Falling (13 page)

“Ernie.”

“Ernie.” The wingbeat of papers as she flicked forward, forward. A pause as she reaches the end. Then backwards. Maybe his name will be there this time. “Um.” She had reached the beginning. The black talons drummed on the formica. Then a sigh. “I’m sorry, my love. It’s an awful thing. Awful. But you’ve got to focus on the good. Got to, it’s all you can do at a time like this.”

Looking at her like she’s speaking a foreign language. “The good?”

That compressed smile, so that she’s all puckered lips, flared nostrils. “You made it. When it comes right down to it, that’s all that matters. You’re here, my love. You survived. And your husband,” nodding towards her hand, “he must be so relieved.”

Sixty years next year we’ve been married. Happiest day of my life.

Her wedding ring pinched at her. The woman was staring, waiting for her to speak, but the words wouldn’t come. They’d crumbled into free-flying letters. Nothing in her head now, but images and smells and sounds.

Cecilia turned and walked away.

The light was beginning to dip, a sepia noon. Clouds had rolled back in, low-lying and bulbous. There were more people now, bundled tight against the cold, slopping their way along the footpath, through the snow. It was visiting time. They carried flowers.

Cecilia ducked her head. It was cold, her body shook wildly. She walked quickly, even though it was slick and slippery through the knots of people, flowing like salmon upstream. Then out, with a sweep of relief, into the car-park with its mounding snow, secret puddles of ice. Quiet here, cars abandoned, owners already inside, smiling, trying to hide their fear. She reached into her handbag, fingers questing for keys, pulled them out, careful, but her fingers shook, narrow keys slipping. They landed on the iced ground with a clatter. She stood, watching them fall.

There was the crunch of footsteps, fast, nearer, nearer. The feeling of breath on the back of her neck.

Cecilia turned sharply.

He wore the same coat that he had worn in the lobby, too thin for the weather. He bent down, movements swift, enfolding her car keys in gloved hands, and she watched him as he unfurled. Tall, far taller than she. Lean, angular features.

She almost backed away, a spurt of fear shooting through her. But there was a look about him, a scared little boy. Couldn’t be more than seventeen, eighteen at the most. She smiled at him, in spite of herself, almost. But he was just a boy, and she thought of Ben and how she should have gone to see him today if she was any kind of a mother. Cecilia smiled at him.

He looked tired, like he hadn’t slept for weeks. Familiar, even though she couldn’t place his features. He held out his hand, the jangle of metal. She’d forgotten about her keys.

“Oh. Thank you.” She reached out, her fingers touching his as she took the keys. “I’m so clumsy.” She tried a smile, just to see if she still could.

He didn’t respond, was still looking at her, and she thought of a sparrow watching a cat. A bitter cold wind springing from nowhere, disturbing the snow that lay on the cars, sweeping it towards them like confetti at a wedding. She shivered, and the boy tugged at the collar of his coat, chin tucking in.

“You…” His voice came out quiet, was pulled away from her by the wind. “I heard you. When you were talking to that lady, the one one the desk. You said,” he looked down, scuffing his feet into the snow “you said, that you were on the plane. The one that crashed.” He looked up at her, a desperate look, hungry almost. He wiped snow from his forehead, his hands trembling.

Cecilia nodded, hands shaking. “I, I was a flight attendant. I am a flight attendant. I helped. I got the passengers out.”

They stood there, in the carpark, for what felt like the longest of times. Although maybe that was just because of the snow and the bitter cold wind. The boy looked down at his feet a lot, seemed like he couldn’t look at her. Embarrassed maybe. He could be Ben, fifteen years from now. She almost reached out, touched him. One shining, flickering moment when motherhood was what it was meant to be. Then she remembered, he wasn’t her son. Then she remembered that it didn’t matter anyway. That she had built the walls so high. That she had no idea how to scale them. The boy glanced up.

“I heard you say, to that woman back there. I heard you say about the crash. Sorry. I…” The boy glanced back towards the hospital. “My Dad. He just died.”

Cecilia’s stomach sank, and without thinking she reached out. Touched his arm.

“Do you, this is weird,” his voice was snatched away, torn by the wind so that she could barely hear him, “I know it’s weird, but do you maybe, like, want to get a coffee?”

He looked so plaintive and hopeful and sad that how could she say no. And so what if there was a whisper somewhere in her saying that this was a good thing to do, spend some time with this terribly sad boy when he needed someone the most and that maybe, somehow that would make the difference in the grand scheme of things.

“Sure.” Cecilia smiled. “Coffee would be good.”

They pushed through the slush, heavy with silence. Moved through the knotted crowds of visitors. Cecilia looked down, studying the concrete, the slush, the slippery, slick linoleum. Could hear the scuffing steps of the boy beside her.

“It’s half day today, mind.” The coffee shop was dimly lit, snow bringing on an early twilight. The woman behind the counter dumped down half-full mugs of orange tea. Peering at Cecilia, across to the boy.

Cecilia held out a five pound note. Suddenly realised that her hand was shaking, probably from the cold.

The woman stared at it. Sighed. Plucked it from her with sausage fat fingers, heavy with thick gold rings that grew from inside the folds of fat, muttering about her shortage of change.

They sat down amongst a forest of chair legs, upturned on tables, cast in shadow. The boy sat across from Cecilia, visible only in the periphery of her vision, shoulders hunched forward. There was a rattle, a cart on a gravel rough road, as the woman pulled at the metal shutters, half covering the wide open mouth of the doorway. The snow was falling again, heavy now, thick flakes tumbling past the long windows. Scuffed counters wiped and wiped again, woody pine, gleaming under low lights. The woman watched them with folded arms and narrowed eyes.

“So…” Cecilia watched him, trying to look like she wasn’t. “I’m sorry about your dad.”

The boy didn’t look up. Murmured “thanks”.

“Do you…you have family?”

“Yes.”

“Your Mum, how is she doing?”

He shrugged. “Bad, I guess. In bed. I can’t talk to her.”

Cecilia nodded, tried to suppress that rush of emotion, the feeling that this child had chosen her, sought her out when he needed a mother. Didn’t really stop to question the why of it all. A boy approaching a stranger because he heard that their plane had crashed. Would think about that later. But for now it was enough to feel a little like a mother, even if it couldn’t be to her own child.

The boy looked up at her then. “The plane. The crash. What was it like?”

Cecilia froze, words stoppered up by a barrage of flitting images of fire and wind and a giant hand pinning her to her seat. “I…I don’t know. I…”

“Please?”

She stared at him for a moment. She didn’t want to talk about it. Couldn’t talk about it, because if she talked about it the flames would come back and that stomach empty sense of tumbling. But he was watching her, eyes fluttering from her eyes to her lips, waiting, like her words and her words alone could save him. “It was…I didn’t realise what was happening. Not at first. When I did…” Wanted to stop, because if she stopped maybe the heat and the smell of burning would dissipate, vanishing back into the linoleum floor. But the words tumbled from her, unbidden. “I keep remembering that feeling, like I’m falling. Like in one of those dreams, you know? But it’s like that all the time. I can’t close my eyes. Every time I do it starts again.”

He was watching her now and she could feel it, that sensation of falling.

“I’m so tired. I just want to sleep. But then I have those dreams. People screaming at me, begging me to save them, the ones falling out of the plane when it pulls apart. They’re screaming things, like they’re angry at me.”

Her fingers shook, slopping stewed tea in a wave over the rim of the thick white mug, her arm throbbing.

“I keep seeing things. I mean, all the time. Even when I’m awake. Fire. Bodies. And faces, all these faces. Jesus. It’s all I can think of. I mean, even when I’m talking to someone, like I’m talking to you. I can still see them. You know? And hear things. Like that noise when the plane broke up. All the time.”

Her hands would not stop shaking, and she hoped that he hadn’t noticed.

“Have you ever had that? You know? That thing where you just keep seeing the same thing over and over again?”

Her fingers had crept forward, crawling across the tabletop, begging this stranger, this kid, to pull her back over the cliff edge. He wasn’t looking at her, but his hands seemed to tremble, mug clattering against greasy formica. Then a quick nod, and in a soft voice, “yes”.

“I feel like everywhere I go there’s these ghosts following me.”

He glanced up at her, eyes darting, then down, and for a fleeting moment it occurred to Cecilia to wonder who he was.

The scree of metal chair legs on linoleum. A loud sigh. Enough to distract her. The woman was staring at them, shaking her head.

“I shouldn’t be here. I should be dead.” Cecilia watched the woman, not seeing her, seeing instead flames and pitch black night sky. “I wasn’t supposed to be in the back. My seat, the seat I was assigned, it was up front. I should have died. But they were talking…Vicki and Sarah. Vicki was getting married. In April. God, it was all she talked about. She was so excited.” Her voice dwindling away. “She was telling Sarah about…I don’t know…something with the band, some problem, and I just thought ‘Jesus, not again’. I didn’t want to listen. I mean, it was all the time, just on and on about this wedding, and I just didn’t want to listen to it, not that day. I’d…it had been a bad day. I wanted to be by myself. So I said I’d go to the back. I made it sound like I was doing them a favour. That it was so they could carry on talking. But it wasn’t. It was me. I didn’t want to hear about it.”

The voice that came out didn’t seem to be hers, not under her control any more. “It should have been Vicki. She was the one who was meant to be at the back. She was the one who should have survived. But I took her place, because I didn’t want to listen to how happy she was. What kind of a bitch does that make me? She had everything…” Tears were building, her voice shuddering under the strain. She shifted her gaze out to the falling snow. “Her fiance, Jason, nice guy. Really nice. Nothing to look at, but…he really loved her.” A tear had fallen. She didn’t bother to wipe it away. It was as if she had forgotten he was there, the words spilling out of her, the flushing of dirt from a wound. “I don’t get it. I really don’t. Why me? Why did I…I mean, all these people. They had lives. They had futures. They had so much to live for. But I’m the one who survives. I don’t understand. Vicki, Sarah. They had people who loved them so much, who wanted them to come home. And they’re the ones to die. And Oliver, the captain. Married with two kids.”

There was a clatter. She didn’t see what happened. She was looking at the snow, waiting for it to drown out the faces. But when she looked back, the tea was puddled across the tabletop, the mug rolling on its side. A scree as the boy she didn’t know pushed his chair back, the tepid liquid cascading towards the floor. The woman was bustling forward, heavy sigh, throwing a cloth on the table, sweeping it from left to right, face a storm.

“We’re closing,. It’s one o’clock on Saturdays.”

“Yes. I’m sorry. We’ll go.” Cecilia moved to push her chair back, gaze dropping away from the heavy scowl.

“Did you see it?” The low voice seemed to come from nowhere.

Cecilia started, dropping back into the seat. “I…what? Did I see what?”

“The plane. The rest of it.”

The woman spun on her heels, a tchh jabbing at the air, stalking away.

“No, I, the tail, where I was, we broke away. I, no, I didn’t.”

“Why did it crash?”

She was staring at him, not understanding now.

“I…”

“The plane. What happened to the plane? Why did it crash?”

“I, I don’t know.”

“Look, we’re closed. You need to leave.” She was standing beside them, had come from nowhere, foot tapping loud against the floor.

“Okay, um, sorry.” Cecilia stood. It seemed like her brain wasn’t working. The boy stood too. He was watching her. “I…” Then something occurred to her. A dawning realisation. “Your father. You said he died. He was on the plane, wasn’t he?”

The boy stood there for long moments. Then a tear spilled down his cheek. “Yes.”

“Oh god.” Cecilia’s fingers flew to her mouth. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t think. And I was just prattling on and on, and, oh god, I’m sorry. I just didn’t think.”

“It’s okay.” He gave her a half smile, wiping at the tears with the back of his hand. “I asked you to tell me. It’s just…it’s nice. No-one will talk to me. No-one will tell me. I needed…I needed to hear what it was like for him. At the end.”

Cecilia reached out. Gripped the boy’s hand. Smiled. “I just realised, I don’t even know your name.”

He seemed to hesitate for a moment. “It’s Richard.”

Chapter 23

Tom – Monday, 19th March – 9.45am

The grating of metal rings on a metal pole, thick velvet curtains billowing outwards. A large window. Libby lay beyond the glass, Snow White in a crystal coffin. Her eyes were closed, and Tom found himself wondering who had closed them, grateful that they did. She could be sleeping now; if you ignored the greyness of her pallor, the blood that crusted her scalp.

“I have to see her.” Jim had been waiting for him when he arrived at the house that morning. Arms folded across his chest, waiting for a battle.

Jim’s fingers rested on the glass, shoulders slumping like the bones have been stripped from him. Policeman posture slipping away onto the dark carpeted floor. There was a noise coming from him, something low that Tom would be willing to bet he didn’t know he was making. A quiet keening. Tom remembered his father talking about him – the big J. You should have seen this guy in the St Paul’s riots, facing down the fury. Had said that they had stood shoulder to shoulder. But then the crowd had surged, Tom’s father slipping on a ground slick with gasoline and anger. Feeling hands tugging at him, boots digging into his soft flesh. Then, he had said to Tom, these hands reaching in, picking me up. That was Jim.