The Girl Below(51)

The ugliness of Auckland shocked me: suburb after suburb of sand-colored bungalows, their newness punctuated by short, spiky plants and an occasional outburst of trees. It was drizzling and sunny at the same time, and on the backseat of the minibus, I broke into a sweat without lifting a finger: I couldn’t, it was stuck to the seat.

In downtown Auckland I checked into a backpacker hostel on a street with massage parlors and strip joints at one end, banks and law firms at the other. I asked for a single room and was shown to a shoe box on the sixth floor with a window overlooking a ventilation shaft, down which people had thrown Coke cans and cigarette butts that were impossible to retrieve. Outside my window, an air-conditioning unit sounded like it was trying to take off, and the air was thick with insects.

Time slipped through the cracks. I woke and thought I’d wet the bed, but it was only sweat. I took a shower but had no soap, I couldn’t get clean, couldn’t wake up. I lay in bed trying not to think about either Mum or food, but ended up alternating between the two until I had a headache. Laughter burst from the corridor, British and Swedish accents, the sound track to international sex. I drank a whole liter of water and went back to bed.

When I woke, my eyes were gummed together. Cramps squeezed my stomach, and I felt light-headed. Dressing in whatever was close at hand, I went outside. The pavement was melting tarmac, and when I looked into the distance, objects shimmered as if they were underwater. The sun was so bright it obliterated the edges of things, and my eyes squinted shut in protest. I found a small supermarket and bought cheese, chocolate milk, and a loaf of bread, and when I paid with a hundred-dollar note from the airport exchange, the man at the counter commented in a language I didn’t understand. Back in my room, I stuffed the bread and cheese into my mouth in pieces, washed down with milk from the carton.

For another two days, I stayed in my room: dozing, thinking, sweating, eating, until I started to feel as if I had fused with the bed. On the third day, I got up in the late afternoon, took a hot shower, dressed in decent clothes, and went downstairs to find a phone book. Dozens of Pipers were listed in the Auckland directory, but none with the first name Ludwig. My father, whose grandparents were German, had been named after the famous composer, but only official documents used the elongated version.

The discovery that his name wasn’t listed was more crushing than it ought to have been, and I realized that looking him up in the phone book had been the extent of my plan to find him. I had no idea what to do next, so I went into a bar and ordered a Mexican beer. The barman wouldn’t give me one; he insisted I drink New Zealand beer instead. “It’s the best in the world,” he said.

Unwilling to make a scene, I handed over a ten-dollar bill and went to sit by the window, as far away from him as I could get. The brown beer was foul, with a heavy, bitter aftertaste, but it was cold and I drank it thirstily. A tall man with angular shoulders and dark hair was in the bar, and as soon as I saw him I knew he would come over. He had heard me talking to the barman and asked what part of London I was from.

“West,” I said. “I went to school in Hammersmith.” Even then, I knew better than to mention Notting Hill.

“That explains your posh accent.”

“I’m not posh.”

“ ‘I’m not posh,’ ” he said, mocking me.

I stood up to leave. I was way too tired to have a sense of humor.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just that I love the way you speak. It’s so quaint.” He placed a hand on my upper arm. “Please. Let me buy you a drink.”

Unused to day drinking, after two gin and tonics, I was tipsy, and he’d told me his name was Hamish. He claimed to be an actor, but I didn’t believe him. He didn’t have the right sort of face. But I told him I was looking for my father, and he suggested I try the library, where they had national phone directories, fewer than twenty for the whole country. “New Zealand is a series of villages,” he said. “Sewn down the middle by a two-lane highway.”

“You make it sound like a sock.”

Hamish laughed. There was something about him I liked, and when he offered to take me on a scenic drive of Auckland, I said yes. The gin had made me reckless, but I sobered up once we were in his car and the doors were shut and locked. He drove us along the waterfront, past thousands of yachts, their white masts jousting against the horizon. He told me one in eight people in Auckland owned a boat.

“Is that an official statistic?”

“Every year, they count.”

“They do not.”

“They did once, in the eighties.”