The Girl Below

by Bianca Zander

  I was tired, and losing it—nothing that couldn’t be fixed by a good night’s sleep. I went downstairs to make a cup of milky cocoa to help me nod off, and walked past Caleb, who was sitting in front of the TV, engrossed in his game. He didn’t look up, but I thought he was going to, that somehow he knew about the dirty dream but was pretending he didn’t.

  Standing by the kettle, waiting for it to boil, I tried not to look at him, but he seemed always to be at the edge of my field of vision. Without Ari and Pippa there to act as a buffer, the flat seemed smaller, too intimate, and I wasn’t sure that Caleb and I should be in it alone.

  The kettle pinged, and I jumped as though I had been caught in a compromising act. I had been meaning to offer Caleb a cup of cocoa but changed my mind in case he read more into the gesture than was meant. Instead I fled upstairs with my drink in hand, spilling a little on the carpet, and not even wishing him good night.

  Chapter Eleven

  London, 1993

  The flight to New Zealand was long but not long enough to account for the shock of how different it was from England. I hadn’t prepared myself for arrival in a strange country—had thought of nothing but fleeing—and the only thing the same was the language. Auckland was a wall of moisture, bright and hot, and I sleepwalked through customs, where men in short shorts and long socks inspected my bags for insects. I wheeled my trolley out from behind a screen and emerged in the arrivals hall, where a crowd of eager faces intently scrutinized my features before passing me over, for the next new arrival.

  The ugliness of Auckland shocked me: suburb after suburb of sand-colored bungalows, their newness punctuated by short, spiky plants and an occasional outburst of trees. It was drizzling and sunny at the same time, and on the backseat of the minibus, I broke into a sweat without lifting a finger: I couldn’t, it was stuck to the seat.

  In downtown Auckland I checked into a backpacker hostel on a street with massage parlors and strip joints at one end, banks and law firms at the other. I asked for a single room and was shown to a shoe box on the sixth floor with a window overlooking a ventilation shaft, down which people had thrown Coke cans and cigarette butts that were impossible to retrieve. Outside my window, an air-conditioning unit sounded like it was trying to take off, and the air was thick with insects.

  Time slipped through the cracks. I woke and thought I’d wet the bed, but it was only sweat. I took a shower but had no soap, I couldn’t get clean, couldn’t wake up. I lay in bed trying not to think about either Mum or food, but ended up alternating between the two until I had a headache. Laughter burst from the corridor, British and Swedish accents, the sound track to international sex. I drank a whole liter of water and went back to bed.

  When I woke, my eyes were gummed together. Cramps squeezed my stomach, and I felt light-headed. Dressing in whatever was close at hand, I went outside. The pavement was melting tarmac, and when I looked into the distance, objects shimmered as if they were underwater. The sun was so bright it obliterated the edges of things, and my eyes squinted shut in protest. I found a small supermarket and bought cheese, chocolate milk, and a loaf of bread, and when I paid with a hundred-dollar note from the airport exchange, the man at the counter commented in a language I didn’t understand. Back in my room, I stuffed the bread and cheese into my mouth in pieces, washed down with milk from the carton.

  For another two days, I stayed in my room: dozing, thinking, sweating, eating, until I started to feel as if I had fused with the bed. On the third day, I got up in the late afternoon, took a hot shower, dressed in decent clothes, and went downstairs to find a phone book. Dozens of Pipers were listed in the Auckland directory, but none with the first name Ludwig. My father, whose grandparents were German, had been named after the famous composer, but only official documents used the elongated version.

  The discovery that his name wasn’t listed was more crushing than it ought to have been, and I realized that looking him up in the phone book had been the extent of my plan to find him. I had no idea what to do next, so I went into a bar and ordered a Mexican beer. The barman wouldn’t give me one; he insisted I drink New Zealand beer instead. “It’s the best in the world,” he said.

  Unwilling to make a scene, I handed over a ten-dollar bill and went to sit by the window, as far away from him as I could get. The brown beer was foul, with a heavy, bitter aftertaste, but it was cold and I drank it thirstily. A tall man with angular shoulders and dark hair was in the bar, and as soon as I saw him I knew he would come over. He had heard me talking to the barman and asked what part of London I was from.

  “West,” I said. “I went to school in Hammersmith.” Even then, I knew better than to mention Notting Hill.

  “That explains your posh accent.”

  “I’m not posh.”

  “ ‘I’m not posh,’ ” he said, mocking me.

  I stood up to leave. I was way too tired to have a sense of humor.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just that I love the way you speak. It’s so quaint.” He placed a hand on my upper arm. “Please. Let me buy you a drink.”

  Unused to day drinking, after two gin and tonics, I was tipsy, and he’d told me his name was Hamish. He claimed to be an actor, but I didn’t believe him. He didn’t have the right sort of face. But I told him I was looking for my father, and he suggested I try the library, where they had national phone directories, fewer than twenty for the whole country. “New Zealand is a series of villages,” he said. “Sewn down the middle by a two-lane highway.”

  “You make it sound like a sock.”

  Hamish laughed. There was something about him I liked, and when he offered to take me on a scenic drive of Auckland, I said yes. The gin had made me reckless, but I sobered up once we were in his car and the doors were shut and locked. He drove us along the waterfront, past thousands of yachts, their white masts jousting against the horizon. He told me one in eight people in Auckland owned a boat.

  “Is that an official statistic?”

  “Every year, they count.”

  “They do not.”

  “They did once, in the eighties.”

  The marina ended in an industrial port, containers stacked like Lego bricks, their sides painted in wacky Russian fonts. Behind them, a cone-shaped island rose out of the bay, and Hamish told me it was a volcano with a Maori name, Rangitoto.

  “I hope you’re kidding,” I said.

  “Don’t worry, it’s extinct,” he said. “Dormant for thousands of years.”

  We drove through undulating streets, past houses that were prettier and more colonial than the ones I’d seen on the way in from the airport. The car climbed a steep road toward the summit of a hill, and Hamish said it was another extinct volcano. At the top, we got out of the car and peered into a crater cup filled with grass and sheep. A strong wind blew me into Hamish, and he put his arm around me. I asked if we could go.

  We drove in silence to the hostel, and when we arrived Hamish wanted to come in.

  “No,” I said.

  “I just want to keep talking,” he said.

  When I opened the door, he followed me in. The shoe box, with two people in it, was crowded, the single bed the only place to sit. We had nothing to say, and I suddenly felt like I had been shot with a tranquilizer gun.

  “You should leave,” I said. “I need to sleep.”

  I got into bed with my clothes on, and Hamish sat on the floor with his knees pulled up in a triangle. “I’m quite comfortable here,” he said.

  My head sank into the soft pillow and the rest of my body followed. Lying down was wonderful, the bed a sort of heaven.

  “You’re very beautiful,” said Hamish, from a distant place, perhaps another room.

  Only the pillow heard me say, “Bullshit.”

  All had gone quiet, except for the air-conditioning unit, droning on. I was sinking, slowly, heavily, downward, with no will to climb back up. At the bottom, there was a volcano, upside down, sheep swimming in a coffee cup. Train no
ises, but no train, and my name whispered down the tracks.

  “Suki. Oh, Suki. So posh.” The last word grunted.

  I paddled upward, felt my eyes pinch as I surfaced. I’d fallen asleep with my contacts in again. Heavy breathing—not mine—and at the edge of my vision, blue jeans concertinaed around a pair of hairy white knees. Higher up: hairy buttocks, tensed flanks, and an elbow, still in its shirtsleeve, pumping.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I said.

  Hamish said absolutely nothing, just pulled up his pants and left.

  I took a cold shower and tried to wash away what I’d seen. And came smack up against what I wanted. Not sex with Hamish, but sex all the same.

  Since ending my nonrelationship with Leon soon after it began, I had gone back to pining for boys I didn’t know or who weren’t interested in me. Between that and my mother’s continued disapproval, I had somehow forgotten to lose my virginity. I was pretty sure I was the only one in my peer group who hadn’t, so I fell into the habit of pretending, cagily, that I had, whenever the subject came up. This had gone on for so long I worried that if I did finally try to have sex, everyone would find out I’d been lying and the humiliation would be double. But now that I was in New Zealand, what did any of that matter?

  In a downtown bar, I met a surfer with salt-bleached hair. With a bottle of tequila on the backseat, he drove us out to a west coast surf beach in his yellow Holden Kingswood station wagon. I would not normally have noticed what type of car it was, but he was so proud of it and repeated the details so many times on the way out there that long after I had forgotten the sex, I remembered the make and model of the car. I would never again see one without thinking of that night, without remembering how I had sat on the sand dunes afterward while a vial of lemon-and-barley syrup trickled down my thigh. I wished I’d thought to bring a towel, and perhaps a paperback, something to read while I waited for him to sober up enough to drive us home.

  The next morning, I felt ready to meet my father, and found his address in the library, just like Hamish had said I would. The very same afternoon, I went to the bus station to buy a ticket for Hamilton, where the directory said he lived.

  The cashier said, “Are you sure that’s where you want to go?”

  I checked the address. “Yes, why?”

  “It isn’t a tourist destination, that’s all.”

  “I’m not a tourist,” I said.

  Past the city limits, the countryside was so green it could have been AstroTurf. I hadn’t telephoned ahead, I’d been too nervous, too unsure of what to say. The coach followed a swollen river for many miles before approaching a town that was far uglier even than Auckland. Wide streets with barnlike stores sold fertilizer and tractors. The coach pulled into a bus terminal, an open-air glue-sniffing bar, and I hesitated before climbing off.

  At a nearby tearoom, I showed Ludo’s address to the woman behind the counter. She told me no buses went out to where he lived, and that I’d be lucky to find the place, even in a car, even with a map. Thinking like a Londoner, I set off on foot, but after an hour, I hadn’t even reached the city limits, and I sat down on the side of the road, defeated. For forty-five minutes, I watched cars stream past, too scared to put out my thumb, until finally a white van just stopped. The woman driving it had brown skin—not Maori but something else—and the backseats were jammed with handicapped kids.

  “Are you lost?” she said, too friendly.

  “I’m trying to find Koro . . . Koro-ma . . .”—I showed her the map—“this place.”

  “Hop in,” she said. “I can take you as far as Temple View.”

  I climbed into the front seat—watched vigilantly by her passengers—and read the sticker on her dashboard. JOY, it said, and underneath: JESUS FIRST, OTHERS SECOND, YOURSELF LAST.

  At Temple View, she let me out. The name of the town wasn’t a joke. Rows and rows of identical white-brick bungalows collected around a temple the size of a mountain, every single window in the place net-curtained against sin. In the shade of a cypress pine, I waited, until it felt like the eyes of the town were on me—even though I couldn’t see a soul. I set off down the road and had walked a few kilometers, thumb out, sweating under my rucksack, when a large four-wheel drive swooshed to a stop on the verge in front of me.

  The passenger window slid down and a mane of blond hair leaned out. “You shouldn’t be hitching,” she said. “It isn’t safe.”

  She seemed cross that she’d had to stop to tell me this, and I apologized. “There isn’t a bus that goes where I want to go.”

  “Where’s that?” she said.

  I reached for the map but realized I’d left it in the white van. “Kora-something?” I said, pointing down the road.

  “Koromatua?”

  “Yes, that’s it.”

  The woman drummed on the steering wheel for a moment before getting out to open the boot, where she put my backpack next to a pair of muddy boots and a bag of poultry wheat. She was absurdly tanned, and moved in an urgent, choppy way. Straw clung to her jacket, and the inside of the car smelled of horses. She pulled out on the main road as though she was driving a rally car. “Your accent,” she said. “Are you English?”

  I nodded.

  “My husband’s English. We met over there.”

  Her erratic driving put me on edge and I wondered if we were going in the right direction. “Do you have a map?” I asked. “So I can show you where to go.”

  “I know this area. Just tell me the address.”

  “Flint Road.”

  “Flint?”

  “Yes, do you know it?”

  “We live on it,” she said, and looked at me strangely. “What did you say your name was?”

  “I didn’t. It’s Suki.”

  The car swerved off the road into a ditch and the woman turned in the driver’s seat to glare at me. “Suki Piper?”

  I felt sick and a little creeped out at the same time. “How do you know my surname?”

  But she was ten seconds ahead of me. What Hamish had said about the smallness of this country was even truer than I could have imagined. In a sharp voice that I would come to fear, she asked, “Why do you want to see him?”

  Her name was Rowan and she had been married to my father for ten years. They had two children, Lily and Simon. She smiled when she said their names. After she told me all this, we pulled out onto the highway again and drove for a while in heavy silence before turning off the road and cruising down a long gravel lane, across cattle bars, and passed through a remote-controlled gate. The parklike grounds were dotted with cows and sheep, a few horses. A ranch appeared, sprawling, with porticos and stables, a garage the size of an aircraft hangar. The car came to a stop in front of a barn, where a handful of brown chickens scratched in the sand.

  “Wait here,” said Rowan. “Your father isn’t home.”

  She disappeared inside. I got out of the car and went over to a tabby cat lounging in the sun. A tag around its neck read FLEA. “Aren’t you a lovely boy?” I said, stroking the soft white down of his tummy.

  “Flea’s a girl, and she’s not allowed inside,” said a child’s voice from behind me. “She sleeps in the stable with Felicity—my bestest pony.”

  I turned, then tried to hide my shock. It was like looking in a mirror at myself at age five or six. She even wore bottle-top glasses. The little me scratched her head. “Are you a friend of Mummy’s?”

  “Not exactly. But I think we’re related.”

  “I thought so,” she said. “You look like my cousin.”

  “And you must be Lily?”

  “Mum called me after a flower because she thought I was going to be pretty.”

  “You are pretty,” I said, although I’d felt the same way at her age.

  “I’m not. I wear glasses. Which means I can’t be a ballerina. Not a proper one.” She attempted a pirouette and crashed into my shoulder. “See?”

  “You just need to practice,” I said. “Besides, I used to wear gla
sses like yours and now I don’t.”

  She looked quizzically into my eyes. “Did you get new eyes?”

  “No, but I have tiny glasses inside my eyes.”

  “Ouch,” she said. “That might be too painful for me.”

  I stood up and noticed that Rowan had been watching us from the front porch. Lily ran to her and was pulled into a hug.

  “It’s my cousin,” she said, kissing her mother. “My new cousin!”

  Rowan kept her arm around Lily, blocking the door. “Ludo’s on his way home,” she said. “He shouldn’t be too long.” An older boy appeared in the doorway behind them. He looked me over then went back inside.

  “You better come in,” said Rowan.

  Their house was messy and smelled of wet dogs. Rowan told me to wait in the kitchen, where a round, dark-skinned woman was gathering her things together. Rowan handed her an envelope and they chatted for a few minutes about the children’s day before the woman, who must have been a nanny, left. Seconds later, Rowan and the boy—who must have been Simon—were swallowed up by the huge house and I was left alone in the kitchen. Lily had parked herself in front of the TV in the next room, occasionally glancing over her shoulder at me to see if I was still there.

  I’d made a mistake coming here, I realized. I was unwelcome. But I was also filled with the same overwhelming longing that I’d felt as an eight-year-old, waiting for my father to come home after a business trip, his arms laden with big, guilty presents. Often, that longing had been the best part, better than actually seeing him.

  After almost an hour in the kitchen, tires crunched on gravel and a car door slammed. He was home.

  The man who walked into the kitchen was smaller than I’d expected, and very nearly bald. But I recognized his eyes, never smiling in unison with his mouth.

  After all this time, what should I call him? “Hi, Dad.”

  “Suki,” he said, pronouncing my name as if he hadn’t said it, or perhaps even thought it, for many years. He came forward and shook my hand, then briefly and clumsily touched my shoulder. “What brings you to our neck of the woods?”