The Girl Below(23)

Vomiting broke the spell completely, and I was surprised by how quickly strength returned to my body. I was still a little shaken, but I got up, turned on the light, and looked around the bathroom. It was orderly, solid, even homely, and I picked up my toothbrush and luxuriated in the ordinariness of cleaning my teeth.

I was so relieved that my powers of observation deserted me. Then, treading softly down the hall, I heard a squelching sound and looked down at my clothes. They were soaked through and covered in a kind of mulch. In the living room, I peeled them off, and some of the mulch got on my hands and gave off the odor of mold. I thought back to the shrubbery I’d fallen into, and decided it must have been muddy underneath, though I did not remember it being so. But after everything that had happened that evening, it was a feasible enough explanation, and I tried hard not to think of an alternative.





Chapter Six


London, 1981





In the months that followed my parents’ wild party, I waited, tense with anticipation, for my mother to confront me again over the whereabouts of her locket. I thought it was only a matter of time before she spoke to Esther’s mother and exposed the fib I had told about Esther breaking it, and each day I rehearsed my confession.

But autumn fell, and still nothing had been said. Mum simply acted as though there had been no locket. She never mentioned it, let alone my part in its disappearance. At first I was relieved, but as time went on, I was utterly bewildered and then finally just plain curious. Why did my mother seem not to miss the locket that had once been so precious to her? When enough time had passed that I was sure I would not be blamed for its disappearance, I found an opportunity to ask her about it. She was sitting at her dressing table, French-plaiting her hair, and I was going through the remains of her jewelry box when I found the silver catch that I had sliced off the locket. I held it up and contorted my face into what I hoped was a look of innocent puzzlement. “What do you think happened to the rest of it?” I said.

Mum abandoned the plait, midfold, and took the piece of silver from my hand. “Someone stole it,” she said. “After the party.”

“Who?” I said, my chest thumping. “Who stole it?”

“I don’t know. It was very dark.”

“You saw them take it?”

Mum put the catch back in the jewelry box and snapped the lid shut. “No,” she said, seemingly irritated by my question, “I couldn’t see well enough. It was late at night.”

Though I asked her again, once or twice, her answer was always the same, and soon enough, I forgot about the locket and became preoccupied with other momentous things, such as Christmas. That was the year I ruined it for myself, by myself. At nearly seven, I was far too old to still believe in Santa Claus, but believe in him I did, with a fervor that bordered on religious fundamentalism. Every year on Christmas morning, I woke at three or four A.M.—sometimes as early as midnight—and pounced on the pillowcase bulging with toys at the end of my bed. It wasn’t the toys I was after, but their supernatural smell: a sugary aroma of nutmeg, fresh snow, and reindeer fur that to me was the essence of magic. To try and preserve the perfume, I held off playing with my presents for as long as possible, and the same went for not eating the walnuts and satsumas that had been tossed into the sack alongside them. Those I would stow under my bed for safekeeping, where they remained until wizened and black with rot.

At home, no brothers or sisters were there to challenge my zeal, but at school I was forced to defend Santa by using all the skills at my disposal. I didn’t mind if other children voiced their doubts, but one day a boy named Charles Pycraft took things too far. He stood on a chair in the middle of the classroom and told us he’d seen his dad sneaking into his room at night with a sack full of presents, and what’s more, he’d taken a Polaroid. When he held it up for us all to see I launched myself at him—rather than look. At first Charles laughed, and so did the rest of the class, until he felt my teeth sink into the fat, juicy lobe of his ear. While I ripped his Polaroid into a thousand tiny shreds, he howled his lungs out. As punishment, I was sent to a small library off the assembly hall called the Quiet Room, and was told to stay there and read the illustrated King James Bible until I was sufficiently sorry and in the mood to apologize. At three o’clock, when that mood still had not arrived, I was frog-marched to the cloakroom where my mother stood waiting to fetch me.

“Suki, love,” she said, “you mustn’t take everything to heart or they’ll tease you even more.”

Mum often spoke of teasing—as in “Don’t cry, he’s only teasing”—but I didn’t understand why it was my fault for reacting, not theirs for being mean. That was one of the disadvantages of being an only child: you lived in your own head, played yourself at Connect Four, and developed a skin so thin it might as well not have been there.