The Girl Below(17)

For what seemed like hours, I lay awake in bed, distressed by the day’s events and unable to make sense of them. A lonely feeling had settled over me and I wished that I had told someone what had happened. I worried now that I had left it too late, that I wouldn’t remember all the details. But that wasn’t all. I had never lied to or kept secrets from my mother before, and doing so made me feel separate from her in a way I didn’t like.

When she came in later to check on me, I pretended to be asleep. Watching her cross the room to look in the bucket, my heart thumped so loudly I was surprised it didn’t give me away. I ruffled the bedclothes a little, willing her to notice me, to come to me, but she didn’t, she just picked up the bucket and left with it.

The night was very still, the air so close it was hard to breathe, and later, when someone went out into the garden to try to close the hatch, the sound of it scraping on the path was jarring, like a skill saw starting up. The noise stopped and, for a short while, all was quiet. I was about to go to the window when I heard male voices, chattering and laughing, before, with a satisfying thunk, the hatch found the groove it had been in for decades, maybe even since the last air raid, and finally, it was shut. I waited to feel relieved, but instead all that gripped me was the strange hunger I had felt earlier, as if there was less of me than there had been that morning. And then, under the spell of approaching sleep, I thought of the locket and how, if I had left it in the bunker, it was going to be down there for a very long time.





Chapter Five


London, 2003





A hair dryer, vacuum cleaner loud, sucked me from sleep, and I realized the flatmates were up before me, eating breakfast in the kitchen and getting ready for work. After leaving Pippa’s around eleven the night before, I had walked the three miles back to Willesden Green, stayed up to write in my journal, then collapsed into a deep sleep. Now I realized I’d slept through my alarm clock as well as all the others in the flat. I didn’t have my own room but was sleeping in the living room, and had been for almost three months. For the last two, I had perfected the art of invisibility, waking early and going out before everyone else got up; sneaking in late after they’d all gone to bed. Only this morning I’d fucked all that up, and was stretched out in the open like the hobo that I was.

A pair of high heels clacked their way toward me and paused near my suitcase. I’d been too tired to stow it the night before, and was pretty sure I’d left my journal out on top. I winced at the thought of it being exposed, but rather than risk a confrontation I rolled over and pretended to be asleep. From the shoes, I had a pretty good idea of which flatmate it was, and if she wanted to snoop, let her snoop. Only she didn’t. Instead she kicked the suitcase hard, a really fierce kick that I supposed she would have liked to aim at my head—a kick that must have hurt her more than it hurt my suitcase.

Half an hour later, the last of them had left for work, and I got up and surveyed the scene. My journal was out in plain sight, which was careless, but it didn’t look like anyone had read it. Watching the video of my mother the night before had unleashed a frenzy of long-forgotten memories, and I had tried to scribble down as much as I could remember about the old days when my parents were still together. I had been doing that a lot lately, writing down events from my past. The present was so empty, so dull, that I didn’t have much to say about it.

Ahead of me, my workless day unfurled, a replica of yesterday and the day before it, lethally empty until I filled it up. The easiest way was to shorten the day with sleep, so I closed my eyes again and slept until eleven, when I got up feeling terminally exhausted. In the poky flat kitchen, I stole three teaspoons of instant Gold Blend and pretended the resulting sour mulch was espresso. It tasted so disgusting that it woke me up enough to check my e-mail on Belinda’s laptop, my second hit of shame for the day.

Belinda and I had worked on the same community newspaper in Auckland. The office had been short on kindred spirits and we had clung to each other more to keep others away than out of genuine affinity. Soon after moving into her London flat, I’d realized that without common enemies, we had little in common, but by then I needed the friendship more than she did and had tried like hell to keep it going. Lately, I had been feeling more like a parasite. At first she’d encouraged me to use her laptop when she was at work, but after a while she started putting it away in the top drawer of her dresser, forcing me to take it out in secret and erase my tracks after using it. I felt crummy the whole time I was doing it, but was careful never to look at her files, and reasoned that I was doing it for her own good. Without e-mail, I couldn’t apply for jobs, and until I had a job, I couldn’t move out of her flat.