Falling Off Air Read online

  “This isn't a slum,” I said through gritted teeth, “and they're not his children. Not anymore.”

  I eyed the twins who eyed me back. I could say these things now and they wouldn't question, wouldn't complain. How many years would that last? Jane was staring at me, eyebrows raised.

  “Adam gives me nothing because I want nothing from him,” I said, miserable because this was so obvious to me and because other people seemed to have such problems with it.

  “Of course, of course.” Jane was struggling, which isn't something you see every day. “I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking …”

  “Forget it.”

  It took Jane exactly five seconds to recover herself and forget it. Then she was back on the scent like a terrier.

  “So did you know her?”

  “I don't think so.” I knew it sounded ridiculous. Surely either you know someone or you don't. Only minutes before I had dismissed the thought that Paula Carmichael lived opposite me as fanciful, but now my mind was, of its own accord, presenting me with shreds of memory dug up from months back. Pushing the twins in their stroller one day in the summer, I'd passed a woman walking under the pigeon-infested bridge by the underground station, and I had nodded at her in recognition, only moments later realizing why I knew her face; that I had seen her on television and that she was Paula Carmichael. She had been hurrying, a briefcase in her hand, papers sticking out of it as though she had stuffed them in, and it had not occurred to me then that she was going home, or indeed that home was anywhere close at hand. This little person—she couldn't have been more than five foot two—seemed too small and insignificant to be the huge persona that Paula Carmichael had become. Even her hair, dark and untamed on television, seemed a graying brown in real life. I remember that I had looked around after her when I realized who she was, and that I had caught her doing the same thing, twisting to look back at me. Catching each other's eye, we had turned back quickly, embarrassed at ourselves. I knew why I had wanted a second look, but why in the name of God had she turned to look at me? I had been having a bad hair year, but did I really look so outlandish?

  A second memory, but out of kilter, a week or so before the first. In Sainsbury's, both children attempting to hurl themselves out of the stroller so they could roll in the aisles, me at my wits' end trying to juggle stroller and shopping basket. A woman wearing dark glasses, long graying hair pinned back from her face, clothes elegant but fraying, two large pepperoni pizzas in her basket. I thought at first that she was angry that we were blocking the aisle, but when I managed to haul the stroller out of the way for her she gave me a big sympathetic grin. “Been there, done that,” she said cheerfully, and I gazed after her, pleased and surprised by the camaraderie. I had not recognized her then, and I had not made the connection even when I later saw Paula Carmichael under the bridge, but now my subconscious made the leap.

  “I think I ran into her a couple of times,” I amended. As I spoke, William started to grunt and groan and fight the straps that held him in his chair. “But I hadn't realized she lived so close by.”

  William threw a bowl of cereal on the floor and Hannah burst into noisy tears for no good reason. They had been tolerant, but their goodwill had run out. My time was up and Jane knew it. She glowered at them.

  “Look, Jane, I'll think about the interview and give you a call,” I said.

  “Okay.” She didn't look happy, but there wasn't much she could do about it. She got up. The twins upped the volume another notch, and Jane had to shout, “There's one thing you should know, because you're not to bite my head off later. I'm getting Adam in to talk about her too.”

  “What the hell …?” But the twins and Jane all drowned me out.

  “He knew her quite well,” Jane spoke rapidly. Perhaps she thought that if she spoke fast enough I wouldn't hear what she was saying. “They worked on a program together a while ago. He'll be great about her, you know he will. If I ever die, I'll want Adam to do my eulogy, and he doesn't even like me. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know. It makes no difference to you. I'll keep a good distance between you.”

  I found myself shaking my head and caught sight of my reflection in the window, mouth pulled down at the corners, eyes narrowed. I sat down hard on a kitchen chair, looking blankly at Hannah, who was screeching in my face. Her big dark eyes, Adam's eyes, were round and angry.

  “I swear, Robin,” I could hear Jane saying, “you won't have to see him. I'm assuming you don't want to …”

  “Damned right,” I said. I felt as though another body had just slammed to earth at my feet.

  Chapter 3

  WITH Jane gone I picked the children up and peered out into the street through the plastic sheeting that was my window. The wind had dropped and the rain was no more than a mist, but everything looked as though it was in shock after the onslaught of the night before. Shrubs drooped under the weight of rain that had fallen on them, blossoms had been dashed from plants and trees by the wind, and the assorted fast-food wrappers that usually blew around on the pavement lay waterlogged in the gutters. A yellow and black ribbon defined the place where Paula Carmichael had fallen and what therefore might or might not be a crime scene. A single police car was parked outside the Carmichaels'. The house looked peaceful. There were a couple of lights on but no conspicuous movement inside. I wondered whether Richard Carmichael and his elder son were back home yet. How much digging would the police do inside the house before they satisfied themselves that Paula Carmichaels death was suicide?

  Photographers and reporters were already gathering. I counted around a dozen men and a couple of young women standing chatting in small groups. Jane was quick off the mark, but with a story like this every news organization would deploy its forces quickly and efficiently. I would become a prisoner in my own house if I stayed put. For a year I had hidden myself away in here, bonding so tightly with my children that we were almost an indivisible organism, breathing, sleeping, waking, emptying our bladders and our bowels in total synchrony. For a year I had been too tired to feel an adrenaline surge. Too tired to feel an anything surge in fact.

  But when a woman falls out of the sky in front of you it gives you a jolt. I felt electrified by the shock, as though part of my brain that was dead had been charged and regenerated. Disaster euphoria. It's an ugly concept, but, for all my disapproval, Jane's excitement was contagious. I had put my working life aside, I had put all my passions behind me, and I was so far exiled from the working world that I scarcely missed it, but this morning, Jane had paraded my previous existence in front of me, and I wanted it so badly I could scarcely breathe. I present it as a logical argument, and of course it all makes sense, cause and effect, but the truth is that that morning I just felt in my guts something that had been building up for months and was bursting out of me like a need for some narcotic. I had to get out of the house, and I had to get back to work.

  Standing there at the window, with the twins in my arms, my head was buzzing. I was chasing ten trains of thought in ten different directions. I tried to focus. I needed help. I needed a babysitter.

  I called my mother, who is a babysitter only in extremis. I called her mobile, because I never know whether she'll be at her house, or at my older sister's. Lorna has had chronic fatigue syndrome, or CFS, for almost two years now, and my mother spends two or three evenings a week with her, as well as running her own law practice in Streatham. Which is to say that my mother has enough on her plate. But she came because it was an emergency. Or that was how it felt.

  An hour later I closed my ears to the petulant squawks issuing from Hannah and gently disengaged myself from William, who had fastened his arms around my neck and his feet around my hips. I pecked my mother on her cheek and guiltily murmured my thanks. Then I walked out of the front door and pulled it shut behind me. There. It sounds so easy.

  Light as air, with no stroller to push, no babe in arms, I walked over to the black gloss door of number twelve, the only door that had been opened to me
the night before. I wasn't sure which of the three doorbells was the one I wanted, so I rang all three just as I had the night before. At the top of the house, a window screeched open and a woman leaned out in a dressing gown, hair unbrushed, face white with exhaustion. It was like looking in the mirror.

  “What is it?” She frowned down at me. “Do I know you?”

  “I'm looking for the man who opened the door to me last night, I—”

  “I don't know who you're talking about. I've got a sick child in here. He's been up all night,” she said in desperation. “Just go away.”

  The window was slammed shut. A child? I hadn't noticed a child going in and out all the time I'd lived here. I had learned more about my neighbors in the last twelve hours than I'd learned in the last year, but perhaps now wasn't the time to suggest a get-together.

  I didn't dare ring again. I looked at my watch. It was nine on a Wednesday morning and my man had probably left for work by seven. I dug a paper and pen from my bag, sat on the step and scribbled a note.

  To Whosoever Opened the Door Last Night,

  Thank you for helping. I'm sorry about the table. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I'll reimburse you for the damage. Just let me know how much I owe you.

  Robin Ballantyne, number 19

  I slipped it through the letter slot, glancing guiltily back at my house, where the small pile of wood in the front yard was all that was left of the table. Whatever sentimental value it held had been comprehensively bashed out of it. I just hoped it wasn't a priceless antique.

  I sweet-talked my way past Gayle and into Maeve's office, and Maeve was as surprised to see me as I was to be there. She looked up from her papers and her face broke into a smile.

  “Well, hello stranger. My God, Robin, what's brought you back to the land of the living? I hardly recognized you.”

  Which was a polite way of saying I looked a wreck. What had I been thinking of to make my office debut in yesterday's jeans? I hadn't washed my hair for three days now. Four perhaps. I tried to think back. Had I brushed my teeth before I left the house? Maeve had half-risen from her chair as if to come and kiss me, but I wasn't sure it was safe for her to come that close. I retreated and sank into the low leather chair in the corner, and she sat back down. She could scarcely see me across the top of her desk.

  “I e-mailed you a month ago to ask whether we could discuss my return to work,” I reminded her. Maeve is head of the Current Affairs department's Documentaries for Television division. Which makes her HCA(DTV), just one of an army of managers who run the Corporation's vast broadcasting empire. Day to day she has no hands-on program-making responsibilities, which is just as well since she has never made a television documentary in her life. Her responsibilities are primarily to oversee the commissioning process and to mastermind personnel. She is a bureaucrat born and bred, and seems to have an army of minibureaucrats working under her.

  “You did,” she agreed, her smile slipping. “You did indeed.” Her eyes ran over me, and I saw her take in the scuffed boots, the mysterious white stains on my jeans, the baggy sweater, the hair that hung limply around my makeup-free face. I wasn't what you'd call dirty, but I didn't exactly sparkle.

  “Do you feel ready to come back?” she asked, working to keep the doubt from her voice. “I'd hate to snatch a mother away from her little ones.” She made it sound like a cat snatching a mouse away from her litter.

  “Absolutely,” I was trying to sound professional. I was supposed to be a journalist, however, not part of the news, so something kept me from mentioning Paula Carmichael. “I'm sorry I'm a bit of a mess this morning. I was involved in an incident yesterday, and I spent most of the night giving a statement to the police.”

  “Oh dear.” If anything she looked more concerned now, as though perhaps she thought I was hallucinating from lack of sleep.

  Maeve is used to vanquishing government spin doctors and hysterical program editors with a flick of her whiplike tongue, but I was problematic. I could sense it in the way her manicured forefinger was rubbing at her lower lip.

  “Well we're all dying to have you back on board,” she said, her eyes not quite meeting mine. “Terry never stops talking about you.”

  Good old Terry—my biggest fan, also my immediate boss, which helps, but a mere handservant to Maeve.

  “How do you see yourself fitting back in?” she persevered. I could tell that the question was just a way of killing time while she worked out a way to get me off her back.

  “I just want to make programs again,” I said. “I'll find a way to make things fit.”

  Maeve stuck out her jaw and nodded slowly. She'd been hoping for a longer answer.

  “Of course, of course, it's what you're best at. It's what you win awards for.” She gave a little smile, then heaved a sigh and looked me in the eye for the first time. “Well we'll see what we can do, Robin, but I have to be honest, we're implementing some stringent streamlining measures here.”

  “You're cutting editorial jobs?”

  “We're,” she hesitated, “losing people. Mostly through natural wastage. You've been away, you probably haven't heard …”

  “I'm guaranteed a job on return from maternity leave.” I gritted my teeth.

  She nodded again, and this time she didn't even try to cover her discomfiture with the words. Then her face brightened.

  “Have you thought of a move sideways?”

  “Sideways?”

  “Well sideways and upwards actually. I mean into a more managerial role?”

  I would have laughed if a heavy hand hadn't grabbed at my heart.

  “The reason I ask,” she pressed on, “is that we've just advertised for an EGIE.”

  “For a what?”

  “An ethical guidelines implementation editor,” she spelled out for me, as though I were a particularly thick child. “It's a new post.”

  I still didn't know what she meant.

  “Someone who checks that programs are being made ethically,” she explained wearily. “You know, Robin, that we're doing all the things we should be doing, and not doing the things we shouldn't. That we—and the independents we commission—are all sticking to the Corporation guidelines, broadcasting with integrity. You'd be perfect for it.”

  I put my head on one side.

  “Why the sudden concern?” I asked.

  “Robin, where have you been? Read the papers. The world moves on. The media are constantly under fire for infringing some journalistic principle or other, and we've got to be seen to respond.”

  The accusation that I was out of touch was unfair. I spent my days with the radio for company, and my evenings with the newspapers. Radio and print reported on the goings-on in television as if it were an unruly younger sister: a scene staged here, an actor hired for reality TV there. Radio and newspaper journalism aren't immune, of course. One person and his mouth are enough to give birth to a lie. You don't need technology, but somehow with more technology and the multiplication of media, there's simply more to play with, and while playing is not usually good journalism, it often makes for a good story. The Corporation had so far escaped scandal, but its own managers were paranoid that they, or someone they employed, would be caught out. Journalism operates on trust. The reader trusts the journalist, and the employer trusts the journalist. However, managers aren't naturally disposed to trust. Which of us is? They know every contract gets broken. Sometimes they even encourage it.

  “Cover our back, you mean.”

  Maeve pinched her lips together and refused to rise to the bait.

  “You've heard about Paula Carmichael's death, I suppose?” she said, making a leap I couldn't follow. “Or has that managed to pass you by too in your domestic idyll? Look, I've got a meeting and I'm already late. Go away and enlighten yourself, so that at the very least you know what I'm talking about. Then come back to me next week and let me know if you want it, and I'll see if I can swing it for you.”

  Maeve stood up and whisked a
briefcase from beside her desk, dropped a floppy disk into it, snapped it shut, and made for the door. I got to my feet, wondering how I'd ended up in this particular mess.

  “But for God's sake, Robin, get a haircut. There's a limit to what I can swing.” She paused again, remembered what she was supposed to say, then added sweetly, “Did you bring any photos of the little ones?”

  I shook my head. I'd never been this far from them before, never needed to consult a photograph.

  I headed straight for the bathroom and spent long minutes looking in the mirror. There were days I didn't look in the mirror from the time I got up in the morning to when I dropped into bed at night. I mean of course I washed when I had the time, but the finer points of grooming had sunk to the bottom of my list of priorities and it showed. I had never plastered myself in makeup but even I had to agree that I needed something to counteract the deathlike pallor of my skin, something to disguise the bags under my green eyes, something to give my lips a little life. And then there was the hair. It made my scalp prickle just to look at it. I combed some water in with my fingers and tried to push it into shape, any shape. I splashed cold water on my face and rubbed it dry with a paper hand towel in an effort to produce some color. I stared hard in the mirror again, but all I could see was a thin shabby woman with lank red hair and a blotchy face.

  “What a loser,” I said aloud to my reflection.

  Behind me a toilet flushed and a door banged open. A woman emerged from the stalls and came to wash her hands at the basin. She was wearing black, well-cut trousers and a tailored jacket over a clingy purple T-shirt with a gold chain at her neck. Her hair was highlighted blond, cut close to her head. She ignored me, gave herself a brief, approving glance in the mirror while she dried her hands, then strode out, her heels clattering in a businesslike fashion on the tiled floor.

  I went to find Jane, skulking through the hushed corridors in case I ran into old colleagues. When I found her, I saw it in her eyes too. It was beginning to piss me off.