Falling Off Air (23 page)

Eventually I was summoned to the desk and informed that Lorna had been admitted. Was she all right, I wanted to know, but
they couldn't tell me how she was, just where she was. I should exit the waiting room, turn left through the car park, left
again at the main entrance, then follow the signs. I was almost crying with frustration by the time I was led through a ward
to a curtained-off corner, and it was nothing less than a miracle when the blue drape was drawn back to reveal my mother and
my sister.

“What happened?” I hugged my mother, then leaned over Lorna. Her red curls fanned out over the stark white of the pillow.
There was a dressing on her forehead, her eyes were closed, and I could scarcely make out the rise and fall of her chest.
I turned back in alarm to my mother, but she shook her head.

“She's sleeping,” she said. “She'll be fine, they're keeping her in for observation because she lost consciousness.”

“What happened?”

My mother looked haggard. “She fell down the stairs.”

I frowned my incomprehension.

“Your father came to Lorna's flat,” my mother said in a voice that shook with emotion. “I opened the door and saw him there,
and I don't remember what I said, but Lorna must have heard and thought I was in trouble. She came to the top of the stairs
and she tripped and fell.”

I winced.

“She's broken two ribs and her right wrist,” my mother recited, “and she hit her head on the edge of the radiator by the door.
She's had stitches just above her eye. There was so much blood, I thought she was dead.”

I stared down at Lorna's still face. Her normal state looked animated by comparison.

“What did he want?” I murmured, not expecting an answer. I turned away from Lorna and looked at my mother. “Did you shout
at him or something? How did Lorna know anything was going on?”

“I don't know … I don't think I shouted.” My mother sighed miserably.

“I'm not blaming you,” I reassured her. “I'm just trying to understand how it happened.”

She nodded. “I know. I suppose I must have raised my voice. I told him to go away. I think he was trying to tell me that he
wanted to see Lorna. I suppose he raised his voice too. I told him Lorna didn't want to see him.”

“What did he say to that?”

“Oh … ‘You're wrong,’ something like that.”

“Could Lorna have seen who was at the door?”

“I doubt it. I was trying to push the door closed.”

“But she'd have heard the sound of his voice.”

“Well, it wouldn't have meant anything to her,” my mother said. “She hasn't heard his voice for thirty years. She hasn't seen
him either, come to that.”

I gazed at my sister. Lids lowered, lips pressed shut, she was the ultimate in inscrutability, but then she had been pretty
inscrutable for years. Even before CFS hit there were always areas of her life that she refused to share, despite her enormous
enjoyment of conversation and friendship. Maybe my stressed-out head was imagining things, but it seemed to me that Lorna's
panicked reaction to the man at the door and his confrontation with Ma indicated that she knew exactly who was there.

“What did he do when she fell?”

“We were both … distraught because Lorna wouldn't come round. He asked me where the telephone was, and he called for an ambulance.
Then I told him to go, and not to come back.”

We both sat and contemplated Lorna, my mother in the regulation visitor's chair, one hand resting on her injured daughter's
hand. I had propped myself uncomfortably against the edge of the bed. Through the window I could see the power station. I
was too wired to sit playing guardian angel for long.

“I'll get you a cup of coffee,” I told my mother, and slipped out between the curtains.

A nurse pointed me past the reception desk into a bleak corridor, then I followed a sign toward a cafeteria. Better that,
I thought, than prefabricated coffee from a machine. The cafeteria was closed, but I spied a vending machine a few yards beyond
in the lobby. A gray-haired man in a raincoat was standing there feeding coins into the machine, and instinct made me stop
well back and watch. There was something about his face. Was my mind playing tricks? He glanced toward me, then past me. So
he did not know me. Or did not think he knew me. I hung back. He turned and went to the information desk. I heard him ask
to use the phone for an internal call and I saw the clerk jerk his thumb at it, and then get up and wander off. At which point
I walked quickly to stand behind the man. He dialed the operator, and asked to be put through to the ward where my sister
was. Then he spoke to a nurse.

“Could you let me know how Lorna Ballantyne is doing?” he asked. There was a pause while he listened. “My name is Gilbert
Ballantyne, I'm her father.” He replied to a question I could not hear.

I stepped smartly backward, repelled. All my distrust of this man was revived by what had happened to Lorna.

“I see, that's good, thank you,” he said. “Would you kindly pass on my best wishes for her recovery?” His voice was a revelation.
Even as I moved away from him, shreds of memory resurfaced, splinters of the past, dimmed voices, arguments, my mother in
tears. They threatened to disable me. He replaced the handset and moved away, toward the exit. I stared after him for a moment
and then, not conscious of having made a decision, I began to follow him.

I'd had no practice, of course. All I could do was follow as far behind as I dared and hope he didn't look around. The worst
bit was through the echoing corridors of the hospital, then a residential street of terraces where we were the only two pedestrians.
He must have been preoccupied. Preoccupied or deaf. Anyone else would have picked up on my footsteps, would have looked around
anxiously, convinced they were not alone. For some reason my father did not.

He turned left along High Street toward the underground, and I followed, relieved to be among the crowds of shoppers. I had
been here before, pre-children, pre-Adam even, on a hot summer day. I remembered pausing to admire a cool white sari on a
headless mannequin in a shop window, buying a mango from a fruit stall and sitting on the Common to eat it, its sticky pungent
flesh making me thirstier still. Today, I kept my eyes fixed on that raincoat.

Once I thought I had lost him. I came to a halt and gazed around until I spotted him in a newsagent's. I waited for him to
emerge. The shop was busy, there was a queue at the cash desk. I watched my father approach the newsstand, watched him bend,
reach out, pick up a copy of the
Financial Times,
watched him slip the pink broadsheet inside his raincoat, turn unhurriedly, and head for the door. For an instant, after
he stepped back onto the street, I stood rooted to the spot. I had just watched my father steal a newspaper, and at the very
least I expected someone to shout after him, but he proceeded down the street unchallenged.

I followed him past the tube station, off to the right past Marks & Spencer's, then to the left, past a church and a betting
shop. This was an area like mine, where the houses were surging in value as middle-aged blue-collar workers sold their homes
for a quarter of a million pounds and moved farther out of town. Meanwhile, moneyed young things moved in and set about a
flurry of home improvement, ripping out walls, sanding floorboards, and fitting power showers.

My father turned into number sixty-two, a crumbling terrace, its peeling woodwork surely an embarrassment to its freshly painted
neighbors. He had a key, and vanished inside. I came to a halt outside the house. Coffee-colored lace curtains hung unevenly
at the windows, obscuring any view I might have had of him. I hesitated for no more than a second. I had followed him this
far, but why hadn't I simply gone up to him and confronted him? Because that, surely, was what I wanted.

I ran up the steps to the front door and pressed the doorbell, but I couldn't hear it ring. Instead I knocked, and after a
few seconds the door was opened on a security chain. I could see a section of face, elderly and female.

“Who are you, what do you want?” she challenged me.

“I've come to visit Mr. Ballantyne.”

“Who?” Her face creased even more, the skin hanging loose from deep wrinkles.

“Mr. Ballantyne. I saw him come in here a minute ago. Are you his wife?”

She hooted with laughter at that and, to my surprise, opened the door wider to reveal a bony, lopsided frame clad in shiny
polyester pajamas. A smell of boiled cabbage and stale urine wafted out onto the air.

“There's no one here by the name of Ballantyne,” she said, “and no husband either.”

With the door open I could see that this was a boardinghouse. A yellowing sheet of instructions titled “Rules of the House,”
was stuck with tape to the nearest wall. The instructions—the last one was “Pull the Frigging Flush”—were handwritten in big,
rounded letters and the paper was curling at the edges.

“The man who just came in here, wearing a raincoat, who is he?”

“None of your business, is it? My guests like their privacy, so if you'll excuse me …” She shut the door firmly in my face.

I knocked again, and tried the bell, but I couldn't be sure anyone heard. I walked up the street, then down, full of indecision.
I glanced at my watch. I could lay siege to the house, I could wait for the man I thought was my father to come out, but my
children were waiting for me at home and Erica was watching the clock. I started to walk back toward the hospital, where my
mother and Lorna were waiting for me too. I couldn't even be sure that the man I'd followed was my father. I could have sworn
I had seen him on the hospital telephone, and that I had heard him give his name. Perhaps I had lost him in the crowds and
started to follow the wrong man. I tried to think back over our route, to identify how and when things might have gone wrong.
I began to feel foolish and my pace quickened, away from the boardinghouse. It was possible, I realized, that I had followed
a total stranger.

O
N Saturday, news from St. Celia's was encouraging. Lorna was feeling much better and was to be discharged. Tanya would pick
her up when she went off duty. My mother had appointments to catch up on that afternoon, and groaned on the telephone to me
that she hadn't prepared properly, and that she had indigestion.

“Why oh why,” she wailed, “is hospital food so totally vile?”

It was such a commonplace complaint that it made me feel better, as though perhaps that day would be more commonplace than
the ones that had preceded it.

I was more tired than ever. Hannah had reacted to my long absence the day before by staying awake all night to be with me,
which was flattering but devastating. She had cried every time I put her down in her crib, and eventually fallen asleep with
her warm tummy pressed against mine, pinning me to the bed. Now, the only thing keeping me going was my own hunch that Paula
Carmichael's death and Adam's were somehow linked. But with exhaustion came self-doubt.

Jane rang.

“I interviewed the Colby woman this morning, you know, Paula Carmichael's deputy, and when we'd finished I told her what you
think about Paula's death. She'd like to speak to you if you want to see her.”

“I'm willing to speak to anyone who's willing to speak to me.”

“She's read all about you. Says you intrigue her.”

“Why, for God's sake?”

“Something to do with being a single mother of twins?”

“I always said it would come in useful one day. Lucky I didn't abort them, eh?”

There was silence from Jane, then her voice, embarrassed.

“Look, do you want my help or don't you?”

I apologized and thanked her, and she told me where to meet Colby, which was at a women's shelter in the north of the city,
just off the Caledonian Road near King's Cross.

For the first time, there were no photographers outside my door. I thought their editors were probably disappointed that I
had not yet been arrested. Or maybe something had happened to distract them. Leaving the house once Erica had arrived was
easy, except that Hannah was upset, and that upset me. I found my way, through the traffic, to a four-story Georgian terrace
in a crescent. There was no visible sign that this was a hostel. No nameplate, just a bell, which I rang. Only then did I
notice the small closed-circuit camera above the doorway. I raised my face toward it and an instant later was buzzed in. Inside
the doorway was a small antechamber and a second security gate, which was opened by a young woman with a blond crew cut who
extended her hand and said, “Hi, Robin isn't it? Come on in.”

If I had been listening to my usual complement of radio news, I would have known that Rachel Colby was Australian, but as
it was I hadn't and I didn't. Rachel led me through a sitting room decorated in minimalist style with what I guessed were
donated secondhand armchairs and a television set. One woman lolled, watching Oprah Winfrey, and another sat at a small table,
writing what looked like a letter. They glanced up as we walked by, and I followed Rachel into a small office opposite a kitchen.
She waved me to a chair while she stood and poured mugs of coffee from a pot. Somewhere Radio One was playing.

“I used to work here all the time. This was my baby, my project,” she told me. “I set the whole thing up. I love it. Miss
it like hell now I'm a bloody bureaucrat. I'm only here today because there's a dispute with the neighbors, and the women
here are a little bit nervous. So if anything blows up today, if we get any media interest or anything, I'm the troubleshooter.”

“The neighbors don't want you here?” I asked as I took the coffee from her.

“Well, they sort of do and then they don't,” she answered with a grin. “They're all good tolerant liberals, and they're all
very sympathetic to the Carmichaelite name, particularly at the moment, but we had a domestic two nights ago. An angry husband
put a brick through the window. Wouldn't much matter if it was ours, it's happened before, it'll happen again, but he got
the wrong house. He put it through a neighbor's window, into a room where the kid was sleeping. She wasn't hurt, but that's
not the point, and then he followed it up with some colorful abuse and the threat of arson. Well, I wouldn't be too happy
about that myself if I had kiddies upstairs in bed. It's a tricky one, and the ridiculous thing is that we may end up having
to identify ourselves more clearly, so that if men do follow their women here, they at least attack the right house. You know,
paint a nice big bull's-eye on the window or something.”