The Fall (10 page)

Julie snipped the gauze. ‘You don’t have to tell me. Listen, there’s a hostel I sometimes send people to. It’s not free, though.’

‘I got money.’ She was so pleased she had those five tenners from her wages. A getaway. Dignity. It was everything.

Julie took out an A-Z and made a little ring on the page where the hostel was. ‘You’ll go there, promise?’

‘S’pose.’ Keisha made it sound like she had millions of other options. That was called
keeping your head held high
. She stood up. She was crap at saying thanks. ‘Er, I know you didn’t have to do all this, so . . .’

Julie laughed. ‘All part of the job. Sometimes I pretend I’m in
Grey’s Anatomy
, you know? Then I remember I’m a librarian. Take care, now.’

Keisha paused. ‘Your boots are cool,’ she said. ‘Are they, like, designer?’

‘These? Forty quid from New Look. I work in a
library
, mate.’

On the third day after Dan went to prison, she woke up at her normal time – eight – and shuffled into the kitchen in her pyjamas. Her mother and step-father were up, bright-eyed, sitting at the table eating Bran Flakes. Gail had on her usual weekday outfit of jeans, padded gilet, immaculate hair and make-up, while Charlotte had creases across her face from the pillow.

‘There you are. I thought you were coming down with the flu!’ Her mother’s tone suggested she’d have woken Charlotte at dawn; of all the things Gail and Phil didn’t believe in, sleeping late was high up the list. ‘You missed the news coverage. It showed this house!’

‘Front wall needs painting,’ Phil grunted. ‘You want to have someone look at that.’

She shuffled in. ‘You’re still here, then.’

‘Someone has to look after you, darling. Have some Bran Flakes.’ Gail waggled the bright blue box, the descending milk like a stream, frozen mid-splash. Was it real, Charlotte had always wondered. Was it just an illusion?

‘I don’t like them.’ Feeling like a petulant child, she rummaged for Nutella and made toast.

Her mother tutted but said nothing. ‘I called your work for you. Explained you were in shock. Quite a nice man I spoke to. Simon, was it? Educated, you could tell. Is he your boss?’

Oh God. ‘Did they – had they heard?’

‘Everyone’s heard.’ Gail sniffed. ‘It’ll be all round the village like wildfire, you can be sure of that.’

There was nothing to say to that but sorry, and why should she? It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t Dan’s fault either.

‘You really must speak to them.
His
parents. They even rang up – sounded as if they’d never used a phone before in their life.’

She winced. ‘Er, Mum, what’s happened about – you know? Will we tell everyone it’s postponed? What about the suppliers?’

Gail’s face dissolved into little flurries of frowns and tears. ‘It’s been so
hard
. Most of them won’t give the deposits back.’

‘But weddings must get moved, surely? I mean, lots could go wrong.’

Phil crunched his cereal. ‘Wedding insurance. We did say.’

‘But you wouldn’t be told, would you, darling?’ They were a double act. ‘I’m afraid you’ll be rather out of pocket on this.’

Charlotte took a brave breath. ‘Look, we just have to try to forget the wedding for now. It’ll happen. I just need to sort all this out first. It can’t be that long till a trial, surely?’

‘Can be years,’ said Phil helpfully, from behind the
Daily Mail
.

‘And all the invitations went out. Such a shame. You’ll need to call your friends, darling. Your phone was going and going, such a racket.’

Why had she been sleeping when there was so much to do? She mustered herself. ‘Mum, it was really good of you to come, but I’m OK now. I can manage.’

‘You haven’t eaten a square meal in days!’

‘No, but I’m better now. Wouldn’t you like to get home to your own nice house?’

They glanced at each other; they loved nothing better than being at home in their own nice house. ‘But Charlotte, you’ve been such a wreck. It’s such a terrible, terrible thing. We can’t just leave you on your own. You need to get a lawyer, cancel things. What about money? You can’t afford to live here on your own, can you?’

She blocked her ears. No time to deal with that now. ‘Sarah could come over, if you think I need someone.’

‘Hmm, I suppose. Where is she now?’ Her mother turned to Phil, who although he was Sarah’s father was nothing like her, except in a certain inflexibility of spirit.

‘Some foreign place – Bangladesh? Meant to be back for the wedding, isn’t she?’

‘Oh yes, and she wouldn’t be told to come back sooner, would she? Well, if you think she can help . . .’ Gail’s tone expressed severe doubts that Sarah would help anyone.

Charlotte said, ‘You’ll beat the traffic if you set off soon. I wouldn’t want you stuck on the M6.’ It was the right thing to say – beating the traffic was practically part of Phil’s religion, and within an hour they were gone, leaving her in the dubious peace of the empty flat. As soon as the door shut she was in the recycling box, pulling out dirty crumpled paper until she found the article she wanted. She sat back on her heels and read about Dan, and his work, and the things they had done.
Institutional racism. Psychological torture. City-boy bullies
. And for hours the sound of the ticking clock was all she could hear.

The hostel was a bizarro place. Weirder than weirdsville. Half the people were like her –
between homes
might be the nice way to say it. Ex-prisoners, single mums with nowhere to go. Most had skin so ruined from smoking it was stretched back over their faces like a mask. Keisha wasn’t the only one with a battered face, either.

The other half of the guests were normal, people who thought it was just a hostel that didn’t allow men. There were Asian girls taking pictures of everything on their camera phones, and once a bunch of middle-aged ladies from Bradford who just wanted to see
Billy Elliot
. She could hear them long before they came down the corridor, muttering over and over things they weren’t happy about. ‘And there’s never any pastries left at breakfast. The ad said pastries – and the noise, Margaret!’

‘I know, Sue, we should complain.’

‘We should. We absolutely should complain.’

There weren’t any pastries because the other half, the in-between women, got up at six and grabbed them – it was free food, after all. One morning Keisha was in the canteen, killing time reading
Metro
, when a wrinkle-faced woman nodded to her.

‘You want that?’ There was a small sticky Danish on Keisha’s plate, and she’d been going to save it in a napkin for lunch, but she said, ‘Nah.’ In a nanosecond the woman’s middle kid, a boy, had scoffed it. There were two other kids, a boy fiddling miserably with a mobile phone, and a girl about Ruby’s age, squirming to get off her mum’s lap. ‘Lemme go, Mam!’

Ruby’d never have been so loud or so cheeky. The woman had ratty dyed blonde hair and glared at Keisha, who quickly snapped her eyes away from the kid. ‘I got a girl,’ she explained. ‘Five, she is.’

The woman narrowed her heavily mascaraed eyes. ‘How old’re you then?’

‘Twenty-five.’

‘Same. Ta for the bun. Tyler, Kian, Jade, get a fucking move on!’

Twenty-five, and the oldest kid was ten at least, maybe eleven. Christ, there was always someone worse off.

At twelve she went out before the Irish cleaning lady, Brenda, came with her fug of floral air freshener, gassing them out like wasps. Then it was the library all day, reading book after book and all the papers and magazines in the place. She’d never known so much about the news. The name of that bank kept coming up again and again. Haussmann’s, a German-sounding name. That was where the blonde girl’s fella worked, or did before. Maybe not now. And it hadn’t collapsed in the end, the government had bought it after the owners lost ten billion pounds.

Keisha had to squint down at that figure, then lay the paper on the table to look at it properly, and an old biddy gave her evils because it rustled the teeniest fucking amount. Was that
right?
If you were rich already, and you lost billions – from dodgy stuff, this paper seemed to be saying, although she couldn’t work out what – then the government would just say, oh, no worries, we’ll cover it? While if she lost a tenner, say ’cos she was stupid and dropped it out of her purse paying a bus fare, and it was all she had to spend in Tesco’s for a week, that was just tough shit?

She saw Julie a few times at the library, but ducked her head down into her hood. She was grateful and all, but sometimes it just hurt more when people were being nice. She didn’t know why, it just did.

At night Keisha lay awake to the constant comings and goings, Asian girls drying their hair at 5 a.m., babies screeching, women shouting all night in the corridor. Her mind raced with worries. She should call the nursing home, explain why she’d not been in. She should ring Sandra, tell her she’d left Chris. She should tell her mum, check on the kid. But she didn’t do any of it.

She thought about Ruby and her face the last time she saw her. Sometimes, however she tried, she thought about what he’d done to the kid, and how she’d just stood there and watched and couldn’t move to stop him until it was too late. Her hands clenched up in her sleep, dreaming about it. She kept thinking about that blonde girl – what did she know? It must be something, or Chris wouldn’t have gone after her at the court. If she could find out what the blonde girl knew, would it keep him away? But, stricken with fear, that was as far as she got.

After three days she was down to her last tenner, and her corner-shop Polish noodles had all run out. It was time to go crawling back.

Charlotte sat still at the table, staring at the huge pile of post. However many times she closed her eyes, it wouldn’t go away. For the first time there was no one else to tackle it with her, and unless she slit open the innumerable window envelopes, money would not jump from one virtual pile to another, and soon the lights would go off and she’d be sitting in the dark without even endless re-runs of
Friends
to dull her into numbness.

Three piles, she decided. Wedding stuff – invoices, gifts still coming in from the slow or the uninformed, condolences – they were all going, there was no point in any of it. Then the dross – flyers, credit-card offers, takeaway menus. Finally, the bills. Some of them had red notices on now when they came in the door and she would have been ashamed for Mike and Susie downstairs to see them if she really cared any more. Dan always paid the bills, so she was hazy on the details, but surely they couldn’t be overdue so soon. Weren’t they all on direct debits from his account?

She got up and shuffled in her slippers to the little spare room. Dan sometimes worked in there at weekends. She rifled through the papers on the desk – lots and lots of printouts in a messy pile, columns and columns of figures, some ringed in red, stamped over with
confidential
. They meant nothing to her. She opened the top drawer and shoved in there were all the envelopes – gas, water, phone – unopened and, she would guess, unpaid. What did it mean? Had he cancelled the direct payments? Why?

She opened the second drawer and there were packets and packets of pills. Paracetamol, Ibuprofen, Zantac, everything you could think of. She touched the silver packets, the popped-out craters where the tablets had been. What did it mean?

Out loud in the quiet room, she said, ‘Why didn’t you
talk
to me?’ She’d have listened. Wouldn’t she?

In the middle of all the post was a heavy embossed envelope, the crest of Dan’s bank indented into the paper in resolute black. She ran her fingers over the grooves of his name:
Mr Daniel Stockbridge
. Could there be a name more solid, more sure? She had hoped to hide herself in it, to be equally sure and solid. Mrs Stockbridge. But everything could crumble. Everything could fall apart. She knew that now.

She opened the letter. Normally she never snooped, didn’t even check his phone; she knew how much he would hate it. But times had changed. When she finally made herself look at the words, it said what she feared. They were very sorry but they had to terminate his employment on the grounds of gross misconduct. If he had any questions he could pop in and see her, signed
Kerry Hall, HR Officer
. Charlotte flung it down angrily, saying out loud, ‘You stupid cow.’ He couldn’t exactly swing by her office. Dan had worked at Haussman’s for eight years and they didn’t care enough not to copy and paste.

Overwhelmed, she swept the pile aside, tears pattering down and smudging the ink. Who cared? What did it matter if she didn’t pay the credit-card bill? But uncovered by her dramatic gesture was a piece of paper with no envelope, scribbled on A4 fileblock, ripped awkwardly so one side tapered in. Curiously she picked it up and tossed it down again as if the paper had burned her. In the cramped crazy writing, the first phrase she’d seen had been,
kill you racist cunt
.

She was suddenly cold right down to her bones with fear. The words spiralled up and down the page in circles, the way a child might write. It lay on the table like a creeping spider, words scored in deeply with red ink.

Charlotte sat at the table surrounded by the litter of her old life. What was happening to her?

The Kingston Town club was shuttered in daytime, closed against the clatter of traffic and delivery trucks. There were grilles on the windows but the yellow police tape was gone. Were they opening again, then, this place where so many lives had been ruined? The back of a restaurant, flats up above with people’s plants and posters; a dry-cleaner’s. Not much to the street where Anthony Johnson had breathed his last, choking on his own blood.

It was hard to believe this was the same place where Hegarty had come across that scene of horror, the blood spreading over the floor under the fluorescent light, realising he was standing in it and that it was all over his shoes, the dull shine drying in sticky pools. He noticed the yellow sign on the dry-cleaner’s opposite –
CCTV in operation here
– and he tried to remember if they’d requested it. Surely they would have? How long did it take?