Catch Me When I Fall Read Free Page A

stopped for breath at last, near an arcade of shops, and they found me there. Two of them, I think. Maybe, maybe not. One grabbed me round the shoulders and pushed me up against a wait, and said he'd got me at last and wasn't going to let me go. He said I was wild, but that he could be wild too. He picked up a brick. His arm arced back over his head, just a few inches from me, and I saw the brick sailing through the air. There was a loud crack and a violent star spread in the plate-glass window in front of us and a pyramid of tins collapsed on their shelves, and for a second it was as if we were going to step through the perfect star into a different world and I could be someone entirely new. New and fresh and whole.
     Then the alarm broke over us, nasal shrieks that seemed to be coming from every direction, and he took me by the wrist. 'Run."
     We ran together. I think there were still three of us but maybe there were only two by then. Our feet seemed in time. I don't know why we stopped running, but I know we were in a taxi, speeding along empty streets, past shops with metal shutters and dark houses. A fox froze as the taxi approached, orange and still
    under the street-lamps. It slipped into a garden, a slim shadow, and was gone.
     After that, there are things I remember and don't remember at the same time, like something happening to someone else, in a film or in a dream you know you're having but can't wake up from. Or, rather, it was like something happening to me, but I was someone else. I was me and not me. I was a woman laughing as she went up the stairs in front of him; a woman standing in an upstairs room with one dim light in the comer, an old sofa heaped with cushions and, hanging from the ceiling, a turquoise budgerigar in a cage. Was there really a budgerigar piping away, looking down at her with its knowing eyes, or was that a strange hallucination that worked its way into the bright fever of the evening? A woman looking out of the window at roofs and night-time gardens that she'd never seen before.
     'Where the fuck am I?" she said, letting her jacket slide to the floor in a puddle of darkness, but she didn't really want to know the answer. "Who the fuck are you?' she asked next, but she didn't want to know that either. It didn't matter at all. And he just laughed anyway and pulled the curtains closed and lit a cigarette, or perhaps it was a joint, and passed it to her. She could feel excitement throbbing loose and deep along her veins, and she sat back in the sofa, against the cushions, and kicked off her shoes and curled her bare legs up under her.
     'What shall we do now?' she asked, but of course she knew what they would do now. She undid a button on her shirt and he watched her. The budgerigar watched her too, daft sharp trills coming from its beak. She drank something transparent and fiery and felt its heat bolt through her body until she was molten at her core. There was music playing and it felt as if it was coming from inside her skull. She couldn't tell the difference between the beat of her feelings and the notes of the song. Everything had joined with everything else.

    For a bit she was alone in the room with the music, and then she wasn't alone any longer. I wasn't alone any longer. I lay back, feeling soft as the river we'd sat by, and let him take off my skirt. We were on the sofa, then on the floor. Fingers fumbling with buttons. If I closed my eyes, lights flashed behind my eyelids and it was as if there was a whole strange world, over which I had no control, waiting to explode in my brain. So I kept my eyes open on this world, but I don't know what I saw. Cracks in the ceiling, the leg of a chair, a wall a few inches away, a face coming down against mine, the twist of a mouth. I tasted blood and ran a tongue against my lips. My blood: good. The carpet burned my skin: good. Hard fingers on my arms, on my body, digging into me. Me and not me; me and this other woman who was pulling off her