The Girl Below(110)

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?”