After The Fall

by Sarah Goodwin

  I would find myself, and I would kill him.

  I went out the very next morning, bundled against the cold, shunning the sights around me. I started with the house where I’d found the boxes of chucked out DVDs. There was a new tenant, but he gave me the number of the landlord. I left messages with him, but didn’t get a call back, though I waited for three days. A dead-end.

  After my attempt to trace Nate through his former landlord failed, I retraced my short journey in life back to the hospital, where I asked for any information they had on me. It was a struggle, and I got passed around department after department, but finally, I ended up with some records. Standard medical stuff, but there was a slip of paper with had escaped from a police report on the accident. It had my car listed, along with the registration number, and a note saying it had been taken away to be scrapped.

  That night, in my tiny room, with a paper cone of untouched chow mein in front of me, I thumbed through the yellow pages and called every local scrap metal yard in the county. My determination was an idiot kind of doggedness. In fact, I was very like a dog, a mutt sniffing for scraps, pursuing a trail even as its body was scratched to pieces and wasted by famine.

  I left messages with all of them, giving them the details of the accident and the number on my car’s licence plate. It was a long shot, but I wanted to know if there was anything in the car that had survived the accident.

  The next morning I got two calls back, both from places that hadn’t seen my car, but who were curious about me. I got them off the phone, none too politely, and then started calling around again.

  I got lucky on my fifteenth call.

  “Yeah, we had it. Red Nissan? Hatchback, bashed to fuck in some accident.”

  “The bridge collapse?”

  “Tha’s the one.”

  “Do you have any of the stuff that was in it?”

  “Like?”

  “Well, it was my car. I was leaving to go somewhere, I would have packed things. And there were two of us in the car when it crashed.”

  “Oh, right, I see.” I heard papers shuffling. “Thing is, we get a lot of cars come through here, and most of the stuff we chuck, unless someone wants to take it home, or I can sell it off.”

  My thin hopes frayed and broke. “Oh.”

  “Tell you what, I’m not going to go through the stuff on my own, there’s a whole garage full of the most recent crap – not car boot season yet, you know? But, if you come down, you’re welcome to look.”

  “Great, I will.”

  “I’m not saying you’ll find anything mind.”

  “I’ll try anyway.”

  He gave me the address, and I got out a bus timetable that had been in the kitchen drawer with the yellow pages. I’d have to take two buses out to the middle of nowhere, but it was doable.

  I had nothing else to do that day, so I went.

  It was drizzling when I got onto my first bus at the almost empty, McDonalds wrapper strewn station. I ignored the other passengers, and stared out of the window at nothing, thinking only of what I might find at my destination.

  Full on rain had developed by the time I got off on a single lane road, next to a pole with a timetable nailed to it. It added to my misery as I stood under it’s relentless grey dripping. I hunched into my jacket and waited for the next bus, looking around in wind-battered snatches at the wet fields and hedges around me.

  The second bus was smaller, and jolted a lot into potholes, but it made good time, and I turned up at the hamlet adjacent to the scrap yard at around two. Walking there took a bit longer, but I was in time to see the owner.

  A short, bullish Danny Devito sort of character came down the gravel drive towards me, the door of his port-a-cabin office banging shut at his back. His hair was the colour of corrugated iron, his face like the inside of a whelk shell.

  “Ray?” he said.

  “Connor,” I said, holding out my hand. He shook it, fingers like ruddy crab legs wrapping around my cold knuckles.

  “Ken.” He gestured to the left of the office. “It’s over in the back here,” he said, leading me towards the last in a block of three garages. The drive petered out beyond them and there was a field studded with the carcases of cars. The crusher hummed, a great, greased thing. There were tyres along the gravel, with scraggy flowers planted in them.

  He unlocked the garage and flung the door up wide, showing me the dark, musty interior. Shelves around the walls were packed with all kinds of things – plastic shopping bags, suitcases, a dog bed, footballs, golf clubs, CDs, cuddly toys and travel cups.

  “Lots of stuff,” Ken said, interpreting my expression correctly. “A lot of people just let it go, can’t be doing with anything that reminds them of any accidents.” He shrugged. “’Course, some buggers are dead.”

  I swallowed. “Thanks for showing me out here.”

  “No trouble. I’ll leave you to it, but, check with me before you take anything.”

  He went back to the office and I made cautious inroads into the junk. I had no idea where to start, but I was anxious to begin. What would I have taken with me when I left Emma? A suitcase? Maybe a bag? That hardly narrowed it down. What else?

  I picked through the piles of stuff, overturning travel rugs and piles of old books and CDs. I hadn’t given much thought to what people kept in their cars before, but now I could see that a wealth of junk was probably rattling around in foot wells, glove compartments and boots. All those things, belonging to people who at any moment could die, or wreck their cars, so all their belonging would end up somewhere like this.

  It was useless looking through the bags, I didn’t recognise anything anyway, and there were so many that it would take me days. I stood back for a moment, on the edge of despair, and thought. What did I know about myself? What did I own?

  Then I thought of something. Golf. The day of the accident, I was down to play golf. I had seen it on the calendar. What if I’d taken my clubs with me? Or put them in the car the night before so Emma wouldn’t suspect anything out of the ordinary? I was clutching at straws, but it was all I had to go on.

  There were only a few sets of clubs, and I looked them over. Most had nametags, and I was incredibly lucky to find that my clubs had been marked. They were in a tatty old gold bag, most likely second hand, and the clubs themselves were grubby. Connor Ray, written in marker on the side of the bag, over the ghost of someone else’s initials.

  I went through the pockets of the bag, and found only receipts and scraps of paper. I pushed them into my pockets to look over later and looked around the clubs, hoping that my other possessions were nearby.

  There was a suitcase, unmarked, but with my size clothes inside. I checked the pockets and in between the folded shirts. I found a plastic wallet with some paperwork in it, old bills and standing order information. In my name. There was also a uniform shirt from my old job at the leisure centre.

  “Yahtzee,” I muttered.

  I dragged the bag outside and put it on the path by the garage. There was nothing else in there that looked like it belonged to me, but I went back in anyway. I knew that I hadn’t been alone in the car. Simon had been with me, and his things might still be in the storage shed. I was incredibly curious about him, the man I’d left my wife for. At least, the first time.

  I’d cleared a little space around the golf clubs by this point, and I stood in it, snorting against the impulse to sneeze in the dusty air. A red holdall caught my attention. It had a laurel crown embroidered on it. The logo I remembered from the shirt I had seen in flashes. Simon’s shirt.

  I reached for it, unzipping the top and sifting through the clothes. The smell of Lynx body spray assaulted me, the smell from my memories. There were worn cotton shirts, and one was white, with the laurel logo on it. I held it for a long moment, just looking at it. The man I’d loved had worn that shirt, filled those sleeves, the cotton on his skin. He had been real.

  The rest of the bag didn’t have much in it, I guessed that he
hadn’t packed to go away, but was just transporting his work bag. There was an empty lunch box and a paperback in the bag, and a wallet jammed into a side pocket.

  I took it out, finding money and receipts. A credit card brought me up short. I looked at the embossed lettering, then scrabbled for another. There was an ID card under it, and I slid it out, my fingers slipping on the slick plastic.

  It was there. Embossed, printed, black and white, silver, gold.

  Cooper.

  Simon Cooper.

  Chapter Eighteen

  For about ten seconds, I thought it might be a coincidence. It was just a name after all, and hardly an unusual one. But the picture was there, a little old and out of date, showing him with almost shoulder length hair and the moody expression of someone sitting for an official photograph, but it was undeniable.

  Simon Cooper, the love of my previous life, the man I’d left my wife for, was Nate Springsteen.

  I sat back on my heels, the damp, musty air suddenly almost too thick to draw on. I tried to put it together, to work out exactly how my old life had looped around to kick me in the chest.

  Nate was Simon. The Simon that Emma had told me was dead. Either she had lied to me, again, or Simon really was gone. Only, not gone as in ‘dead’. Gone as in ‘missing’. Even his landlord hadn’t known where Simon was, and hadn’t cared enough to keep his belongings safe. It seemed unlikely that he would have reported his AWOL tenant missing.

  So Simon had been lost, and stayed lost.

  I thought of the accident, or the brief recollections I had of it. The images that came to me in my nightmares, half real, half imagined. The river, swelling angrily against the windows, breaking the glass, dark and heavy with earth and leaking petrol. I tried to picture Nate, Simon, in the seat next to me, maybe struggling with his seatbelt. But it wasn’t a memory, just a thought. I could imagine him being swept away, swept down river. Discovered a few miles away, maybe taken for a drunk who’d stumbled into the river, or someone trying to commit suicide. Taken to the hospital, a different hospital to the one I’d woken up in.

  I thought of Simon fading away in his own head, until he woke up empty and blank, as I had. Of Nate slowly growing in his mind, a persona, half old personality, half new. Just as I’d changed, altered by the effects of the accident.

  I picked up the bag, sliding the cards into my pocket. I had to see Nate. I had to tell him. I was still angry, still completely out of sync with myself, thanks to the bombshells that had rained down on me in the last few days, but I knew this couldn’t stay with me. Nate had to know.

  “I need to take these,” I said, finding Ken smoking outside his little office. The two bags were heavy, and I was already having trouble with them.

  He gave me a look that said he was already wondering if I had something valuble hidden in them.

  “It’s just clothes, I can show you,” I said.

  That seemed to reassure him. “I’ll take your word. You can take them, gives me more space anyway. Lots of accidents around Christmastime.”

  I felt cold at the thought.

  With the bags weighing me down it took me longer than before to walk to the bus stop. I almost missed the hourly bus, and had to run, ungainly and sore from the cases knocking my legs. But I made it, and thrust my crumpled ticket at the driver breathlessly. On the ride back I couldn’t stop thinking about Nate, about the heap of forgotten things that had been between us the whole time we’d been together. There was so much that neither of us had known.

  All at once my anger, at myself, at him, had been cut off at the roots. Neither of us could have known that he was Simon. Neither of us had meant to meet again, to get involved.

  I knew the truth, at last, and it made me calmer, chased away some of the darkness.

  Could I tell him? I knew I should, that it was the right thing to do. I could give Nate back his life, his past and the lead that might take him to his family and friends. But, although I wanted to commit to it, to telling him, I felt cold when I thought of it.

  The bus bumped along, and I probed my feelings experimentally. Why couldn’t I imagine facing Nate and telling him that I knew who he was?

  I had to wait for twenty minutes by the side of the road for my second bus. It was growing dark by then, the sky turning first greyish and then deep blue. The trees and hedges blurring like someone had drawn their thumb over a charcoal picture.

  If I told Nate, then it would stir the whole mess up again. It was one thing to know that we’d slept together, made a few dirty films, but now I knew we’d had a whole relationship, that I’d left my wife for him, or for whoever he’d been. It made things complicated, made us complicated. What if it made him all the more determined to see me? Could I handle that?

  I had loved him. As Nate, and as Simon, I must have. But now, I had no idea how I felt, or what I wanted. But I no longer wanted to die, and that itself was so relieving that it almost had me crying again.

  The bus pulled into the bus station and I stepped off and walked out of the station, past the few benches surrounded by fast food litter and supporting drunk girls dressed for going out in tower block heels and thigh baring dresses, and the dirty drunks in their no-colour clothes and straggling beards.

  It was properly dark when away from the fluorescents of the station, and I walked quickly, not wanting to be accosted by a homeless case on my way back to the B&B. It was hard going with the heavy bags.

  When the shape of a person came out of the shadow of the building next door to The Old Crown, I was already raising my hand to ward them off when they said, “Con?”

  I turned, and it was Nate, bundled deep in his parka, a pair of fingerless gloves doing little to keep his hands warm in the sharp, brisk cold of the night.

  “Nate? What are you doing?” I said, but I couldn’t inject any heat into my voice.

  “Waiting for you. I haven’t seen you all day.” He glanced at the cases in my hands, “what’s with the bags?”

  I ignored the question. “You’ve been following me?”

  He shrugged. “I usually walk down the road when you’re on your way out for the day. I don’t follow you after that.”

  “Well, I was out today, early.”

  “Ah,” he said, “but you’re OK?”

  “Yeah, you?”

  Another shrug.

  “Look, Nate-”

  “I know, I’ll get going. See you around.” He started to walk off, and I felt a jolt of unpleasant panic.

  “No, don’t.”

  He turned back to me.

  “I’ve got something that I need to tell you.”

  Nate was still tense, waiting for me to reject him again. “Thought you never wanted to speak to me again.”

  “This is important.”

  “If it’s about who I was...forget it,” he said, “I haven’t gone looking for that name you gave me. I don’t want to know.”

  “But it’s your life.”

  “No. My life is in that flat, and I wanted it to include you,” he told me. “and since that isn’t going to happen, I don’t need to dwell on what we had, or didn’t have, before.” His eyes were dark when he looked at me. “I mean, you left me once, didn’t you? For someone else. Why go over that?”

  I shook my head. “Nate, it wasn’t-”

  “I don’t care, just look after yourself, promise?” he said, and started to walk away.

  “Nate, about what you did, with the messages and things you sent me...”

  “Yeah, I know, it was a stupid, shitty thing to do and you’re still-”

  “I want to hear your side of it.”

  That brought him up short, as I’d hoped it would, and he just stood there, staring at me, like he couldn’t believe the words that had come out of my mouth. Myself, I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t said them sooner. My misery was only half to do with losing my trust in Nate, but wholly caused by the loss of Nate himself. I hadn’t realised just how much I had missed him.

  “Co
me on, tell me...I want to know,” I took a step closer to him, “I don’t...want to be on my own anymore.”

  Nate looked down at the ground. “If this is just you being sick of having nowhere to live...”

  “It’s not. I promise...I miss you.”

  He looked up at me then, and stuffed his hands into his pockets.

  “I’ve missed you to. A lot. Shit, you don’t know how much.”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  I could see him worrying his lip with his teeth, one hand, I knew, was twisting a receipt or a bus ticket around in his pocket.

  “I didn’t mean to,” he said eventually.

  “What did you want?” I said, trying to keep my voice level, “when you started talking to me, telling me you were some affair I’d had. You knew I had all those doubts...”

  “I didn’t even know it was you when I got the email,” Nate said, “your email – Call me yourself? And, your email address was Cray@hotmail.co.uk, so I checked my phone, number for ‘C-Ray’. I called you, and when you picked up, I knew.”

  “So why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Like I could have,” Nate’s desperation was clear, “you were scared, confused, so intent on living with her, on being married, that you couldn’t see the truth. How could I tell you, ‘oh, by the way, we were having it off before your brain got scrambled?’ You never would have believed me, and then you never would have spoken to me again. I didn’t want that. I didn’t even know what those fucking DVDs meant.”

  “What did you want then?” I asked, “did you want me to leave her?”

  “Look, it wasn’t like that” Nate said, “at least, not at first. Then I only wanted to see you...only, I started thinking...I don’t want him to go back to some woman he isn’t happy with...I want him here with me.”

  I was silent, and Nate looked so guilty that I couldn’t help but believe him.

  “I know, it was an awful thing to do, I didn’t even mean to take it that far. I just wanted to talk to you, and see if you had any thoughts of leaving her...but then I got carried away and I started...maybe, pushing a little. But you can’t say it was all me.”