Falling Off Air

by Catherine Sampson

  “Adam Wills babysitting?” My mother's voice was filled with scorn.

  “Ma, I cannot do it all.” I was getting angry. My mother's face was set and pained.

  “I did,” she said.

  “That's just not true.” I didn't pause to think, just leapt right in. “We had aunts and uncles coming out of our ears.”

  She was pushing the double stroller uphill, her shoulders hunched over with the effort and also, it seemed to me, with hurt.

  “Ma, I'm not criticizing you, and I'm not belittling what you did, but it's different now.”

  Uncle William, my cousin Hannah, these were the names that came to me when the nurse bent over me and placed a baby on each arm, asking me what I was going to call them. There were half a dozen names—Katherine, Donald, Meredith—that would have done just as well. My mother's older siblings and their offspring had been my extended family. A couple of my cousins had found work in Croydon. The better-heeled were now in Surrey and Sussex. There was no one left in Streatham except my mother. We all kept in touch, but the bond that was so strong and proud when we were young was now stretched and weakened by distance and time. It was only at Christmas that we managed to get together.

  We paced on in silence, keeping to open patches of ground, aware that the light was fading fast.

  “I thought I'd brought you up to be self-sufficient,” my mother said eventually, her tone at once disappointed and disapproving. I bit back a reply and continued to walk in silence, but my mother couldn't let it be.

  “Adam Wills is not an avuncular presence,” she hissed, hurrying ahead and turning to face me so that I had to stop or run the stroller into her. “If you let him back into your life, he'll take over. He's a dominator. You'll never escape from him.”

  I steered the stroller around her, kept on pushing.

  “Okay, end of conversation,” I told her over my shoulder. “This is pointless.”

  We walked in silence back to our cars, put the children into their car seats, and went our separate ways.

  That night he rang as I had known he would. His voice was full of apprehension as though he half expected me to hang up, but I was too drained to fight anymore, and too unsure of my own position.

  “I thought I'd leave you twenty-four hours to cool down,” he said.

  I had been lying on the sofa, but now I sat up straight, swinging my feet to the floor, the better to concentrate. If I was lying down he would walk all over me.

  “I didn't look good in the Chronicle, did I?” His voice was light but I could hear the strain under the surface.

  “It did me no favors either. Who fed them that crap?”

  “I have no idea. I'm sorry. Look, I want to apologize about last night. I was stupid, insensitive. I'd had a drink or two. I was, you know,” he tried for a jokey tone, “tired and emotional.”

  “Forget it.”

  I had lit the fire and now I gazed into the flames, trying to pretend that this phone conversation could go on at the margins of my consciousness, that I did not have to get involved, did not have to get hurt. I stared at the flames, and they leapt and they played and they soothed, but when Adam spoke it still seared right through me.

  “Look, I meant what I said, I mean about wanting to help with the children, but I'm not going to interfere. I promise. It's your life, they're your children. I mean mostly yours. I'd just like to have a little bit of them. Whatever you think I deserve, which probably isn't much.”

  A tear found its way down my cheek, and then another. I fumbled for a tissue but had to make do with my sleeve.

  “You can't expect …” I tried to control my voice, but I could hear it waver, and I had to start again. “If you meet them, even once, you have to stick with it.”

  I sounded like a sergeant major, as if I could order undying loyalty.

  “I know, I know, I understand all that.”

  It was too glib for my liking.

  “I mean you can't be their father and then not be their father. That would be worse.”

  “Well, like you said, I hardly qualify anyway.”

  I rubbed my hand over my forehead. I was too upset by all this to be able to read him. I couldn't tell what he wanted. I couldn't tell how much he wanted it.

  “Look,” he said, “this is impossible over the phone. How about we meet? I mean, we can do it on neutral territory, and we can talk about things, you can tell me what the ground rules are, we'll go from there.”

  I heaved a breath. He was handing me the initiative, but it's not something you can give away. You have to seize it and I thought he had probably already done that.

  “No,” I said slowly, “you come here.”

  Let him see, my brain was telling me, let him see how life is. If he can't take it, you'll know then. And only when I saw him together with the children would I know whether I could bear it.

  “All right, if you're sure.” He sounded taken aback. “Um, when should I come?”

  “How about Tuesday.” It would give me a couple of days to psyche myself up. “At six-thirty,” I said. Bedtime. Life in the raw.

  We said our good-byes and hung up. I sat and stared at the flames some more. They leapt and they played and they soothed. Then I picked up the telephone and hurled it at the wall.

  Chapter 8

  ADAM,” I told Jane, “wants to talk.” Jane had rung to apologize. Her judgment, she said, had been warped by too much sex. She had emerged from Quentin Browne's flat, presumably sated, and returned home only in the past hour or so. Then she picked the five minutes after Adam phoned me to call me herself. She was lucky to find my telephone in working order.

  “Tell him to go fuck himself,” Jane proposed.

  I sighed. I couldn't find the words to argue it with her.

  “You're not really going to talk to the wee shite?”

  “Shouldn't you be a bit more mellow after a day in bed?”

  “I'm bursting with love for all mankind, except for Adam. And don't change the subject.”

  “He's coming here on Tuesday, at six-thirty. He's going to meet the children.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line.

  “And anyway, how much of a shit is he?” I was thinking aloud, trying to persuade myself. “Maybe I've been unreasonable. He was honest with me, he told me he didn't love me, so I told him to go. No one can change the way they feel, after all. I as good as threw him out.”

  “Robin, don't do this. Don't rewrite history. We all heard him the other night. The whole domestic deal, that was his problem. It was nothing to do with loving you or not loving you.” She paused, but I didn't say anything, and she realized she had to say more to convince me and plowed right on, pressing home her advantage. “When did he tell you he didn't love you? Was it before or after you told him you were pregnant?”

  “Weeks after I told him I was pregnant. Roughly ten minutes after I said it was twins,” I admitted.

  “Robin.” Jane sounded appalled. “The man's a bloody great shite.”

  Jane's outrage echoed in my ears. It wasn't the greatest recipe for a peaceful night and indeed I scarcely slept. No sleep, no nightmares—there's always a silver lining.

  The next day Erica was back on duty for my lunch with Suzette. I was learning to schedule the child-care handover twenty minutes before I left the house so I had time to wash and change my clothes. This time I even went to the remarkable lengths of brushing my teeth before I went and asked for a job. Then I gathered up an armful of bills that had come through the mail slot. I had no time to deal with them, and I shoved them in my bag to open on the tube.

  Suzette and I were to meet in Covent Garden at one, and I miscalculated the tube time and arrived fifteen minutes early. I got off at Charing Cross and walked through the underpass, buying a copy of the Big Issue from a man with a nice smile, a dog, and a low-key sales drive. He nodded his thanks and took a sip from a paper cup of cappuccino as I stepped out into the sunlight and headed up the Strand. It was one of
those bright autumn days when the chill in the air seems festive and the blue sky promises spring instead of winter. Covent Garden was bustling. There were crowds of eager easy-to-please tourists around the street clowns and strains of Carmen coming from the open-air café under the arches. I strolled around, too unused to shopping and too aware of my empty bank account to buy anything, but lapping up the buzz of commerce.

  Suzette and I found each other and we headed up Long Acre to a Japanese restaurant where she said they did a good affordable sushi lunch. I was happy to eat anything that wasn't Indian or baby food, but I tried to greet the suggestion with only mild enthusiasm, as though I ate Japanese at chichi restaurants at least once a week. I was trying hard to act like a professional all over again, but I kept having out-of-body experiences looking down on myself striding around in central London in work clothes and makeup and wondering who the hell I was.

  The restaurant was all stripped pine benches and rice paper blinds. We found an unoccupied booth and slid in, and ordered set lunches with mineral water. Suzette was looking pale and tired. Her fine skin seemed stretched tight over her bones and there was a rim of red around her huge eyes. She was wearing a dark gray sweater that just about showed her ribs, and made her skin look even paler.

  “I got about three hours' sleep last night,” she said, pulling chopsticks out of their paper sleeve and fiddling with her place setting. “Everything was spinning around in my head … I shouldn't say that, I'm supposed to be persuading you to come and work with me.”

  We smiled at each other.

  “I don't mind hard work,” I told her. “I like the idea of freedom if that's what's on offer.”

  “That's exactly what you'd have,” she said, “and no bureaucrats who know nothing about program-making dictating how many shots you take of what and quoting guidelines at you day in, day out.”

  “But you have to sell the programs, and they still give you a budget,” I pointed out.

  Suzette nodded, sitting back as a Japanese waitress brought a tray and placed it in front of her. It was followed by a tray for me. I plunged a tempura prawn into the sauce and then into my mouth. I was starving, and I nearly groaned with pleasure as I bit through the crispy batter and into the tender meat.

  “It's not perfect,” Suzette said, taking a little wasabi on the end of a chopstick and mixing it into the soy sauce, “but I feel freer here and now than I did when I was with the Corporation.”

  We talked for a while about Suzette's plans. She was full of ideas, as I'd known she would be. She read voraciously and a line in a book or a magazine article, even a picture caption, could be all the catalyst she needed to set her off. A television producer has one aim, and that is to get pictures that will shock or amuse or delight the audience. No pictures, no story. Suzette was scathing about bad television, damning about the lackadaisical approach of others, insulted by images that weakened the story. To her, the picture was the mission, and her almost obsessional approach gave Paradigm the energy that I knew many others lacked. Paradigm, in her eyes, would become a great name in documentary making if it could get through the early and financially sticky years of obscurity. She'd done a lot of thinking about how I would fit in and what I could bring to the company, where our skills would complement each other and where I would be able to take the lead. It sounded exciting and attractive and I found myself wanting to do it. The more I heard about the financial side of it, however, the more I became uneasy. She didn't say it outright, but it was pretty clear that she was living hand-to-mouth, and I tried to pin her down on how much I could expect to earn. I needed to know at least to within the nearest five thousand pounds, but she didn't want to commit herself even to that.

  “It's really difficult to talk in those terms,” she said, with an apologetic grimace. “A couple of years from now, if we can make our name and be the obvious choice for commissioning editors, we'll be on much surer ground, but right now we're competing hard on price. What you or I take home depends on what we make week to week and month to month.”

  We concentrated on the food for a while. The sashimi was good, fresh and firm. I warmed my hands on the cup of miso soup.

  “I'm not sure whether I can take the financial risk,” I said eventually, unwilling to introduce my domestic situation but wanting to be honest with Suzette.

  The comment seemed to annoy her, or perhaps she was just disappointed that I was having doubts.

  “I know you have responsibilities, we all have responsibilities of one kind or another. I wasn't suggesting you should work for charity, but you have to take risks if you want rewards. You stay in the Corporation and you'll suffocate.”

  Maybe she was right, maybe in my role as mother hen I had just become risk averse. My alternatives, after all, were bleak.

  “Did you know Maeve wants me to do the ethics job?” I said.

  Suzette gave me a sickly smile and said, “You're not going to turn me down to be ethics czar?”

  I shrugged.

  “Terry tells me I couldn't do better.”

  Suzette just pulled an unimpressed face and shrugged, so I changed the subject. “I hadn't realized the documentary Richard Carmichael was complaining about was a Paradigm production.”

  “In the end it wasn't an anything production, it was a total nonevent,” she said, and shrugged again. “There was nothing to say. I wasn't keeping anything from you.”

  “I'm not suggesting you were, but what went wrong?”

  She heaved a deep breath and put her head on one side, looking at me with some amusement.

  “Why all the interest?”

  “For God's sake, Suzette, the woman killed herself in front of me.”

  “Or was killed,” she reminded me quietly. She thought for a moment, fiddling with the table setting again, then looked up at me.

  “This isn't for general release,” she said, “because it all got extremely messy. Basically, we did a lot of filming and then Paula pulled out. She wanted a puff piece, no negative stuff, just two hours of how wonderful Paula Carmichael is … or was, I should say. When I pointed out that we weren't in the business of hagiographies she refused to cooperate.”

  I frowned. The waitress arrived at our table and refilled our teacups with green tea.

  “Couldn't you have gone ahead with what you had? It must have been financially crippling to dump the whole thing.”

  “It cut Paradigm's projected revenue by more than thirty percent last year.” Suzette sounded grim. “Anyway, it's over. I really don't feel like going through it all over again. Carmichael's retracted, so there's no more to be said.”

  “But why would he have made it up? It makes no sense.”

  Suzette speared a slice of apple with a cocktail stick.

  “Paula Carmichael had a big ego,” she said, keeping her voice low, her eyes flitting around us to see if anyone was listening in. I would have thought her paranoid if it were not for the fact I myself had recognized two former colleagues at another table. Paula Carmichael was, after all, still news. “If Paula got depressed it was because she thought she was going to get great publicity and then she realized we were going to show her warts and all, and she didn't like that. But no one wants to think their wife is as self-obsessed as that. Maybe her husband just saw it differently.”

  She popped the apple into her mouth. I considered what she had said.

  “So what were her warts?”

  Suzette chewed and swallowed. She thought for a moment.

  “She was a megalomaniac. She thought we should treat her like Mother Theresa. I'm not going to go into all the stuff that happened, because it would take forever, but she seemed to have left reality behind some time ago, and that's the nice way of putting it.”

  “Everyone's eulogizing her now.”

  “Yes,” Suzette gave a wry smile, “well, that's the power of the media, for you. For the most part, she handled it like a pro. We just took our brief very seriously. Too seriously for her.”

  I sat
back on the bench and looked at Suzette. Maybe Paula had always been too good to be true. I felt a little sad. Since her death I'd kept that exchange in the supermarket with me, that grin, the sympathetic, “Been there, done that.” I didn't want to hear that she'd been a cynical media manipulator.

  “Still, you don't jump out of a window because someone didn't show you due respect.”

  “Maybe,” she said harshly, “if you're Paula Carmichael you think it will immortalize you.”

  I shook my head. It wasn't worth arguing.

  “Adam and Paula got on well, didn't they?” I was guessing, but if it was Adam who had told Paula about me, as I suspected it was, that surely pointed to friendship.

  Suzette watched me carefully. “What do you mean?”

  “I heard they got on really well.”

  “Really?”

  “You didn't see any evidence of it?”

  “They seemed to get on fine, I mean Adam is always professional, but I didn't see much of them together. I really have no idea what they got up to, I wasn't with them every minute of the day …”

  Suzette appeared to have misunderstood my question, and to resent it.

  “I'm not suggesting an affair or anything like that,” I said.

  “Oh.” Suzette was quiet for a moment. “Well, I don't know then. I suppose I would say that Adam kept out of the arguments about the content of the documentary,” she said eventually. “He was working on other projects at the same time, it probably didn't mean that much to him when the whole thing fell through.”

  I managed to get a seat on the Northern Line, and gazed at the ads above the heads opposite. There was a poem about urban greenery that kept me occupied for the length of time it took me to read its four lines. Teenage girls in uniform were standing by the doors, their arms draped around each other's shoulders, whispering and then once in a while bursting into giggles. Next to me a middle-aged man with a huge paunch and purple veins on his cheeks smelled of urine. I'd done all the thinking I could about Paula Carmichael. I needed some other distraction. I looked in my bag to see whether I had left a book or a magazine in there. I hadn't, but I came across the letters I had shoved in on my way out. I thumbed through and pulled one out of the pile, a fresh white WH Smith envelope. I frowned. It had been addressed in a hand I did not recognize, to Adam's flat, my old address, then redirected in what looked like Adam's hand. It surprised me, for a minute, that he knew my new address. Then I realized when we had spoken on the telephone he had not asked where he should come to see me. This thought delayed me for a moment, but somewhere around Waterloo I opened the envelope, unfolded two sheets of handwritten paper, and started to read.