The Girl Below by Bianca Zander Page A

it means. All you have to tell me is that he’s real!”
    “I can’t do that,” she said. “I don’t want to lie to you.”
    “I’m not asking you to lie to me. Just say it.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Yes!” My excitement grew. Finally, I was going to have proof that Santa was real, and I could go to school and tell all the other kids they were dimwits.
    “Well, I suppose you’re old enough to know.” She sounded sad, wistful. “We did start to wonder why you hadn’t found out.”
    “Found out what?” My stomach flipped a pancake. “What do you mean found out ?”
    “You caught him once, barging into your room with the pillowcase—he tripped on something and woke you up—and the next day you were convinced you’d seen Santa. We couldn’t believe it.”
    “But I did see Santa.”
    Mum laughed. “I thought I saw a ghost once, but that doesn’t mean it was real.”
    “Santa is a ghost?”
    “No, weenie, Dad is Santa.”
    I was inconsolable, but she hugged me as I wept, and promised to take me to the natural history museum, and to the movies, and wherever else I wanted to go to cheer me up. I told her I didn’t want to go anywhere, and probably never would. But there was worse to come. That Christmas, I woke at six out of habit and crawled to the end of my bed to marvel at the bulging pillowcase. For a moment I forgot and was filled with the old exhilaration. I sniffed the air and waited for the intoxicating fragrance to fill my lungs. But there was none. Instead I smelled wrapping paper, sticky tape, walnuts, and orange peel, stuff you could buy at Woollies or any other store. And even though I noticed that the sack was a little more bulging than usual, it was hours before I had recovered enough from the blow to open it.
    Christmas vanished that year, and so too did my father, who went on a business trip and never came back.
    The first sign of real absence was a box of clothes and shoes that Mum dropped off at the Westbourne Park branch of Oxfam. We often went there to look for unusual fabrics and outdated castoffs, which my mother miraculously recycled into fashionable outfits, but we never donated anything unless it was falling apart, practically in rags. So I was immediately suspicious when she placed a box on the counter and in it were a new pair of brogues, along with a selection of immaculate business shirts and ties.
    “Won’t Dad be needing those when he gets back from Frankfurt?” I said.
    “He isn’t in Frankfurt,” said Mum, pushing the box across the counter.
    The way she said Frankfurt—like it was a type of poisonous snake—made me too scared to ask where he was. Besides, I was used to Dad being away for weeks or months at a time, working as some kind of businessman, and he always came back eventually, his arms bulging with last-minute presents still in their airport plastic bags: colored pencils and pens from Switzerland, chocolate blocks the size of my leg. I looked forward to his return for all the wrong reasons, and this time was no exception.
    But the box of clothes didn’t add up. Standing by the Oxfam counter, a wobbly sensation spread through my stomach. I’d felt it before, when I left my favorite teddy bear at the newsagent’s and he was gone when we went back to get him. Whatever I was feeling must have been written on my face because Mum asked me if I wanted to get an ice cream. I didn’t really feel like one but didn’t want to miss out on a treat either, so when we went to the newsagent’s, I burrowed in the freezer for a Mini Milk. Out on the street, I pulled the ice cream from its sleeve, and straightaway, the long, thin tube fell off its stick and nose-dived to the pavement, but when Mum came out of the shop, I pretended to her that I’d already eaten it.
    “That was quick,” she said as I covered the milky mess with my foot.
    We walked home in silence, and the maisonette seemed bigger and emptier when we got there, as if Mum and I were rattling around