The Girl Below(108)

I stopped rubbing her back, and sat down heavily on the grass, watching her. She lifted her head and I caught her profile—her nose had a small bump from wearing spectacles, and her full lips turned down in a sulk. A thin line of blood trickled from one corner of her mouth, but what took away my breath was her big mole eyes, the way she was straining to see me without her glasses on; the way she gave up trying and looked away, frustrated. My whole life, I had been doing that, been blind when I most needed to see.

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.