The Girl Below

by Bianca Zander

  “I’m sorry,” said Arthur. “It was foolish of me to suggest going to the park.”

  His apology made him seem even feebler, and it was all I could do to stay long enough to get out my checkbook and pay him.

  “This one’s on the house,” he said, flustered that I was leaving. “We’ve barely had half a session.”

  “Good-bye,” I said, quickly, and walked out of his office for the very last time, the only time I’d done so without feeling robbed.

  Chapter Twenty

  Skyros, 2003

  My suspicions that Pippa hadn’t summoned me to Skyros wholly to atone for her guilt were confirmed the morning after I arrived when my duties began. She didn’t say as much, but it was obvious they needed an extra pair of hands—women’s hands. In times of sickness and death, women were still expected to cook, clean, and change soiled bedding, whereas men were permitted to invent reasons to be absent. Or they didn’t invent reasons but simply made themselves scarce, as Ari did, a little after nine in the morning, telling Pippa not to worry, that he wouldn’t need lunch—as though by eating out he was somehow doing her a huge favor. I didn’t know where Harold was, and cared even less, but the news that Caleb had also gone off for the day, to the beach, was a blow. I had wanted to talk to him, to attempt to tell him what had happened the night before. Just having to say out loud that I had gone back in time and visited the communal garden would make it seem like a thing that was impossible, and when Caleb laughed and dismissed it as nonsense, I would laugh too and think he was right.

  Soiled sheets, at any rate, were a distraction, and directly after breakfast Pippa set me to work in the laundry at a cranky cast-iron washing machine that refused to spin clothes and shuddered off its support blocks in protest. Wet clothes had to be wrung out in a mangle, which is how they ended up if you didn’t feed the garments in at the correct angle and speed. One load took me two hours, and after I’d hung it all out in the sun to dry, my shoulders were almost as bent out of shape as Elena’s. I was sweating too, and cursing under my breath, when Pippa appeared at the end of the clothesline with a glass of iced water. After I had gulped it down, she said Peggy had asked to see me.

  “Are you sure she asked for me by name? She always calls me Hillary, and I stopped trying to correct her.”

  “Oh yes,” said Pippa, pulling us under the fig tree for shade. “She asked for the young woman who’d read to her so nicely—she remembered your name and also that you had taken a shine to Madeline.”

  “I haven’t taken a shine to Madeline. She gives me the creeps.”

  Pippa laughed. “It’s probably just another one of her stories. The other day she started going on about a fellow in the village square who had asked for her hand in marriage—I expect she was reliving something that happened years ago. She’s been babbling a lot about her old lovers, especially the gay one.”

  “Peggy was a lesbian?”

  “God no, but she was in love with a gay man. She probably showed you his photograph on her fantasy wall.”

  I recalled the short, effeminate man with the big smile. “The one she calls the love of her life?”

  “His name was Lawrence,” said Pippa. “They worked at the same theater. He was a raving queen, but in those days you got arrested for buggery, so they came to an arrangement.”

  “You mean she was his beard?”

  Pippa nodded. “Something like that. He was fond of her too, maybe not in the same way, but fond enough to get engaged.”

  “But they never married?”

  “No. It was a very sad business. Just before the wedding, he was arrested in the toilets on Hampstead Heath. He couldn’t face going to court and he hanged himself.”

  “That’s so terrible,” I said, and felt that it really was a double tragedy. Not only had the suicide list won but Peggy had lost someone she loved dearly, knowing all the while that she had not been enough for him.

  Peggy was dozing when we went in, but she still had her pinkie looped through the handle of a teacup that rested precariously on the counterpane. “Is that really tea?” I whispered, while Pippa tried to unhook Peggy’s finger from the cup without waking her. “She doesn’t normally take it black.”

  Pippa shook her head. “I gave in,” she said. “It seemed mean to take away her best chum so near the end. But so as not to offend Elena, I made her pretend it was tea.”

  Just then Peggy stirred, and her eyelids flicked open as though she’d had a fright. She stared at us both.

  “Suki,” she said, perfectly lucid. “I thought you’d never get here.”

  “It took a while, but here I am.” I took her hand, the coldest thing on the island, while Pippa turned to fiddle with the morphine pump. “And I brought all the stuff you asked for—even the fur coat. Your hands are freezing—perhaps you need it after all.”

  At the mention of the coat, Peggy’s eyebrows—or at least the tattoos of them—shot up. She put a shaky finger to her lips. “Sshhhhhh. Not now.” She glanced at Pippa, whose back was turned, and gave me a stern look. “Not in front of her.”

  I was too busy the rest of the day to think anything more about it. Pippa had me doing odd chores in the kitchen and laundry, and by the time the sky was darkening and she suggested that I go for a walk round the village, I confessed I was too tired to do anything but eat and go to bed. Caleb hadn’t come home yet, but I convinced myself this was a good thing.

  For once I nodded off without any trouble, but I was still jet lagged and had set my bedtime too early. I woke several hours later in the dead of night with the sense that I’d already had my quota of sleep. For a few minutes I lay on the platform, listening for strange sounds, but only the ever-present chorus of cicadas could be heard. We were too high up to hear the sea, though I sometimes caught the tang of salt in the air, and I suddenly longed for a swim. The night was balmy, and I didn’t see why I couldn’t go then, when no chores had to be done and everyone else was asleep, so I pulled off my bedclothes with the idea of rummaging in my suitcase for a swimsuit. I had packed a bikini too, but thought the one-piece more modest night attire, and put it on under shorts and a T-shirt. For a towel, I took the one I’d used that evening after a shower.

  I climbed down the ladder, slid my feet into sandals, and set off across the pebbled floor, wary this time of the obstacles I’d tripped on the night before. The door to the courtyard was ajar, and I slipped through the gap and closed it behind me in an easy, fluid movement, trying, I supposed, to be stealthy.

  I was preoccupied with thoughts of my swim, so it was a shock to realize that I was in our old garden, its features set out gloomily in front of me, like the pieces of an abandoned chess game. Despite the warm night, the air of melancholy sent a chill through me, and I wanted to turn back immediately.

  But I remembered the child in the bunker—and I hesitated, standing my ground.

  Something had changed from the night before. A few moments passed before I figured out what it was, why the scene looked so forsaken. For a start, it was gloomier. No light spilled from the flat, and the moon was completely obscured by cloud. Rain was in the air—or at least the tension of it—and I recalled that the night after the party had signaled the end of my Wendy tent. I had woken the next morning to find it floating in a pool of mud—salvageable, only we hadn’t bothered. It had stayed outside for weeks, browning and rotting, and we had simply thrown it away.

  With less light, it was harder to make out the air-raid shelter, and I had taken a few steps down the path before I realized the hatch was in fact closed. Next to it, a dozen rusted bolts lay helter-skelter along the path. I went over to them, to the hatch, and tested the metal surface warily with my foot. Bending down, I listened for the child but heard nothing, only my own tight breaths, high up in my chest, anxiety escalating.

  The men had been and gone.

  They had come out into the garden, put the hatch in place, and stumbled back inside. It was the right night, but I had arrived too late—perhaps
by only a few minutes, or longer, by a few hours. I remembered the geranium plants, and went over to see if they were still wet. Sure enough, their leaves had been recently sprayed by a phantom Jean Luc, meaning my tardiness had been a matter of minutes.

  Why was I here if the hatch was closed? It didn’t make sense. I went back to the air-raid shelter and banged on the plate with my fists. “Wake up!” I yelled to whoever was down there, and lay down on the hatch to listen.

  No one answered, but even if they had, the hatch was too heavy for me to lift. The first fat drops of promised rain landed on my bare forearms. I didn’t remember London ever having rain like this, so tropical in pelt, so warm on my skin, and within seconds of the deluge beginning the garden started to flood. Water pooled on the lowest flagstones and ran along the patio in furious rivulets, surged into the narrow slit between the concrete path and iron hatch. Before long, my clothes were soaked through, my feet submerged, and I imagined water cascading down the steps of the bunker and flooding the chamber below.

  Whoever was down there would drown—if it wasn’t already too late.

  I felt angry, helpless, sick to the very bottom of my soul, but also glad that the poor wretch down there wasn’t me. For although I was soaked through, the instant I chose to I could leave this horrific scene and return to midsummer Greece. Only then did it occur to me that perhaps I couldn’t, that perhaps I’d left my return until too late. For if I’d arrived in the garden a few minutes after the men had closed the hatch, then it was all about to dissolve—with me in it.

  Until that moment, I did not know what sprinting was—how fast it was possible for my legs to run. I moved like a tornado, but very nearly not fast enough. When I reached the service door, it was already going a little out of focus, and I stepped through it and turned around to see that the garden had blurred beyond recognition. It remained so for another moment before clarity slowly returned, and with it the view of the courtyard.

  Shaking with nerves, I walked over to sit on the low white wall, where the view of the ocean began to calm me. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been sitting there when I heard footsteps behind me and looked up to see Pippa walking out of Peggy’s room. She tiptoed toward me, and the first thing I noticed was how drawn her face looked.

  “Is Peggy okay?” I said.

  “She’s the same,” said Pippa. “I’ve been in with her all night. I couldn’t sleep.”

  “I can’t sleep either. Too hot.”

  She frowned. “Did you go for a swim?”

  “Actually, I was about to,” I said, before glancing down at my T-shirt and shorts, and seeing they were wet through. “I mean, yes. Yes, I went for a swim. What I meant was that I was just about to take a shower.”

  I could see that I had confused her, but she just yawned and said, “Good idea to have one now, before the morning rush.”

  In the tiny bathroom, I peeled off my wet shorts and T-shirt and wondered if perhaps I had gone for a swim and imagined the rest. But when I held my clothes up to my nose, they gave off the fresh scent of rain, not the sharp tang of salt.

  It occurred to me that I ought to find out what the time was—something I hadn’t bothered with for weeks. I wasn’t sure at what exact point I’d stopped paying attention to alarm clocks and watches, but I hadn’t even switched on my cell phone since arriving in Greece. I found my phone in the bottom of my backpack, and it had enough charge left to switch on and display London time. From memory, Greece was two hours behind GMT, so I calculated it was about half past three in the morning. Working backward, I figured out I must have woken at around three fifteen that night, and gone out into the garden a few minutes after the hatch had been closed. Which meant that the night before . . .

  I caught what I’d been trying to do—calculate the time I’d need to wake up to be in the garden before the hatch closed—then realized how bonkers it was to assume that the time twenty years ago would be concurrent with now. I could no more predict when and where the garden would appear than I could control what Caleb would do next.

  Then, exactly as I had the night before, I felt wiped out, my brain aching from the effort of trying to understand something wholly irrational. I was already in bed, had climbed up the ladder to find my phone, and minutes later passed out cold.

  The sleep was a short one, and I managed to get up and dress and make it to the kitchen for breakfast before the men took off for the day. Elena was the only one absent, and while the rest of us tried to drink coffee and eat toast in a civilized manner, Caleb horsed around in the kitchen and wasn’t satisfied until he had knocked a basket of onions off the bench. I was trying to avoid eye contact with him, but had been aware of his every move, and laughed involuntarily when the onions spilled.

  “That’s it,” shrieked Pippa, reaching her wit’s end at the early hour of eight in the morning. “After you’ve picked up the onions, you can bugger off to the beach—anywhere except hanging around here being a bloody great pain in the neck.”

  “You should come with me, Suki,” said Caleb, juggling the onions instead of picking them up like he’d been told. “The beach is terrific, really top notch.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I promised to stay here and help with Peggy.”

  “Oh no you don’t,” said Pippa. “You’ve been here two days and haven’t left the villa yet. We can’t send you back without a tan.”

  “You need my help, and I really don’t mind,” I said, trying to be emphatic.

  Pippa cleared away my plate from in front of me. “We’ll manage fine without you, and on top of that, I absolutely insist.”

  I caught Harold’s eye, and it was as though he had seen the treachery in my thoughts; why I was trying so hard to avoid being alone with Caleb. To provoke him, I said, “Why don’t you come with us?” even though I suspected he was the kind of bookish person who hated beaches, swimming, sunshine, and the outdoors.

  “No thanks,” he said. “You’ll have more fun without me.”

  “Oh,” said Caleb, smiling. “Do you think so?”

  Within the hour, we had set off for what Caleb promised was the best beach on the island, though it was also quite far away. Outside Elena’s villa we turned left and followed the cobbled street up the hill until it petered out and became a dirt track that ran along a cliff top. Caleb led us inland and we followed a trail of goat droppings through a wilderness of prickly pears and what looked like rosemary bushes grown enormous and out of control. Away from the village the screech of cicadas was deafening and the heat was unbroken by trees or shade of any kind. I was close to melting when Caleb climbed to the top of a small, scrubby outcrop and pointed. “There,” he said. “Told you it was worth the trek.”

  Below him, scrub gave way to a silver flash of sea and a crescent of yellow sand with a wreck of a taverna at one end. The descent was steep, an obstacle course of crumbling rock and aggressive, spiky plants, but we scrambled down in one piece to stand at the edge of a divinely blue stretch of water.

  “Race you to the pancakes,” said Caleb, pulling off his T-shirt and pointing to a ridge of flat rocks in the middle of the bay.

  He was a scrappy swimmer and I beat him easily, climbing out of the water while he was still only halfway. Up close, the rocks were red and pitted, not flat at all, and burned my backside when I laid down on them. When Caleb finally climbed out of the water and plonked down next to me, I pretended not to notice him. For a few minutes he played along and we lay there soaking up the sun, our skin slowly crusting with salt. I made the mistake of looking down at my blue-white skin, and noticed a small crop of hairs sprouting in a place where there ought not to be any. My swimsuit was old and threadbare, and I suddenly felt self-conscious, exposed. Turning, I saw Caleb had been staring at the same place. He looked away, and I quickly rolled onto my stomach, but not before our eyes met and a guilty look passed between us.

  “Race you back,” I said, standing up and diving into the cold shower of the ocean.

  Back on the bea
ch, Caleb suggested we hire a paddleboat from the taverna, which had no roof or walls but still functioned as a kind of kiosk. Lying on a mat on the floor was the old codger who owned it, a man whose leather face cracked open to reveal a single gold tooth as we approached. We didn’t have enough drachmas on us to match his fee, but Caleb persuaded him to lend us a paddleboat for a couple of hours by claiming Ari was the old man’s cousin. He gave us his rustiest bucket, an orange relic from the seventies that leaked oil and lost traction when you pedaled too hard. Undeterred, we chopped out past the pancake rocks, where the water was deep and green and so clear that you could see wrinkled sand on the ocean floor.

  For a spell we simply drifted, tired after all that fierce pedaling, and let the boat swing round to reveal whatever part of the view it fancied. Even though the vegetation there was different, being out on the water reminded me of home—and I realized that by home I meant New Zealand. The next thought I had was that I couldn’t imagine ever living in London again. Caleb had closed his eyes, and his not looking at me made me want to confess to him all the strange things that had been happening at the villa. “You remember how I told you about the presence?” I began.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, it did follow me here.”

  Caleb opened his eyes a second. “You saw the ghost?”

  “Not exactly, it’s more like I’m the ghost and I keep revisiting the past, our old garden, because there’s something I have to do there. There’s this bunker—and I think someone’s trapped down there.” I told him what I’d seen and heard—even imitating the yelp of the child.

  When Caleb yawned, it struck me that he hadn’t been listening, he’d been zoning out like you do when someone bores you to death with their detailed recollection of a dream. “Anyway,” I said. “It’s probably nothing.”