The Girl Below(47)

I climbed into bed but saw that I hadn’t put away the tea chest. It was out in the middle of the room, and behind it, I had left the wardrobe doors wide open.

I had to put the tea chest away before morning, or risk Pippa seeing it, but there was something about the wardrobe that made me not want to go near it. The black space between the two open doors no longer seemed neutral, but pulsed with a presence that was strangely malevolent. Worse than that, it seemed to be exerting a magnetic pull.

Keeping one eye on the wardrobe, I hurried into the bathroom and closed the door behind me. What was I so afraid of? I tried to breathe it out, to talk myself down, and as I did so, I realized I was exhausted, worn out with anxiety—so much so that the floor between shower stall and sink looked inviting. When I lay down, I noticed how grubby it was, dirt crammed into the grooves between the tiles and tiny coils of hair behind the column that supported the sink. But with one glance I was able to take in the entire room, including both doors, firmly shut, and the thought of that was comfort enough to lull me into sleep.

I woke up when Caleb, in striped pajamas, walked into the bathroom, eyes sleepy, a hand clamped over his crotch. He didn’t see me until he had stumbled into my head. “Fuck!”

My embarrassment equaled his, and I rolled out of the way. “Sorry, I fell asleep.”

“In the bathroom?”

“I guess I must have been sleepwalking.” I had never sleepwalked in my life.

We returned to our rooms to regroup, then avoided each other for several days.

As a guest in Pippa’s house, I never quite felt sure where the boundaries were. She’d glibly told me on many occasions to make myself at home, but hadn’t meant it literally, as I discovered to my cost. The second or third morning I was there, I came downstairs to find a note pinned to the fridge telling me to help myself to food, except for the leftover lasagna, which was being saved for Caleb’s dinner. The note put me on edge, and from then on I was careful not to eat or drink too much, except for coffee, which I allowed myself almost unlimited quantities of. The disturbance in the wardrobe continued to bother me, and I spent two more fitful nights on the bathroom floor, and a third downstairs on the couch with the TV on low so as not to wake anyone. After a week of this, I was so utterly frazzled from accumulated sleep deprivation that I wasn’t sure if the disturbance had caused my insomnia or if it was the other way round. I didn’t mention anything to Pippa because I didn’t want her to think I was a nut job; if that happened, I’d be out on the street.

One night I got back from a walk in the park—I had been trying to wear myself out with exercise—to find Pippa wrestling with a basket of washing. She was trying to separate Caleb’s socks and underwear from Ari’s slightly bigger ones, and when she said, “It’s make your own dinner night, the servants are on strike,” I thought she meant I hadn’t been pulling my weight around the house.

Downstairs in the kitchen, Ari told me to help myself to baked beans, which he’d heated up in a pot on the stove. “Finish them up,” he said, handing me a bowl and pointing to a loaf of sliced bread for toasting. I ate in the living room, watching TV with Ari, and just as I was finishing, Alana finally returned one of the dozens of calls I had made to her mobile.

“I’m sorry it’s taken me so long,” she said. “I’ve been terrifically busy.”

“Me too,” I said, though the opposite was true. I tried to arrange another outing, but Alana was booked up, and sounded stressed. “Is everything okay?” I said. “Is it Steve?”

“Steve? No, he’s great.” She softened. “Actually, he’s lovely. He took me to Paris for the weekend.”

“Wow, he didn’t seem like the romantic type.”

“Exactly what type did he seem like,” she said, unexpectedly sharply, “to you?”

I had offended her, in a way that wasn’t easy to put right. “He seemed nice,” I said. “Really nice. A top bloke.”

“You never liked nice,” she said.

The edge was still in her voice, but as I opened my mouth to defend myself, Alana cut me off.

“I was going to get it over with the other night,” she went on. “But you were so drunk I didn’t see the point.”

“I’m sorry about that,” I said, wincing. “I was excited about hanging out with you—I got carried away. There’s no one else I can talk to about how weird things have been lately—moving here, being unemployed, not having anywhere to live. I have terrible insomnia—”