Falling by Julie Cohen (extract)

TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS 61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA www.penguin.co.uk Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Black Swan an imprint of Transworld Publishers Copyright © Julie Cohen 2016 Julie Cohen has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781784160630 Typeset in 12/15pt Bembo by Falcon Oast Graphic Art Ltd. Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY. Penguin Random House is committed to a sustainable future for our business, our readers and our planet. This book is made from Forest Stewardship Council® certified paper.

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Falling.indd 4

13/5/16 12:15:54

For Lillian Cohen: grandmother, card player, one-eyed driver, crosshatch doodler, kneidlach maker; always remembered, always missed

Second Chances.indd 5

24/7/15 09:54:10

And we, who have always thought of happiness as rising, would feel the emotion that almost overwhelms us whenever a happy thing falls.

Rainer Marie Rilke, ‘Tenth Elegy’, translated by Stephen Mitchell

Second Chances.indd 7

24/7/15 09:54:10

Chapter One

Honor

T

he last stage of Honor Levinson’s life began at the top of the stairs in her home in North London.

The windows had been cleaned two days before by the young man who came every spring with his bucket and ladder.

The sun shone through the glass, warming a stripe of carpet and wall, stroking against Honor’s cheek as she passed through it on the way to the stairs, carrying a basket of laundry to be washed.

She was thinking of the laundry she used to have to do: the weight of PE kits and trousers caked with mud at the knees.

School uniforms and gardening clothes, shirts that needed ironing, knickers and pants and handkerchiefs. So many loads every week, one after the other, unrelenting, just for one child and one woman. Sometimes it had felt as if her home were festooned with dripping clothes. She had to negotiate a jungle of drying socks and tights just to get into the bath. For something that took up so much time and effort, washing clothes was under-represented in literature.

This afternoon her basket contained two blouses, a vest, a 9

Second Chances.indd 9

24/7/15 09:54:10

skirt, and three pairs of knickers. None of them dirty, really; what did she do to make her clothes dirty these days? Those days of sweat and soil and spills were over. Now her basket was light, as light as the sunshine in the side of her vision.

Honor balanced the basket on her hip and put her hand on the banister. The wood was warm, too, from the sun.

Downstairs on the ground floor, the phone rang. She stepped forward to go down the first stair and she missed it.

The shock wasn’t that she was falling. It was that she had missed the step, that her body had forgotten the language of the house, how to do this thing she had done every day for most of the years of her life. Honor put out her hands to stop herself but the banister slipped from her grip and she hit the riser hard with her hip and kept falling, slithering down the wooden stairs on her back.

‘Stephen!’ she cried to the empty air.

No pain, not yet, just thuds as she slid down the rest of the stairs, with no one to catch her.The back of her head bounced off a step and she saw stars. They were clearer than anything she had seen in a long time.

She knew this feeling, as if she had played this out in her mind many times before. The last moment, familiar as a child or a lover.

She came to rest at the bottom, splayed on the floor. The phone rang for the second time. Two rings, Honor thought. It all happened in the space between two rings of the telephone.

Now she felt it, or some of it: the back of her head, her hip, her back, her bottom, her elbows – impact rather than pain.

Her head was resting on the last step. She lay in another pool of sunlight and dazzle. But she was alive.When she called out, she had been certain she wouldn’t survive.

10

Second Chances.indd 10

24/7/15 09:54:10

Honor touched the back of her head. It was warm and wet, and her hand, when she saw it, was shaking and covered with blood.

Seeing it, the pain came.

‘Stephen,’ she said again and her voice came from someone else, someone old and weak.

Honor sat up, ignoring the screaming from her back and hip, the pounding in her head. She sucked in a breath and, holding on to the banister, tried to pull herself up.

She immediately fell back down, squealing aloud with pain from her hip.

The phone rang for a third time, or perhaps it was the fourth. Broken hip, old woman living alone, what a cliché she was. All these years of struggling, and she was a cliché.

Carefully, gasping, Honor turned herself so she was lying on her left side, the side where her hip wasn’t broken. Using her arms and her left foot, pushing herself across the wooden floor, she crawled towards the phone.

There was a telephone on each storey of her house: one in her bedroom, one in the kitchen in the basement, and one here on the ground floor, in the living room. Her mobile was upstairs in her bedroom. Honor crawled through the doorway, slipping on her wet hands, her weak foot, to the Persian rug.

She rested for a moment there, the wool scratchy against her cheek. Blood dripped from the back of her head, down her face. Cold water to wash that out, she thought, and the phone rang again, for the sixth time? Tenth?

It had been ringing for as long as she could remember and she still had a metre to crawl.

She drew in a deep breath tasting of dust and wool, and pushed herself forward once again. It was more difficult across 11

Second Chances.indd 11

24/7/15 09:54:10

the carpet. As soon as she was better she was going to put this carpet in the nearest skip, bloodstain and all.

The phone was on a low table by the sofa. She wriggled the last few inches, using her shoulder to propel herself ­forward. Honor hooked her arm around the table leg, pulled as hard as she could and the table toppled over. Thank God for flimsy furniture.

Luckily the phone landed beside her, the receiver off its cradle. She snatched for it with her good hand. ‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Hello, I need help.’

A pause. Her hair had come loose and was hanging in her face, dark with blood. She could feel sweat on her upper lip.

It had been some time since she had last sweated.

‘Yes, madam,’ said a voice on the line at last, heavily accented.

‘Good day, this is Edward from Computer Access Services. I am calling about trouble with your Windows computer?’

‘Piss off,’ she told him clearly, and pushed the button to hang up the phone. She dialled 999. ‘I require an ambulance,’ she told the operator, and waited the million hours until she was put through.

‘Ambulance service, what’s the nature and location of the emergency, please?’

‘I’ve fallen down the stairs and I have broken my hip and I am bleeding from my head.’ She gave the calm-sounding woman her address.

‘All right, ma’am, I’ve alerted the dispatcher, and I’m going to stay on the line now and try to help you while you’re waiting. You say you’ve hit your head and broken your hip?

Are you having any difficulty breathing?’

‘That’s about the only thing I’m not having difficulty doing.’

12

Second Chances.indd 12

24/7/15 09:54:10

‘Good girl.’

‘Don’t patronize me, I’m old enough to be your grandmother. My name is Honor.’

‘Yes, Honor,’ said the dispatcher, a hint of humour in her voice. ‘If you don’t mind me saying, your telling me off is a good sign. Is there anyone with you?’

‘I’m alone.’

‘Is your head still bleeding?’

‘Yes.’ ‘OK, Honor, is there anything you can use to press against it and stop the bleeding?’

She groped upward. A cushion, squashed nearly flat from use, lay near the edge of the sofa. Honor pulled it off. She pressed the cushion against the back of her head, gritting her teeth at the stab of pain. She held the phone to her ear with her other hand. It was slippery with blood.

‘I’ve done it,’ she said to the woman on the other end of the line.

‘That’s good to hear.’ She sounded young and chirpy. Like Jo. Honor closed her eyes and pictured wavy hair, a pinklipped smile.

‘Honor? Are you still with us?’

She shook her head, trying to clear it. Still with us, another cliché, trying to make this whole incident sound inclusive, when she was more alone than she had ever been before.

‘I can’t walk to the door to let the paramedics in but there is a key under the blue plant pot holding a geranium.’ There was a buzz in her ears; blackness grew from the centre of her world. ‘I’m going to pass out now, so I hope they come quickly.’ * * * 13

Second Chances.indd 13

24/7/15 09:54:10

She is at the top of the stairs, noise from the party swelling around her. She leans on the banister and sees the top of a man’s head below her. He has dark hair, glossy and thick, and is wearing a brown tweed suit. He is taller than the people standing around him. He holds a drink in one hand, whisky, and the other one is resting on the newel post of the banister, on the round ball that crowns it. His hand is slender; even from here she can see the nails are clean, cut short. He wears a watch with a thick black leather strap.

Every detail so clear. Sharp.

‘What’s his name?’ she asks Cissy, standing next to her.

‘What, you haven’t met him yet? That’s Paul.’ Cissy turns to someone else, and Honor keeps on looking.

There are people around him but he is alone. Somewhere, someone laughs loudly and instead of looking for the source he turns his head and looks up, straight into Honor’s eyes.

For the first time, she feels as if she is falling.

‘Hello, love? Can you hear me?’

Honor opened her eyes, tilted her head. A blur above her, two blurs, wearing green and yellow. ‘Paul?’

‘No, my name’s Derek, this is Sanjay, and we’re paramedics.

Can you squeeze my hand for me? Fell down the stairs, did we?’

‘I fell down the stairs. I don’t know about you.’ Her mouth was dry. How much blood, how much time? One of the paramedics was messing about with her head, with any luck stopping the bleeding. She heard the rip of packets opening, the rustle of bandages. She tried to struggle up, get some of her dignity back. She’d called him Paul. How embarrassing.

‘What’s your name, love?’

‘Honor Levinson.’

14

Second Chances.indd 14

24/7/15 09:54:10

‘Can you tell me what day it is, Mrs Levinson?’

‘Tuesday the eleventh of April. You shall have to ask me something more difficult than that.’ Her voice was raspy and hard.

‘I’ll get these questions out of the way and then I’ll start with the Pointless questions, shall I? Are you taking any medication?’

‘I’m eighty years old, of course I’m taking medication. It’s in the bathroom cabinet.’

‘Blood pressure eighty over fifty, Sanjay. Are you feeling dizzy, Mrs Levinson?’

‘Yes.’ ‘Are you alone here?’

‘Do you think I would have left my underwear on the stairs, otherwise?’ She closed her eyes and gritted her teeth as the paramedics shifted her, placed a restraint on her head to stabilize it.

‘She must have pulled herself all the way from the bottom of the stairs to the phone,’ said one of the medics. ‘Pretty impressive.’

‘Morphine,’ she gasped.

‘Don’t worry, we’ve got gas and air in the ambulance and we’ll have you to hospital in a tick. Do you have anyone you’d like us to ring for you, Mrs Levinson?’

‘Doctor. Doctor Levinson.’

‘Is that your husband?’

‘No, it bloody is not. It’s me. I don’t have anyone to call.’

They lifted her, more delicately than she could have thought possible, onto the stretcher and out through the door where the ambulance was waiting. Honor kept her eyes closed, unwilling to see the pedestrians who would be pausing to 15

Second Chances.indd 15

24/7/15 09:54:10

gape at the helpless old lady carried out of her home, frail as a bundle of twigs. Once she’d known all these people, everyone in the houses all around. The outside air cooled the tears on her cheeks.

‘No one,’ she whispered as they slid her safely into the back of the ambulance, and she repeated their names in her head like a song, the names of no one.

Paul, and Stephen. Stephen, and Paul.

16

Second Chances.indd 16

24/7/15 09:54:10