The Fall by Claire McGowan

three days she was down to her last tenner, and her corner-shop Polish noodles had all run out. It was time to go crawling back.
Charlotte
    Charlotte sat still at the table, staring at the huge pile of post. However many times she closed her eyes, it wouldn’t go away. For the first time there was no one else to tackle it with her, and unless she slit open the innumerable window envelopes, money would not jump from one virtual pile to another, and soon the lights would go off and she’d be sitting in the dark without even endless re-runs of Friends to dull her into numbness.
    Three piles, she decided. Wedding stuff – invoices, gifts still coming in from the slow or the uninformed, condolences – they were all going, there was no point in any of it. Then the dross – flyers, credit-card offers, takeaway menus. Finally, the bills. Some of them had red notices on now when they came in the door and she would have been ashamed for Mike and Susie downstairs to see them if she really cared any more. Dan always paid the bills, so she was hazy on the details, but surely they couldn’t be overdue so soon. Weren’t they all on direct debits from his account?
    She got up and shuffled in her slippers to the little spare room. Dan sometimes worked in there at weekends. She rifled through the papers on the desk – lots and lots of printouts in a messy pile, columns and columns of figures, some ringed in red, stamped over with confidential . They meant nothing to her. She opened the top drawer and shoved in there were all the envelopes – gas, water, phone – unopened and, she would guess, unpaid. What did it mean? Had he cancelled the direct payments? Why?
    She opened the second drawer and there were packets and packets of pills. Paracetamol, Ibuprofen, Zantac, everything you could think of. She touched the silver packets, the popped-out craters where the tablets had been. What did it mean?
    Out loud in the quiet room, she said, ‘Why didn’t you talk to me?’ She’d have listened. Wouldn’t she?
    In the middle of all the post was a heavy embossed envelope, the crest of Dan’s bank indented into the paper in resolute black. She ran her fingers over the grooves of his name: Mr Daniel Stockbridge . Could there be a name more solid, more sure? She had hoped to hide herself in it, to be equally sure and solid. Mrs Stockbridge. But everything could crumble. Everything could fall apart. She knew that now.
    She opened the letter. Normally she never snooped, didn’t even check his phone; she knew how much he would hate it. But times had changed. When she finally made herself look at the words, it said what she feared. They were very sorry but they had to terminate his employment on the grounds of gross misconduct. If he had any questions he could pop in and see her, signed Kerry Hall, HR Officer . Charlotte flung it down angrily, saying out loud, ‘You stupid cow.’ He couldn’t exactly swing by her office. Dan had worked at Haussman’s for eight years and they didn’t care enough not to copy and paste.
    Overwhelmed, she swept the pile aside, tears pattering down and smudging the ink. Who cared? What did it matter if she didn’t pay the credit-card bill? But uncovered by her dramatic gesture was a piece of paper with no envelope, scribbled on A4 fileblock, ripped awkwardly so one side tapered in. Curiously she picked it up and tossed it down again as if the paper had burned her. In the cramped crazy writing, the first phrase she’d seen had been, kill you racist cunt .
    She was suddenly cold right down to her bones with fear. The words spiralled up and down the page in circles, the way a child might write. It lay on the table like a creeping spider, words scored in deeply with red ink.
    Charlotte sat at the table surrounded by the litter of her old life. What was happening to her?
Hegarty
    The Kingston Town club was shuttered in daytime, closed against the clatter of traffic and delivery trucks. There were grilles on the