After The Fall

by Sarah Goodwin

  While Nate braced himself on two flinty chunks of ruined wall and picked the hard, rosy little fruits, I set the picnic up in a wobbly circle of trodden grass. Around it the grasses and whippy little trees rose almost two feet high, and I spread my jacket out on the ground to tamp down the little nettle and thistle shoots that made the ground uncomfortable.

  The picnic consisted of a half lump of cheese, a box of cheese savouries, three apples, a jar of homemade chutney and half a baguette with an Aldi ‘reduced’ sticker on it. There was also a four pack of own brand cola, and I opened a can while I waited for Nate to strip the tree bare and return with his bag of fruit. I had a copy of A Room with a View in my pocket, a book that Nate had bought from the library sale rack for me. It had no back cover, but it was still readable. I got through about twenty pages before he was done picking.

  “There’s enough here for a nice jelly I think,” he said, putting the bulging carrier down and showing me the oval apples. “Put it on sausages and things, lovely.”

  I handed him a cola and he broke the bread up and sliced the cheese with a fake Swiss army knife that he’d bought on the market and hung on his keys.

  It was weirdly quiet by the church, even the birds were quiet, and the noise of traffic from the nearby road, and the trains from the line, was muted by the crumbling building.

  “Do you think this interview’s going to go alright?” I asked.

  Nate shrugged, half lying on my jacket, crunching mini fish-shaped crackers. “Might, might not.”

  “Comforting.”

  “Well, it’s not really easy to tell. Depends, you might get interviewed by a total arsehole, get passed over for someone with more experience, or you might turn up and find that they filled the position last week and didn’t tell you,” he leaned up on one elbow. “If you’re asking me if you deserve the job, then yes, I’d say you do. You’re qualified, you’ve got training, and even if you don’t remember a lot of it, you can do the job standing on your head, and your CV still says you did the courses, got the grades. But, that doesn’t mean you’ll get the job, because, like I said, you can be as qualified as you like, but if the bloke doing the interview is a dick, he’ll take against you the minute you walk in, and he won’t give it to you.”

  I knew he was right, in a rambly, bitter way. He’d been trying for jobs since he’d left hospital, and no one was letting him in. I knew it would be just the same for me, as it was for a lot of the people we saw week in, week out at the job centre. Nate was almost better off being unemployed, mainly because of the disability money he was getting for his amnesia. Myself, I couldn’t claim, because I at least knew my name and some basic facts about myself. I was starting to hate getting screwed by my own memory loss.

  “Still, even if you don’t get it, you can always try again,” Nate said, “fuck ‘em, if they don’t want you, who needs them?”

  It was a nice afternoon, even if the grey sky made it a chilly one. We ate our lunch and lay out on our jackets, because it was better than going home and sitting on the sofa all day. We didn’t talk much, and we kissed a bit, putting our arms around each other like a couple of teenagers while the wind whipped at the grass. As we picked ourselves up to walk home in the coming dark, I knew it was going to stick with me as one of the best moments of my life. And that had little to do with cheap cheese and blustery grass.

  Still, back at home I felt cold, and shoved on a jumper, plus thick socks. I was still shivering, even after Nate had made me a cup of tea and put the duvet over me.

  “I think it’s a chill,” I said, wishing I’d kept my jacket on. We were due to go out and meet Greg and some of the others at the pub.

  “Go on, I’ll be fine,” I told Nate, when he said he’d stay in and make me some tea. “There’s still leftover pie in the fridge, I’ll have that with some chips or something and get to bed early.”

  Nate didn’t look happy about it, but he went out anyway, leaving me with strict instructions not to go out in the cold without at least two layers if I felt like joining him later. I didn’t think I would be, even inside the flat I couldn’t get warm.

  I microwaved the chicken pie from the fridge and baked a handful of oven chips to go with it. I put the plate on the sofa and fished about for a DVD to watch. We’d seen all of Nate’s, and he hadn’t picked up any new ones from the library, so I plunked for one of the unmarked cases from the lot I’d salvaged for him. Nate had put the three unmarked cases behind the others, slotted between a box set and the wall. Odds were that it was a pirate DVD that had been produced by an amateur, someone who hadn’t even bothered to print a cover image from the internet.

  I put it into the player and settled down to eat my dinner. The screen was black and fuzzy, and I waited for the developer logo to pop up, to my surprise, the film started right away. Almost right away I recognised the fact that it wasn’t a dodgy copy of a cinema release, it was a porn film.

  I picked up the remote to turn it off, not being the slightest bit in the mood, and then I paused, looking at the screen.

  It took me a few seconds to realise that it wasn't a film, it was a recording. It took me longer to recognise the men on screen.

  One of them was Nate, and the other, was me.

  I looked at the screen, completely thunderstruck.

  For a moment I thought that I’d found a DVD that Nate had recorded of us, maybe a few nights ago. But that thought died almost as soon as I grew angry about it. The bed they, we, were on, was not Nate’s. It was in a room I had never seen before, a green bedroom with shelves on the walls covered in books, DVDs and small, glittering trophies. And while it was definitely Nate and me on screen, I could see that we looked different. My body was more toned, like I was a gym regular, and I was missing the scar on my shoulder, the barely healed scratch from the car accident. Nate’s hair was longer, falling into his eyes in thick locks and he had a chain around his throat, a thin silver necklace.

  I watched the two men on screen, watched myself put my arms around Nate and pull him close, moaning and whispering. Once or twice, he, I, glanced at the camera, knowing it was there, not caring.

  I thought wildly, how had this DVD gotten here? Had Nate seen it? When had it been filmed?

  I picked up the case, looking over the blank plastic as if it could give me a clue as to where the DVD had come from.

  Maybe Nate hadn’t watched it yet? I thought wildly, maybe it was one of the one’s I’d found in that box. But how? How could it have even existed to begin with?

  I remembered the disk that Nate had put in my pocket as a prank, and felt suddenly ill. Nate had put a porn DVD in my pocket, and that meant he had watched the ones from the box. He had to have seen this. Had known what was on it, and he’d hidden it from me, behind the other DVDs.

  How had it found its way into that box at the side of the road? There was now no doubt in my mind that it was one of the blank cases I had carried to Nate’s.

  If it had been in the box I had brought him, then it was from that house clearance.

  The only way it could be from there was if it had belonged to the person who had lived there, the person who had clearly abandoned all of their belongings.

  Nate had been the one who had lived there. It was the only thing that made sense.

  I stood up, and the forgotten plate of pie and chips fell to the floor, dropping gravy and sauce everywhere. I stepped over it and went for the other DVDs. I could see now that they had slipped down from where Nate had put them, on the top shelf, behind a plastic box of leads and cables. They’d fallen down behind the other DVD boxes. He had never intended me to see them.

  I picked up the cases and put another DVD into the machine. It was the same, the two of us, only in this one I was on my front, hands and knees on the bed. I took the disk out, dropped it on the floor. The other disk was the two of us again. I’d seen enough. My hands were shaking as I pressed the ‘off’ button.

  Nate had seen these DVDs. I felt cold. Nate had seen thes
e recordings, and he had kept them from me. All this time I’d believed Nate to be a stranger. A man I’d met and fallen in love because an accident had thrown me into his life. Now I knew that something infinitely more complicated was at play. I just had no idea what.

  He hadn’t told me about them, hadn’t said a word about it. About what he knew, that he had proof that we had been together before my accident.

  Why hadn’t he told me? Why was he pretending that we were strangers, when clearly he was one of the affairs I’d had before I left Emma. I felt shaken. Who was he really? Could I trust anything that he’d told me? Anything that he seemed to be? Was he just pretending to be an amnesiac to get to me? Maybe I’d broken it off with him when I left Emma, and now he wanted to get payback. Or maybe he was just twisted, trying to make me fall for him in a way that I hadn’t before.

  I was scared, because I was in his house, and he could come back at any moment, this stranger who I’d thought I knew. I realised that I had no idea who Nate was under his bright, truant personality. I had no idea who would walk through the front door wearing his familiar face, or what he was capable of.

  But, at the same time I couldn’t let go of the idea that I knew Nate, and knew that he wasn’t that kind of person. He wasn’t malicious, he wasn’t a liar, he wouldn’t hurt me. He’d welcomed me in, tried to help me find a job, he had gotten me through my worst bout of depression. He loved me.

  And yet, the DVDs lay on the floor, silver circles of incontrovertible evidence. Nate had lied to me. Since almost the first time I’d met him.

  I’d had enough of being lied to, of being taken advantage of. I knew then that I had to leave.

  I went into the bedroom, pulled out the bag I’d brought from Emma’s and started to fling my stuff into it. I felt like shit, and even with a fleece and jacket on, I was still shivery. Still, I couldn’t stand the idea of seeing Nate again, or spending the night in his flat. I had to get out.

  I packed very little in the interest of being gone as soon as possible, not very many clothes, a few scraps of paperwork and bits and pieces. I didn’t take everything, but I filled the bag. I couldn’t fit a bulky, grey wool coat into it, so I changed my jacket and put the coat on instead, still trying to fight off my chill. I packed my jacket into the bag and then zipped it up, slinging the bag over my shoulder.

  I left no note, but after I shut the door my hand stayed on the cold, brass handle like it was frozen there. The peeling paint of the door was as familiar to me as the pattern of moles on Nate’s back, as the damp spot over his bed, or the chips in the rim of my favourite mug. With some effort I let go of the handle. It was all over now.

  It was dark outside, and very very cold, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the relative warmth of the day had streamed away upwards like vapour from a hot coffee. A wind with a sharp edge chased leaves on the pavement, and nipped at the exposed skin of my hands and the back of my neck.

  With nowhere to go, I focused first on getting away from the flat, and away from anywhere I might run into Nate. At every corner I felt a jab to my heart, knowing that Nate could at any moment come walking up the street ahead of me. I didn’t know if I was glad that he didn’t, or disappointed. Maybe part of me wanted him to catch me, ask me where the fuck I was going, and convince me to come home with him.

  I have no idea what would have happened if Nate had come across me as I was leaving him. I only know that I didn’t see him, and wound up at the Unemployed Men’s Club, the only building that I thought would be easy to get into. I climbed over the fence at the back of the warehouse and found that the door there was loose, and boarded over badly. It was easy to snap the old planks away and force the door in.

  I found my way up the pitch black stairs and through a small room where tables and chairs were stored, along with old tins of paint, rusted buckets and dusty archive boxes. I moved on into the familiar cavernous space of the warehouse proper. Perhaps it wasn’t the best place for me to have gone. The broken pieces of the pool table were propped up against one wall, a reminder of that afternoon, not so long ago, when I’d lost my job, and gained Nate as more than just a friend.

  I pushed my bag into a corner and lay down with my head against it. Sleep was not easy, but after a long time spent shivering in the dark, I dozed.

  I woke up to grim sunshine, grey tinted from the thick clouds outside. My nose was running, and I was colder than ever. I tried to ease the ache in my back by sitting up, hunting through my coat pockets for a tissue. I found one, old and half disintegrated, but used it anyway. A scrap of paper came with the tissue, falling from my pocket. I almost didn’t pick it up, being focussed on other things, like my swollen throat and aching stomach, but some impulse made me stoop to grab it.

  It was a receipt, and the only thing that kept me from crumpling it up, was the amount of money printed on it. Three-hundred and fifty pounds.

  I smoothed out the paper. The debit card receipt had my name on it, Connor Ray, then half of my account number, the rest x-ed out. It was from a jeweller, one I knew from the high street. Cantwell and Sons. Which wouldn’t have registered with me as important, were it not for the item description – Ster.Silver Neckl.

  A sterling silver necklace, valued at over three-hundred pounds, just like the one Nate had owned, and pawned.

  I stared at the receipt. Nothing made sense to me anymore. Had I bought Nate an expensive necklace when Emma and I were struggling for cash? If so, why? Why buy him anything at all? Given that he was the type of guy I’d apparently made sex tapes with. It could hardly have been a deep relationship.

  What kind of bastard had I been? To spend that kind of money on someone I was just fucking around with, while my wife coped with my limited wage and her own ASDA salary.

  Part of me wanted to rip the slip of paper up, but I resisted. If I had bought Nate a...token of our time together, I wanted to know for sure. It was unlikely that I had bought it and taken it home with me. I’d been smart enough not to leave any other clues lying around. I must have either given it to him straight away, or had it delivered. If I’d done that, then there was a chance the jeweller would still have Nate’s old address, or his name. At least then I’d know if he was really an amnesiac, with no knowledge of his past self. I needed to know if he was lying about everything.

  I needed to know if he was lying about loving me. Even if I didn’t deserve to, after all, I was a bigger liar than him and Emma put together.

  In my rush to leave Nate’s flat, I had forgotten my anti-depressants, and I tried to tell myself that it didn’t matter, even though I felt worse than I had when I found out about Emma’s lies.

  I left the warehouse and walked straight to the jewellers, even though I hadn’t eaten since lunch the previous day, and even though I was cold and homeless. Somehow finding out who Nate had been to me was more important.

  I got to the shop just as it was opening. It was a small shop front, one window with a fine metal grille over it, and a door in need of painting. I pushed it open and a bell chimed overhead. The room inside was walled with glass displays, each one lined with faded cloth, with the chains and pendants held up by pins. Thick alarm cables went from the cases to the top of the wall, where wires were held in place with electrical tape. It smelt like furniture polish and old dust, and the man behind the counter was wearing leather slippers under the cuffs of his black trousers.

  “How can I help you?” he asked, and I took the receipt from my pocket.

  “We don’t accept returns,” the man said, his face stiffening, “you can try the pawn shop.”

  “I’d just like to know if this was delivered, or just handed over to me,” I said.

  He gave me a weird look, but took the receipt anyway.

  “I’ll check.”

  I waited while he went through records on a big, slow computer that crouched on the counter in a rubble of balled up papers and used mugs. I imagined coming here with Nate, or, more likely, coming here alone to pick out his present.
The prices sending jolts of guilty dismay through me, even as I picked out the perfect thing, determined to buy it, even if it meant emptying my account of that week’s pay.

  “Connor Ray, bought a sterling silver fleur-de-lys chain. Three-hundred and fifty pounds.” He squinted at the screen. “Delivered to a local address.”

  He read it out, and I knew it was the house that I had taken the box from. So I was right, Nate had lived there before.

  “What’s the name?” I asked.

  “There’s no first name.”

  I didn’t know what to think, was Nate lying to me about losing his memory, had he made up a name to cover his tracks? Or, was he genuinely ignorant about who he was? Not knowing that I had bought him the necklace that he’d told me about.

  “What’s the surname?”

  “Last name’s Cooper. That’s all we’ve got.”

  I froze, stung. Cooper.

  Coop.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Stupid.

  I’d been so stupid.

  As I walked into the job centre, trailing my bag and shuddering as warmth from the unforgiving central heating seeped through my coat and into my skin, I became aware of just how much of an idiot I’d been.

  After all, I’d told Nate about the weird phone call, the emails. I’d confided in him about all of it.

  And it had been him all along.

  Nate. Coop. Each offering advice, lending their ears and giving me guidance. Each one pointing me down the path of ‘who I really was’. They had been the same person all along. The same, singular person who had manipulated me, moulded me, and lifted me from my old life like I was a hapless oyster to be ripped from a shell.