Falling Off Air

by Catherine Sampson

  “‘May have heard,’” Finney repeated the phrase with disgust. “What the hell does that mean?”

  Neither I nor D.C. Mann answered, and after a second he asked, “Do you often hear voices?”

  “Only when I'm not taking my medication.” I gave him a hard look.

  “Your medic …?” He trailed off, uncertain how to continue, then saw that I was winding him up.

  “No, I do not hear voices,” I said firmly. “There was a lot of noise from the storm. I thought I heard something that sounded like a voice, but I may have been mistaken. I wish I'd never mentioned it. I was just trying to be helpful.” Finney pursed his lips, then turned again to Mann.

  “Have you asked anyone else in the street whether they heard voices around the time Carmichael fell?”

  “There's some confusion.” Mann was relieved to be able to offer him something by way of reply. “We've had a couple of people saying they heard shouting in the street around that time, but of course Miss Ballantyne was the only one who saw her fall, so she's the only one who even knows exactly what time we're talking about. And immediately after she'd fallen, Miss Ballantyne started shouting in the street herself, and I think that's what our witnesses heard. The storm may have distorted Miss Ballantyne's voice, because nobody seems to have been able to tell us what she was shouting.”

  “I don't think that's true,” I interrupted. “I think they heard, I think they just don't want to admit that they heard me yelling for help but didn't open their doors.”

  Finney was silent for a minute, reading over the statement again.

  “Try and clarify that,” he said shortly.

  Mann grimaced.

  “Now, moving on, last night you told D.C. Mann that you didn't know the woman who died.”

  “I didn't recognize her,” I clarified. “It was dark and I scarcely saw her face.”

  “In fact,” he had the transcript of my TV interview in front of him, “you'd met her twice.”

  “I said I thought I'd bumped into her,” I said, frowning. “Paula—I think it was her—said a total of four words to me.”

  “You implied you were friends on TV.”

  “I said I thought I'd bumped into her,” I repeated.

  Finney blew softly, not hurrying.

  “So what were these four words?”

  “Been there, done that.”

  “‘Been there, done that,’” he repeated it slowly, wonderingly.

  I explained the context then, that I'd been struggling with small children in the supermarket, but Finney still looked bemused.

  “I think Carmichael was being sympathetic,” D.C. Mann interjected, “saying she'd been through that too.”

  “Been through what?” Finney scowled and I saw D.C. Mann cringe.

  “Dealing with small children,” D.C. Mann spelled out, remembering at the last minute to add, “sir.”

  Finney went a little paler, as though one of us had mentioned menstruation. He breathed deeply, then fired a series of questions at me. I say fired, but he had this slow, deep delivery that meant you only felt the kick afterward.

  “Did you ever visit the Carmichaels?”

  “I told you, I don't know them.”

  “Were you ever inside their house?”

  “No.”

  “Did you speak on the phone?”

  “No, what is this? I told you, I—”

  “Did you have mutual friends?”

  “No.”

  That last question and answer started to bother me, but I was too distracted to think why.

  Finney's eyebrows rose.

  “Well, you'll have to help me out here, Miss Ballantyne,” he said. “We've been spending a lot of time looking through Mrs. Carmichaels things, as you can imagine.”

  Looking for a suicide note, I speculated, but I wasn't about to open my mouth.

  “Mrs. Carmichael left a lot of papers,” Finney went on, “and I mean a lot. It's still early days, so we're still paddling in the shallows, so to speak, but we've come across a bit of a mystery, and I'm hoping you can put me straight.”

  Here I was gripped by a sense of foreboding so strong that I felt deprived of oxygen. Finney looked up questioningly at me and I managed to jerk my head to indicate that he should go on.

  “Could we open a window in here?” I asked.

  Mann got up and went over to the window, fiddled with the catch for a moment, then turned and shrugged at me apologetically. Finney did not seem to have noticed her failed efforts.

  “Mrs. Carmichael kept diaries,” he was saying. “She kept work diaries, she kept family diaries, she kept a personal diary. We're drowning in diaries. How she found time to do anything but write in her diaries I do not know. It's her personal diary that we've been having a little look at, and in it she mentions you.”

  My eyes fixed on Finney's. There was unhappiness there, there was impatience there, but I could see no shadow of a lie in them.

  “It mentions me,” I echoed.

  “Yes. Can you tell me why that might be?”

  “I can't imagine.”

  Silence, and I knew he wanted me to talk into it.

  “How do you know it's me?”

  “Robin, two children, same names, right ages, living opposite. Same physical descriptions. Slim, red hair, green eyes …” He paused to clear his throat. “Couldn't be anyone else.”

  I forced myself to carry on breathing, tried to make my brain turn.

  “There is no explanation that I can think of,” I said, as calmly as I could, “but maybe if I could see the context …”

  He produced a photocopied sheet and pushed it across the table at me. His fingers brushed mine, and we each pulled our hands away as if burnt. I stared across at him, then down at the sheet, trying to focus. Most of the page was blacked out. Only one paragraph remained for me to read. I pulled the sheet closer to me and forced myself to concentrate.

  Robin goes back and forth to the supermarket like a mother bird with worms for her young. So much of her life is full of grim determination. How lonely she must be at the end of the day when Hannah and William are asleep. She never seems to go out. But yesterday I was walking across the Common to the underground. It was a real summers day, everyone going about with no clothes on and radios blaring, and there she was, there they all were, lying sleeping in the sun. She'd rigged up an awning for them so they were shaded, and she'd got hold of each of them even in her sleep, and you just knew that the slightest stirring would waken her. They were all three in shorts and T-shirts. Oh, and the babies' little fat legs, and plump white arms, all hither and thither. What abandon, what sheer joy to sleep in the sun. It's the first time I've seen them truly at ease. How I envied them their innocence. I wanted to lie down on the grass beside them. Oh, how I wanted to sleep in the sun without guilt.

  I picked the sheet up and read it through again, cool and forensic. I was beyond feeling uneasy, beyond feeling that this was all terribly strange. This, these words on the page, were beyond coincidence. This woman had watched me. She knew my name and the names of my children. Instinctively my body and my brain reacted as if under threat, tensing, adrenaline racing to prime me for fight or flight. I tried to calm myself, willed my heart to slow its pounding. She was dead, I told myself, there was no one to fight or to flee. I examined the date on the diary entry. Early September, just weeks before. It was mid-October now, and the extreme heat of the past few days was a strange climactic blip in the middle of an autumn that was fast advancing toward winter. I remembered the day Paula described, remembered how refreshed I'd felt after that sleep: sleep without guilt, without dreams, sleep without interruption. I'd had to wake the twins as the sun disappeared, so we could wend our happy way home. I read the passage over and over again until I realized that Finney was impatient.

  “Obviously she knew me,” I said slowly, exactly, needing to convey this distinction, “but I did not know her.”

  Both D.C. Mann and Finney gazed at me in disbelief. />
  “Are you accusing Paula Carmichael of being a stalker?” Finney asked, almost amused. “Because I don't think that's going to go down very well.”

  After the interview with Finney I went for a walk on the Common. I knew the children were at Tanya's, knew I should pick them up before Patrick's shift. Tanya had made it clear to me more than once that, while happy to help when they could, their lives were already fraught with the demands of work and children. They needed a holiday, and they couldn't afford one, and here was I taking advantage.

  My head was full of questions, but they kept getting pushed to one side by Finney's smile, which lingered there far longer than was decent. The man annoyed and intrigued me in equal measure. His attitude had been antagonistic, but the prospect of tangling with him was not entirely unpleasant. Adrenaline was rushing through my bloodstream. Adrenaline and something else, something seductive, was making my head light and threatening to dull my sense of danger. Paula Carmichael's death was unremittingly awful. Yet here I was, just hours later, excited and intrigued by a man for the first time since Adam left. I was appalled at myself. How could my emotional life be so distorted that a woman's death would have the effect of reawakening me to the joys of sexual attraction? I was in a state of temporary insanity. I despaired.

  I didn't just want to walk. I needed to walk. I needed to walk on my own. I walked as though my life depended on it, arms swinging at my side. With every step I felt calmer.

  I was scarcely aware of where I was walking, but I know the Common like the back of my hand. I know the large open lawn where mothers push strollers and where for much of the year the wind howls across the flat expanse; I know the run-down playground, where the slide is forever surrounded by metal barricades that entice the children in. I know the duck pond, the graffiti-covered snack bar, the toilets with no paper and no running water, the sheltered wooded area where men cruise for sex of one kind or another and prostitutes loiter just in view of the passing motorists.

  I sat down on a bench and gazed at the spot where, in the summer, I had lain asleep on the ground and Paula Carmichael had watched me. Had she sat down on this seat, I wondered, or hurried on by, briefcase under her arm, just as I had seen her that day under the bridge. The grass where we had lain was now a muddy patch. Despite the sun, no one was lazing on the ground today; it was still too damp from the storm. I sat there in solitude, but it was as though Paula sat with me, beside me on the bench, silently challenging me to work out our connection. How did Paula know me? How did she know my children, my circumstances, even my loneliness? Certainly she had lived as good as opposite me, but that in itself was not a sufficient explanation. None of my neighbors could have put my name to my face let alone named my children.

  “She doesn't know me from Adam,” I whispered to myself. It's a hazard of living alone.

  Then the words I had said started to fade and reform in my head, and synapses sparked. What had Jane said? That Adam had worked together with Paula Carmichael on a documentary. Of course that didn't mean they were so much as friends. It was probably nothing. As far as I knew, Adam had remained pretty secretive about what had happened between us. Leaving children fatherless was hardly something you boasted about at the dinner table. So the leap from knowing Paula to sharing his secrets with her, to her living opposite me was all too much. I was clutching at straws, but there was only this one straw to clutch.

  I was back at home with the children when Terry phoned. I was trying to get us all a late lunch. We were suffering from low blood sugar and I was just managing to hold it down until the food was ready, but Hannah and William were falling apart. The last thing I wanted was a work call.

  “Terry, how are you doing?” Terry, my favorite manager. No doubt Maeve had told him to ring.

  “Good, and you? Getting any sleep?”

  “Here and there,” I said lightly. I felt about a hundred and three.

  “Still, worth it all in the end.”

  “Absolutely,” I said, thinking: Speed it up here, Terry.

  “Well, I was just ringing to touch base,” he said, “and find out whether you've given Maeve's offer any thought.”

  “Um, I need more time,” I said. I still intended to turn the job down, but I was afraid if I said that right now Terry was programmed to try to persuade me and I'd be there all day. I just wanted him off the line.

  “Well, you've got a day or two to play with,” he said, “but after that Maeve says she's going to have to open it up.”

  “Okay. I'll let you know before then.” Couldn't he hear the impatience in my voice? He could certainly hear the children fussing.

  “Meanwhile, do you fancy a night out?” His voice became playful, a fairy godfather offering Cinderella a trip to the ball. “I've been left with an extra ticket to the awards ceremony at the Grosvenor House Hotel on Saturday, and everyone will be there. It would get you back in the swing of things, remind people who you are. What do you think?”

  I couldn't see the harm.

  “The children will love it,” I said, waiting for Terry's sharp intake of breath before adding, “Just kidding. Of course I'd love to come.”

  Chapter 6

  THE awards ceremony required some lifestyle changes. I hired a babysitter—I mean a babysitter who charged an hourly rate that was the GDP of a small nation, an agency nanny called Erica from Sweden—because I couldn't stretch my mother's goodwill any further, and Tanya and Patrick had for once screwed up their shifts, so that they were both working at the same time. They were wondering what to do with their own kids, let alone mine. Erica's main qualifications consisted of a black belt in judo, which seemed a little irrelevant, and a stellar career at a Swedish nannying academy. I got a haircut, short and sleek. I got a new subscription to Sky digital television. I'd been economizing for the past few months, but if you're going to work in television you've got to have access to all the news that's out there and this way I could watch everything from CNN to China Central Television. I dusted off my mobile phone and charged it up. If I was going to leave my children in the care of a total stranger—albeit a stranger with impeccable references—at least she could contact me when they choked or knocked themselves out, as they inevitably would. I even bought myself a new lipstick.

  Terry came miles out of his way from Putney to pick me up and tooted his horn outside my door at six-thirty. Terry is nearly sixty and gay, but he loves to play Prince Charming and take a woman out on a date once in a while. He has the car for it, a macho four-wheel drive, high off the ground. There aren't many white Range Rovers around. They tend to show the mud, but Terry's is always spotless.

  “Robin, you look wonderful,” he said with surprise as I climbed into the passenger seat. “Maeve said—” He stopped short.

  “She said I looked like shit,” I guessed.

  “Maeve would never use language like that.”

  “Maeve should try getting up a dozen times in the night.”

  “She should try getting up to all sorts of things in the night,” Terry said. “She's certainly missing out on something.”

  We drove through the streets of south London toward the city center in companionable silence, warm air billowing through the open windows. I love driving, and four years ago, back in the days when I still indulged myself, I bought a 1990 BMW. It accelerates like a sports car and does a hundred smooth as cream. I love its understated lean lines, but bits of it keep dropping off or going wrong and, weight for weight, spares are probably more expensive than solid gold. It had got to the point where I was afraid to drive it for fear of something else going wrong. I used it to pootle to and from Lorna's and Tanya's, and recently to and from the police station, even though it was developing some alarming rattles. It was due for its inspection and I knew it was barely roadworthy and I was dreading the expense, so when Terry had offered a lift, I had grabbed it.

  Usually I love to be driven as much as to drive, to be free with my thoughts, gazing out the window as the world passes by. Toni
ght I could not completely relax. I was flailing in a pool of unease. I took some comfort from Terry's presence at my side. It was easy to make fun of him, he did it himself all the time, but it was people like Terry, talented, creative, collegial, who still gave the Corporation a gilding of style. Old school and Oxbridge educated, with a passion for hand-embroidered silk waistcoats and a halo of curly gray hair around an otherwise bald head, Terry had made his way easily up the Corporate ladder. Then he'd hit a ceiling because he didn't have the raw ambition to make it right to the top like Maeve. In the Corporation he was comfortable, relatively safe. His creativity had become stifled by a career in management, but out in the raw competition of the independent producers someone like Terry would have been ripped limb from limb. I had always assumed he would sit out his career at Maeve's knees, perfectly content. Then I remembered what Jane had said and wondered how long Maeve would have knees for Terry to sit at. It was strange, I thought, that Terry should be happy to sit just this far up the ladder, making no apparent effort to climb. Meanwhile Jane, Suzette, and Maeve were driven by red-hot ambition to go that extra step. And me? What was I driven by? There had been ambition, as strong as Jane's. I had banished it for the past year, but I could feel it lurking, and I feared that if it had lost none of its heat, its return would condemn me to a life of frustration. Could I tame my ambition so that I would not be constantly torn between my children and my work?

  “Penny for them,” Terry said.

  I shook my head.

  “It's weird being out and about without the children. Nice but weird.”

  “You'll go mad if you don't work, Robin.” He said it softly.

  I sighed.

  “I have to work or we'll starve. I just don't like the children being with anyone but me.”

  “You'll have to get over it.”

  “I am aware of that, thank you, Terry.” Silence fell. I felt guilty for snapping at him, but really there was no need for him to be so damned patronizing.