The Girl Below

by Bianca Zander

  “I hope you don’t mind, but we’re meeting some friends of mine here, colleagues, actually,” said Alana as we elbowed our way to the bar. Then she yelled out, “Chris! Over here!” and disappeared behind a ridge of corporate shoulders.

  Alana’s friends—Chris, Mike, and Steve—materialized in identical navy blue suits and one second after they were introduced to me, I forgot which of them was which. The one who made Alana blush I guessed was the bloke from work she fancied, but that didn’t tell me his name, and soon I was left to entertain the other two when she and her beau drifted away. Of the two left behind, one was taller and heavier, with a wider chin, but both had cropped brown hair, clear skin, and pale eyes—clean, good-looking blokes, the kind you took home to mother, if you had one.

  Next to them I felt like a backpacker who’d been dragged off the street and charitably given a beer, but they seemed to find me fascinating, and raised their eyebrows in amused surprise at everything I said, no matter how inane. It took me a while to realize they were partly laughing at my accent, an odd combination of deep Kiwi and West London posh that flummoxed almost everyone. Partly laughing at me, but not wholly. The taller one soon announced that he’d been to New Zealand and had “totally fallen in love with the place”—a line I’d heard before from a dozen English kids on their gap year. Because I didn’t know them, and it was easier, I played along with the version of New Zealand they had in their minds and found myself banging on like a tour guide about black-water rafting, tandem skydiving, nude bungee jumping, and a host of other extreme activities I had never participated in. I didn’t tell them I preferred bars to beaches, that I had never been to the South Island, except for a night in Christchurch, or that my experience of the beautiful, unspoiled landscape was that in a nanosecond it could switch to empty and oppressive—a Gothic cathedral without a congregation. At other times, the cities seemed so new they were barely there.

  On one of my last mornings in Auckland, I had gotten up early and gone for a drive before the sun came up. It was a Sunday, and the streets near where I lived were still asleep, bathed in weak gray light, everything hazy, undefined. As I drove it looked to me as though all the buildings and cars were slowly fading out, and I remember thinking the time had come to depart from this place, that if I didn’t leave, I’d fade out too.

  Someone bumped me from behind and spilled beer down my top, and I realized Alana’s colleagues were smiling at me in a keen way, undeterred by my sudden silence and oblivious to the gap between what I had been saying earlier and what I had been thinking.

  “You should come with us,” one of them was saying. “Steve’s got a massive tent—big enough to sleep twelve people—and last year we got a wicked campsite near the main stage.”

  “Yeah, mate, I’m still deaf,” said the other one, laughing. He pointed to my empty glass. “Fancy a refill?”

  “Sure,” I said, and he went to the bar, leaving me alone with his friend, who was the shorter of the two. An awkward silence followed while I tried to think what to say.

  “Reckon you’ll stay in London once the summer’s over?” he said.

  “That was the plan,” I said. “I don’t have a return ticket.”

  “Brilliant,” he said. “So you’ll be able to come to Glastonbury with us then?”

  I hesitated, not wanting to tell him that I couldn’t afford to go, even if I wanted to.

  “Go on,” he said. “It’ll be such a laugh.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  I hadn’t seen Alana for what was beginning to seem like hours, and I looked around the bar for her, at the same time checking out who else was there. Fewer suits; more art school types; and one or two who looked like they were in bands, or wanted to be. My eye caught on a guy who looked Icelandic—pointed elfin features, blond hair—and just as I thought he was about to turn and look in my direction, someone passed in front of him and he vanished.

  “If you like, I can get you a ticket when I get mine. It’s cheaper if you get in early.” His smile was too expectant, like he wanted me to do more than just go to Glastonbury with him, and when I registered his eagerness and what he was trying to communicate, something changed in me, a switch flipped, and I took an involuntary step away from him, as though repelled. “Thanks, but I’m not sure if I can go.”

  “Where’s Chris got to with our beers?” he said, his face falling briefly before becoming jovial once more. “He must be getting them from a pub down the road.”

  I laughed, but it didn’t quite come off sincerely. So the other one was Chris, and he must be Steve or Mike. He was still smiling at me, a big warm-hearted smile, and the longer he grinned, the more I started to feel like a cat with its hackles up, getting ready to swipe or bolt. “Excuse me,” I said, trying to hide the fact that he was the cause of my violent reaction. “But I need to go to the bathroom.”

  I found Alana in the queue to the ladies’, her cheeks and lips restored to their schoolgirl rose by a few pints of beer.

  “There you are!” she said. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

  “I was by the bar, with your friends from work—right where you left me.”

  If she noticed my sardonic tone, she ignored it. “I’m so glad you’re hitting it off with Chris and Mike,” she said. “They’re such top blokes.” She winked at me. “And single too.”

  “I’m not looking for anyone,” I said. “I told you I was happy on my own.”

  “Bollocks,” she said. “You were always so obsessed with boys. You haven’t changed that much—surely?”

  “They’re not my type,” I said, wishing she’d change the subject.

  “Oh, that’s right,” she said, a little archly. “I forgot about you and your types.” We had reached the front of the queue, and Alana ducked into a vacant stall. She locked the door and shouted through it, “What about Steve? You have to admit he’s a bit of all right!”

  I didn’t think he was, but she wanted to hear otherwise. “Steve’s hot,” I said, shouting back. “And he obviously thinks the same thing about you.”

  Over a flushing toilet, I heard her giggle—had she forgiven me?—then I went into a stall and when I came out she was gone. Fighting my way back, the bar swarmed in front of me, an impenetrable scrum. I considered going home, but didn’t want to leave things on a sour note with Alana or the others. Pushing my way through the crowd, I collided head-on with some guy before we sprang apart, both clutching our heads in pain. “I’m very sorry,” he said, in a strange, jerky accent, and I looked up and saw it was that Icelandic guy. Up close, he was even more striking, with eyes that could cut through glass. He brazenly looked me up and down before asking, “Which way were you trying to go?”

  “Over there,” I said, pointing toward where I thought the others were.

  “Well,” he said, slowly. “This is really a shame.”

  I returned to the others and tried to act relaxed, like I had when we’d first arrived, but I couldn’t think of what to say to Mike that would put things right between us without also leading him on. Perhaps there was nothing, and I ought to just leave. When one of the blokes suggested going for a curry, I saw my out and quickly declined, saying I was tired. Alana seemed less disappointed than Mike, who tried to persuade me to go with them by offering to pay, then, when I wouldn’t, insisted on collecting my phone number on the pretext of making sure I got home safely. When we said our farewells, he gave me a crushing bear hug that tried very hard in its pressure to communicate more than just good-bye. I told Alana I would call her the next day, and whispered in her ear, to make amends, that I thought she and Steve would make a cute couple. “Thanks,” she said, squeezing my hand as they tumbled from the bar, the boys arm in arm and already belting out “Wonderwall,” the hooligan version.

  The instant they left, I realized how drunk I was, how far from home. Just thinking about the number of tube changes made me weary. I drifted toward a bald patch in the crowd next to the cigarette machine,
and decided to at least sober up before I set off. I was standing there, a few minutes later, feeling self-conscious, when I noticed the Icelandic guy throwing glances in my direction—too many, and too lingering for them to be accidental. He did not look at me expectantly like Mike had. His look was direct, almost a challenge; he was daring me to resist looking back.

  Before he even walked over to the cigarette machine and casually dropped in a few coins, I could tell he was a player, but there was something about those men that put me at ease. You always knew where you stood with them, what you were letting yourself in for: nothing.

  “What happened to your pals?” he said, pressing the button above Lucky Strike.

  “They went to get a curry, but I didn’t feel like going.”

  He opened the cigarette packet before answering. “You made a good decision. These Englishmen, they meet a pretty girl, they have fun together . . . but they always ruin it by taking her for a curry on the way home. They don’t know what is sexy. Myself, I don’t know either, but I know it’s not curry.”

  Putting down the opposition, false modesty: smooth, but I let him get away with it. He introduced himself. He was Dutch, not Icelandic, and his name was Wouter—the kind of name that only a confident man would admit to outside his homeland. He said he was a multimedia artist and I pretended to believe him, just as I pretended not to mind when he didn’t ask what I did or even what my name was. Nor did he offer to buy me a drink, perhaps realizing that he didn’t have to.

  “How about we go outside?” he said when a surge of new people arrived in the bar. “This place is too crowded—don’t you think?”

  I had to agree. In the tiny paved courtyard at the back of the bar, he took a small tin out of his jacket pocket and lit a giant spliff. When he handed it to me, I inhaled as lightly as I could and passed it to him, but my throat was still burning from the first toke when he handed it back to me. The joint tasted strange, like chlorine or Jif, but I put that down to London pollution, which often got up your nose just before you were about to eat and made everything taste like the end of an exhaust pipe. Soon, the thing was only a roach, and I remembered why I didn’t normally smoke: marijuana made me want to hurl, especially if I had been drinking. That was probably my last coherent thought.

  Wouter put his arm around me, and without any warning, tongue-dived my ear. I leaned away, or thought I had, but all that happened was that the pint glasses on the table in front of us began to list, and the courtyard dipped and folded like swell on a rough sea.

  I was way, way too old for this. “Last tube,” I slurred, into Wouter’s hair—he had dandruff, I noticed as I pushed him away and stood up, knocking something off the table that shattered into a million lethal pieces. Using him as a springboard, I launched myself across the courtyard, but he had attached himself to me seemingly with Velcro and was still trying to snog me when I reached the other side. He was still trying when I got to the tube station, and pushed me up against a wall, sliding a leg in between mine. He managed to undo a few of my shirt buttons, but he was so wasted it was like being mauled by a puppy, and when a tube rumbled toward the platform, I whipped through the barrier to catch it, and left him on the other side, looking hopelessly around for me.

  Somehow, I emerged unscathed half an hour later at the Willesden Green tube station, five hundred meters from home, but in my condition, a distance of seven times that. Just before reaching my door, I fell sideways into a shrub that I swear hadn’t been there before I left that night. I hadn’t fallen over since I was a kid, and the shock of it was deeply insulting, like a punch in the face from a stranger, though I can’t say I felt any pain.

  In the poky kitchen, I guzzled three pints of water and plundered the fridge for leftovers, finding a pink, three-day-old sausage—was it raw?—and something that had looked like pizza but turned out, when I bit into it, to be only its empty cardboard carton. I stumbled down the hallway, where one of the flatmates jack-in-the-boxed out of a bedroom and told me, in the voice of a mother superior, that the stock market had crashed and it had all gone white.

  “What’s gone white?”

  “Are you all white?” she repeated.

  Something flew in the shadows behind her, a bat with a human face, and I ran away.

  I should have known that I wasn’t going to be able to sleep, but I tripped over the sofa with hope in my heart. Normally when I was drunk or high, I could turn my head to the left on the pillow and the room stopped spinning, but this time I was so far gone it spiraled whichever way I faced. Soon, the wallpaper was rippling too, and I lurched off the couch and zigzagged down the hall to find the bathroom. But someone had moved it, and the next thing I knew, I had taken a tumble and was groping at hulks of ceramic and trying to swim the breaststroke across a deep, black puddle of water.

  The bathroom was flooded, not just sprayed with water as if someone had taken a shower and forgotten to use a bathmat but drenched in an unpleasantly cold and glutinous liquid that was black but reminded me of thin, overcooked porridge. It took half a minute for me to recall what the stuff reminded me of: the water in the bottom of the bunker on the day we were trapped down there. In the next instant, as though I had bitten my lip, I tasted blood, but when I ran my tongue over my teeth and gums, there was only saliva.

  The bathroom was windowless, and no lights were on in the hallway, but I made my way toward the pale hull of the toilet bowl, rising out of the water. It didn’t look far away, but when I tried to crawl toward it, my arms and legs were switched off, and wouldn’t do as my brain told them. My neck was weak too, and my head drooped into the cold, thick water. Soil and salt filled my mouth, and I tried to spit it out but couldn’t. Just as my neck collapsed, I managed to turn my head to one side and my mouth came to rest only millimeters clear of the foul liquid.

  I had taken drugs before, in reckless combinations, but this was different. I wasn’t out of it, I was hyperpresent, and fighting for my life. Somehow I found the strength to turn over onto my back. I concentrated on breathing, listened hard to the rhythm of my lungs. Slowly the water receded, started to melt away as if it had never been there, and the tiles were soon only damp. I got to my knees and spewed into the toilet, emptied my stomach of whatever rank poison had been there.

  Vomiting broke the spell completely, and I was surprised by how quickly strength returned to my body. I was still a little shaken, but I got up, turned on the light, and looked around the bathroom. It was orderly, solid, even homely, and I picked up my toothbrush and luxuriated in the ordinariness of cleaning my teeth.

  I was so relieved that my powers of observation deserted me. Then, treading softly down the hall, I heard a squelching sound and looked down at my clothes. They were soaked through and covered in a kind of mulch. In the living room, I peeled them off, and some of the mulch got on my hands and gave off the odor of mold. I thought back to the shrubbery I’d fallen into, and decided it must have been muddy underneath, though I did not remember it being so. But after everything that had happened that evening, it was a feasible enough explanation, and I tried hard not to think of an alternative.

  Chapter Six

  London, 1981

  In the months that followed my parents’ wild party, I waited, tense with anticipation, for my mother to confront me again over the whereabouts of her locket. I thought it was only a matter of time before she spoke to Esther’s mother and exposed the fib I had told about Esther breaking it, and each day I rehearsed my confession.

  But autumn fell, and still nothing had been said. Mum simply acted as though there had been no locket. She never mentioned it, let alone my part in its disappearance. At first I was relieved, but as time went on, I was utterly bewildered and then finally just plain curious. Why did my mother seem not to miss the locket that had once been so precious to her? When enough time had passed that I was sure I would not be blamed for its disappearance, I found an opportunity to ask her about it. She was sitting at her dressing table, French-plaiting her hair
, and I was going through the remains of her jewelry box when I found the silver catch that I had sliced off the locket. I held it up and contorted my face into what I hoped was a look of innocent puzzlement. “What do you think happened to the rest of it?” I said.

  Mum abandoned the plait, midfold, and took the piece of silver from my hand. “Someone stole it,” she said. “After the party.”

  “Who?” I said, my chest thumping. “Who stole it?”

  “I don’t know. It was very dark.”

  “You saw them take it?”

  Mum put the catch back in the jewelry box and snapped the lid shut. “No,” she said, seemingly irritated by my question, “I couldn’t see well enough. It was late at night.”

  Though I asked her again, once or twice, her answer was always the same, and soon enough, I forgot about the locket and became preoccupied with other momentous things, such as Christmas. That was the year I ruined it for myself, by myself. At nearly seven, I was far too old to still believe in Santa Claus, but believe in him I did, with a fervor that bordered on religious fundamentalism. Every year on Christmas morning, I woke at three or four A.M.—sometimes as early as midnight—and pounced on the pillowcase bulging with toys at the end of my bed. It wasn’t the toys I was after, but their supernatural smell: a sugary aroma of nutmeg, fresh snow, and reindeer fur that to me was the essence of magic. To try and preserve the perfume, I held off playing with my presents for as long as possible, and the same went for not eating the walnuts and satsumas that had been tossed into the sack alongside them. Those I would stow under my bed for safekeeping, where they remained until wizened and black with rot.

  At home, no brothers or sisters were there to challenge my zeal, but at school I was forced to defend Santa by using all the skills at my disposal. I didn’t mind if other children voiced their doubts, but one day a boy named Charles Pycraft took things too far. He stood on a chair in the middle of the classroom and told us he’d seen his dad sneaking into his room at night with a sack full of presents, and what’s more, he’d taken a Polaroid. When he held it up for us all to see I launched myself at him—rather than look. At first Charles laughed, and so did the rest of the class, until he felt my teeth sink into the fat, juicy lobe of his ear. While I ripped his Polaroid into a thousand tiny shreds, he howled his lungs out. As punishment, I was sent to a small library off the assembly hall called the Quiet Room, and was told to stay there and read the illustrated King James Bible until I was sufficiently sorry and in the mood to apologize. At three o’clock, when that mood still had not arrived, I was frog-marched to the cloakroom where my mother stood waiting to fetch me.