Catch Me When I Fall (8 page)

Meg dropped me at home just after nine. She said she wouldnt stop, she'd seen quite enough of me for one weekend, b wandered in with me anyway. In the house we found Charlie with his old friend Sam watching a DVD in the dark. I kissed Charlie on the top of his head and took a gulp of wine from hi glass.
'Hi,' he said, reaching out a hand. 'Hello, Meg.'
'Hello,' she said. I looked at the way her blush spread owe her face.
'Good weekend?"
'Knackering."
'Do either of you want something to drink? Or eat, even There may be some pizza left.'

'Just a cup of tea. I'll get it.'
"Don't worry. I can't work out what's going on in this anyway.' He disappeared into the kitchen, followed a few moments later by Meg. I could hear them talking in low voices, and then his burst of laughter. I lowered myself into the sofa next to Sam
and looked at the screen. Something blew up.
"What's happening?" I said.
'It's a bit complicated,' said Sam. 'He's an assassin who's agreed to do one last job. And his daughter's been kidnapped. We think the two things might be connected."
'Did you get your accounts done?' I called through to Charlie. 'I made a start,' he replied.
'I thought they were overdue.'
There was no reply.
I went out into the garden, which was a bit like a wasteland, but Charlie and I had plans for it. We were going to run a winding paved path up the middle, make a lawn on either side, plant an apple tree and a cherry tree at the end and -this was my particular task -make a small gravelled patio by the kitchen door, which I was going to fill with dozens of terracotta pots full of shrubs, fragrant flowers and ornamental trees. I'd already ordered a bay. I leaned back against the wall where I was going to grow jasmine and honeysuckle, and imagined myself sitting out there in the summer, nothing to do, a glass of cold white wine in my hand, watching Charlie at the barbecue he'd said he was going to build.
But it was cold outside, and dark, so after a few minutes I went back in. Meg said she was about to go and for once I didn't try to dissuade her. I had a shower. I was exhausted, yet still buzzing from the weekend and I felt as if I wanted the water to extinguish something in me so I could go to bed and sleep. I put on the pyjamas Charlie had given me and joined the men again, but the film was too jangly, busy, fast-moving and it, made me

feel even more agitated. I went upstairs and picked up the novel I was reading, but after a couple of pages I hadn't taken any of it in and would have to go back to the beginning. I wasn't in the mood for reading. I needed to do something mindless. I padded down the stairs again and peeked into Charlie's work room. I couldn't help grimacing.
When I first heard that Charlie was an illustrator, I thought I knew what that meant. "Illustrator' wasn't the same as 'artist', which was a vague, vast and splendid word, full of drift and danger. It was neater and more precise, with clear boundaries and a sense of wit about it. An illustrator had a commission and a deadline, a subject and a portfolio. I imagined that editors would ring Charlie up and ask him to do a newspaper drawing for the following day, a magazine one for the following week, a book-jacket for several months away. Maybe he'd do children's illustrations too. I'd pictured him in a neat, airy room, with a large table and lots of sharp pencils in a mug. And that seemed to fit with what I saw of him: that he was dreamy and interior, but solid and humorous at the same time; absent-minded, yet meticulously clever and focused on the task in front of him. He had delicate, rough hands. He could make things (wooden carvings, shelves and intricate boxes, a go-kart for the autistic boy three doors down) and mend things (windows, bicycles, all the plates and mugs I broke, even the washing-machine).
What I hadn't realized was that being an illustrator is a grubby nasty business just like any other. You need to put your foot in the door, hustle your portfolio round editors and agents. It's about making contacts, then exploiting them. I had come to understand that in the back of Charlie's mind, when we were lying in bed together, when we were away, was that every year another flood, another Niagara, of new, hungry, talented illustrators poured out of the art colleges on to the streets with their portfolios, their ambition and their fresh, new ideas.

I was desperate to fight for him like a tiger, to be his muse, his agent, his hit-woman, but he was too laid-back for that. Maybe he was too much of an artist. I loved that about him and I hated it and wanted to claw the walls in frustration. I bit my tongue because he was wonderfully talented and I tried to explain it to people, but the only people who really understood were the ones who knew him, who had seen the drawings or, better still, had seen him at work. There was a look in his eye when he stared at the paper, the wonderful economy and dexterity he had with a line and a blob of colour, the incredible feeling he had for putting them in the right place and doing enough and knowing when to stop. I wasn't going to be the nagging woman who stopped him fulfilling his potential. I'd seen the terrible old movies. I wasn't going to be the harridan who says, 'All right, Leonardo, go and paint that Last Supper, if you have to, but don't expect me to be here when you come back.'
He always said he'd do it in his own way and in his own time. Sometimes this meant he wouldn't do it at all. Deadlines passed. I couldn't bear it when that happened. It wasn't just the money, though God knew we needed it badly enough, with the huge mortgage and me and Meg starting the company. It was the waste of it that I hated. I hated it so much that I felt itchy and crackly with rage when it happened. I told myself not to say anything, not to nag: that only made it worse. But more often than not I couldn't keep my mouth shut. I once read a collection of Van Gogh's letters. It was Charlie's favourite book. It was his Bible. I kept thinking that what Van Gogh really needed was a good woman and some medical help. But he painted the pictures. And killed himself.
There were papers all over the floor. There were envelopes, some unopened. There were books face down, spines cracking -one about black holes, one about new evolutionary theories, an anthology of chess games. The Van Gogh letters. I could

imagine Charlie's weekend all too clearly: cups of tea, coffee. A run in Highgate Woods. Bits of TV. Flick through a book, a magazine. Start some job around the house. A drink with friends. A few hours online. A takeaway. At some point he had steeled himself to get going with his accounts. He had taken the large piles of papers on his desk and next to his desk and broken them up into smaller piles which he had arranged around the room. He had given himself a glimpse of the horror, then retreated. That was probably when he had called Sam. It was at moments like that that you needed friends, to keep your mind off what you ought to be doing.
The kitchen looked as if it had been burgled and vandalized, so while they watched the movie I cleaned and scoured and wiped and put things away in cupboards, then got things out of cupboards and looked at them and put some in a bin bag, then replaced the rest. When Charlie came in, I was finishing off and I felt as if I had climbed a mountain and was standing on the
summit looking over a beautiful valley in the sunshine.
'I was going to do that," Charlie said.
'It's not a problem," I said. 'I was meaning to sort it out." 'Sort it out?'
'I've done the cupboards as well. I've thrown lots of stuff away. Like the ice-cream maker with the stirrer thing, except the stirrer thing was missing.'
"I was going to replace it.'
"How? Where? This isn't the nineteenth century. There aren't hardware shops any more where you can buy replacements. It's cheaper to buy a new ice-cream maker. If we need one. Which we don't because we've never made ice-cream. Or homemade pasta. I threw that machine away as well. It was rusty. We never make anything, really, except toast and bacon and eggs.'
'How can you do this,' he said, 'after your weekend? I bet you hardly slept. Aren't you exhausted?'

"It's the opposite," I said. 'It's good. It helps me wind down."
'You know, I love you in those pyjamas. But sometimes I regret buying them for you.'
I knew what he was saying but pretended I didn't. My body felt all wrong. I couldn't bear the thought of someone touching it.
"I looked into your study...' I began.
'I know, I know," he said.
"Your tax form. It was due in last week, wasn't it? Or was it the week before last?'
'I'll do it soon,' he said.
"Let me have a look.'
'Don't be ridiculous. It's half past eleven. You've probably not had any sleep all weekend, if I know you. And you've a company of your own to run.'
'I'm not tired, I just want to have a quick look. Come on."
I put on slippers and a dressing-gown, and dragged Charlie to his work room. It really was a scary place.
'It's like a diagram of the inside of my brain," he said, with a smile.
'Don't say that.'
'I'll deal with it tomorrow," he said. "I promise. I'll even open some of the letters. The ones with red bits on.'
I took a deep breath. 'The main bit of advice we got when we started KS was to keep in touch with people. They get worried when they don't hear from you. This,' I gestured at the atrocious scene, "is like when a child puts his hand over his eyes and thinks nobody can see him."
He grimaced.
"We don't want to lose the house, Charlie,' I said.
'Things aren't that bad," he said, in a light tone. 'You could always kill me and collect the insurance.'
I fetched a bin bag, my second of the evening, and a notebook, and got to work. I opened all the letters and started putting them

into piles: real, meaningful, consciously arranged piles. Charlie protested at first, but then he lay down on the old sofa and drifted into a half-sleep from which I woke him occasionally with shouted inquiries. Envelopes and bumf and other rubbish went into the bag. Then I read through everything and arranged it first by subject and then in order of scariness. Charlie hadn't been keeping proper accounts, so I created a rough and ready account book that could just about be presented to a tax man.
I woke Charlie and he went and made us hot chocolate, into which we dunked digestive biscuits. My feet were chilly and I could feel I was starting to slow down. A great weariness lurked behind my eyes, waiting to pounce. I put the piles of papers that could be forgotten about on the floor. I scribbled in the account book, I took notes, I prodded Charlie and reduced and reordered the papers, boiling it down, boiling it down, until there were just six pieces of paper that absolutely had to be dealt with. Three were unpaid bills; three were invoices he'd never sent off.
As Charlie dozed off again, I came across a letter in the bottom drawer, scrunched-up, as if Charlie had balled it angrily in his fist before chucking it in there. It was three lines long, not counting the signature, from a publishing company, rejecting his proposal for a graphic novel that I hadn't even known he was working on. I shut the drawer quietly, and looked at Charlie, his head tipped to the side, his soft hair falling over one eye, his mouth half open, and a tiny rumble in the back of his throat. He hadn't told me. He'd hidden it and pretended it didn't exist. A violent spasm of tenderness shot through me, leaving me shaky and anxious.
'Some of these are really good," I said brightly, when he woke, gesturing at the pile of drawings I'd put on the desk, except for the one of Meg and me together in which I looked scrawny and cartoonishly demented, which I'd surreptitiously screwed into a ball and crammed into the bin bag.

'They're nothing," he said, rubbing his eyes. "Just stupid doodles."
I looked at him curiously. "You don't enjoy it any more, do you?" 'What?" 'Drawing."
He shrugged. 'It's just work.'
'It's not just work. You're good at it, really gifted. God, if I only had a gift like yours. And you always used to love it.'
'That was before I had to do it. Before it was a job. Like you
keep telling me, we have to pay the mortgage.'
"You really feel that it's just a grind?'
'This isn't the time to talk about it, Holly. It's two o'clock in
morning."
'Then stop doing it," I said. "You don't need to.'
'What are you going on about?"
"You know what you really love doing, what makes you contented? Making things, fixing things. I've seen the expression
on your face. That's what you should do.'
'I should fix things?'
'Yes. Forget being an artist or an illustrator. Retrain. Retrain as a ... as a plumber. I'm always reading about how plumbers can ask any price they want, they're in such demand. We can remortgage the house and put you through an apprenticeship. You'd love it."
'So that's what you think of me, is it? I should fix drains and broken pipes and clogged gutters.'
I heard the danger signs and ignored them. 'It'd be better than sitting here day after day failing to work, staring into space, and feeling miserable, with me getting all resentful. Let's just do it.'
'So you're in Soho being a consultant or an enabler or whatever you fucking care to call it. And what does your husband do? Oh, he's a plumber. If you've got a blocked toilet, you know who to call.'

'Why not, Charlie? What's wrong with being a plumber?' 'I thought you believed in me.' 'I do -of course I do.'
"I thought you said I had a great future ahead of me.'
"I just want you to be '
The phone rang. We looked at each other in puzzlement. "Who the fuck could possibly ring at this time?'
A shudder of apprehension passed through me and I leaped to it, but Charlie got there first. 'Yes? Oh.' His expression changed and his voice lost some of its aggression. 'No, unbelievably I wasn't asleep. Yes. Yes, OK. I'll be right over.' He put the phone down.
'What's wrong?"
"Naomi in a panic. She needs my help with something.' 'At this time of night?' "She saw our lights on.' 'What can be so urgent?'
"She can smell something burning. She's worried there might be an electrical fire.'
'Can't she call someone?' I said.
"She did call someone,' he said. 'She called us.'
'It's the middle of the night.'
"I know, I know,' said Charlie, 'and I'm a plumber, not an electrician. But she's a neighbour. If her house bums down, it'll take ours with it."
'Come back soon, Charlie. We can't leave things like this.'
"I thought you'd sorted it all out,' he said, and he was gone. I heard the front door slam, his footsteps ring out in the silence.
I sat there for a few moments, going over the conversation in my head, seeing his hard, furious face. Then I put each pile of paper into a separate folder. I picked up all his pencils and pens and put them into a glass jar. I pushed rubbish into the bin bag. I returned all the mugs and ashtrays to the kitchen. I wiped every