I reached the door, which was slightly ajar, and pushed on it with my hand. At my feet, through the door, was a short flagstone path and clipped grass, Notting Hill green. The door swung shut again, and I remained still, with my hand on the wood. Behind me was Elena’s room—the faded rugs and Jesus and Mary, their halos glowing faintly, neon lit. But in front of me, on the other side of the door, was what? Not the courtyard, not Elena’s villa. Not what ought to be there.
Once again, I pushed the door open, and held it open with my hand. I took a step forward so that one foot landed on soft grass. In front of me was a homemade brick barbecue, a small, square lawn littered with empty wine bottles, and the discarded red slip of a Wendy tent. Everything I’d seen that night at Peggy’s, but right here, within arm’s reach. I put my hand up in front of me and moved it forward, waited to meet resistance, but felt none, only a different kind of heat; the air through the door was swampier, like just before a downpour.
I lowered my hand and inched my right leg forward, leaving the other behind so that I straddled the doorway. The temperature on either side was subtly different, but both places were warm, summery, strangely inviting. Without thinking, I shifted my weight onto the front foot, and swung the other leg forward so that all of me was outside in the garden—my old garden from when I was six years old.
Not trusting what I was seeing, I stepped back through the door, into Elena’s room. But the garden was still there on the other side. I crossed the threshold another four or five times and then, satisfied that I wasn’t going to be shut out, I stepped resolutely into the garden. At first, being there felt like coming home, but as I walked a little farther my legs began to shake, and after a meter or so I stopped and looked behind me.
The door I’d come out of was an old servants’ entrance that I’d forgotten was there. It went nowhere, had been blocked off long before we’d lived in the basement flat. This was the same door, I now realized, that had confused me when I was staying at Peggy’s and had imagined a direct exit from the communal lobby to the garden.
Only then did I have the wherewithal to examine my surroundings more closely. The area immediately around where I stood was perfectly solid, tangible even. When I bent to feel the grass, it was springy to the touch, and slightly damp. I walked onto the patio and crouched down. The flagstones were smooth, and the grooves between them were gritty with soil fragments and dust that adhered to the ends of my fingers.
But looking across the communal garden, and beyond that into the distance, I noticed that the trees and masonry had soft edges, that they melted into one another, became indistinct. The waxiness of it unnerved me, and I had the sense that at any moment it might all collapse, taking me along with it if I was still there.
The thing I most wanted to see—but was also afraid to look at—was over to my right, on the other side of the flagstone patio. When I finally had the courage to glance over, I could just make out the edge of it—of the hole—and next to that, the hatch of pitted iron. The bunker was open, the same as it had been that night at Peggy’s, only this time I was at ground level, close enough to feel the vertigo that insisted I was going to fall in.
Pulled by that irresistible force, I moved a little closer, near enough to see moss growing around the edge of the iron plate. I moved closer still, until the top step that led down to the chamber of the air-raid shelter came into view. Seeing the step below that one sent a shiver through the hairs on my head, and I thought of the horrors that were down there. Not just the teeth and the T-bar shoe, but the lingering smell of decay, and the soup of hair and bones.
As if replying to my thought, a soft whimper sounded from the pit of the bunker—such a tiny sound that it was almost negligible, and I wondered at first if I had imagined it. To better hear, I dropped to my hands and knees, and lay down next to the hole with my fingers curled around its mossy edge. Cautiously, I put my ear to the cavity and listened. For half a minute, I remained stationary but heard nothing, and then a piece of soft moss crumbled off in my palm. Beneath it the soil churned with earwigs, squirming in all directions and wriggling blindly toward my hand.
Mice and rats I could tolerate, but insects were another case entirely, and I got up and shook the dirt from my hands, danced around on my tiptoes as if I was infested with the things. At that exact same moment a high, desperate wail escaped from the bunker, followed by a heartbreaking moan that sounded like a child in pain crying out for its mother. Halfway through, the moan was cut off, as though the creature making it had been strangled or plunged underwater.
So disturbing was the combined effect of the moan and the earwigs that I found myself mechanically stepping away from the hole, first walking backward in slow, deliberate strides, then turning around and legging it toward the service entrance. In the doorway I paused, and turned round to face the bunker. Someone, a child, was trapped down there, and I had to go back for her. Was that why I kept returning to this place?
I had retraced my steps almost to the service door when a sharp guffaw tore through the air and a man stepped through the French doors of our old flat and out into the garden. Two other men followed, also in raucous hysterics, snorting with abandon. Among the voices, I recognized my father’s low chortle, and for a moment or two I simply listened in a kind of trance, before it clicked that my presence in the garden was an unthinkable anomaly. I was trespassing across space and time. What would happen if they saw me? My nerves caught up with me and my heart began to pound. Whatever blip was occurring, I did not wish to cross paths with a giddy, young version of my father. I wasn’t ready to have that experience, not now, or ever.
I resolved to return to Elena’s room, and as I crossed the threshold of the service entrance and found myself back on her hard, unforgiving pebble floor, relief flooded through me. I was back in Skyros, back in the present. But when I turned around and looked back through the door, the view of our old garden was still there. I could even put my hand through the doorway, touch the humid, pre-storm air. I leaned on the doorjamb and peered into the garden. Some ten or fifteen meters away, the shadowy figures of Jean Luc, Henri, and my father were heading toward the air-raid hatch. They bent down and each took one side of it and tried to heave it a few inches off the ground. Mere seconds later they dropped it again, and the sound of clanging iron reverberated around the garden. The three of them fell about laughing—the gleeful, irrepressible hysteria of wine-addled youths—so intoxicated that they seemed unable to continue with their task. But a few minutes later they had recovered enough to try again. On the third try, they finally succeeded in placing the hatch over the hole. They didn’t bother fastening the bolts, just staggered off toward the flat with linked arms—all except Jean Luc, who loitered by my mother’s prize geraniums. I realized after a time that he was relieving himself, though the procedure seemed to take him longer than necessary. His elbows stuck out at odd right angles and he was struggling with something, perhaps a zipper. After what seemed like an age, he got it sorted, went inside, and the garden was deserted.
For a short while longer—perhaps only ten seconds—I stared at the apparition in front of me, until I had the sense that my vision was failing, that the scene was rapidly going out of focus. Gradually, like a windscreen demisting, the distortion lessened, but as it did so I realized the scene in front of me had changed. Instead of the old garden, I could make out the dark outlines of a stooped fig tree and a low wall, the solid features of Elena’s courtyard. The evening light was a little bluer than it had been a few minutes earlier, but the time of night I judged to be approximately the same—give or take twenty years.
I felt shattered—not just physically exhausted, but mentally done in, as though I’d been trying to figure out complex algebra that was far beyond my ability. I managed to climb the ladder to my sleeping platform, to lie horizontally on the small, firm mattress, and the instant my head connected with the pillow I was out for the count.
Chapter Nineteen
Auckland, 2002
When after six months the suicide list still hadn’t gone away, I paid for sessions with Arthur, a Jungian psychoanalyst who had been recommended to me by my doctor. Before that, I had gone to see a psychiatrist who had offered me a choice between two brands of psychotropic drugs. I’d told him I didn’t want either, that I thought perhaps drugs were what had gotten me into this mess in the first place, and he had sent me on my way with a condescending look and a flyer for group counseling.
Arthur was fiftyish, with a beard and sad, suffering eyes that made me think of paintings of Jesus with nails through his hands. He worked out of a small room with obscured glass windows at the front of a weatherboard villa, where I sat on an overstuffed couch next to a jumbo box of man-size four-ply tissues. Only once did I reach for the tissues, when I’d come to my session after a particularly grueling day at work, but Arthur reached for them often, whenever a story I told made him cry.
“Don’t you feel sad when you tell me that?” he’d ask, dabbing his eyes.
“I don’t know,” I’d say, and I’d really mean it. Often when I talked about my past, I noticed it was easy to articulate the events, but not so easy to feel the emotions that went with them. A lot of the time I felt nothing at all. I told myself it was the falseness of the situation that was restricting me. Arthur was genuinely kind, but I was paying him handsomely to listen, he wasn’t doing it out of the goodness of his heart.
On and on I talked, until I ran out of saliva, and week after week, Arthur said very little. He was fascinated by my dreams, and got me to recall them in detail at every session, but when I asked what they meant, instead of telling me outright, he’d ask cryptic questions until I came up with my own unsatisfactory explanations. It was like hiring a translator who then refused to interpret the foreign language you didn’t speak.
In one of our early sessions, Arthur asked about my father, and why I’d stayed in New Zealand instead of going back to London, and I had replied, “Because I like it here.”
“Do you?” he said. “You haven’t been very happy.”
“I prefer this to going back to Grandma and all that.”
“All that?”
“Grief, I suppose. London is where Mum died.”
“But ten years is a long time away from your homeland. Were you hoping the situation with your father would change?”
“To begin with, maybe, but not anymore.”
“When did you last see him?”
“Only once since he offered me the check. He tried to give it to me again.”
“Do you regret not taking it?”
“Sometimes.”
“And did you tell him about the list? About being suicidal?”
“I haven’t really talked to him in a while.”
“When did he last call?”
For only the second time in Arthur’s office, I reached for a tissue, and he waited patiently while I used it.
“Not having any family to fall back on,” he said. “That must be very hard.”
His pity rankled, and I sat up straight and blew my nose. His wife and children were playing noisily in the backyard behind the villa—I’d seen them arrive home in their Volvo. What did he know about having no family, about being alone? I had left his office in a snit, but later that night, listening to music in my room, I realized Arthur had only been trying to make me see that I no longer had a valid reason for remaining in New Zealand. I was refusing to accept that I’d never have a prominent place in my father’s life, and it was the only thing that was holding me here.
In another session, from out of the blue, I had recalled how the whole family had been trapped down in the air-raid shelter. I told him about the teeth, about the move across the bunker that I couldn’t account for, and as I was telling him I had the strangest sensation that perhaps it had all happened to a parallel version of myself who shared my experiences but wasn’t me. “Is that normal?” I asked. “To feel like a bystander in your own past?”
“It’s perfectly normal to disconnect from traumatic experiences,” he said. “Do you have any other memories like that?”
“There’s the hand in the cupboard,” I said, and told him about the way it had untied my dresses in a sort of game. Even as I was telling him, I knew he’d have a field day with the implications of a mysterious, meddling hand, and duly, he seized upon it as tremendously significant but wouldn’t say why.
“Do you think it’s a suppressed memory of sexual abuse?” I suggested, half joking.
“Well, do you?” he said, not joking at all.
“The hand was real,” I said. “In fact, I’d stake my life on it.”
“That’s very interesting,” said Arthur, nodding his head. “Have you always believed in things other people can’t see?”
“Only when it comes to men,” I said, surprising myself, and finding it was true. “I see qualities in them that aren’t there. Then I fall in love with my own creation.”
“What a fascinating observation,” said Arthur, making a note with his pencil. He often jotted things down while I talked and told me the reason he finished the hour early was so he could write up his notes before the next patient arrived. Early on, I’d assumed his notes were what I was paying for, that at some future interval, I’d be handed a dossier along with a diagnosis and a cure. When that didn’t happen, I began to feel increasingly duped.
“Have you figured out what’s wrong with me yet?” I asked after three or four months of weekly visits.
“It doesn’t work like that, I’m afraid,” said Arthur. “You have to come to your own realization.”
Two weeks later, after a period of no realizations at all, and a bill of almost two thousand dollars, I lost patience and rephrased my question in a less polite way: “You must have worked out by now if I’m fucked in the head?”
Arthur laughed. “Do you really believe that about yourself?”
“You’re never going to tell me, are you?”
He shook his head. “It isn’t for me to say.”
As the weeks dragged on, I grew tired of talking about myself, and couldn’t shake the feeling that I was locked in a game with no end and no rules. Often at the close of an hour I had a sore throat but no insights, though I did notice that on the days I went to see Arthur the list was quieter, more subdued.
Toward the end of summer, I found enough courage to quit my job and book a ticket to London, and once bought, I pinned my hopes on going back there. New Zealand was to blame for making me depressed, and leaving would be the cure. It wasn’t just about what had happened with my father, or with men; the country had a melancholy side. Flip paradise over and all that wide-open space with too few people in it became an echo chamber for your own thoughts. I wanted to go to a city that was noisy and polluted and crowded with people. I thought it would be safer there, that with so many bodies jostling and colliding, I might be able to leap from my skin into someone else’s.
Through the southern-hemisphere autumn I daydreamed of escape, though I failed quite spectacularly to plan any details of the new life I was heading toward. Instead I got carried away with the rightness of it all, the synchronicity of returning to London after exactly a decade.
I didn’t tell my plans to Arthur because I feared he would imply, with pointed questions, that I was running away. Then one morning, after a spell of cold, wintry weather, I arrived for my appointment at his office and Arthur said, “It’s a glorious day. Why don’t we take our session outside?”
“Okay,” I said, surprised and a little unnerved.
We walked the leafy streets around his office, past gabled villas with sweeping driveways and canopied trees, and arrived at a small reserve, open on one side to the road. Arthur laid out a checkered picnic rug, the sort men keep in the back of their cars for romantic dates, and he sat down on it with stiff crossed legs. I tried to copy him, but was wearing a skirt, and ended up in an awkward posture with my legs twisted uncomfortably to one side.
“How have you been
this week?” asked Arthur, in the same manner he began all our sessions.
“Fine, I guess.”
He looked at me expectantly, waiting for more, but I said nothing. A woman with a pram and a young child in tow walked past, and she glanced in our direction for a second longer than she needed to. Did she think Arthur was my boyfriend, or, worse, did she realize he was actually my shrink?
“Don’t worry about her,” said Arthur. “Pretend we’re still in my office.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I thought she was looking at us.”
“Tell me how you’ve been,” said Arthur, fixing me with his kind, sad eyes.
Away from the squishy couch and the box of tissues, his question seemed unnatural, prying, and his voice too loud. I felt exposed.
“Is something wrong?” Arthur’s brow creased with concern and he leaned a fraction closer and placed his hand tentatively on my arm. “You don’t need to feel uncomfortable,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere. You’re safe.”
But his words sent panic coursing through me, and I shrank from his touch as though he was diseased. What were we doing together on a picnic rug in a secluded park? Was he coming on to me? I was sure a line had been crossed, and every molecule inside me turned against him. “I don’t like it here,” I said, flatly. “I want to go back to the office.”
“Of course,” said Arthur, immediately getting to his feet. “Wherever you feel more comfortable.” He stood up too quickly, and his papers scattered in a gust of wind. With pathetic flapping movements, he chased them around the small park. I should have helped him but embarrassment paralyzed me, and I turned away, pretended I didn’t know him. On the walk back, I hurried ahead, picking up speed whenever Arthur tried to catch up. Back in the office, he tried to continue the session, but I felt no less uncomfortable and couldn’t shake off the sensation of disgust. “I need to go,” I said.
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