Mum led me to the kitchen, where she took a box of pineapple juice out of the fridge, left over from last night’s punch. “By the way,” she said, pouring me a glass, “have you seen my locket? It isn’t in my jewelry box, and I know that’s where I left it.”
She had taken me by surprise—wasn’t I still being comforted?—and I guiltily put my hand to my neck, but the locket wasn’t there. The last time I remembered wearing it was down in the bunker. What if someone made me go down there again to look for it? “No,” I said, quickly. “I haven’t seen it.”
Mum stopped what she was doing. “Are you sure?”
“I haven’t seen it since last night.”
She fished around in the pocket of her jeans and held something out in the palm of her hand. “That’s odd,” she said, “because this morning I found this.” She showed me a tiny nugget of silver, the broken catch.
“Oh,” I said, feigning surprise. “It’s broken.”
“Yes, it is.” Mum paused. “I found it in your room, Suki. Next to the carving knife.”
Blood surged through my head, deafening me. Then, over the noise, squeaked a voice that didn’t sound like mine, “It was Esther.”
“I beg your pardon?” said Mum.
“Esther did it. We played with your jewelry box when you were asleep.”
Mum eyeballed me for a long time, and I stood in front of her, dumbstruck by my audacity.
“And you don’t know where the rest of it is?”
I shook my head.
“I knew I shouldn’t have taken it off,” she said, sounding disappointed. “Even with the other necklace on, I looked nothing like Mae West.”
We went to join the others on the lawn of the big garden, and I was given a sandwich but couldn’t do more than nibble at it. The adults around me were unusually animated, running over the highlights of last night’s party and laughing loudly. Two men who lived across the garden had joined us and it was they who confessed to closing the air-raid-shelter hatch while we were down there. The men had been at the party too, and shutting it had been a hangover prank. It was only once the hatch was shut, they explained through tears of laughter, that they realized what a devil of a time they’d have getting it open. Jean Luc, Henri, and my father hooted at the prank, but my mother, in a private glance, made sure to let my father know just how unfunny she thought it was.
While the adults talked, I sat rigid on the blanket with a tumbler of juice in my hand. I couldn’t drink it, nor eat any of the black forest gateau—my favorite—that was handed round at routine intervals, the slices getting smaller and the cream curdling as the afternoon wore on. Every so often, Mum would lean over and stroke the hair out of my eyes or ask if I was okay, and I would nod or smile to mask what was really going on.
Not very far away, in the middle of the patio, the bunker hatch was open, and the magnetic pull of that square black hole made me think I was going to throw up.
I would have run into the flat, but I didn’t want to leave my parents’ side, even though the later it got, the less often they looked at me, and my mother stopped asking how I was. When night fell, Dad dragged the stereo speakers out through the French doors and someone arrived with fish and chips wrapped in newspaper. They had not long been eaten when a neighbor leaned out of his window and told us off for making a ruckus, and the adults staggered inside with the picnic rug and laid it out on the floor of the living room. I tried to tell Mum and Dad they had left the hatch open and that my Wendy tent was still out on the lawn, but they said to stop fussing and that it was high time I went to bed.
I was sent to my room, where I put on my pajamas. By the window, the clothes I had changed out of earlier were soaking in a bucket, and I peered in at the stained pattern of my strawberry dress. Something was bobbing on the surface of the water, what looked to me like treasure, two pretty white pearls, and I fished them out and in the palm of my hand examined them. Only on closer inspection they turned out to be not pearls, but teeth—a small pair, perfectly formed, very clean. Staring at them, I tasted iron, and a stab of pain echoed in my jaw—the same sensation I’d felt in the bunker, after the fall. I reached for my mouth, frightened to think what I might find, but my teeth, all of them, were still in place.
I began to shake anyway, and the teeth fell out of my hand. One landed in the bucket, where it floated lazily on a fold of the strawberry dress, but the other tooth flew off in a wild direction and disappeared. I half-heartedly looked for it on the floor and under the bed but soon gave up because it wasn’t something I really wanted to find.
For what seemed like hours, I lay awake in bed, distressed by the day’s events and unable to make sense of them. A lonely feeling had settled over me and I wished that I had told someone what had happened. I worried now that I had left it too late, that I wouldn’t remember all the details. But that wasn’t all. I had never lied to or kept secrets from my mother before, and doing so made me feel separate from her in a way I didn’t like.
When she came in later to check on me, I pretended to be asleep. Watching her cross the room to look in the bucket, my heart thumped so loudly I was surprised it didn’t give me away. I ruffled the bedclothes a little, willing her to notice me, to come to me, but she didn’t, she just picked up the bucket and left with it.
The night was very still, the air so close it was hard to breathe, and later, when someone went out into the garden to try to close the hatch, the sound of it scraping on the path was jarring, like a skill saw starting up. The noise stopped and, for a short while, all was quiet. I was about to go to the window when I heard male voices, chattering and laughing, before, with a satisfying thunk, the hatch found the groove it had been in for decades, maybe even since the last air raid, and finally, it was shut. I waited to feel relieved, but instead all that gripped me was the strange hunger I had felt earlier, as if there was less of me than there had been that morning. And then, under the spell of approaching sleep, I thought of the locket and how, if I had left it in the bunker, it was going to be down there for a very long time.
Chapter Five
London, 2003
A hair dryer, vacuum cleaner loud, sucked me from sleep, and I realized the flatmates were up before me, eating breakfast in the kitchen and getting ready for work. After leaving Pippa’s around eleven the night before, I had walked the three miles back to Willesden Green, stayed up to write in my journal, then collapsed into a deep sleep. Now I realized I’d slept through my alarm clock as well as all the others in the flat. I didn’t have my own room but was sleeping in the living room, and had been for almost three months. For the last two, I had perfected the art of invisibility, waking early and going out before everyone else got up; sneaking in late after they’d all gone to bed. Only this morning I’d fucked all that up, and was stretched out in the open like the hobo that I was.
A pair of high heels clacked their way toward me and paused near my suitcase. I’d been too tired to stow it the night before, and was pretty sure I’d left my journal out on top. I winced at the thought of it being exposed, but rather than risk a confrontation I rolled over and pretended to be asleep. From the shoes, I had a pretty good idea of which flatmate it was, and if she wanted to snoop, let her snoop. Only she didn’t. Instead she kicked the suitcase hard, a really fierce kick that I supposed she would have liked to aim at my head—a kick that must have hurt her more than it hurt my suitcase.
Half an hour later, the last of them had left for work, and I got up and surveyed the scene. My journal was out in plain sight, which was careless, but it didn’t look like anyone had read it. Watching the video of my mother the night before had unleashed a frenzy of long-forgotten memories, and I had tried to scribble down as much as I could remember about the old days when my parents were still together. I had been doing that a lot lately, writing down events from my past. The present was so empty, so dull, that I didn’t have much to say about it.
Ahead of me, my workless day unfurled, a replica of yesterday and the
day before it, lethally empty until I filled it up. The easiest way was to shorten the day with sleep, so I closed my eyes again and slept until eleven, when I got up feeling terminally exhausted. In the poky flat kitchen, I stole three teaspoons of instant Gold Blend and pretended the resulting sour mulch was espresso. It tasted so disgusting that it woke me up enough to check my e-mail on Belinda’s laptop, my second hit of shame for the day.
Belinda and I had worked on the same community newspaper in Auckland. The office had been short on kindred spirits and we had clung to each other more to keep others away than out of genuine affinity. Soon after moving into her London flat, I’d realized that without common enemies, we had little in common, but by then I needed the friendship more than she did and had tried like hell to keep it going. Lately, I had been feeling more like a parasite. At first she’d encouraged me to use her laptop when she was at work, but after a while she started putting it away in the top drawer of her dresser, forcing me to take it out in secret and erase my tracks after using it. I felt crummy the whole time I was doing it, but was careful never to look at her files, and reasoned that I was doing it for her own good. Without e-mail, I couldn’t apply for jobs, and until I had a job, I couldn’t move out of her flat.
Progress was inert. So far, I’d e-mailed out hundreds of résumés to HR departments and recruitment agencies without getting a single response. In the beginning, fresh off the plane and brimming with faux Kiwi enthusiasm, I’d actually rung people up, but they’d been so insulted by the interruption of a live voice that I’d given up doing it and now stuck to impersonal e-mails. The London job market was a fortress, and the harder I tried to get in, the more impenetrable it became. All I wanted was a humble temping assignment—office flunky, receptionist, wallpaper—but as August neared, and London shut down for the summer, even that was beginning to seem wildly beyond my reach.
For the third or fourth time that week, I took out my passport folder and considered my last traveler’s check, a crisp sheet of paper worth fifty quid if I cashed it. But I was worried that cashing it would signal the beginning of the end, that the second after it became real currency it would be taken from me. Just a few days earlier, I’d left the flat with a twenty-pound note in my jeans pocket, feeling flush, only to reach the tube station and find it had vanished into thin air. I had searched the pavements for an hour, mistaking leaves and lolly wrappers and even a condom packet for the lost note, to no avail, and had had the keenest sense that I had been fucked with, that someone had pinched my money and was hiding nearby, watching me and laughing.
With all the flatmates at work, there was no one to tell me to hurry up and save hot water, so I drained the boiler with a long, scalding shower, and sampled the comprehensive range of salon shampoos and conditioners lined up along the bath. Somewhere in the apartment, a phone trilled, but I’d just squeezed out the last blob of organic seaweed and jojoba frizz-control elixir, and left it unanswered.
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.
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