The Girl Below(26)

That night I dreamed the house was on fire and Mum was trapped inside. From the air-raid shelter in the garden, I could see her standing in the hallway, paralyzed. She kept shrinking to the size of a doll, small enough for me to pick up, but I couldn’t get out of the air-raid shelter to rescue her. The house became a furnace and she vanished, or burned, or both.

Dad wasn’t the only thing to disappear around that time. A few weeks after he left, I went into the living room one Saturday morning to watch cartoons but the television wasn’t there. On the shelf where it usually sat there was a clean space in the shape of a television set, and around it, an oblong of dust. I ran my finger through it and yelled out, “Mum! What have you done with the TV?”

There was no answer, so I padded downstairs to the kitchen, where Mum was at the table, studying a plate of toast. When I asked her where she had moved the TV, she looked confused. “I didn’t move it.”

“Well, someone has. Did Dad take it?”

Mum looked at me, puzzled, and we went upstairs to the living room. There was still no TV on the shelf, only the dust with a finger mark through it. Mum ran round the maisonette, checking all the rooms and opening windows to look outside. She opened the front door, but the TV wasn’t sitting in the communal hallway like I guessed she hoped it might be. Watching her anxiety escalate made me queasy. When she arrived at the guest cloakroom on the ground floor, a new addition to the maisonette that didn’t yet have bars on the windows, her shoes crunched on shards of broken glass and she held her hand out behind her to prevent me from rushing in. I stared at the broken window, the pieces of glass on the floor. The window was just big enough for a television to fit through, along with a small person, a midget or a child.

I didn’t go into the garden much after the burglary, just in case the midget was still around. I thought perhaps he or she lived in the air-raid shelter and was down there watching cartoons on our TV.

In the spring, we got a state-of-the-art alarm system installed. You had to punch in a long sequence of numbers when you switched it on and another long sequence when you switched it off. Mum wrote the numbers on the back of a five-pound note she kept in her wallet, reasoning that if her wallet was stolen, no one would think to examine the note for an alarm code or suspect that’s what the numbers related to. Just in case, she added a couple of extra digits to the sequence. She also stapled the five-pound note to the inside of her wallet to stop herself from accidentally spending it.

Each time we opened the front door, Mum grappled with the entire contents of her bag, trying to locate her wallet and the long sequence of numbers before the thirty-second grace period ended and the siren went off. Plenty of times she couldn’t decipher her own handwriting and punched in the wrong code, so I learned the sequence of digits by heart and would recite it to her as she attacked the number pad. I don’t know what she did when I wasn’t there. But then, I was never not there.

At night, we slept with the alarm on. Once inside my room, I had to stay there because otherwise one of the flashing green sensors would spot me creeping around the house. Mum had a red panic button installed by the bed, which alerted an army of security guards and policemen if anything terrible happened. As far as I knew, she used it only once, when a black-and-white tomcat broke into our house and pissed all over the kitchen bench. The cat set off the alarm and Mum pressed the panic button. I always thought it was the sudden, piercing shrill of the alarm that’d made the cat wet itself, but Mum said cats didn’t pee when they were frightened, only humans did that, me especially. When she discovered the cat in the kitchen, Mum tried to call the security guards to tell them not to come round, but she couldn’t reach anyone on the phone. Once you pressed a panic button, it turned out you couldn’t unpress it.

While we waited for the guards to arrive, Mum changed out of her nightdress and into jeans and a sweatshirt. She seemed embarrassed when she opened the door and explained to them what had happened. One of the men patted Mum on the shoulder and asked her if she was going to be okay. He offered to stay the night on the couch, but Mum pulled away from underneath his hand and soon after the guards left.

When they had gone, I climbed into Mum’s bed and snuggled next to her. Since Dad left, I had often slept there, but this was different. Usually, I drifted off within minutes, drawn quickly into oblivion by the reassuring presence of my mother, but this time I was seized by the notion that I was the one soothing her toward sleep. I even considered stroking her head but was worried she might think it weird. Once or twice I thought she had finally nodded off, only for her body to jerk violently, as it sometimes does on the cusp of sleep, with that peculiar sensation of falling off a cliff.