The Girl Below(83)

I went to Wellington for a week to get away from it all. The capital was in the grip of an Arctic wind when I arrived, and I stayed in a dreary self-contained studio on the tenth floor of an industrial concrete block. It had a tiny balcony shaped like a cage, and a view of an abandoned building site that had been turned into a car park. When I had “settled in,” I picked up the phone and worked my way through a short list of phone numbers. I had hoped to see Becky, but a message told me her cell phone had been deactivated, and when I tried her home number, a flatmate told me she had moved out long ago. When I couldn’t reach anyone, I decided to go out on my own.

The city was jammed with after-work drinkers, and I fought my way through them in bar after bar, pretending to look for someone who was never there. I found a pub where hundreds of blokes and their girlfriends were crowded in front of a rugby match on a giant screen, but the boisterousness of the crowd unnerved me, and I left without ordering a drink. It was too early to be out alone, though, when everyone was just getting started, so I went into a liquor store that was next door to an Irish pub. The girl at the counter had pink shiny skin and ginger hair, and chirped at me in a thick Irish accent when I handed over my money. I had not understood a word of what she’d said.

“Excuse me?”

“Can I see year eye dee?” she repeated.

“My eye what?”

“Your eye-dentification,” she mouthed, slowly, as though I were retarded. “So I can check you’re over twenty?”

I held up my driver’s licence, which had a picture of me taken when I was at university. She looked from me to the photograph and scowled. “You need a new picture, love,” she said. “That one looks nothing like you.”

Maybe it wasn’t me. I certainly didn’t feel like the girl in the photograph anymore.

I bought cigarettes and hurried back to the gray box of my studio room to smoke them with wine. As I fumbled with the swipe card, I heard the phone ring on the other side of the door. I missed the call, but when I got in, a red light was flashing on the telephone. There were no instructions about what to do, how to retrieve the message or make the flashing stop, so I ignored it and went outside to smoke in the cage of a balcony, sitting cross-legged on a metal grate. Cars and bits of pavement were visible through the gaps and for a split second I imagined what would happen if the cage came unattached from the wall. The wine had been supposed to act as a heater, but my feet and hands were frozen, and I ran inside and, seeing a NO SMOKING sign propped up next to the empty fruit bowl, smoked with my head hanging out of an open window. I’d already downed most of the bottle, but instead of getting me drunk, the wine had combined with the nicotine to cause my nerves and thoughts to race unrelentingly.

I had the strangest sensation then that I had somehow left the real world behind, and had gone to a place that didn’t exist. I had taken annual leave, and it would be weeks before anyone realized I was missing. Starting to panic, I tried to call friends in Auckland to tell them where I was, but it was Friday night and none of them was home, not even my best friend Susan, who had a young baby and never went out. I even started calling my father, but remembered Rowan’s letter, and stopped in the middle of dialing his number. Desperate to talk to another human, I rang a pizza delivery chain and ordered whatever was on special. They said it would take forty-five minutes, so I switched on the TV and flicked through random images. Then, in the middle of taking a pee, the phone rang again, and I ran to answer it with my jeans half zipped.

“Hello?” I said, eagerly, hoping Becky had somehow tracked me down.

“It’s me.” His voice was robotic.

I felt sick. “How did you find me?”

“I was worried about you and I called your work. They said—”

I held the phone away from my ear and stared at the tiny plastic holes where Edward’s voice was leaking out. Maybe if I didn’t put the phone back to my ear, I could pretend he wasn’t there. Maybe he wasn’t there. Right from the start, the phone had been playing tricks on me. I followed the cord to the wall and pulled it out at the socket. The flashing red light finally extinguished and the rest of the phone went dead.

Had I really talked to Edward? It seemed unlikely that he would have found me here. But if not him, then to whom had I spoken? I scanned the studio’s gray walls for clues, but found none—nothing in here reminded me of anything. Even the clothes in my suitcase did not look like mine. My driver’s license showed a picture of a familiar young woman, but the girl in the liquor store had been right not to recognize her. Neither did I.