Falling Off Air (3 page)

“You didn't see how it happened?”

Surely he must already know this from the police, unless they had decided for some reason to leave him in ignorance. I shook
my head. The uncontrolled dive had haunted my night. What could make a woman loosen her hold on safety and step out into the
void, surrender herself to plummet unchecked, inevitably to shatter on the earth below?

“Did she say anything to you?” His eyes fixed on mine, and I was struck by their blue intensity. “They said there was some
time between her falling and you calling the ambulance.”

I tried to ignore the implicit criticism, shook my head.

“I'm almost certain she was already dead when I reached her. There was a man from a few doors down who was with her for a
few minutes after me, but I really think she was dead by then.”

He nodded, glaring through watery eyes, then touched his fingers to his lips like a child. Upstairs there was a bang, then
a wail. He jumped, his nerves giving him away.

“I'm sorry,” I gestured upward, “I have to go and get them …”

He frowned as though I had added a whole new level of complexity to an already impossible situation.

“I have children upstairs,” I explained, making for the door.

When I came back downstairs a few moments later he was back by the photographs. He turned as soon as I entered the room and
resumed his interrogation without apparently registering the fact that I had a pungent child wriggling under each arm.

“Did you see anyone?”

“See anyone?” I repeated stupidly. Did he mean inside the house? Outside? Then I realized it made no difference. I bent down,
put the children on the floor so they could move around and play—I hoped we'd got all the glass out of the carpet the night
before—but they were hungry and uncomfortable and they just sat there and bawled.

“No one,” I told him.

“But they said there was shouting, arguing.”

“That was earlier,” I corrected him, then remembered the wisps of argument I fancied I'd heard through the storm just before
his wife fell. “I've no idea whether that was connected or not.”

“Of course not. That is for the police to say. What I am trying to determine is whether you had any reason to believe my wife
was with anyone before she died.”

“As I said, I saw nothing and no one until your wife fell,” I said, a little abruptly. I had made myself clear the first time.

He seemed to recover himself slightly, looking down at the children as though seeing them for the first time. Hannah's nappy
was about to burst.

“I was out at a dinner, my wife didn't want to come,” he explained to me. I had to strain to hear his voice over the children.
“My elder son was at a friend's house for a sleepover. He doesn't know yet.” He glanced at his watch. “I have to go. I have
to go get him.” His mouth worked again, and I thought I saw his chin tremble. He took a deep shuddering breath, and must have
remembered that he had not introduced himself. “I'm Richard, Richard Carmichael,” he said, holding out his hand and making
an attempt at the social niceties. “We've been neighbors for a while now, six months almost.”

“I'm Robin Ballantyne.” I took his hand and we shook. I could feel the misery seeping from the flesh of his palm. Then, made
unthinking by the children's demands for attention, I asked, “Did you know that your wife might do this?”

He didn't like the question, withdrew his hand immediately.

“How could I expect this from Paula?” he snapped.

Well, if I didn't like him so much as glancing at my photographs he was allowed to be a little prickly when I asked him if
his newly dead wife had been suicidal. After that he made for the door, muttering that he would see himself out. I made a
move to go after him. I might even have apologized for my insensitivity, but Hannah grabbed my leg and wouldn't let go. I
heard the door slam.

I gazed down at the children, overwhelmed by my lack of sleep. They were shouting as though they'd been abandoned in a snowstorm
at the top of a mountain without food or drink. At moments like these I never knew where to start. Milk or nappies? Hannah
or William? Milk, nappies, milk, nappies, Hannah, William, Hannah, William—it was like a crazed chant. My hands started to
do the right things, gathering wipes, clean nappies, placing bottles of milk in the microwave, and all the time this other
part of my head was working on something else entirely. He'd called his wife Paula. Paula Carmichael.

The only Paula Carmichael I'd heard of was a prominent social activist. She was a Labour member of parliament who sat on the
back benches and irritated the party leadership. But that was almost marginal to who she was: so flamboyant and inspiring
in her public speaking that during the past year or two she had begun to make a social conscience fashionable again. She had
hundreds and thousands of people volunteering to do good works on their Saturday mornings. Even the home counties had become
a hotbed of Carmichaelites. Some of them had added a zero or two to their regular charitable giving. Others had actually got
off their gin-logged backsides to try and find someone, anyone, in their affluent communities to help. More a poet than a
politician, she used the power of her rhetoric to shame men on both sides of the house. “All over this country volunteers
are picking up your pieces,” she'd famously harangued the prime minister on one occasion, “sticking together lives that should
never have been broken, attempting to cure with compassion and a collection box what should have been prevented by good government.”

I had not seen the face of the woman who fell, or enough of the rest of her to identify her, and yet there was something even
in the manner she had fallen, even in the voice that had called out through the night that was not unfamiliar. I would never
have chosen to watch anyone die like that, but Paula Carmichael was a woman I knew something of, a woman I liked and respected.
I felt ice form in my veins, and I shivered.

On autopilot I cleaned and changed the babies in turn, lifted them one by one into their high chairs, then toasted bread and
cut up apples and bananas. I poured milk into two cups and twisted lids onto them. With food and drink in front of them they
stopped complaining. I turned on the radio, but before I got to hear so much as a headline the doorbell rang. I sighed, abandoned
the children again and went to open the door. It was Jane. I had hardly seen her since she realized that I had a problem making
child-free lunches—in fact I had a problem with child-free anything—and she had a problem with children. I let her in, along
with another squall of rain. The whole house felt damp, as though the rain were leaking into its joints.

Jane shook herself like a dog, spraying a mist of water all over me, then took off her raincoat, handed it to me, and raised
her eyebrows.

“What a thing to happen, eh?” she said.

Jane is of Chinese descent, with a high forehead, sharp cheekbones, and black hair that hangs almost to her hips. She looks
positively imperial. It's all undermined though when she arches an eyebrow, opens her mouth, and a strong Perth accent emerges.
Her parents settled in Scotland in the late fifties, fleeing Mao and getting farther than most. Her mother and father, both
physicists who spoke no English, opened what must have been one of the first Chinese restaurants north of the border. They
retired after a couple of decades, but Jane's sister now ran the business, which had diversified into fish and chips years
ago and was about to go up market and launch a Thai menu. Her parents, fearing her Scottish accent would hold her back, sent
her to elocution lessons, but Jane refused to cooperate. Instead, defiantly, she became more Scottish than ever.

Jane looked tired, the early morning light illuminating the dusting of feathery lines around her eyes and across her forehead.

“You're up early,” I said.

She gestured over her shoulder toward the Carmichael house.

“I was working into the wee hours. I put two and two together. It was you who found her, was it not?”

I nodded.

“The address was on the agency copy,” she explained, heading into the sitting room. “I—” She stopped dead, staring at the
window.

“Come into the kitchen,” I turned to lead the way, “and I'll get you a towel for your hair.”

I boiled the kettle while Jane arranged herself on an upright chair, rubbing the towel I gave her over her head and watching
Hannah and William, not touching, not talking to them, clearly at a loss as to what to say. Well it's hard to coo over a baby
when you've suggested to its mother that she have it aborted. Without someone to share the load they would ruin my life, she'd
told me, and of course they had, in the nicest possible way.

“Well,” she said at last with rare diplomacy, “they're thriving.” Then, with less diplomacy, “Hannah's the spitting image
of Adam.”

I scowled.

“What? Do you not think so?” Jane protested.

“I prefer to think they were an early experiment in cloning.”

“William's got his mouth as well, so no one will believe you.”

There was silence as I poured boiling water into the coffeepot, and I became very aware of my baggy sweater with a hole at
one elbow and the remains of Hannah's regurgitated apple on the other. Under Jane's cool and elegant scrutiny I could feel
the bags under my eyes swell to balloonlike proportions. I felt resentment prickle at my neck. I had not invited her here
to observe me.

I turned to face her, leaning my hips back against the counter, allowing the coffee to steep.

“Why are you here?” I asked, although I had already as good as guessed.

Jane held my gaze.

“The police aren't ruling out foul play.” It was her work voice, confident, persuasive. “Did you see what happened? Was there
anyone there but her?”

Only the few of us who knew Jane very well could hear the slight increase in pace, the increased intensity of the accent,
the breathless undertone when she was on an adrenaline high. I could hear it now, and it confirmed my identification of the
woman who had died. No garden variety Paula Carmichael would have excited Jane like this.

“Why are you assuming she didn't kill herself?” I asked.

“I'm not. But why should she?”

I glared at her. I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach and my head was beginning to throb. There was a time, when
I was working with Jane, when she held no terrors for me, I gave as good as I got or else I ignored her, but I knew I was
about to be bullied and I was out of practice.

“You'll do an interview for me, won't you? I haven't spoken to Jez yet, but I'm just going to hand him a fait accompli. We'll
be doing a special tonight, and we'll get friends and family on board of course, but if you could do that ‘I saw her plunge
out of the sky,’ moment, that would be a really moving counterpoint. Frankly, if you could talk to us, and not to anyone else,
I'd really owe you.”

We gazed at each other, and she must have misinterpreted my reluctance, because she plowed on.

“When I say … I mean I don't see how we could actually pay you—”

“Jane,” my hackles had risen, “talk to me like that and you can leave right now.”

Silence, a couple of heartbeats long.

“I'm sorry, I wasn't implying …”

“Of course not.”

“I only said it because I know Adam gives you nothing, and while he's busy swanning around on the telly here you are living
in a slum bringing up his … For God's sake, it should be you editing
Controversies
tonight, not me … I cannot bear to see you—”

I slammed a cup of coffee down in front of her so that a tidal wave of liquid slopped onto the table. It stopped her in midflow.

“This isn't a slum,” I said through gritted teeth, “and they're not his children. Not anymore.”

I eyed the twins who eyed me back. I could say these things now and they wouldn't question, wouldn't complain. How many years
would that last? Jane was staring at me, eyebrows raised.

“Adam gives me nothing because I want nothing from him,” I said, miserable because this was so obvious to me and because other
people seemed to have such problems with it.

“Of course, of course.” Jane was struggling, which isn't something you see every day. “I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking …”

“Forget it.”

It took Jane exactly five seconds to recover herself and forget it. Then she was back on the scent like a terrier.

“So did you know her?”

“I don't think so.” I knew it sounded ridiculous. Surely either you know someone or you don't. Only minutes before I had dismissed
the thought that Paula Carmichael lived opposite me as fanciful, but now my mind was, of its own accord, presenting me with
shreds of memory dug up from months back. Pushing the twins in their stroller one day in the summer, I'd passed a woman walking
under the pigeon-infested bridge by the underground station, and I had nodded at her in recognition, only moments later realizing
why I knew her face; that I had seen her on television and that she was Paula Carmichael. She had been hurrying, a briefcase
in her hand, papers sticking out of it as though she had stuffed them in, and it had not occurred to me then that she was
going home, or indeed that home was anywhere close at hand. This little person—she couldn't have been more than five foot
two—seemed too small and insignificant to be the huge persona that Paula Carmichael had become. Even her hair, dark and untamed
on television, seemed a graying brown in real life. I remember that I had looked around after her when I realized who she
was, and that I had caught her doing the same thing, twisting to look back at me. Catching each other's eye, we had turned
back quickly, embarrassed at ourselves. I knew why I had wanted a second look, but why in the name of God had she turned to
look at me? I had been having a bad hair year, but did I really look so outlandish?

A second memory, but out of kilter, a week or so before the first. In Sainsbury's, both children attempting to hurl themselves
out of the stroller so they could roll in the aisles, me at my wits' end trying to juggle stroller and shopping basket. A
woman wearing dark glasses, long graying hair pinned back from her face, clothes elegant but fraying, two large pepperoni
pizzas in her basket. I thought at first that she was angry that we were blocking the aisle, but when I managed to haul the
stroller out of the way for her she gave me a big sympathetic grin. “Been there, done that,” she said cheerfully, and I gazed
after her, pleased and surprised by the camaraderie. I had not recognized her then, and I had not made the connection even
when I later saw Paula Carmichael under the bridge, but now my subconscious made the leap.