After The Fall

by Sarah Goodwin

  Fuck.

  I could still smell him all over me, a mixture of cigarette smoke and Lynx body spray. Pungent as tomcat piss. It stabbed something in my brain, a sore place in my brain. I could almost see something, dim as a cataract on my memory, something like...like a white t-shirt. That’s all I could see in my head, a white t-shirt with a tiny green logo on the breast, a laurel wreath.

  I kicked off the duvet and went upstairs to the bathroom, turning on the shower and nearly scalding myself. I fiddled with the soap speckled dial, alternatively burning and freezing my hand, until I got a drizzle of warm water to fall continuously.

  I stepped under it and wetted my hair, rubbed wet palms over my chest and stomach, lower, dislodging the thin, dried smears of evidence. I lathered myself with body wash, and then paused. It had the same smell as Nate’s skin. The exact same. Hardly surprising given both our limited incomes, the small selection of men’s toiletries at the supermarket. Still, it unnerved me, that there should be any similarity between us.

  I rinsed all the soap off of myself and turned off the shower, wrapping myself in a colourless towel and patting the droplets of cooling water off of my skin.

  Someone tapped on the door. “Connor?”

  Emma. “I’m sorry I woke you up.”

  “Why’re you in the shower? It’s late.”

  “I went for a drink, one too many, you know? I needed to sober up.”

  She sighed. “OK, take some paracetamols to bed with you.”

  “Will do,” I promised. Emma was caring, in her way, after all. I could see her as an indulger of hangovers, a ruffler of hair and provider of hot soup or plasters as the occasion demanded.

  I let myself out of the bathroom and padded downstairs, sliding under my duvet and letting my chilly limbs warm up. I was due back at work the day after tomorrow. Then I’d have plenty to keep me busy.

  I fell asleep, though I don’t remember when, and woke at nine the following morning, to the sound of Emma creeping around in the kitchen. After a few minutes she brought me a glass of water and some crackers, and tutted at the state of me.

  “Honestly, I thought you’d want to hang onto the functioning brain cells you have left.”

  I raised a smile, “couldn’t resist, sorry. The meeting was dull as a ditch.”

  “Hmmm, maybe the next one will be better?”

  “Maybe,” I said, already dreading the next meeting of the AA.

  “I’ve got to get to work,” Emma said, “I’ll be in at five to cook your tea.”

  “I’ll see you then,” I said, and when she leant down to kiss me I pecked her on the cheek. She smelt like vanilla body spray and Jammy Dodgers. Soft and warm.

  Once she’d gone I got up, went upstairs for clean clothes, and then started to search the house.

  I wasn’t really looking, not tearing the place apart like the Gestapo. I was just curious, about who I was, what I was like.

  The wardrobe yielded very little, I had an Arsenal shirt and a pair of new looking boxing gloves, battered golf shoes and normal things like trainers and jeans. Same with the chest of drawers – socks, pants, cufflinks in a box. There was a shelf of books on the landing, a couple of aromatherapy guides, soppy covered love stories and murder mysteries. I felt nothing as I looked at their covers. They could have been mine, or Emma’s. Flicking one open, I found writing in the cover, To my bookworm, happy birthday, Love Emma. So the romance novels were mine. I looked through some of the other books, but found no more with inscriptions. Maybe they were all mine, if so, I’d read a great deal before the accident, maybe two hundred books in total, on shelves in different rooms of the house. Even the bathroom.

  I found nothing of interest in the bathroom aside from the books, but the study was more promising. I found an old copy of my CV and read my employment history, a string of unskilled jobs (cleaner, shop assistant, refuse collecter and finally fitness instructor) I also found my birth certificate and a scrap of paper with a hotmail address and password written on it.

  I booted up the ancient computer, and was confronted with a password box. I typed ‘password’ into it experimentally and it let me onto the home screen. I brought up the internet and logged the email details into hotmail.

  My name appeared at the top of the screen, above a short list of new emails, mostly spam and offers from Amazon. I opened a few ‘your order has been dispatched’ messages. I’d bought a lot of books, some were the one’s I’d seen upstairs, but there were others that I hadn’t yet found in the house. I looked at the titles, Timequake, The Great Gatsby, East of Eden and As Meat Loves Salt. Clearly I’d been a devoted reader. I wondered if I’d ever get that interest back, or if it was lost forever.

  In the inbox there was one email which caught my attention, from someone called Coop@hotmail.co.uk, sent about two months previously. Unlike some of the other emails, the address wasn’t accompanied by a name, presumably the person who’d made the account hadn’t used their name to do so. I clicked on it, and the message was simply, call me.

  Who was Coop? And why not just tell me what they wanted in the email? I had a brainwave and checked my ‘sent’ box.

  There weren’t many. A few emails to the leisure centre, some to Amazon and others in reply to job adverts.

  I went and found my mobile phone and checked the address book. No Coop, which wasn’t surprising. There wasn’t even anyone under ‘C’ who might have been called Coop. I read the short message again. Without really thinking about it, I typed a reply, Call me yourself.

  I sent it before I could think of changing my mind. If they were just a friend, or some online buddy, they’d call me and I’d have found my first connection to the old me. If it was some kind of secret, well, then I wanted to know.

  I searched downstairs, even going so far as to look through the kitchen cupboards and through the pages of the calendar. Nothing very interesting leapt out at me. On the day of the accident I was marked down to play golf, the day before that was a reminder to send a cheque off to the electric people.

  Another brainwave struck and I went upstairs again to google the bridge collapse. There was a lot of the same information the doctors had given me, albeit in much more compelling prose. There were also pictures, which were so clear, and made the whole thing seem so cataclysmic, that I had to close the internet and leave it be.

  I still had hours to fill until Emma came home from work, which was at a supermarket about an hour away. We’d been there the day before the AA meeting to do the weekly shop. I decided that I couldn’t face being stuck in the house with only Jeremy Kyle and my own thoughts for company. I got my jacket and headed out.

  It was a grey day, one of those mornings when the sky is the colour of old pants and the pavements, the walls and the very air is damp and old smelling, like the inside of a washing machine. I walked along the street, and then along another, until the houses came to an end and I found myself on the high street.

  Mooching like a teenager bunking off, I went into a brand-less ‘emporium’ and poked around the plastic garden ornaments, cheap carpets and tinned spam. I wandered around three charity shops, a chemist and a newsagents. Then I got hungry, and went into the first place that served food, a greasy café called Paula’s.

  Inside, the walls were white, with a patina of greasy spots, much like the face of the kid working in the kitchen behind the elderly cashier. A small radio played tinny music, and almost all the tables were covered in crumbs and other breakfast rubble.

  I fished coins out of my pocket, bought a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich, then went and sat at a table with a chequered oilcloth stapled to it. I looked down at the salt and pepper shakers, the exact ones that I’d seen in the emporium, and nearly jumped out of my skin when Nate sat down opposite me, casually thumping a copy of the Sun down on the table.

  “Penny for them,” he said, and when I was too tongue-tied to answer he gestured to the grey haired man at the counter, “two fulls mate, and a plate of chips.”

>   “I already got a sandwich.”

  “Well, now we’ll have a proper breakfast as well, God knows I need it. Didn’t sleep a wink last night.” He gave me a look. “We’re still mates, yeah?”

  I didn’t know what to say, and he sighed.

  “Come on Con, don’t write me off just because I had a few to drink and felt you up a bit.”

  I looked around and, finding no one else in the immediate area, muttered, “That was a bit more than ‘feeling up’.”

  Nate grinned. “That it was, but still, hardly makes for a hot night in anyone’s book. A scorching five minutes, granted, but...not exactly anything for you to feel guilty over.”

  I looked down at the table.

  “Hey, girls get wasted all the time, they go out, knock back the vodka, and by closing they’re either all over each other, or clawing each other’s eyes out in the street. No big deal.”

  I wasn’t convinced, but, I liked the idea that last night had been a one off, a sort of drunken accident, a one in a million occurrence.

  “Thanks for breakfast,” I said eventually.

  Nate grinned. “There you go, now, what shall we do today? I’ve got nothing on, and I don’t fancy watching Jeremy Kyle until bedtime.”

  Aside from the Sun, he also had a copy of the local paper, and he thumbed through it briskly, looking at the cinema listings and the calendar of events. Our breakfasts arrived, standard plastic fry-ups that we devoured unselfconsciously. Me chomping mushrooms and fried bread, Nate scooping runny egg yolk into his mouth with a triangle of toast.

  “Nuffin on,” he said, his mouth full of bacon. “’Cept some art gallery thing, and who wants to spend nine pounds getting into an exhibition?”

  “I wouldn’t mind actually,” I said, surprising myself.

  Nate smiled, “me neither, come on then.”

  Nate folded his last sausage and slice of bacon into a toast butty, left a tenner on the table, and took me off in the direction of the gallery. It was on the other side of town, but we didn’t get the bus, it was too expensive, and neither of us had the three quid to waste on top of the extortionate entrance fee.

  I’d thought Nate was bullshitting about wanting to go to the exhibition, just to keep me happy, but on the way there he started talking about how he’d seen posters for it, and had really wanted to go.

  “There’s this statue that I’m really into, this bloke’s head, all in detail, but huge, and on its side like he’s sleeping. And you can see all the lines in his skin, the eyelashes, everything.”

  “I didn’t think you’d be into art.” As far as I knew, I wasn’t either, it was just something to do.

  “Not like paintings and stuff...well, it depends. But I like models and sculptures, I’ve got some magazines at home, they were just in the flat when I moved in, but they’ve got some amazing stuff in them. Like, in Wales, there’s this guy who made a granite ball, and put it on top of a natural spring, right? So, the water pressure builds up, and pushes the ball a little way up off of this pillar it’s on. It’s been sort of...floating, for five years now. Wicked, right?”

  I agreed that it did sound cool.

  The gallery, as it turned out, was closed. Not only that, but it wasn’t actually there anymore. Nathan’s copy of the paper was out of date, and he admitted that he’d found it in his flat some days ago, propping up the water tank. We stood in front of the empty building, with circus posters pasted over the shop front, and Nathan clicked his fingers.

  “Not to worry, come with me.”

  He took me down a street, across the road and up some stairs into a warehouse that appeared to have been disused for a very long time. Everything was wooden and creaky, and a fine layer of dust coated every surface. The staircase we went up was claustrophobic and the walls had massive scratches in the plaster and paint, like something huge had been manoeuvred up the stairs with great difficulty, and by people unconcerned with the damage they left behind.

  “I found this place through some guys at the pub,” Nate said, leading further up the stairs.

  “What exactly...”

  But my question was answered for me, as we reached the top of the stairs and stepped into a vast, wood floored space, hung over with bare bulbs that burnt a feeble orange. Six snooker tables, all looking the worse for wear, were set up on one side of the vast room, next to a folding table with a minifridge and a kettle on it.

  “Welcome to the unemployed men’s club,” Nate said, and waved hello to the three blokes who were gathered around one of the tables, playing pool. One had a can of White Lightning in his hand, all three were smoking. Nate went over to the fridge, took out two cans of Stella and handed one to me.

  I didn’t point out that it was only ten o’clock in the morning, and Nate racked up the balls so we could play pool. The cues were dented, the felt of the table scuffed, and I couldn’t remember ever having played pool before.

  “You hold it like this,” Nate demonstrated with his own cue, “and you pot the balls, you’re trying to put down whichever one you put down first. Like, if I start, and I pot a stripe, then I’m stripes. Get it?”

  I got it, and we played four games. I managed to lose less and less spectacularly, and by the fourth game, I actually came close to winning. The three other guys called Nate over and they started a game of two-a-side football in the vast space of the disused warehouse. I sat down on the floor, with my back propped against the side of the sturdiest snooker table, and watched them. Nate threw himself into the game, leaping into the air to deflect the ball, pulling his shirt up over his head and sprinting around in celebration whenever he got the ball between the two cans that served as goal posts.

  Feet tripped up the stairs, and Gregory the stick insect came in, an Aldi bag hanging from his limp fingers. He was wearing brown-ish jeans and a brown hoody, and he raised a hand at me in greeting before coming over.

  “You found us then,” he said, sitting down next to me and putting his bag to one side. “The unemployment centre.”

  “Nate brought me.”

  “Ah,” Gregory said, and we watched the game in silence for a while.

  “We need a TV up here,” Greg said, “so we can watch proper football.”

  “This is proper football,” Nate called, having paused in his antics to look over at us.

  “You’re a bunch of amateurs.”

  “Better than you.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Gregory stood up and jogged over the warped floor to where Nate was waiting.

  “Con, you come and play for us,” Nate ordered.

  We played a game with no real end, and no one was keeping score, at least, no one had kept the same score, and rather than fight over it we all just let it go. When we started to get bored, we stopped, and the other three (Baz, Luke and Mitchell) took their leave to go off and meet some other people.

  Gregory opened his Aldi bag and started on a pack of pork pies, and Nate lit a cigarette and passed it to me. We sat on the floor, picked through abandoned copies of the paper and a few copies of Live magazine. Nate lay down on the boards and chain smoked, talked bollocks and sang bits and pieces of songs that I didn’t know, but which he’d learnt off the radio.

  Eventually Gregory sighed, put his remaining pies away and declared that he had to go sign on.

  “You coming back?” Nate asked.

  “Nah, I’ve got to see my advisor, it’s gonna take for-fucking-ever, they make me go over my CV with them every time, and last month they said it had ‘too many words on it’. It pisses me off, so after, I shall go get pissed.”

  “Good luck.”

  “I’ll see you at the next meeting though, right?”

  “Right.”

  Gregory left and Nate spent the next fifteen minutes trying to blow smoke rings and failing miserably. I read a review of a film that had just come out on DVD. Though, any film, new or old would be completely new to me. I couldn’t remember ever having seen one. Even though I remembered about videos and
DVDs. Just like I couldn’t remember any songs, but still knew how to work a CD player. Maybe it was just something I’d picked up. It wasn’t exactly hard.

  “Have you seen this?” I asked, showing Nate the picture next to the review.

  “No, is it any good?”

  “I don’t know. It’s about someone who goes to a prison island to find a missing inmate, and the whole island is full of mental patients and murderers.”

  “Cool. Ten to one that the guy’s delusional, and he’s one of the mental murderers.” He looked more closely at the paper. “I bet they’ve got that down at the library.”

  “So?”

  “So, I get free DVD rentals, ‘cos of me being on disability. They told me that when I first got approved, it’s the only reason I’m a member.” Leaning up on one elbow he looked at me. “What do you reckon? Get the DVD out, swing by Aldi for some lunch and then back to mine to watch it?”

  I wasn’t keen on the idea of returning to the scene of last night’s drunken tryst, and I could see that Nathan read that on my face.

  “I’ll keep my hands to myself, promise,” he said, “I’ll even pay for the crisps.”

  I agreed, because he’d saved me from half a day of boredom already, and he was starting to be someone I considered a friend. He was taking an interest in me, introducing me to places and people, broadening my life from its shockingly small dimensions.

  We went to the library, a depressingly small building, one floor, with scratchy brown carpet, several revolving racks of Mills and Boon paperbacks, and a stand of magazines in plastic covers. The DVD’s were at the front near the window, and Nathan looked through them. The film we wanted wasn’t there, but there were a few that he said would do, though I think he was just going by their covers. On the way back to his we stopped by the Aldi and he bought two big bags of crisps and a six pack of own-brand beer.

  Being back in Nate’s flat so soon after last night made me uncomfortable. I sat on the edge of an armchair, looking for stains on the sofa, and finding none. The place didn’t smell like anything other than cigarettes, and there was an overflowing ashtray on the floor by the table. I picked it up to throw the fag ends into the bin, and noticed that under it was a DVD case, one that was definitely not from the library. It had a naked guy on it, eyes squeezed shut and a great big yellow star hiding his cock.