The Girl Downstairs

by Iain Maitland

  It is quiet along the promenade. I can hear the odd shout and the roar of a car up and back and away towards the town centre, up Convalescent Hill. But there is no one around the prom, the pier and the faded leisure centre beyond it. Just rubbish, crisp packets and fish and chip wrappers blown about in the chill night air.

  In the distance, the lights and the occasional noise and the tall, alien-like cranes of the docks form an eerie backdrop. It is as if Felixstowe is riven in two, the tired, broken-down town settled for the night and the endless, restless energy of the docks, twenty-four hours around the clock.

  I stop where the prom meets the pier and look around me. There is a man, with a big dog – hard to see what it is – an Alsatian maybe, walking away and up the hill to the town itself. There is no one else to be seen.

  I crouch and look under the pier as the pebbly beach rolls away and into the sea.

  There is a body there, curled up beside one of the huge metal pillars supporting the pier.

  It is her, the girl. And she must be wet and cold and frightened.

  And I realise then what it is I am going to do. As I was always going to do from the moment I saw her. It’s not about giving her a five-pound note or a warm and waterproof coat. It’s more than that. I want to bring her back to my cottage in Bluebell Lane.

  I look left and right. Then step onto the pebbles. The crunch-crunch-crunch of my footsteps sounds deafening in the silence. I wonder if the noise will wake her and she will panic and run off. Or whether she will see my kindly face, recognise me from yesterday, and be reassured by my arrival. That I am here to rescue her from her miserable existence.

  I am close now, and she has not moved. I think she must be in a deep sleep. Hard to imagine anyone sleeping below the pier, more exposed to the elements than I thought, the crashing of the waves, the wind whistling through and the ever-present threat of passers-by. I guess you can get used to anything if you have to.

  I feel a surge of excitement with the first touch – my hand on her shoulder, her back to me, pulling her slowly over so that she will be lying down on her back in front of me.

  It is a man. A young thin man. Unkempt and dirty. He stirs and struggles as he realises what is happening.

  I step back, stumble and fall as he lashes out his arm towards me.

  He is up on his feet, half standing, half crouched under the pier. I can see his face in the shadows, part scared, part angry. He moves slightly to one side to stand in front of two or three carrier bags packed full of his belongings. To protect them.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, my breath swirling like smoke in the biting cold.

  He looks at me, uncomprehending, still half-asleep. Expecting me to have been just another down-and-out trying to steal his belongings.

  “Here,” I add, reaching instinctively into my pocket for a five-pound note. But I have no notes, only loose change, which I offer to him.

  He looks at the coins in silence, almost with contempt. But he reaches out his hands and takes them anyway.

  A stand-off. I am frustrated and furious with myself for my stupidity. He waits for me to say or do something. I’m not sure what he expects. After a moment or two, he smiles at me. A lopsided, wolfish leer. I imagine tobacco-stained teeth, meths on his breath. He disgusts me.

  He says nothing. But the way he stands. How he looks at me. The loosening of his body. It all tells me what he thinks I am. Why I am here. What I want. From him. I am looking for sex in return for money. The thought revolts me.

  I imagine his hands at my trousers, unzipping me, as I stand there looking back and forth along the prom. Dropping to his knees in front of me. I step back instinctively, and he must see from my face what I am thinking. I flush red and hot, although he cannot see that in the dark. He makes some sort of clicking gesture with his fingers – money, that’s what he wants – and some sort of chirping noise with his lips.

  He is mocking me.

  As I turn to go.

  Hurrying away home to my warm safe haven, and then my bed and my ever-tormented sleep.

  I am standing in the middle lane of a motorway.

  The sun is blinding me.

  Cars swerve to avoid me.

  Angry faces at the wheels, shouting and screaming at me.

  To move.

  To do something.

  To see whatever it is behind me.

  I turn.

  A tanker.

  On its side, ablaze.

  All the cars that swerve to avoid me.

  Crashing into it.

  I wake up, and I am shaking.

  3

  Wednesday, 20 November, 2.23 Am

  I cannot sleep. I am tortured. My mind and body. My endless nightmares. I am now up.

  And I am sitting at my computer, trawling through images. Girl after girl.

  Searching for one who looks like the girl by the pier. I want to have a picture that looks something like her.

  I have only seen her face. Her sweet, beautiful face. Soft and kind and gentle. And her eyes. Her steady, mesmerising gaze that drew me in and pulls me back again and again to find her. It is the eyes. They truly are the windows to the soul.

  Huddled over, I could not see her properly. But the look of her reminded me of my daughter. So much so that I had thought it was her for a split second. My brain a moment or two ahead of my conscious thoughts.

  I imagine the girl on the pier being happy. I can see her in my head. On the beach. In summer. It is warm, and the waves crash onto the shore. She is laughing, her head tipped back joyfully. She is in a bright red polka-dot bikini. She’s striking, and everyone looks at her. She has been swimming and is now drying herself with a colourful beach towel.

  She is young and lithe with long arms and legs, slim but shapely. The epitome of youth. Her whole life ahead of her. This is how I see her in my head. Strong. Vibrant. Young. So much to come. Happiness. Goodness.

  I search for “missing girl Felixstowe”. And “missing girl Suffolk”. That somehow her face will suddenly be there in front of me on the screen. Madness, I know. All there are to see are images of dirty, bedraggled girls, with handwritten signs and knocked-over bottles and used syringes around them. Girls who should not have let themselves be photographed.

  Next, I search simply for “young girl”, and there are endless pages of sweet, cute little things, mostly five or six, maybe younger. In dresses. And swimsuits. And funny hats. With puppies and kittens. And, slightly older, in bras and knickers and bikinis. I click from one to the other, on and on, faster and faster.

  I stop. One photo shows a young girl – preschool, I’d say – running down a grassy slope, her face slightly obscured by the faux fur of her anorak hood. It is my daughter, as near as makes no difference. When she was little. The three of us had gone to Yorkshire for a weekend break. And we visited an old ruined castle near Harrogate. Spofforth Castle. My daughter running up and down whilst I took photographs. Happy days.

  And here she is, in front of me and in my head.

  I pause, my screen full of pictures of pretty little girls.

  And I bow my head for a minute, maybe longer, with my terrible thoughts.

  And then I am searching for “teen girl”. And here they are now, half-girls, half-women, staring into the screen. Some proud. Others vulnerable. A few make eye contact, staring at me with haughty disdain. They pout their lips, throwing back shoulders, attempting an air of sophistication. Or sexuality, although they should be too young to have such knowing looks.

  Through them all I go, searching for the face, the body, the sense of someone who looks something like the girl by the pier. And, page after endless page, changing my search phrases for variations of young girl and different ages and what she might be wearing, I finally find a face that matches. Or something close to it.

  But the hair, blonde and cascading, is wrong. I did not see the girl by the pier’s hair clearly, as it was beneath a hood. But it was different – brown, I think – and streaked maybe, and
scraped back and tied in a knot at the back of her neck.

  And the body is wrong, too. This girl in the bikini with her curves and shapes and sexual pose is not right. It’s just not right at all. The fullness of her figure. Her long legs, slightly apart, her way of standing. The overt sexuality.

  And I am searching again. Taking a face. And a body. A bit of this. And a part of that.

  And finally, I am creating a composite, Photoshopped lookalike. As I see her in my mind.

  There she is. Perfect. Cut and pasted in front of me at last. Just so. The girl by the pier.

  Still I cannot sleep. I walk restlessly about my cottage.

  It’s not just the endless nightmares. I can live with those. I have to.

  My mind is on the photograph in my hand. And the girl.

  My cottage, most of it, dates back to the nineteenth century. You walk to it via a little path from Bluebell Lane and knock on the heavy wooden door. Entering, there is a small hallway where I am standing now, and a slightly curved staircase that leads up to two roughly equal-sized bedrooms with beamed ceilings. It had a thatched roof originally, but this was later replaced with tiles. They give it a sturdy look.

  They say round here that my cottage is haunted. Ghosts of those who died in torment. Over the years. Lost souls. I pooh-pooh such nonsense. I cannot say I have seen or heard anything other than the odd knock and the whistling of the wind. I am not a believer. When you’re dead, you’re dead. If it is haunted, the ghosts would come up from the cellar. I keep the door, to the side of the foot of the stairs, locked. But that is for practical rather than superstitious reasons.

  To the left of the hallway, there is the living room, with a fireplace that Fluffy sleeps in front of, in his basket, except when he is by my feet, waiting for the leftovers of a meal I’ve eaten on a tray. I call it a nooks-and-crannies kind of room, with its uneven floor and window bays and its bumpy walls. It is, in truth, a dreary place that forever smells of damp and dust and soot from the fireplace, no matter how often I clean and polish. The walls were painted a bright canary yellow once, although that has faded now, almost to the colour of pale urine.

  To the right, as I walk into it now, is a more formal, dark-painted room, with bookshelves to either side and a dining table in the middle of it. Oak, with six battered old leather-seated chairs around it. All too big for the room. Too much for me these days; I never entertain. I am a private person, keeping myself to myself. I can smile and make small talk well enough up the town, about the weather and the Ipswich Town Football Club and new shops opening and closing. But that’s about it.

  I don’t engage with people. Talk about my feelings.

  I keep all of that to myself. It’s better that way. Safer.

  I know, when my emotions are unleashed, where it all leads. Where it’s led before. And will do again. If I am not very careful.

  This dining room used to be a kitchen. And there was an outside toilet. And a tap to fill a tin bath, most probably. Sometime in the 1950s or 1960s, the owners added a flat-roof extension right across the back, with a kitchen to one side and a bathroom and toilet to the other. These have been decorated and the appliances upgraded over the years, the toilet and bath and basin changed, too. But there is still a dilapidated feel to the extension, and it always seems to be a few degrees chillier than the original part of the cottage.

  The garden is fenced to either side and lined with a mix of bushes, mostly laurels, down to the bottom, so many yards away. Never-ending fields beyond. A farm in the distance. Neighbours to the left and right. The Lump to one side, the alleyway between us, and the perfect family to the other, on the other side of my fence. A shed at the bottom to the side of a small vegetable patch. I dug it over to soil last year, but never got round to relaying turf. I should have done.

  Closer to the cottage and extension, there is a patio area that I relaid the summer before last. It was level when I finished, but part of it, most of it really, seems to have sunk down a little since then. It now looks lumpy and uneven. I cannot bring myself to dig it up and start again.

  I put the bins, one blue, one green, one grey, over the worst of it. On Wednesday mornings, I wheel one or two of them out through the gate in the fence and into the alleyway and round to the front of the cottage, where they sit at the end of the driveway to be emptied by the dustbin men.

  “Driveway” is a rather fancy term for what it is really, a patch of scraggy land by the trees where I park my car, a Nissan Almera. It is old and battered, much like me. But it does its job, taking me out to the big supermarkets at Warren Heath and Martlesham Heath on alternate weeks for my shopping. And occasionally, further afield.

  We’ve had petty vandalism down here at night. Bins tipped over. A large penis scratched onto the bonnet of my car once. And couples have come down to the far end of the lane to have sex in their cars.

  Technology is amazing these days. You can have dash cams in cars and even tiny cameras and listening devices in rooms, seeing and hearing everything. I am good with things like that.

  I put up a big, easy-to-see camera and a sign to deter the vandals and the dirty couples. It stopped soon enough.

  There is the nookery to the side of the cottage, a garage conversion and extension really, entered by a door in the corner of the living room. It is a self-contained unit, a room with a bed that rather cleverly folds up and folds down from the wall as needed, an armchair and a coffee table at the front and a tiny kitchenette and a toilet and shower at the back. What some might call a granny annex. It is the nicest place of all. It is warm. It has proper double-glazing, and the windows don’t rattle in the wind. And it has its own heating rather than relying on the fire and the heavy gas cylinders all around the rest of the cottage.

  It is dark in here, in the little bedroom in the nookery, although the light of the moon shining through the window allows me to move around easily enough. The bed is against the far wall, flipped up on its side, legs folded down, beneath a shelf when it is not in use. Curtains are pulled round it. I put the photo of the girl by the pier on the shelf and look at it for a minute or two, just thinking about things. What I’d like to do. What I hope happens.

  I pull the curtains back from around the bed, deciding that I should clean them in the morning. That they have never been washed in the years they have been there. They must smell by now, no matter how fresh the room otherwise is. I start to unhook the curtains, one hook at a time. I realise I should leave this to the morning, but know I will not rest until I have at least taken them down and put them in the washing basket.

  And then I stop. There is a glimpse of white material sticking out from the edge of the upturned bed. I wonder what it is, a dusting cloth maybe, from when I last polished and cleaned this room. I pull at the material, and it comes out easily enough, and I look down at a pair of little white panties in my hand. I turn them over, in the moonlight, feeling them with my fingers. They have been worn. They should not be here. I overlooked them. They should have been burned. Thrown on the fire.

  I look up and glance out of the window and across into the lane.

  I jump, startled by what I see.

  There is someone standing there, a hand on the gate, looking straight at me.

  I know who it is. My admirer from the top of the lane. The knock-knock-knocker.

  A middle-aged woman, a granny. Angela. Widow Woman, I call her. We met last year when her dog, a big fat Labrador, did its business by my gate. I happened to be coming out with Fluffy at the time, and she asked me for a poo bag, which I gave her so she could pick up the mess. She took something of a shine to me as I smiled and nodded and listened to her endless twaddle. She soon started bumping into me whenever I walked Fluffy. I soon got wise to what she was doing and changed my routine. I also took a dislike to the Labrador, who would always stick his nose into my crotch at every opportunity.

  She stalks me by day, knocking on my door. And now by night. She is an obsessive.

  I do not step away
from the window, as others might instinctively do. The net curtains are heavily patterned and thick textured. She should see me, but with the moon where it is, I am not sure that she can. I may just be a shadow. A dark blur. A piece of furniture, even. If I stand still, she may not realise I am here. Watching her.

  She remains there, just staring. I gaze back impassively. If I move, she will see me. So I wait. And she waits too. Whoever blinks first. It will not be me. I wonder if she stands there every night, and if so, how long she has been doing it. And how long she is there each time, just looking and waiting.

  Whether she sometimes opens the gate. Comes up the path.

  Walking around, peering through windows, trying door handles. Tapping on windowpanes.

  What she would do if I forgot to lock a door one night and she came in whilst I was asleep.

  She told me her life story, of course, which she repeats, near enough word for word, every chance she gets. An endless spew of trivia. How her sainted husband, Barry, who did a desk job at the docks, had died nine months earlier. How she has since kept busy (she was always a housewife, devoted to her husband’s every need).

  How she has two grandchildren, a little boy and a small girl, who stay with her as often as not, because her daughter is bipolar. And divorced. And has to go in and out of places. And how the children, lovely though they are, run her ragged with their games and hide-and-seek and this, that and the other. I smiled – winced – my way through it all. I don’t do idle talk. No, not me.

  I think suddenly that I should step back, open the front door and stride down the path towards her.

  Asking her what the hell she is doing. Tell her to go away and leave me alone. But the truth is I am scared of her and what she might do.

  I am worried there will be shouts and screams and a scuffle, and the police might be called. I cannot have that.

  And so I wait, full of doubts in my mind and agony in my body. I cannot stand like this, my weight somehow all on my right side, for much longer. Standing as still as a statue was a game I used to play as a child. I was not good at it then. I cannot do it now. I am too old. My body wants to move. To shift its position. But I deny it. I have to wait until she turns and goes, unsure whether I was ever there or not. Her imagination working overtime.