Falling Off Air (19 page)

“Well, if I want to find out why he was killed and who killed him, some of the answers have to be there.” I thought it was
obvious and I gave her a look that must have said she was a fool. My mother gave me a similar look in return but I carried
on, caught up in the urgency of my mission. “There are people I need to talk to, and all of them are there … What the hell
can I find out at home? I was just trying to keep my foot in the door. Damn Maeve.”

I almost spat the last words and my mother heaved a sigh.

“I don't want to interfere,” she ventured. “You must do whatever you decide of course, but—”

“I know, I know,” I interrupted, snapping at her. “I should just put it aside, right? Like everything, always, pretend it's
not happening, put it aside.”

She was stunned into silence. In an instant I knew I shouldn't have said it. My sisters and I had frequently laughed at my
mother's maxim behind her back, but none of us, as far as I knew, had ever taunted her with it before.

“I'm sorry,” I muttered. “I'm really sorry. I shouldn't have said that. But someone did this and tried to frame me, and frankly,
if you don't want to see me in jail, I have no choice.”

She bit her lip and gazed back at me, then shook her head sadly.

“Let's get the children out,” she said, subject not closed but put aside.

We got them out of the bath and into their nightclothes. I dimmed the bedroom light, laid the children down, and leaned over
to kiss them and murmur in their ears. Their first day fatherless and they were oblivious. When they were older they would
ask me about it. Would they half remember, half imagine a chill in the air, a cloud in their mother's eyes, the echo of sirens,
the stern presence of the police? I prayed that there would be no more mystery about it by then. I needed to be able to say
this is what happened and why, this is who did it and why. I needed to be able to say it was awful, but it is over. I stroked
Hannah's hair. She was as good as asleep already, gazing up at me dreamily through heavy-lidded eyes, her mouth pulling on
her pacifier. I resolved that their father's death would have no impact on their days. They would not be the tragic offspring
of a murdered parent. Not if I had anything to do with it. Not if I could stay out of jail. Which did not seem then, as I
stood over my children, as much of a challenge as it would seem an hour later.

I went to bed just minutes after the children. I had no appetite for food. I was so drained that I could barely lift one foot
in front of the other, and even if my mother and I had anything to say to each other, I would not have been able to articulate
the words. I fell into a deep sleep and then half woke to voices downstairs. Despite my exhaustion, my brain was in such a
state of excitement that I could not simply ignore them. I sat up and listened, but the words were muffled, so I crept to
the door and opened it softly.

Mann's voice, “We understand absolutely, Mrs. Ballantyne, but this is a murder investigation. It's only eight-thirty, it's
not as though it's midnight.”

“Let her sleep, for heaven's sake. Why can't you leave it 'til tomorrow? This is nothing more than harassment.” There was
a brief silence after my mother's speech, and her claim of harassment might well have swung things in her direction, but I
could not sleep knowing that there was some news. Good or bad—and my instinct was that it was the latter—I had to know. I
pulled on my jeans and T-shirt and padded down the stairs in my bare feet. Finney was there too, which for some reason came
as a surprise. They were all looking at me by the time I reached the foot of the stairs, and I wished I had taken a moment
to splash some water on my face and put a comb through my hair. In particular I wished I'd pulled some underwear on. I felt
vulnerable, exposed.

“What is it?” I asked.

Finney's eyes went in one easy move from my sleep-creased face to my bare feet.

“We're sorry to disturb you,” Mann said, “but we need to ask you a few more questions.”

“You could have rung first,” my mother complained.

“We tried. We got the answering machine,” Mann said. I exchanged a glance with my mother and she nodded. The calls were piling
up both here and at my own house: Terry, Jane, Tanya, Suzette, a dozen others. I'd rung none of them back. Not yet, not until
I'd sorted things out.

“Okay,” I said, and led them into the sitting room. My mother told me that the press were outside too. My escape had been
short-lived.

Mann sat on the sofa next to me, and looked around at my mother's collection of kitsch while Finney pulled up a wooden dining
chair from the table. My mother hovered behind me, and I wished at this moment that she would be one thing or the other, that
she would leave the room and leave me to it, or remain and be professional. Her anxious, sympathetic presence was irritating
me and that in turn was distracting. I could practically feel her breath on my neck.

“We need to ask you some questions about your house,” Mann started. “How long have you lived there?”

Behind me my mother gave a little snort, as if the question were clearly irrelevant, and therefore justified her claim that
I should not have been woken up to answer it. My own reaction was more cautious. Why the house? What did they know that I
did not?

“Just over a year. Why?”

“You moved there from Mr. Wills's Upton Park flat?”

“I was here at my mother's house briefly, while I bought mine. Why? What's this about?”

“Why did you choose that particular house?” It was Finney this time, but I was getting increasingly annoyed at their assumption
that I was not to be told anything. To me it was an assumption that I was guilty.

“I liked the paintwork,” I snapped at him. He looked at me levelly.

“You did not like the paintwork,” he said.

“Well, why do you think?” I said. “I had no money. It was cheap.”

“You have a job,” Mann interjected. “You probably have savings.”

“Child care is going to cost me nearly all that I earn,” I spelled out to her, incredulous that another woman should be so
obtuse.

“And your savings?”

“I put down a large deposit on the house so I could afford the mortgage payments,” I explained wearily, hating to discuss
what were essentially private matters. Even my mother didn't know all this. “I also took an extended maternity leave, most
of which was unpaid. As of now I have no savings, no prospect of saving in the next eighteen years, and two children to feed,
clothe, and send on school skiing trips.”

“So that little council house is your future,” Finney said. “Two teenagers in bunk beds, taking turns at the kitchen table
to do their homework, and no space to swing a cat.”

“Thank you, yes, but we'll have to pass on the cat.”

In the moments that followed, when no one spoke, I wished I had not let that note of bitterness into my voice. I wasn't even
sure where it had come from. Then Finney spoke again, dropping words like depth charges into the sea.

“Well, you'll be all right now,” he said, “won't you?”

I frowned. I turned around to face him.

“What do you mean by that?”

Finney's eyes had a tired, world-sick look to them, and his next words were impatient. “You know perfectly well what I mean.”

“I don't,” I said distinctly, “know what you mean.”

I could feel my mother, very still, behind me.

“Who inherits Adam's flat?” he asked softly.

I gazed at him, lost for words, alarm bells beginning to ring, then clamoring, deafening me.

“I have no idea,” I said eventually, but I could scarcely hear my own words for the noise of danger in my head.

“You know perfectly well everything comes to you,” he said, not even attempting to keep the contempt from his voice.

“This is outrageous.” My mother saved me from having to speak. She had stepped out from behind the sofa and forward, as if
to shield me from Finney. “You come here, you wake up my daughter, and while she's still half asleep you produce some half-baked
accusation to try and provoke her to an ill-considered response.”

It was a performance worthy of any defense attorney, but this time Finney brushed her away like a fly.

“It's all in black and white,” he told her, “and its been in your daughter's possession for more than a year.”

He drew a long buff envelope from the inside breast pocket of his jacket and handed it to me. For a moment I just held it
on my knee. My hands were shaking too much to open it, and besides, I knew what it was. After a moment I handed it to my mother.

She took it from me, wide-eyed, and opened the envelope. It was not sealed. It had never been sealed. She stared down at it,
her eyes moving over the text.

“The last will and testament of Adam Wills,” she whispered, and handed the paper back to me as though it had scalded her fingers.

I
was all alone in my mother's house. Alone, that is, with the children. My mother had gone to work.

“I can't not go, I've got appointments all day long,” she said defensively. “I've been putting people off for the last few
days, but there are clients waiting for me. I can't just palm them off on someone else.”

My mother specializes in refugee and immigration work. She listed for me the clients who were waiting for her attention: a
refugee woman who'd been in Britain since her childhood, now fighting deportation; a young man injured in a police cell who
was accusing the officer of racism; a middle-aged man completing the paperwork to bring his recently widowed mother from Bangladesh
to Britain. They all sounded a great deal more worthy than me.

She bustled around the house, gathering up papers and files, losing and then finding her car keys.

“Life must go on,” was my mother's parting shot as she slammed the door shut, but mine was going nowhere. My mother seemed
to be distancing herself from me, as though she were preparing to lose me. She had not challenged me about the will. After
Finney's departure the night before, we had gone to our beds with only the minimum of conversation. I'd slept badly for the
second night in a row and I'd woken when the children did, at a quarter to six, with my head pounding.

My mother's silence over the breakfast table had been frightening, and the thought that she might be doubting my innocence
just intensified the pain in my head. I would have challenged her, forced her to talk to me, but I was capable of little more
than holding my head in my hands. I could not face food or caffeine, and preparing the children's porridge made me feel sick.
When the door slammed shut behind my mother and I heard her rev the car and drive off, I felt abandoned. I glanced from the
window and saw the press gathering already, several of them sipping from cardboard cups, the steam from their drinks rising
into the chilly air.

Hannah and William didn't know what was going on, but their mood had become brittle and dissatisfied in reaction to the tensions
around them. My nerves were stretched taut and every whine sounded to me like fingernails on a blackboard. There was no way
the children could know that any minute Finney might decide he had enough evidence to arrest me for murdering their father,
but they clung to me like drowning kittens to a raft. And I could not bear their touch. As gently as possible I disengaged
myself time and again from their clutches, but they welded themselves to me with increasing desperation.

These things I had done automatically for months: kneeling to wipe up the mess after breakfast even as more mess fell to the
floor around me; wrestling clothes onto cobra-like limbs; shielding myself from kicking feet while I changed nappies, shit
leaking all over their clothes, little heels pounding in the excrement, then pounding me. For months I had let these things
wash over me, shit and all. On that morning, the second day after Adam's death, with the pain in my head threatening to burst
my skull open, these same things drove me to tearful distraction.

When my mother had been gone about half an hour several things happened in quick succession.

Hannah was screaming because I had taken away from her an open carton of milk that she was pouring on the floor. I gave her
a bottle to calm her, but she rejected it, stamping her feet and pointing at my glass of juice. Too weak with anxiety, exhaustion,
and pain to argue, I handed it to her. She took one gulp, two, then carefully placed the glass on a stool, before swiping
it to the floor with a purposeful right hook. The glass broke, showering William's legs in glass and apple juice.

I yanked him up, but not before he put his hand down on a shard, which forced its way into his palm. Blood oozed from the
cut, he screamed, and I saw Hannah about to pick up a dagger of glass that would have severed an artery the moment she touched
it. I yelled at her and lunged, with William still in my arms, pushing Hannah away from her trophy, but toppling her at the
same time so that she fell and hit her head on the table leg.

At this moment the doorbell rang. I ignored it. I couldn't have done anything else. William was still howling, holding his
hand away from him, the blood dripping all over us both. Hannah was in floods of tears, face down on the floor in the middle
of the minefield, and when I tried to help her up she thrust me away. At that point something in me snapped. I couldn't help
myself. I stood over Hannah and shouted down at her. I shouted in fear that turned into anger against the world. I don't remember
what I shouted and I don't particularly want to. At the same time I grabbed her arm and hauled her out of danger. It must
have hurt, but she yelled as though I was amputating it.