The Girl Below(43)

In the morning, the wallpaper seraphim had gone, and a little after nine Granny arrived to take care of the rest. I stayed in Mum’s room, wearing her clothes, while she attacked the flat, her grief masquerading as a cleaning hurricane. I found a hatbox that I thought had been full of Mum’s hats, but it was brimming with medication in brown plastic bottles, enough analgesics to relieve the whole street of pain. In the same hatbox were mementoes from my childhood: a lock of fine hair, tied with a ribbon; the plastic identity bracelet from around my newborn wrist; and wrapped in a tissue, a clutch of milk teeth. At the sight of the teeth, I felt a muted surge of adrenaline and tipped them out on the bed. There were a couple of tiny pointed fangs, and some flat, straight ones in varying sizes. I wondered if any of them were the ones I had brought up from the bunker in the folds of my dress, but I did not have the heart, that morning, to examine them, and I never saw them again.

I refused to let Granny hug me, but she was only the first to invade. Starting that morning and continuing for days, hordes of people arrived with casseroles and cards and flowers. So many bouquets arrived by courier van that they had to be flung in the bath. Who were all these people and where had they been for the last two years? I didn’t think, in that whole time, we’d had anyone over or received a single invitation to dinner. At first I tolerated the smothering, the condolences from strangers, but as the days wore on, I grew belligerent and locked myself in Mum’s room. That’s when I found her building society book, and a note that said: “For Suki: my password, just in case.” So she had known. She had made preparations. She had known I would come in here looking for a way out.

By the day of the funeral, I’d shut down completely. Why had everyone come to inspect my grief? And why did they keep trying to feed me? Didn’t they know I wasn’t hungry, that I might never eat again? When some relatives of my mother’s asked if I’d like to go and live with them in Edinburgh, I was openly rude. “Scotland,” I said. “Are you kidding?”

I had already bought my plane ticket with the money from Mum’s savings account. The flat we lived in was rented; I thought Granny could sort through the chattels.

Not long after Mum was cremated, I caught the Piccadilly line to Heathrow Airport with a single suitcase, no ashes. Briefly, as the plane wheels lifted off the tarmac, a shadow of regret passed over me, but I blamed it at the time on shifting air pressure, a moment of queasiness as my body adjusted to the change in altitude.





Chapter Ten


London, 2003





For five or six hours after I had seen the old garden from Harold’s bedroom window, I remained under the covers in a tight ball, coming down off the fear and confusion that had gripped me like a fever. Explanations came and went in that time, but none that made sense, and as light started creeping into the room I decided that the garden had been an apparition, an elaborate hoax on the part of my imagination. I had seen the air-raid shelter because I wanted to see it, not because it was there.

Still, getting out of bed that morning, I approached the window in a cautious mood. What if the apparition hadn’t gone away? I needn’t have worried—there was nothing out of the ordinary to see. The garden was back to the way it had been the day before, terra-cotta pots in two parallel lines reaching out from the back door, surrounded by paths made from chalk. The only thing there that I hadn’t noticed before was an ornamental orange tree, clipped into submission, in keeping with the garden’s unbending design. A few months ago I’d looked upon that symmetry and loathed it, but that morning I found it a reassuring sign that the world was, after all, a sane and rational place.

Just to be certain, though, I decided to go down and see the garden for myself. But first I put my head through Peggy’s door, and listened for reassuring sounds. Yes, she was out for the count, her breathing punctuated by something that was either a trembling snore or flatulence.

Pippa had left a note to say the keys to the garden were on a small rack in the kitchen, and I took them and went down the communal staircase, meaning to let myself out through the back door. Only, where I had remembered there being a back door, there was none. The communal stairs stopped at ground level, and the end of the hallway was blocked off with a wall. To get out into the garden, I’d have to use the main gate on Kensington Park Road. It was inconvenient to have to walk along the street and around the corner just to get into the garden, and I realized why I’d hardly ever seen Peggy or Pippa out there.

The morning was crisp, not at all summery, and as I crossed the lawn to find a patch of sun, I recalled the strange humidity in the night—so different from the current dry atmosphere. At that early hour, the garden was empty save for a man smoking a cigarette while his dog squatted at the base of a tree. He wore pajamas under his jacket and looked both surprised and displeased to see me. When the dog stood up, he stubbed out his cigarette on the tree trunk and quickly moved on.