The Girl Below(27)

To pass the time, I stared at the ceiling, and watched in awe as the dimensions of the room began to distort. One moment the ceiling was a few inches above my head, bearing down on me like the lid of a tomb; a few seconds later it was mile-high open sky. To make it stop, I turned and focused on Mum, but she was shifting too—one moment her head colossal, the next a fragile sparrow’s egg attached by a spindle to her body. I closed my eyes, but that just made me dizzy, so I opened them again and watched the show. Was I causing the peculiarities, being tricked by my eyes, I wondered, or were the room and my mother really changing shape? I considered the question for quite some time before realizing, abruptly, that the distinction was meaningless. Whatever I could see in front of me was the reality I was stuck with, regardless of whether it was real or not.





Chapter Seven


London, 2003





The morning after the rat-poison spliff, I woke to shameful recollections of Dutch elves and flash floods and my own appalling behavior. My limbs had been stretched all night on a medieval rack, and my head throbbed like it had been thrown through a plate-glass window. It was almost midday and I had just enough time to shower and dress and catch a bus to Holland Park (extravagant in the extreme since my last forty quid had mysteriously become twenty overnight).

The park seemed unnecessarily crowded, its paths clogged with tourists and baby strollers, the sandpit crammed with juicy, dribbling toddlers—God, I was thirsty—and I sprinted over them and round them as if they were an assault course I had to get through. Pippa and Caleb were already at the café, seated by the window, and even from a distance, I could see that Pippa had been trying to cajole Caleb, with little success. He clearly didn’t want to be there any more than I did—perhaps even less—and as I approached the table, he pushed back his chair and attempted to do a runner.

Pippa caught him by the sleeve. “There you are, Suki,” she said, brightly. “Caleb’s been so looking forward to meeting you.”

“That’s total crap,” Caleb said, and flicked me a look of such unbridled hostility that I actually flinched.

“Caleb,” chastened Pippa. “Remember our deal?”

Whatever the deal was, it held some power, for Caleb groaned but sat down obediently and looked out the window. In the flesh, his expression was more devilishly sullen than it had been in any of the photos, but confusingly, it was grafted to the features of a seraph.

“Well, it’s lovely to meet you too,” I said.

Pippa fished out her purse and stood up. “Like I said on the phone, Caleb’s been in a lot of trouble lately, and I’ve explained to him that he might find it helpful if you shared your experiences.”

At this fresh insult, Caleb stood up again. “I said I’d come here, but you can get stuffed if you think I’m going to hang around listening to this patronizing shit.” His voice careened so wildly from low and gruff to choirboy that I couldn’t help grinning.

“Fuck off,” he said to my smiling face, and to Pippa: “Seriously, Mum, this is totally fucked.”

Pippa handed me a twenty-pound note. “Well, I’ll leave you two to get acquainted. Have what you like. The food here is delicious.”

I sat down for as long as it took Pippa to walk out of the café, then I got up. “Do you want anything? Coffee, tea, a good smack?”

That got his attention. “Shut up,” he said. “I’m not allowed coffee.”

“Do you want one or not?”

“Okay.”

“Cappuccino or latte?”

“Latte.”

“I thought so.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. But if you’re a good boy, you can have a treat as well.”

He was so cross he actually snarled—his mood a good match for my hangover.

Since my last visit many years ago, the Holland Park Café had been refurbished, and as I waited in line at the counter I wanted to bulldoze its clean Scandinavian makeover. Back in the old days, an Italian family had run the place, treating their customers as though they ought to be grateful to be getting served at all. But their spaghetti Bolognese alone had been worth the abuse—rich, salty, and piping hot. Just remembering the taste of that sauce made me salivate, and I scanned the new menu of organic, gluten-free follies with growing dismay. No grease—nothing that’d come close to soaking up a hangover. In the end I plumped for what was most filling: a carnivorous ploughman’s with organic grass-fed beef.

When I arrived back at the table with two coffees, a chocolate brownie, and a nobby-looking stick with a number on it, Caleb scrutinized me as though I were an enemy warship that had just appeared on his radar screen. “So how do you know Mum and Dad?” he said.