The Girl Below(5)

Chapter Two


London, 1981





Madeline was not the only little friend to dwell behind the stucco facade of Ladbroke Gardens. Downstairs in the basement flat, the boiler cupboard outside our bathroom was home to a hand.

This hand was just a hand—no body attached—and it liked to come out of the cupboard and untie the bows on the backs of my dresses. That was the only thing it liked to do: untie bows. If I was wearing dungarees, or a dress without a bow on the back, the hand did not come out. It did not come out for pajamas, or when anybody else was with me, and it especially did not come out when I wanted it to—though many were the times I climbed into the cupboard and looked for it. Where the hand went when it wasn’t in the cupboard, I never knew, but I do know that if it had been attached to a body, it wouldn’t have fit in there—the boiler took up too much room.

I was not afraid of this hand without a body. Never had it occurred to me to be afraid of it. The hand untied my dresses; that was the game it played and the sole reason it existed. Perhaps it helped that the hand reminded me of my mother’s: soft and feminine but also strong.

I knew what it felt like because I’d once made the mistake of grabbing it. I had been trying to show the hand to my mother, and one day when it appeared, I took hold of it and called out to her. Mum took her time getting to the boiler cupboard, and while she was on her way, the hand and I engaged in a tug-of-war. Strangely, even though I had been the one to grab the hand, once I had grabbed it, the hand started pulling back. Before long, we had traded places, with the hand trying to drag me into the cupboard, and me attempting to shake it off. I don’t remember who let go first, but by the time my mother got to the cupboard, I was sitting alone on the floor, rubbing at a red mark on my wrist.

Around the same time—my sixth or seventh year—my parents threw the only party they ever had, a bash so wild and debauched that it’s the party I’ve subsequently measured the success of all others by. They had reason to celebrate. We had literally moved up in the world, bought the flat above us and knocked through a staircase to create a maisonette—so much more posh sounding than a basement. For a while, and at the time of the party, we had two kitchens, two front doors, two bathrooms, and two boiler cupboards—though the hand never ventured to the one upstairs.

The party was in midsummer, a humid weekend in July, and my parents invited the neighbors, including Peggy and Pippa, plus a score of other friends I didn’t know they had. There was a costume-party theme, but no one told me what it was and I couldn’t work it out from the dozens of pilots, policemen, chambermaids, and slave girls who turned up. In a departure from her usual mild look, Mum donned a corkscrew blond wig and dressed up as Mae West. Eagerly, I helped her to get ready, pulling tight the laces on a corset she had rented for the occasion. She had bought new lipstick too, crimson red, and in the mirror I watched her apply it, then pull back to admire the transformation.

“You look really beautiful,” I told her. “Like a lady in a magazine.”

“I feel silly,” she said, wiping off a little of the lipstick. “And this looks completely wrong.” She removed from around her neck the simple oval locket she always wore, and I pounced on it immediately, fingering the silver and fiddling with its latch. She’d bought it in a flea market in Paris and loved it for its plainness—she told me the way it had slowly tarnished over the years made it feel like an extension of her skin.

“Can I wear it?” I said.

Mum hesitated. “Not tonight. I won’t be able to keep an eye on you.” She put the locket in her jewelry box, and selected another necklace made from dozens of diamantes that I had never seen her wear. “There,” she said, putting it on. “Now I look more like a tart.”

She pulled herself to standing and hobbled awkwardly out of the bedroom in five-inch stiletto heels, the only pair she had ever owned. When my father saw her, he wolf-whistled. “I might not go away so much if you dressed like that more often.” My mother blinked her heavy eyelashes at him but didn’t smile.

“Do you like my clown suit, Dad?” I said, sticking out my chest. I was hugely proud of the costume Mum had whipped up on her sewing machine in the week leading up to the party. Together we’d made pom-poms of yellow wool, cutting out cardboard circles and winding the yarn around them to make fat, woolly doughnuts. We’d folded another circle of card to make a pointed hat, topped with a pom-pom and tied under my chin with string. When my so-called friend Esther arrived in a Snow White costume from Hamleys, I was gutted. Suddenly, my clown suit looked homemade, all crooked pom-poms and collapsing hat. Esther’s parents were getting a divorce and my mother insisted that I invite her over out of pity. But broken home or not, Esther was mean; she called me four eyes when no one was around.