The Girl Below(46)

“Suits me,” I said, and waited for him to skulk back to his bedroom, but instead he hovered in the doorway. “You can come in,” I said, eventually. “I won’t bite.”

“I don’t want to,” he said. “But this used to be my room.”

“So?”

“I had to give it up so you could stay.”

“Well, thanks,” I said, and turned away, expecting him to leave. But he didn’t, he just stood in the doorway, openly taking an inventory of my belongings.

“Do you keep a diary?” he said, pointing to the pile of notebooks in my suitcase.

His impudence was annoying me, so I decided to annoy him back. “What music were you listening to?”

He reddened. “Why do you want to know?”

“I don’t,” I said. “I just didn’t pick you as the hair-metal type.”

He went back to his room and I heard no more from him. Before going to sleep, I wrote for a while in my journal, breaking in a new notebook because the old one was full. The house was quiet when I finished; I had stayed up later than I thought. The room was stuffy and I opened a window and leaned out. Down below, the back gardens of Ladbroke Grove stretched out in neat compartments, separated by brick walls and the occasional tree. In the neighboring garden, there was even a vegetable patch, and I marveled that anyone would want to eat whatever produce managed to grow there. I looked around the bare room, and my gaze kept returning to the closet. What if those tea chests really had belonged to my parents? What if they’d accidentally left something in there? The next thing I knew, I had flung open the wardrobe and was opening one of the boxes, convinced of the possibility.

The first yielded paint-splattered clothes and a jumble sale of unmatched cutlery, saucers, and cups. Pippa’s stuff. The second tea chest was heavier, and difficult to drag out of the cupboard. While I was shoving, one of its metal strips scraped loudly against the doorway, giving me quite a fright. I stopped to see if the noise had woken up anyone, and sure enough, a thumping noise came from Caleb’s room.

He went into the bathroom, and I leaped up to turn off the light in case he noticed I was still awake. The walls were thin, and I could hear a long stream of urine splashing into the bowl. He didn’t flush the toilet, but went back into his room and dragged what sounded like a heavy object in front of his door. His room fell quiet, and I turned my attention back to the tea chest. I was being nosy, but my urge to explore the tea chest and find something that belonged to my parents was stronger than my willpower to resist it. Before long, I’d prised open the lid.

Art materials took up the top half of the chest, a raggedy canvas, rolled up, and a box of crusted oil pastels. Underneath those was a spindly wooden mannequin with movable arms and legs, the kind we used to practice life drawing with. I’d been given one for my birthday once, when I was going through an art phase, and had experimented with it enthusiastically, bending it into different poses, only to discover that its flat wooden chest and mechanical joints were nothing like the human body.

When I reached into the box again, my hand jumped back from what it touched: a strange, hard object with a firm center and protruding stems, like a starfish or a giant tarantula made of wood. I stared into the chest, hardly breathing, but it was too dark by the wardrobe to see anything, so I brought over the bedside lamp and shone it into the box. There, in a black velvet glove, was a hand with long, thin fingers, about the same size as mine. I reached into the box and picked it up, noticing how little it weighed. The glove peeled off easily, and inside was a jointed wooden hand, also used for life drawing. We’d had one of those in the art room at school.

I put the hand back in its glove and held it as though we were shaking on a deal. The gesture was enough to bring back a sharp recollection of the past, and briefly the wooden hand turned into my hand in the cupboard, the one that had untied the bows on my dresses. I experienced then a strange jolt, not déjà vu but its opposite, a conviction that the way I had always remembered the hand might be wrong. What if I had seen this wooden hand at Pippa’s and had transferred it, in my imagination, to the boiler cupboard? The theory seemed plausible, but it didn’t resonate except in a cold, scientific way—and the hand in the cupboard had been neither of those things. It had been warm, as human and alive as I was. But how could that be?

One by one, I returned the objects to the tea chest and found that I was shaking. Discovering the mannequin hand had unnerved me to the core. Not just because it was creepy, but because it had rattled my sense of certainty that how I remembered the past was how it actually was. Now when I thought of the hand, my memories of it were unmoored.