Sally BlundellThe Girl Below, by Bianca Zander (Penguin, 2012), 324 pp. $30.00.
Notting Hill, London. Famous for its race riots, Portobello market and the 1999 film that pitched Julie Roberts and a simpering Hugh Grant into a romantic entanglement. For Suki Piper, newly arrived from a decade in New Zealand, the suburb she called home for the first eight years of her life is now a joke, ‘part tourist bauble, part film set’, a neighbourhood sighing ‘with so much privilege that I felt shut out’.
Jobless, near homeless, apparently friendless and increasingly disenchanted by a city she naively assumed, as part of her birthright, ‘would always take you back’, Suki is the deeply chaotic protagonist of this, the first novel by Auckland writer Bianca Zander.
Zander herself grew up in London and moved to New Zealand as a teenager. She is a journalist and screenwriter with an MA in creative writing from Victoria University. And she is a skilled writer. The Girl Below belts along at a cracking pace, the plot is well-structured, alternating as it does between scenes from Suki’s childhood in Notting Hill to her more immediate past in New Zealand to the increasingly strange events of the present. The characters are fully formed and consistent (although I doubt a sixteen-year-old would say ‘don’t be such a square’) and the writing fluid, sliding from moments of overwrought terror to the banality of the everyday – in one case a blaring radio programme on raising pigs – with dexterity. But galloping plot lines require some corralling. As does Suki herself.
Since her mother’s death in London ten years earlier, her life has been a mess. Within days after the funeral she is on a plane to New Zealand to find her estranged father, Ludo, now ensconced in a farm in the Waikato with his second wife and their two children. She finds the New Zealand landscape empty and oppressive, ‘a Gothic cathedral without a congregation’, yet wanders on into a night-time job at a ‘faux-French restaurant’ in Auckland, a speed-driven, alcohol-slumped social life, aimless affairs and an increasingly strained relationship with her father’s wife (failing to deliver her half-sister’s Christmas present on time and passing out at the family dinner table don’t help).
There is an element of the picaresque here as our flawed protagonist, a self-confessed stray with her ‘deep kiwi and West London posh’ accent, stumbles from one disastrous encounter to the next. She drifts through university, works as a journalist on a community newspaper, confronts depression and thinks maybe, just maybe, ‘New Zealand was to blame for making me depressed, and leaving would be the cure.’
Back in London her life continues its erratic course. She has no family to turn to (she doesn’t know or seem to care if her grandmother is still alive), little money and seems to live in a fug of apathy and self-pity as she crashes her way in, and usually out of, other people’s lives. She overstays her welcome in a London flat, gets wasted, room-spinningly drunk and helps herself to her flatmates’ food before being finally, inevitably told, ‘You have to leave. Today’. Little wonder the Chick-Lit-is-not-Dead website says that the novel ‘rocks’.
On revisiting the basement flat in Ladbrooke Garden where she grew up Suki reconnects with Peggy, the aged theatre publicist and would-be film star who still lives in the upstairs apartment, and her daughter, Suki’s old babysitter Pippa. She accepts an invitation by Pippa to live in Peggy’s flat for a week to look after the delightfully addled octagenarian. From here Pippa comes to the rescue again, inviting her to live in the apartment she shares with Ari and their belligerent 16-year-old son Caleb who – Pippa fears — is rapidly going off the rails.
But Suki is an unlikely role model. She rummages through Pippa and Ari’s possessions (‘nothing uncommon’ under the bed) and hauls out her hosts’ tea chests in the middle of the night on the wild suspicion that they may have belonged to her parents. In watching over Caleb while the rest of the family are in Greece she uses Pippa’s money on ‘indulgent groceries, the kind I hadn’t bought for months’ and, after a Goldilocks-type rest in their bed, forces her way into Ari’s hideaway roof-top shed: ‘This counted as breaking in, I supposed, but there was no question of giving up now’. Transgression after transgression (and, with Caleb at her side, more to come). Next she’s drinking beer with her youthful charge and dancing to Ari’s prized vinyl collection.
‘I know you’ve had a hard life,’ says the patient Pippa, ‘But at some point you’ve just got to let it go and move on’.
Too right. But despite Suki’s own admonitions there is still much she wants to unravel about herself and her past. ‘Thinking it all over, I started to feel a little like Narcissus, staring endlessly into the lake at his own reflection. Except that in the end it hadn’t been all about me.’ It is all about her, yet within this myopic self-centredness she somehow misses the most important events: her childhood glimpse of a man (her father?) with a young woman (Pippa?) is vague without her glasses; her father simply fades from family life; she later chastises herself for missing the moment of her mother’s death. Even the much-anticipated loss of her virginity is an unmemorable event – although she does remember the make and model of the surfer’s car. ‘My whole life, I had been doing that,’ she thinks, ‘been blind when I most needed to see.’.
In reconnecting with Pippa, and her old school friend Alana, she manages to unravel some of the murkier events of her past: her father’s dalliances, her mother’s anxiety, her own lonely and nervous self, ‘Always dressing up,’ recalls Pippa, ‘and entertaining everyone with your imaginary worlds’.
But these worlds are not so easily dismissed. As a child Suki is terrified of ‘Jimmy, the bogeyman’ who lives on the floor above. She is deeply disturbed by Peggy’s beloved statue of a kneeling girl, trapped, ‘blank-eyed’, in a ‘noose of perpetual childhood’ that still sends the 28-year-old Suki into a state of ‘quickening vertigo’. She recalls the hand in the hot-water cupboard which would reach out and untie the bows on the back of her dresses. Then there is something overwhelmingly nasty, not in the woodshed but in the abandoned air raid shelter at the bottom of the garden. It is here, the day after her parents throw a memorably wild party, that she and her mother follow Ludo down the darkened stairwell. Suki slips, landing, she is sure, further from the stairwell than she should have. ‘Is that normal?’ she asks her Jungian therapist many years later. ‘To feel like a bystander in your own past?’ She is later haunted by the apparent loss of her mother’s locket in the shelter and the discovery of two small teeth amongst her soiled clothes.
In returning to Notting Hill as an adult Suki finds herself again in the grip of strange fears as the past continues to infringe on the present. The view from Peggy’s window transforms into a replica scene of her childhood garden on the night of the party – wine bottles on the lawn, her Wendy tent in situ, the ominous rectangle of black that is the air raid shelter ‘peeled open like the lid of a sardine can’.
At Pippa’s house, trying to keep closed a mysteriously opening wardrobe door, she moves a desk only to have it jam on… a small white tooth. Odd and odder. In her overtired, overwrought state even a misprint in a book appears to be ‘part of a larger and more sinister puzzle’. In a C.S. Lewis moment, the back of the wardrobe gives way to a dark and downy substance and contact with another adrenalin-pumping reminder from the past. Finally, at Peggy’s deathbed, in a villa on the Greek island of Skyros, these night-time experiences culminate in an unforgettable and strangely believable encounter at the bottom of the air raid shelter….
The Girl Below is a hybrid creature: a thoughtful, action-packed romp combining magic realism, coming of age narrative and a Sarah Waters’ style plunge into genre fiction. Not all the threads of this story are resolved. We never really know how much of Suki’s experiences are real: telltale signs, such as an imprint on skin, a missing jandal and a returned locket, suggest these are not just the symptoms of an overwrought mind or ‘the temporary psychosis of sleep deprivation’. And any self-insight Suki may have achieved is tempered. Her conclusion, that ‘I was not the decent person I’d always imagined myself to be. I was flawed, just like everyone else’, is an alarming understatement evident to all around her from day one. This absence of tidy ends is not a problem in itself, but it is indicative of the challenge Zander has given herself in trying to weave such bulky threads into a seamless whole. While she tackles them with aplomb they could have been spread over two or three more subtle novels rather than piled on to the shoulders of one young, befuddled, exhausted traveller.
SALLY BLUNDELL is a Christchurch-based freelance journalist and writer and editor of Look This Way: New Zealand Writers on New Zealand Artists. In 2009 she completed a PhD at the University of Canterbury looking at responses to terror and trauma in contemporary fiction.
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