reminded me of my mother’s: soft and feminine but also strong.
I knew what it felt like because I’d once made the mistake of grabbing it. I had been trying to show the hand to my mother, and one day when it appeared, I took hold of it and called out to her. Mum took her time getting to the boiler cupboard, and while she was on her way, the hand and I engaged in a tug-of-war. Strangely, even though I had been the one to grab the hand, once I had grabbed it, the hand started pulling back. Before long, we had traded places, with the hand trying to drag me into the cupboard, and me attempting to shake it off. I don’t remember who let go first, but by the time my mother got to the cupboard, I was sitting alone on the floor, rubbing at a red mark on my wrist.
Around the same time—my sixth or seventh year—my parents threw the only party they ever had, a bash so wild and debauched that it’s the party I’ve subsequently measured the success of all others by. They had reason to celebrate. We had literally moved up in the world, bought the flat above us and knocked through a staircase to create a maisonette—so much more posh sounding than a basement. For a while, and at the time of the party, we had two kitchens, two front doors, two bathrooms, and two boiler cupboards—though the hand never ventured to the one upstairs.
The party was in midsummer, a humid weekend in July, and my parents invited the neighbors, including Peggy and Pippa, plus a score of other friends I didn’t know they had. There was a costume-party theme, but no one told me what it was and I couldn’t work it out from the dozens of pilots, policemen, chambermaids, and slave girls who turned up. In a departure from her usual mild look, Mum donned a corkscrew blond wig and dressed up as Mae West. Eagerly, I helped her to get ready, pulling tight the laces on a corset she had rented for the occasion. She had bought new lipstick too, crimson red, and in the mirror I watched her apply it, then pull back to admire the transformation.
“You look really beautiful,” I told her. “Like a lady in a magazine.”
“I feel silly,” she said, wiping off a little of the lipstick. “And this looks completely wrong.” She removed from around her neck the simple oval locket she always wore, and I pounced on it immediately, fingering the silver and fiddling with its latch. She’d bought it in a flea market in Paris and loved it for its plainness—she told me the way it had slowly tarnished over the years made it feel like an extension of her skin.
“Can I wear it?” I said.
Mum hesitated. “Not tonight. I won’t be able to keep an eye on you.” She put the locket in her jewelry box, and selected another necklace made from dozens of diamantes that I had never seen her wear. “There,” she said, putting it on. “Now I look more like a tart.”
She pulled herself to standing and hobbled awkwardly out of the bedroom in five-inch stiletto heels, the only pair she had ever owned. When my father saw her, he wolf-whistled. “I might not go away so much if you dressed like that more often.” My mother blinked her heavy eyelashes at him but didn’t smile.
“Do you like my clown suit, Dad?” I said, sticking out my chest. I was hugely proud of the costume Mum had whipped up on her sewing machine in the week leading up to the party. Together we’d made pom-poms of yellow wool, cutting out cardboard circles and winding the yarn around them to make fat, woolly doughnuts. We’d folded another circle of card to make a pointed hat, topped with a pom-pom and tied under my chin with string. When my so-called friend Esther arrived in a Snow White costume from Hamleys, I was gutted. Suddenly, my clown suit looked homemade, all crooked pom-poms and collapsing hat. Esther’s parents were getting a divorce and my mother insisted that I invite her over out of pity. But broken home or not, Esther was mean; she called me four eyes when no one was around.
The most thrilling guests at the party were Jean Luc and Henri, who had come all the way from Paris by ferry and train. They were younger than my parents, perhaps in their early twenties, with long, raffish hair—though my dad had that too—and they smoked a ton of Gauloises. They told each other jokes in French that I knew were dirty from the way my mother made furious hand signals when they told them in front of me.
I thought of the Frenchmen always as a pair, but around Jean Luc in particular, I felt strange. I wanted his attention, but when he gave it to me, I just needed to pee. I think Mum felt something of the same thing because around him she smiled too much and fiddled with the curls on her wig. When Jean Luc came out of the bathroom in a pirate waistcoat—bare chested and exposing a trail
of tiny hairs that disappeared under the waistband of his leather pants—she spilled red wine on her dress and rushed off to make sure the chicken vol-au-vents hadn’t caught fire in the oven.
Henri was dressed as a crash victim, with a bandage wrapped round his head that oozed tomato ketchup. He didn’t make Mum blush, but I think she liked him better, especially after he spent the afternoon polishing our mismatched wineglasses and poking skewers of cheese and pineapple into an orange. The evening before, Mum and I had stayed up late making crudités and a vat of pink taramasalata. But overnight in the fridge the taramasalata had formed an orange crust. When Mum tried to fix it with lemon juice, it curdled, and she had burst into tears before throwing the whole lot out. She was worried there wouldn’t be enough to eat almost as much as Dad was worried there wouldn’t be enough to drink. Five minutes before the party began, he dashed to the off-license for more supplies and was still out when the first guests arrived.
Pippa brought Lulu, her friend from the polytechnic, who would babysit sometimes if Pippa was busy. Lulu was a stunner. Dad was dressed as a pilot and the minute she arrived he made an embarrassing fuss over her and frisked her French maid outfit, which ended at her bottom in an outbreak of frills. Pippa came dressed as the singer from Blondie, her spiky black hair covered by a platinum wig, and the change made her act in a way that was sassier than usual. When Dad patted her on the rump, she cuffed him round the ear and he smiled a little too warmly.
Esther and I had been told we were allowed to stay up until ten o’clock, but when it got that late no one told us to go to bed, so we sneaked around the kitchen taking sips out of abandoned paper cups. Out of revenge for upstaging my costume, I handed Esther a cup of red wine with a cigarette butt in it, but when she didn’t see the butt and drank from it, I worried she might die, and told her it was there.
Trying to get all the wine out of her mouth, she had just about choked. “No wonder you don’t have any friends at school,” she said, adding, “four eyes,” to drive home her point.
Tears pricked my eyes. “Four eyes are better than two,” I said, even though the retort made no sense. I wasn’t clever at being friends with people and always said dumb things and got teased. Mum said I had a thin skin because I was an only child, but I didn’t see how having brothers and sisters could stop other children from being mean.
After the cigarette-butt incident we gave up on sneaking drinks and hung out in the disco room. It was dark in there—the floor lamp glowed from under what looked like Mum’s dressing gown—and the music was so loud it hurt my stomach. We crept in near the back and hid behind the sofa, where we had a good view but were largely invisible. On the improvised dance floor, adults collided with each other in time to the music, while others bunched together on couches as though trying to keep warm. Surrounded by attentive men, Pippa and Lulu formed a nucleus at the center of it all. The whole night, Dad had been pitching drinks into their hands, with Jean Luc and Henri rushing in to fill the gap when he wasn’t around. Now the Frenchmen leaned in with their hips and whispered secrets into the girls’ hair.
“What the devil are you doing behind there?”
It was Dad, his pilot hat on back to front. He picked us up, one under each arm, and carried us, kicking, from the room. When he put her down, Esther looked stunned—even more so when he shooed us out the back door and closed it behind us. “My father would never treat me like that,” she said, her whisper outraged.
“At least my parents are still together.”
In the garden, Mum had put up the Wendy tent, and laid out cushions and sleeping bags. I gave the one with the broken zipper to Esther, and snuggled into the other but didn’t feel sleepy. It was dark in the tent, and we were soon telling spooky stories and squealing, which led after an hour or two to a thrumming noise inside my head and then a pinching headache.
“You’re taking up too much room,” I said, kicking Esther for the umpteenth time.
She fought her way out of the musky sleeping bag. “I need to pee.”
“You can’t go by yourself, you’ll fall into the bunker.” I stood up too quickly, and hit my head on a tent pole.
Esther laughed. “Spastic.” She was still dressed as Snow White.
I couldn’t tell her that I was the one who didn’t want to be left outside by myself because of the bunker, so I followed her across the dark patio in my clown suit. We had no torch, and stumbled on a stack of clay pots, which clattered over and broke. At first I thought the French doors at the back were locked, but after an extra-hard pull they came open. Inside, it looked like an elephant was asleep on the bed, and I was startled before remembering it was only the coats. We took turns going to the toilet, then heard giggling from the adjacent bathroom. I told Esther to keep quiet and squinted into the keyhole to get a better look. Behind me, Esther tugged at my clown suit, and tried to peer over my shoulder.
“Don’t stand so close. You’re making it all wobbly.” I shoved her away. Through the keyhole, all I could see was the mist on my glasses—steam from the bathroom had made them fog up. I wiped the lenses and looked again. One corner of avocado bathtub was visible and a gold tap, or half of it. If I closed one eye, I could see a bit more of the wall and a bit more of the taps. Disappointed, I pulled back to let Esther have a look.
“I can’t see anything,” she said after a spell at the keyhole.
“Maybe they’re taking a bath?”
Esther frowned. “In the middle of a party?”
We skulked away from the door, but hadn’t gotten far when a groan sounded from the bathroom—followed by a tidal wave of water hitting tiles. We rushed for the keyhole at the same time but I got there first, grabbed the door handle, and elbowed Esther out of the way.
“It’s my bathroom,” I spat. “You’re just a guest—remember?”
She shrank back and I looked through the keyhole but couldn’t see the tap—a tangle of buttocks and legs was in the way. Briefly, a gap opened up and I glimpsed what looked like a golf ball in a sock, then the whole lot slammed together as though powered by pistons. I was mesmerized, and wanted to look through the keyhole forever, but a dark shape fell across it, as if someone had pulled down a blind.
“What is it? What can you see? Let me look!” Behind me, Esther grew frantic. She yanked the yellow pom-pom on top of my clown hat until I fell backward, clutching at my neck where the chin strap dug in like a garrotte. Esther leaned forward and spied through the keyhole then recoiled in shock, screamed, and sprang from the door. She gave me a fright, and I screamed even louder than she had. A lumbering, splashing sound came from the bathroom and we hurtled from the door, tripping over each other to be the first to get away.
We made it as far as the bed, and hid behind the coat elephant. In the scramble, my glasses came off, but I couldn’t see well enough to find them. I clutched at Esther. “Can you see where my glasses went?”
“Shhhhh,” she said. “Someone just came in.”
Whoever it was knocked on the bathroom door, then when he or she wasn’t let in, they left.
“Let’s go back to the Wendy house,” said Esther.
I stuck my head above the coats just as a lock turned in the bathroom door. “Wait,” I said. “They’re coming out.”
A vast hulk walked out of the bathroom then split in two—one half tall and thin, the other short and curvy.
“Who is it?” said Esther.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t have my glasses on!”
The two halves rejoined and made a sucking sound.
“They’re kissing,” said Esther. “It’s disgusting.”
I tried to shut her up with a sharp look that was more of a cross-eyed squint and stuck my head over the ramparts. I willed the two figures to come into focus, or better still, to turn on the light. The short figure was a girl in a miniskirt. She held what looked like a cat—which she put on her head.
“Is that Pippa?”
“I think so,” whispered Esther.
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The cat was a wig. I had glanced away at Esther for only a second but in that time the two figures had become three—Pippa and two men. I grabbed Esther’s hand in surprise. I wasn’t sure if the other man had come out of the bathroom or if it was the same one who’d knocked on the door. They huddled together and laughed, and I thought I saw the outline of a pilot’s hat. Trying to make out if that’s what it was, I strained my eyes to the point of popping—but to no avail. By daylight the world was a blur without glasses, and by night I was legally blind.
“Did you see who it was?” I asked Esther when they’d gone.
She didn’t answer.
“Who was it?”
“Not telling,” she said, her smile smug. She was getting back at me for the cigarette butt, and I hated her more than ever.
Ten minutes later of fumbling on all fours, I found my glasses but it was too late to identify the people in the bathroom—they were long gone. Before trundling back to the Wendy tent, I stuck my head into the room where the party was still going on. It was a few shades darker than it had been earlier and everyone moved in slow motion. More of them were sitting down than standing up, and the ones on their feet were leaning against each other so as not to fall over. I searched for Pippa and Jean Luc and Henri, but while I was looking, I accidentally caught Mum’s eye and she stood up and staggered toward us. Not taking any chances, I grabbed Esther’s arm and hauled her to the Wendy tent, where we lay still and squinched our eyes closed, pretending to be asleep. When no one came to tell us off, what I’d been trying so hard to fake became real, and the next thing I knew, it was light outside and my sleeping bag cover was wet with dew.
When we got up and went inside the flat, it was eerily quiet. Bodies lay stacked on couches and the floor—Jean Luc was slumped against Henri—but there was no sign of Lulu or Pippa. We ate Coco Pops and waited for the adults to stir, and when they didn’t we sat down in a gap and watched cartoons on TV. But even that didn’t wake them up.
The Girl Below Page 2