The Girl Below(18)

Progress was inert. So far, I’d e-mailed out hundreds of résumés to HR departments and recruitment agencies without getting a single response. In the beginning, fresh off the plane and brimming with faux Kiwi enthusiasm, I’d actually rung people up, but they’d been so insulted by the interruption of a live voice that I’d given up doing it and now stuck to impersonal e-mails. The London job market was a fortress, and the harder I tried to get in, the more impenetrable it became. All I wanted was a humble temping assignment—office flunky, receptionist, wallpaper—but as August neared, and London shut down for the summer, even that was beginning to seem wildly beyond my reach.

For the third or fourth time that week, I took out my passport folder and considered my last traveler’s check, a crisp sheet of paper worth fifty quid if I cashed it. But I was worried that cashing it would signal the beginning of the end, that the second after it became real currency it would be taken from me. Just a few days earlier, I’d left the flat with a twenty-pound note in my jeans pocket, feeling flush, only to reach the tube station and find it had vanished into thin air. I had searched the pavements for an hour, mistaking leaves and lolly wrappers and even a condom packet for the lost note, to no avail, and had had the keenest sense that I had been fucked with, that someone had pinched my money and was hiding nearby, watching me and laughing.

With all the flatmates at work, there was no one to tell me to hurry up and save hot water, so I drained the boiler with a long, scalding shower, and sampled the comprehensive range of salon shampoos and conditioners lined up along the bath. Somewhere in the apartment, a phone trilled, but I’d just squeezed out the last blob of organic seaweed and jojoba frizz-control elixir, and left it unanswered.

I was used to the phone ringing and it not being for me, so I was surprised when I listened to the message and it was from Pippa, something garbled about Caleb bunking off school that had been cut off midway by an electronic pip. I considered calling her back, but doing nothing all morning had resulted in a strong inclination to do more of the same, and instead I sat down on the couch and idly flicked on the TV. Daytime soaps and infomercials were in full swing but the screen was so sun bleached that it was more like listening to the radio. For longer than was healthy, I watched dust particles drift across the living room, staring through them into space until I felt drowsy, too lethargic even to move. A familiar emotion welled inside me, not fulsome like sadness, but a dragging sensation, like the tide going out. In its wake, I felt canceled out. Almost patiently, I waited for the compulsions to begin, and when they did, I was relieved to find them weak, easy to tune out. Even so, I reminded myself to be vigilant, that I could not afford to slip any further off the grid.

The phone rang again, snapping me back to reality, and this time I answered.

“Thank God you’re there,” said the voice on the other end. “I know you’re busy and you’ve got better things to do, but I’ve run out of ideas and something you said last night made me think you might be able to help.”

“Pippa?” I said. “Is that you?”

Her voice was more anxious than in the earlier message. “Caleb’s really in a bad way. I’m worried he’s going to do something stupid—harm himself in some way. I desperately want to help him, but he won’t talk to me about what’s going on. I thought . . . well, I thought he might talk to someone closer to his own age.”

“I’m not that much closer,” I said, wondering how to convey the fact that I was the last person he ought to talk to, that I needed a little help myself. “If I say the wrong thing, it might be dangerous.”

“Please,” she said. “I’ve tried everything else. I know you’ve been through a lot, and I thought that maybe if you just talked to him about how you’d gotten through it then he’d be able to get through it too. That’s all I want—for him to make it out the other side.”

“But I’m not out the other side,” is what I should have said, but instead I capitulated to her air of desperation. That and the offer of a free lunch, in return for attempted counseling, were I to meet Caleb the next day in the Holland Park Café.

After she hung up, my cell phone beeped—a noise I hadn’t heard in weeks—and I discovered a text from my old school friend Alana, inviting me for after-work drinks in three hours’ time. I had been trying to see her since I first arrived in London, but she had been away on holiday, then busy at work, and it was only now just happening. In a matter of moments, my week had gone from fatally empty to socially overwhelming.