Falling Over (3 page)

“Is this really the time?” Michelle snaps. “We need to get her to A&E, a taxi could be ages, not that you’ve even ordered one.” She is angry at me, at my inefficiencies.

“I’ll get dressed,” I say, straightening up, suddenly feeling cold and self-conscious in just my underwear. But I am miles from my own room; I could just get yesterday’s clothes from Michelle’s but even then...

“There’s no time!” Christophe and Michelle say in unison, and their synchrony shocks me for a second. “Should have slept in your own room last night,” Christophe says with an evil look at me, and instead of being annoyed at him, Michelle just smiles.

“She wanted me to go with her,” I say, as the two of them take hold of Grace, one either side of her gripping her elbows, hauling her off like she really has done harm to herself. My words sound like a child’s, plaintive sentiment ready to be ignored. Grace is struggling, but mutely, like she is half resigned to her fate. Like I have let her down too. I don’t follow. Michelle glares at me over her shoulder, for not being any help, for creating complication where none exists, and I know it was a one-off last night after all – there’s no future there. I have made an incorrect decision, and allowed myself to be judged by a girl whose standards I no longer even understand.

It’s
not
Michelle remember, I tell myself, something has taken her place in hospital... and the thought of this doppelganger is now oddly comforting – the
real
Michelle wouldn’t have rejected me... But I know the feeling of comfort is illusory, for there is danger here, and I doubt I’ll ever see Grace again. Oh, something will come back, bandaged up and with scars I never found erased, but it won’t be Grace. They will have gotten to her too.

After the three of them are out of sight, my sense of powerlessness fades. I need to find out what is going on. And in all the confusion with Grace, Michelle has left her room unlocked...

When I find it, it is almost too easy, like fake clues have been planted directly in my path – I find Michelle’s diary. It is almost too obvious.

~

Everyone has gone home for the holidays except for me and a few others
, I read. Michelle’s handwriting is entirely legible, as if she’d wrote it out neat for the class. But despite this clarity there is an uncertainty to the content – although it is never written directly, each line seems to hint at the fact that girls like Michelle don’t really keep such diaries anymore, in this late age. As though the sincerity of each sentence is contradicted by an irony affecting the whole. I skim read the latest entries, not really knowing what I am looking for.
Everyone seems to be sticking to
their own floor – annoying because that boy I really like from lectures is on Floor 2 and I don’t even know if he’s still around. Last year he was so drunk I doubt he even
remembers
what we did together. So
bad
that I can’t remember his name! Drunk too. Maybe I should go and look see if he is still around.

Still feeling faint. Thank god I didn’t go home – Mother would be
unbearable
if she knew. More unbearable, I mean.

......

Talked with others about plans after uni today. None of us know except C, who was being his usual self! Flattering that he likes me though, with his expensive tastes. G will end up being a teacher or nurse surely, she was only copying anxiety to fit in. World outside is going crazy too – keep the news switched off.

Floor 2 was empty when I went up – full of ghosts creaking. No sign of that boy!

......

Saw him today! Was shameless! He’s practically all alone up there, and I said I was too down here.
Strongly
hinted that I could do with some company – talk about playing hard to get Michelle! Ah well. He’s coming down tonight with some wine and DVDs.

Wish G would stop following me around, she better not turn up tonight! At least those boys have hormones as an excuse – decided they
both
fancy me now? Christ, it’s this place, too empty – the mind makes shit up.

......

Fuck, fuck, fuck,
who
was that boy? Fuck!

......

No wait, calm down. The mind makes shit up, you said it yourself.

......

But shit wasn’t he circumcised the first time?!!!

......

Michelle’s handwriting had been getting steadily more ragged as I’d read, but for the next entry it was back to its previous neat and tidy progress across the page.

How drunk was I last night? (And how hung-over this morning – but then I’ve had this background headache for days.) Should tear the above pages out, I’m obviously stir crazy. But leave them. I can’t help thinking...

I’ll go up today,
sober
, and speak to Floor 2 boy again (still don’t remember his name) and that will sort me out. That and aspirin. Stop craziness. Which I don’t need. I need to
sort stuff out
, work out what graduate placements to apply for. Writing this knowing I won’t. C has invited me to some careers fair, transparent, but it won’t be because of that I don’t go. I’ll just end up kicking around here with the other two. We can all be losers together. Until the money runs out. Or the oil dries up and we all end up back in the caves anyway.

Better go upstairs and find that boy though, so I can get my head into some kind of working order. Before I lose my nerve.

~

The was the last entry, dated the day she fell over. After that, nothing. I wasn’t expecting entries for the time she was actually in hospital, but I was for the days after. But it is like diary writing is a childish, teenage thing that she has suddenly grown out of.

But the Floor 2 boy – that is a clue surely? The boy who she went up to find on the day she fell. And the person I have read more about in Michelle’s diary than myself, despite the fact she sees
me
every day, despite the fact that she doesn’t even know
his
name...

Without letting myself think too much I drop Michelle’s diary on her bed, leaving the clasps open. Let her guess that I read it, that I know her secrets... My head is pounding as I leave her room and head towards the stairwell. I am dizzy on the stairs, and scared I will fall myself. I hold tightly onto the banister, and I feel enflamed, tenacious despite my dizziness. I welcome the unexpected struggle of the climb, for without obstacles my anger would be a tantrum only; with them my fury seems justified... The fact that it is without cause doesn’t signify, only its intensity.

Floor 2 is an identical layout of corridors and rooms to our own, and for a moment I have the feeling that the staircase I have climbed is like one from an Escher drawing, and I have returned to where I started from. The windows are so dirty you can’t even get a feeling of height. Like our floor, Floor 2 is deserted, almost everyone elsewhere for the holidays. The corridors seem longer, as if emptiness isn’t an absence but a physical thing, pushing at the boundaries. But the boy I am looking for was here at least up until last week, so there is an outside chance that I’ll find him. There are a hundred doors, but I can hear faint music; I walk down the corridor slowly, quietly, a hunter following the trail of some hectic animal, for the music is loud, riotous yet synthetic, the rush of beats exactly the kind of thing I despise.

The music is coming from behind a closed door, and I pause in front of it. What exactly am I going to say; why have I followed this trail here? Because I believe that the room this dreadful music is coming from is the room of the boy from the diary? And furthermore that the boy is some kind of doppelganger (
shit wasn’t he circumcised the first time
) who somehow caused Michelle to fall down the stairs and become a double in her turn? Every time I cross-examine my thoughts their ludicrousness seems obvious; yet I continue to think them.

Without knowing his name, how will I even check it’s him? Could I recognise him from the fact that Michelle fancies him – has she a ‘type’? Given the fact that she slept with me too, probably not. But that was an aberration, as she has made clear. And besides that wasn’t
her
; the real Michelle slept with the boy behind this door. Twice.

But even that isn’t true I think (still paused outside the door). For the second time Michelle slept with him (
shameless
I think, wondering what he did that was so special she came back) it wasn’t who she thought it was but some bodysnatcher with original foreskin attached. So I am right to hate him – if I hit him hard enough, will I see the skin of his real face beneath?

Right too to be afraid.

Before I can knock or push open the door, it opens from the inside.

I start, flinch backwards. The person who opens it flinches back too. It obviously
isn’t
the boy that Michelle liked.

“What the hell are you doing?” she asks.

Flustered, my mind tries to adjust from conspiracy plots to the more mundane and embarrassing fact that I have been caught snooping outside a girl’s room.

“Your music...?” I improvise lamely. “Could you turn it down? I’m right below you, on the floor below...”

Some of the heat fades from the girl’s face, although she still looks wary.

“Sorry,” she says, cautiously apologetic and friendly. “I thought I was on my own; there’s no one else up here you see.”

“No one?” I say quickly, thinking of the boy I am after, but I realise I have said it
too
quickly, too eagerly, for the fright returns to the girl’s eyes.

“No there are people,” she says loudly, “there are other people here” – throwing her voice into a shout that echoes down the corridor, trying to make me believe she has someone to call for protection, if I try anything funny. As if anyone could hear her over the music.

“Wait I just meant are there any
blokes
up here?” I say, but she is already shutting the door, and my words don’t make her stop, for if I was thing she feared I might have said that too. I make a grab for the door, but just manage to get my fingers nipped as it slams shut.

“Get away you freak or I’ll call the police!” she shouts from behind the door, her fright obvious now. I turn and run, feeling out of synch with this situation I have somehow got myself into. Like one of those films where the good guys and bad guys are not who they first appear to be, and your brain lags as you work it out. Will she call the police? Even if she does, why am I running, for I would merely have to explain things to them and they’ll see I’ve done nothing wrong. There’s no crime but I am running as if guilty, hurtling downstairs so quickly that I almost trip, back to my floor, my room. I shut the door but don’t put any music or TV on – I pace but try to keep quiet. I think of the campus security cameras outside, and shut the curtains.

If the body-snatchers get you, I wonder, do you even realise? But I don’t understand what that thought even means.

I can’t sleep, for the airplanes seem too low overhead, and the light coming through the windows seems unnatural.

~

The next morning I try and call Grace to see how she is, to see if she went under at the hospital. She’ll be alright, I think, she’ll be safe as long as she’s not been anaesthetized. I have  nothing to base this on, but cling to it with an odd certainty. But my mobile has no signal – I am sure it is a network problem, but it is hard not to think that the fault is deliberate, local, centred on me. I head towards the front of the halls of residence where there are some payphones, but they have no dial tones and my coins just clatter through the mechanism and fall out the other end.
This
I am not surprised by, this doesn’t become a factor in my emergent paranoia, for the payphones are dilapidated relics of the days when mobiles were for the likes of Christophe only; I’ve never seen anyone actually use them. They have been superseded by later technology that can’t be relied on.

I decide that I’ll have to go to the hospital to find Grace – and I am surprised to find that my decision is not just based on the still unspoken fears clenched in my gut, but also on something Christophe said:
she likes me
. Assuming for one minute Michelle is Michelle and my delusions are proven just that – still, why was I so fixated on Michelle? I suddenly can’t remember why.

I force myself outside, but after days of being confined to halls the outdoors just seems a continuation – the holidays have thrown up a localised fog which makes me feel enclosed in a vague bubble, my sight limited to its circumference. I walk down the path from our campus, past the Job Centre which is outside the exit – a nice irony that is not lost on those of us doing humanities degrees – and towards the main road. Strangers coming the opposite way through the fog loom up so quickly that I couldn’t make eye contact even if I wanted to. The world appears in gasps and snatches through the mist. They are queuing round the block for petrol again, for fear of another price hike; their idling fumes add to the mist. My progress up the street is faster than that achieved by the rush-hour traffic, and I sense their antagonised looks as I pass: fuckin’ student; fuckin’
pedestrian
.

There is no bus in sight yet and so I decide to walk to the 24hr garage (the one the cars are slowly working towards) to buy some chocolates or flowers for Grace. I feel even more self-conscious inside: the only person not buying war-inflated petrol. I quickly buy some chocolates, because the only flowers look plastic to me, even though they are promoted as real. Outside two motorists almost crash, going for the same pumps. Their tempers are up before they are even out their cars, their firsts clenched before they can even see each other properly in the mist. They curse at each other, but it doesn’t quite come to blows.

One day, my son, all this will be yours.

A bus has somehow fought its way up the car clogged bus-lane, and I run to the stop. The bus is full of people studiously avoiding the world on the other side of the windows: plugged into headphones or bent over beach-fiction. It’s only a local bus but they have the practised look of long-distance travellers, of people who have given up hoping their journey will arrive on time, and are concentrating on making the best of being there – I settle myself in too, but I am not the same as them, for I am surely the only one not riding to work. The idea and desire that one day I will be feels oddly remote, like an advert for something that you can’t possibly imagine ever being able to afford.