The Girl Below(101)

It was the presence of a firm, insistent nub that, moments later, brought me back to earth. Caleb’s breathing had quickened, and I pulled back to listen while he nuzzled my neck. I knew that sound, what it meant. My knickers were still on, and so were his boxers, but the sheet was no longer between us, and on the crest of my hip bone, where the skin is taut and sensitive, a dot of moisture landed. Instinctively, I shrank from it, twisted away, just as an animal, guttural sound escaped from Caleb’s throat.

He sprang back, as shocked as I was, and cringed next to me on the mattress. At the same time, blinded by darkness but senses burning, I registered a slow, trickling stickiness close to my hip, and covered it with the sheet.

In the silent, airless crypt our shame was mercilessly amplified, and for something like a full minute, neither of us moved or spoke.

There were so many things I could have said to patch his crushed ego and make it all better for him, but the magnitude of my own folly had hit me like a wrecking ball, and I needed reassuring as much as he did. “It doesn’t matter,” I managed. “You should go.”

For once obedient, Caleb put on his T-shirt and pulled it down to cover his boxer shorts. Under his breath, he said, “You’re not going to write about this in your diary, are you?”

“Of course not,” I said, thinking that would be the last thing I’d do. “Just go back to bed.”

So caught up was I in the mood of reckless humiliation that a few moments passed before I realized the implications of his plea. “What diary?” I said, already dimly aware of an approaching apocalypse.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m just going to go.”

I couldn’t see his face. It was too dark. But I already knew the answer to my question. It was written in my own handwriting in all those notebooks and journals that I had left behind in London under the bed. They went back years, to the very beginning, when I’d had my real first kiss in Ladbroke Gardens under a cloud of marijuana smoke. Caleb was worried he’d end up in them, another specimen in my collection. “You read my journals, didn’t you?”

He said nothing.

“So that’s a yes?”

A sigh of defeat signaled Caleb’s confession.

“How could you?” But of course he had. Who wouldn’t? Diaries were written to be read. If not now, then in a hundred years’ time. If you really wanted to keep something secret, you kept your mouth shut and your pen capped. “They were private,” I said, my final attempt to make Caleb feel bad.

“Private?” he said, scoffing. “You mean like the stuff in Dad’s shed?”

“That’s not the same—and you know it.”

“Dad’s shed was locked,” Caleb said. “I’d call that private, wouldn’t you?”

I didn’t respond. Like any hypocrite, I wasn’t about to admit that I was one.

Caleb was right, though. On the moral low ground, we were about even. But a sheet was stuck to my leg, and before another word was said, I needed to clean myself up without anyone seeing.





Chapter Twenty-One


Skyros, 2003





When grilled, Caleb admitted he’d accidentally unearthed the first installment of my journals while I was out shopping for groceries one afternoon, and had gone back to read the next by torchlight while I slept on the bathroom floor. To make sure I stayed put while he read, he’d tried to make me more comfortable by propping up my head with a towel and covering me with a quilt. Then, once he discovered the diaries had “sexy bits,” and episodes involving booze and drugs, he confessed he’d gotten addicted to reading them and had even risked going into my room one night while I was in the shower.

“I remember that night,” I said. “Only I thought it was Harold in my room.”

“That was me,” he said. “But I didn’t look at you in the shower.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” he said, and a second later: “No.”

We had moved from Elena’s crypt to the courtyard by then, and were huddled under the fig tree, whispering like fugitives. Caleb showed zero remorse about the snooping, and I found that I couldn’t really blame him for it. (After all, had I shown any?) All he wanted to know was if everything he’d read in the diaries was true, particularly the stuff about his mother “shagging” some guy in a bathroom.

I said I wasn’t sure what had happened that night, that he’d have to ask her.

He screwed up his face. “No thanks.”

I noticed that all the tension had gone from our conversation, just as I noticed that a dusting of fine black hair had appeared, seemingly overnight, on Caleb’s top lip. Had I really been even a little bit in love with this downy adolescent, this presumptuous boy who had bowled into my room to seduce me without even taking a shower? Alone on the sleeping platform after he’d gone to bed, I felt like a prizewinning idiot, with only myself to blame. How daft of me to think Harold had been the shower spy when it was Caleb who’d lurked and gone AWOL and generally behaved appallingly from the start. Or had he? What if he had followed my journals like a manual for delinquency? Certainly it was their contents that had given him the confidence to appear in my room late at night in his boxer shorts, the knowledge he needed to play me—that, and perhaps, Lolita.