The Girl Below(8)

“Did you see who it was?” I asked Esther when they’d gone.

She didn’t answer.

“Who was it?”

“Not telling,” she said, her smile smug. She was getting back at me for the cigarette butt, and I hated her more than ever.

Ten minutes later of fumbling on all fours, I found my glasses but it was too late to identify the people in the bathroom—they were long gone. Before trundling back to the Wendy tent, I stuck my head into the room where the party was still going on. It was a few shades darker than it had been earlier and everyone moved in slow motion. More of them were sitting down than standing up, and the ones on their feet were leaning against each other so as not to fall over. I searched for Pippa and Jean Luc and Henri, but while I was looking, I accidentally caught Mum’s eye and she stood up and staggered toward us. Not taking any chances, I grabbed Esther’s arm and hauled her to the Wendy tent, where we lay still and squinched our eyes closed, pretending to be asleep. When no one came to tell us off, what I’d been trying so hard to fake became real, and the next thing I knew, it was light outside and my sleeping bag cover was wet with dew.

When we got up and went inside the flat, it was eerily quiet. Bodies lay stacked on couches and the floor—Jean Luc was slumped against Henri—but there was no sign of Lulu or Pippa. We ate Coco Pops and waited for the adults to stir, and when they didn’t we sat down in a gap and watched cartoons on TV. But even that didn’t wake them up.

“I’m bored,” said Esther. “Don’t you have a VCR?”

I didn’t even know what that was. “We could try on my mum’s jewelry?”

Esther waited reluctantly on my bed while I crept into Mum and Dad’s room, past their sleeping bodies, and lifted Mum’s jewelry box. Back in my room, I meted out the various trinkets, allowing Esther to try on all but the locket. That one I saved for myself.

“It’s very plain,” said Esther. “What’s inside it?”

“It’s a secret.” I wasn’t lying. Mum had refused to open the locket—she said it was bad luck—and I’d never been able to work the catch. I assumed it had pictures of her and Dad inside it, but the one time I’d asked her to confirm it, she’d smiled and said, “What makes you think I love him the most?” Of course she loved him the most, he was her husband.

I put on the locket and admired my reflection in a scratched mirror that was stuck to the back of a wardrobe door. When Esther’s hand appeared in the glass, I thought she was going to swipe it, but instead she closed her fingers around the skin of my neck and pinched it so hard I felt sick. For a few seconds, we simply stared at each other in the mirror, then I lunged for her ponytail and tried to yank it from her head. She flailed for a moment, striking air, then twisted around far enough to claw at me. Naturally, I clawed right back. I don’t know who burst into tears first, but before long I was lying on the bed, sobbing into my pillow, while Esther stood, rigid, in front of the mirror, howling at her reflection.

Not long after that, Esther phoned her mother to be picked up, but it was the Filipino nanny, in a Volvo, who arrived to collect her. When Esther saw the nanny, she started to cry again.

The second she had gone, I went into the kitchen to find our sharpest knife, the blade of which was as long as my forearm. Back in my bedroom, I pushed the blade between the two halves of the locket and tried to prise it open, but it wouldn’t budge. In a fit of frustration, I put the locket down on a side table and began to hack at the catch mechanism until eventually I sliced it off. This was precisely what I had been trying to do, yet it was only when I saw the snag of broken silver that I realized how awful and irreversible was the thing I had done. I picked up the locket, at least hoping I’d be able to see inside it, but by breaking the blasted thing, I had also somehow cinched it shut.

My first impulse was to return it, damaged, to the jewelry box, and deny all knowledge of the incident. But I felt too guilty and instead put the locket around my neck and resolved to confess just as soon as Mum woke up.

Only later that morning, after calling me into the bedroom, she straightaway asked me to run to the kitchen to fetch a stainless-steel bowl from under the sink, and I did as I was told and forgot about the locket. Mum put the bowl in front of Dad, who thrust his head inside it as though he was about to lick out the remains of a delicious cake mix. Seeing the top of his head, I remembered what I’d seen outside the bathroom the night before, how one of the shapes had been wearing his hat.

“Dad,” I blurted out. “Did you take a bath last night, in the middle of the party?”