The Fall (14 page)

It was a short journey down to King’s Cross, then a switch to the Piccadilly Line. It was too short, really, and before long she was coming out of the tube at Caledonian Road, blinking in the bright spring light. She’d been there once before with Dan, to do a coaching session at the tennis centre up the road, but she didn’t want to think about that. She set off up the scruffier end of the road, past run-down corner shops and takeaways. How many times would she have to come here in future? Would she be getting to know that Chicken Cottage sign a bit better than she wanted?

Charlotte took deep breaths, putting one foot in front of the other. It was ironic that just a week before, she’d been worrying about the walk down the aisle. It’s easy, Dan had said, impatient with wedding talk. Just take a step, then another one. You’ll be walking to me, remember.

And now she really was walking to him, but not at all in the way she had planned.

Keisha was cringing as she snuck into the porch. The Church of Holy Hope wasn’t a pretty stone one like you might see in the countryside, it was a huge white building with banners on the outside saying things like,
Jesus Lives, Let the Lord into Your Heart
, and so on. Stuff that her mother believed as truly as she believed that if you got on the train at Gospel Oak, you’d get off at Stratford. In fact, since God didn’t do planned engineering works, the route to Him was probably a lot more reliable.

Still wearing her jeans and hoody, she slid into the back seat and tried to keep her head down. No chance of that.

‘Welcome, sister!’ It was a jolly black vicar in one of those white collars. ‘Your first time joining us?’

‘I’m, er, Mercy’s daughter. You know, Mercy Collins?’

‘Sister Mercy? Ah, welcome. We heard of her illness. We are praying for her.’ He smiled wide as a banana, flashing white teeth. She could tell from his accent he was an import, reversing the way white people used to send priests out to the ignorant Africans. Now that the white people preferred to go to the pub on Sundays, they were having to get the Africans over to make up numbers. There wasn’t a single white person in the church, and Keisha felt, as usual, totally aware of her own pale skin. Sometimes she wanted to get a T-shirt that said,
Yeah, I’m mixed. Stop fucking staring
.

‘Is this the funeral?’ She nodded at the host of squawking ladies in hats.

‘Yes. Such a sad day. The gangs, sister, they are killing our sons. So many of our worshippers came to London to escape violence. But now see.’

‘Oh, but I thought – did he not get into a fight? I mean, Anthony . . .’ She jerked her head vaguely at the altar, although the coffin wasn’t there yet.

The vicar shook his head from side to side. ‘There is talk. His mother, I know her well, she prayed and prayed for him to get out of the gangs, the drugs.’ He sighed at the endless waste of human life, the parade of coffins decorated in the various football strips of London. Postcode rivalry, the papers called it.

He patted her with a dry hand, and she saw with horror that he only had one. The sleeve of his other arm was empty up to the elbow. ‘Let God into your heart, my dear. Send His love to our sister Mercy.’

‘Yeah. Er, I will, yeah.’ She tried not to stare.

He bumbled off to the head of the church, and then music struck up – an R ’n’ B song, how fucking surreal. And in came the coffin, held up by six black men. After came the women, wearing old-fashioned veils. She recognised Rachel Johnson, who’d stuck the boot into the blonde girl in the toilets. They reached the altar and set down their burden. Inside was Anthony Johnson, last seen groping a girl’s arse while wearing a cheap shiny suit. Now he was dead, his life all bled out through his throat. Keisha shuddered as the vicar invited all the ‘brothers and sisters’ to stand.

Afterwards, Keisha was trudging her way up the hill to the Royal Free again. She’d managed to slip out of the funeral without too many people shaking her hand. The vicar had collared her and made her talk to Anthony Johnson’s mother, who spoke in the same rich tones as Keisha’s own mum. ‘Mercy’s child,’ she said, pulling Keisha into a huge musty hug. ‘Pray for us, my child.’

‘Sorry for your loss,’ she muttered, thinking of the man with his flashing earring and wide smile.

Bloody hell, that had been embarrassing. All that singing and holding hands and eyes closed, begging for the soul of Anthony Johnson to ascend to heaven. When as far as Keisha could see, he’d been a lying cheating scumbag like most men. She reached the hospital and pushed in the swing doors, as if it was home to her now. She knew exactly which corridor to go down for Female Surgical. She knew exactly what bed her mother would be in, probably snoring, her huge bulk shuddering under the covers.

But she wasn’t.

Keisha’s head swivelled round and round, like some idiot on TV. Eh? Where was she? The bed was empty, the covers smoothed back as if Mercy had never been there. Her Bible and box of tissues were gone and the bedside locker had been wiped clean. For a few seconds Keisha wondered if she’d gone into the wrong ward, like a div.

A nurse in blue padded into view; it was the Irish motherly one who blessed herself every time she saw a patient. ‘Are you right there, deary?’

‘Er, where’s me mum?’

‘What’s that now, love?’

‘My mum – Mercy Collins. She was here.’ For fuck’s sake.

The nurse stopped at the desk, huffing a little. She was about to end up on her own ward if she didn’t lay off the pies. She shuffled around the stacks of paper. ‘Now let me see, deary. Mrs Collins, was it?’

‘Yeah.’ The Mrs was a lie Mercy allowed herself. God wouldn’t want her to face the shame of being a Miss, not with a twenty-five-year-old daughter.

‘Ah, right so. She had a wee turn this morning, so they took her down to theatre.’

‘She’s in surgery? Still?’ Keisha had been gone hours.

The nurse kept peering; then she stopped and looked up at Keisha. For a second her endless chatter stopped and she said nothing; Keisha’s stomach went down like she was on a roller coaster at Thorpe Park. ‘Where is she?’

Chattery Nurse didn’t look at her. ‘I’ll just get the doctor, so.’

She left Keisha standing there in the quiet ward all alone.

After a week indoors, Dan was already sallow, his eyes dry and bloodshot as they brought him out. Although remand prisoners could wear their own clothes, he had on the same grey tracksuit as the other men, the rapists and thieves. The killers.

She swallowed hard.

Dan couldn’t meet her eyes. That was the most shocking thing. Unlike Charlotte, who was often shy, he’d always been able to meet anyone’s gaze. He said it was what made people trust him with millions and millions of pounds of their money. He’d been biting his nails, she saw, and there was a raw pulsing pimple on his neck. And she was such a fool, such an idiot, that despite all the hundreds of films and TV shows she’d seen with prison scenes, she still tried to jump up and hold him. They were nicer to her than they were in American dramas.

‘You’ll have to stay seated, miss.’ The guard looked like someone’s dad, soft round the middle. Charlotte caught up an hysterical shout in her throat; she really would have to calm down.

She’d always thought crime was something done by other people, a different type of person altogether. Never had it occurred to her that you could just stumble and fall, and bang into someone, and without meaning to, send their whole life flying off course. That was why Dan was here under this sickly light – because he’d fallen. That was all it took.

There was a little hutch over to the side of the room where volunteers sold tea and chocolate bars and things. It was the hot, sick smell of the burned coffee that she would never forget when she thought about what he said to her next.

For a moment she didn’t understand why he was standing there, just staring at her. ‘What the hell happened to your face?’

Of course, he didn’t know she’d been beaten up. ‘It’s nothing. I sort of – well, I sort of got attacked at the court. But it’s all right.’

He said nothing for a few seconds. ‘Because of me?’

‘I don’t know. It’s nothing, honest. Please, baby, sit down.’

‘Didn’t think you’d come today,’ Dan muttered, once he’d sat down and pushed his chair out.

She reached over the table for his hand. ‘Of course! It was the first time I was allowed, they said—’

‘I meant because of yesterday.’ His face was screwed up. ‘I kept thinking about it. It was so mad. I kept waking up, thinking I was going to be late for the church.’

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she made herself say.

He laughed. It was a horrible sound. ‘Whose fault was it then? I’m never going to forgive myself for it. Look at your eye, for God’s sake! You look like a fucking battered wife.’

He said it so matter-of-factly, it scared her. ‘It’ll heal, they said. It’s OK.’ She took out his post, screened at the door for any staples or sharp edges. ‘I’m sorry, baby – this came.’

Dan curled his lip at the embossed paper that announced his sacking. ‘Big surprise. They’ll want me as far away as possible now.’

‘But you worked there for years, you worked all hours. It’s not fair.’

‘You think they give a shit? They’re scared, see. Don’t want me shooting off my mouth about the things I had to do this past year, how stressed I was . . . No, they want me well out of the way.’ He leaned in close, eyes flicking round the room. ‘Listen. I’ve been expecting this. In the house, there’s a drawer.’ He was whispering. ‘In the desk. Promise me you’ll keep that stuff safe. Don’t give it to them, even if they ask.’

‘What stuff?’ She was bewildered.

‘Just promise.’

‘Well . . . OK, but it doesn’t seem fair, what they did. Is there anything we can do? Appeal? Sue them? I looked it up and there’s a chance you could even ask for bail again, if—’

‘What’s the point? I’m in prison, you may have noticed. Or did you think we were in Starbucks?’

She stared at him, hurt. ‘I don’t understand why you won’t at least try.’

‘For fuck’s sake, there’s no point. Can you not see that?’

Charlotte blinked, trying to halt the runaway train of this conversation. ‘I know this must be hard for you—’

‘You’re not listening!’ He brought his hand down hard on the table, and the guard looked over warningly. ‘There were witnesses, and the CCTV . . . can you not see I must have done it? Everyone else sees it. Look around you.’ He was shaking badly now.

‘But you said you didn’t do it! You said you just hit him – just lightly!’

‘Charlotte.’ He lowered his voice. ‘It’s true what I said, in court. I have no fucking idea what happened. It’s gone – black. As far as I know, I did it.’

‘But if you just tried to remember . . .’

‘Are you deaf? Jesus! I had a blackout. I’ve been having them for months, and nothing ever comes back. Bloody hell, you hadn’t a clue what was going on with me.’

She looked at her hands, afraid she might cry. ‘You never told me.’

‘Would you have listened? If it wasn’t about the wedding and wrapped up in a pink bow? All this time you’ve been in La-La-Land, all dresses and flowers and bloody sugar-coated almonds—’

‘Stop it! You could have told me.’

‘You’d never have understood. You heard the evidence – I went into the room with the guy and I came out, and next thing you know he’s got a bottle in his neck. With my prints on. I don’t know why, or how – but I have to accept I’ll go down. That evidence – how can you get round it? Ten years at least, I’m looking at.’

She flinched. ‘It won’t be like that.’

‘You want to be thirty-eight, coming up here every week? Jesus, you don’t belong here.’

She refused to look round at the room full of squealing kids, their ears pierced, smearing Wotsits on each other, and raddled women in baseball caps. ‘I’ll come as long as you’re here. I don’t care.’

He lowered his head into his hands. ‘That’s the thing. I don’t want you to.’

She gaped at him. ‘Baby!’

‘Charlotte, I . . . I can’t even start to say sorry to you for what I did. I ruined your wedding. It meant everything to you, I know.’

‘
You
mean everything to me!’ But as she said it she wondered how much it was even true. She’d been in a wedding fog for months now.

‘Look, I can’t understand it either, how this happened . . . I just have to accept it. But
you
don’t have to. I won’t ruin the next ten years for you too.’

Her eyes were overflowing with tears, stinging. ‘It’s not up to you. You can’t tell me this, you can’t
say
this.’

‘I’m sorry.’ He reached out for her hand; took it gently with his limp one. She felt some remnant of the warmth, the strength that had always seemed to flow out of him. ‘A week ago, I thought we’d be married by now . . .’

‘
Don’t!
’

‘. . . And I’d have tried my best, I’d have tried to work less – although the cost of that wedding, Jesus, had you any idea? Forty grand, Charlotte. You know how much I have to work for that?’

‘I didn’t know – you never said.’ She wiped her face on her sleeve.

‘You’ve had some bills come in already, I bet.’

‘Yes – I thought they were done automatically . . .’

‘I cancelled them. Cash-flow problems.’

Her mouth fell open. ‘But why – Dan, why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I couldn’t. See, I wanted you to have it all – I loved you, you know. I know I’m cold sometimes, and I can’t help it, but really I loved you so much.’

Past tense. Why was he using the past tense? The words were spilling out of him. ‘But the stress . . . You don’t know what it was like, the pressure, working all night, knowing we might go under. Christ, it’s almost a relief. At least I can say it now.’

‘But – but why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I couldn’t explain. You saw the papers, I suppose? What did you think of me, when you heard what that girl said we called her – a Paki bitch?’

She flinched away. ‘I didn’t believe it.’

‘Well, it’s true. I didn’t say it to her face, but I sent on the emails, I laughed . . . we bullied her. Because in that place, it’s kill or be killed. That’s the truth. And I hope you never have to understand that.’ He stood up, scraping back the chair.