The Girl Below

by Bianca Zander

  At twenty-two, I was working in a faux-French restaurant on Christmas Eve when Scott, my first love and nemesis, walked back into my life and asked me to marry him.

  The evening had not begun well. When I arrived at six for my shift, the place was packed with red-faced office workers who’d been drinking buckets of chardonnay and eating nothing since lunchtime. Anton, the maitre d’, was already in a state of high agitation—too much speed, too early on, I supposed—and the second I appeared in the kitchen, he threw an apron at me and told me to get straight out on the floor.

  “But I’m early,” I protested. “Can I at least have breakfast?”

  “Babe,” he said, tossing the remains of a steak béarnaise into the scraps bin, “it isn’t my fault you fucking just got out of bed.”

  Lately, I had been keeping vampire hours, going to bed sometime around dawn and getting up a few hours before work started at five or six. That afternoon, I’d slept in and had had just enough time to shower, dress in my waiter’s uniform, and race down to a department store on the main street to pick up Lily’s Christmas present. Rowan had already paid for the present and had given me detailed instructions on where to pick it up. The next day, she was expecting me to arrive in Hamilton with the gift in time for Christmas lunch. It was the first time in years that I’d been invited—the year before they had flown to Rarotonga without telling me—and I was trying not to believe it was only because they’d needed a courier.

  For dinner I had two short black coffees and a sneaky cigarette on the kitchen fire escape, where I hoped Anton wouldn’t find me. I was still out there, sneaking a second, when I glanced into the restaurant and saw a familiar figure heading for the men’s toilet: Scott. The scoop of his neck, the quiff at the front of his hair, the slope of his nose—his features were as familiar to me as my own, maybe more so. And that brief sighting was all it took for my mood and confidence to plummet.

  The last time I’d seen Scott was a few weeks after we broke up, at least a month before. He had summoned me to his flat on a Sunday morning with no explanation other than that he had something to tell me. I had gone eagerly—I still wasn’t over him—and had stood on the porch with a swelling of hope in my heart. With barely a greeting, he had guided me to the living room, and told me to sit down on a wooden dining chair that had been placed in front of the stereo.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  Scott kneeled on the floor next to my chair and pressed play. “Listen carefully to the lyrics,” he said, then put his head in my lap.

  I recognized the opening bars immediately. It was Elvis, his favorite, my least, and a track that was slow and saccharine.

  The first line, “Maybe I didn’t treat you . . . quite as good as I should have,” had been a doozie. But as the song went on, I became confused. When Elvis pleaded, “Tell me that your sweet love hasn’t died,” I wondered, did Scott want me back? Or did he just want me to want him back? I wasn’t even sure, now that it seemed to be on the table, if that’s what I wanted. Which had been the problem all along. When I wasn’t with Scott, I pined for him, like a lost limb, but when he was in the same room, as he was now, I felt nothing—not just for him but full stop. My emotions went blank, along with my mind. The longing was gone but his being there erased me, turned me into a cipher, and I didn’t know which of those two things was worse.

  At the end of the song, Scott had stood up and I saw that he had been crying. “Now you know exactly how I feel,” he’d said, apparently proud of having expressed himself so clearly. But I was baffled. I had been about to ask him what he wanted to do about these feelings he had, when he announced that he had to go into the office, but he could give me a lift somewhere seeing as it was raining. That was it, and that was Scott: chivalrous and cold in equal measure.

  Since then we had not even bumped into each other, even though I lived less than two blocks from his apartment.

  I stayed out on the fire escape a little longer, defying Anton, delaying the moment when I’d have to go back out to the restaurant and face Scott.

  As if on cue, Becky sailed into the kitchen carrying an armada of dirty plates. “Fuck, it’s busy,” she said, putting down the plates and rubbing a red indentation on her arm. She looked at my face. “Shit, doll, are you all right?”

  I swept her into an alcove and whispered, “Scott’s here.”

  Becky’s eyes widened. “Are you sure?” But she could see from my face that he was. She reached under her apron and pulled out a tiny piece of folded paper, which she pressed into my hand. “Save some for later,” she said, and winked.

  I went into a stall in the ladies’ toilet and closed the door. Usually, we waited until toward the end of the shift to have a line, but occasionally, in emergencies, we had one early.

  The speed was bitter, and hung in a lump at the back of my throat, but soon after taking it, I felt the familiar rush of clarity, and the aftertaste was easily fixed by a slug of vodka behind the bar. When I stood up, Scott was heading toward me, smiling the alligator smile that early in our relationship I’d mistaken for debonair.

  “Suki Piper,” he said, enunciating every syllable in a proprietary way. He leaned on the bar and looked me up and down for a moment, as if he was appraising goods in the window of a shop. He liked to use silence to his advantage, and was waiting for me to speak, I knew.

  “Would you like a drink?” I said.

  He nodded. “And I wanted to see you.”

  We were still standing like that on either side of the bar when Anton came up behind Scott and slapped him on the back. “Scottie, my boy. You’re up early. Got any samples for us to try?”

  “I’m off duty,” said Scott. “But I’m sure we can find something else to do.” Scott was a wine rep who preferred to conduct business at night when he could most enjoy his customers’ hospitality. He smiled roguishly at Anton and an understanding passed between them, an understanding I recognized all too well.

  “Suki,” said Anton, “look after table five. They just ordered coffee, but try the dessert menu one more time. I think the fat chick’s about to cave.” He drummed Scott’s arm with a series of friendly punches and led the way to the staff room. I knew where they were going; it was where Scott always went on a Friday night, where he had taken me about a month into our relationship to induct me into his shady world of rolled-up banknotes and powder. He had cleverly waited until I had fallen in love with him before revealing his habit, before taking me to the staff room to lovingly chop up my first line. He was proud of being the one to initiate me, and even more delighted when I turned out to be a fiend.

  When Anton returned to the restaurant floor, he reeked of cigar smoke and peppermints, his favorite amphetamine digestif. Scott was heading for the door, about to leave, when he turned back and walked to the coffee machine where I was standing. “I’m heading to Dagger,” he said. “You should come up for a drink when you finish.”

  I hated how he did that, made a suggestion but didn’t ask outright. I also knew that I would go meet him, that I couldn’t help myself.

  He leaned over the counter and whispered in my ear: “I miss you, Sukes.”

  After he left, the restaurant got busier and louder before starting to empty out as people went home to wrap their Christmas presents and stuff them into stockings or hide them under trees. The store had already wrapped Lily’s present in garish pink paper; all I had to do was get it, and myself, to the bus stop.

  After putting all the chairs up on the tables and polishing the last piece of cutlery, Anton poured us all cheap fizz to celebrate Christmas and the end of the shift, which irked because the week before we’d asked for, and had been denied, a monetary festive bonus. I drank the champagne thirstily and poured another glass. I was nervous about meeting Scott. Becky had offered to come along for moral support, but I told her I preferred to go alone. “Okay,” she said. “But I’ll be at Kuzo if you need me.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I reassured her.

 
“Just don’t sleep with him again, okay?” she said. “He’s a scumbag.”

  I smiled at her. Since breaking up with him, everyone had told me what Scott was really like, but while I was with him, no one had said a thing.

  When I got to Dagger, Scott was surrounded by his cronies, but he left them to settle in a corner booth with me. He went to the bar and came back with a bottle of champagne—the French stuff, he refused to ever buy fake—and two plastic flutes, like you’d find in a picnic set or on a boat.

  “Kind of ruins the effect, don’t you think?” he said, pouring out the bubbles, which smelled of freshly baked bread.

  “What are we celebrating?” I asked, my voice flat because the speed had worn off.

  Scott leaned in closer and put his hand on my knee. “You look tired,” he said. “I’m worried about you.”

  “Why?” I said, defensively. “I’m fine.”

  “Suki,” he said, gently cupping my chin in his hand and forcing me to look at him. “I know you better than that.”

  I took a huge gulp of champagne and said nothing. Scott put his hand around mine on the plastic flute stem, gripping me with warm fingers. With his other hand, he brushed the hair from my face and swept it behind one ear. It was so easy to respond to his touch, to forget the hurt and turmoil of the preceding months, to surrender to my longing for intimacy. Involuntarily my body leaned into his, reacting to the familiar pull of his closeness.

  “We should just get married,” he said, settling back into the seat and scooping his free arm behind my back.

  “What?”

  “We should get married.” His words hung surreally in the air.

  “You’re joking—right?”

  “Why would I joke about that?” he said.

  Scott’s proximity and the mellow warmth of the champagne had me intoxicated, but from five fathoms down came the voice of unwavering reason. “We can’t get married,” I said. “We’re not even going out.”

  “Being married would fix that.”

  His sureness threw me into turmoil. Some of the happiest times of my life had been with Scott, early in our relationship, when I’d tasted the first sweet sip of reciprocated love, but so had some of the worst, all the mornings I’d woken up to find him missing, only to have him come in a few hours later reeking of booze and lousy excuses. “Being married wouldn’t change anything,” I said.

  Scott shrugged. “It might make me good.”

  “I’m not marrying you to find out,” I said.

  Scott laughed. “Then there’s nothing more to talk about.” He drained his champagne glass and stood up, looking at his watch. “I’m supposed to be meeting Anton in a minute.”

  Following him out to the pavement, I wondered how he could offer to spend the rest of his life with me and snatch it away moments later. While he had been proposing, I’d felt sure of myself, in control, but now that he was walking away, I was overcome with wild emotions. “Wait,” I said. “You just said we should get married. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  “You said you didn’t want to.”

  “So that’s it—either marriage or nothing?”

  “That’s it,” he said, adjusting the lapels of his jacket.

  I had begun to sob, quietly at first, but then with real despair. He tried to quiet me down, to prevent a scene, and when that didn’t work he started to back away, to disown me. I clutched at his clothing, half blind from the flooding in my eyes. “That isn’t what I want,” I said, pathetically.

  “What do you want from me?” he said.

  The question was so insulting, so belittling—as though I didn’t even have the right to want anything from him—that I finally let go of the jacket and watched him walk away.

  Seven minutes later, I pushed past the doorman at Kuzo and stumbled down the long staircase into the basement. They were having a drum ’n’ bass night and the place was decked out in camouflage netting strewn with orange emergency tape. Sweat dripped from the ceiling and huge speakers shook from the effort of spitting out bass. I fought my way past heaving shoulders and found Becky, sitting on her friend Justin’s lap in the corner by the bar. We didn’t speak to each other—we couldn’t, it was too loud—but she saw I’d been crying and put her arms around me, enveloping me in a damp hug. She pulled me into the bathroom, where we shoved our way into an empty stall and hunched over a small plastic bag of wet brown crystals. “Lick your finger,” she ordered. “This shit is too sticky to snort.”

  At the bar, we demanded flaming Quaaludes, and washed them down with vodka and tequila shots, toasting, “Fuck you, Scott,” with each one. There was only eighty dollars in my account to last until next week’s payday, and I had spent it within twenty minutes. The brown speed was good and strong, but it made me thirstier than I had ever been in my life and I was relieved when we ran into Guy, a regular at the restaurant, and his mate Rupert, who had a face like a potato but was rich and liked to buy everyone drinks. I didn’t care who they were or what they looked like, I just wanted them to pay for it all and they did, round after round of shots, vodka, tequila, and schnapps. When I took speed, I could drink as much as I wanted without falling over or suffering the calamity of a hangover, and before long I felt dazzling and witty. Guy and Rupert were my new best friends, and the night opened up in front of us, a Christmas cracker of possibilities. Getting into the festive spirit, we raised our glasses to Jesus Christ and sang him happy birthday. Then I overhead Guy saying something to Rupert about Charlie and I said ugly things and flattered and lied until I got some.

  I took Becky with me into the toilet stall, where we laughed and fell into each other as we poured out a tiny cloud of the white powder. “Just a bit more,” I said to Becky, shoving her elbow so that a teaspoon of cocaine fell onto the toilet seat.

  “Shit!” she said, laughing. “We better leave some for Guy.”

  We tried to get the powder back into the packet, but our coordination was off and most of it drifted across the seat in white puffs, which we chased and licked with our fingers. “Don’t worry, he’s loaded,” she said, cutting up what was left and inhaling it greedily through a ten-dollar note. “Merry fucking Christmas, Suki!”

  We stared at our wide, sparkly eyes in the dimly lit bathroom mirror and I was sure I had never looked so beautiful. “I feel like dancing,” I said.

  “Me too,” said Becky, and we jumped in the air and kissed.

  Hours and a lifetime later, a dull glow filtered through the glass bricks of the skylight above the back bar of Kuzo. Outside it was daylight, but I had convinced myself that the bar was still suspended in the night before. I lit a cigarette and looked in the packet: only two left. Apart from the barman, Lewis, the place was deserted. Becky had gone home with Rupert and Guy to their flat in Saint Heliers, but at the last moment I’d changed my mind about going with them. It was a long taxi ride there and I’d had an unlovely vision of how the hours after that would unfold, especially with the kind of deficit Becky and I had racked up. Everyone would sit around on the patio with their sunglasses on, drinking and smoking pot until they came down enough to sleep or at least lie horizontally in a dark room. When that happened, there would be sex, or the expectation of it, and even though I was wasted, that was the part I shrank from the most. It was never a question of being forced to put out, but if you didn’t, you had to be prepared for the hostility that followed. Rich young lads didn’t take girls home for company—they had guy friends for that—and after the deed was done, they happily left you on the bed with your knickers round your ankles, feeling like you should have gotten paid. Except that we had already been paid, at Kuzo, in large amounts of booze and fags and coke.

  Staying in the bar with Lewis seemed like a simpler option. He was the bar manager, and like everyone in the district, knew Scott, and knew about our messy breakup. When he offered me another line, I took it, even though I was already shaking so much that my coffee cup rattled on the saucer when I put it down. The new line of speed wip
ed away the effects of the alcohol and instantly sharpened my focus, but when I looked around at the objects in the shadowy bar, they formed a surreal jigsaw that held no meaning. The longer I stared at a chair or a table, the less I was able to recognize it as either of those things.

  “I’m hungry,” I said, even though it wasn’t my stomach that was empty.

  Lewis had closed up the bar and there was no avoiding the bright glare of the pavement any longer. When we walked out onto Vulcan Lane, the buildings looked to me like cardboard scenery.

  At the corner, Lewis hugged me and said good-bye. Through his thin shirt, I felt a ragged heartbeat and was overcome with an urge to cling to him. “Do you want to come up for tea?” I said, trying to sound light, but hearing the desolation in my voice.

  He held my hand for a moment. “I can’t.” He tipped his cap and let it settle back on his head. “Merry Christmas though.”

  “You too.”

  When the lift doors opened, the painted scenery of the apartment I shared with Becky and two of the chefs at the restaurant gave way and let me in. There was a ringing in my ears that I hadn’t noticed in the bar, where there had been low music playing, or in the street, where there had been traffic. The door to my room was wide open, and a boy was standing by the window. I was startled at first to see him and then I remembered: his name was Liam, he was the brother of one of my flatmates, staying with us until he found his own place. He was much younger than me, fresh out of school, but he had kind eyes and this sagelike quality that made him seem older.

  He was embarrassed at getting caught in my room, but I told him not to leave. I didn’t want to be on my own. “Are you okay?” he said, and looked at me with such gentle concern that I had to tell the truth.

  “I feel like a ghost,” I said, through chattering teeth. “Like I’m not really here.”

  Liam reached out for my hand, the one nearest him, and tried to warm it. “You’ll be okay in a couple of hours.”