Falling Off Air (7 page)

My mother was in Lorna's lilac and walnut sitting room with a tray on her lap. Her face was long and strained and I assumed
she was worrying about Lorna.

“How's she doing?” I asked.

Ma heaved a breath, as if I'd dragged her away from some other train of thought. She pulled a face.

“Oh, not bad at all,” she said, “but she wipes herself out. She did a little exercise this morning, and she spent all afternoon
on the Internet.”

“She must know more about this disease than her doctor.”

“On the contrary,” Ma gave a strained smile, “she's educated him very well, and I'm sure most of her time on the Net is spent
educating other people.”

“Strange how she manages to be as bossy as ever,” I commented drily.

It was Lorna who had insisted that she would continue to live in her own home, a flat in an Edwardian terrace that she had
had expensively renovated in the months before she became ill. The flat is ideal because it is close to me, and to Ma, and
to our baby sister, Tanya, but not so ideal because it is a first-floor flat with a steep staircase down to the front door.
For a long time she simply didn't go out. More recently she's ventured down on Ma's arm and into the street. One day they
went for a drive to Richmond Park, another day to a coffee shop. Lorna does her supermarket shopping on the Internet. She
has part-time home help. Lorna wants, I know, to think she is still being independent, but Ma spends at least three evenings
a week there so that Lorna doesn't feel isolated. Tanya moves heaven and earth to leave her three children with her husband,
Patrick, and sit with Lorna twice a week. I was pretty useless because Lorna couldn't take the noise of the twins for more
than a few minutes at a time and I had no one to dump them on. Except, of course, for my mother or Tanya. Which brought us
back to square one.

“She's got an acupuncturist coming tomorrow to take a look at her,” Ma said.

I caught her eye and we both broke into broad grins. Ma was full of scorn for alternative medicine. She waved an arm expansively.

“Next week it's a cauldron and some frogs, what the hell. If she wants to try it, that's fine by me.” She laughed, shaking
her head, blinking back tears. Anything Lorna wanted had always been fine by Ma. She was Ma's golden daughter, her delight,
the success plucked from the disaster of her broken marriage. Lorna had not always returned the devotion. As a teenager she
found Ma's intensity irritating. She'd rejected her advice whenever it was offered, and never asked for help. I often wondered
how she felt now, with Ma ministering to her every need.

I tucked into my food. I was ravenous. My mother and I are regulars at the Haweli around the corner from Lorna. We know the
menu back to front. It's my version of a social life, to have takeout, put the children to bed and sit in front of
ER
with my mother, like an old married couple. Sometimes it unnerves me when I think of the two of us, both single independent
women yet dependent on each other for company, my face an echo of my mother's thirty years ago. It's like looking into my
own future and seeing the loneliness stretching forever.

“Prefer the masala,” I commented between mouthfuls.

“Hmm.” Ma still didn't seem to have her mind on the food, and she spoke very quietly. “I can't … Have you spoken to Tanya?”

I shook my head. “She left a message last night, but I haven't got back to her.”

“I know. I saw her last night after she'd tried calling you.” Ma paused to sigh again. I'd stopped eating now and was watching
her. She looked suddenly older, her face creased along lines of worry that I had not seen, even with Lorna's illness, for
years.

“She was quite upset. Apparently your father turned up on her doorstep and invited himself in.”

We stared at each other.

“My father?” I echoed. Ma shrugged her shoulders at me, as if to say she couldn't help it, it was nothing to do with her.
“I thought he was dead,” I said. Which wasn't strictly true, but he had vanished so comprehensively from my life when I was
four that he might as well have been.

“Evidently not.” Her voice was stretched thin, barely under control. “Tanya sent him packing, but she thinks he'll be back,
and she wanted to warn you in case he tries to contact you. He asked her for money.”

I snorted.

“Talk about being out of touch … Can she be sure it's him? I mean, where's he been all this time? And how did he find Ta”

Ma stood up abruptly, her face sagging.

“I don't know and I don't want to know,” she snapped. “I'm telling you in order to warn you, nothing more. As far as I'm concerned
he has been dead for thirty-odd years. All three of you know that your father is not to be trusted. He's a crook and a con
man and my greatest regret is that I ever had anything to do with him.”

I sat there, gazing after her, stunned as much by my mother's outburst as by my father rising from the dead. My mother disliked
anger, feared its unpredictability. In us, she had always counseled repression. “Just put it aside,” she'd advised in every
crisis, and we all knew she told herself the same thing.

I looked down at my plate. The curry was cold, fat congealing around the edges of my plate. I felt sick with apprehension
and excitement. My father had been purged from our lives, all talk of him was taboo. I had dredged through my memories time
and again to find a face in my memory, a voice, anything. I had found almost nothing. Now I would meet him.

T
HE damp weather had cleared and the heat of the sun was direct. The carpet of flowers outside the Carmichael house was still
soggy from the rain, and condolence cards had been mashed into the pavement. Now the whole sodden mess would be cooked. There
was a police officer stationed outside the house looking uneasily at the grunge at his feet. He kicked a couple of rotting
bouquets into the gutter and then, after a moment, he bent to pick up a fresher bunch of lilies and place them in the relative
shelter of the doorway. I found a note shoved into my letter box.

Robin,

Don't worry about the table. It belongs to the landlord. I'll stick something else there and with any luck he won't notice
it's gone. If it was worth a fortune I'll fake a robbery and he can claim it on the insurance. You might want to chuck away
the remains.

Pretty foul introduction the other night. Hope to meet again in better circumstances.

Dan

I smiled, turned the scrap of paper over. It was a dry cleaning receipt. Two suits, six shirts. The name at the top was Dan
Stein. I put the note in my pocket. I liked the idea of a neighbor with a sense of humor.

When D.C. Mann rang to ask me to come to the station, I couldn't bring myself to ask her whether she doubled as a babysitter.
Nor could I ask my mother again, so I dropped the children off with Tanya. My sister and Patrick are both nurses, and they
work shifts at the hospital. Tanya was still in her nightgown when she opened the door to me, and her hair was standing on
end.

“Shouldn't you be asleep?” I said guiltily.

“I just got the girls off to school. I'm going back to bed for a couple of hours,” she said, holding out her arms for the
twins, “but Patrick will look after them until I get up. Then he has to get going.”

Patrick appeared behind her, pulling on a sweatshirt over jeans.

“Hand them over,” he said. “I'll knock them into shape.” Tanya handed William to her husband and Patrick started to tickle
him.

“You look like you should be in bed too,” I said over William's squeals of delight.

“Nah, I've had my six hours, it's Tan's turn. I'm fine.”

With three girls and a perpetually empty bank account Tanya's life was a complicated one. Whatever arrangements she and Patrick
made usually worked simply because there was no space for them not to work. How the two of them ever got to see each other
with their head-to-toe schedules I couldn't work out, but perhaps that was the secret of their success. I was two years older
than Tanya and in the past I'd maintained a somewhat superior attitude to her. She wasn't as ambitious as I had been. She
had allowed herself to get distracted by hearth and home. Now I just felt humbled by her. She was so much better at the whole
thing than I was.

“I heard about your visitor,” I told her as Patrick retreated into the house with William.

“Nerve of the man,” she muttered. “I'll tell you all about it later. Off you go. Tell the nice policeman you didn't do it.”

Which I thought was a joke, until I met Finney, the police officer who had stood by and let Richard Carmichael rave: the same
gray suit, the dark hair still unbrushed, the same cool, watchful eyes, and, most powerfully, what the television had not
begun to convey, the sense of restless energy and intelligence that washed over the room the moment he walked in.

He walked with a slight professorial stoop. There were gray strands in his hair, his trousers were perhaps an inch too short.
A badly knotted tie veered violently off course exposing a missing button on his shirt that in turn revealed a patch of white
skin and dark hair. If you had asked me right then whether I was intimidated, I'd have said I tended to be intimidated only
by people who were capable of dressing themselves in the morning. He must have been about the same age as me, and I wasn't
about to defer to him.

“Good morning, sir,” D.C. Mann said, standing. She didn't seem frightened of him, but she did seem alert, as though she was
waiting for something.

Finney flashed her a smile that transformed his face and nearly floored D.C. Mann. The smile jolted me too, just on rebound.
That, I thought, was what she had been waiting for. By the time he turned his attention to me the smile might never have been.
Grave-faced, he introduced himself, pulled out a chair on the other side of the desk, flopped into it, and then said in a
voice that was almost a drawl, “I saw you on the telly last night.”

I felt I should defend myself, but I had done nothing wrong. I nodded.

“The word ‘confidentiality’ mean anything to you?” Finney asked mildly. I saw D.C. Mann wince.

“I said on television exactly the same as I said to D.C. Mann. How can that influence your inquiry?”

“I hate television,” Finney growled. I remembered the door to the Carmichael house that Finney had slammed in the face of
the journalist. Our eyes locked. Challenge and counter-challenge passed silently between us like an electric charge. Television
was my life, or had been. This was a declaration of war, and I savored it.

“You can never tell what's true and what's lies,” Finney complained, dragging his eyes from mine. “Don't you think, D.C. Mann?”

Mann agreed, lowering her head, her eyes on him.

“Television is man-made.” Automatically I parroted what I said to others in my life who were critical of what I do. “It can
lie, it can tell the truth, just like the people who make it. Often it falls somewhere between the two, but in many cases
it may reveal a different truth.”

Finney gazed at me. I wished I'd kept my mouth shut.

“Well, here we have a bit of a problem with a different truth.” His voice dwelled with contempt on those last two words. Then
he glanced at his notes. “On television you made no mention of the voices you heard shouting yesterday evening, but you told
D.C. Mann that you heard an argument just before you saw Paula Carmichael fall. Can you explain that?”

“I wasn't asked about the arguments in the television interview,” I said. “You know as well as I do how these things work;
it's just intended to be a sixty-second snapshot, not an exhaustive investigation.”

“Really,” Finney said sarcastically. “Useful to know how these media techniques work, but I'm more interested in the voices
you heard.”

“I told D.C. Mann very clearly last night that I was not sure whether or not I heard voices before I saw Paula Carmichael
fall. I wasn't sure then, and I'm still not sure.”

Finney raised his eyebrows, looked interrogatively at Mann.

“That's right,” she said, looking uncertainly first at him then at me, as though she was unsettled by our skirmish and not
sure which side she should be taking. “I tried to make that clear in the statement. There were two different incidents. Loud
voices earlier in the evening that everyone heard, and then Miss Ballantyne looking out of the window and thinking she may
have heard someone shouting around the time Paula Carmichael fell.”