The Girl Below by Bianca Zander

possible, and the same went for not eating the walnuts and satsumas that had been tossed into the sack alongside them. Those I would stow under my bed for safekeeping, where they remained until wizened and black with rot.
    At home, no brothers or sisters were there to challenge my zeal, but at school I was forced to defend Santa by using all the skills at my disposal. I didn’t mind if other children voiced their doubts, but one day a boy named Charles Pycraft took things too far. He stood on a chair in the middle of the classroom and told us he’d seen his dad sneaking into his room at night with a sack full of presents, and what’s more, he’d taken a Polaroid. When he held it up for us all to see I launched myself at him—rather than look. At first Charles laughed, and so did the rest of the class, until he felt my teeth sink into the fat, juicy lobe of his ear. While I ripped his Polaroid into a thousand tiny shreds, he howled his lungs out. As punishment, I was sent to a small library off the assembly hall called the Quiet Room, and was told to stay there and read the illustrated King James Bible until I was sufficiently sorry and in the mood to apologize. At three o’clock, when that mood still had not arrived, I was frog-marched to the cloakroom where my mother stood waiting to fetch me.
    “Suki, love,” she said, “you mustn’t take everything to heart or they’ll tease you even more.”
    Mum often spoke of teasing—as in “Don’t cry, he’s only teasing”—but I didn’t understand why it was my fault for reacting, not theirs for being mean. That was one of the disadvantages of being an only child: you lived in your own head, played yourself at Connect Four, and developed a skin so thin it might as well not have been there.
    At school, Charles became a hero because he’d needed stitches (“How many?” the other kids had squealed, ferreting in his hair) and I was called a ninny or a baby for believing in made-up things. After that, I saved my zeal for home, where it blossomed into an obsession. Midyear, I started sending letters to Santa, and by November I was writing daily to butter him up. According to a book I’d read, letters to Lapland didn’t need stamps, which is how I bypassed my mother, who always tried to sneak a look at what I was writing.
    “Do you know what you want for Christmas this year?” she’d say.
    “You don’t need to know what I want,” I’d tell her. “Only Santa needs to know.”
    But I needed my mother for something, and devised a plan in which she’d finally give me the ammunition I needed. Mum could be relied on for the truth; she didn’t believe in God and said so. She was the one who could verify Santa.
    It was a rainy Sunday when I asked her, and she was tackling the weekly mountain of Dad’s business shirts, carefully steering the iron round an obstacle course of collars and cuffs. I started out warily by asking if Lapland was a real place, and if it might be possible to go there on holiday, for instance, next Christmas for two or three weeks.
    “It’s a real place, all right,” she said. “In the Arctic Circle, near the North Pole. But I don’t know about going there on holiday. That would cost an arm and a leg.”
    The mere thought of Santa’s reindeer skidding about in all that snow made my heart thud, and I took a deep breath to ask my next question, the big one. “So if Lapland is a real place in the Arctic Circle, then Santa must be a real person too—right?”
    “You know the answer to that,” said Mum, ironing on.
    “I know he’s real, but the kids at school think he isn’t, and I want to prove them wrong.”
    Mum looked up from the ironing board. “He’s real if you think he’s real, dear.”
    “I know, I know, but is he?”
    She studied me for a moment, searching for the right words. “If you believe in him, he is.”
    That sounded like a trick, and I stamped my foot in indignation. “You always say that and I don’t know what