Falling Over Read Online Free PDF Page A

if she does, why am I running, for I would merely have to explain things to them and they’ll see I’ve done nothing wrong. There’s no crime but I am running as if guilty, hurtling downstairs so quickly that I almost trip, back to my floor, my room. I shut the door but don’t put any music or TV on – I pace but try to keep quiet. I think of the campus security cameras outside, and shut the curtains.
    If the body-snatchers get you, I wonder, do you even realise? But I don’t understand what that thought even means.
    I can’t sleep, for the airplanes seem too low overhead, and the light coming through the windows seems unnatural.
    ~
    The next morning I try and call Grace to see how she is, to see if she went under at the hospital. She’ll be alright, I think, she’ll be safe as long as she’s not been anaesthetized. I have  nothing to base this on, but cling to it with an odd certainty. But my mobile has no signal – I am sure it is a network problem, but it is hard not to think that the fault is deliberate, local, centred on me. I head towards the front of the halls of residence where there are some payphones, but they have no dial tones and my coins just clatter through the mechanism and fall out the other end. This I am not surprised by, this doesn’t become a factor in my emergent paranoia, for the payphones are dilapidated relics of the days when mobiles were for the likes of Christophe only; I’ve never seen anyone actually use them. They have been superseded by later technology that can’t be relied on.
    I decide that I’ll have to go to the hospital to find Grace – and I am surprised to find that my decision is not just based on the still unspoken fears clenched in my gut, but also on something Christophe said: she likes me . Assuming for one minute Michelle is Michelle and my delusions are proven just that – still, why was I so fixated on Michelle? I suddenly can’t remember why.
    I force myself outside, but after days of being confined to halls the outdoors just seems a continuation – the holidays have thrown up a localised fog which makes me feel enclosed in a vague bubble, my sight limited to its circumference. I walk down the path from our campus, past the Job Centre which is outside the exit – a nice irony that is not lost on those of us doing humanities degrees – and towards the main road. Strangers coming the opposite way through the fog loom up so quickly that I couldn’t make eye contact even if I wanted to. The world appears in gasps and snatches through the mist. They are queuing round the block for petrol again, for fear of another price hike; their idling fumes add to the mist. My progress up the street is faster than that achieved by the rush-hour traffic, and I sense their antagonised looks as I pass: fuckin’ student; fuckin’ pedestrian .
    There is no bus in sight yet and so I decide to walk to the 24hr garage (the one the cars are slowly working towards) to buy some chocolates or flowers for Grace. I feel even more self-conscious inside: the only person not buying war-inflated petrol. I quickly buy some chocolates, because the only flowers look plastic to me, even though they are promoted as real. Outside two motorists almost crash, going for the same pumps. Their tempers are up before they are even out their cars, their firsts clenched before they can even see each other properly in the mist. They curse at each other, but it doesn’t quite come to blows.
    One day, my son, all this will be yours.
    A bus has somehow fought its way up the car clogged bus-lane, and I run to the stop. The bus is full of people studiously avoiding the world on the other side of the windows: plugged into headphones or bent over beach-fiction. It’s only a local bus but they have the practised look of long-distance travellers, of people who have given up hoping their journey will arrive on time, and are concentrating on making the best of being there – I settle myself in too, but I am not