The Girl Below

by Bianca Zander

It was never completely dark in the city, or even very quiet, but the night was peculiarly still, as if the neighborhood had been covered with a tarpaulin. I looked over at Caleb, breathing slowly. His sleeping face was exquisite, like something out of a pre-Raphaelite painting. I wanted to run my finger down the length of his nose and over the bow of his lips. I wondered if his skin felt as smooth as it looked, and tried to imagine what it might taste like. Then I caught the direction my thoughts had been going in and stopped them. Caleb was just a boy. I had no business thinking about him in that way, none whatsoever.

  I shone the torch into the wardrobe and directed the beam upward, illuminating a lone spider in its web. Next to my head, the carpet smelled of dead beetles and shoe dust, and something like sour milk, the stain from a spilled coffee perhaps. The torch was rubbery and heavy in my hand, and I felt my grip on it loosen as my body relaxed. Lulled by Caleb’s regular breathing and the sound of distant traffic, I let my eyes close, just for a minute or two, and enjoyed the weighty feeling of exhaustion. The torch swooned to the bottom of a coffee pond and I swam through floating beetles toward a pair of dirty socks. How long I was under, I’ll never know, but the pull upward was violent and complete, as though being wrenched from a hot bath and held up naked in a blizzard. Gasping, I opened my eyes, or thought I had opened them, but nothing registered except darkness so thick it was like trying to see through oil. I thought the disorientation was because I had been asleep, but rather than abating as I came to, it increased.

  The only thing I was sure of was that I was no longer in the attic bedroom. Wherever I was, it was claustrophobic, with a harsh smell of mildew and wet concrete. Overhead, thick earth bore down and my hands, I realized, were lying in a puddle. My clothes had become heavy with water.

  The experience was dreamlike, but it was not a dream. Instead, it was like being pulled backward through time to a distant memory, reliving it with perfect sensory recall. In the dark, when I reached out, I was able to touch the dry nylon coverlet of Caleb’s sleeping bag, but when I tried to shake him, my hand was too weak to close around the fabric. My voice, when I shouted his name, went backward into my throat.

  Shifting my weight to try and stand up, my hand struck a group of small, wet objects that were smooth and hard, like pebbles. Straightaway, from their irregular shapes, I knew they were teeth—not just two but enough for a whole set—and my hand shrank from them, colliding with other debris. The water was crowded with matter that hadn’t been here on my first visit, and I groped at textures that were hard, like bone, but also slick. Mixed in with those were fragments of organic material, hair perhaps, and fingernails, an unholy bric-a-brac of human remains. In protest at the strong smell, my nostrils clamped shut. My chest heaved in a sob that I couldn’t hear, and in spite of a rising feeling of disgust, my hands kept searching through the swill for something I’d lost. On my hands and knees, I crawled forward, and encountered a familiar child’s leather shoe, rounded at the end with a metal buckle and an old-fashioned T-bar strap.

  My fingers closed like a vise around the shoe, and in the same instant a tapping began, quiet at first, then louder and more insistent. The rotting odor receded, replaced with the doughy smell of a sleeping body, and I was completely dry, no longer submerged in water. Before I opened my eyes, I noticed that one side of my body was jammed up against an intense source of heat, but the knocking sound distracted me from that. My eyelids flicked open, I was back in the attic bedroom, and there stood Harold, framed by the doorway, his body a dark silhouette.

  Three or maybe five seconds later, I clocked that Caleb had shunted over in his sleep until he was crammed hard up against me. I rolled away from him, but too late. From his vantage point by the door, Harold would have seen Caleb and I wedged together, my belated attempt to roll away from him, and worst of all, my stunned expression—a possum caught in headlights. I reached for my glasses, and put them on.

  In the early morning gloom, the look on Harold’s face was hard to make out, and he was unmoving, silent.

  “Hi,” I said. “How long—how long have you been there?”

  “Long enough to figure out what’s been going on in this house,” he said.

  While I tried to think of something to say, Caleb sighed awake, registered it was morning, and looked over at the wardrobe. “You didn’t wake me up for my shift,” he said. “What happened?”

  Harold cleared his throat and flicked on the light switch, startling Caleb. “I’m sorry to interrupt your slumber party, but Pippa just called from Greece.”

  Something in his tone made us both sit up and try to look awake.

  “It’s Peggy,” he said. “Her fall was worse than anyone thought, and because it wasn’t treated immediately . . .” He trailed off.

  “Is she okay?” I said.

  “Not really, but she refuses to go to Athens, where they could treat her. She wants to stay put in Skyros, come hell or high water.”

  “What does that mean?” said Caleb.

  “It means we need to get there as soon as possible,” said Harold. “And that includes you, Suki.”

  “Me?”

  ”Yes,” said Harold. “All three of us.”

  “Great,” said Caleb, throwing off his sleeping bag. “That’s just fucking wonderful.” He got up and stomped to the bathroom, banging the door shut behind him.

  “Why am I going too?” I asked Harold.

  “I don’t know,” said Harold. “You tell me.” He looked meaningfully around the room at the pillows, torches, and junk piled up on the bed. Surely he could also see that my sleeping bag was zippered to the top, as Caleb’s had been.

  “You don’t think—” I began, but didn’t know how to continue.

  “You might want to put this room back the way you found it,” said Harold, and turned on his heel and left.

  Alone in the attic room, I felt a stinging sensation in my hand, and unclenched my fingers from around the phantom shoe. On the palm of my hand, small, but very clear, was a dot of blood where the pin of a shoe buckle had gouged a hole in my skin.

  Chapter Sixteen

  London—Paris—Athens, 2003

  Out the train carriage window, London’s backside was on display, and even at six A.M., eyes clogged with sleep, I couldn’t look away. Satin sheets and flannelette, cloth nappies, magic knickers, garter belts, socks, tights—even the things people didn’t want you to see had to be washed and hung out to dry. Some gardens were profuse with vegetables and roses, scattered with abandoned children’s toys and signs of life. Others were barren squares of concrete, windswept or clogged with litter, and I wondered if whoever lived there was as untended, as unloved, as their backyards.

  But I was only distracting myself. The discovery of the tooth and what had happened afterward—the grisly remains in the bunker—were still fresh in my mind. I was worried too about what Harold had surmised from what he had seen. I didn’t think Pippa would have summoned me to Greece and paid for my ticket solely because she wanted to tell me off, but in the absence of another, it was the only explanation that seemed plausible.

  At such short notice, no direct flights from London to Athens had been available, so we were taking the long route to Skyros, catching a train and hovercraft to Calais—the tunnel train was fully booked—and flying out of Paris. We would overnight somewhere near Athens and catch the ferry from a nearby port.

  The night before, Harold and I had been sent to Peggy’s apartment to pick up items on a list given to us by Pippa. Peggy wanted some of her personal belongings brought to Greece—photograph albums, various mementos, and a heavy white fur coat. Despite the Skyros heat, she would not budge on the fur coat, though her request to bring over Madeline had, thankfully, been refused. While we were over at her apartment, Harold and I had gone into his old room and he had shown me the clipped wires under the floorboards where Jimmy’s illegal phone line had been disconnected. Jimmy had stuck the wires to the plaster with pale green putty that looked like chewing gum. I
hadn’t noticed the wires when I was staying there, or the scratch marks around them, as though a small dog had been digging under the floorboards.

  “Maybe she thought he was still down there,” said Harold, poking his finger into a crumbling plaster hole in what would have been Jimmy’s old ceiling.

  “Maybe he is,” I said, half joking, half not.

  While we were at Peggy’s, Harold was civil with me, though I had been on edge, wondering when he would mention the sleepover again. It wasn’t until the next morning, when Caleb was with us, that he reverted to being frosty and sarcastic—or perhaps I was reading too much into his mood and he was just tired. Whatever the case, we almost came to blows over Peggy’s extra suitcase, a giant, cumbersome thing that required the three of us to cooperate in ways that were beyond us at that or any other time of the morning. Still, we made it onto the train to Dover, and Caleb immediately fell asleep with his head against the carriage window, oblivious to the greasy smear next to his face that someone else’s hair gel had left behind. Harold was reading one of the left-wing newspapers, holding it up in front of his face to shield himself from the rest of us, and I closed my eyes and pretended to snooze but could not. At Dover, we boarded a hovercraft, and watched uneasily as it farted its way to inflation. Hovercrafts had seemed so futuristic once, but now the thing just seemed like a relic, unseaworthy and rank, especially inside the grubby main cabin where the wet carpet ponged of diesel and latrines.

  We took our seats and I thought of coffee, teased by the sweet smell of powdered hot chocolate that began to waft through from the onboard cafeteria. We were lined up in a row with Caleb in the window seat, but any views that might have been there were obscured by fog and violent hurls of sea spray.

  “Can I get something to eat?” said Caleb, turning to Harold. “I’m famished.”

  “There won’t be anything decent.”

  “I don’t care.” He climbed out past Harold and rolled his eyes when he got to me.

  “I’ll go with you,” I said.

  A long queue curled around the refreshment kiosk, and everyone in it looked grim, deflated from rising too early. Even Caleb had bags under his eyes, and was yawning enough to make his jaw snap.

  “Has Harold said anything to you about the other night?” I asked when we were in the queue.

  “Nope,” he said. “He just told me to stop pissing around and pack my shit.”

  Briefly, I caught another whiff of the onboard toilets, and it reminded me of the dreadful smell in the bunker. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep it all to myself. “That night while you were asleep,” I ventured. “Something did happen.”

  “Why didn’t you wake me up?”

  “Because I’m not sure if it happened, or if I imagined it.” I thought of showing him the scab on my hand, but without the shoe that put it there, it didn’t seem proof of anything. “And it wasn’t the wardrobe this time.”

  “Well, whatever it is, I’m sure it won’t bother you in Greece.” He laughed. “I don’t think ghosts can swim the channel.”

  I wanted him to be right but was afraid that he wasn’t. “What if I’m the ghost?” I said. “Or I take it with me wherever I go?”

  We’d reached the food cabinet, where I lost Caleb’s attention to a hundred plastic sandwiches and pastries in dinky cardboard boxes. “Can I get whatever I like?” he said.

  “Go crazy.”

  Fifteen minutes later, midchannel, the hovercraft buzz was at its most deafening, and Caleb sat beside me looking green. He got up suddenly and lurched toward the aisle, clutching his stomach. I got up to follow him, but Harold reached out to stop me. “He doesn’t need you to hold his hand,” he said.

  It was the first time he’d spoken to me since we’d boarded the hovercraft.

  “I wasn’t planning on it,” I said.

  Harold gave me a challenging look. “Are you sure about that?”

  “Whatever you think happened the other night,” I said, “you’re wrong. Caleb was just trying to help me sleep, that’s all.”

  Harold said nothing, but I suddenly remembered his carnal cure for insomnia, and realized I’d only made things worse.

  “I’m going to get another coffee,” I said, and decided not to mention it again.

  We arrived in Calais as disheveled as if we’d been traveling for weeks. Back on dry land, after emptying his guts at sea, Caleb was ravenous again, and tucked into a stale pain au chocolat, while Harold stood on the concourse and smoked. Already the journey was starting to feel like punishment.

  At Charles de Gaulle Airport, Caleb rode up and down the conveyor belts of the central dome, waving at us and pulling faces until, at the end of one trip, he decided simply to vanish. With less than half an hour to go before we had to board our plane, Harold dispatched me and my schoolgirl French to find him. I wandered the concourse, bewildered by foreign signage and shoving hordes, until I too was lost. The airport was hideously chaotic, overrun with thin, jabbering women and fat, smoking men, and an intimidating array of security guards and military police with guns. I wanted, very much, to lock myself in the toilet.

  In the end, it was Caleb who found me and not the other way round. I was buying bottled water at a kiosk when he punched me on the arm and said, “Salut!” then tried to blow a smoke ring in my face. He seemed perfectly at home, another louche garçon with a Gauloise packet hanging from his shirt pocket.

  “Where were you?” I said. “We’re going to miss the plane.”

  “Je suis un flâneur,” he said, with a pretentious flourish.

  “Oui, and je suis un rock star.”

  We caught the plane, but only just, and Harold was furious about it for as long as it took him to pass out with a deep snore on the seat between us. Within seconds, Caleb was tapping me on the arm, asking me to order an extra glass of wine for Harold so he could drink it. When I refused to, he turned up the volume on his headphones and turned his back on me, the model of a sulking teenager. It was silly to even analyze it, but telling him off, and the casual way he’d rebuffed me, made me feel like I was his mother, and I wished that I hadn’t said no.

  Hours and hours later, we were in the back of a hot, cramped bus from Athens to the port of Kymi when I first noticed that Harold had been crying. Only then did it dawn on me that his cantankerous mood probably had nothing to do with Caleb or myself. We were on our way to Skyros because his mother was dying, and I of all people should have had a little empathy.

  Our hotel was a fleapit in an industrial quarter by the port, half the letters missing from its neon sign. In the dim lobby, Harold went to the reception desk to check in, while Caleb and I sat on our bags in the cracked marble foyer, yawning our heads off.

  After what seemed like forever, Harold came toward us looking glum. “They didn’t get our reservation,” he said. “They’ve one room vacant, a double, and the best they can do is a trundle bed.”

  “Fuck that,” said Caleb. “I’m not sleeping on a trolley.”

  “There aren’t many hotels here,” said Harold, wearily. “But the girl at reception said she’d ring round to see if anything’s available.”

  The thought of more travel was torture. “I’ll sleep on the cot,” I offered. “It’s sort of the only arrangement that works.”

  Harold nodded. “Caleb and I will have to share.”

  “No fucking way,” said Caleb.

  In the small, ovenlike room, we put down our bags and turned on the ceiling fan. It scudded to life and wafted hot, stale air over our faces.

  Caleb flopped on the double bed. “I’m hungry.”

  We all were, in the inexplicable way jet lag stimulates the appetite, and set out along a strip of kebab joints and all-night bars, grateful to abandon the hotel. It was well past midnight by the time we sat on the curb munching souvlaki, but a gang of olive-skinned urchins was still up and playing in the street, terrorizing a scrawny orange cat and her litter of emaciated kittens. The day had been a hot one, and the sten
ch of baked rubbish was intense but not unpleasant, just all part of the new and vivid sensory imprint of Greece.

  For the first time in weeks, I felt energized and awake, but I was out of sync with our itinerary. Our ferry left at seven the next morning, and before long, we were back in the oven, trying to sleep. The beds had lumpy horsehair mattresses over squeaking springs and made a cacophony as we took turns to get up and use the bathroom. Caleb wore pajamas and tried to build a protective wall of pillows down the center of the bed he was sharing with Harold, who came out of the bathroom bare chested, wearing a towel fashioned as a skirt. He climbed in next to Caleb, and fumbled under the sheets before dropping the towel to the floor.

  Caleb sat bolt upright. “You’re not going commando, are you?”

  “Y-fronts. I don’t like to feel restricted when I sleep.”

  Caleb wriggled closer to the wall, while overhead the ceiling fan flapped as though it were trying to take off. The tepid breeze that reached my face smelled of unwashed travelers, with a top note of garlic tzatziki and lamb. Harold fell asleep almost immediately, his snoring a low, steady rumble, but hemmed in next to him, Caleb pitched and moaned. “I can’t sleep,” he said. “I feel like a rotisserie chicken.”

  “It’s your pajamas,” I said. “They’re too restricting.”

  “Shut up.”

  Exhaustion had caught up with me, but there wasn’t enough oxygen to go round the room, and each time I reached the edge of consciousness, a mosquito screamed in my ear, and I swiped at it pointlessly in the dark. An hour passed before Caleb kicked the wall in total frustration. “I don’t see why we all have to go. Granny hates it when we make a fuss over her.”

  “I don’t think we’re going for Peggy’s sake,” I said. “Your mum wants the family to be together.”

  “Even Harold?”

  “Shhhh,” I said, pointing to the bed. “Peggy’s his mother too.”

  A loud squeak came from the mattress springs as Caleb catapulted himself out of bed and tugged off his pajama top. Briefly, his bare silhouette appeared in front of the neon hotel sign, his bony shoulders bent over like a spoon.