The Girl Below(68)

“Sorry to interrupt,” he said, drinking in the scene and also my bungled attempts to cover what I was doing—the book, but also the writhing. “Jilly Cooper,” he pronounced with emphasis. “Always a racy read.”

“I found it in Pippa’s room.”

“Oh, you needn’t convince me,” he said. “We all read that in the eighties. It was compulsory.”

I stood up from the bed and tried to laugh. “Yes, I think my parents had a copy.”

“My mother had half a dozen. She used to give them away at dinner parties.” Harold scratched his chin and looked about the room, apparently stalling. “Look,” he said, finally. “The thing is, I’m dying for a pint. And I thought you might like to join me.” He looked briefly at his feet and laughed. “It’s a terrible habit, but I find getting drunk is the best way to get over jet lag.”

I vehemently did not want to go, but no excuse came to mind. “I’m not really dressed for an outing,” I said, pulling, rather stupidly, at my rag of a T-shirt.

“I was thinking of the local pub,” said Harold. “You’ll fit right in with the junkies and hobos who hang out there.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything, and then, when the awkward silence had gone on for too long, we both tried to speak at once.

“I didn’t mean—”

“I don’t want to—”

Harold cleared his throat. “Well then,” he said. “Another time.”

“Yes. Another time.”

He went off to the pub on his own and I stayed at home to wait for Caleb. If he hadn’t returned by the following morning, I decided, I’d have to call the police, then Pippa, in that order. But at a little after midnight the phone rang.

I thought no one was on the line at first, then a male voice in the background barked: “Is that your parents? Give it here.” I thought I heard a tube train shunting into a station, then a voice closer to the receiver said, “Suchi? Zatchoo?”

“Caleb?”

Ten minutes later, I was shown into the guard’s office at the Ladbroke Grove tube station, where Caleb was slumped over a desk, his bloodshot eyes at half-mast, his face pale green and bloated. One side of his nose was crusted with blood from a cut.

On the other side of the desk, a hulking man looked up from his crossword. “I don’t usually bring them in here, but he was about to get beaten up. Someone shoved him off the train then got out after him, and he spewed on the other guy’s trainers. That’s when they started kicking him. They took off but I think they knew him—he was calling out their names.”

I was horrified. “I’ll get him out of your way,” I said.

“And you are his—?”

“Sister.”

He looked surprised. “There’s a fine to pay, of course.”

“What for?”

“Traveling without a ticket and damage to LTA property.”

At that moment, Caleb looked up from the desk and winced at the harsh fluorescent lighting. He tried to speak but couldn’t manage it, and a torrent of pale yellow liquid poured unobstructed from his mouth, like water from a tap. When it stopped, I hoisted him up from the waist and dragged him to the door. Ribbons of slime decorated his shirt and pants and he weighed so little it was like picking up a chopstick.

“You can’t just leave,” said the guard, torn hopelessly between running after us and salvaging what he could from the floodplain of his desk.

Out in the station foyer, Caleb puked again. I tried fervently not to record the lurid egg yolk yellow of his vomit, but knew it was likely now embedded in my brain forever. On the hundred-meter stretch between the station and home, he kept himself together, then a dollop escaped on our way up the communal stairs. In the living room, I propped him up on the couch, and fetched a glass of water and a bucket.

“Take small sips,” I advised, helping him hold the glass upright and guiding it toward his lips. Chips of gravel were stuck in the gash on his nose, and I wondered how they had gotten there and how to get them out. “Jesus, how much did you drink?”

He did not reply, but before I could stop him he gulped down the glass of water.

“Nother one,” he said.

Filling up the glass at the kitchen sink, I heard what sounded like the whoosh of a bath overflowing, but by the time I got back to Caleb, it was too late.

“How could you have missed?” I said, taking the empty bucket from him.

Searching in the kitchen for a mop, I heard Harold’s voice, and got back to find him, in a pair of threadbare pin-striped pajamas, surveying the scene with baffled amusement.