The Girl Below(53)

At a nearby tearoom, I showed Ludo’s address to the woman behind the counter. She told me no buses went out to where he lived, and that I’d be lucky to find the place, even in a car, even with a map. Thinking like a Londoner, I set off on foot, but after an hour, I hadn’t even reached the city limits, and I sat down on the side of the road, defeated. For forty-five minutes, I watched cars stream past, too scared to put out my thumb, until finally a white van just stopped. The woman driving it had brown skin—not Maori but something else—and the backseats were jammed with handicapped kids.

“Are you lost?” she said, too friendly.

“I’m trying to find Koro . . . Koro-ma . . .”—I showed her the map—“this place.”

“Hop in,” she said. “I can take you as far as Temple View.”

I climbed into the front seat—watched vigilantly by her passengers—and read the sticker on her dashboard. JOY, it said, and underneath: JESUS FIRST, OTHERS SECOND, YOURSELF LAST.

At Temple View, she let me out. The name of the town wasn’t a joke. Rows and rows of identical white-brick bungalows collected around a temple the size of a mountain, every single window in the place net-curtained against sin. In the shade of a cypress pine, I waited, until it felt like the eyes of the town were on me—even though I couldn’t see a soul. I set off down the road and had walked a few kilometers, thumb out, sweating under my rucksack, when a large four-wheel drive swooshed to a stop on the verge in front of me.

The passenger window slid down and a mane of blond hair leaned out. “You shouldn’t be hitching,” she said. “It isn’t safe.”

She seemed cross that she’d had to stop to tell me this, and I apologized. “There isn’t a bus that goes where I want to go.”

“Where’s that?” she said.

I reached for the map but realized I’d left it in the white van. “Kora-something?” I said, pointing down the road.

“Koromatua?”

“Yes, that’s it.”

The woman drummed on the steering wheel for a moment before getting out to open the boot, where she put my backpack next to a pair of muddy boots and a bag of poultry wheat. She was absurdly tanned, and moved in an urgent, choppy way. Straw clung to her jacket, and the inside of the car smelled of horses. She pulled out on the main road as though she was driving a rally car. “Your accent,” she said. “Are you English?”

I nodded.

“My husband’s English. We met over there.”

Her erratic driving put me on edge and I wondered if we were going in the right direction. “Do you have a map?” I asked. “So I can show you where to go.”

“I know this area. Just tell me the address.”

“Flint Road.”

“Flint?”

“Yes, do you know it?”

“We live on it,” she said, and looked at me strangely. “What did you say your name was?”

“I didn’t. It’s Suki.”

The car swerved off the road into a ditch and the woman turned in the driver’s seat to glare at me. “Suki Piper?”

I felt sick and a little creeped out at the same time. “How do you know my surname?”

But she was ten seconds ahead of me. What Hamish had said about the smallness of this country was even truer than I could have imagined. In a sharp voice that I would come to fear, she asked, “Why do you want to see him?”

Her name was Rowan and she had been married to my father for ten years. They had two children, Lily and Simon. She smiled when she said their names. After she told me all this, we pulled out onto the highway again and drove for a while in heavy silence before turning off the road and cruising down a long gravel lane, across cattle bars, and passed through a remote-controlled gate. The parklike grounds were dotted with cows and sheep, a few horses. A ranch appeared, sprawling, with porticos and stables, a garage the size of an aircraft hangar. The car came to a stop in front of a barn, where a handful of brown chickens scratched in the sand.

“Wait here,” said Rowan. “Your father isn’t home.”

She disappeared inside. I got out of the car and went over to a tabby cat lounging in the sun. A tag around its neck read FLEA. “Aren’t you a lovely boy?” I said, stroking the soft white down of his tummy.

“Flea’s a girl, and she’s not allowed inside,” said a child’s voice from behind me. “She sleeps in the stable with Felicity—my bestest pony.”

I turned, then tried to hide my shock. It was like looking in a mirror at myself at age five or six. She even wore bottle-top glasses. The little me scratched her head. “Are you a friend of Mummy’s?”