Catch Me When I Fall (31 page)

An old weaver's workshop in Spitalfields. A canal barge. A closed-down Underground station. The biggest bouncy castle in the entire world. She knew a clown, a magician, a juggler, a hurdy-gurdy man, a puppeteer from the Transvaal. They all sounded wonderful, she was wonderful, but I shook my head. 'No," I said. 'This is my day and I want absolutely nothing to worry about. There aren't even going to be any speeches. Todd made me promise. It's going to be a grown-up party. People can drink and people can dance and nothing at all can go wrong.'
'What about food?' she said, and she started talking about a chef she'd met who did something involving every single bit of a pig.
'Todd's parents are arranging all that,' I said. "They insisted." "I just want to help,' she said.
"But you'll ask first?' I said. 'I mean, before helping."
I worried that I might have upset her but she laughed and gave me a hug.

One of Todd's friends had a house in Hackney with a large garden that backed on to an even larger garden. There was a gate between them that could be opened to make it into one, improbably large, secret walled city garden, and that was where we held our party. The girls in the office worked on it for a whole day and when I arrived I almost burst into tears. There were garlands of flowers hanging from the branches of trees, and wind chimes tinkling in the breeze and candles everywhere, their soft light growing stronger in the dusk.
There's so much else to say about the party. About how I was worried whether anybody would come, and how I was then worried about whether there was enough to drink, and in the end about whether anyone would ever leave. About how I saw my whole life there in that walled garden, from people I hadn't met since I left primary school to people I saw every day by

the coffee machine, from ancient great-aunts to old boyfriends. About how I saw a cross-section of Todd's life, people I would get to know properly over the next months and years, people I would like because he liked them. About meeting Todd's previous girlfriend, who irritated me by being almost six feet tall and then even more by being rather nice, and then soothed my ego by being with a new boyfriend who was clearly, at even the most cursory glance, much less attractive than Todd. But those are other people's stories and this is still a story about Holly.
I mustn't give the impression that I was worrying about her all the time because I didn't need to. Starting again at work had taken enormous courage. She was right back at the bottom of the hill and she had to climb it wearing concrete boots. So much damage had been done. There were clients who came back but quite a few didn't and we had to go out in search of new ones, and even some of the new ones had heard strange rumours on the grapevine. And I could hardly believe it but she had done it: she had got down and dirty and done the grindingly awful work of getting KS Associates back on its feet.
It wasn't quite the same this time round. It couldn't be. There wasn't quite that air of improvisation there had been, or the thirty-six-hour parties, the feeling of being on a tightrope with no safety-net. A lot of it had gone, as maybe it had to. It was the difference between drunk and sober, manic and normal, between being young women too stupid to know what they were taking on and slightly older women who had been made to learn a lesson or two.
But I had a few pangs about Holly at our party, if only because the last wedding party I'd been at with her had been her own. I felt better as soon as I saw her. The rule about not outshining the bride apparently ceased to apply after the wedding ceremony had finished. She had let her hair down so it flowed over her shoulders and she was wearing a scarlet dress expressly designed

for reprehensible behaviour. She staggered in carrying a large, elaborately decorated box tied with ribbons. I insisted on opening it there and then. It contained a globe. There was another pink ribbon tied tightly around the equator with a label that bore only the two words 'Your Oyster'. 'As in, "'The world is..."," said Holly.
Todd came over and gave her a hug. 'I love these things,' he said, spinning it round, like a child. 'Look. Did you know that
New York is on the same latitude as Rome?'
"No, I didn't," I said happily.
"It's useful to be reminded of the world's roundness," said Holly, 'from time to time."
Todd carried the globe through to a place of honour. Holly hugged me and looked at me close up. 'I've got through, I think,"
she said. 'And it's about ninety-nine per cent due to you.' 'Nine per cent, more like,' I said.
'We can negotiate details like that,' she said.
'I just did what friends are meant to do."
Holly shook her head. "I don't think most of them know that all that's part of the deal." She squeezed my hand. "Oh, by the
way, Charlie sends his regards.'
'You're not serious,' I said.
'He writes to me,' said Holly. 'I give his letters a glance before
I pass them on to my lawyer."
"How can it be allowed?'
"I keep trying to decide if it was my fault and in a way, of course, it was. I think I fell in love with a fantasy, and then God knows what hell I put him through, what nightmare he found himself living in. I wrecked him. If he hadn't met me, he would still be free, still be good. I pushed him into being a man who could murder.' She looked around and saw other people arriving. "This isn't the time," she said. "Oh, there is one thing, something my lawyer told me. You remember Charlie's plan? He kills me,

it looks like suicide, one insurance policy pays off the mortgage, another one gives him a fat cheque. But he didn't read the small print. It wouldn't have worked. They didn't -needless to say pay out in cases of suicide. Poor Charlie. He failed even as a murderer.' She gave my hand another squeeze and disappeared.
From then on I caught a glimpse of her from time to time. There was the inevitable problem with a party of that kind that people stuck in groups, relatives, colleagues, college friends. Holly wasn't like that. Every time I saw her she was in a different part of the garden, talking with all sorts of different people. Then, for a time, I didn't see her at all. I looked around, couldn't find her, wondered if she might have sneaked home, and then I thought of other things, got involved in other conversations, forgot about her for a while.
I was in the kitchen having a delirious reminiscence with a girl from my secondary school when I felt arms round me from behind and found myself held by Todd. 'Having a good time?' he said.
'Wonderful."
'I'm only just starting to learn what a rich and interesting life you've had," he said.
"Who the hell have you been talking to?' I asked, in some alarm.
"Everybody,' he said. He looked at his watch. 'You know what
time it is?'
'No."
'It's just about to be midnight. I wanted to '
He never said what he wanted because there was the most extraordinary explosion and the house shook. In a moment of panic, I wondered if there could have been a terrorist bomb. Then I saw smoke in the garden, billowing in through the French windows. Todd and I ran outside. The crowd in the garden was talking avidly and gesticulating up at the house. We turned and

looked up. A top window was open, with smoke pouring out of it, billowing over the sill and tumbling downwards like foamy brown water. Then two faces appeared, their faces black with soot, like chimney sweeps. I turned to the people around me.
'What the... ?'

So here they are, then. The people who loved me and hated me, who wanted me to live and who wished me dead, who tried to save me and who let me go. They all look happy. They are gazing at each other, holding hands; some of them are kissing. I can tell that they are making promises to each other for the life ahead. That great journey. Only one is missing.
Sometimes it feels as if Charlie never existed, that he's just a dream I've woken from, a figure fading into nothing inside my giddy head. In a way, that's true. It's like I said to Meg a few minutes ago, the Charlie I fell in love with was a fantasy figure -in the same way that I was for him. He was the man who was going to rescue me from myself. As my therapist says to me about three times each bloody session, 'You're the only person who can help yourself, Holly." She uses my name in every sentence -"What do you feel about that, Holly?' 'How do you explain that, Holly?" I want to tell her I've been to that people-management course too, the one that teaches you how to grip someone firmly by the hand when you first meet them, look them in the eye. I want to say that I'm bored to death of talking about me, me, me. That it's all very well looking inside all the time, exploring the dark and secret labyrinths of the mind, but what about the wonderful world outside? What about poetry, music, passion, the lash of the green sea? But then I think of my friends, my family; I think of darling Meg, who even now, on the day of her wedding party, keeps glancing at me to check that I really am all right. I'll keep going. I'll keep on taking the tablets, the exercise, the talking cure. I don't want to die a third time. Not yet, anyway. I'll save death up.

Meg asks me if I miss my moods. She has such an anxious expression on her face that usually I avoid the question. The truth is, of course I do. I miss them like you miss a lover. My wild and swinging self. The inky darkness where demons lurked, and then the glorious light. Falling then flying; crashing down but then hurtling up again until I was so happy and so free I almost wanted to die of the sheer joy of it; a delirium of delight that was very close to terror. The world was mine and I was its.
But the missing is getting better. To begin with, I kept myself on such a tight rein I almost throttled myself. Got up at the same time; went to work at the same time; came home on the dot; sensible food; early bed. Didn't dress up in my favourite clothes, didn't flirt, didn't dance, didn't drink, didn't giggle, didn't howl, didn't stray. Bit by bit, I'm letting myself off the leash.
Tonight I feel good, I feel great, it's almost like the old days when a glorious, uncontainable energy would ripple through me so I could hardly keep my feet on the ground. And look at Meg, her kind and lovely face. She's happy. Never has anyone deserved to be happy as much as Meg, who always puts other people's happiness first. I hope Todd always realizes how lucky he is. I hope I always realize how lucky I am.
I used to think that, in the end, I was profoundly on my own -and that everyone in this seething world is too. It's a condition of being human. All through your life you search for love and intimacy; you search for unconditional loyalty and recognition. From parents, friends, partners. We all make promises to each other and we believe them, or pretend to believe them. VCe hang on to the hope that we're not alone. And yet, at moments of great crisis and black despair, the only person who can save you is yourself. No one else can do it. That's what I've always thought, and in a way I think it still, but when I was down and helpless and had given up on myself, Meg was there, like a miracle. She believed in me when I'd lost belief in myself, and made me live when I was ready to die. Put my demons on one side of the scale and

Meg on the other, and she outweighs them all. That's what I mean by lucky.

The party is winding down now. People are talking about leaving. 1 look at my watch and see it's midnight, nearly time. I push my way through the crowds of people, back into the house, and collect the package from where I'd hidden it under coats in the spare bedroom.
A familiar bubble of joy opens in my throat. I know that I am about to do something stupid.
They'd cost me nearly two hundred pounds. The man selling them had been a bit surprised and told me to make sure to read the instructions properly, and there was a woman buying sparklers who'd been downright disapproving. How could I spend that much money, she asked, on something that would be over before you could count to ten, and nothing to show for it? But didn't she understand that that was exactly the point? To work for days and weeks, then blow it all in a single, dazzling moment.
I sneak out into the garden again. In the kitchen, Meg is leaning against Todd and he's saying something in her ear. They don't notice me. It says on the outside of the pack that they should be planted eighty metres away from people. How ridiculous. Eighty metres would take me through the other house and over the road. So I make do with the end of the garden. It'll be fine. Probably.
The first one goes a bit wrong. Its stake tips sideways at the last moment so that it shoots off at an angle, towards the house. I have a nasty feeling it went through the window. I hear shouts and screams behind me, see smoke. But it's too late to bother with any of that, because a falling spark has already lit the fuse of the second. I watch as the tiny light travels up towards the rocket, then burrows into its base. For a moment it looks as if it has been extinguished, but then there is a short, powerful hiss and the rocket soars fabulously upwards, leaping into the dark sky, its solid body ripping apart and turning into suns and stars and squibs of exploding colour. My gift for my friend.

Time stops. In the secret garden, everyone looks upwards together, at the blossoming flower of perfect shedding light. Its petals of sol, fire fall silently towards us.
Twice I died. Now I live.