Falling Off Air Read online

  There was a time when I was jealous of Lorna. She was a bossy older sister, overzealous at school but still the most popular girl in the class, excelling at hockey and tennis. When she was seventeen I was fourteen, bookish and arty and hopeless at sports. I looked on bewildered as my girlfriends fought for the favor of a smile from Lorna and the boys followed her around like puppies. From there she disappeared to Cambridge, and the stories of her achievements both academic and otherwise came to me secondhand. There was no way I could even hope to step into her shoes at school, but at least I could get on with my life outside the shadow cast by her sun.

  Now Lorna has chronic fatigue syndrome. Even medical experts refer to it as an illness “of ambiguous status and uncertain cause.” They fight a fierce clan war over its name. It's also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis, chronic Epstein-Barr, and atypical poliomyelitis, even yuppie flu—which, if it wasn't so derogatory, sort of fitted Lorna. Cambridge led to a fast-track career in merchant banking, and now she had the money to move on from hockey to more exotic activities. It was on a cycling holiday in Nepal that the trouble started. A day into the expedition she was struck down by a fever, some mysterious virus never identified, but quite probably something she had picked up in Britain before she left. She spent two days on her camp bed in a tent, forcing the fever down with Panadol, then tried to plow on. It wasn't like her to admit defeat, although it is true that until then most things in her life had come with relative ease. Anyway, this time she found herself unable to continue. She returned home and was adamant that this was just a temporary setback.

  The exhaustion that she insisted would not last long went on for months. A year later, one day after she resigned from her job, she was diagnosed with CFS.

  No one could tell us why it had happened. Lorna's case did not fit any one of the medical models perfectly. It is possible that CFS involves a link between physical and psychological factors, but the nature of that link, if it exists at all, is still a matter for speculation. CFS affects all socioeconomic and ethnic groups, we were told, is more common in women than men, with a typical onset between the ages of twenty and forty. All of which meant little to Lorna, who at the worst of it was tortured by sleeplessness, an excruciating sensitivity to noise, and was racked by muscle pain. She would try to get out of bed and get only as far as the door before collapsing.

  There is no cure, and we don't know if or when it will go. Experts have difficulty with any sort of prognosis because there have been few long-term studies. However, Lorna is better than she was, her progress marked in small steps back toward independence. She has a tendency to rush at things, so when she does feel better she pushes herself to the limit, and then profound exhaustion overwhelms her again. Still, her progress, even if she takes one step backward for every two forward, gives us hope that one day this strange affliction will leave her altogether.

  I put the tray down and bent to kiss Lorna's forehead. Her huge green eyes looked up at me. They smiled that sad dark smile that had been hers since the dazzle left her. Those eyes haunted me.

  I busied myself drawing the curtains. When she was tired like this, she had no energy to do anything for herself. It was already dark outside and God knows it would depress even the happiest soul to stare out into the night for hours on end. She hauled herself into a sitting position, and I fixed the table over her so that she could eat comfortably. She began to pick at her food and I sat down in the armchair next to her bed.

  I tried to make a couple of visits a week. It tended to be in the evening, by which time she was usually exhausted. I would sit with her for a while, not saying much—chatter tires her at the end of the day—but it would be companionable all the same. Since the birth of the twins I had often come frazzled into this room, near the end of my tether. Despite the awfulness of Lorna's condition the enforced tranquillity had given me a few moments of respite. Once I had dozed off in that armchair and my mother had come to find me an hour later, only to discover me fast asleep and Lorna lying in bed watching over me.

  Tonight, though, I couldn't get ahold of the tranquillity. I was frustrated. I wanted the old talkative Lorna back, not this silence. I wanted the Lorna who would regale me with her victories, and who would listen to my troubles with at least an attempt at sympathy, then make me laugh, felling me with some hilarious observation that was always spot on. Today there were things I'd have liked to get off my chest, like how it feels to watch someone plunge to their death, and how grotty I felt about doing Jane's television interview, but depression hovers over Lorna. It has lifted somewhat with the improvement in her symptoms, but nevertheless suicide didn't seem to be a good late-night topic of conversation. What I had to say was not calculated to soothe, so I kept quiet. Nevertheless, Lorna seemed to have sensed that something was wrong. She had stopped eating and was looking at me.

  It nearly burst out of me then. The words were there waiting, a mouthful of poison ready to be spewed. For God's sake, snap out of it, Lorna. Pull yourself together!

  I bit it back.

  “I'll see you later, my food's getting cold,” I muttered, standing and leaning over to kiss her again. Then I made for the door. I felt the full force of Lorna's eyes on my back. Lorna's my big sister and I've always been scared of her.

  My mother was in Lorna's lilac and walnut sitting room with a tray on her lap. Her face was long and strained and I assumed she was worrying about Lorna.

  “How's she doing?” I asked.

  Ma heaved a breath, as if I'd dragged her away from some other train of thought. She pulled a face.

  “Oh, not bad at all,” she said, “but she wipes herself out. She did a little exercise this morning, and she spent all afternoon on the Internet.”

  “She must know more about this disease than her doctor.”

  “On the contrary,” Ma gave a strained smile, “she's educated him very well, and I'm sure most of her time on the Net is spent educating other people.”

  “Strange how she manages to be as bossy as ever,” I commented drily.

  It was Lorna who had insisted that she would continue to live in her own home, a flat in an Edwardian terrace that she had had expensively renovated in the months before she became ill. The flat is ideal because it is close to me, and to Ma, and to our baby sister, Tanya, but not so ideal because it is a first-floor flat with a steep staircase down to the front door. For a long time she simply didn't go out. More recently she's ventured down on Ma's arm and into the street. One day they went for a drive to Richmond Park, another day to a coffee shop. Lorna does her supermarket shopping on the Internet. She has part-time home help. Lorna wants, I know, to think she is still being independent, but Ma spends at least three evenings a week there so that Lorna doesn't feel isolated. Tanya moves heaven and earth to leave her three children with her husband, Patrick, and sit with Lorna twice a week. I was pretty useless because Lorna couldn't take the noise of the twins for more than a few minutes at a time and I had no one to dump them on. Except, of course, for my mother or Tanya. Which brought us back to square one.

  “She's got an acupuncturist coming tomorrow to take a look at her,” Ma said.

  I caught her eye and we both broke into broad grins. Ma was full of scorn for alternative medicine. She waved an arm expansively.

  “Next week it's a cauldron and some frogs, what the hell. If she wants to try it, that's fine by me.” She laughed, shaking her head, blinking back tears. Anything Lorna wanted had always been fine by Ma. She was Ma's golden daughter, her delight, the success plucked from the disaster of her broken marriage. Lorna had not always returned the devotion. As a teenager she found Ma's intensity irritating. She'd rejected her advice whenever it was offered, and never asked for help. I often wondered how she felt now, with Ma ministering to her every need.

  I tucked into my food. I was ravenous. My mother and I are regulars at the Haweli around the corner from Lorna. We know the menu back to front. It's my version of a social life, to have takeout, put the children t
o bed and sit in front of ER with my mother, like an old married couple. Sometimes it unnerves me when I think of the two of us, both single independent women yet dependent on each other for company, my face an echo of my mother's thirty years ago. It's like looking into my own future and seeing the loneliness stretching forever.

  “Prefer the masala,” I commented between mouthfuls.

  “Hmm.” Ma still didn't seem to have her mind on the food, and she spoke very quietly. “I can't … Have you spoken to Tanya?”

  I shook my head. “She left a message last night, but I haven't got back to her.”

  “I know. I saw her last night after she'd tried calling you.” Ma paused to sigh again. I'd stopped eating now and was watching her. She looked suddenly older, her face creased along lines of worry that I had not seen, even with Lorna's illness, for years.

  “She was quite upset. Apparently your father turned up on her doorstep and invited himself in.”

  We stared at each other.

  “My father?” I echoed. Ma shrugged her shoulders at me, as if to say she couldn't help it, it was nothing to do with her. “I thought he was dead,” I said. Which wasn't strictly true, but he had vanished so comprehensively from my life when I was four that he might as well have been.

  “Evidently not.” Her voice was stretched thin, barely under control. “Tanya sent him packing, but she thinks he'll be back, and she wanted to warn you in case he tries to contact you. He asked her for money.”

  I snorted.

  “Talk about being out of touch … Can she be sure it's him? I mean, where's he been all this time? And how did he find Ta”

  Ma stood up abruptly, her face sagging.

  “I don't know and I don't want to know,” she snapped. “I'm telling you in order to warn you, nothing more. As far as I'm concerned he has been dead for thirty-odd years. All three of you know that your father is not to be trusted. He's a crook and a con man and my greatest regret is that I ever had anything to do with him.”

  I sat there, gazing after her, stunned as much by my mother's outburst as by my father rising from the dead. My mother disliked anger, feared its unpredictability. In us, she had always counseled repression. “Just put it aside,” she'd advised in every crisis, and we all knew she told herself the same thing.

  I looked down at my plate. The curry was cold, fat congealing around the edges of my plate. I felt sick with apprehension and excitement. My father had been purged from our lives, all talk of him was taboo. I had dredged through my memories time and again to find a face in my memory, a voice, anything. I had found almost nothing. Now I would meet him.

  Chapter 5

  THE damp weather had cleared and the heat of the sun was direct. The carpet of flowers outside the Carmichael house was still soggy from the rain, and condolence cards had been mashed into the pavement. Now the whole sodden mess would be cooked. There was a police officer stationed outside the house looking uneasily at the grunge at his feet. He kicked a couple of rotting bouquets into the gutter and then, after a moment, he bent to pick up a fresher bunch of lilies and place them in the relative shelter of the doorway. I found a note shoved into my letter box.

  Robin,

  Don't worry about the table. It belongs to the landlord. I'll stick something else there and with any luck he won't notice it's gone. If it was worth a fortune I'll fake a robbery and he can claim it on the insurance. You might want to chuck away the remains.

  Pretty foul introduction the other night. Hope to meet again in better circumstances.

  Dan

  I smiled, turned the scrap of paper over. It was a dry cleaning receipt. Two suits, six shirts. The name at the top was Dan Stein. I put the note in my pocket. I liked the idea of a neighbor with a sense of humor.

  When D.C. Mann rang to ask me to come to the station, I couldn't bring myself to ask her whether she doubled as a babysitter. Nor could I ask my mother again, so I dropped the children off with Tanya. My sister and Patrick are both nurses, and they work shifts at the hospital. Tanya was still in her nightgown when she opened the door to me, and her hair was standing on end.

  “Shouldn't you be asleep?” I said guiltily.

  “I just got the girls off to school. I'm going back to bed for a couple of hours,” she said, holding out her arms for the twins, “but Patrick will look after them until I get up. Then he has to get going.”

  Patrick appeared behind her, pulling on a sweatshirt over jeans.

  “Hand them over,” he said. “I'll knock them into shape.” Tanya handed William to her husband and Patrick started to tickle him.

  “You look like you should be in bed too,” I said over William's squeals of delight.

  “Nah, I've had my six hours, it's Tan's turn. I'm fine.”

  With three girls and a perpetually empty bank account Tanya's life was a complicated one. Whatever arrangements she and Patrick made usually worked simply because there was no space for them not to work. How the two of them ever got to see each other with their head-to-toe schedules I couldn't work out, but perhaps that was the secret of their success. I was two years older than Tanya and in the past I'd maintained a somewhat superior attitude to her. She wasn't as ambitious as I had been. She had allowed herself to get distracted by hearth and home. Now I just felt humbled by her. She was so much better at the whole thing than I was.

  “I heard about your visitor,” I told her as Patrick retreated into the house with William.

  “Nerve of the man,” she muttered. “I'll tell you all about it later. Off you go. Tell the nice policeman you didn't do it.”

  Which I thought was a joke, until I met Finney, the police officer who had stood by and let Richard Carmichael rave: the same gray suit, the dark hair still unbrushed, the same cool, watchful eyes, and, most powerfully, what the television had not begun to convey, the sense of restless energy and intelligence that washed over the room the moment he walked in.

  He walked with a slight professorial stoop. There were gray strands in his hair, his trousers were perhaps an inch too short. A badly knotted tie veered violently off course exposing a missing button on his shirt that in turn revealed a patch of white skin and dark hair. If you had asked me right then whether I was intimidated, I'd have said I tended to be intimidated only by people who were capable of dressing themselves in the morning. He must have been about the same age as me, and I wasn't about to defer to him.

  “Good morning, sir,” D.C. Mann said, standing. She didn't seem frightened of him, but she did seem alert, as though she was waiting for something.

  Finney flashed her a smile that transformed his face and nearly floored D.C. Mann. The smile jolted me too, just on rebound. That, I thought, was what she had been waiting for. By the time he turned his attention to me the smile might never have been. Grave-faced, he introduced himself, pulled out a chair on the other side of the desk, flopped into it, and then said in a voice that was almost a drawl, “I saw you on the telly last night.”

  I felt I should defend myself, but I had done nothing wrong. I nodded.

  “The word ‘confidentiality’ mean anything to you?” Finney asked mildly. I saw D.C. Mann wince.

  “I said on television exactly the same as I said to D.C. Mann. How can that influence your inquiry?”

  “I hate television,” Finney growled. I remembered the door to the Carmichael house that Finney had slammed in the face of the journalist. Our eyes locked. Challenge and counter-challenge passed silently between us like an electric charge. Television was my life, or had been. This was a declaration of war, and I savored it.

  “You can never tell what's true and what's lies,” Finney complained, dragging his eyes from mine. “Don't you think, D.C. Mann?”

  Mann agreed, lowering her head, her eyes on him.

  “Television is man-made.” Automatically I parroted what I said to others in my life who were critical of what I do. “It can lie, it can tell the truth, just like the people who make it. Often it falls somewhere between the two, but i
n many cases it may reveal a different truth.”

  Finney gazed at me. I wished I'd kept my mouth shut.

  “Well, here we have a bit of a problem with a different truth.” His voice dwelled with contempt on those last two words. Then he glanced at his notes. “On television you made no mention of the voices you heard shouting yesterday evening, but you told D.C. Mann that you heard an argument just before you saw Paula Carmichael fall. Can you explain that?”

  “I wasn't asked about the arguments in the television interview,” I said. “You know as well as I do how these things work; it's just intended to be a sixty-second snapshot, not an exhaustive investigation.”

  “Really,” Finney said sarcastically. “Useful to know how these media techniques work, but I'm more interested in the voices you heard.”

  “I told D.C. Mann very clearly last night that I was not sure whether or not I heard voices before I saw Paula Carmichael fall. I wasn't sure then, and I'm still not sure.”

  Finney raised his eyebrows, looked interrogatively at Mann.

  “That's right,” she said, looking uncertainly first at him then at me, as though she was unsettled by our skirmish and not sure which side she should be taking. “I tried to make that clear in the statement. There were two different incidents. Loud voices earlier in the evening that everyone heard, and then Miss Ballantyne looking out of the window and thinking she may have heard someone shouting around the time Paula Carmichael fell.”

  Finney bent his head over my statement again.

  “That's not as clear as it might be,” he grumbled.

  “Sorry, sir,” Mann muttered.