The Girl Below
The Girl Below
Bianca Zander
Chapter One
London, 2003
It was only May, but the streets flared golden like they do in high summer, and all around me the neighborhood sighed with so much privilege that I felt shut out—a stranger on the block where my childhood took place. In the twenty years since we had moved away, Notting Hill had changed beyond recognition, become a kind of joke suburb—part tourist bauble, part film set—and a ludicrous place to say you were from. Of course I’d changed too in that time, but not so much that I was ready to accept the slight. Instead, for the last ten minutes, I had been glued to the doorstep of our old building, staring at a familiar name on the buzzer, too shy to press it but feeling aggrieved that I couldn’t get in.
On the other side of a spiked black railing, the basement flat was oblivious to my injury, and bore no trace of our having lived there. Fresh paint slicked the iron bars that guarded the front windows, and behind them our homely green and orange curtains had been replaced with stiff white venetian blinds. Shorn long ago of my mother’s pink and red potted geraniums, the patio was bald, and had been industrially water-blasted to remove any residue of dirt or character. Fleetingly, the lemony scent of geranium leaves spiked my nostrils and I saw my mother, hovering over her plants, trimming rogue stems and plucking off blooms that had died.
I had been right, in one way at least, about coming back to London: everything here reminded me of her. She had left behind a trail of crumbs, a dusting of sugar to guide me through the woods.
That day was only my second in London, but already the optimism I had been fizzing with was beginning to seem false. On the long flight over from New Zealand, I had imagined a triumphant homecoming: streamers and banners above a red carpet the length of Kensington Park Road, or at least an easy transition back to my old life. I had been out of the country for ten years, living in Auckland for most of that time, but I had thought that the old life would be waiting for me, that if you were born in a place and had grown up there, you were one of its citizens and it would always take you back.
Other places maybe, but not London. At the Heathrow arrivals gate, no one had been there to meet me. On the way into London on the tube, I had tried smiling at people, projecting a sunny attitude, but I had been met with frowns, and some had turned away. Getting off the tube at Willesden Green, I had gone into a newsagent’s to buy a packet of wine gums, had excitedly told the cashier that you couldn’t buy them in New Zealand, and he had silently—no, scornfully—handed me my change. Still feeling upbeat, I had walked from the tube station to my friend Belinda’s flat only to discover no one was there. Belinda had left a note, and a key, and I had let myself in and sat down on my suitcase—stuffed to the zipper with all I owned—and that’s when deflation began. I had come back to London without any plan besides entitlement, and staring at the two-seater couch in front of me that was about to become my bed, I realized what a fool I had been.
The name that had caught my attention on the buzzer of our old building was Peggy Wright: our former upstairs neighbor, a force of nature, someone to be reckoned with, older than my parents but ageless. I remembered her well—her high, cackling laugh, her lipstick-stained teeth—but wasn’t sure if she’d remember me, at least not in my present incarnation. At the time we left the neighborhood, I was a scrawny eight-year-old waif in glasses so thick that no one—including me—knew what I looked like behind them. Since then, I had grown tall and robust and switched to contact lenses, but along with those things had come caution, and that’s what hindered me now.
From the front stairs, I surveyed the altered street. The most obvious thing missing was Katy’s, the junk shop that had doubled as a grocery store, and the first shop I had been allowed to visit on my own—pound note clutched in sticky hand—to buy bread and milk and liquorice allsorts. There was no signage over the door, just a blank awning, but everyone knew the old lady who owned it and referred to the shop by her name. Katy would have been well into her eighties or even nineties back then, and walked with the aid of a Zimmer frame, but she had the smile of a schoolgirl and ran her shop like she was one. Sliced bread and newspapers were her staples, but she sold these alongside a gargantuan pile of moth-eaten trash: lace doilies, books, curios, plates, petticoats, brooches, hats. How any of it got there, nobody knew, but if you spotted something in the junk pile you wanted to buy, Katy would examine it in her shaking hands as though she had no idea how it got there either. She would mutter that she just had to check with her daughter to see how much it was worth. And that would be the last you saw of it. Katy’s daughter ran a stall in the Portobello Market arcade, and once alerted to the desirability of certain objects in her mother’s junk shop, she whisked them away, polished them up, and rebirthed them as exorbitantly priced antiques. Now in place of Katy’s there was a boutique for “hommes” with a solitary, art-directed sneaker displayed in its long, gleaming window—nothing else—and I wondered if it was progress or absurdity that Katy’s path of excessive bric-a-brac had culminated, decades later, in a store for one-footed Frenchmen.