Falling Off Air (4 page)

“I think I ran into her a couple of times,” I amended. As I spoke, William started to grunt and groan and fight the straps
that held him in his chair. “But I hadn't realized she lived so close by.”

William threw a bowl of cereal on the floor and Hannah burst into noisy tears for no good reason. They had been tolerant,
but their goodwill had run out. My time was up and Jane knew it. She glowered at them.

“Look, Jane, I'll think about the interview and give you a call,” I said.

“Okay.” She didn't look happy, but there wasn't much she could do about it. She got up. The twins upped the volume another
notch, and Jane had to shout, “There's one thing you should know, because you're not to bite my head off later. I'm getting
Adam in to talk about her too.”

“What the hell …?” But the twins and Jane all drowned me out.

“He knew her quite well,” Jane spoke rapidly. Perhaps she thought that if she spoke fast enough I wouldn't hear what she was
saying. “They worked on a program together a while ago. He'll be great about her, you know he will. If I ever die, I'll want
Adam to do my eulogy, and he doesn't even like me. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know. It makes no difference to you. I'll
keep a good distance between you.”

I found myself shaking my head and caught sight of my reflection in the window, mouth pulled down at the corners, eyes narrowed.
I sat down hard on a kitchen chair, looking blankly at Hannah, who was screeching in my face. Her big dark eyes, Adam's eyes,
were round and angry.

“I swear, Robin,” I could hear Jane saying, “you won't have to see him. I'm assuming you don't want to …”

“Damned right,” I said. I felt as though another body had just slammed to earth at my feet.

W
ITH Jane gone I picked the children up and peered out into the street through the plastic sheeting that was my window. The
wind had dropped and the rain was no more than a mist, but everything looked as though it was in shock after the onslaught
of the night before. Shrubs drooped under the weight of rain that had fallen on them, blossoms had been dashed from plants
and trees by the wind, and the assorted fast-food wrappers that usually blew around on the pavement lay waterlogged in the
gutters. A yellow and black ribbon defined the place where Paula Carmichael had fallen and what therefore might or might not
be a crime scene. A single police car was parked outside the Carmichaels'. The house looked peaceful. There were a couple
of lights on but no conspicuous movement inside. I wondered whether Richard Carmichael and his elder son were back home yet.
How much digging would the police do inside the house before they satisfied themselves that Paula Carmichaels death was suicide?

Photographers and reporters were already gathering. I counted around a dozen men and a couple of young women standing chatting
in small groups. Jane was quick off the mark, but with a story like this every news organization would deploy its forces quickly
and efficiently. I would become a prisoner in my own house if I stayed put. For a year I had hidden myself away in here, bonding
so tightly with my children that we were almost an indivisible organism, breathing, sleeping, waking, emptying our bladders
and our bowels in total synchrony. For a year I had been too tired to feel an adrenaline surge. Too tired to feel an anything
surge in fact.

But when a woman falls out of the sky in front of you it gives you a jolt. I felt electrified by the shock, as though part
of my brain that was dead had been charged and regenerated. Disaster euphoria. It's an ugly concept, but, for all my disapproval,
Jane's excitement was contagious. I had put my working life aside, I had put all my passions behind me, and I was so far exiled
from the working world that I scarcely missed it, but this morning, Jane had paraded my previous existence in front of me,
and I wanted it so badly I could scarcely breathe. I present it as a logical argument, and of course it all makes sense, cause
and effect, but the truth is that that morning I just felt in my guts something that had been building up for months and was
bursting out of me like a need for some narcotic. I had to get out of the house, and I had to get back to work.

Standing there at the window, with the twins in my arms, my head was buzzing. I was chasing ten trains of thought in ten different
directions. I tried to focus. I needed help. I needed a babysitter.

I called my mother, who is a babysitter only in extremis. I called her mobile, because I never know whether she'll be at her
house, or at my older sister's. Lorna has had chronic fatigue syndrome, or CFS, for almost two years now, and my mother spends
two or three evenings a week with her, as well as running her own law practice in Streatham. Which is to say that my mother
has enough on her plate. But she came because it was an emergency. Or that was how it felt.

An hour later I closed my ears to the petulant squawks issuing from Hannah and gently disengaged myself from William, who
had fastened his arms around my neck and his feet around my hips. I pecked my mother on her cheek and guiltily murmured my
thanks. Then I walked out of the front door and pulled it shut behind me. There. It sounds so easy.

Light as air, with no stroller to push, no babe in arms, I walked over to the black gloss door of number twelve, the only
door that had been opened to me the night before. I wasn't sure which of the three doorbells was the one I wanted, so I rang
all three just as I had the night before. At the top of the house, a window screeched open and a woman leaned out in a dressing
gown, hair unbrushed, face white with exhaustion. It was like looking in the mirror.

“What is it?” She frowned down at me. “Do I know you?”

“I'm looking for the man who opened the door to me last night, I—”

“I don't know who you're talking about. I've got a sick child in here. He's been up all night,” she said in desperation. “Just
go away.”

The window was slammed shut. A child? I hadn't noticed a child going in and out all the time I'd lived here. I had learned
more about my neighbors in the last twelve hours than I'd learned in the last year, but perhaps now wasn't the time to suggest
a get-together.

I didn't dare ring again. I looked at my watch. It was nine on a Wednesday morning and my man had probably left for work by
seven. I dug a paper and pen from my bag, sat on the step and scribbled a note.

To Whosoever Opened the Door Last Night,

Thank you for helping. I'm sorry about the table. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I'll reimburse you for the damage.
Just let me know how much I owe you.

Robin Ballantyne, number 19

I slipped it through the letter slot, glancing guiltily back at my house, where the small pile of wood in the front yard was
all that was left of the table. Whatever sentimental value it held had been comprehensively bashed out of it. I just hoped
it wasn't a priceless antique.

I sweet-talked my way past Gayle and into Maeve's office, and Maeve was as surprised to see me as I was to be there. She looked
up from her papers and her face broke into a smile.

“Well, hello stranger. My God, Robin, what's brought you back to the land of the living? I hardly recognized you.”

Which was a polite way of saying I looked a wreck. What had I been thinking of to make my office debut in yesterday's jeans?
I hadn't washed my hair for three days now. Four perhaps. I tried to think back. Had I brushed my teeth before I left the
house? Maeve had half-risen from her chair as if to come and kiss me, but I wasn't sure it was safe for her to come that close.
I retreated and sank into the low leather chair in the corner, and she sat back down. She could scarcely see me across the
top of her desk.

“I e-mailed you a month ago to ask whether we could discuss my return to work,” I reminded her. Maeve is head of the Current
Affairs department's Documentaries for Television division. Which makes her HCA(DTV), just one of an army of managers who
run the Corporation's vast broadcasting empire. Day to day she has no hands-on program-making responsibilities, which is just
as well since she has never made a television documentary in her life. Her responsibilities are primarily to oversee the commissioning
process and to mastermind personnel. She is a bureaucrat born and bred, and seems to have an army of minibureaucrats working
under her.

“You did,” she agreed, her smile slipping. “You did indeed.” Her eyes ran over me, and I saw her take in the scuffed boots,
the mysterious white stains on my jeans, the baggy sweater, the hair that hung limply around my makeup-free face. I wasn't
what you'd call dirty, but I didn't exactly sparkle.

“Do you feel ready to come back?” she asked, working to keep the doubt from her voice. “I'd hate to snatch a mother away from
her little ones.” She made it sound like a cat snatching a mouse away from her litter.

“Absolutely,” I was trying to sound professional. I was supposed to be a journalist, however, not part of the news, so something
kept me from mentioning Paula Carmichael. “I'm sorry I'm a bit of a mess this morning. I was involved in an incident yesterday,
and I spent most of the night giving a statement to the police.”

“Oh dear.” If anything she looked more concerned now, as though perhaps she thought I was hallucinating from lack of sleep.

Maeve is used to vanquishing government spin doctors and hysterical program editors with a flick of her whiplike tongue, but
I was problematic. I could sense it in the way her manicured forefinger was rubbing at her lower lip.

“Well we're all dying to have you back on board,” she said, her eyes not quite meeting mine. “Terry never stops talking about
you.”

Good old Terry—my biggest fan, also my immediate boss, which helps, but a mere handservant to Maeve.

“How do you see yourself fitting back in?” she persevered. I could tell that the question was just a way of killing time while
she worked out a way to get me off her back.

“I just want to make programs again,” I said. “I'll find a way to make things fit.”

Maeve stuck out her jaw and nodded slowly. She'd been hoping for a longer answer.

“Of course, of course, it's what you're best at. It's what you win awards for.” She gave a little smile, then heaved a sigh
and looked me in the eye for the first time. “Well we'll see what we can do, Robin, but I have to be honest, we're implementing
some stringent streamlining measures here.”

“You're cutting editorial jobs?”

“We're,” she hesitated, “losing people. Mostly through natural wastage. You've been away, you probably haven't heard …”

“I'm guaranteed a job on return from maternity leave.” I gritted my teeth.

She nodded again, and this time she didn't even try to cover her discomfiture with the words. Then her face brightened.

“Have you thought of a move sideways?”

“Sideways?”

“Well sideways and upwards actually. I mean into a more managerial role?”

I would have laughed if a heavy hand hadn't grabbed at my heart.

“The reason I ask,” she pressed on, “is that we've just advertised for an EGIE.”

“For a what?”

“An ethical guidelines implementation editor,” she spelled out for me, as though I were a particularly thick child. “It's
a new post.”

I still didn't know what she meant.

“Someone who checks that programs are being made ethically,” she explained wearily. “You know, Robin, that we're doing all
the things we should be doing, and not doing the things we shouldn't. That we—and the independents we commission—are all sticking
to the Corporation guidelines, broadcasting with integrity. You'd be perfect for it.”

I put my head on one side.

“Why the sudden concern?” I asked.

“Robin, where have you been? Read the papers. The world moves on. The media are constantly under fire for infringing some
journalistic principle or other, and we've got to be seen to respond.”

The accusation that I was out of touch was unfair. I spent my days with the radio for company, and my evenings with the newspapers.
Radio and print reported on the goings-on in television as if it were an unruly younger sister: a scene staged here, an actor
hired for reality TV there. Radio and newspaper journalism aren't immune, of course. One person and his mouth are enough to
give birth to a lie. You don't need technology, but somehow with more technology and the multiplication of media, there's
simply more to play with, and while playing is not usually good journalism, it often makes for a good story. The Corporation
had so far escaped scandal, but its own managers were paranoid that they, or someone they employed, would be caught out. Journalism
operates on trust. The reader trusts the journalist, and the employer trusts the journalist. However, managers aren't naturally
disposed to trust. Which of us is? They know every contract gets broken. Sometimes they even encourage it.

“Cover our back, you mean.”

Maeve pinched her lips together and refused to rise to the bait.

“You've heard about Paula Carmichael's death, I suppose?” she said, making a leap I couldn't follow. “Or has that managed
to pass you by too in your domestic idyll? Look, I've got a meeting and I'm already late. Go away and enlighten yourself,
so that at the very least you know what I'm talking about. Then come back to me next week and let me know if you want it,
and I'll see if I can swing it for you.”