Falling Sideways Read Online Free PDF Page B

casual thoughtlessness and into actual malice.
    He switched off the machine and looked round. In a little over six hours, I could be bringing Philippa Levens back to this, he panicked. Welcome to the twenty-first century; things are a little different here. He hurried through into the kitchen and looked in the freezer; he could defrost her a Waitrose lasagne, or he could phone out for a pizza.
    But of course that wasn’t going to happen, because none of it had happened . . . He sat down on the sofa, fidgety and tense, feeling almost as if he’d just taken a life rather than bespoken one. (How about the other clone joints, the better-class ones? Did they deliver? Did they take Visa? Assuming Honest John was down at the opposite end of the spectrum, did that make him a clone shark? Which reminded him, he’d have to find a cash-point at some stage.) Sitting down proved to be torture, so he got up and paced, an activity that the architect who’d designed his home had left at the bottom of his list of priorities. Seven paces brought him up sharp against the kitchen sink. He stopped and turned round, monarch of what little he surveyed. On the very few occasions when he’d brought girls home to his flat, they’d appeared either disconcerted, amused or both (as if they’d broken down on a lonely road at night, and there’d been a blinding light in the sky, and suddenly they were on an alien ship, and the aliens had turned out to be the Teletubbies) and they hadn’t stayed very long. Perhaps he should clean the kitchen floor. There’d be time.
    He looked again. A clean kitchen floor probably wasn’t going to solve his problems. The feeling of being about to be submerged up to the chin in very deep trouble closed in all around him. Perhaps, after all, the most sensible thing would be to read a book or watch something. Was that how people passed the time on Death Row, he wondered, when the point came when it no longer mattered? Strange way of thinking. He walked across to his desk. The obvious thing to do was work, but he knew he’d have no chance of concentrating to the level his kind of work required. He stood up again and put the kettle on. When all else fails, make tea.
    What have I done? he asked himself, as the watched pot took its own sweet time coming to the boil. Everything was happening in deadly slow motion, even perfectly straightforward things like making a cup of tea. Not a good omen, really. Nothing had actually happened yet, and already he was stressed out, his mind chasing up and down strange avenues of thought, speculation and downright craziness. Were real expectant fathers as wound up and twitchy as this, he wondered?
    At some point he must have sat down, just for a moment; because he woke up in his worn-out old armchair, and the phone was ringing. He jumped up like a cat, and tripped over his feet with a degree of athletic clumsiness that Charlie Chaplin could’ve learned a thing or two from, before reaching the phone and picking it up.
    â€˜Hello?’
    â€˜Hello, dear. So you’re not dead or anything, then. Only it’s been so long since you phoned, I was beginning to wonder.’
    Oh, for God’s sake. ‘Mum . . .’
    â€˜Yes, I know, you can’t talk now. Probably expecting a vitally important call any minute now, just like you always seem to be, though I can’t really think of any vitally important people who’re going to ring you this late in the evening – obviously I don’t fit in that category, I’m only your mother . . .’
    He closed his eyes, took the phone away from his ear and counted up to ten before putting it back.
    â€˜Â . . . At least he’s got the decency to phone his mother from time to time, even if he is in prison and wears a ring through his upper lip. But you might as well be living on the Moon, actually that’d be better, at least I’d know