Catch Me When I Fall Read Online Free PDF Page B

morning, with my aching head and sore throat and a sense of disaster hanging around me like a toxic miasma, I started to reassign the two absent women's duties in my head and work out a rough timetable and think of what lay ahead in the next seventy-two hours. The train burst out of the tunnel and I suddenly thought: Wouldn't it be nice to let myself tip over like a tree in front of it? I would never have to work out anything ever again. After all, in a hundred years I'd be dead anyway.
    Everybody on this jam-packed platform would be dead, most of them probably after years of loneliness and illness. I'd just be arriving early. And there are no spreadsheets in the grave. And no greyness. Just blackness, or nothing. Or maybe even as a surprise bonus there would be heaven and I would meet my old budgies and hamsters and my rabbit and my cat from when I was a little girl. And I would see my father again.
     But then I saw the face of the driver, homely, jowly, unshaven, shockingly close, and I saw us, the crowd on the platform, from his point of view, all teetering on the edge over the rails. Did he have nightmares that one day someone would jump?
    Our office doesn't look like what my father would have called a normal office. Not that he ever worked in a normal office. At least, it's not what normal fathers would call a normal office. We found it on the edge of Soho and took over the lease from a dot com company that had gone bust. It has no wails, no partitions, no doors. There's just a series of parallel tables like a modernist monk's refectory. There's a poky so-called conference room, but usually when we have a meeting with clients, we hold it at another long table on a dais at the end, where the abbot would sit. It has industrial-looking lights hanging from the ceiling and people have lockers but no set desks or terminals -except me, because apparently wherever I sit I make such a mess that no one wants to take my place. We inherited the design from the dot com company and have never got round to changing it. Meg and I have promised each other that one day we'll have it converted into real offices with walls so we won't have to stare at each other all day, but I doubt we'll bother.
     I walked through the door at five minutes past eight, which, considering everything, I thought deserved an entry of its own in the Guinness Book of Records. The office was empty and silent. Good. I had about half an hour. I made myself a cup of coffee
    and got to work. I heard a noise and looked round sharply. It as probably something out in the street. I couldn't help smiling nervously at my situation. I was like a burglar in my own office. It took only a moment to locate Deborah's files. It was an easy task because for the most part I knew what I was looking for. Like any skilled thief, I had cased the joint well in advance and I knew where the plunder was to be found. I felt a brief glow of satisfaction at being proved right, but this was quickly replaced by a sour feeling about what had been done. I photocopied some of the papers, then replaced the files in the locker just as I heard footsteps on the stairs.
    4
    I knew it was Meg, always first in the office. Except today. was wearing a white cotton shirt and her hair was pulled k from her face. There were little silver studs in her ears but makeup on her face. I thought how fresh she looked, like unblemished piece of fruit, an apple or a peach. She started x surprise when she saw me, then came and sat beside m thought you'd be late,' she said, 'after last night. What did get up to?"
     I gave a sort of shrug that meant: Later. We'll talk about later.
She stared at me. 'You've done something stupid, haven't you.
     It's important not to underestimate Meg. She sees right through me. She can even see through my shrugs.
     "This isn't the time,' I said. 'I came in early because I wan to check through this. Look."
I laid out the photocopies in front of her.
     She looked at them with a frown of