The Dying Fall

Chapter 18: Meg

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Song for this chapter:

Chapter 18: Meg

An ashen light was creeping through the basement windows, drawing grey forms out of the basement shadows. Rolling stiffly onto her back, Carrie could just make out the shapes of the five album covers Nano had pinned to the ceiling above his bed. One of them was the same as an album cover Carrie had seen many years ago, flung in fury across the kitchen floor after her mother had discovered her father’s ‘collection’ at the back of the saucepan cupboard. Nano had lain next to Carrie on the bed and explained how he’d obtained each cover and which tracks were on each of the albums. Carrie recognised most of the songs he listed and they’d talked about the best highs they’d had until talking no longer seemed necessary and they’d drifted into a cosy stupor and Carrie had eventually fallen asleep.

Carrie realised a light was on somewhere in the basement when she finally eased herself onto her elbows. She spotted a small lamp on the floor next to the sofa and thought about the colossal fine it would incur if they weren’t in a basement where no one outside could spot a light on after Lights Out. Carrie wriggled out from under the duvet, shivering at the cold, even though she was fully dressed, and adjusted her twisted clothes as she crept across the floor to the sofa. She needed to check the time but Nano didn’t have a clock anywhere in the basement.

Reaching the nearest end of the sofa, Carrie found Nano asleep on it, under a blanket, one arm under the cushion that supported his head and the other flung above it. Carrie leant on the back of the sofa and lightly touched his wrist where he was still wearing his watch. Nano opened his eyes and gave her a bemused look for a second as he transitioned from a drowsy slumber to full wakefulness.

“I need to check the time,” Carrie explained.

Nano didn’t move as she turned his arm so she could read his watch. It was 6.30 a.m..

“Shit, I’ve missed the bus,” Carrie hissed.

“Good morning to you too,” Nano said dryly. “What time is it?”

“Six-thirty.”

“Call in sick.”

“Can I use your phone?”

“As long as I don’t have to move, go ahead. I think it’s on the floor somewhere…”

Carrie sniggered. “Not a morning person are you?”

“Not when I’ve only had three hours sleep.”

Carrie understood how he was feeling. Telling work she was sick would only be stretching the truth a little. Physically, she felt cold, tired and loosed-limbed, and her voice sounded convincingly hoarse when she made the call to work to say she had a stomach bug. Internally, however, she felt settled in a way she hadn’t for a long time, and when she thought about the finished track on Nano’s laptop, Vannah’s Song, her soul gave a little leap of joy. As she hung up the phone, she caught Nano watching her and wondered if he had noticed how easy it had been for her to lie.

“I’ll make tea,” she said, putting the phone on the coffee table.

“Bring the biscuits too,” Nano yawned.

Carrie made two mugs of tea and brought them over to the sofa with the biscuits on a tray she found. Nano sat up and made room for her on the sofa next to him as she handed him a mug.

“Are you happy for me to give Gubbs a copy of Vannah?” Nano asked.

Carrie knit her eyebrows as she thought for a moment. “All right,” she agreed, after sipping her tea. “I suppose a song is supposed to be heard—might as well let him listen to it. He might think it’s rubbish though.”

“He’ll like it,” Nano said confidently.

Carrie gave him a doubtful look and drank her tea. Just because she loved what they’d created, it didn’t mean others would too. Vannah still felt like it was too personal a thing to share, but not sharing it also felt like a betrayal to the song itself—was a song even a song if no one ever heard it?

“You’re going to let Rox listen to it, aren’t you?” she asked.

“I’m going to see if Rox will put it onto a couple of buds for us,” Nano replied. “Then we can have a copy each—just don’t let your mother destroy this one.”

Carrie half-smiled. It suddenly occurred to her that now the track was finished, she didn’t have any reason to spend her weekends in the basement with Nano. Were they just going to go back to their official bi-weekly transactions?

Nano seemed to be having the same thought as he said, after a pause: “It would be a shame to waste all the experience we’ve gained making Vannah. I don’t suppose you’ve got any more tunes you want to get out of your system?”

Carrie shrugged. “Maybe.”

“I’ve been working on something I could do with some advice on.”

Carrie hid her smile behind her mug. “Sure.”

When they’d both finished their tea, Carrie put her mug on the coffee table and faced Nano.

“I have to get home,” she said.

“I’ll walk you,” Nano offered.

“What for?”

“I dunno—seems like the polite thing to do.”

“Polite? You must be really tired,” Carrie teased, placing a hand on his chest and pushing him back onto the sofa cushions. “You should go back to sleep.”

Nano smirked at her and didn’t disagree. Carrie got up to hunt for her shoes, found them by the bed and put them on.

“See you Wednesday,” Nano said as Carrie grabbed her jacket from a hook at the bottom of the stairs.

“See you Wednesday,” she agreed before she snuck up the stairs, into the hall and out of the front door.

The walk home woke Carrie up enough that when she got it in she decided to wash and dress and then get out the journal so she could work on the latest melody that had been visiting her. Now she had worked on Vannah, she had learnt which notes were which and how to write them out on a roughly-drawn stave. Understanding and memorising this kind of information came intuitively to Carrie; it was as if she had finally been given access to her mother-tongue and there was nothing more natural to her than speaking it.

As she hummed and scribbled, and paused to listen to the melody in her head, she also mulled over the moment she and Nano had held each other in the middle of the basement, the music enveloping them in its own embrace. There was no longer any way she could tell herself that Nano was just her dealer. She wasn’t sure if it was their shared connection with Savannah, their shared addiction, or the time they’d spent together creating the track that had brought them closer, but their relationship had inevitably evolved into something more meaningful than it had once been. The idea was comforting but also terrifying. In Carrie’s experience it was frighteningly easy to lose the people she cared about.

Eventually, the little sleep she’d had for the past two nights caught up with her and she fell asleep on her bed, with her cheek on Savannah’s journal. The buzz of the doorbell woke her in the late afternoon and she automatically shoved the journal under her pillow before fumbling downstairs to answer the door.

The blood immediately drained form Carrie’s face when she saw Meg’s sister, Talissa, standing on the step, looking pale and puffy-eyed.

“Carrie,” Talissa said, her voice strained, as if her breath was caught in her throat. “I need your help. I don’t know what to do. It’s Meg—they let her out this morning and they… they’ve…” She choked on the words that she dare not verbalise.

Carrie’s heart fell into her stomach. She didn’t need Talissa to explain; she knew what the authorities had done.

“I can’t get her to eat or drink anything,” Talissa continued. “She won’t even look at me. She just lies there, staring into space. The kids have gone to a friend’s house after school, but I don’t know what I’ll do when they get home. I’ve never seen Meg like this and I’m scared, Carrie. I can’t get through to her, but you might—will you come and try? Will you come and see if you can get some sort of response?” She swallowed and bit her lip apprehensively, as if she expected Carrie to say no.

“I’ll come,” Carrie said without hesitation. “Just give me a second…”

Swallowing down the nausea she felt, Carrie put on her boots and grabbed her coat and hat.

“I have an idea,” she said to Talissa, as she closed the front door behind her. “I know someone who might be able to help—if you don’t mind?”

“I’ll try anything—anyone—whatever you think will help Meg.”

Carrie hurried across the road to Mrs Giles’s house and pressed the doorbell, hoping that her neighbour was at home and would notice the doorbell-light flashing. A few minutes later, Mrs Giles came to the door, hugging a long cardigan around her slim frame.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” Carrie said, trying to use some of the sign language her mother had taught her. “But my friend—she’s just been released from prison—will you come and see her with me? If you don’t mind? I think you might be able to help her.”

As soon as Carrie mentioned the word ‘prison’, a grave look settled on Mrs Giles’s face. When Carrie had finished speaking, the old lady placed both hands reassuringly on Carrie’s arm and nodded. Then she went back into her house to put on her shoes and a quilted coat.

“This is Mrs Giles,” Carrie explained to Talissa as the old lady joined them on the street. “She can help.”

The knot in Carrie’s stomach tightened when they reached Talissa’s house and she showed them into the living room. Meg was lying curled up on the sofa, her hair falling lankly against her face as she stared unseeingly ahead of her. She looked wan and the flesh around her eyes was swollen and a purplish hue. When Talissa crouched in front of her, Meg didn’t even blink.

“Meggy,” Talissa sad softly, “ Carrie’s here, my love. She’s come to see you.”

She beckoned Carrie over and Carrie shuffled forward. Getting on her knees by Meg’s head, Carrie gently brushed her friend’s hair from her thin cheek and touched her own forehead to Meg’s cold brow.

“I know you can’t hear me, Meg,” she whispered. “But I’m here for you, always, I promise.” She pulled away a little, just enough so Meg could see her lips moving. “I’ve brought a friend to see you, Meg,” she said, forming the words as slowly and clearly as she could.

She glanced over her shoulder at Mrs Giles, who brought up a footstool and placed it next to where Carrie was kneeling. Very simply, the old lady took one of Meg’s curled fists in her delicate hands and lightly, but rhythmically, tapped it with her fingers. After a moment, Meg’s shoulders began to tremble and a tear streaked from the corner of her eye. Mrs Giles kept tapping the same repeated pattern on Meg’s hand, softly rocking herself on the stool and nodding her head a little. After a minute, Meg’s gaze drifted towards Mrs Giles and Carrie realised the elderly lady was moving to the rhythm of a song in her head. Meg stared at her for a moment as her tears began to fall more freely and then turned her face and sobbed into the sofa. Her fist uncurled and her fingers gripped one of Mrs Giles’s hands as if it were a life line. Mrs Giles raised her free hand to stroke Meg’s head and for the first time in her life, Carrie heard her speak.

“There you are,” she said, her voice barely a breath, but powerfully compassionate. “There you are.”

Carrie stayed until Meg fell into a fitful sleep and Mrs Giles moved to a more comfortable chair nearby. Talissa seemed relieved when the elderly lady signed that she would stay longer.

Waking up is the hardest part, she explained with her hands. It’s disorientating. She patted Carrie’s arm before she left and gave her a reassuring look.

Carrie walked home on legs of lead, her stomach churning and her throat battling to keep down the bile that rose in her gullet. It seemed to take an age to get home, even though she walked as fast as she could, and as soon as she got through the door, her body lost all resilience. Dashing upstairs, she rushed into the bathroom and just made it to the toilet as her stomach ejected all its contents. This was exactly the same reaction she’d had after they’d come back from identifying Savannah’s body at the morgue. The image of her sister’s grey-looking body lying on a mortuary slab had been like a poison dart to Carrie’s system and as soon as she’d got home she’d vomited until she thought she was going to throw up her insides too. Her body was going through the same process now, trying to purge her of her horror and disgust.

Of all the emotions she was feeling right now though, her utter helplessness was the most unbearable. The sense of her own lack of power was so overwhelming, Carrie felt on some level like she had been violated. An authority, cold, impersonal and entirely uncompromising, had taken someone she cared about and mutilated them without an ounce of mercy. And there was nothing she could have done to stop it, and nothing she could do to reverse it.

It could have been her. It probably should have been her. But it had been Meg instead: vibrant, generous, passionate Meg. She’d been in love with music and for that they had taken it permanently from her. Her world had suddenly, brutally, fallen silent and now she was sentenced to a life without sound—without melody and without the comfort of another human voice.

This was why Savannah had resisted arrest; why she had provoked the Patrol to shoot her dead in the street; why she had died with her arms outstretched to embrace the bullet as a bud poured music into her ear.

As her stomach finally conceded there was nothing left to excavate, Carrie heard the front door open and close, and then footsteps on the stairs. Too weak to move, she sat on the tiles and leant numbly against the side of the bath. She couldn’t even lift her head when Molly came into the bathroom, sat on the floor next to her, and put an arm around her shoulders. Carrie dropped her head onto her mother’s chest as she sank into her embrace. Neither of them spoke. Words weren’t necessary to convey that, whatever their differences, they shared the same pain; and this pain, as raw as the day it had been inflicted, was never going away.

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Next weekend: Chapter 19—Debut

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Author’s Notes:

Mrs Giles 💛

Chapter 19: Debut, coming next weekend.

PJ