Falling to Earth

by Deirdre Palmer

  A long moment passed before Gray spoke again. ‘It feels – I mean it felt - like I was walking around with a stone in my shoe.’

  This succinct, all-telling description sent a dart of recognition through Juliet. She’d had a stone in her own shoe for many years – Charlton, not so much a stone but rather a tiny piece of gravel tucked between her toes – a constant, sharp reminder of the way she had deprived father and daughter of the chance to play the roles nature had decreed for them. She’d shaken out that piece of gravel now, though, once and for all – Charlton’s betrayal of Rachel had seen to that. Perversely, she felt almost grateful to him.

  ‘Thank you for telling me,’ she said.

  ‘I miss you, darling, and I will be home very soon but it just isn’t possible yet. I can’t explain. All I can do is ask you to trust me because I do have my reasons. Don’t give up on me, will you?’ Gray’s voice was gravelly with emotion. It struck a chord in her heart.

  But why? she’d wanted to ask. Why can’t you come home now? But she mustn’t put pressure on him because if she did, she could well send him hurtling in the opposite direction. He had asked her to trust him, so that was what she had to do. She wished she could understand, though. If he really wanted to come home all he had to do was walk out of one door and into another. Why did he have to make it sound so complicated?

  ‘Of course I won’t give up on you. I miss you, too, but you must take as long as you need.’

  ‘And you’re sure you’re all right?’

  Juliet sighed. Gray seemed unwilling to end the conversation but she’d had enough now. Much as she loved to hear his voice, it was all seeming rather pointless.

  ‘Yes, I’m fine, I told you. I’m sorry, I have to go now. Something in the oven. The pinger’s just gone.’

  Juliet kept thinking she ought to phone Gray’s parents but couldn’t think what to say, and then she decided it might be better to send them a card instead, one she had made herself, with a brief, warm message inside. While she was still deliberating, they saved her the trouble by phoning one evening.

  She was sitting in the kitchen, her sketch pad on her knee. It had been one of those languorous, late-summer days which seemed to defy any attempt at over-exertion and, having had the house to herself, she had drifted along with it, moving from studio to garden and back again as the mood took her.

  The back door was wide open, flooding the room with cones of golden light. She was drawing Sidney who was stretched full-length and half-asleep on the cool tiled floor. Her pencil made faint swishing sounds on the paper. Later, she would take the picture up to Rachel’s room and leave it for her to find when she returned from Sarah’s.

  The trill of the phone wired through the stillness, causing Sid’s ears to flick briefly to attention. Juliet need not have worried about talking to Gray’s parents because as soon as she heard Lizzie’s cultured-but-homely voice she felt immediately at ease.

  ‘We’ve been so worried about you. Are you all right, you and Rachel? Honestly, I could throttle him, I really could!’

  She meant Gray, of course. Lovely as it was of Lizzie to denigrate her son in order to show Juliet that she didn’t blame her for what had happened, Juliet had to put her straight, which was difficult since she hadn’t a clue as to what, if anything, Lizzie and Martin had been told. She would just have to offer a bland response that would, hopefully, cover all eventualities.

  ‘It wasn’t all Gray’s fault. It was mine as well, one of those stupid quarrels based on pure misunderstanding, that’s all.’

  ‘Yes, well, he’s a silly boy and it’s time he came to his senses and moved back in.’

  Ah, so they knew the ‘silly boy’ in question had fled to the nearest cave in order to lick his wounds then. In response to Lizzie’s next question, Juliet gave her a run-down of Rachel’s latest doings, minus the Charlton episode, then Martin spoke.

  ‘Graeme tells me he’s having some sort of crisis, career-wise. Is it serious or is it just a phase, do you think?’

  Juliet had no idea, and said so. It was no use pretending she was privy to the machinations of Gray’s mind. If she was, they probably wouldn’t be in this mess.

  Martin chuntered on comfortingly about the garden and the classic car show he’d been to and by the time the call had ended, with both Martin and Lizzie exacting a promise from Juliet that she would call them if she wanted anything at all, she felt a distinct lifting of her spirits, as if by assuring Gray’s parents that she was fine she had convinced herself that this was the case. Anyway, she was all right, wasn’t she? At least she would be, given time, whether Gray came back or not. There was no other way to be.

  Talking to Martin brought her own father to mind. Stubborn old devil that he was, Arthur Cole had made it perfectly plain that nothing short of an Olympic tug-of-war team would succeed in removing him from the house in Oakmere Crescent, despite his increasing frailty. Juliet had exchanged a look with the woman who came to put him to bed at night and get him up in the morning and they’d both known there was no point in arguing.

  She had harboured no resentment at giving up a chunk of her life to caring for him during his final months. How could she? He had cared for her all those years because being a parent never stopped, even when the so-called child was old enough to jolly well look after itself, and neither had he judged her when she’d turned up on the doorstep, pregnant, with no ring on her finger. The chance to give something back had instilled in her a sense of privilege.

  Pamela Cole had been less obliging on that score. At the relatively young age of seventy-one, her life had been snuffed out on a frosty pavement outside Woolworth’s – an aneurism, apparently. How bizarre, Juliet thought later, that her mother had met her end outside a shop she would never admit to setting foot in and with her arms full of bags marked ‘Sale’.

  While Juliet was ensconced in Oakmere Crescent, watching her father’s world shrink until it barely reached beyond three feet of mattress, Gray took time out of work to keep Rachel company and bring Juliet little food parcels at intervals during the day because he suspected, rightly, that she wouldn’t bother to feed herself otherwise. When, eventually, Arthur was moved, resignedly, to hospital, Gray drove Juliet to and fro as many times as she needed and stayed by her side amid the heat and smells and decay of the geriatric ward while she talked softly to her father for hours on end, her knees jutting into the metal frame of the bed.

  It was only afterwards that she’d remembered Gray’s phobia about hospitals. Gray had had a brother, Max, three years younger than himself, who had contracted a rare form of cancer at the age of five. On the day Max died, Gray had been closeted in a little room outside the charge nurse’s office with a pile of comics, and when the nurse left her post, he had crept to the half-closed door of the side ward and seen his brother, his face leached of colour, his body so tiny it hardly made a bump in the bed, the snaking tubes, the waiting faces of the doctors and his parents, while the monitors pip-pipped into the silence. He’d fled before they’d noticed him, but the scene had remained, an ever-bright screen image embedded in his brain, along with a fear and hatred of hospitals.

  Gray had set aside his own fears and responded to Juliet’s needs willingly, without hesitation. If she’d needed proof that he loved her, surely that was it.

  And now it was her turn. He’d said, not so long ago, that he didn’t know what she wanted from him. Well, wasn’t it time she told him how much she loved and appreciated him, that the thought of living her life without him in it was unbearable? He was couple of miles across town, that was all, yet he might as well be on Mars for all the distance there was between them. She would go and bring him home, simple as that, and whatever doubts and fears and anxieties plagued him, they would work it all through together, because surely that was better than each of them suffering alone. They’d wasted enough time as it was.

  The front door opened and closed. Andrea, with unusually impeccable timing, was home early from play rehearsal –
about two hours early, actually, but Juliet didn’t have time to enquire. Issuing a quick instruction to her friend to keep an eye on Rachel when she came home, Juliet grabbed her car keys and fled.

  Huge drops of rain peppered the windscreen within seconds of her departure, so unexpectedly that they startled her. Peering upwards, she jumped again as a vein of lightening ripped the sky apart, a sky that was no longer placid blue but a sulky greyish purple.

  By the time she reached the railway bridge which gave on to Gray’s road she was roasting. There seemed to be no air in the car, even with the window wound down, as if the summer storm had sucked it all away. Her arm and shoulder were damp from the encroaching rain. Not having spotted the change in the weather, she hadn’t thought to bring a coat or umbrella but it didn’t matter. All she cared about was getting to Gray because once she was with him everything would be fine, she was sure of it, and even if it wasn’t - not at first, anyway - he could hardly turn her away, could he?

  She took the bridge a shade too fast and the car landed on the other side of it with a bump. A growl of thunder preceded another lightening flash. Juliet peered through the rain-fuddled windscreen. This was it. This was the road, and over there, if she wasn’t mistaken, was Gray’s block of flats.

  For the first time since she’d left home, a smidgeon of doubt entered her mind but she swept it away. She was a woman on a mission, wasn’t she? She had come this far and nothing was going to stop her, not even the promise of a downright soaking.

  Balking at the idea of parking slap-bang outside the flats in case Gray happened to look out and decided against letting her in, she drove past, made a right turn and manoeuvred, with difficulty, into a slightly too small space. She managed to avoid looking in the mirror as she opened the door and stepped out – if her face looked like a boiled beetroot, which she suspected it did, she would rather not know.

  There was little traffic but the road was wide and she waited until it was completely clear both ways before haring across, by which time her Madras cotton dress was already soaked, the skirt binding itself uncomfortably to her legs and forcing her to adopt an ungainly, much slower gait as she reached the mosaic-tiled entrance to the flats.

  The wail of sirens made her stop and look round, just as an ambulance flew up the road towards her and bounced to a standstill, the police car on its tail swerving to a brake-standing stop a couple of feet behind it with two wheels on the kerb. Within seconds, doors were flung open and a bevy of people in uniforms and boiler-suits converged on the pavement outside the flats.

  Juliet’s stomach lurched at the suddenness of all this activity. She glanced nervously upwards in case the din brought Gray to the window. Several sets of curtains twitched but of course she had no idea which flat was his. Typical! Here she was, hoping to arrive quietly and without fuss, and there was all this pandemonium. She wondered, without much interest, what it was in aid of. Heart attack? Baby on the way? But neither of those warranted police attendance, surely, unless they’d got bored down at the station and decided to tag along just for the crack.

  The uniforms and boiler-suits barged past, forcing her to leap off the path into the lavender bushes, and then she realised this could work in her favour. If there was any part of this expedition she’d been dreading, it was the part where she pressed the door-bell and, assuming Gray was in, announced her presence into the entry panel’s aluminium face. Her confidence in the success of this mission depended on her and Gray being together, physically, not separated by several tons of brick and steel. He might very well decide not to let her in at all.

  Overcome by panic at the thought, she hitched up her skirt, hopped back on to the path and half-ran, half-skidded her way to the entrance in the wake of the crew. The double glass doors were inches from closing as she approached. Launching herself at them, she grabbed the handle, yanked them open and plunged through.

  Once inside, she stood still and took a few deep breaths. Across the entrance hall, the lift stood open but was already filled to capacity with two police officers, two paramedics, one of those collapsible chair things and other assorted bits of kit. There was no room for her, but she wouldn’t have wanted to share it with them anyway. The doors purred shut and the lift bore its lugubrious cargo upwards.

  A hush descended on the thickly-carpeted hall. Juliet looked about. Above a polished half-moon table, on which sat a neat pile of free newspapers and a vase of football-sized artificial chrysanthemums, a mahogany board gave discreet directions in gold lettering as to the whereabouts of the various flats. Gray’s was number sixty-three, on the fourth and highest floor. It would be. Shaking out her wet skirt and running a hand perfunctorily through her hair, Juliet started up the stairs.

  She’d reached the second floor when she heard sounds from above, hurrying footsteps, the chink of metal, voices, urgent but restrained - the police and ambulance crew. Please God they were on the next floor up, not the top floor. As soon as she took the next flight of stairs and looked up into the void she knew that was exactly where they were. Unbelievable! There must be about a hundred flats altogether. What were the chances of an emergency situation occurring right next door to where Gray was staying, and at the very moment she chose to arrive? Pretty slim, she’d have thought. She began to hope Gray wasn’t in after all so that she could just ring the bell once then hot-foot it down the stairs again without getting caught up in anything nasty.

  The uniforms and boiler-suits were very much in evidence as, tight-chested with exertion and nerves, Juliet reached the top of the last flight. They were congregated at the door of one of the flats to the right of the staircase, to the rear of the block. She checked the numbers of the flats. There were four on this level. Numbers sixty and sixty-one were at the front of the building. That left sixty-two and sixty-three at the back. She knew before she even looked. The door of sixty-two stood firmly closed. Sixty-three, on the other hand, was alive with frenzied activity. The door was open, police and ambulance crew crowding through it into the flat.

  Juliet’s heart gave an almighty thump. At the same time, her lungs seemed to shrink to prune-size and a slick of sweat broke out beneath her fringe. Suddenly rooted to the spot, she heard her own voice calling out Gray’s name but she couldn’t tell whether she’d called out loud or just in her head.

  Forcing her legs into action, she moved towards the open door without knowing whether she should go in or not. As she hesitated, her heart now banging away somewhere close to the base of her throat, Gray emerged from the flat, glanced at her without seeming to register her presence, then rushed past her and threw up spectacularly into the corner.

  It wasn’t until he straightened up and wiped his mouth on his sleeve that she saw that his hands and the front of white shirt were covered in blood.

  20

  Juliet inhaled so deeply and sharply that she emitted a sound that was half shriek, half gasp. It seemed to jolt Gray out of his semi-aware state and he looked at her as if he was seeing her properly for the first time, the expression of pure relief on his face both palpable and gratifying.

  ‘What’s happened? What have you done?’ Her voice bounced off the walls of the stairwell and sent a piercing echo back.

  Gray followed Juliet’s gaze downwards, his jaw dropping with astonishment as he took in the vivid red stains on his shirt and his blood-smeared hands. He looked up at her, shaking his head.

  ‘It’s not me. Not my blood.’

  ‘Whose then? Why are the police here?’ Juliet’s voice

  What the hell had gone on here? If Gray wasn’t hurt, and, thank heaven, he didn’t seem to be - at least, not physically - how had he got into this state?

  She moved towards him, intending to put her arms round him, when he wobbled a little and lurched sideways. Feeling her own legs would let her down any time now, she took a firm hold on Gray’s upper arm and he allowed himself to be led to the stairs where they sank down together on the top step.

  Gray’s shoulders sagged. He s
tared down at his feet, not speaking, not answering her question. Juliet glanced towards the door of the flat then turned back to Gray, dipping her head to see his face.

  He raised his head a little, as if was too heavy for him to hold up. ‘I’m so sorry. She came back. She came here and I let her in. I’m so sorry. I tried to help her but I couldn’t. And then they came...’

  ‘The police?’

  ‘Yes, and the ambulance people. I must have rung them. I don’t remember.’

  Gray wasn’t making much sense. It frightened her but she realised he must be in shock.

  ‘It doesn’t matter who rang them as long as they’re here.’ She gave Gray’s arm a gentle squeeze.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I should have known. I should have done something sooner. I’ve let you down. I’ve let everyone down.’

  ‘You haven’t let anyone down, Gray, not at all. It’ll be all right, you’ll see.’

  What would be all right? Juliet winced at the futility of her own words. Shifting along the cold step, she pressed herself instinctively against Gray as if by sheer proximity she could draw off some of whatever it was he was feeling and lessen it, but after a few moments she felt him tense his body against her and she had no choice but to move away again.

  She wished he would talk to her. For the past few minutes she’d had a growing suspicion as to who, if not what exactly, this was all about. It would be good to have it confirmed, but Gray was clearly in no state to be cross-examined and had lapsed once more into a troubled silence.

  One of the police officers came up behind them and stooped to touch Gray lightly on the shoulder. A wisp of pale blonde hair escaped from its French pleat and fell softly across her cheek.

  ‘Are you all right, sir?’

  Gray nodded.

  ‘Well, we’ll get you checked out anyway. And this is?’ She looked at Juliet.

  ‘His partner,’ Juliet said, quickly. ‘I’ve come to take him home.’