Catch Me When I Fall Read Online Free PDF

arrangements for the following day and Derek, our boss, had forgotten all about it. As if that wasn't enough, he shut himself away in his office. After about an hour, I went in without knocking and he was crying. Even now I can remember his wretched, crumpled face and his red eyes. He looked desperate, so I told him it would be all right. We'd make sure of it. He held my hand in both of his and told me his wife had run off with her decorator.

    We had nothing to lose. We were only twenty-two, and everything seemed possible. We phoned the woman, got some details about the company, then found a hotel and cobbled together some exercises from talking to people around the office. We stayed up the entire night preparing cards and little speeches. The next day, well, it wasn't the greatest office away day of all time, but Meg and I worked like dogs getting people to cross a carpet with only a plank, a rope, a bucket and a couple of other stupid things, and we flirted and sparkled until our faces hurt or mine did, at least. Meg is the straight man in our double-act. She doesn't flirt -when she likes a man, she gets clumsy and abrupt, laughs in the wrong places, blushes to the roots of her hair. And she never shows off. I do, and when I do she looks at me with an expression that's a mixture of indulgence and faint anxiety. She has a faint crease between her eyebrows from when she frowns. It makes her look as if she's about to burst into tears.
     We did it all day and we did it in the bar all evening. Just after midnight the woman from the company came up and hugged us and said, thank you, thank you, thank you, that we had saved her job, and then Derek the next day, he was so emotional he started crying again. I sat there again and said reassuring things and looked at him. I remember shivering. We were both on a high wire, making it look easy. All it took was a glance down, the realization that there was no safety-net, and you slip and fall.
     And yet at the same time it was the biggest high of my life bar nothing. I've heard people say they have a recurring nightmare that they are on a stage and a play is going on and they don't know their lines. That day showed me that it wasn't my ultimate nightmare at all. Quite the opposite: it was something I sought out. My nightmare begins when the show is over.
     It wasn't many months later that Meg and I decided to go it alone. I had never met anyone I liked as much as her. I think she was almost the first person in the whole of my adult life I didn't
    feel the need to put on an act with, didn't need to try to charm or impress. I always knew she was kind-hearted, and in a peculiar way I felt that I was a better, or less bad, person when I was around her. Perhaps, in my twenties, I had at last found my first real friend.
     We could have called our company something New Age like Swish or Enthrall or Aspire but we stuck with KS Associates, which is brilliantly derived from Krauss, my surname, and Summers, which is Meg's. We paid an old art-school boyfriend of Meg's five thousand quid to design a logo for us. Imagine the K and then imagine that the sideways V is the top half of the S, which continues below, then curves back and almost touches the bottom of the straight bit of the K. It's rather hard to picture unless you see it. We thought it looked quite classy, but when we had the party in our office to celebrate the launch of the company, someone pointed out, late at night when we were all quite drunk, that it looked like the wheelchair sign you see on disabled toilets. But it was too late to change and, anyway, Meg and I decided it was probably only an effect noticed by the very drunk.
     I like the impossible, but there are limits even to impossibility. The previous week one of our staff had gone off on maternity leave and another woman had resigned and we had two away-days coming at us, like something very big and very heavy. As I stood on the Underground platform, for the second time that