Catch Me When I Fall by Nicci French Read Free Book Online Page A

breath
    and walked back to the shop. There was a man behind the counter. I supposed him to be the husband of the woman I'd met outside. I put the envelope on the counter.
     'I found this outside on the pavement," I said. "It must be for you."
     He looked puzzled and I left. As I got outside it started to rain with the plump drops that soak you instantly. I hoped it was a convincing enough story and he wouldn't hand over the money to the police. What would God say, if He existed? He would probably say I ought to have confessed. Instead I just stood still in the rain, letting it drench me thoroughly.
    I called out as I came in, but there was no reply. I unpacked the supplies and put my head round Charlie's study door. He wasn't there, although the radio was on, and the room was in a catastrophic mess. Sheets of paper were scattered over the floor, piles of books had toppled, ashtrays were pushed under the chair and the drawing-board, CDs teetered on every spare surface. On the sketch pad on his desk a faint line of pencil ended in an elaborate doodle. There were also five half-finished mugs of tea, two brown apple cores and the skin of a satsuma. And there, on the window-sill, was the mug I'd dropped that morning. 1 examined it: you could barely see the hairline crack where Charlie had mended it. I closed the door.
     If I went to sleep now, I'd never be able to wake up. Instead I pulled on some old jeans and one of Charlie's paint-spattered T-shirts, and forced myself into action. I turned on all the lights downstairs, fake daytime in the darkening evening, then hauled the step-ladder into the middle of the hall so I could scrape off wallpaper. It was a job I'd started several months ago when we'd moved here but hadn't got round to finishing. It's odd how you can get used to living in a house with unlovely shredding walls and bare plaster.

    And that was how Charlie found me, three-quarters of an hour later, when he came through the door in his lovely soft suede jacket that I'd bought for him. I stepped off the ladder and kissed his eyelids, and he hugged my dusty, aching, tired, guilty body.
     'What I want to know is, where do you get all your energy from? Can I have some?'
     Now, at this moment I could have stepped back, looked him in the eye and said, 'Yesterday night, Charlie, I don't know why, I can't say who, I had sex with a stranger.' A little thrill ran through me, like a shiver of pure and infinite cold, like a delicious lick of terror.
I smiled back at him, bright as innocence. 'Big decision. Chinese, Indian or Thai takeaway?"
    Later, we had sex, made love, fucked. I don't know what to call it, because I didn't want to do anything but close my eyes and sleep and sleep and sleep, but I couldn't say that. Not after everything. So when he smiled at me in that particular way, I smiled back, although my face felt tight and my eyes raw. And when he put his arms round me, I put mine round him too and pulled him close and murmured into his ear. And he didn't know, he didn't begin to guess, that I wasn't there at all.
    5
    As I was standing on the Tube, swaying between two large sweaty men, I had a feeling of existential freedom. There was no law of nature, like gravity, forcing me to go to work, to continue on the rails of my old life. I could stay on the train, change at Leicester Square, go to Heathrow, catch any plane and never come back to England for the rest of my life. First, I'd have to go home for my passport. And what about money? Everything was in the house. As an investment that was probably fine, but there was a definite liquidity problem. Abroad was difficult as well. The idea of existential freedom had probably been invented at a time when visas weren't such a big deal, and you didn't get grilled in the arrivals hall of airports about how long you wanted to stay and whether you were planning to get a job. There were limits to freedom, limits to whom you could become.
     So I got out of the train, went up the