The Girl Below(90)

Mice and rats I could tolerate, but insects were another case entirely, and I got up and shook the dirt from my hands, danced around on my tiptoes as if I was infested with the things. At that exact same moment a high, desperate wail escaped from the bunker, followed by a heartbreaking moan that sounded like a child in pain crying out for its mother. Halfway through, the moan was cut off, as though the creature making it had been strangled or plunged underwater.

So disturbing was the combined effect of the moan and the earwigs that I found myself mechanically stepping away from the hole, first walking backward in slow, deliberate strides, then turning around and legging it toward the service entrance. In the doorway I paused, and turned round to face the bunker. Someone, a child, was trapped down there, and I had to go back for her. Was that why I kept returning to this place?

I had retraced my steps almost to the service door when a sharp guffaw tore through the air and a man stepped through the French doors of our old flat and out into the garden. Two other men followed, also in raucous hysterics, snorting with abandon. Among the voices, I recognized my father’s low chortle, and for a moment or two I simply listened in a kind of trance, before it clicked that my presence in the garden was an unthinkable anomaly. I was trespassing across space and time. What would happen if they saw me? My nerves caught up with me and my heart began to pound. Whatever blip was occurring, I did not wish to cross paths with a giddy, young version of my father. I wasn’t ready to have that experience, not now, or ever.

I resolved to return to Elena’s room, and as I crossed the threshold of the service entrance and found myself back on her hard, unforgiving pebble floor, relief flooded through me. I was back in Skyros, back in the present. But when I turned around and looked back through the door, the view of our old garden was still there. I could even put my hand through the doorway, touch the humid, pre-storm air. I leaned on the doorjamb and peered into the garden. Some ten or fifteen meters away, the shadowy figures of Jean Luc, Henri, and my father were heading toward the air-raid hatch. They bent down and each took one side of it and tried to heave it a few inches off the ground. Mere seconds later they dropped it again, and the sound of clanging iron reverberated around the garden. The three of them fell about laughing—the gleeful, irrepressible hysteria of wine-addled youths—so intoxicated that they seemed unable to continue with their task. But a few minutes later they had recovered enough to try again. On the third try, they finally succeeded in placing the hatch over the hole. They didn’t bother fastening the bolts, just staggered off toward the flat with linked arms—all except Jean Luc, who loitered by my mother’s prize geraniums. I realized after a time that he was relieving himself, though the procedure seemed to take him longer than necessary. His elbows stuck out at odd right angles and he was struggling with something, perhaps a zipper. After what seemed like an age, he got it sorted, went inside, and the garden was deserted.

For a short while longer—perhaps only ten seconds—I stared at the apparition in front of me, until I had the sense that my vision was failing, that the scene was rapidly going out of focus. Gradually, like a windscreen demisting, the distortion lessened, but as it did so I realized the scene in front of me had changed. Instead of the old garden, I could make out the dark outlines of a stooped fig tree and a low wall, the solid features of Elena’s courtyard. The evening light was a little bluer than it had been a few minutes earlier, but the time of night I judged to be approximately the same—give or take twenty years.

I felt shattered—not just physically exhausted, but mentally done in, as though I’d been trying to figure out complex algebra that was far beyond my ability. I managed to climb the ladder to my sleeping platform, to lie horizontally on the small, firm mattress, and the instant my head connected with the pillow I was out for the count.





Chapter Nineteen


Auckland, 2002





When after six months the suicide list still hadn’t gone away, I paid for sessions with Arthur, a Jungian psychoanalyst who had been recommended to me by my doctor. Before that, I had gone to see a psychiatrist who had offered me a choice between two brands of psychotropic drugs. I’d told him I didn’t want either, that I thought perhaps drugs were what had gotten me into this mess in the first place, and he had sent me on my way with a condescending look and a flyer for group counseling.

Arthur was fiftyish, with a beard and sad, suffering eyes that made me think of paintings of Jesus with nails through his hands. He worked out of a small room with obscured glass windows at the front of a weatherboard villa, where I sat on an overstuffed couch next to a jumbo box of man-size four-ply tissues. Only once did I reach for the tissues, when I’d come to my session after a particularly grueling day at work, but Arthur reached for them often, whenever a story I told made him cry.