After You Fell
‘Thanks.’ I take them and put them on the short chest of drawers beside the bed.
‘You okay?’ There’s an undercurrent in the enquiry.
‘Yes.’ Why?
‘You’ve been disappearing a lot lately.’
‘I went to Swindon to find out about another job. I told you.’
‘I know what you told me, after agreeing you weren’t ready to go back to work. But it’s not just that you are disappearing physically, you’re disappearing into yourself a lot. Even when you’re with the boys, you go silent at times when they’re talking to you. And why are you so determined to look for jobs in Swindon?’
‘Because I’m well enough to live alone and I can afford somewhere in Swindon if I find a job. I’ve had a heart transplant, Simon. I have a lot to think about. I can do things I haven’t been able to do for years. I’m thinking about what I want to do with my life.’
A smile touches the corners of his lips before a sigh leaves his throat, then he breathes in. ‘Let me know if I can help.’
‘I am the only one who can decide.’
His lips purse and he leans to one side to reach into his trouser pocket then pulls out a brown plastic bottle. ‘The tablets for your bipolar.’
‘Don’t tell me you’ve been counting the pills to see if I’m taking them? You weren’t there to count my tablets when I lived with Dan.’
‘I know.’
I snatch the bottle, rattling the pills. ‘I am taking them.’
‘Good.’
‘And I’m not taking one in front of you because I’ve already taken one.’
‘All right. I believe you. I care about you, that’s the only reason I interfere. The last thing you need is to be sectioned now.’
‘Thank you for reminding me about one of the worst times in my life. That’s the last thing I want to think about now.’
‘I know. But you are so physically healthy I want to make sure you are thinking about your mental health, too.’
‘I am. You don’t need to lecture me. I don’t want to be unwell.’ I think this lecture was spurred on by Mim. She’s been watching me with increased intensity.
My bipolar frightens Mim. She’s scared of it – of what the illness might do if it takes control of me. The obsessions, envy and anger.
A deep-pitched laugh ripples from his throat. ‘I know. Sorry. Sometimes I can’t help myself.’
There’s only one thing to do: stick out my tongue, in the childish gesture that was a favourite of mine when I was small and he was overbearing.
He mimics the gesture: a grown man sticking his tongue out in answer.
This is why we are special, because we still connect with one another as a brother and sister as though the years of pain growing up have not occurred. Perhaps because we had already grown up when we were still so young. Perhaps because he shares the same parents-shaped hole. The same journey of pain and isolation.
The moment takes me back through the years to the hours we spent in foster homes when we retired to the shared bedroom he insisted on, to the place where it was just us. The place where I was wholly understood and we clung to each other because there was never anyone else to rely on.
The bipolar medicine bottle is left on the bed as he stands.
I grasp his hand, holding it tight and saying nothing because we do not need to speak to say things.
His fingers squeeze mine, telling me the things I know about what he feels for me.
When his hand slips out of mine it is always a conscious decision on my part to let him go to Mim and the boys. I learned to let go of him a long time ago. But when I want him back, he always comes.
‘Goodnight.’ His baritone rings around the room.
‘Goodnight. I love you.’
‘I love you too.’
Chapter 12
6 weeks and 2 days after the fall.
Chiming bells ring close to my ear. My hand reaches out on autopilot to find my phone on the chest of drawers. My brain is heavy and clogged with the dulling interference of prescription drugs. The sound rings out again. I look at the clock on the bedside chest by my phone. The vivid green numbers tick over to 9:14. Simon and Mim will have left with the children. It will be a message from Chloe.
I pick up the phone, squinting through tired eyes. It’s not a message. It’s a Facebook notification telling me that Robert Dowling has accepted my friend request.
Life rushes into my brain, as though a switch has turned my body on.
I want to post a thank you on his wall, for making friends.
But if I do that I’ll stand out and perhaps he hasn’t realised he doesn’t know me.
I am a similar age to Louise – he might have assumed I was a friend of hers.
It makes more sense to be cautious, stay quiet and remain an observer of his life – of Louise’s old life.
My legs bend under the duvet. My arm embraces my knees as his Facebook page opens on the small screen of my phone. Picture after picture slides past under my thumb. Most of them are of the children, lots more than those on his public posts. The other pictures are dated before Louise’s death, and posted privately by her.
I scroll back through time, just over a year, then stop on something unusual. The children are with a blond man. The girl’s bottom is balancing on his forearm, her fingers clinging to the back of his neck in a way that says she is used to the position. The man’s other hand is on the boy’s head and that too looks like a frequent gesture that is well known by the boy.
I can’t see the man’s face. He’s looking away from the camera at a door that must lead out of the room. Only the girl is looking at the camera, waving with her free hand.
The text above the image says, ‘Louise Lovett, Alex has picked up the children and is on his way.’ The post is marked as just for friends, but it reads as a message that is just for Robert’s daughter.
Alex.
The man’s hair is a riot of messy curls like the boy’s. The same curls are looser in the girl’s longer hair. Louise did not have curly hair.
Was she married when she died?
It is obvious she married at some point because her surname was different from her parents’ but this is the first hint of a partner being involved in her life.
The man’s left hand is hidden. I can’t see if he’s wearing a ring. But even if she was married a year ago she might have been divorced or separated by the time she died.
I want to know more about this. Frustration grips at me, more a feeling in my stomach than my heart, a feeling that is my desire, not Louise’s.
I open Google on my phone and type, ‘Alexander Lovett’. Frustration switches to urgency that might be Louise’s.
The surname is worth a try.
Images of the children flood my head as the heart pulses faster.
The usual social media search links come up. But there’s something different amongst the links; the word photographer appears again and again. I click to the second page of links and ‘Alexander Lovett photographer’ appears in the text under nearly every link.
‘Alexander Lovett on The Perfect Image’, one of the links says in the heading. It is posted on a country-living magazine website. I click on that. The article is full of beautiful images of the city of Bath. The back arrow returns me to the search results. I want to find his business link.
www.AlexanderLovettPhotography.co.uk.
Click.
The website displays a clean-edged contemporary style. The Instagram link takes me to post after post of pictures of beautiful places, people and nature. There are no pictures of him or anything personal.
I go back and click the Facebook link to a business page that I Like before scanning through the same professional images. There’s nothing personal on here either.
I want a picture of him so I can tell if this photographer is the father of Louise’s children.
There is an About us tab on the website. Click.
The Team, it says at the top of the page, and beneath the heading, centre screen, there is a picture of Alex Lovett. He has tight curls in his blond hair.
He’s looking into the camera lens in a way that communicates with the person behind the camera. His eyes, which I imagine are blue in some lights but are pale ice-grey in this image, are bright and full of an expression that tells me a moment after the camera has clicked he’s spoken.
I feel as if Louise is staring at him through my eyes. The energy in my heartbeat has stalled as she stares, the pulse weakening.
He’s remarkable. The sort of man I would look at if I walked past him in the street. The sort of man any woman who liked men would look at if they walked past him in a street.
Very little is written beneath his image, just information about his professional capability and achievements.
Louise lived with this man. If not at the point she died, for years at least, because they had children.
There is a Contact us tab at the bottom of the webpage.
The studio address is in the city of Bath. By train, Bath is about half an hour further on from Swindon.
The business is a limited company; it will be registered with Companies House. The registration might record Alex’s home address.
The site shows a correspondence address in Bath that is different from the studio’s address.
The phone drops out of my hand onto the duvet. Instead I pick up the laptop. This needs a bigger screen and Google Earth. As the lid lifts the screen comes to life. I glance over to get the address and type it in.
It looks like a residential street.
I drag the yellow Plasticine-like man, that reminds me of Morph, over the screen, waving his legs, and put him down in the street then turn the camera to the houses. It is a house. Definitely. Not an office. I move the camera shot looking at the numbers on the doors. When I find number twenty-two, it shows curtains in the windows, a vase and other ornaments on the windowsills. The house looks lived in, not worked in.
Is this where Louise lived with the children? Perhaps she was inside this house when the Google’ street pictures were taken.
The Companies House information on my phone shows Alex Lovett’s age. He is four years older than me. His birthday is the same month as mine, but I am Aquarius and he’s Pisces.
My legs cross underneath the laptop as my heart jumps with excitement. My excitement, at the success.
This is a breakthrough.
Chapter 13
12.53.
The glossy white door with the fox-head knocker and the brass number twenty-two is in front of me, staring at me from across the street.
The only difference in the view I am looking at, compared to the day Google’s street view captured this image, is that there are no flowers planted in the boxes attached to the railings in front of the house. In the Google image, this house has full flowerboxes bursting with scarlet-red pelargoniums, white euphorbia and trailing ivy. But now, they have all gone.
I think this is the door that Louise Lovett walked in and out of day after day. The door to her home.
I feel as though she’s holding her breath, waiting and watching inside me, with fear and hope. I know she wants me to be here, but I do not know what she wants me to do.
I lean back against the cast-iron Georgian railing that edges the park on the opposite side of the street from the house. The action crushes the rucksack hanging from my shoulder. The rucksack contains a raincoat and umbrella. But today the rain has stayed away.
The five-foot-high iron bars of the railings are topped by pointed fleur-de-lys shapes and so my head rests against a sharp cold fleur-de-lys design. One foot lifts to settle on the stone that the ironwork is embedded in.
This is an old street. In the park behind me are half a dozen plane trees with broad shady canopies and thick trunks over a metre in diameter. The trees must have been planted around the time the houses were built. The park was made to be a garden for the rich who lived in these houses in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The people who live here today must appreciate it even more because there’s a road behind them, and a supermarket beyond that.
I glance at the watch on my wrist then look back at the door, breathe in then exhale slowly. I have been standing here for twenty-two minutes and there’s been no movement in the house.
The street has a dead end, so even though on the other side of the park there’s a noisy main road, here there are no people or traffic, just parked cars and closed front doors.
My foot slips off the stone and I walk forward with a sudden urge to respond. It’s not a choice to move, it’s a need. Louise’s impatience, not mine.
I cross the road, mount the pavement, walk up to the door and grip the doorknocker. The brass fox-head drops onto the metal plaque with a heavy clang. I lift and drop it again.
I need to know if there’s life in this house – if the children are here.
Louise wants whatever she has brought me here for to begin.
The button of a modern doorbell is on the doorframe on the left, as though it’s hidden to prevent it spoiling the appearance of the frontage. I press that, holding it down for seconds. The property is five floors tall, including the windows of a cellar in the area behind the railings.
I step back so I can look at the windows, trying to see someone moving in the house.
One thing is obvious about Alex Lovett: he has a good amount of money; he must do otherwise he would not be able to afford to live in this property.
Noisy footsteps echo beyond the door with the hollow sound of wood.
Someone is running down bare wooden stairs.
I step forward as a chain rattles on the inside of the door. There’s a scrape of metal. I imagine a door-chain being slotted into its holder to prevent the door from being pushed fully open.
When the door opens, the face of a young woman peers through the gap. ‘We don’t buy anything at the door …’
There are high-pitched shouts and small feet running in a room upstairs. There are children in the house somewhere.
The sound of them breathes emotion through my heart, as though Louise’s lips have pursed and blown a kiss, as gentle as a blow on the sails of a paper boat.
My children, a voice in my head declares.
I smile in a way that tries to reassure. ‘Is Alexander Lovett in?’ I don’t know what I will say if he is in. But the one thing I do know is that Louise wants me to find a way into this house. This family.
The thought sends a sharp pain through my middle.
My black hole stirs, like a waking dragon. Opportunity and hope are being absorbed. It consumes every thought other than those that focus on the children.
A family here have a space for me, and I have a space for them. It is a jigsaw puzzle left on a table waiting to be completed with the last piece.
The last piece is me.
‘He’s at work. Can I take a message?’
‘No. I’ll contact him at the studio.’ I don’t give her a chance to answer. I don’t want to hear her try to put me off the idea. I know what I need to know from this house. The children are here and I need to find a way into their home.
I walk back to the centre of Bath caught up in a dream, the rhythm of my heart setting the pace as I stride through streets packed with tourists. People bump my shoulder or legs with their shopping bags.
Alex’s studio is on the other side of the city centre, in a side street near the Holburne Museum.
Once I’m on the other side of Pulteney Bridge, the density of tourists dissipates and the road widens into a broad avenue of high, pale-stone terraced houses. There is a fountain in the middle of the road. I turn left there and look at the numbers on the buildings.
My fingers grasp the shoulder strap of my rucksack as I walk to the studio’s front door. My legs and arms are shaky. I’m nervous, but I will not run from this.
There are three polished brass plaques inscribed with the names of different companies that have separate intercom systems.
I press the intercom for Alexander Lovett Photographic Services and Studio Ltd.
‘Hello, can I take your name?’ A female voice crackles through the speaker.
‘Helen Jones,’ I lie.
‘Are we expecting you? You’re not on the list.’
‘No, I’d like to make an appointment.’
‘People usually ring to make an appointment.’
‘I want to see Alex Lovett. Is he there?’
‘No. Alex is working in London today, but I can help. Come in.’ There’s a buzz, then a click.
I push the heavy door. It opens.
The doors on the first and second floor are for the other businesses. On the third-floor there is another brass plaque for Alexander Lovett’s studio.
The door opens into a reception area, with brown leather seating and photography lining the burgundy walls.
A woman, who I presume is the person I spoke to through the intercom, is sitting behind a curved dark wood desk. ‘How can I help you?’ She is tapping the end of her pen on the desk.
The strap of the rucksack cuts into my palm as I grip it tighter. ‘I’d like to talk to Alex about photography for a wedding.’ The second lie slips out easily, although I might be blushing.
She’s his gatekeeper.
The pen is raised like a spear as she stands on guard. She’ll send me away if she doesn’t think I have a good reason to meet him.
He is the gatekeeper for the children.
She smiles; a customer-service smile. ‘Alex rarely gets involved with weddings. I can put you down to talk to one of the others? They’re all very good. I can show you their portfolios if you would like to choose someone?’
‘It’s not my wedding.’ I sit down in the chair on the opposite side of her desk, my jeans sliding on the leather seat. I am under-dressed, in jeans and canvas daps. ‘I’m a wedding planner and I have a large society wedding scheduled for next year. I want the best photographer. These shots will be on the mantelpieces of stately homes for generations.’
A dubious gleam twinkles in her eyes. She judged my clothes when I was standing and now she’s judging my scarce make-up and un-kempt hair and she knows I’ve lied. I don’t look wealthy enough to be a society wedding planner. I would be dressed in a figure embracing, tailored, deisgner suit and I would not have even come in person, I would have rung first.
Anger overrides the nervousness. I square my shoulders and the lies become even easier to say. ‘No one else will do. That is why I have come in person, to express how important this event is. The bride’s family won’t accept one of his assistants.’
She stares at my face while she decides what to do. ‘Okay, I can book you in for a quick chat with him, say an initial quarter-hour, and he can make a decision if he wants to do it or not. But I’m not promising. Alex is in demand.’
‘Yes, I’m aware.’
She flicks through pages in a paper diary, the sweeping sound of the paper stirring the air in the small waiting room. ‘His diary is full for weeks,’ she adds as she continues looking. ‘Ah. Here’s a small slot. Four weeks’ time. He won’t charge you for a first appointment.’ Her gaze drops down as she reaches for a card and writes the time and date on it. Then she looks at me. ‘Here.’ She holds out the card.
‘Thank you.’ I stand again, re-exposing my jeans that are faded from over-washing, not fashionably bleached, and the jumper that has pulls in the threads where it caught on the wall in the car park in Swindon.
‘Goodbye,’ I say to fill an awkward moment.
I am given another bland customer-service smile. ‘Good—’
I shut the door on her last syllable.
Chapter 14
6 weeks and 5 days after the fall.
The lies I have been telling Chloe over lunch are becoming as thick as pea soup; if I’m not careful they will become so thick and deep the pea soup will drop on my head in a smothering, embarrassing slime. But she keeps asking questions, wanting me to expand on the details I’m making up.
Louise’s urgency is in me; it has been racing through my blood for hours. Her energy pushes the lies from my mouth. I feel like the friend of a bully. I can’t hear her words, but I feel her pressuring me. Rushing me. She doesn’t want me to be here with Chloe. She thinks this is wasting time. But even though I have her heart, she doesn’t own my mind and body.
Whereabouts was the job in Bath? Chloe’s questions go on and on. How big is the school? What are the staff like? What are the class sizes? Have I looked at places to live near there? Can I really afford a place on my own?
I won’t remember what I’ve said if she asks me to repeat anything later. I’ll tell her I didn’t get the job as soon as I can.
I want to change the subject but it’s hard to find a moment in the rush of her incessant questioning.
‘I can’t imagine you leaving London,’ she says eventually, ‘or living alone.’ She doesn’t want me to get the made-up job anyway.
Chloe and Simon are too used to my dependency on them. I must break that. I want the freedom I have access to. ‘I’m well now. I don’t need people to be there for me all the time. I know how to wash myself,’ I joke.
She smirks.
‘I can even wash my clothes now; I can pick up the washing basket and fill the machine. I can polish my shoes too and, guess what, I can lift a spoon to my mouth.’ I laugh.
She shakes her head. ‘You’re not funny. I can’t help being nervous for you.’
‘If I decide to move to somewhere in that direction it’s only a short train journey away, and I’m not nervous.’ I am eager and excited – but those emotions are merged with Louise’s impatience.
Chloe’s lips twist and her nose twitches. She’s worried because ever since I’ve known her I have been ill to some degree.
I can feel the difference Louise’s heart pulses into every cell in my body. Chloe can’t. It will take her and Simon longer to know how different my life is now.
‘What if I promise you will be the first to know if I feel unwell? And if I do feel ill I’ll hand in my notice and move back to London.’
Chloe gives me one of her broad smiles that throws good cheer out. ‘I’ll take that promise and I’ll hold you to it.’
I hold out a hand to shake on it. ‘Deal.’
‘Deal.’ Her hand takes mine, warming it as her fingers wrap around and hold on securely.
We hug each other in the entrance hall of the underground station, then say goodbye, before I descend on one set of escalators and she disappears into the tiled tunnel leading to another Tube line.
It’s 5.45 and busy; teeming with commuters who rush and push past me with no courtesy, just a need to carry on with the next part of their getting-home journey.
I shuffle along in the herd of people navigating the London rush hour, manoeuvring down the narrow escalator and then finding a carriage to squeeze into, like cattle packed into a pen. I stare out of the windows that show me nothing but the black tunnel we are speeding through. But that’s better than looking at the armpit of the man who’s hanging onto a ceiling bar an inch away.
There’s something strange in the reflections formed on the windows, with the blackened tunnel wall beyond them – a blurred figure. A woman who seems to be looking at me.
I look over my shoulder; the woman isn’t there. It is just the man’s arm and chest.
When I look back at the window, the woman has gone.
I want to get home. I love seeing Chloe, but today feels like a wasted day. I’ve been trying to find out the name of the young woman I met at the house yesterday. I think she’s the children’s nanny, but Alex doesn’t have any personal social media accounts and as far as I can tell the nanny hasn’t liked or followed his business accounts.