Falling (5 page)

“I’m so sorry. I’m really, really sorry. Look, have a seat. Just until we find out some more.”

Then it was Tom’s turn. He stared at the receptionist, eighteen if she was a day, looking for all the world like she wanted to cry too. Knowing what he had to say. My wife. Is she alive? But then stuck on the words, because this right here couldn’t possibly be his life.

“Sir?”

“Cecilia Allison.” But it wasn’t, was it. She had never taken his name. “Sorry.” His voice was shaking. “Cecilia Williams. She’s a stewardess.”

There was dejection on the receptionist’s face, shaking her head, but typing the name in anyway because that was her job. Then suddenly sitting up straighter. A smile of dazzling relief.

“She’s here.” A laugh as if she couldn’t believe it. “She’s here.”

People looking at him, faces ugly with jealousy that it’s him who gets the prize; he who couldn’t even be bothered to shake or to cry. Then he was walking through the crowds, them parting for him like the red sea for Moses, and the doors to the treatment area swinging open. And the noise. The noise was deafening here, as nurses ran from cubicle to cubicle, all with that same look of focus. Cries of pain and a scrabbling scream as someone realises that they survived alone. And there, right at the back, in amongst a knot of people coated in bruises and blood, there she was.

He should have run to her. Should have called out to her at least.

But she looked up anyway, as if she already knew. And her body began to move, a half-turn, as if it still wasn’t too late, as if she could still run if she really tried. Then she stopped, and she looked at him. orn pushed through the survivors, towards his waiting fe, and tried to not to see her look of despair.

Chapter 8

Freya - Thursday, 15th March - 10.19pm

They had left the television on. Hadn’t been able to bring themselves to turn it off, not whilst helicopters circled above leaping flames, orange sprinkled with flashes of blue. Freya watched it, couldn’t seem to pull her eyes away from it. Without thinking she sipped the tea, so sweet that her teeth stung, sinuses humming. It scalded her lips.

They were waiting. After all, what was there left to do but wait? Freya had called the airline, once, twice, her fingernails dredging into the phone as it chirped, engaged, again and again. Her mother was at the table now, slumped into the chair like all the bones had simply vanished from her body, her head resting on her hands, a puddle of tears gathering on the table top beneath the shadow of her hair. Richard beside her, so close it seemed that he would crawl into her lap if only she would allow him. He hadn’t spoken. Not since the television flared to life, the screen lighting up with fire and snow. He just stared.

“It’s stopped snowing.” Freya’s grandmother was drying dishes, rubbing a tea towel around and around and around the outside of a mixing bowl that had once reached the stage of dry and was now on its way back to wet. Her brow furrowed, as if in concentration, eyes red rimmed. “Well, for now. They say we’ll be like this for days yet. So much for Spring. My flowers have had it.”

It could not have been more than moments after the world had changed that her grandparents arrived. She remembered that it was before her mother sank into the chair, a puppet whose strings have been cut. Before Richard began to cry. They had been hanging there, in that world between the past and the future, when the front door had swung open. And their breath had caught, and even though none of them said it, they were all thinking the same thing. That they were wrong and he was home.

Then her grandparents, sweeping in like a breath of Siberian air, the argument that they had been having about something she couldn’t possibly remember now still fresh on their lips. Halting in the doorway, as if the fear hit them head on, buffeting them so that they had forgotten the latest affront to their patience, the snow and the long car ride. Their gazes trickling towards the television. Faces changing with the knowing.

Freya’s grandfather sat beside her, hands folded. Ignoring his own mug of over-stewed tea.

“You know they still haven’t gritted our road. I’m going to write a letter. Ridiculous. Someone’ll have to die…”

She stopped, stumbling on the word so that it came out as little more than a squeak. A deep breath. “…before they get around to it. Then they’ll be gritting it in the middle of August.” Her grandmother pulled out a chair, tea towel clutched tight between her fingers. Her lips were trembling now.

“Betty.” Her grandfather’s voice was thick, dense with years of smoking rolls up. He’d given up, years ago now, but still when Freya thought of him, it was that smell that she thought of.

“What?”

“This tea tastes like battery acid.”

Freya’s grandmother rolled her eyes, lips pursing like she wanted to say something but, just this once, would refrain. Freya bit her lip, pushing down a flush of anger. Wanted to tell them to shut up. Wanted to shout. Look at the television. Don’t you understand what’s happening here? But she drank her tea instead, watching her mother across the rim of her cup. She seemed to be slumping lower, sinking into the hard wooden chair. She hadn’t said anything, not a word since the television had flashed to life, changing their world.

“Mum? Why don’t you go on up to bed?” Freya leaned across the table, fingers stroking the soft skin on her mother’s arm. “Just for a little while. We’ll wake you when…we’ll wake you when we have some news.”

It seemed like her mother didn’t hear her at first, that her words couldn’t penetrate this hell into which she had descended. Then, eventually, she looked up. Freya started. She had aged fifteen years. There were lines that Freya had never seen before, her gaze was dead, skin as white as the snow that lay thick on ground beyond the windows. Her mother’s lips moved, a child testing her first words. Then she seemed to give up, words more than she could possibly handle. Her gaze dropped and she shook her head.

“You know, you can’t be sure he was on that flight.” Freya’s grandmother offered. “I mean, they change the crews around all the time. You know what these airlines are like. He’s off one minute, he’s working the next. Always getting called away. He’ll have been on a different flight. I’m sure of it.” Looking down, studying the red chequered cloth. “I’m sure of it.” This last a whisper.

Freya looked down, studying her fingernails, chipped, saffron paint colouring the edges, and tried her best not to think about yesterday, about her father standing in the snow, the tension that pulsed across his shoulders. The look when he saw her, desperation edging into fear.

“I’m telling you,” Freya’s grandmother had twisted the tea towel into a tight spiral “he’ll be fine.”

“I’ll try the airline again.” Her grandfather’s chair scraped against the floor, nails down a chalk board. “Someone must know.”

They watched him leave, closing the door softly behind him.

“It’s awful.” Her grandmother was watching the television, shaking her head. “Just awful. Those poor people.” As if she hadn’t realised that ‘those poor people’ were them, as if it was just one more news cycle of murder and flooding and genocide. Tragic but not really real.

Richard moved his hands, so that they covered his ears. His hair had flopped forward over his eyes. The lights of the television danced on the loose curls, and his fingers dug in, tugging, again and again.

And in what seemed like seconds, the kitchen door was opening again, slowly this time, and Freya’s grandfather was there. Only he wasn’t looking at any of them and his steady fingers were trembling. Freya knew it without him saying it, could see it in his eyes, in the downturn of his lips. She reached out, taking tight hold of her baby brother’s hand.

“Grampa?” Richard was looking at him, and it was like he was pleading. Say it isn’t so.

Then her grandfather reached out, took hold of her mother’s shoulder. And she was looking up at him, eyes pleading, large tears leaking from the corners of her eyes.

Freya’s grandfather shook his head. “I’m so sorry.” His voice cracked. “I’m so, so sorry.”

It seemed that time stopped in the kitchen. That they hung there, the world no longer spinning.

Then a sound, her mother, a low moan creeping from her, the sound of an animal caught in a trap. Her grandmother gasping, the news punching her in her narrow stomach. Her grandfather had moved, had wrapped his arms around her mother’s shoulders as she shook. Richard, rearing back pushing the chair away so that it tumbled, hitting the tiled floor with a clatter, shoving his way past his grandfather and was gone. And Freya frozen. Because this isn’t real. None of this can possibly be real.

Chapter 9

Cecilia – Friday, 16th March – 9.22am

Cecilia was alone when she awoke. Unimaginable that she could have slept, and it seemed to her now that what she had experienced could not possibly have been sleep. Sleep made you think of rest, a gentle sinking into an easier state, not that plunging over the cliff edge, a black hole of unconsciousness. There had been dreams, if you could call them that. Rather piecemeal edges of sound, flashes of light that danced on the edge of her vision, and that pain that wrapped itself around her arm, wrenching at the socket, hauling her up towards wakefulness before the pain killers gripped her again, tugging her back down into the roar of the engines and the heat from the fire.

She lay, staring at the ceiling. Not so different from every other night. Just different dreams.

Her mouth seemed to be of cotton wool, head thick. She blinked, once, twice. There were the magnolia walls, the Degas reproduction that she had chosen that Tom hated. It seemed like there should be fire. There was the thick duvet over cotton sheets, but her body shivered like it was snow. There were sounds, right at the edge of her consciousness, a voice, familiar, strained. Cecilia turned her head, away from the sound, but it was still there.

The sky was a dull cotton today, snow falling in a relentless drone. She gazed out of the window at the grey sky, and the grey rooftops, and thought of plunging towards the ground. There were other voices, farther away, laughter, childish shrieks and dull thuds. Cecilia thought of the scream of metal.

“She’s sleeping now.”

Cecilia closed her eyes again. It seemed so loud, that voice. Disproportionately loud, like the roaring of engines. Perhaps she could sleep again. Or pass out. Whichever.

“No. There’s no way I can today.”

It seemed to be getting closer, looming larger the further under the duvet she sank, tightening around her. Her head throbbed.

“Yeah, I know. No, Ben’s with my mother.”

Ben. Her eyes fluttered open. She wanted to see him. Now. It was a sudden need, like the pull for breath at the bottom of a swimming pool. Had to see him. Her tiny baby, born earlier than he should have been so that he came out little bigger than a bag of sugar. Too small for her to hold, even if she had wanted to, even if she hadn’t been too ripped apart, too addled with drugs to care. The nurses had taken her to see him, wheeling her in an overlarge chair that looked to be of Soviet design. This miniscule creature, with the wires and the tubes, buried behind glass. They had encouraged her forward, in voices that promised Christmas and spring flowers, glancing at one another in self-satisfaction when she had finally rested her fingertips on the glass of the incubator. Then the baby had turned, and although now it seemed that she must have imagined it, looked straight at her, and something had swelled up on the inside, a terror that they had got the wrong woman. They were standing there, smiling, thinking that it would be okay, that she would be able to take care of him, give him everything he needed. Didn’t they know that she couldn’t even take care of herself? They hadn’t understood when she had wanted to leave,

“ Yeah, I know. No…no, I didn’t tell him about the crash.”

And Tom. So damned capable. So much a father, right from the start, even with the tubes and the wires and this thing that looked barely human. Talking softly through the plexiglass walls, as if there was someone to hear him. And then it seemed that he had heard, because in what felt like a moment he was two years old, and it was his father that he ran to when he fell to the ground because walking was still an imprecise affair. His father who made him smile so wide that it seemed that his face would split apart. Whilst she floated, still stuck behind plexiglass.

Would Ben have noticed if she had never have come back? Cecilia felt tears building. She already knew the answer.

“I know, boss, but it’s a really bad time. I feel like my place is here.”

Tom seemed to be just outside the door now. She wondered if he was listening, waiting for her to make a sound. He had a smoker’s voice, a deep throaty bass, even though he’d never touched a cigarette in his life. She remembered that voice, how it sounded through tinny telephone lines, distant and surprised that she’d called him. Three years ago. After she had left him, assumed she would never see him again. After all, they weren’t much, were they? A little casual affair, dipping her toes back into the water. And then, after it had drifted to its inevitable conclusion, she had left, retreated home, back to her parents’ in the leafy outskirts of Hay-on-Wye, even though she had sworn she would never go back there to that house choked full of silent hostility and jagged edges. But she had nowhere else to go. She had sworn that she was laying off men. No more pointless dating, killing time with men that left her feeling empty inside. Then had come the nausea and the backache and the little blue line on the unremarkable white stick. And she had called him, because she didn’t know what else to do. There had been a ripple in his voice, forced politeness because he just was that kind of man, and she had known that he had missed her no more than she had missed him. Her hand had hovered for a moment. He didn’t want her. She didn’t want him. What was the point? But then the memories had crowded in on her, and she had felt a shiver of fear, and almost without meaning them to, the words had tumbled out. Pregnant. Feeling like she was falling down the rabbit hole and knowing that she was sealing her fate, that uttering that word would make it so. The stunned silence, as he figures out what he needs to do next, then the soft sigh as he realises that he is as trapped as she is now, and the quiet “It’ll be okay. We’ll figure it out.”