The Girl Below(75)

Chapter Sixteen


London—Paris—Athens, 2003





Out the train carriage window, London’s backside was on display, and even at six A.M., eyes clogged with sleep, I couldn’t look away. Satin sheets and flannelette, cloth nappies, magic knickers, garter belts, socks, tights—even the things people didn’t want you to see had to be washed and hung out to dry. Some gardens were profuse with vegetables and roses, scattered with abandoned children’s toys and signs of life. Others were barren squares of concrete, windswept or clogged with litter, and I wondered if whoever lived there was as untended, as unloved, as their backyards.

But I was only distracting myself. The discovery of the tooth and what had happened afterward—the grisly remains in the bunker—were still fresh in my mind. I was worried too about what Harold had surmised from what he had seen. I didn’t think Pippa would have summoned me to Greece and paid for my ticket solely because she wanted to tell me off, but in the absence of another, it was the only explanation that seemed plausible.

At such short notice, no direct flights from London to Athens had been available, so we were taking the long route to Skyros, catching a train and hovercraft to Calais—the tunnel train was fully booked—and flying out of Paris. We would overnight somewhere near Athens and catch the ferry from a nearby port.

The night before, Harold and I had been sent to Peggy’s apartment to pick up items on a list given to us by Pippa. Peggy wanted some of her personal belongings brought to Greece—photograph albums, various mementos, and a heavy white fur coat. Despite the Skyros heat, she would not budge on the fur coat, though her request to bring over Madeline had, thankfully, been refused. While we were over at her apartment, Harold and I had gone into his old room and he had shown me the clipped wires under the floorboards where Jimmy’s illegal phone line had been disconnected. Jimmy had stuck the wires to the plaster with pale green putty that looked like chewing gum. I hadn’t noticed the wires when I was staying there, or the scratch marks around them, as though a small dog had been digging under the floorboards.

“Maybe she thought he was still down there,” said Harold, poking his finger into a crumbling plaster hole in what would have been Jimmy’s old ceiling.

“Maybe he is,” I said, half joking, half not.

While we were at Peggy’s, Harold was civil with me, though I had been on edge, wondering when he would mention the sleepover again. It wasn’t until the next morning, when Caleb was with us, that he reverted to being frosty and sarcastic—or perhaps I was reading too much into his mood and he was just tired. Whatever the case, we almost came to blows over Peggy’s extra suitcase, a giant, cumbersome thing that required the three of us to cooperate in ways that were beyond us at that or any other time of the morning. Still, we made it onto the train to Dover, and Caleb immediately fell asleep with his head against the carriage window, oblivious to the greasy smear next to his face that someone else’s hair gel had left behind. Harold was reading one of the left-wing newspapers, holding it up in front of his face to shield himself from the rest of us, and I closed my eyes and pretended to snooze but could not. At Dover, we boarded a hovercraft, and watched uneasily as it farted its way to inflation. Hovercrafts had seemed so futuristic once, but now the thing just seemed like a relic, unseaworthy and rank, especially inside the grubby main cabin where the wet carpet ponged of diesel and latrines.

We took our seats and I thought of coffee, teased by the sweet smell of powdered hot chocolate that began to waft through from the onboard cafeteria. We were lined up in a row with Caleb in the window seat, but any views that might have been there were obscured by fog and violent hurls of sea spray.

“Can I get something to eat?” said Caleb, turning to Harold. “I’m famished.”

“There won’t be anything decent.”

“I don’t care.” He climbed out past Harold and rolled his eyes when he got to me.

“I’ll go with you,” I said.

A long queue curled around the refreshment kiosk, and everyone in it looked grim, deflated from rising too early. Even Caleb had bags under his eyes, and was yawning enough to make his jaw snap.

“Has Harold said anything to you about the other night?” I asked when we were in the queue.

“Nope,” he said. “He just told me to stop pissing around and pack my shit.”

Briefly, I caught another whiff of the onboard toilets, and it reminded me of the dreadful smell in the bunker. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep it all to myself. “That night while you were asleep,” I ventured. “Something did happen.”