The Downstairs Neighbor

by Helen Cooper

  I think about what might be happening back home, and cross my fingers tight. For a second I waver: Can I trust her? Becca’s been so nice to Nick’s face these last few days, but when he turns his back, her eyes are like steel. The switch is kind of unnerving. But I have to trust her. I do trust her. Aside from Mum, she’s my best friend in the world.

  The next plane seems to be heading a different way. As it rises I see both its wings, spanned as if to hug me, and I realize it’s going to sweep right over my head. I feel the gust and hear the roar, and then I’m craning my neck as it cloaks me in its shadow. Just as I’m thinking that’s the first time I’ve seen the belly of a plane, something crazy happens. There’s a crackling noise and the sky seems to ripple, to churn. It’s like there’s an earthquake up above rather than on the ground, or like I’m inside one of those balls of electricity we experimented with in science. A sensible part of my brain tells me it must be turbulence, or the plane interfering with the atmosphere, or something. But another part thinks this is what the end of the world feels like.

  Then, abruptly, it’s over, like a storm that’s passed so quickly you think you’ve imagined it, and calm settles, like a clean sheet.

  * * *

  —

  When I get home I’m cold and tired, but my head sings with what I’ve seen. The way that plane tore up the sky, the way everything was normal again seconds later. How can the atmosphere stay intact if it gets thrown around like that every time a plane blasts through?

  As soon as I walk into the flat, I realize something’s changed the atmosphere in here too. There’s tension in the air. I backtrack through my memory: I’d been lost in thought approaching the tower block, but had I seen Nick’s car parked outside? What if he came back unexpectedly and heard Becca talking to Mum about him? My breath quickens: Why didn’t I pay attention? Daydreaming again, Kate.

  I look at the spot where he normally leaves his sneakers. They aren’t there. Hearing sounds from my room, I hurry through to see Becca aggressively rolling up her sleeping bag. Her rucksack sits by her feet, bulging with clothes.

  “Are you going?” I ask, with a spark of panic.

  “No choice.” She tries to bully the sleeping bag into its impossibly small cover but it keeps unraveling, won’t be tamed.

  “Why?”

  “She didn’t like my interfering.”

  I blink at her. “Mum’s making you leave?”

  “Fuck’s sake . . . How did this ever fit in here?” Becca punches the polyester while it balloons out the other side. “I said we were worried about her. We thought she didn’t seem herself . . .”

  “Did you mention the bruises?”

  “I hinted. She went all pale and said she often bangs herself at work.”

  “She only works in a post office!”

  “I don’t think she realizes you’ve seen them all over her body.”

  “What else did . . . ?” I trail off and glance behind me as I remember that Mum might be nearby.

  “She’s on the balcony,” Becca whispers.

  I tiptoe to check she’s still outside, and see her profile in the dark, framed by curls of smoke.

  Back in my room, Becca’s given up with the sleeping bag and is sitting on my bed. When I sink down beside her she grabs my arm. “We need to help her, Kate. I could see she wanted to tell me something, but it was like she was afraid. So instead she got mad, said I’d got a bloody cheek . . .”

  “Did you mention Nick?”

  She flushes. “I might’ve got a bit carried away there.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “I wasn’t going to push it, just ask if he was treating her right and hope she’d realize what I was getting at. But she wouldn’t take the bait. She just clammed up. So I said I got bad vibes from Nick. I said he made me uncomfortable . . . I might’ve called him sleazy . . .”

  “I thought you were going to be subtle, Bec!”

  “I tried. But she was so fucking careful in what she was saying. She won’t hear a bad word against him. And I just know it’s because she’s scared. I could see it in her face.”

  The thought is unbearable. My brave mum who used to protect me from nightmares, from nasty kids in the playground, from monsters under the bed.

  “You can’t leave,” I say desperately. “I’ll talk to her.”

  “She’s mad with both of us.”

  My heart plummets. I hate Mum being angry with me, hate when disappointment pulls at the corners of her mouth. I’ll do or say almost anything to make her smile at me again.

  “We’ll apologize,” I say. “We’ll act like we didn’t mean any of it and think of a new plan.”

  Becca shrugs. “Worth a shot.”

  “I’ll go to her now.”

  I venture into the living room, looking through the smeary glass at my mum still outside, cigarette finished. She turns and our eyes lock. There it is: disappointment, anger. But something else too. I feel those eyes are pleading with me.

  She slides back the door and steps into the room, slow as a moonwalker.

  “What’s all this about, Kate? Honestly!” But it’s like she’s just playing the part of a stern mum, confident in her crossness. The hollow ring of her telling off frightens me even more.

  “I’m sorry, Mum. We obviously got the wrong end of the stick.”

  “I’ve told you not to worry, Kate. I know things feel stressy round here sometimes, and me and Nick have the odd . . .” She pauses as if selecting the right phrase. “. . . tiff. But you need to keep that imagination in check. And stop letting Becca encourage you.”

  “It wasn’t her fault. Please don’t make her go.”

  “She gets you all wound up. Puts these ideas in your head. I know you idolize her”—she glances at the wall, drops her voice—“but I don’t think she’s the best influence. She’s going to cause trouble if she keeps saying . . . well, things that just shouldn’t be said.”

  “We made a mistake.”

  Mum rests her hands on my upper arms. Her own arms are covered by her cardigan. I can’t remember the last time she wore a short-sleeved top. “I don’t need you to rescue me or worry about me, Kate. That’s the wrong way round! I want you to focus on school and your exams, make more friends . . .” Her fingers squeeze. “I want you to have all the chances I never did. To get out of this place one day.”

  I look down at my feet. My shoes are bobbled with clumps of wet grass. “Just let Becca stay a bit longer. Please.”

  Mum sighs and hoops me in her arms. “I’ll think about it. If you promise to drop all this.”

  I creep my hands round her waist, wanting to cling on. If I hugged her forever, he’d never be able to push his way between us.

  “And one more thing,” she murmurs into my hair. “One more promise you need to make.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t . . .” Her arms tighten and her voice vibrates at the side of my head. “Don’t mention any of this to Nick. You mustn’t . . . He’d be upset.”

  I feel my heart swooping again, her muscles tensing as our hug stretches on.

  “Promise me you won’t accuse him of anything, Kate.”

  Gently I flatten my palm against her back, listening for her stifled gasp of pain. She stiffens and I know the bruises are still there. I can sense them beneath her clothes, urging me not to give up.

  21.

  EMMA

  Emma was sketching when they arrived, sitting in the chair that had somehow inched closer to her window in the last thirty-six hours and stayed there. She drew a hamster’s wheel with blurred, in-motion spokes; a tortoiseshell hair clasp abandoned on a stair; Zeb’s old sneakers, which were still in the corner of the room, laces trailing . . .

  When she heard footsteps descending from the Harlows’, she paused. Her eyes rebounded to her pad and she was shocked to se
e that she’d also drawn the face of an alien-like girl, with wide eyes, trying to lure her back to the past. It was a kind of self-portrait. A version of herself that, until recently, she was sure she’d left behind.

  She dropped her pencil. The footsteps had come to a halt outside her door. She heard two people murmuring to one another—Steph and a man with a Welsh accent, possibly the police officer Emma had heard around the building a lot lately. An older couple had also arrived yesterday; Emma had guessed from the resemblance that they were Paul’s parents. She’d glimpsed them only briefly from her window, but their devastated faces had fed her insomnia for another night.

  It didn’t feel like a springtime Sunday. It was the third morning of Freya being gone.

  Just before she answered the door, Emma remembered she had three strings of glass beads around her neck and an ostentatious ring on each finger. During the night she’d been sifting through her stock, fishing out things she’d managed to sell back to her suppliers, and had begun draping herself in her favorite pieces of jewelry as though to become a walking embodiment of her shop. Hastily she shed the necklaces, slipped off the rings before opening the door.

  Steph was wearing the green scarf again, but unwound, its ends swinging. There was a wildness to her bloodshot eyes, while the man was neat and composed next to her. Emma had never thought neat and composed could ever be used in contrast to Steph. Her neighbor seemed about to speak but the man took over, introducing himself as George, the Harlows’ family liaison officer.

  “Could we come in?” he asked.

  They’d hardly made it through the door before Steph spun toward Emma. “Your partner . . . where is he?”

  “My partner?”

  “Boyfriend, husband . . .” Steph blinked with impatience. “Doesn’t he live here anymore?”

  “Steph,” George said, “maybe we should all go and sit down.”

  Steph ignored him. “Do he and Freya know each other?”

  “What?” Emma felt like she was in the wrong conversation, a misunderstanding she couldn’t disentangle herself from because she couldn’t quite get a footing in it.

  Steph reached into the pocket of her cardigan and drew something out, shoving it at Emma.

  It was a strip of photos. Emma’s confusion bled into shock as she held it by its edges. That’s . . . But they . . . She struggled to comprehend the series of snaps taken in a booth. Zeb. And Freya. Squashed together in the four square frames. Playful poses and drunken eyes.

  Her heart started to thud.

  Steph jabbed a finger at Zeb’s face. “Why’s my daughter having photos taken with your partner?”

  Emma’s eyes slid up to meet her neighbor’s. Her head was still fogged, heart still booming, but a tiny part of the puzzle was inching into place. “Oh . . . no,” she said. “Zeb’s not my partner. He’s my son.”

  A surprised silence filled the room. Awkwardness shimmied up the back of Emma’s neck. It wasn’t in anticipation of the explanations she’d have to reel off, wasn’t because she cared that Steph might gape at her as people often did, scandalized that she, with her petite stature and electric blue hair, could have a six-foot eighteen-year-old son. It was because it suddenly looked as if she’d kept Zeb a secret. Emma hadn’t let on that she had what her neighbors feared to lose, if not in touching distance, then at least within some kind of reach. It hadn’t seemed appropriate, or kind, to bring it up in any of her recent conversations with Steph.

  “I thought . . .” Steph’s eyes moved around the room, clocking the photos of Zeb she obviously hadn’t studied the last time she’d been there. Emma felt something expand from her chest as if to envelop all the pictures, all those reluctant, self-conscious, precious smiles.

  “I had him when I was fifteen,” she said. “He looks older than he is. And I guess I look younger . . . as long as you don’t peer too closely.”

  Steph drifted around, nudging framed photos, like somebody spoiling for a fight by prodding a rival in the shoulder. Emma wished she would stop, but how could she deny her anything, this woman whose child was even more lost than hers?

  “I don’t think you ever properly met him,” Emma tried to explain. “He was at art college, and he worked in a comic-book store at the weekends, so he was out a lot. And now he’s”—she hugged her elbows—“away.”

  Steph spoke at last. “How old?”

  “Eighteen.”

  Steph echoed the number, gazing at Emma’s son who had been her whole life, really, since before she’d even grown up herself. They’d lived with her parents until he was thirteen; rented a house with a garden and a plum tree while the shop was doing well; swapped it for this flat when profits had started to fall. And then everything had seemed to go very wrong, very quickly, both with Zeb and her business, as if the two were as intrinsically connected as her heart and brain.

  “I didn’t realize,” Steph said. “Didn’t realize you were a mum too.”

  It was as if Emma had added to her neighbor’s grief with this secret she’d barely been conscious of keeping. Then Steph seemed to snap out of it, whirling around and pointing again at the photo strip, which Emma was still holding. “What was he doing with Freya?”

  Emma’s hackles rose at the way Steph said it. But jumbled with the instinct to defend her son was a flutter of nerves. She hadn’t been aware that Zeb and Freya were friends either. More than friends? They seemed such different teenagers: Freya social and sporty; Zeb more introverted, creative, obsessed with obscure bands and Marvel films.

  “I’ve no idea,” she admitted.

  George cleared his throat. “Could you contact your son, Miss Brighton?”

  “Yes,” Steph said, that wildness back in her eyes. “Call him.”

  Where was her phone? As Emma scanned the room she saw her sketchbook still open on the table. She prayed Steph wouldn’t recognize her own hair clasp among the drawings. And the windows around the edges of the page—Emma couldn’t stop sketching windows.

  Spotting her phone on the sofa, she grabbed it and pulled up her recently dialed list, dominated by Zeb’s name. After weeks of longing to talk to him, she wasn’t sure she wanted him to answer this time, with Steph and George staring. Her mind raced as the phone rang: Zeb and Freya? Zeb and Freya?

  “No answer,” she said, hanging up.

  “Please keep trying him,” George said. “Could you supply us with a phone number and current address for him too?”

  Emma nodded, her palms moist as she tore out a page of her sketchbook to write them down. Steph’s traumatized face made her maternal anxieties surge to the surface with renewed force. She should never have let Zeb go. Should have fought harder. How to Be a Better Parent, the book that had come through their door was called, with a mother and an adolescent boy on its cover. Emma had kept seeing that cover ever since, likening the boy to a younger Zeb, paranoia overtaking sense.

  Did the book contain any advice that might have helped either Steph or herself hold on to their children?

  Steph extended her hand and it took Emma a moment to realize she was asking for the photo strip back. For a second she felt territorial: It featured both their kids, so why should Steph get to make demands? But she was being ridiculous: They were Freya’s pictures. And perhaps they were evidence now. A shiver zipped through her. Evidence of what?

  * * *

  —

  Left alone, Emma dialed Zeb’s number three more times, anxiety soaring again when there was still no response. She sent him a text: Need to speak to you, Z. It’s urgent.

  To distract herself she turned to a clean page and began to sketch him. The velvet-haired baby; the rampaging toddler; the gangly adolescent with a mop of curly brown hair. She found it harder to sketch him as he was now. The nuances of his face kept eluding her: sometimes grinning and guileless, at others withdrawn, unfamiliar. She’d experienced something like grief e
ven before he’d left, feeling him pulling away, their relationship fraying. That was why she’d caused such a scene outside her shop on the day he’d dropped his bombshell. She winced as she remembered half the street looking on, Zeb walking away shaking his head, like he was ashamed of her.

  Her hand stilled as an image popped into her mind. A sketch, but not one of hers. She leaped up and went to Zeb’s room, where the scent of aftershave and musty maleness lingered. She hadn’t stored any stock there in case it jinxed his return. Some of his clothes still hung in the wardrobe, band T-shirts and black jeans: a reason to hope, or an indication he’d left in a hurry? Emma imagined Steph sitting in Freya’s room, gazing at her things, her teenage life. The shock of finding unexpected photos.

  She took Zeb’s sketchbook from his drawer. The well-being officer at his college had suggested he use his love of drawing to help with his “anger issues.” Emma still became dry-mouthed when she thought about that phrase, so at odds with the baby Zeb she’d been sketching. It was probably temporary, his tutors had told her. A response to stress, to becoming an adult. And didn’t Emma know how hard that could be?

  Zeb mostly used charcoal, giving his drawings a dark smokiness. Emma turned the crisp pages, drinking in the skillful pictures she’d studied many times in his absence. She flipped past a hand with fingers curling into a fist. A jacket caught on a bush, its sleeve torn, the shrub starred with flowers and thorns.

  Eventually she reached what she was looking for today. The drawing was larger than the others, and he’d filled in the backdrop with dense strokes, so the figure in the foreground rose off the page. It was a girl of around Zeb’s age, sitting on the edge of what looked like a merry-go-round in a playground. She had a pale ponytail and wore a sweater and leggings, slim arms stretched above her head. Zeb hadn’t drawn her face in much detail, only closed eyes and the smudge of a mouth, but she was suddenly so familiar that Emma’s heart skipped.