The Girl Below

by Bianca Zander

  There was no mistaking who the girl was, but what was this other Suki doing out here? I recalled being rescued from the bunker by my father—in which case she should have been safely tucked up in bed, like I had been. So why wasn’t she? What strange glitch had occurred that the two us could coexist?

  For a second or two she squinted at the garden before fixing her eyes on the French doors, the brightest, and only, source of light. Too dazed to move, I looked in the same direction, until the doorway swarmed with the silhouettes of a trio of men who were walking toward us, coming out into the garden.

  Though I did not understand why this other Suki was here, I did not think it would be a disaster if the men stumbled across her in the garden—whereas if they stumbled across me it would be catastrophic.

  The nearest cover was a small holly bush to the right of the patio—in the opposite direction from the service door—and I dived for it, hoping the leaves would be dense enough, and the men drunk enough, that the plant would hide me. It did, but only just, and I noticed, once I was stuck behind it, that I was shivering, I supposed in shock.

  None of the strange and irrational events leading up to this one had prepared me for the strangeness and irrationality of meeting myself as a girl. And I couldn’t work out what I had just done, or how it was even possible. How had she been left in the bunker, while I remembered being carried out by my father? Where were her glasses and why did blood trail from her mouth, while I had made it to the surface with my spectacles and teeth intact?

  From behind the holly bush, I had a clear view of the men, and I watched intently as they made their first, failed attempt to lift the hatch then stopped to regroup. I wondered why they hadn’t noticed Suki sitting on the grass, but I did not have a clear view of her myself, and thought perhaps they had missed her because they were drunk.

  The sequence of the men’s actions was familiar to me by now, but on other nights I had not been close enough to hear what they were saying. From my new vantage point, I could hear each word as though it were being piped directly into my ear.

  They were talking about sex, and Henri was miming a recent encounter. “The rail for the bath was at just the right height,” he said and smacked his lips. “C’était parfait,” he said. “Parfait.”

  Jean Luc held two hands in front of his chest and squeezed a pair of imaginary breasts. “And what about these?”

  “Parfait aussi,” said Henri.

  “Merde,” said Jean Luc, laughing. “I chased the wrong chicken.”

  “Yes,” agreed my father. “Lulu’s what around here we call a cock tease.”

  “But not Pippa,” said Henri, almost singing. “She is wonderful!”

  Jean Luc turned to my father. “And she likes an audience, n’est-ce pas?”

  A low, dirty laugh went round the men and Ludo put a finger to his lips. “Shhhhh, you’ll get me in trouble,” he said.

  “With which one?” said Jean Luc, and the three of them laughed some more.

  They had not so much as bent over the hatch yet, but stopped talking and laughing for a moment to concentrate on their task. So it had been Henri and Pippa having sex in the bathroom, and my father had been a spectator—which he didn’t want either his wife or his mistress to find out about. I felt a familiar flare of anger toward him. Not just for cheating on my mother with Rowan or for watching the babysitter have sex, but for having no conscience about any of it.

  When their work was done—with much huffing and puffing and swearing in both English and French—the men left the garden, just as they had on previous occasions, with Jean Luc staying behind to water the potted geraniums. I’d been right about the zipper—halfway up it got stuck, and he struggled for some time to close it.

  Once he had gone, I came out from behind the holly bush and stopped dead in my tracks. The patch of grass where I’d left the young Suki was empty, though in the spot where she’d been sitting there was a slight indentation. No wonder the men hadn’t seen her. But where was she? I looked around the garden, then again at the patch of grass. Something was there, partly hidden, and when I got a little closer I recognized the locket, on its chain. The locket part was blackened and gritty, as though it had been submerged in silt, and I wiped it clean with my T-shirt and settled it, tenderly, around my neck.

  I thought Suki must have gone inside—though I wasn’t sure how she could have done so without anyone seeing her. My childhood bedroom overlooked the patio, and I tiptoed to the window and peered in. Bars in front of the glass made it hard to see, but enough light filtered through from the hall that it was just possible to make out the bed and a figure sleeping in it: Suki.

  Was this the same Suki I had rescued from the bunker? I realized there was no way of knowing, but I saw that there might be a way to return the locket—to right the mistake I had made so long ago.

  The French doors were open, but at the threshold I hesitated, wondering what would happen if I stepped through them. I had gotten as far as putting my foot in the door, experimentally, when I heard movement inside the flat. Someone was heading straight for me, then at the last minute they veered off to the right, toward Suki’s room. In the light of the hall, I recognized Hillary, my mother, and froze, not knowing what to do.

  She went into Suki’s room for a minute or two then came out carrying a bucket—and I still hadn’t moved. I knew I should leave but my feet had decided, independently of me, to stay put. I must have gasped then or made some other noise for she turned in my direction and appeared to be staring straight at me. She looked so young, so vital, that every cell in my body yearned to go to her.

  My mother approached me with an expression of open curiosity, but as she got nearer she looked troubled—and then plain frightened. I noticed she was looking in my direction but not straight at me, not meeting my gaze, and I wondered what it was she was seeing. Perhaps I was in shadow—or maybe I resembled a ghost. A few steps in front of me she halted, eyes wide, and put her hand to her throat. When I mirrored her actions, my hand collided with the locket. Was that what transfixed her?

  “Mum, it’s me,” I said, and she tilted her head so that for one brief second I thought she had heard me and was going to respond. But instead whatever had caused her to tilt her head also galvanized her into action, and she reached out and shut the French doors, then pulled the curtains across in front of them.

  She was gone, but not the ache, and I remembered what she’d told me just before she died, about seeing each other again in the garden. This had been it. Only her motivation had not been to reproach me for taking the locket but to gift me a moment of hope. She had wanted me to know, in some small way, that her dying wasn’t the end of us—that we would share another moment of connection, even if for her, that moment had been and gone.

  I was so relieved I wanted to cry—but not yet. I was still trapped in the garden, and before anything else, I had to get out.

  I returned to the service door hoping it had somehow opened during the time I had been in the bunker, but it was still stubbornly painted shut. The French doors, the way I’d arrived, were locked, so I went to the edge of the patio and peered into the communal garden, or what I could see of it: the large stretch of lawn bordered by towering oak trees. I tried to make out what was beyond those trees, but no matter how much I strained, the buildings that should have been there remained murky and in shadow—the edge of a world I did not have the courage to explore.

  Heavy rain started, surprising me, for I hadn’t been so aware this time of moisture in the air. Almost instantly I was soaked through, my glasses so streaked with water that I found it hard to see. Getting wet didn’t bother me, but I minded that I had nowhere to run, and that the garden, with me in it, was about to dissolve. Even through my streaked lenses, I could see the edges of the garden were losing definition, rinsing away. So I did what anyone would do when faced with no other option: I crouched on the ground and covered my head with my hands, and prayed for it all to be over.

  Chapt
er Twenty-Three

  Skyros, 2003

  And sooner than I had thought possible, it was. The rain stopped, abruptly, and I opened my eyes and looked down at a surface that was covered with pebbles. Dry pebbles inlaid in concrete. I was back in Elena’s courtyard, crouching next to the wall. Someone was patting my shoulder, talking to me in a soft voice: “Suki, are you okay?”

  It was Pippa.

  “She’s gone to a better place,” she was saying. “They both have.”

  To uncurl myself took some effort—my muscles had been clenched clamshell tight, and now they felt weighed down with lead. My clothes weren’t soaked through this time, but they were damp, as though I’d been sweating.

  “I thought this might happen,” said Pippa. “That Peggy dying would bring back all the memories from when Hillary passed away.” She pointed to my neck. “Your mother’s locket. I had no idea you still had it.” She smiled. “It looks well loved.”

  I touched the locket, scarcely able to believe it was still around my neck. The temporary psychosis of sleep deprivation could explain many things, but not this, a solid, tangible object. My voice, when I spoke, was strangely waterlogged. “Yes,” I said. “It is.” I did not know what else to say. I tried to stand up, but immediately had to steady myself against the wall. One of my flip-flops was missing, left behind in the bunker. “I’m sorry, I haven’t slept for days.”

  “I know how you feel,” said Pippa. “I’ve been sitting with Peggy for hours and I actually thought we were having a conversation. She was telling me not to wear anything that draws attention to my waist, because I didn’t really have one. And I was telling her that if she’d actually eaten food once or twice during her lifetime she might not be so dead.”

  I laughed, although I wasn’t sure if it was the appropriate response. I was only sure that I needed to lie down. “Do you mind,” I said, “do you mind if I—?” I pointed in the direction of Elena’s room, but couldn’t think what the word was for a place where one slept.

  “Don’t even think about getting up for breakfast,” said Pippa. “We’ll start tomorrow with lunch.”

  For twelve hours straight, I slept better than I had in years, and woke sometime around sundown, just a few hours before Peggy’s funeral.

  In the shower, trying to work out what exactly had occurred the night before in the bunker, I realized a curious thing. Alongside my original memory of the day after the party was a new version in which I had a few of my baby teeth knocked out on the steps of the bunker and was rescued many hours later by a woman who looked like me. The strangest thing about this new memory was that it broke off in the garden, right after Suki was rescued—around the same time I last sighted her. After that point, the little Suki, and her consciousness, seemed to vanish like smoke.

  Thinking it all over, I started to feel a little like Narcissus, staring endlessly into the lake at his own reflection. Except that in the end it hadn’t been all about me. My mother was there, and so was her locket. Where was the locket? I had shrugged it off the night before and hadn’t seen it since.

  I found it on the sleeping platform, partially tucked under the mattress. It was a little grubby, and the catch was still broken where I’d sliced it off, but it was otherwise intact and I was suddenly desperate to open it. On Elena’s dresser, I found a nail file, and much more carefully this time, I wedged it between the two halves of the locket and slowly nudged them apart. When the gap was wide enough, I prised it the rest of the way open with my thumb.

  The inside of the locket was caked in silt, but in the heat it had almost dried and when I tapped it against the hard pebbled floor, the bulk of it fell out. Under the silt, I expected to see pictures of my mum and dad, looking young and in love, perhaps when they first met. But what I saw instead was a tiny photo of a toddler and another one of a child—both of them me. The first one was taken before I needed glasses, when I was under two, and in the second I would have been about five.

  I did not have any formal black clothes with me in Skyros, but put on a charcoal gray dress that was plain and also modest. Just as we were leaving the villa, Pippa handed me an emerald feather boa and a heavy diamante necklace. She herself had on a garish array of beads and brocade. “These belonged to Peggy,” she explained. “She loathed it when people wore black to funerals, and I’m terrified she’s going to complain.”

  “I felt like that about the food at my mother’s wake,” I said, putting on the necklace over the locket and resting the boa across my shoulders. “All those tea cakes and sausage rolls. She hated that stodgy, old-fashioned stuff.”

  The coffin was placed on a simple wooden cart harnessed to two donkeys and we followed behind it, dressed in our finery, carrying beeswax candles that flickered as we walked. The service was held in the island’s largest and most airless Greek Orthodox church, which seemed inappropriate until I saw how heavily it was festooned on the inside with swaths of lapis and gold. Afterward, at a taverna that opened out onto the village square, we toasted Peggy’s life with Johnny Walker, neat, and ouzo for the locals who preferred it. Worn out from sleepless nights and sorrow, inebriation came quickly to those who sought it, and even Pippa broke months of sobriety with a tipple or two. Ari was in his element, and was ready to smash plates once the tributes were through, despite being reminded by the old folks that it was a custom at Greek weddings, not funerals. “Well, malakas to that,” he said by way of vindication. “Since when was the old biddy Greek?”

  Harold drank too, but he became withdrawn, and wandered off into the night on his own. Quite understandably, Caleb had been avoiding me since the sticky sheet incident, and had disappeared with his friends right after the service.

  In the crowded taverna, Pippa sat wedged between two old widows dressed in black, who leaned forward and talked to her in English or across her in Greek, depending on the topic. I had been cornered by a couple of Ari’s young nieces who wanted to practice their English, and at their request, found myself teaching them swear words and slang. I’d switched from whiskey to ouzo by then, and everyone in the room was beginning to seem jovial and kind. Ari and his backgammon cronies formed a singing circle around a couple of lads with balalaikas, and the decibel level rose inexorably. To a tremendous cheer, towers of white plates arrived in a crate, and I noticed that Pippa had disappeared. A few minutes later I found her in the kitchen, rinsing glasses and scraping dishes—the beads, brocade, and boa discarded to one side.

  “I’ve always hated balalaikas,” she said, looking up when she saw me. “They make my teeth vibrate.”

  “I hadn’t realized Peggy was so popular.”

  Pippa smiled. “Imagine what it’s like when a local dies.”

  I had a sudden urge to rescue her, just as, I now realized, she had rescued me, and pointed to the back door. “Why don’t we get some fresh air?”

  She looked relieved that someone had given her permission to leave. “What a bloody good idea.”

  The alley behind the restaurant reeked of rotten fish heads and deep-fryer fat and we had to walk a fair distance to reach this mythical fresh air I had spoken of. Then, we just kept on walking, right through the square and down a long cobbled street toward the port. On a low, white plaster wall with a jaw-dropping view, Pippa sat down and closed her eyes, letting the breeze wash over her face. “God, the end was horrible,” she said, to the sky. “I can’t get that awful moaning noise out of my head.”

  “Death is awful even when it’s quiet. I guess we should hang on to what the doctor said, that she wasn’t actually in pain.”

  “I don’t believe that for a second,” Pippa said. “She was in agony.” She opened her eyes and I saw they had tears in them. “All day, I’ve been trying to replace it with a good memory of her, but I just don’t have any. She’s been cross with me for the last forty years.”

  “What about before that?”

  “I’m forty-one,” she said drily.

  “Maybe she loved you more than she let on,” I said,
thinking of my own mother. “I think that’s why Hillary didn’t tell me she was dying. It was too awful. She couldn’t face doing it.”

  “You might be right,” said Pippa. “But I don’t think Peggy was like other mums—especially not like yours. Hillary was worse than I am with Caleb. I remember her telling me this crazy story once about how she loved you so much that she actually thought she’d killed you. It was that day you all went down in the bunker. She said one minute you were standing next to her on the step, when she had this awful premonition that you were going to fall down the stairs and hit your head—and the next thing she knew, you had fallen. Almost as if she had pushed you.”

  The hair on my head stood on end. “She told you that?”

  “Something like that—it was a long time ago.”

  I felt a residue of tingling on the back of my neck, almost like an aftershock. “Don’t you think that’s sort of creepy?”

  Pippa shrugged. “I thought it was at the time, but now that I’m a mother myself I don’t. I’m always having visions of the horrible things that could happen to Caleb . . . and if something did, I might blame myself for it.”

  I understood what Pippa meant, but it wasn’t the track my thoughts had taken. I had been wondering if my mother had killed me—or at least a piece of me—that day in the bunker. That’s what it had felt like all these years, that hunger, that emptiness, like some vital part of me was missing. But did that also mean it had now been restored?

  Pippa stood up from the wall, seeming lighter than when she’d sat down. “Let’s go swimming. I haven’t put my feet in the water since we got here.”

  The main beach was reached by a narrow, cobbled path that snaked down the hillside to the water, then veered up again toward an ancient acropolis on the hill. Despite a steady flow of tourists and donkeys, the path had never been widened, and we had to walk down it in single file.