The Girl Below(50)
“And Ari?” There was no use trying to talk Pippa out of it—I could tell she had already relented—and I was grabbing at the only straw I could think of.
“He’ll get over it. The second he sits down to an ouzo with his brother.”
Two days later, with Ari in a funk, they left without Caleb. I took them to the airport, and drove the car back on my own. I had never driven before in London and it took me twice as long to get back as it had to get out there; I followed the wrong lane out of a roundabout, and wound up south of the river in a suburb that might have been Putney or Barnes. By the time I got back to the flat, it was dark, and Caleb was hunched in front of the TV in the living room with the lights off, frantically pushing buttons on a gaming console. On the screen, a lone high school jock was fighting off an army of bloated, pale green Samurai warriors. I picked up the box next to the console. “Samurai Zombies?”
“Promise you won’t tell Mum. She thinks it’s too violent.”
“I expect I’ll tell her right away—the instant she calls.”
“What?” he said, losing concentration long enough to meet a grisly end. “Fuck!” he said. “I was nearly on the next level.”
“I’m not going to promise anything.”
“What?” He looked at me again—shocked that I had disagreed with him—but I had decided, on the way back from the airport, that the only way I could survive the next month was to show him who was boss.
“You heard me,” I said, and went upstairs.
Ari had told me I could use the car while they were away, but in Central London there was no point in driving, so I went into their bedroom to leave the keys there. Their room looked like a rogue tornado had passed through, and I wondered if I ought to tidy up, just a little. I hadn’t really been in their bedroom before and couldn’t resist looking round and trying out the bed, which was an enormous king-size futon, of the kind I hadn’t seen since the late nineties. The futon hadn’t been made, and the bedding smelled a little funky, but after all the sleepless nights I’d had, it was devilishly inviting, and I lay down on it, meaning to rest only for a moment. But once I was lying down, all the exhaustion of the last few weeks arrived at once, and I succumbed to a kind of half coma. Must get up, I told myself as I relived the day as a sequence of increasingly wonky moments—getting squashed by Peggy’s antique trunk in the back of the car, catching a plane with no wings, driving off the side of Putney Bridge . . . and then, as I got really woozy, I imagined someone was lying next to me on the futon, a man who smelled of Christmas morning—that delicious aroma I remembered from when I was a kid. I didn’t know who the man was, but he smelled so good that when he rolled over and started to kiss me, I put my hand on the small of his back and pressed my mouth into his. All at once the man’s back narrowed, and the bones shrank under his skin, and I realized he was a boy, that it was Caleb I was kissing–Caleb who tasted so good.
It was such a vivid, startling dream that it propelled me out of sleep and off the bed in the same instant. My pulse raced as I looked around the room, but it was empty, static. No one else had been in the bed except me. The door was still closed, and beyond it I could hear the steady click, click, beep of a gaming console downstairs. It was nothing more than a dream, I told myself, just a man morphing into a boy who happened to be Caleb.
I was tired, and losing it—nothing that couldn’t be fixed by a good night’s sleep. I went downstairs to make a cup of milky cocoa to help me nod off, and walked past Caleb, who was sitting in front of the TV, engrossed in his game. He didn’t look up, but I thought he was going to, that somehow he knew about the dirty dream but was pretending he didn’t.
Standing by the kettle, waiting for it to boil, I tried not to look at him, but he seemed always to be at the edge of my field of vision. Without Ari and Pippa there to act as a buffer, the flat seemed smaller, too intimate, and I wasn’t sure that Caleb and I should be in it alone.
The kettle pinged, and I jumped as though I had been caught in a compromising act. I had been meaning to offer Caleb a cup of cocoa but changed my mind in case he read more into the gesture than was meant. Instead I fled upstairs with my drink in hand, spilling a little on the carpet, and not even wishing him good night.
Chapter Eleven
London, 1993
The flight to New Zealand was long but not long enough to account for the shock of how different it was from England. I hadn’t prepared myself for arrival in a strange country—had thought of nothing but fleeing—and the only thing the same was the language. Auckland was a wall of moisture, bright and hot, and I sleepwalked through customs, where men in short shorts and long socks inspected my bags for insects. I wheeled my trolley out from behind a screen and emerged in the arrivals hall, where a crowd of eager faces intently scrutinized my features before passing me over, for the next new arrival.