Falling Over

Published by infinity plus
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© James Everington 2013
Cover image © geniebird
Cover design © Keith Brooke

ISBN: 9781301774654

‘Falling Over’ first appeared in
Penny Dreadnought Volume Two: Descartes’ Demon
‘Haunted’ first appeared in
100 Horrors
from Crunetus Libri Press
‘New Boy’ first appeared on the
Dark River Press
website
‘Drones’ first appeared in
Sirens Call
issue 2
‘A Dream About Robert Aickman’ first appeared on the author’s website

No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

The moral right of James Everington to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

Electronic Version by Baen Books

Falling Over

Ever since Michelle has come back from hospital, I’ve not been sure that it’s really her.

By this I don’t mean that her personality has changed, that the shock of the fall has shaken her confidence, or left her tired and prone to staring into space (although both of these are in fact true); I literally mean that she went in but didn’t come out; that something has taken her place.

Which shows, given that another part of me knows that it certainly
is
her, that it is my own sanity that I should be questioning, my own identity rather than that of the girl I’ve fancied all term.

I am looking at her now; looking at her reflection in the window at least, for I am facing away from her. Is she aware that I am looking? Michelle is sitting at the table in our communal kitchen area; another girl called Grace is making her a cup of tea, and giving her looks of half-concern, half-admiration (Grace has always been somewhat under Michelle’s shadow). I am pretending to wash-up, half-heartedly scrubbing at the first plate from the stack, while studying Michelle’s reflection. It is superimposed over a bleached English sky, making her look paler than she really is.

The halls of residence are disturbingly quiet, for we three are almost the only ones on this floor – it is the holidays and most of the students have gone home. For reasons I won’t go into some of us have nowhere else to go, and so we stay. There is a becalmed atmosphere; any radios or TVs switched on seem too loud on their old settings. There are a few others scattered on the floors above us, but although we hear signs of their existence a certain lethargy prevents us from seeking them out. Instead we sit together in this kitchen (although during term-time we are hardly all best friends). The only other person on this floor is called Christophe; I don’t know where Christophe is. Looking out the window at the lifeless campus I imagine we are lost at sea, everyone else having been saved but us. A plane silently crosses the sky, glinting in sunlight which doesn’t reach us down here, but I make no attempt to wave for rescue. Behind me, the song on the radio cracks up with static, as if we really were adrift.

Michelle is dressed in jeans and a familiar baggy jumper that she always wears when there are no guys around whom she wants to impress. She says she knows it is too large but it is soft and comforting; it was a present from her sister. Her hair is tied back – she normally has a habit, Michelle, of playing with her hair, unconsciously twisting a lock around her fingers. In a completely characteristic gesture she raises her hand to do this, then lets it drop because her hair is back, all without noticing. She says something to Grace and her eyes do that thing of hers where she blinks in rapid succession, then focuses on you again as if seeing you for the first time. Despite her proclaimed tiredness her voice is as precise as always – she never ‘umms’ or ‘ahs’ but remains silent until she has figured out what to say. Which doesn’t normally take her long. Her accent is somewhat plummy (which I find sexy, with her) although her background is similar to mine: nothing special.

I hear the noise of car motors, distant from a road I cannot see. They are coming home from work again, and I am so out of synch with their daily rhythm that I am surprised it is so late already. I only got up a few hours ago, and my day is yet to come.

Michelle does that thing with her eyes
again
as she thanks Grace for the tea, and Grace smiles back somewhat nervously. This interaction between the two of them is in keeping with everything I’ve seen previously; it isn’t just Michelle’s appearance and body-language that are manifestly the same as before, but everyone else’s perception of her, their relationship to her.
So why do I think that it’s not her?

Maybe it is the bandage around her head like some kind of bandana. She doesn’t need it, it is to hide stitches rather than to protect the wound or staunch bleeding. She doesn’t want anyone to see the (five) stitches in her head – which is reasonable enough – more importantly it is
in character
. Nevertheless her bandage does make her look different, almost surreal: she looks like a disaster survivor, a terrorist victim interviewed on TV, while she sits at our table drinking tea and moaning about coursework (she is writing her final year dissertation on ‘The Geo-Politics of Oil’ or some-such and she has to revise it almost every news broadcast). The white bandage makes her face seem too pale, as if she hasn’t recovered lost blood. It seems to shade into the skin of her forehead.

But I know, it isn’t the bandage. I would still feel the same suspicion if it wasn’t there, still have the same nagging feeling that she is an impostor, a chameleon, an impersonator. That I have no evidence to back up this theory (and indeed much that refutes it) doesn’t make my feeling go away; it makes it stronger, it convinces me how clever she, it, is. I must be going mad, I must have read
Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers
one too many times. Except I have never read it, and this is no sci-fi:
it isn’t her.

“Hey,” Michelle says to me. “You’re very quiet. Aren’t you glad I’m back?”

I look at the plane, not at her. I try to see it for what it is: 400 people sitting strapped in, reading, sleeping, talking, farting... But I can’t keep that image in my head at the same time as watching the silver dart of the plane. Even its pollution looks otherworldly; beautiful. 

But Michelle is still waiting for an answer. I mustn’t let on that I suspect. After all, it was me that found her.

~

I was in Christophe’s room at the time. The girls were elsewhere, watching some traffic camera TV show, so we had retreated to drink beer and listen to the radio – a neutral choice since neither of us liked each other’s CDs. It was supposedly night outside, but the on-campus lighting made it hard to tell. Every fourth or fifth light had a CCTV camera fitted – a hangover from some campus crime-wave that had never really abated, just become the accepted norm. Christophe had left his curtains open, and so every so often you’d see one of those cameras rotate, an unnerving reminder of the human hand behind the lens. Or is it just software? It worries me, when you see them move; I know I would have more of a sense of humour if I was adjusted, rather than this itchy feeling of being watched.

We were talking, Christophe and I, about the
future
, a vague but compulsive topic that has much occupied the paranoid parts of my mind recently. After all, there are just over two terms left, and then this degree course that I took as a stopgap (not knowing what else to do with my life) will be over. Barring catastrophe, I will achieve an honourable result in a course that leaves me fit for no job, except to teach similar courses. Of course, the lecturers would argue that
employability
is not the be all and end all of knowledge, and I would agree. But I
still
have no idea what to do with my life, and this thought makes me feel both desperate and apathetic – looking ahead, my life just disappears into a black-hole in nine months time, unknown and unobservable to anyone outside the periphery, including myself.

Christophe however, has it all sorted out. Or rather, his dad has – Christophe’s father is high-up in some faceless corporation, one whose actions would no doubt be stained and corrupt with oil, if I could be bothered to look them up. And so Christophe has all the money he needs – he is a student but he has savings; he has
shares
for fuck’s sake. He already has contacts among his dad’s friends in the city, which will guarantee him a foot on the rung of a very tall ladder when he graduates. So Christophe doesn’t want to talk about the future, or its attendant worries in my mind. Christophe wants to talk about girls.

“You know Grace likes you,” he says, opening another beer.

“Fuck does she,” I say. “She
likes
Michelle.” Christophe laughs because it’s true, sometimes the way Grace admires Michelle borders on infatuation: the way she follows her around, copies what she does, always harmonizes... But I doubt she actually fancies her.

Does
she fancy me? It would be typical if she does – since the holidays started we have all been spending too much time together in these deserted halls, isolated by their perceived emptiness and the grey winter outside (I have started to feel an odd
unease
stepping outside, a sense of vague uncertainty and lack of purpose. It is cold out there, but not as cold as it should be this time of year). And in our isolation we have played out our little micro-dramas of lust in different combinations: I want to sleep with Michelle; Christophe wanted to sleep with Michelle and then wanted to sleep with Grace; Grace wants to sleep with Michelle (maybe)
and
me. God knows who Michelle wants to sleep with.

“Seriously,” Christophe says, still on about the Grace thing.

“She isn’t my type,” I say, and she isn’t – not because of the way she looks or the way she is, but because the one clear idea I have of my future is that I want Michelle to be in it. Never mind that the Michelle-future is a pipedream, whereas a Grace-future might just possibly work out. I want Michelle in the same way I want things from the brightest, gaudiest adverts. “What’s Michelle going to do when she finishes?” I ask. “Has she said anything to you?”

“Nope – she’s a loser too,” Christophe says. Once Christophe has put you into one of his little mental boxes there is no easy way out, and I am frightened by the fact that he will no doubt attain a position of real power in this country, and yet he barely seems to know he’s born. He imagines he is slumming it with us sometimes, I feel, treating us as equals when at best we will be employees of people like him in the next world. It’s like an unconscious caste system in his head. But one that others share, and maybe they are right and maybe I am a loser, for I have yet to summon the energy to even go and see the university careers adviser. I have yet to work out what I would actually say.

Upstairs on the floor above us there is the sound of movement – other stowaways on this abandoned ship of ours. The radio takes a break from music for a brief, rushed news bulletin – the presenter sounds like she just wants to rattle through the headlines as quickly as possible (and admittedly they would be scary if you stopped to think about them). Only the traffic report is lingered over – all gridlock and overturned chemical lorries.

“Bloody fucking hippies,” Christophe says, apropos of an environmental protest march that is alleged to be blocking traffic. “Talk about shutting the door after the horse has bolted!” Do I have the right to feel angry with him when I am not there; have not contributed?

I get up to go to the bathroom. I’m halfway down the corridor when I hear a faint sound, almost a tapping sound. It is on the other side of the door that leads to the stairwells to the other floors. It gives me pause, for it doesn’t sound like one of the girls – when you live with people for awhile you can identify them by the sounds of their footsteps or whatever, but this sound is different. Is it the sound of something moving, something alive... is it trying to keep quiet?

Somewhat nervously I open the door and Michelle falls through. She had obviously been sprawled against it, at the bottom of the stairs; the sound I heard was her fingers scratching against the wood. There is blood spreading down her face from a wound to her head – so much of it and so bright that it looks like a bad special-effect to me, not something I am inclined to believe in. Her eyes are closed; I can see her lips moving. For a moment the shock is so great that I almost fall myself.

She has obviously fallen down the stairs, and I completely ignore all the advice they give you about people whose back might be broken – I try to move her, cradling her and lifting her up so that she is half-sitting, half-leaning against me. She is half-awake, woozy.

Michelle’s eyes flutter as they struggle to open; when they do she seems pleased to see me, in a vague sort of way – I can’t help the thought that it would be like this if we woke up together some morning: the slow coming to consciousness, the hazy pleasure of recognition... But my cries have alerted the others and suddenly they are both here – Christophe is calmly calling for an ambulance on his mobile; Grace is just standing behind us, her face drained of what little colour it had. She is wringing her hands like it is her fault, like it has happened to her. But it is not Grace that I feel angry with but Christophe, for he is competently doing the things that I should have done.

Then Michelle’s grip tightens on me and I panic for a second, for the way she is holding me is suddenly desperate, clingy. But she is just trying to pull herself up to speak to me. I try to calm her, to tell her whatever she wants to say can wait, but she is insistent. Her breath is hot against my ear as she whispers into it, her voice husky like a seduction...

But I couldn’t tell what she said.

I couldn’t work it out, and now I have the nagging feeling that I have missed something important. I am sure she was herself then, Michelle, for that moment at least, with the same conviction that I feel that the person drinking tea in our communal kitchen isn’t someone I know. But she has just asked me if I am glad to have her back, and I say of course I am. I wish you’d never left, I say, and Michelle’s reflection smiles, slightly confused.

~

I leave the kitchen and find Christophe in the communal TV room, which is of course deserted. The whole room is a throwback to last century – all students have TVs in their rooms now. The TV here looks old-fashioned, redundant technology. The colours look off; the ratios are all wrong. Christophe has a large TV and no end of gadgets in his room, but here he is sprawled out across the sofa, as if enjoying the perversity of being alone in such a large room. He is watching 24hr news, and from the empty beer cans by his feet I can tell he must have watched the same looped bulletins over and over, which can’t be healthy. The sky framed in the window is darkening towards grey, and the planes are now only identifiable by their blinking lights.

I sit down next to him, practically on his legs until he reluctantly makes room. I know better than to ask for any of his beer.