Free The Girl Below by Bianca Zander Page A

down to London pollution, which often got up your nose just before you were about to eat and made everything taste like the end of an exhaust pipe. Soon, the thing was only a roach, and I remembered why I didn’t normally smoke: marijuana made me want to hurl, especially if I had been drinking. That was probably my last coherent thought.
    Wouter put his arm around me, and without any warning, tongue-dived my ear. I leaned away, or thought I had, but all that happened was that the pint glasses on the table in front of us began to list, and the courtyard dipped and folded like swell on a rough sea.
    I was way, way too old for this. “Last tube,” I slurred, into Wouter’s hair—he had dandruff, I noticed as I pushed him away and stood up, knocking something off the table that shattered into a million lethal pieces. Using him as a springboard, I launched myself across the courtyard, but he had attached himself to me seemingly with Velcro and was still trying to snog me when I reached the other side. He was still trying when I got to the tube station, and pushed me up against a wall, sliding a leg in between mine. He managed to undo a few of my shirt buttons, but he was so wasted it was like being mauled by a puppy, and when a tube rumbled toward the platform, I whipped through the barrier to catch it, and left him on the other side, looking hopelessly around for me.
    Somehow, I emerged unscathed half an hour later at the Willesden Green tube station, five hundred meters from home, but in my condition, a distance of seven times that. Just before reaching my door, I fell sideways into a shrub that I swear hadn’t been there before I left that night. I hadn’t fallen over since I was a kid, and the shock of it was deeply insulting, like a punch in the face from a stranger, though I can’t say I felt any pain.
    In the poky kitchen, I guzzled three pints of water and plundered the fridge for leftovers, finding a pink, three-day-old sausage—was it raw?—and something that had looked like pizza but turned out, when I bit into it, to be only its empty cardboard carton. I stumbled down the hallway, where one of the flatmates jack-in-the-boxed out of a bedroom and told me, in the voice of a mother superior, that the stock market had crashed and it had all gone white.
    “What’s gone white?”
    “Are you all white?” she repeated.
    Something flew in the shadows behind her, a bat with a human face, and I ran away.
    I should have known that I wasn’t going to be able to sleep, but I tripped over the sofa with hope in my heart. Normally when I was drunk or high, I could turn my head to the left on the pillow and the room stopped spinning, but this time I was so far gone it spiraled whichever way I faced. Soon, the wallpaper was rippling too, and I lurched off the couch and zigzagged down the hall to find the bathroom. But someone had moved it, and the next thing I knew, I had taken a tumble and was groping at hulks of ceramic and trying to swim the breaststroke across a deep, black puddle of water.
    The bathroom was flooded, not just sprayed with water as if someone had taken a shower and forgotten to use a bathmat but drenched in an unpleasantly cold and glutinous liquid that was black but reminded me of thin, overcooked porridge. It took half a minute for me to recall what the stuff reminded me of: the water in the bottom of the bunker on the day we were trapped down there. In the next instant, as though I had bitten my lip, I tasted blood, but when I ran my tongue over my teeth and gums, there was only saliva.
    The bathroom was windowless, and no lights were on in the hallway, but I made my way toward the pale hull of the toilet bowl, rising out of the water. It didn’t look far away, but when I tried to crawl toward it, my arms and legs were switched off, and wouldn’t do as my brain told them. My neck was weak too, and my head drooped into the cold, thick water. Soil and salt filled my mouth, and I tried to spit it out