After the Fall (2 page)

‘Whoops! You’re going to spill that.’ She takes the mug from me, resting it on a stainless-steel trolley. ‘What a horrible thing to happen. He’s getting the best possible care, that’s the main thing.’

Then she asks the question. She’s the first, but I know she won’t be the last.

‘How did he come to fall?’

Honesty is the best policy!
hisses Mum, right in my ear. Makes me jump. She’s long dead, my mother, but that doesn’t stop her and her clichés. Don’t misunderstand me; I’m not having auditory hallucinations, nor—so far as I know—am I a medium. My mother’s personality was so assertive and censorious that she took up residence in my head when I was about three. I’ve been trying to evict her ever since. Sometimes she disappears for months at a time, but always pops up to twist the knife when the going gets tough.

The truth sets us free!
she whispers now.

I think about the truth. I really do. I turn it over and over with a sense of horrified disconnection. I look at it from every angle, like a 3-D image on a computer screen. And on that screen I see police, and a courtroom, and a prison cell. I see disaster.

Finn’s a sleepwalker, I tell the kind nurse. Always has been. It’s funny because his twin brother never does it. Funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha. I should have locked their door. It’s my fault.

That last part is true, at least.

‘Nah. Could have happened to anybody,’ she croons, in comfortable ignorance. She isn’t really listening. People don’t. ‘It’s an accident waiting to happen when they mess about in their sleep. I’ve got one who did it till he was thirteen. We lost him in a resort in Fiji, two years old!’

‘Awful.’

‘Worst ten minutes of my life. Lucky he wasn’t floating face down in the pool.’

‘Lucky.’ I think of Finn, whose luck ran out.

‘So what brought
you
out here?’ she asks.

It’s a perennial question. This country is home to many immigrants, and every one of us has our story. I wonder how many tell the whole truth.

‘My husband,’ I say. ‘He fell in love with the place years ago, always wanted to come back. You?’

‘Married a Kiwi. Broke my mum’s heart, but what can you do?’

I try to answer, but Finn is falling. He’s falling, and I hear the thud. The nurse pulls some tissues from a box, handing them to me with a sisterly rub of my shoulder.

‘Sometimes you have to wonder, don’t you?’ she muses, smoothing the breaking wave of her fringe. ‘You have to wonder
why
these things have to go and happen.’

Clattering feet, the rumble of a trolley. A baby’s fretful wail.

‘Got to go,’ she sighs, giving my shoulder one last pat. ‘No rest for the wicked.’

Ah, I think, as I watch her twitch back the curtain and hurry duck-footed to the latest emergency. There’s the question. Not how.
Why.

I’m haunted by that question as the night wears on.

Why, why, and why.

Two

If I had to stick a pin in the map of space and time, marking the start of our journey, I’d choose a Bedfordshire village on a Friday in June. Our village. Our house.

I remember driving home from work through a brief summer downpour. For ten minutes I skulked in the car by our garden pond, while the cooling engine tick-tick-ticked, summoning the will to go into the house. Finally I dug out my phone. Delaying tactics.

How did physics go? xx

Immediately, the screen flashed and buzzed.
dunno xxx

Very informative, I thought resignedly as I hauled myself out and up the path. My daughter was coming to the last of her fifth-form exams, and I had no idea how she’d done. I stood for a long moment in the porch, steeling myself. Then I opened our front door.

The change struck me as soon as I stepped into the hall. That morning, I’d escaped a house pervaded by the cold draught of Kit’s despair. Now I caught the cheerful whiff of toasting crumpets and his mellow voice, accompanied by the twins’ merry discordancy.

Jack and Jill went up the hill

To fetch a pail of water

I followed these sounds of revelry to the kitchen. Kit stood ironing a shirt while his sons lumbered on the tabletop among the plates. Charlie paused to give me smacky crumpety kisses, but Finn was reaching an earsplitting crescendo, shaking matted dark locks:

Jack fell down and broke his crown

And Jill came tumbling af-ter! Hello, Mummee!

Inevitably, he stood in the butter dish.

‘Yuck!’ he squawked, hopping on one narrow foot while holding the buttery one up in front of him.

‘Butter toes,’ said Kit, and flashed me a vivid smile.

Charlie pointed a chubby forefinger, delight on the cartoon-round cheeks. Fair-curled and sturdy, he was the elder by half an hour. ‘Butter toes, butter toes.’

I gave Finn a piggyback to the sink, dumped him on the draining board and doused his foot. Then I stood close behind Kit, running my hands around his waist and basking in his buoyancy. When he was on top of life, we could cope with anything at all. Sacha’s dog slithered out of her basket to headbutt my knees. Muffin has a lot of Old English sheepdog in her and a touch of something smaller, and wanders through life with an air of genial absent-mindedness, like a professorial teddy bear.

‘Hey, Muffin,’ called Finn from the sink. ‘D’you want to lick some lovely butter?’

‘You’re ironing a shirt,’ I said, watching Kit turn a crumpled rag into something crisp and immaculate. ‘Why are you ironing a shirt?’

‘Think I’ve had a bit of a break.’ Steam hissed from the iron. I could smell washing powder. ‘I’ll be taking the train to London in an hour. I called Stella Black today—remember, from way back? Graphic designer, I’ve worked with her on a couple of projects—she reckons her boss might have some consultancy work for me.’

‘That would be wonderful,’ I breathed, rubbing my cheek into the warmth of his shoulder. Consultancy work would be more than wonderful. It might even be a lifeline.

Kit was taut with hope and nerves; I could feel them jangling through his skin. He always had a deceptively lazy, understated way of moving— never seemed to pick up his feet—yet I sensed a frantic excitement that day. He finished the shirt, kissed me enthusiastically and strode off to the shower. Our house was one of the oldest in the village, the stairs steep and uneven. I sat halfway up, fretting, while the boys plotted mischief in the kitchen. My chest seemed to be squeezed in a vice, as though it was I who had the vital meeting. There was so much at stake. I had to force myself to exhale.

That’s where Sacha found me. She paused in the hall, grinning, schoolbag swinging from one shoulder. ‘Mum! You on the naughty stair?’

My daughter inherited the syrup-and-caramel ringlets from me. I can’t seem to grow my hair beyond shoulder length and it sticks out like a string floor mop, but hers is glorious, rippling exuberantly down her back and around her face. She has the Norris family hooked nose, too. I’ve always thought—as her adoring mother—that her high forehead and imperfect nose are what make Sacha truly beautiful.

‘I put myself here,’ I said. ‘It’s my place in life. Now gimme the lowdown on that exam, and if you say “dunno”, I’ll tan your hide.’

She held up innocent palms. ‘Well I
don’t
know, do I? I think I did okay. Bastards never asked about electromagnetism though, after all the swotting I did. That was scummy.’

‘Kit might have some work,’ I blurted, and she promptly dumped her bag and sat on the stair beneath mine, resting her forearm on my lap while I told her about his trip to London.

‘How bad
are
things, Mum?’ she asked seriously. ‘You can come clean, now GCSEs are almost over. I know you two have been trying to cover up.’ She was right, of course. We’d been shielding her from the worst. I reached down to plait her hair, comforted by the heavy skein of it under my fingers.

‘Our lifestyle—this house, everything—it all came from Kit’s income, from the heyday of his agency before the economy melted down. My salary isn’t nearly enough. I don’t earn much more than his PA did! Pretty galling, but there we are.’

‘So we’ll have to sell this house if he doesn’t get another job?’

‘Maybe,’ I agreed cautiously.

‘And I’ll have to shift schools, won’t I?’

‘We’ll see.’

‘That means yes.’

I shrugged, wishing I could deny it.

‘Um . . .’ She began tapping a syncopated rhythm on my knee with her palm. ‘I know Kit’s drinking again.’

‘You do?’

‘I have eyes, Mum, and I have ears. Last Friday the twins told me they locked themselves out in the rain and got soaking wet while he was asleep on the sofa. Charlie said he’d “gone funny again”. Poor little beanies! No prizes for guessing what went on there. And I heard on the grapevine that you had to collect him from the pub.’

‘They don’t want him back,’ I confessed.

That call was excruciating. Our local landlord, concerned and embarrassed:
I’ve had to take his car keys off him again . . . might be best if he doesn’t
come here for a while.

‘Losing the agency was his worst nightmare,’ I said now, needing to defend Kit. ‘Letting people down, when they had mortgages and school fees too. The past few months have been really rough and—well, endless knockbacks and money worries have finally worn him down. Alcohol’s a sort of self-medication.’

‘Poor Kit.’ Sacha wrinkled her nose. ‘Banned from the local? That’s pretty screwball.’

Charlie appeared in the kitchen doorway, lighting up at the sight of his sister. ‘Come and see,’ he squeaked, beckoning. ‘We’ve made a slide on the kitchen floor.’

‘A slide? How?’ Sacha sounded suspicious.

‘With loads and loads of butter. It’s
really
slippy.’

Sacha’s jaw dropped, but I flapped a hand in defeat. ‘Leave it for now. There are worse messes than butter.’

I found Kit in our bedroom, shrugging into a jacket and looking every inch the successful advertising guru. He had a way of wearing clothes as though they didn’t matter; it was peculiarly stylish.

‘You still scrub up good,’ I murmured, taking his arm in my hands and watching us both in the wardrobe mirror. When the man in the mirror smiled back at me, I saw the old spark dancing in his eyes. After eight years of marriage, and all our troubles, Kit’s smile still made me feel happy. I turned him to face me, took hold of his lapel and began to fuss with it. ‘The picture of civilised man,’ I said, brushing my knuckles along the firm line of his jaw. ‘Good luck.’

He caught my hand and pressed it to his mouth. I felt a small tremor in his fingers, and ached for him. ‘I’ve run out of doors to knock on, Martha. If this doesn’t come off, I’ll have failed you.’

Sacha hurried in, pretending to do a double take. ‘Wow, Kit! You look like James Bond. Well, except for that zany black mane, which is more Mumbai street urchin.’ While her stepfather made a dutiful attempt to tame his hair, she plonked newly shined shoes at his feet. ‘I gave these a quick polish for you. Found them by the back door. They’re the right ones, aren’t they?’

‘You’re a princess,’ said Kit fervently. ‘How was the exam?’

‘Murder.’

‘Oh, bugger. Really?’

‘Nah, not too bad. Only one left—and then it’s party time!’

‘I’ll bet you’ve sailed through,’ predicted Kit, sitting on the bed to tie his laces. ‘Jesus! Look at the time.’

Minutes later he’d hopped into his car and was roaring away towards Bedford. Sacha and I stood at our gate, watching that bright green blur threading between the traffic. It seemed terribly significant somehow, the only coloured dot on a sombre landscape.

‘I really hope he gets it,’ said Sacha.

I held up two sets of crossed fingers, blinking hard, overwhelmed by the strain of the past weeks. I felt Sacha’s arm around my neck.

‘Don’t worry, Mum,’ she whispered, kissing my cheek. ‘Whatever happens, it’ll all come out in the wash.’

She and I spent the rest of the evening eyeing the clock, begging fate to give Kit this break. The phone rang twice. We jumped both times, but it wasn’t him. The first call was from Sacha’s boyfriend, Ivan, wondering how she’d done in physics. The next was male too, with a Dublin accent.

‘Gerry Kerr,’ he said, and instantly I remembered. One of Kit’s art college cronies, Gerry had become a dealer and swanned around the States for a few years before buying a gallery in Dublin. I had a mental image of the man at our wedding reception—an urbane figure, cornering me to swear that Kit McNamara was a fucking genius and I had to get him painting again, he didn’t care how much filthy lucre he could make in advertising.

Kit’s career was rocketing when we were married, and then the twins arrived and took up every spare second. There was never enough time to indulge his passion, unless you counted the enchantment he’d created for his family. In the boys’ bedroom it was Palaeolithic cave paintings: exquisite stags and bison chased one another all around the walls and over the ceiling, to the envy of visiting children. For Sacha he’d conjured a bewitching mural of mermaids.