Catch Me When I Fall (3 page)

2

There was something crawling along my cheek. A fly trickled down towards the comer of my mouth. Without opening my eyes, I moved my hand and brushed it off and I heard it buzz sluggishly away. I could tell without seeing it that it was one of those fat, late-summer flies, heavy with blood and decay. If I were to squash it, it would leave a purple-brown stain.
I didn't stir, but I knew something was wrong. I managed to squeeze one eye open and felt pain screw its way into my brain. I touched my lips with my dried-up tongue. They felt puffy and cracked. There was a foul taste in my mouth: stale, smoky, greasy, dirty.
All the colour had gone now. My one eye was looking through the gloom at a door with a scruffy grey towelling robe hanging from a hook. I swivelled my gaze to the left and saw the dull grey half-light of dawn coming in through the thin curtains. I held my breath and kept absolutely still. I heard the sound of steady breathing behind me. I closed my eye and lay there while the last shreds of dreams dissolved, until at last I was face to face with this day and this self. I touched my face, which felt numb and rubbery, like a mask. Silently I counted to fifty, then opened both eyes and gently shifted my head, feeling a queasy pain ooze round behind my forehead and flood into my temples.
Gradually I made out objects around me. I was lying on the left-hand side of a double bed, under a crooked pale duvet with a large L-shaped rip in the middle. There was a single square window quite high in the wall, an exercise bike under it that was draped with a pair of jeans and a bra. A nylon sports bag lay near

the door with a squash racket on top of it. A wardrobe stood half open to reveal a few shirts on hangers. A pile of magazines tottered in the comer. A bottle of wine had tipped on to its side. The toe of a trainer poked out from under the bed. A tissue was screwed into a ball. An ashtray, a few inches from my face, overflowed with cigarette ends, which had spilled across a pair of striped boxer shorts. A digital clock showed a sickly green 4:46.
As I inched myself up into a sitting position, I saw there were smears of blood on the sheet as if painted on it in a couple of delicate brushstrokes. I stared straight ahead, then gingerly swung my feet to the floor. I stood up and the floor tipped under me. I instructed myself not to look round, but it felt as though an invisible wire was tugging my gaze and I couldn't stop myself darting a glance backwards to the shape in the bed. I saw hairy legs poking out from the duvet, a shock of darkish hair, an arm over the eyes, a mouth slackly open. That was all. I turned away again. I didn't know who he was. Didn't want to know. Mustn't.
I needed a pee, so I crept towards the door and pulled it open cautiously, wincing at the little groan it gave. There were gritty floorboards underfoot and opposite me a door, which I pushed. It didn't give on to the expected bathroom though. There was a carpet, a bed, a figure that shifted, then lifted its head and mumbled something thickly, out of deep sleep. I closed the door. I felt clammy, nauseous.
I found the tiny lavatory and sat down shakily on the toilet. My cold, sticky body felt as if it didn't belong to me, and I had to make an enormous effort to stand up again and make my way into the living room. I was hit at once by a locker-room smell of bodies and a late-night pub smell of smoke and beer. The room was strewn with clothes -his, mine. The table lay on its side, a broken mug beside it; another ashtray stood among spilled butts; crumpled beer cans rattled against my feet and a bottle of clear schnapps lay on its side. A garish picture was tipped sideways on

the wall, and there was a red smear daubed beside it. There was also a strangely neat circle of what looked like brown rice on the floor. With a stab of memory, I looked up and saw the budgerigar's cage hanging above the spilled seed. The bird was asleep.
I picked up my skirt from behind the sofa and found my shirt, crumpled in the comer. Only one button remained and it was ripped along the armpit. One shoe was under the table, its heel wobbly. After nervous fumbling I found the other in the corridor outside the bathroom. Holding my breath, I edged my way back into the bedroom and collected my bra from the exercise bike. It reeked of alcohol -schnapps, maybe. There was something sticky under the ball of my foot and when I looked down I was standing on a used condom. I peeled if off and dropped it on to the floor.
I couldn't find my knickers. I knelt down and peered under the bed, then retraced my steps along the corridor without success. I'd have to go without them. I needed to get out before the man or the person in the other room -or the bird, for that matter -woke and found me. Skirt, bra, flimsy torn shirt, whose hem I knotted round my waist. Sore feet into wobbly shoes. Jacket over the top over everything, but it was one of those stupid affairs with a single decorative button and scarcely concealed the mess underneath. I longed to be in a pair of flannel pyjamas under clean sheets, minty breath, clean limbs ... Bag, where was my bag? It was near the front door, its contents slopping out in a heap. I shovelled everything back in, opened the door and closed it softly behind me, scuttled down the stairs and out into the grey street, where weariness hit me. For a moment I had to
bend over to catch my breath.
Where was I?
I made my way to the end of the street and read the name Northingley Avenue, SE7. Where was that? Which way did I go to get anywhere else? My watch -still miraculously on my wrist

-told me it was 5 am. I looked up and down the deserted street, as if a taxi would suddenly appear and scoop me up, then took a deep breath and set off in a random direction. It took so long to cover any distance; nothing seemed to get any closer. It was cold before the sun came up properly and I was crawling like a mucky slug along the road of unlit houses.
At last I came to a road where there were shops and one, a newsagent's, was just opening. I ducked under its half-lifted grid and approached the man behind the counter. He looked up from the papers he was stacking and his eyes widened. 'What... ?' he stuttered. "Have you been mug?'
"Can you tell me the way to the nearest Underground station, please?'
His gaze hardened into something like disgust. I put up a hand
to pull my jacket closer together and tried to look nonchalant. "Straight that way for about half a mile."
I bought a bottle of water and a little pack of tissues, then fished in the bottom of my bag for change.
'Thanks,' I said, but he just stared at me. I tried to smile, but my face wouldn't obey me. My mouth seemed too tight to move.
Strange people travel on the Underground at dawn. People stumbling home at the end of the previous day overlap with people at the beginning of the next, still bleary from their beds.
A man with gorgeous long dreadlocks came and sat beside me at the station while I was waiting for the first train out and played his mouth organ. I tried to give him some change but he said he wasn't a beggar, he was a wandering minstrel and I was clearly a damsel in distress. So I gave him my packet of cigarettes instead and he kissed my hand. My knuckles were grazed, my nails dirty.
When I was on the train I poured water on to a wad of tissues and dabbed at my face. Mascara, blood. I tried to see what I looked like in the window, but I was just a pale blur. I dragged

a brush through my hair, and changed for the Northern Line and Archway.
I arrived at my dark green front door at ten to six and felt as if I'd climbed a mountain and run a marathon to get there. I opened the door with the double set of keys and eased my way into the hall. I dropped my bag on to the floor by the metal step-ladder and the tins of unopened paint. I kicked off my shoes and went into the kitchen, where I drank two glasses of water in quick succession. Outside, it was grey and windless. The tree in the back garden hardly stirred. I took off my shirt and pushed it deep into the rubbish bin, pulling tins and coffee grounds over the top to cover it.
The stairs seemed so steep that I went up on all fours. I crawled into the bathroom and took off the rest of my clothes. I bundled them up and shoved them into the bottom of the laundry basket, under the others. I looked at myself in the mirror and it was hard not to scream at the sight of the person looking back at me: the bleary, grubby, stained, smeary, bloody woman with the swollen lips, reddened eyes and a bird's nest of matted hair. I was like something that had been left out for the bin men to take away.
I made the shower as hot as I could bear, and then I made it hotter, burning needles of water puncturing me. I washed my hair till my scalp stung. I soaped my body and scrubbed it as if I could rub off an entire layer of skin and emerge renewed, uncontaminated. I brushed my teeth until my gums bled. I gargled with mouthwash. I rubbed cream into my face, sprayed myself with lotion, shook talcum powder wildly, roiled deodorant under my arms.
I went into my bedroom, where through the curtains the dawn had become day. The alarm clock showed 6:ii. I made sure it was set for 7:m as usual, then slid under the duvet and wrapped my arms round my knees.

"Holly?' muttered Charlie. 'Time is it?'
"Ssh. Go back to sleep. Everything's fine."
As I fell asleep, I remembered I had forgotten to put my wedding ring back on.

3

'Holly. Holly, I've brought you some coffee. It's twenty past seven.'
For a moment I lay with my forearm over my eyes to shield them from the glare of the morning. My limbs were heavy, my mouth was parched, my head throbbed and my throat ached. I couldn't face the day; I couldn't face Charlie.
"Holly," he said again.
I moved my arm, managed to open my eyes and look into his nice face, his brown eyes, and could see no disgust or surprise. 'Good morning, Charlie. You're up early.'
He looked warm and solid, in a shabby, unshaven, homely way. He worked at home, so he didn't have to put on a suit and a public self like I do every day, standing in front of the mirror and applying a glossy face, lipstick and lying eyes; smile, Holly, smile. He was just wearing his old grey cords and a long-sleeved, mustard-coloured shirt with a flaying neck.
I heaved myself up on to one arm and took a gulp of the
coffee. Harsh, hot, black.
"Late night?' he asked.
'It .just sort of went on and on.'
'I didn't hear you come in."
'You were fast asleep. God, is that the time? I must have slept through the alarm. I'll be down in a second.'
I dosed my eyes once more and heard him leave. I'd had a couple of hours of fragmented sleep, and now I had about three minutes before I had to become a person again among all the other people pretending to be people. I pulled the duvet over

my head and made myself consider the events of the previous evening. It wasn't really like thinking. I felt I was being punched by someone who was skilled in such things, the blows aimed at the soft areas of my body where they would leave no mark. I found it difficult to breathe. I gasped and coughed, as if I had been washed ashore by a large wave. I thought of that woman last night -me -laughing and flirting and being so reckless and yielding to every temptation. No, not "yielding', courting every temptation. The life and soul of the party. Now she just seemed like a ghastly, trashy bore. I thought of myself in that room, that other bed, with that man -whoever he was.
That's the thing, with love and sex: people write songs and poems and make movies and we swoon and fantasize about it and we all want it or we want it to be better. But in the end when it happens, when you've left the club, when the clothes are off, it's just a spotty back and a stained sheet and an awful flat somewhere in a nasty bit of London you've never been before and a slimy, crinkled-up condom on the carpet, which makes you want to throw up. I thought about going downstairs to the kitchen, sitting down opposite Charlie, telling him what I'd done last night while he'd been peacefully sleeping in our bed. The sheer stupid, squalid, ugly, nasty pointlessness of it. I imagined the way the expression would change on his face as I told him, and I squirmed further into my duvet and groaned out loud in the muffled darkness, sickened by what I'd done. If I could turn back the clock, leave the bar when Meg had done, leave the noise and lights and laughter, and come home to my husband, go to sleep innocently curled up at his side between clean sheets, wake this morning with a clear conscience... If only, if only...
Part of me knew quite well that I'd changed my life. There was a little voice in my head saying, 'You've committed adultery." I remembered religious education lessons in school, fragments from the Bible about how you could commit adultery in your

heart just by looking at someone with lust. But I hadn't committed adultery in my heart, or even in my head. I'd committed it with my body, the body I'd scrubbed so ferociously in the shower, as if I could wash it all out of me. I couldn't tell Charlie about it. It would be cruel and, like a great stain, it would pollute everything in our life.
I'm good at lying. I always have been. Since that autumn day eleven months ago, so blustery and bright and full of promise, when I tugged him into the register office, followed by the two bewildered, shy witnesses we'd grabbed from the street, I've lied lots of times, lied and pretended and faked, but never like last night. That was a first.
I heard Charlie downstairs, the clink of china, a clatter of mail falling through the letterbox on to the bare boards of the hallway, and I pulled the duvet off my face and squinted out into the room. My legs ached and my eyes ached and there were swollen glands in my neck. Perhaps I was getting flu, I thought hopefully. Then I'd have a reason to hide from the world just a little bit longer. But I knew I didn't have flu, just a hangover and a guilty conscience.
'Out of bed, Holly,' I ordered myself and, like an automaton obeying its master's command, I sat up, headache clanging round my skull, and put my feet on the floor. I waited for the room to steady, then shuffled into the bathroom where I washed my face in cold water. I stared at myself in the mirror: the darkish blonde hair that Charlie used to say looked like a lion's mane, the grey eyes that gazed back at me candidly from under thick brows, the wide mouth that smiled out at me so brightly. How was it possible that my mind should be covered with a layer of sooty grime while my face looked so fresh and happy?
'You can't fool me,' I hissed at myself, wrinkling my skin in a hideous grin. "I know you, Holly Krauss. You can't fool me.'