Falling (2 page)

I sigh. This is not a conversation I want to be having, especially not with Soren, whose opinions are always very black-and-white.

“She’s not going to hurt anyone.”

He raises his eyebrow, looks at me quizzically, and puts his hand on the metal shutter, shaking it to make sure it’s locked securely. The sound echoes on and on down the empty walkways of the shopping center.

“So what’s the deal with her son?”

Mentally I grit my teeth. We’ve been over this. Well, we’ve been over the fact that I have no intention of telling him about Angus. Unfortunately I think my reluctance to talk has piqued Soren’s interest.

“He’s eighteen, okay. A kid. Eleanor suffers from anxiety, and she’s been too scared to go outside her front door for a long, long time. That alone freaks him out. But since last week, when she was robbed and threatened at knifepoint in her own home, she’s been in this permanent state of panic. He doesn’t know how to deal with any of it.”

“And you do?”

I frown. “I just… I need to be there for her.”

“Well, try and sort something out. I’m not getting paid enough to do your job as well as mine,” he says bluntly, pulling a fat joint out of his cigarette packet. He lights up as we part ways.

I sigh.
If only it were that fucking easy, Soren.
If only.

“Josh.” I turn as he calls my name and instinctively catch the small, light object he throws. “Chill out, yeah?”

A little shocked, I stare at the joint in my hand. Is he trying to get me arrested? I wonder if I should just bin it. I’ve smoked weed before, a long time ago, but only at other people’s houses and using other people’s weed, never on my own. Personal use, though, right? It’s just one tiny (quite fat, actually) joint.

I don’t move until Soren has vanished into the now dimly lit, empty shopping center. Aren’t there security cameras everywhere watching us? I bet some fucking security guard is rubbing his hands together up in his snug little office. Maybe he has a little file with all our tiny indiscretions noted down so that one day he can blackmail us with them.

Fuck. Is this paranoia?

Maybe it’s not just Eleanor who’s been sent spiraling by all this. I close my fingers around the joint and head out of the shopping center.

O
NE
OF
the weirdest things about working in a shop tucked away on the lower floor of a shopping center is that in winter you don’t see any hint of daylight at all. It was dark when I got here at eight fifteen this morning, and it’s dark now that I’m leaving at five forty-five too. My life is just one endless night.

It’s not raining, but it has been because the streets glisten wetly in the lamplight. All along the High Street, garish Christmas lights sparkle too brightly, their vibrant colors blinking on and off with headache-inducing irregularity. I close my eyes for a moment, feeling tired and old. I’m not normally so gloomy, but maybe I’ve been possessed by the ghost of Christmas past or something. I shouldn’t feel like this at twenty-five. I just want to get home to bed and shut it all out. I know that’s not going to happen. I’ve got to make sure Eleanor is okay before I can shut the world out…. I made a promise.

The car park is dark and empty, but my falling-apart car sits faithfully where I left her. She’s nothing special to look at, and is probably twice as old and ten times as rusty as most of the other cars that usually fill this car park, but it’s more what she means to me and my sanity that makes her so important—she is my freedom, my get-out clause. She feeds that secret thought at the back of my mind of just being able to start her engine and drive away, never looking back.

“J
OSH
? J
OSH
?
Is that you?”

Eleanor’s panicky whisper greets me as I close the front door to her flat quietly behind me and step into the narrow hallway.

Of course it’s me
, I think. As far as I know, I’m the only one with a key apart from Angus… who should be here somewhere too.

“Yeah,” I call, “it’s me. I brought you both some fish and chips.”

I hang my coat on one of the pegs in the hall, then walk into the kitchen.

“Angus is gone,” she says dully, rocking back and forth as I lay the fish and chips on the table and glance around the cozily lit Victorian flat.

Although she seems a lot calmer now and there are no knives laid out anywhere that I can see, her face is blotchy as though she’s been crying. I wonder if they have argued or disagreed about something, though I’ve never seen Angus angry, and I can’t imagine even if he did get angry that it would be with Eleanor. He’s too sweet with her.

“Want me to go look for him?” I ask.

After being at work all day, it’s the last thing I want to do, but I know the guilt won’t leave me alone if I don’t at least offer.

She shakes her head, strands of soft, graying hair falling across her face.

She’s barely forty, but she appears a lot older because she frowns and looks worried all the time. And more and more now, she hunches over as if she’s trying to take up less space in the world. She’s scared of her own shadow. But she wasn’t always that way—the dark grip of anxiety has tightened its hold slowly, over time.

When I first moved into this block of flats five years ago, I could barely function. Eleanor took me firmly under her wing, showed me how to cook, how to shop for food (though she rarely went with me, even then), how to clean—how to cope. She showed me that someone cared. And that dying organ inside my chest came back to life a little bit.

Back then I didn’t know she had a son she didn’t see. Or an ex-husband with control issues. It surprises me (and it hurts too) because now Angus is here, I can see how much she adores him, and he adores her. But she told me she wasn’t good for him back when he was small—I guess she means her anxiety. And I know leaving him with his dad was her choice, not something her husband forced her to do. Though, to be perfectly honest, what I’ve seen of Angus’s father hasn’t inspired any good feelings in me.

Since the beginning I’ve always seen Eleanor’s anxiety as part of her personality. Some people are just more anxious than others, and their way of coping—or not coping—with the world is more pronounced, but her fears have escalated hugely since the burglary, and while that would be expected, I’m not sure her behavior is anywhere near normal anymore.

“He got upset and said he needed to go out. I’m scared he’s had enough of me and is going back to his dad’s.” Her voice trembles over the words.

Today must have really got to him, then.

I put down the two plates I took out of the cabinet behind me and lay a hand on her arm. For the past couple of years, she’s desperately wanted Angus to come and live with her. Even so, when he turned up on the doorstep two months ago and wanted to move in, it was completely unexpected and out of the blue.

“He won’t do that,” I say, only half convinced, because what goes through the mind of that kid, I can’t even guess at most of the time. “He probably just needs a bit of space. You know how it is when you’re eighteen.” I shrug. I’m making it up. I was nothing like Angus at eighteen. Or rather, my life was nothing like Angus’s life at eighteen.

Because eighteen is a black hole you can’t remember
, a little voice in my head whispers.

I try and encourage Eleanor to eat something, but she’s too distracted. I’m starving though and inhale my dinner while she picks at her chips.

Ten minutes later the front door gently clicks open and then closed. Eleanor jumps out of her chair and disappears behind me making small anxious humming noises. I stand up. This sort of behavior puts you on edge however hard you try to remain calm.

For a moment Angus stands in the shadows of the hallway and looks at me the way he does sometimes, that expression I don’t understand. Or maybe I do, and I just don’t want to.

I can feel the relief rolling off Eleanor like great ocean waves.

“Angus,” she whispers, as if she thinks perhaps he will disappear again if she says his name any louder.

“I just went for a walk,” he says quietly, shaking rain out of his dark unruly hair—he has too much hair and the wildness of it makes me want to reach out and smooth it down. Sometimes the sunlight catches it and highlights it with gold, but mostly it looks as dark as the shadows he hides in.

He takes off his soaked cotton jacket and lays it carefully over the back of one of the dining chairs. I catch a flash of silver in the lining. Usually Angus wears black, as though there are no other colors. The silver is new.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he murmurs as he brushes past me.

Refusing to show how uncomfortable his words make me, I sit back down and try to act normally. I don’t know why he gets to me like this. I wish he didn’t.

It’s a discomfort that built up over time.

He sits down opposite me, but he won’t meet my gaze.

This is what unsettles me the most. Angus appears confident one moment, then crushingly shy the next. I have no idea how to deal with it, and so the ground is giving way beneath me.

“Grab a plate,” I say airily as if I’m in control of the situation, and I start unwrapping the still warm portion of fish and chips I saved for him.

W
E
SIT
and watch some inane program on the small portable television another neighbor kindly brought round after Eleanor’s got smashed during the robbery, and then we help Eleanor to bed. It’s early, but she has sleeping tablets that knock her out for a good twelve hours. I don’t know how she’d cope if she had to get through the night without them. I don’t know how
we’d
cope.

It’s the fourth night we’ve done this, and I’m coming to dread the awkward moment when we close Eleanor’s door. I mean, Angus is going to know I’m avoiding him if I say I’m going up to bed at seven o’clock every evening, isn’t he? I should be able to deal with this, for fuck’s sake. I’m twenty-five; he’s eighteen. I should be able to say, “I’m going home now, good night,” without feeling the need to explain further. But I do feel the need to explain because I
am
avoiding him. For some reason, I don’t want him to know that.

We head back into the living room.

“I know I said I wasn’t going to leave her on her own, but I just couldn’t take it anymore,” Angus says, sitting down at the dining table and concentrating on picking at the wax trail left by a candle.

I pull out a chair and sit down opposite.

“It’s okay,” I say, shrugging, because I have no idea what else I should say.

I’ve no idea if she’s okay to leave on her own. I’ve no idea what could happen. Soren’s words from earlier gnaw at me, and I wonder if he’s right and calling a doctor would be the best thing to do. Last week, after the robbery, a nurse came out and gave Eleanor a prescription for sleeping tablets, but I don’t think they realized the extent of her distress. At that point neither did Angus nor I.

It just seems so serious to involve anyone official—what if they decide she’s not fit to be at home? The thought causes my chest to tighten. Old fears, memories of hospital corridors, locked doors, expressionless doctors, and psychiatric assessments rise to the surface. I push them down and wonder instead what would happen to Angus. What would he do? Would he cope on his own? Would he end up going back to his controlling father? Questions I’m afraid of the answers to—and that’s why I tell myself most of the time she’s not that bad.

“You’re probably sick of this. Us,” Angus mumbles into the tabletop, bringing me out of my thoughts.

I roll my eyes. I realize this situation is better than the usual one of Angus’s coming on to me and my pathetic attempt to ignore it like it’s not happening, but I don’t deal with people feeling sorry for themselves very well, so I try to change the subject.

“Fancy a smoke?”

I pull Soren’s joint out of my pocket and lay it on the table between us.

I only ask because it seems like a quick-and-easy way for me to get out of here. We’ll smoke, and it’ll make both of us relaxed and a bit sleepy, and I can make my excuses to go. And to be honest, the stupid thing has been weighing me down since Soren threw it to me, and I’ll be glad to get rid of it.

It’s only when Angus meets my gaze for a fraction of a second that I think “fancy” was completely the worst word to use.

He nods. “Can’t in here, though. Eleanor doesn’t like smoking. She hates the smell.”

Inwardly I groan. The rain is still whispering against the window, the world beyond fathomless and black. There’s no way we’re going to be smoking outside tonight. I feel like I’ve unwittingly boxed myself into a corner.

“Come on, then,” I say darkly, mentally assessing how tidy I left my flat this morning.

Angus looks far too happy about this.

What the hell am I doing?

“T
HIS
IS
a one-off, and I’m tired, so don’t get all offended when I chuck you out,” I say as we stand on the stairs. I keep one step above him to exaggerate my height even more. It makes me feel more like the grown-up if I treat him like a child. “I don’t like visitors. Very few people have been up here. Feel privileged.”

I mean it as a joke, but I don’t smile.

My tiny flat is on the top floor. Its four rooms would have been the servants’ quarters back when this house was built in the late nineteenth century. I’m secretly very proud of it, and when Angus follows me inside and goes “Whoa,” some little place inside me lights up like a Christmas tree.

“I like books,” I say nonchalantly, because it’s a complete understatement. Because I am
obsessed
. Books, stories, poetry, words.

The walls that aren’t lined with shelf upon shelf of them are papered with pages saved from obscurity: weird poems, outdated theories, stories. In fact, the whole flat wouldn’t look out of place as the outlandish library in some eccentric stately home, the furniture all dark wood and plush velvety fabrics in eclectic colors.