The Girl Below by Bianca Zander Page B

in our old life, without a husband, without a dad, not enough of us to fill up the space. Dr. Who was on TV, and I watched the opening credits from behind the couch, frightened by the mind-bending music and swirling spiral of doom. When the Daleks bleeped, “Exterminate, exterminate!” I switched off the set and wondered if I’d ever be able to watch shows like that again without Dad’s knee to sit on. He’d let me stay up to watch Jaws with him once, and every time the shark attacked—or there was even a hint of jaggedy music—I had burrowed into the safety of his chest.
    A week after Oxfam, Mum still hadn’t told me where Dad was, but by then it seemed too late to ask, so I made do with clues. Mum spent a lot of time on the phone after I’d gone to bed, and I struggled to piece together the missing side of the conversations I heard. There was one, late at night, that was so loud it woke me up. I was wondering if I should get out of bed to see what was wrong, when Mum went very quiet, and then I heard mewling, like a locked-out cat. That got me up, and I hovered in the hallway outside the kitchen without her seeing me.
    When she spoke again, she said, “But, Mum, they’ve already left the country.”
    She’d said “they.” Which meant Dad wasn’t alone. I guessed Mum was talking to Granny and she sounded exasperated with her. “He’s wanted to leave England for years. We argued about it all the time because I didn’t want to go.” For a while, she didn’t say anything and I thought she’d hung up. Then she hissed, “Because she’s from there.”
    I held my breath and waited for her to say more. I waited a long time, imagined Mum winding the cord around her fingers like she did when the person on the other end was waffling. In a feeble voice, she said, “What are you suggesting? That I go all the way to New Zealand just to beg? I don’t even know his address.”
    The names of all the capital cities of the world swirled in my head—we’d been learning them at school—but none matched with New Zealand. I was pretty sure we’d skipped it because the country was too small, just an island, like Corsica or the Isle of Wight.
    “That’s not going to happen,” was the last thing I heard her say before the kitchen door flew open and she came out holding a ball of colored party napkins to her face. “Suki! Why aren’t you in bed?”
    Too late, I leaped to my feet and scrabbled for the door to the bathroom, waiting to be told off. But Mum didn’t say anything, she just stood in the hallway staring at me.
    “Sorry, Mum,” I said.
    “It’s not your fault.” She sounded waterlogged, upset. “Go to bed.”
    I hesitated. The right course of action was to do as I was told but instead I threw myself at her. When I squeezed her round the waist, she seemed to give way, as though her bones had only been made of sand. I squeezed tighter, but that made it worse and I fancied she was disintegrating. I choked back a sob and then she was comforting me, picking me up and putting me to bed, stroking the hair behind my ear until I fell asleep.
    That night I dreamed the house was on fire and Mum was trapped inside. From the air-raid shelter in the garden, I could see her standing in the hallway, paralyzed. She kept shrinking to the size of a doll, small enough for me to pick up, but I couldn’t get out of the air-raid shelter to rescue her. The house became a furnace and she vanished, or burned, or both.
    Dad wasn’t the only thing to disappear around that time. A few weeks after he left, I went into the living room one Saturday morning to watch cartoons but the television wasn’t there. On the shelf where it usually sat there was a clean space in the shape of a television set, and around it, an oblong of dust. I ran my finger through it and yelled out, “Mum! What have you done with the TV?”
    There was no answer, so I padded downstairs to the kitchen, where Mum was at the table, studying a plate of toast.