The Girl Below(31)

After a few glasses of wine, she seemed to relax, and we sank back into the old routine of recalling the most recent dramas of our lives in amusing and elaborate detail. She finally got it out of me that I had given up on men only because the latest in a long line of destructive breakups had been such a train wreck that in the aftermath, it had hurt too much to have hope.

“You went out with a bunch of assholes,” she said a little dismissively when I had finished explaining. “It was a bad run, that’s all.”

She didn’t understand, and I knew I could never explain, how a bad run left its mark—that at the end of it, you were not the same person you had been at the start. Every time you went through a breakup, it took something from you, leaving less of you to give to the next one, and the longer the bad run went on, the harder it was to offer up what little was left.

When I was done with talking about men, I moved on to my family (which took us through another bottle of wine) and to being broke and unemployed—out came a bottle of foul coffee liqueur her great-aunt had given her for Christmas—and for good measure, I doubled back and added in those final messed-up months in Auckland—hard to leave out—at which point it was half past eleven and Alana announced that she was spent. She went to tip her glass of coffee liqueur down the sink, and I told her not to waste it, that if she didn’t want it, I’d drink it—but she must not have heard me.

“The couch folds out,” she said, fetching sheets and a blanket from an airing cupboard. “It’s a bit lumpy, but I shouldn’t think that’ll bother you much.”

While I was trying to work out if that was an odd thing to say, I was swamped by a wave of nostalgia for the after-school phone marathons and sweet delusions of our girlhood friendship—a wave I needed to share. “There’s something so great about old friends who really know you, who understand you,” I began, with a lump in my throat. “Living in New Zealand, I really missed that. I always had to make new friends, and we didn’t share any history. Not like I do with you.”

“Yes,” she said, matter-of-factly. “We used to have a lot of fun.”

She was tired, she said, shutting the door to her bedroom, and so was I. So tired that my second hangover came early, while I lay on the lumpy sofa bed, staring at the ceiling and worrying about how many flats, how many lives, were stacked on top of that thin piece of particle board.

Scanning over the evening’s conversation, it struck me that I couldn’t remember a single thing Alana had told me about her life. Not because drunkenness had wiped out my memory, but because she hadn’t told me anything. Then, with a mix of horror and shame, I realized that was because I hadn’t let her get a word in, that I’d done all the talking—all of it. I had been rabid, had frothed at the mouth. But it was too late now to go back and put a stopper in the bottle. I could only apologize, and try not to do it again. Over breakfast, I would make amends.

But by the time I woke up, Alana had gone. She hadn’t left a note, but I wrote one to her saying thanks for the bed, and then I called Pippa.

“I’m so pleased you’ll do it,” she said, the relief clear in her voice. “I think Peggy took a shine to you, and we had so much trouble finding a nurse she liked. Most of them weren’t posh enough and she complained about their ‘dreary accents’ when they were reading to her.”

“I have to read to her?” I hadn’t meant to sound rude, but reading aloud was the pits.

“Only if you feel like it. But it’s either that or listening to her stories, which can get a little . . . repetitive. You know what old people are like.”

“Not really,” I said. “My grandmother was more interested in telling people what to do than in boring them to tears.”

“I met her once, I think,” said Pippa. “Is she still alive?”

“I don’t know,” I said, truthfully. “So, can I start straightaway?”

“If you want.”

Pippa made arrangements for me to pick up a key from her place, and I was about to hang up when she said, “By the way, what on earth did you say to Caleb?”

Oh dear. Had he told her about my bunking advice? “Nothing much,” I said, tentatively. “We hardly spoke.”

“Are you sure?”

“I asked him a few questions, but he wasn’t exactly chatty.”

“Really?” she said, sounding surprised. “Because on the way home, instead of renting a game, he insisted on going to the library and getting out a stack of books. When we got home he went straight to his room and we haven’t seen him since—well, hardly, except for dinner, which he wolfed down in five seconds.” She paused. “He’s never wanted to read books before. I’m a little freaked out.”