Falling Off Air

by Catherine Sampson

  Maeve gazed at me for a moment, then she heaved a sigh.

  She swiveled her chair and tapped something out on her keyboard, then printed it out, read it through, signed it, and handed it to me. In my hand I held a signed instruction to the personnel department to issue me a Corporation pass.

  “Thank you,” I said, without a smile. This was all I had wanted.

  “It's the least I can do,” Maeve said drily. Which was true.

  I went to find Terry. He'd been reduced, in the last redesign, to a large Perspex cubicle, like a fish tank in the middle of the newsroom. It was supposed to be a model of soundproofed transparency, but most staff had simply brushed up their lip-reading skills. It was an evolutionary thing, like growing longer thumbs to play video games. Terry's eyes were constantly flitting beyond me, watching passers-by watching him.

  “You're missing a meeting with Maeve,” I told him.

  “I am?” he said. He pulled a Palm from his pocket and poked at it for a minute before hissing at it, throwing it down, and thumbing anxiously through a desk diary. “I don't think … no … no, not 'til Monday.”

  He slumped back in his chair, his potbelly sticking out. I hadn't seen Terry since the night of the award ceremony. He was sweating slightly. Despite the cold outside, the building was hot and his little greenhouse was hotter.

  “Robin, Robin, Robin, what are we going to do with you? This is a fine mess you've got yourself into.”

  The nervous banter irritated me, and the underlying accusation irritated me more.

  “Someone else got me into this,” I said bluntly, sitting myself down opposite him. He pushed his chair backward as if to retreat from me. “Someone stole my car to run Adam over then rang the police to tip them off. Someone's framing me.”

  Terry's eyebrows rose a little, but his eyes avoided mine.

  “Whatever you say, my dear. I wouldn't like to be the one to upset you.”

  I stared at him, but his face was still turned away from me. He seemed to be looking at his left shoe, a rather fancy wingtip. If I wasn't mistaken he was sufficiently unnerved by Adam's death, and my alleged part in it, that he could no longer look me in the eye. Terry was high on my list of people to be trusted, but it looked distinctly as though he'd have to be struck off.

  “Has Finney been to see you?” I asked.

  “Finney?” He shook his head in genuine confusion.

  “The police.”

  “Ah. Yes. A young black girl took a statement from me, about my phone call, you know.”

  “Of course.” I had known that they would check telephone records to my house—they had my full permission to do so, among a thousand other invasions of my privacy—but still it made my skin crawl. “What did you say?”

  “Well,” Terry puffed, “that you had cut me off saying you were in the middle of some crisis. That you were clearly distraught.” Terry glanced upward and caught sight of my face. “What am I supposed to say? That's what happened. I'm not about to perjure myself.”

  I had come here to ask him for information about the Carmichaelite Mission documentary, but I had lost my appetite for it.

  “Well, I just dropped in to say hi.” I stood up.

  Terry looked sheepish. “Where are you off to now then? We could get a coffee.”

  In the light of our conversation the suggestion seemed ludicrous. “I don't think so.” I pushed open the door so that his staff could hear my farewell. “I'm really glad I can count on your support,” I said loudly, and forced myself to kiss him on his unwilling cheek. Then I turned and left him staring after me.

  I found Suzette in the canteen. A wintry sun was shining through the high windows and casting great patches of bright light over the tables and chairs, most of which were empty. A group of kitchen staff chatted and laughed near the buffet. A panorama of London spread beyond the glass. Suzette had chosen a table as far away from the sun and from other people as possible. She was sitting alone, facing the wall and contemplating a plate of something green.

  “Suze,” I said, and she jumped at her name, twisting to see who had spoken and spilling liquid from the white teacup in her hand.

  “Sorry.” I grabbed a paper napkin and dabbed at the mess. “I didn't mean to give you a shock. What's the matter?” I caught sight of her ashen face, eyes swollen, and pulled up a chair opposite her. “Suze, you look worse than I do.”

  She gazed at me, then shook her head wordlessly. She hadn't touched her open sandwich. The lettuce was beginning to wilt and the ham was taking on a nasty sheen, and I wondered how long it and Suzette had been sitting there. I could see her struggling to pull herself together, and eventually she spoke.

  “I rang you but you didn't ring back.”

  “I'm sorry, it's been a really bad time.”

  “I came in for a meeting with a commissioning editor, but…” She shook her head, on the verge of breaking down. “Adam and I used to have lunch here sometimes. Christ, what a thing…” She attempted a watery smile.

  I sat and stared at her. Something in her expression was like a lightning bolt in my head, suddenly illuminating the landscape of the past. I had introduced Suzette and Adam, and I knew they had worked together more than once. I knew they had liked each other. Now Suzette's face was telling me something more, almost as though she were willing me to know. Still, for a moment, I could not bring myself to say anything, and she too sat there silently, staring at the table. There was a sense, I think, that for either of us to take a step forward from that point would be to enter a minefield, but eventually I could not resist asking the question.

  “Were you and Adam seeing each other?”

  She stared at me with huge sad eyes, but she took her time over answering, just sitting there, her hands in her lap clutching a screwed-up tissue.

  “No one was supposed to know,” she said at last. “I'm so sorry.”

  I felt as though she had slapped me—and as though Adam had risen from the dead to slap me too. We sat there for a moment, but there were more questions that had to be asked.

  “When did it start?”

  “When you split up,” her voice was a whisper.

  “So you mean, all the time you were dropping by to give me moral support,” I couldn't help dwelling on those two words sarcastically, “you were with him?”

  She nodded, tears overflowing onto her cheeks.

  “I'm sorry,” I had to lean in close to hear what she was saying, “he didn't really want me.” She passed the tip of her tongue over dry lips. “He wanted news about you and about the children …”

  I stared at Suzette and she started to sob softly, dabbing at her nose and her eyes with a paper napkin. “I felt so bad for you.” Her voice kept breaking up. “I wanted Adam, but I could see what you were going through, and I wanted to be your friend too. I'm sorry.”

  I shook my head.

  “Have you told the police about your relationship?” My voice was accusatory and Suzette jumped again.

  “They haven't asked me.”

  “What did you do, communicate in code? They must realize he was seeing someone.”

  She shook her head for a long time before she could stop crying enough to speak. “We split up months ago, there's nothing the police need to know. It just, you know,” she looked at me sideways, “fizzled.”

  I gazed at her waxen face. Fizzled wasn't a concept I associated with Adam. After a moment Suzette shrugged.

  “We just got bored,” she said.

  I gazed some more and she shrugged again.

  “There always was someone else with Adam, wasn't there?” Then she said, “I really want to know who did this.”

  I wanted to get this straight. “It was over. So when you invited me to work with you at Paradigm, you weren't going to work alongside me and then go home to Adam at night?”

  Suzette wouldn't look at me, but she shook her head.

  I sat and stared at her. I felt drained. Drained and hugely disappointed, and as though, if I had
to lose another friend, I would disintegrate. At the same time something inside me was hardening. The earth beneath my feet was crumbling, but in some strange way I was finding my footing. This was not the time for forgiving and forgetting. Indeed that time might never come—I saw no particular reason why it should—but, whatever became of our friendship in the long run, in the short term I needed Suzette.

  “I'm not going to tell you what I think of you right now,” I said to her. Her eyes lifted, and I saw relief flit across her face. “But if you want to know who killed him, you have to help me. I think Adam's death has something to do with Paula Carmichael's.”

  That put a stop to the sniveling at least.

  “Why do you say that?” She wiped her eyes.

  I told her what I'd told Jane and managed to overcome her initial skepticism as I had with Jane too. By the time I'd related all the coincidences, she was listening carefully.

  “Adam and I were together when we were working on the documentary,” she said thoughtfully. “We spent our spare time together. I've already told you, as far as I'm aware he had nothing but a passing professional relationship with Paula.”

  I scowled. There had to be something.

  “Is there any film from the documentary knocking around anywhere?”

  “I don't really see how that could … I'd have to take a look, I don't know off the top of my head,” she said eventually. “I don't understand what you're looking for.”

  “Anything that tells me anything. I'm clutching at straws here.”

  “Well,” she said, “I can have a look …” Her voice trailed off and we sat in silence for a moment, Suzette scrutinizing my face.

  “So this is some sort of investigation then,” she said uncertainly.

  I held up my hands, defending myself.

  “I'm just trying to dig myself out of a hole,” I said.

  Suzette nodded.

  “I can see why you would want to do that,” she said.

  The silence stretched between us. Suzette seemed much calmer now, but she was lost in her own thoughts, her eyelids heavy. The canteen was getting noisier as teatime neared and I didn't want to have to face my former colleagues. With Erica on a stopwatch I couldn't afford to hang around with Suzette, even if I'd wanted to, and frankly I didn't want to. Her morose state of mind depressed me, and her betrayal had left me angry and hurt. Right then I could not foresee any time that I would seek her out as a friend. Just as I was about to get to my feet and make my excuses my mobile started to ring in my pocket. It was my mother. She was with Lorna, in an ambulance, on her way to accident and emergency at St. Celia's. She would explain when I got there.

  Chapter 19

  ST. Celia's accident and emergency was a prefab shack next to the car park. Two nurses sat behind what might or might not have been—but probably should have been—bulletproof glass. They listened wearily to my pleas to be given access to my sister and assured me that they would try to find out where she was, if only I would just take a seat.

  It took a while, during which a procession of mildly injured and sick-looking people arrived and joined the forlorn queue. Now and again someone would be ushered through a scuffed navy door into the inner sanctum of the hospital itself and a shudder of excitement would run through the room. I tried to track my mother down by calling her mobile, but she had switched it off.

  Eventually I was summoned to the desk and informed that Lorna had been admitted. Was she all right, I wanted to know, but they couldn't tell me how she was, just where she was. I should exit the waiting room, turn left through the car park, left again at the main entrance, then follow the signs. I was almost crying with frustration by the time I was led through a ward to a curtained-off corner, and it was nothing less than a miracle when the blue drape was drawn back to reveal my mother and my sister.

  “What happened?” I hugged my mother, then leaned over Lorna. Her red curls fanned out over the stark white of the pillow. There was a dressing on her forehead, her eyes were closed, and I could scarcely make out the rise and fall of her chest. I turned back in alarm to my mother, but she shook her head.

  “She's sleeping,” she said. “She'll be fine, they're keeping her in for observation because she lost consciousness.”

  “What happened?”

  My mother looked haggard. “She fell down the stairs.”

  I frowned my incomprehension.

  “Your father came to Lorna's flat,” my mother said in a voice that shook with emotion. “I opened the door and saw him there, and I don't remember what I said, but Lorna must have heard and thought I was in trouble. She came to the top of the stairs and she tripped and fell.”

  I winced.

  “She's broken two ribs and her right wrist,” my mother recited, “and she hit her head on the edge of the radiator by the door. She's had stitches just above her eye. There was so much blood, I thought she was dead.”

  I stared down at Lorna's still face. Her normal state looked animated by comparison.

  “What did he want?” I murmured, not expecting an answer. I turned away from Lorna and looked at my mother. “Did you shout at him or something? How did Lorna know anything was going on?”

  “I don't know … I don't think I shouted.” My mother sighed miserably.

  “I'm not blaming you,” I reassured her. “I'm just trying to understand how it happened.”

  She nodded. “I know. I suppose I must have raised my voice. I told him to go away. I think he was trying to tell me that he wanted to see Lorna. I suppose he raised his voice too. I told him Lorna didn't want to see him.”

  “What did he say to that?”

  “Oh … ‘You're wrong,’ something like that.”

  “Could Lorna have seen who was at the door?”

  “I doubt it. I was trying to push the door closed.”

  “But she'd have heard the sound of his voice.”

  “Well, it wouldn't have meant anything to her,” my mother said. “She hasn't heard his voice for thirty years. She hasn't seen him either, come to that.”

  I gazed at my sister. Lids lowered, lips pressed shut, she was the ultimate in inscrutability, but then she had been pretty inscrutable for years. Even before CFS hit there were always areas of her life that she refused to share, despite her enormous enjoyment of conversation and friendship. Maybe my stressed-out head was imagining things, but it seemed to me that Lorna's panicked reaction to the man at the door and his confrontation with Ma indicated that she knew exactly who was there.

  “What did he do when she fell?”

  “We were both … distraught because Lorna wouldn't come round. He asked me where the telephone was, and he called for an ambulance. Then I told him to go, and not to come back.”

  We both sat and contemplated Lorna, my mother in the regulation visitor's chair, one hand resting on her injured daughter's hand. I had propped myself uncomfortably against the edge of the bed. Through the window I could see the power station. I was too wired to sit playing guardian angel for long.

  “I'll get you a cup of coffee,” I told my mother, and slipped out between the curtains.

  A nurse pointed me past the reception desk into a bleak corridor, then I followed a sign toward a cafeteria. Better that, I thought, than prefabricated coffee from a machine. The cafeteria was closed, but I spied a vending machine a few yards beyond in the lobby. A gray-haired man in a raincoat was standing there feeding coins into the machine, and instinct made me stop well back and watch. There was something about his face. Was my mind playing tricks? He glanced toward me, then past me. So he did not know me. Or did not think he knew me. I hung back. He turned and went to the information desk. I heard him ask to use the phone for an internal call and I saw the clerk jerk his thumb at it, and then get up and wander off. At which point I walked quickly to stand behind the man. He dialed the operator, and asked to be put through to the ward where my sister was. Then he spoke to a nurse.

  “Could you let me know how Lorna Ballantyne is doing?
” he asked. There was a pause while he listened. “My name is Gilbert Ballantyne, I'm her father.” He replied to a question I could not hear.

  I stepped smartly backward, repelled. All my distrust of this man was revived by what had happened to Lorna.

  “I see, that's good, thank you,” he said. “Would you kindly pass on my best wishes for her recovery?” His voice was a revelation. Even as I moved away from him, shreds of memory resurfaced, splinters of the past, dimmed voices, arguments, my mother in tears. They threatened to disable me. He replaced the handset and moved away, toward the exit. I stared after him for a moment and then, not conscious of having made a decision, I began to follow him.

  I'd had no practice, of course. All I could do was follow as far behind as I dared and hope he didn't look around. The worst bit was through the echoing corridors of the hospital, then a residential street of terraces where we were the only two pedestrians. He must have been preoccupied. Preoccupied or deaf. Anyone else would have picked up on my footsteps, would have looked around anxiously, convinced they were not alone. For some reason my father did not.

  He turned left along High Street toward the underground, and I followed, relieved to be among the crowds of shoppers. I had been here before, pre-children, pre-Adam even, on a hot summer day. I remembered pausing to admire a cool white sari on a headless mannequin in a shop window, buying a mango from a fruit stall and sitting on the Common to eat it, its sticky pungent flesh making me thirstier still. Today, I kept my eyes fixed on that raincoat.

  Once I thought I had lost him. I came to a halt and gazed around until I spotted him in a newsagent's. I waited for him to emerge. The shop was busy, there was a queue at the cash desk. I watched my father approach the newsstand, watched him bend, reach out, pick up a copy of the Financial Times, watched him slip the pink broadsheet inside his raincoat, turn unhurriedly, and head for the door. For an instant, after he stepped back onto the street, I stood rooted to the spot. I had just watched my father steal a newspaper, and at the very least I expected someone to shout after him, but he proceeded down the street unchallenged.