The Girl Below(69)

“Don’t just stand there,” I said, trying not to look at his hairy potbelly. “He’s your bloody nephew.”

I made him hold the bucket while I mopped up and I made him help me carry Caleb upstairs, and it all took much longer than it should have. Harold was fussy about who should go at the front and recoiled from the slime on Caleb’s clothes. Halfway up, Caleb revived and looked at Harold and burst out laughing, then turned to me and said, “What’s my cock of an uncle doing here?”

In the attic bathroom, I told Harold I’d take it from there, and held Caleb’s head over the toilet until I was sure he had finished spewing. Manhandling him into bed, I felt like a boarding school matron doing what needed to be done, but as I peeled off his soiled shirt and trousers, I hesitated, as though I really ought not to be doing it. With only his boxers on, Caleb’s limbs were thinner and more childlike than I had expected, and his arms were covered in bruises. Looking more closely, I saw they were only smudges, that he’d been drawing on his arm with a felt-tip pen. Next to a girl’s face, her mouth fixed in an enthusiastic O, I could just make out the ruined sketch of a spurting penis.

As best I could, I recovered my matronly outlook and flipped him over onto his side so that if he vomited in the night he wouldn’t choke, and I pulled the duvet right up to his chin. After that, I went downstairs and drank a mug of Ari’s cooking wine. The bottle had been standing next to the stove for months and it tasted like vinegar, but at least it took the edge off, and washed away the smell of all the puke I had just cleaned up.

That night I was so tired and so relieved to have Caleb home that I went up to my old attic room and slept like the dead. The next morning I felt more refreshed than I had in weeks, and even sang to myself as I made a pot of coffee. Harold had gone out early—he’d asked to borrow Ari’s car keys—but had left his laptop and papers strewn across the dining table. I remembered Pippa had told me Harold wrote screenplays, and, deeply curious, I picked up a few pages and gave them a cursory read. The formatting was hard to follow at first, but I was able to pick up the gist of the scene. A masked crusader rushed into a burning building to rescue a woman who wore nothing but stilettos and a transparent wet raincoat . . .

I dropped the papers immediately and tried in vain to unread what I’d read. How much had Harold seen under Ari’s raincoat when it had gaped open? And had he asked me to the pub because of it—not as a friend but as a date?

By midday, there was still no murmur from Caleb, and I carried up to his room a tray of sugared black tea and dry toast. My knock on his door went unanswered, and his room, when I went in, smelled strongly of alco-sweat. When the tray landed on the bedside table, he finally stirred. “Ouch,” he mumbled, touching his nose. “What happened?”

“I think you got the shit kicked out of you.”

“Yeah, I remember that part. But how did I get here?” Struggling to sit up, he noticed he wasn’t wearing a shirt. Then he peered under the covers to see what else he had on. “Who undressed me?”

“You were unconscious.” I pointed to his crumpled clothes. “And there was vomit on everything except your underpants.”

He pulled the duvet up around his shoulders. “I threw up?”

“You really don’t remember?”

A startled expression crossed his face. “Did anything else—did someone—?”

“Did someone what?”

“I don’t know.” He looked grave. “Maybe you should tell me.”

I told him about fetching him from the tube station, about all the spewing, and about Harold being there, and he listened intently, as if hearing it all for the first time. When I got to the part about missing the bucket, he chuckled.

“You can’t laugh at that,” I said. “You didn’t have to clean it up.”

“You’re right. Sorry.” His face fell. “Wait, did you say my uncle’s here?”

“He arrived yesterday.”

“Shit,” he said. “Mum’s going to kill me when she finds out I got wasted.”

“You think Harold will tell her but I won’t?”

“You wouldn’t tell her,” he said, with absolute confidence.

“What makes you think that?”

“Nothing.” I was sure there was something but couldn’t guess what it was. “You just seem cooler than that,” he said.

I had been meaning to tell Caleb off, but his comment so threw me that I left his room without doing anything of the sort. After everything that had happened, how could he possibly think I was cool? And why did I even care? It was the answer to the second question that bothered me the most.