Catch Me When I Fall

by Nicci French

  So I got out of the train, went up the escalators and out into a grey, drizzly morning. I thought of Charlie lying in bed and wondered if he had any work to do. I decided I ought to phone him. I reached into my bag but couldn’t find my mobile. I couldn’t find it when I got to the office either. I tried to remember when I had last used it and couldn’t. On the previous day I’d used the office phone. So either it was at home or I’d dropped it somewhere, most probably on my lost evening. It might have been stolen by now, but perhaps a normal human being had picked it up. I’ve spent my life breaking and losing things. I don’t think I’ve ever owned an umbrella for longer than a week. Everything – purses, sunglasses, keys, hats, anything that isn’t permanently buttoned or fastened to my body – I’ve left around the world. That’s a good thing about a mobile phone. You can’t call up sunglasses and ask where they are. I dialled my own number and after a couple of rings a man answered. ‘You’ve got my phone,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t steal it,’ said the voice, then laughed as if it was a big joke.

  ‘I’ll take your word for it,’ I said. ‘I think I left it in a pub or club in Soho.’

  ‘A pub or club?’

  ‘I’m not very good on names,’ I said. ‘It might have been a pub on Wardour Street or… there’s a club round the corner from there, one called the something house…’

  ‘The Red House.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘It was there, then. I’m so sorry. I leave it everywhere. I was wondering if there’s any way you could get it to me. I could send a messenger.’

  ‘Where do you work?’

  ‘Soho.’

  ‘I’m in the Strand. I’ll drop it by at lunchtime.’

  ‘That would be fantastic.’

  ‘It would be my pleasure.’

  ‘Have you got it with you? Sorry. That’s a very stupid question. Obviously you have it with you.’

  ‘I was trying to think what to do with it.’

  ‘Well, you can stop now.’

  I named a cafe´ in Dean Street, one o’clock, and put the phone down, then plunged into my day as if I had held my nose and jumped into a foaming torrent. I’d written a ‘to do’ list that covered two sheets of paper. It was a mixture of calls to be made, messages to be written, meetings to be held, arrangements to be made, decisions to be taken, ideas to be had. It was like a malignant alien creature in an old science-fiction film. The more you chopped bits off, the larger and more aggressive it became. I didn’t have time to think or feel. All I did was respond to the immediate stimulus in front of me, deal with it and push it behind me. Things came in and out of my field of attention. Most notably there was Meg. Together we would talk and make quick decisions. Full cups of coffee were pushed in front of me and empty ones taken away. I ate mouthfuls of food without knowing what they were. Then I looked up and saw it was ten past one. I glanced around me, dazed. I barely knew where I was. My list was obliterated under a series of arrows, scrawled notes and crossings-out. My desk was clear, spiritually, if not in actuality. Everything was in a file or somebody else’s problem. I gathered what remained into a pile and pushed it into my locker. I shouted to Meg that I would be back in a minute. Meg called a response, but I couldn’t hear it as I clattered down the stairs.

  I saw him as soon as I entered the cafe´. He was a big man, solid. His jacket was hung over the back of his chair and he’d rolled up his shirtsleeves. He had thick dark hair combed carefully backwards. A mobile phone lay on the table in front of him. ‘My phone, I presume,’ I said glibly.

  He stood up, smiled and held out his hand, but when I took it he didn’t let it go at once, squeezing my fingers between his.

  ‘Hello, Holly,’ he said. ‘My beautiful Holly.’

  The knowledge crawled into my brain like a small insect. I could almost feel it making its way to the front of my consciousness. Oh no, I thought. Not this. Please. I thought of picking up the phone and making a dash for it, but my body felt heavy and leaden. You can run but you can’t hide. That was what my father used to shout when he played tag with me in the park near our house. It used to make me feel scared even then. I pulled my hand from his.

  ‘Just as beautiful in the light,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t… I can’t…’

  ‘Don’t be sorry.’

  ‘I mean, it was a stupid mistake.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ he said with a smile. ‘It’s Rees, by the way. In case you don’t remember.’

  ‘I don’t want to remember. I was drunk. That’s all.’

  ‘You were wild.’

  ‘I’m going now.’

  ‘No, you’re not.’

  I put out my hand for the phone but he grasped me tightly by the wrist and wrenched me towards him. ‘Let go.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you don’t want it again. Not after our night together.’

  ‘Let go,’ I said, more firmly.

  ‘You wanted it then, just as much as I did. You said–’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Married, are you?’ he said, twisting my wrist so that my ring showed. ‘Who to? Which poor sod? Let me see, is it David, or Connor or Fred or Charlie or Wesley? Ah, Charlie, is it?’

  ‘Take your hand off me, you creep.’

  ‘I’ve got his number safely on my phone anyway. And some others.’

  I made myself look him in the eyes and the thought of him and what we’d done caused a wave of nausea to ripple through me. ‘Don’t be pathetic,’ I said. ‘Just let this go.’

  ‘And I’ve got your knickers. Remember? Lacy black things.’

  There was a red mist in front of my eyes. I jerked at my wrist but he held me firmly, fingers digging into my flesh. ‘What?’ I said. ‘If you think you can blackmail me, you’re even more stupid than you look.’

  ‘Yeah?’ he said. ‘If you think you can just walk out of this door and pretend it didn’t happen, then…’

  He didn’t finish the sentence. I drew back the hand he wasn’t holding and slapped his cheek as hard as I could, leaving the stinging red marks of my fingers to fade slowly.

  ‘You little bitch,’ he gasped.

  ‘Excuse me, but if you’re going to do that,’ said a voice behind us, ‘take it outside.’

  ‘I’m going right now,’ I said. ‘And you’d better stay out of my way.’

  ‘You’re asking for trouble,’ he shouted, as I left. ‘And I swear you’ll get it. You’re fucked, you are.’

  6

  I walked around the area for an hour. Lunch was a nectarine I bought in the market. Even so, when I got back to the office I was still steaming. I was so angry with that man and so bitterly, contemptuously angry with myself and so humiliated and upset that I was in my own hot emotional fog. I stumbled into our so-called conference room and found Meg and Trish having a muttered conversation. Meg looked round at me and seemed embarrassed, as if I’d caught her doing something she shouldn’t.

  ‘I had a word with Deborah,’ she said, ‘about the various problems we’ve been having.’

  ‘Deborah?’ I said. ‘I thought she was at the conference.’

  ‘She left early,’ said Trish. ‘She just got in.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘We raised some of the concerns with her. We wanted to hear her side of the story. She admitted that she had got behind. She hadn’t wanted to tell us about it because it was Lola’s fault.’

  ‘What?’

  Lola had joined us only a couple of months before. She was young and eager. She was learning fast but her responsibilities didn’t extend much beyond making coffee and carrying files around.

  ‘She was trying to involve her in the Cook account.’

  Trish embarked on a complicated story of what was supposed to have gone wrong but I interrupted her.

  ‘No, no, no,’ I said. ‘That’s rubbish. Leave this to me. I’m going to talk to Deborah myself. Ask her to come and see me in five minutes, will you, Trish? I need to make a
call first.’

  Even now I could see Deborah as Meg and I had seen her when we had first interviewed her a few months earlier. She was tall, immaculately groomed and had an air of complete confidence. It had almost felt as if she was the one conducting the interview. If we hadn’t exactly warmed to her, well, that was part of the point. We weren’t looking for a new best friend. We wanted someone hard-working, efficient and generally formidable. Deborah looked all of that as soon as she walked though the door. Her reference had been a bit odd. It was clear she had fallen out with her previous employer, but even that didn’t worry us. Especially me. I liked the idea of employing someone abrasive. I told Meg we needed a bad cop in the office. We already had enough good ones. The problem was that she was meant to be a bad cop to other people, not to us.

  When she came into the conference room, she was looking as impressive as ever.

  ‘How was Roehampton?’ I asked.

  ‘It was all right,’ she said.

  ‘Anything stand out?’

  She gave a shrug. ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I left early.’

  ‘Oh, stop this,’ I said. ‘I just rang Jo Palmer, who happens to be running the conference. You never even signed on.’

  I have to admit that I was impressed by the aplomb with which Deborah responded to being caught out. She looked puzzled and slightly hurt. ‘Have you been spying on me?’ she said.

  ‘That’s my job,’ I said. ‘I run this company.’

  ‘I went to the conference,’ she said. ‘Maybe I forgot to pick up my badge.’

  But I had my file with me. I opened it and laid out in front of her the photocopies I had made, like an unbeatable poker hand.

  ‘What’s this?’ she said.

  ‘You know what it is,’ I said. ‘We talked about what to do about you and I had a moment of weakness where I thought we could let you off with a warning. But then you tried to put the blame on Lola. What was that about?’

  ‘She’s inexperienced,’ Deborah said. ‘I’ve been covering for her.’

  ‘Are you insane?’ I said. ‘Do you never give up? Look at these pieces of paper. You’ve been lying. You’ve been defrauding the company.’

  She looked at me, unshaken. ‘I’m good at my job,’ she said. ‘You know that.’

  ‘You’re fired,’ I said. I looked at my watch. I couldn’t remember the date. I couldn’t even remember the time of year. Leaves were falling, weren’t they? ‘We’ll pay you until the end of the month. But I want you out of the office.’

  There was a long pause. I had her attention now.

  ‘You can’t do this,’ she said. ‘I left a good job to come here. I’ve got a flat. I’ve got a mortgage.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘You’re good at your job. I don’t know what’s gone wrong. You clearly can’t carry on here. But I wonder if you need some help…’

  Deborah pulled a face as if there was suddenly a terrible smell in the room. ‘Don’t patronize me, you stuck up…’ She paused as if she was unable to find a word bad enough for what I was. ‘They don’t like you, you know. You think you’re brilliant, dashing around, being crazy and dipsy and winning people over, but you don’t fool us. You’re pathetic, really. You’re a fake.’

  I took a deep breath and made myself speak quietly and slowly. ‘You’d better leave now,’ I said.

  She laughed. ‘You think you’re so fucking clever,’ she said. ‘One day someone’s going to do something to that stuck-up little face of yours.’

  I couldn’t stop myself smiling. ‘Are you threatening me, Deborah?’

  She stood up and there was a fierce glow in her eyes. ‘You think everybody will just lie down for you, that’s what you think. One day someone will get back up and then you’ll see. It’ll just take one.’

  She left like a small hurricane, sweeping through the office. When she was gone, I walked down to Old Compton Street. There’s a particular cream cake they make in the patisserie: it’s got this very light pastry on top, it’s really one of the great creations of the Western world. I bought ten, one for everybody in the office, and ten cappuccinos. I took them back to the office. Trish and Meg looked a bit shellshocked. I walked over to them. ‘You think I did the wrong thing?’

  They looked at each other.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Meg. ‘It was complicated.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t,’ I said.

  I called everybody together. I talked very briefly about the problems in the office and how it was important for all of us to talk to each other when things were going wrong, but this inspirational sermon segued into a tribute to the cream cakes and within a couple of minutes everybody’s nose was deep into them and it looked like a toddler’s birthday party.

  Forty-five minutes later, Meg and I were driving out of London. Meg was reading the map with great precision and I was driving too quickly. We were on our way to inspect the venue for the weekend event. ‘Venue’ makes it sound formal and bland, like a modern hotel with identical bedrooms, well-stocked and over-priced mini-bars, a dinky gym where businessmen sit on rowing machines for fifteen minutes before their nine o’clock meeting, and conference facilities. It wasn’t. It was a semi-converted water-mill in Oxfordshire, covered with Virginia creeper. As well as the stream running through it, there was a small duckweedy lake at the end of the tangled stretch of land, a dozen or so higgledy-piggledy bedrooms with the suspicion of damp under the wallpaper. It was perfect: trees for adults to climb; water for them to fall into; a long, shuttered dining room where they’d have to sit round a single table together in the evenings, no other building for miles and miles. It had been bought recently by friends of friends of Meg, who wanted to get away from their stressed life in London and were now discovering what real stress was, among the cowpats, under the dripping trees.

  ‘This feels good,’ I said. ‘It reminds me of when it was just you and me.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Meg, with a hollow laugh. ‘Those were the days.’ There was a pause. I thought she was looking at the map. ‘I suppose it’s all right. About Deborah. I mean, I hope she won’t sue us.’

  ‘I hope she will,’ I said. ‘We’ll show her.’

  Meg just coughed.

  London feels like a different city according to which way you leave it. When you head towards Oxford, it seems to dribble on and on and then you blink and everything’s green. Water sprayed up from the wheels of cars as the rain, which had been threatening all morning, started to fall at last. I turned on the windscreen wipers and, through the arcs swept clear with each stroke, saw a grey, sodden, empty landscape. I turned on the radio, jabbed at buttons, jumping between stations, then gave up and turned it off again.

  Corinne and Richard were waiting. They’d lit a fire in the large sitting room, and made a pot of coffee. Corinne handed round a plate of little sponge cakes with raspberries on top and I devoured two, one after the other, my cheeks bulging like a hamster’s. I stretched out my legs to feel the warmth of the flames and sighed. The stream gushed and burbled outside, and when the sun came out from the heavy clouds it threw weak beams of light over the wooden floor.

  ‘Maybe I should do it,’ I said.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Run away from London.’

  ‘I wouldn’t call this running away, exactly.’

  ‘Escape,’ I said dreamily. ‘Begin afflict.’

  ‘What? Afflict?’

  ‘Begin afresh,’ I corrected myself. My eyelids were dragging down, so I snapped them open, sat up straighter, gulped my good, strong coffee, listened to the rain on the windowpanes. The garden outside was damp green; on Saturday, seven men and five women would be playing games out there.

  ‘Right,’ I said, reaching for the last cake. ‘To work.’

  We went to the bedrooms first: fine, except that a fire blanket and mini-extinguisher were needed on the top landing. Then we visited the kitchen, which had a blissful half-sized door that opened on to the gushing stream.

  ‘Is this safe?�
� asked Meg, always the practical one.

  ‘We’re not opening a crèche here,’ I said.

  ‘We keep it locked,’ said Richard. ‘It’s an architectural feature.’

  With some difficulty, I drew back the heavy set of bolts, pushed open the little hatch, and pushed my head out. Flicks of water stung my cheek and the wind whipped my hair across my face. I sighed and closed my eyes.

  ‘Holly?’

  ‘Mmmm. Coming.’

  I pulled my head in, shut the door.

  ‘Do you want to discuss the food for Saturday evening?’

  ‘I’m sure it’s fine.’

  ‘I’ve done a menu for lunch, and breakfast on Sunday and made a list of ingredients that are available for them to use in the curry you want them to cook, so if you care to look at it and–’

  ‘I’m sure it’s fine,’ I repeated.

  ‘Oh.’ Corinne looked taken aback, but she rallied brightly. ‘Then there’s the drink.’

  ‘I trust you completely.’

  ‘But–’

  ‘Just make sure that there’s more than you think necessary, then double it. Let’s go and have a look outside.’

  ‘Do you want to borrow some boots? The grass is still wet.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  Meg and I walked past the stream, through what must once have been a vegetable garden and over the spongy ground towards the lake. It was gorgeously dank and green. I picked up a stone and threw it into the water, watching how the duckweed closed over it immediately, leaving no trace. We looked at each other and giggled.

  ‘I’m looking forward to seeing them fall off their raft into that,’ I said.