Falling Off Air (2 page)

I stretched my neck back, straining my eyes against the darkness and the elements. Where had she come from? On the third story
a tiny wrought-iron balcony extended from the brickwork. I got to my feet, my hair hanging in wet ropes across my face. I
could do nothing for her. If she was still alive she would drown if she stayed here. I was wasting time. She needed an ambulance.
I took four paces to the front door and rapped on it, then kept my finger pressed on the doorbell. There was just one anonymous
doorbell, which meant the house was not divided into flats, that it was occupied by one family or one person, perhaps the
one person who lay shattered on the ground behind me. Yet even as the thought occurred to me I knew it was not the case, knew
I'd seen other people letting themselves in at this door. A big well-dressed man, grungy teenagers, these were the images
that came to mind. No one, however, came to the door.

The noise of the rain, like waves slamming against a shoreline, meant I could not hear whether there was movement inside the
house. I took a step back. There was only one light on as far as I could see, and that was in the third-floor room with the
balcony. I stepped back farther, and I could see now that there were French windows opening out and that drapes of some light
fabric had been lifted by the wind and were blowing into the night. I banged on the door again, shouted, then gave up. I turned
back toward my house, making for the nearest telephone, then stopped dead in my tracks. My front door had blown shut. Hannah
and William were inside. My hands went to my head, clutching great handfuls of sopping hair.

“Shit, shit, shit,” I heard myself shout.

I had left them safe in bed, of course, but at that moment, in the face of sudden death, neither fire nor earthquake seemed
impossible or even unlikely. I vaulted the brick wall between the house with the pale blue walls and its neighbor. I hammered
on the door with one hand while I pressed the bell with the other. For a moment I thought I heard footsteps, but then nothing.
No one. I could have sworn someone was on the other side of the door.

“Please open the door,” I shouted. “I need your help.”

Still nothing.

“It's an emergency,” I yelled.

I gave up, climbed over the fence into the next pathway, pounded on that door with the same results, gave up, clambered over
a low hedge, tried again. There were three bells here, three flats. I pressed all three with my palm, kept pressing and thumping
at the door, my fist numb. All of a sudden the door opened and a young man peered out, outraged at my invasion. We had passed
each other in the street many times but never so much as nodded hello. Tall and athletic, with cropped hair, he was dressed
in a short raincoat, carrying an umbrella, dry as a bone, getting ready to venture out and get soaked.

“For Christ's sake, what—?” He took in my bedraggled state, my crazed eyes, and I saw him want to close the door in my face.
But he didn't. Anyway I wasn't going to let him. I was half inside already.

“Your phone,” I gasped, dripping all over his threshold. “I have to phone for an ambulance.”

He let me shove past him and stood awkwardly, hands pushed angrily into his pockets, while I grabbed the phone on the hall
table and dialed 999. All the time I spoke to emergency services, telling them about the woman who had fallen, and about my
house locked with my children inside, I was looking at him, needing him to understand too and to help me. He had the sense
to keep quiet, anyway, while I spoke. The anger lifted from his face as he listened, and the expression was replaced by one
of shock. By the time I'd given my address, he was heading out into the rain, leaving me alone in his hallway.

I hung up, then looked around. How long would it take them to get here? I couldn't wait. There was nothing but the hall table,
a spindly antique affair about a foot square, no room for anything but the telephone, which I tipped onto the floor. I lifted
the table, liking the look of its long legs, and I ran back across the road with my loot. The man had stopped by the woman,
bending over her. I didn't stop to see what he was doing. I stepped over my front wall and swung the table at the window,
holding it by its legs, leaving the wooden edge of the tabletop to do its demolition work and turning my face away as the
glass shattered. I bashed around a bit more to get rid of the shards of glass, then dropped what was left of the table. It
was more delicate than I'd thought, and it hadn't fared well. I pulled off my sweater and wrapped it around my hands for protection,
then pulled myself carefully over the sill and into my sitting room. I pounded up the stairs and into the tiny room that was
the twins' bedroom. Inside all was quiet, two cotton-suited bottoms stuck in the air, faces half-hidden in the mattress, lips
working, dreaming of sucking.

I stood there for a minute just looking down at them, catching my breath. So peaceful. I had an overwhelming desire to stay
here and stand guard over them. Outside I heard sirens approaching. I turned and left the room. I ran back down the stairs,
grabbed my keys from the kitchen table and, just to make double sure, wedged open my front door with a copy of the
Guardian.

The street was full of flashing blue lights. Not only that: This street, abandoned as a ghost town when I had needed help,
when I had shouted and yelled for help, was now as populated as a rush-hour station. Faces peered from windows and from behind
half-open front doors. The more adventurous had grabbed some sort of protective clothing and made their way into the street,
where they stood in ones and twos, not really knowing how to talk to each other, not wanting to be involved, curious nevertheless
and therefore conversing. How to form a community, I thought. Kill one of them.

Suddenly the door of the house from which the woman had fallen burst open. A slight figure raced from it and before anyone
could move, hurled itself on the woman's body. An animal cry rose into the night sky and my blood ran cold. The small figure,
scarcely more than a child, was hugging the limp flesh, burying his face in her wet hair, for all the world as though he was
trying to breathe life back into her. Then the police and paramedics closed in, forcing the boy away, protecting what could
no longer be protected. He tried to fight them off, pint-sized fists pummeling the living bodies that dragged him tenderly
from the dead. The rain hissed down, drowning his shrieks and drenching us all.

Later that night, when the body and the boy had both gone, a young woman, Detective Constable Mann, took my statement. She
had stamina, and I fed her stamina on cups of tea. She tried every way she knew to stir my memory, to search it for the thing
I did not even know I knew, for the elusive glimpse of the unusual, the out of place, the clue. I was pleased by her doggedness
because I needed to have what I had seen examined and reexamined. I needed to repeat it aloud, and to someone other than myself.
I needed to have it recorded.

From my work I know that what is remembered as the truth may be only a version of the truth, so I knew I would return to this
record that D.C. Mann produced to check and retune my memory in the days to come. By the early hours of the morning my statement
was a marvel of description on everything from the state of the weather to the exact angle at which the woman had fallen,
the altitude at which I had first spotted the body falling, the degree of lifelessness with which the woman's body had lain
broken on the saturated ground.

I recited to D.C. Mann what I could remember of the screamed argument earlier in the evening. It was strange to sit there
in my kitchen in the midnight silence and calmly recite the words “whore” and “bitch.” I told her I had no idea which house
the argument came from, no idea whether it had anything at all to do with the woman's death that came later. I was telling
her about the argument only because she wanted to know the story of the whole evening, from beginning to end. Then I hesitated.
When she pressed me to say what was on my mind, I told her that I thought I had heard voices again just before the woman had
fallen, but that—and this I stressed—could have been sheer fancy. This time there were no words to give her, no splinters
of sentences, just my impression that I had heard voices mixed with the noise of the storm. She did not want to use words
like “impression” in the statement, wanted me to firm it up, but I could not. I ended up wishing I hadn't even mentioned it.

The woman, she said, had not yet been formally identified, but I learnt the name of the family who lived at the house from
which she had fallen. She said the house belonged to the Carmichaels. I told her the name meant nothing to me. I read my statement
and reread it. My words had been transformed into police language. I would not myself have chosen to describe the woman who
died as “Caucasian female, middle-aged, wearing light-colored nightdress.” Just as I would not, in my first breath of description,
have described D.C. Mann as black, although she was. The statement simply did not sound like me, yet nothing that Mann had
written was inaccurate. I signed every page, scratching lines through the empty space at the bottom of the last page so that
nothing could be added. Every detail was there, but nothing I had witnessed was the slightest clue to the heart of the matter:
why this woman had fallen and how.

T
HE electronic mangling of “Greensleeves” roused me from sleep. It took a moment for the memory of the night before to hit
me, but when it did it fell like a sledgehammer. I hauled myself from my bed, my eyes barely open, and pulled on the same
jeans, T-shirt, and sweater that I'd peeled off three hours before. I could smell sweat on them, and fear. I peered at the
clock. It was six
A.M.
Even standing upright I could still feel sleep, like the pull of gravity, dragging me back toward my bed. I resisted it and
padded barefoot to the front door.

A large man stood there, the man I'd seen entering what I now knew to be the Carmichael house. His broad face was working
in distress, his eyes red and heavy. He wore a creased business suit that I guessed he had put on yesterday morning and had
not yet had a chance to change.

“They said you saw her fall,” he said, and I was surprised to hear an American accent. He stepped inside without further introduction.

I closed the door behind him and led him the two steps that constituted my hallway. Upstairs I could hear the twitter of the
twins' voices, awoken by the doorbell. I ignored them. I knew I had a few minutes' grace while they chatted before calling
for me. I opened the door to the sitting room, wondering absentmindedly why I'd closed it, then remembered as a blast of damp
air hit us both. He followed me in and stood staring at the broken window. D.C. Mann had been due to go off duty when she'd
finished taking my statement, but instead of going home she'd helped me sweep up the glass and then vacuum, to make sure we
got it all up before the children started crawling around on it.

“Next time take a key,” she'd suggested drily.

She'd tried ringing a couple of twenty-four-hour glass repair shops too, but the earliest anyone could come was nine. So we'd
found a grimy plastic sheet in a cupboard and taped it across the window.

Between us we'd done a pretty good job, but overnight the wind had dislodged some of the tape with the result that we might
as well have been standing in the street outside. Carmichael gestured interrogatively at the window.

“My wife …?” he asked, confused. How, after all, could she have fallen out of his house and into mine?

“No, no, something else,” I reassured him. I invited him to sit down. I doubt he even heard me, he was so agitated, and because
he did not sit down neither did I. I stood hugging my sweater around me and watching him pace like a caged animal in my tiny
room. He seemed to fill the space and reach the ceiling. I had the feeling that he was used to assuming control of situations
and places and that, unable to control this situation, he was doing his best to master at least the ground under his feet.
He paused by the fireplace and examined the framed photographs I'd put there, picking each up and replacing it, forming a
line much straighter than the original display. I don't have many strangers visiting the house, and his attention unsettled
me until I realized it was only this attempt to impose order that was stopping him falling apart.

“I'm so sorry,” I told him. “How is your son?”

“Kyle. He's not … He's sleeping, the doctor gave him something. Look, I don't understand,” he turned toward me, making a visible
effort to articulate his confusion, “what happened.”

“I didn't see … I saw her falling, that's all. I was looking out of that window.” I gestured toward it, and he walked to the
place where I had stood and looked out through the drizzling rain toward his own house as if he expected to see her falling
still. “I saw her falling, and then, when … she was on the ground I went to her, but there was nothing I could do, so I called
the ambulance.”