The Girl Below(60)
Into the sudden, deafening silence, he said, “Fuck me!”
I stared at the turntable, where a fault line wended its way from one side of the case to the other. We could replace the beer, but this was different. I felt the giddy spirit of the evening desert me. “We really should call it a night,” I said, starting to tidy up, but Caleb was selecting another record from the shelf.
“Bob fucking Dylan,” he said. “Awesome!” He was beginning to slur his words, and I wondered if he’d already had a few drinks before he came up here. It would explain why he’d been so friendly.
“Come on, let’s go,” I said. “Before we destroy anything else.” I had it in mind to come back up the next day to assess the damage—without Caleb.
“Wait, wait, wait,” he said, before, with exaggerated, inebriated care, he launched the needle across the record. But nothing happened. The turntable wouldn’t revolve. He tried to push it round with his hand, and a sick, whining sound escaped from the speakers.
“Holy shit, it’s really broken,” he said, cracking up. “Dad’s going to fucking kill you!”
“Kill me?” I said. “You’re the one who broke it.”
“Yes, but I’m not the one who busted in here—am I?” He shot me a challenging look and held it for a moment or two, letting me sweat. Then he cracked up laughing. “Relax, I’ll take one for the team,” he said. “I’m already in deep shit with Dad, so a bit more won’t make any difference.”
We stood sipping our beers for a moment, but it was deadly quiet, airless and hot, the space too cramped to be alone in with Caleb.
“We really should go downstairs,” I said, and as much as was possible began to put things back the way I’d found them. Caleb gulped the rest of his beer and took another out of the fridge, stowing it in his back pocket. The weight of it made his trousers droop below the hem of his T-shirt, and escaping from the top of his waistband was a curly sort of down. “One for the road?” he said, offering me the last beer.
“No thanks.”
With the lights off, the crack in the turntable case wasn’t so noticeable, but on the way down the ladder the incident worried me for reasons other than who would take the blame. Granted, I had broken into Ari’s shed on my own, and the music had loosened me up, but in the short space of time Caleb had been there I had basically lost my head.
On the landing outside my bedroom, Caleb turned to me. “Maybe you should sleep in Mum and Dad’s room.”
“Do you think they’d mind?”
“They won’t even know.” He glanced in my room. “What did you see in there that freaked you out so much?”
“I didn’t really see anything. It was more of a presence.”
He laughed. “You’ve been sleeping on the bathroom floor because of a presence?”
Said like that, it sounded ridiculous. “I guess so.”
“If it’s only a presence, then it’s all in your head. So tell it to go away.”
“It’s not that simple,” I said.
“Yes it is.” He gave me a friendly punch on the shoulder. “Don’t be such a wimp.”
Caleb was right; it was beyond silly to be frightened of a cupboard. That first night in Pippa and Ari’s room, I slept dreamless and undisturbed, putting it down to my newfound determination to be more courageous.
When I woke the next morning, Caleb had gone out, leaving a note on the dining table to say he was at a friend’s house. Midmorning, a temping agency called to get me in for a typing test the following week—the first appointment in my diary for almost a month. For the rest of the day, I did washing and housework, interspersed with long periods of staring out the window or into space. The only time I left the house was to walk to the supermarket at half past five, when it was jammed with after-work shoppers filling their baskets with pre-prepared meals and wine. Using Pippa’s money, I splurged on indulgent groceries, the kind I hadn’t bought for months, but by the time I’d carried it all home and put the food away, I couldn’t be bothered making anything more gourmet than a ham and mustard sandwich. While I was eating it, Caleb sent a text saying “Hi how R Stones,” so I sent one back that said, “Are you home for dinner?” but got no reply. Later, when I tried to call his mobile, it went straight to voice mail. He had told me he never checked messages, so I didn’t leave one.
At midnight, I woke on the couch with a stiff neck, an infomercial for body bronzer blaring at me from the TV. No messages from Caleb, but outside, Friday-night revelry had taken over the street. The bass from a nightclub almost a hundred meters away, under the flyover, was making the windows vibrate. There had been a time when staying home on a Friday night would have made me anxious and depressed, but now it was the idea of going out and jostling in a bar with strangers that seemed perverse. I thought of the night with Wouter and the spliff and how out of practice I’d been, how my body had no longer been able to tolerate what I’d once put it through all the time.