Falling Off Air (11 page)

“Adam Wills is not an avuncular presence,” she hissed, hurrying ahead and turning to face me so that I had to stop or run
the stroller into her. “If you let him back into your life, he'll take over. He's a dominator. You'll never escape from him.”

I steered the stroller around her, kept on pushing.

“Okay, end of conversation,” I told her over my shoulder. “This is pointless.”

We walked in silence back to our cars, put the children into their car seats, and went our separate ways.

That night he rang as I had known he would. His voice was full of apprehension as though he half expected me to hang up, but
I was too drained to fight anymore, and too unsure of my own position.

“I thought I'd leave you twenty-four hours to cool down,” he said.

I had been lying on the sofa, but now I sat up straight, swinging my feet to the floor, the better to concentrate. If I was
lying down he would walk all over me.

“I didn't look good in the
Chronicle,
did I?” His voice was light but I could hear the strain under the surface.

“It did me no favors either. Who fed them that crap?”

“I have no idea. I'm sorry. Look, I want to apologize about last night. I was stupid, insensitive. I'd had a drink or two.
I was, you know,” he tried for a jokey tone, “tired and emotional.”

“Forget it.”

I had lit the fire and now I gazed into the flames, trying to pretend that this phone conversation could go on at the margins
of my consciousness, that I did not have to get involved, did not have to get hurt. I stared at the flames, and they leapt
and they played and they soothed, but when Adam spoke it still seared right through me.

“Look, I meant what I said, I mean about wanting to help with the children, but I'm not going to interfere. I promise. It's
your life, they're your children. I mean mostly yours. I'd just like to have a little bit of them. Whatever you think I deserve,
which probably isn't much.”

A tear found its way down my cheek, and then another. I fumbled for a tissue but had to make do with my sleeve.

“You can't expect …” I tried to control my voice, but I could hear it waver, and I had to start again. “If you meet them,
even once, you have to stick with it.”

I sounded like a sergeant major, as if I could order undying loyalty.

“I know, I know, I understand all that.”

It was too glib for my liking.

“I mean you can't be their father and then not be their father. That would be worse.”

“Well, like you said, I hardly qualify anyway.”

I rubbed my hand over my forehead. I was too upset by all this to be able to read him. I couldn't tell what he wanted. I couldn't
tell how much he wanted it.

“Look,” he said, “this is impossible over the phone. How about we meet? I mean, we can do it on neutral territory, and we
can talk about things, you can tell me what the ground rules are, we'll go from there.”

I heaved a breath. He was handing me the initiative, but it's not something you can give away. You have to seize it and I
thought he had probably already done that.

“No,” I said slowly, “you come here.”

Let him see, my brain was telling me, let him see how life is. If he can't take it, you'll know then. And only when I saw
him together with the children would I know whether I could bear it.

“All right, if you're sure.” He sounded taken aback. “Um, when should I come?”

“How about Tuesday.” It would give me a couple of days to psyche myself up. “At six-thirty,” I said. Bedtime. Life in the
raw.

We said our good-byes and hung up. I sat and stared at the flames some more. They leapt and they played and they soothed.
Then I picked up the telephone and hurled it at the wall.

A
DAM,” I told Jane, “wants to talk.” Jane had rung to apologize. Her judgment, she said, had been warped by too much sex. She
had emerged from Quentin Browne's flat, presumably sated, and returned home only in the past hour or so. Then she picked the
five minutes after Adam phoned me to call me herself. She was lucky to find my telephone in working order.

“Tell him to go fuck himself,” Jane proposed.

I sighed. I couldn't find the words to argue it with her.

“You're not really going to talk to the wee shite?”

“Shouldn't you be a bit more mellow after a day in bed?”

“I'm bursting with love for all mankind, except for Adam. And don't change the subject.”

“He's coming here on Tuesday, at six-thirty. He's going to meet the children.”

There was silence on the other end of the line.

“And anyway, how much of a shit is he?” I was thinking aloud, trying to persuade myself. “Maybe I've been unreasonable. He
was honest with me, he told me he didn't love me, so I told him to go. No one can change the way they feel, after all. I as
good as threw him out.”

“Robin, don't do this. Don't rewrite history. We all heard him the other night. The whole domestic deal, that was his problem.
It was nothing to do with loving you or not loving you.” She paused, but I didn't say anything, and she realized she had to
say more to convince me and plowed right on, pressing home her advantage. “When did he tell you he didn't love you? Was it
before or after you told him you were pregnant?”

“Weeks after I told him I was pregnant. Roughly ten minutes after I said it was twins,” I admitted.

“Robin.” Jane sounded appalled. “The man's a bloody great shite.”

Jane's outrage echoed in my ears. It wasn't the greatest recipe for a peaceful night and indeed I scarcely slept. No sleep,
no nightmares—there's always a silver lining.

The next day Erica was back on duty for my lunch with Suzette. I was learning to schedule the child-care handover twenty minutes
before I left the house so I had time to wash and change my clothes. This time I even went to the remarkable lengths of brushing
my teeth before I went and asked for a job. Then I gathered up an armful of bills that had come through the mail slot. I had
no time to deal with them, and I shoved them in my bag to open on the tube.

Suzette and I were to meet in Covent Garden at one, and I miscalculated the tube time and arrived fifteen minutes early. I
got off at Charing Cross and walked through the underpass, buying a copy of the
Big Issue
from a man with a nice smile, a dog, and a low-key sales drive. He nodded his thanks and took a sip from a paper cup of cappuccino
as I stepped out into the sunlight and headed up the Strand. It was one of those bright autumn days when the chill in the
air seems festive and the blue sky promises spring instead of winter. Covent Garden was bustling. There were crowds of eager
easy-to-please tourists around the street clowns and strains of
Carmen
coming from the open-air café under the arches. I strolled around, too unused to shopping and too aware of my empty bank
account to buy anything, but lapping up the buzz of commerce.

Suzette and I found each other and we headed up Long Acre to a Japanese restaurant where she said they did a good affordable
sushi lunch. I was happy to eat anything that wasn't Indian or baby food, but I tried to greet the suggestion with only mild
enthusiasm, as though I ate Japanese at chichi restaurants at least once a week. I was trying hard to act like a professional
all over again, but I kept having out-of-body experiences looking down on myself striding around in central London in work
clothes and makeup and wondering who the hell I was.

The restaurant was all stripped pine benches and rice paper blinds. We found an unoccupied booth and slid in, and ordered
set lunches with mineral water. Suzette was looking pale and tired. Her fine skin seemed stretched tight over her bones and
there was a rim of red around her huge eyes. She was wearing a dark gray sweater that just about showed her ribs, and made
her skin look even paler.

“I got about three hours' sleep last night,” she said, pulling chopsticks out of their paper sleeve and fiddling with her
place setting. “Everything was spinning around in my head … I shouldn't say that, I'm supposed to be persuading you to come
and work with me.”

We smiled at each other.

“I don't mind hard work,” I told her. “I like the idea of freedom if that's what's on offer.”

“That's exactly what you'd have,” she said, “and no bureaucrats who know nothing about program-making dictating how many shots
you take of what and quoting guidelines at you day in, day out.”

“But you have to sell the programs, and they still give you a budget,” I pointed out.

Suzette nodded, sitting back as a Japanese waitress brought a tray and placed it in front of her. It was followed by a tray
for me. I plunged a tempura prawn into the sauce and then into my mouth. I was starving, and I nearly groaned with pleasure
as I bit through the crispy batter and into the tender meat.

“It's not perfect,” Suzette said, taking a little wasabi on the end of a chopstick and mixing it into the soy sauce, “but
I feel freer here and now than I did when I was with the Corporation.”

We talked for a while about Suzette's plans. She was full of ideas, as I'd known she would be. She read voraciously and a
line in a book or a magazine article, even a picture caption, could be all the catalyst she needed to set her off. A television
producer has one aim, and that is to get pictures that will shock or amuse or delight the audience. No pictures, no story.
Suzette was scathing about bad television, damning about the lackadaisical approach of others, insulted by images that weakened
the story. To her, the picture was the mission, and her almost obsessional approach gave Paradigm the energy that I knew many
others lacked. Paradigm, in her eyes, would become a great name in documentary making if it could get through the early and
financially sticky years of obscurity. She'd done a lot of thinking about how I would fit in and what I could bring to the
company, where our skills would complement each other and where I would be able to take the lead. It sounded exciting and
attractive and I found myself wanting to do it. The more I heard about the financial side of it, however, the more I became
uneasy. She didn't say it outright, but it was pretty clear that she was living hand-to-mouth, and I tried to pin her down
on how much I could expect to earn. I needed to know at least to within the nearest five thousand pounds, but she didn't want
to commit herself even to that.

“It's really difficult to talk in those terms,” she said, with an apologetic grimace. “A couple of years from now, if we can
make our name and be the obvious choice for commissioning editors, we'll be on much surer ground, but right now we're competing
hard on price. What you or I take home depends on what we make week to week and month to month.”

We concentrated on the food for a while. The sashimi was good, fresh and firm. I warmed my hands on the cup of miso soup.

“I'm not sure whether I can take the financial risk,” I said eventually, unwilling to introduce my domestic situation but
wanting to be honest with Suzette.

The comment seemed to annoy her, or perhaps she was just disappointed that I was having doubts.

“I know you have responsibilities, we all have responsibilities of one kind or another. I wasn't suggesting you should work
for charity, but you have to take risks if you want rewards. You stay in the Corporation and you'll suffocate.”

Maybe she was right, maybe in my role as mother hen I had just become risk averse. My alternatives, after all, were bleak.

“Did you know Maeve wants me to do the ethics job?” I said.

Suzette gave me a sickly smile and said, “You're not going to turn me down to be ethics czar?”

I shrugged.

“Terry tells me I couldn't do better.”

Suzette just pulled an unimpressed face and shrugged, so I changed the subject. “I hadn't realized the documentary Richard
Carmichael was complaining about was a Paradigm production.”

“In the end it wasn't an anything production, it was a total nonevent,” she said, and shrugged again. “There was nothing to
say. I wasn't keeping anything from you.”