The Fall Read Online Free Page A

something. Her skin was pale but you could tell from her eyes, the shape of her face. ‘It’s fucking disgusting,’ the girl was saying.
    Privately, Charlotte agreed – it was disgusting, but still feeling the sharp chafing of panic, she scrabbled in her Radley purse for money. Crap, she only had notes.
    The girl turned on her. ‘What’re you looking at?’
    ‘Oh. Nothing.’ Charlotte was swaying so much she could hardly get the money out. ‘It’s kind of a pain, I know, I agree, but yeah – bet it’s not much fun, is it, sitting here? No – right?’ She gave a slightly dazed smile to the angry girl and the blank-faced toilet attendant, and crumpled a fiver down in the dish, embarrassed. ‘Anyway, thanks.’ She wobbled out.
Keisha
    The bitch! The fucking bitch! She’d been trying to make a point – it was fucking horrible to steal all the soap and charge people a pound for it. It was like begging, it was shameful, sitting there with your cheap market perfumes and sad little lollies. Who’d want a lolly when there was wee all over the floor? She hated clubs like this, tired black women in the toilets, your drink on a little napkin so you had to leave the change just for pouring it.
    Keisha liked to know the price of things, pounds and pence, not tips and VAT and all that shit. Just a haircut, a drink, a fucking piss , for Christ’s sake. She hated it when Chris hid tenners in his hand and palmed them to doormen and waitresses. There you go, mate, darling, love . Since she had Ruby she could only see those tenners as nappies that weren’t going on her baby, shoes not on her kid’s feet.
    And then this rich bitch from the queue, chucking down her fiver, making Keisha look like a tight-arse. She would get what was coming to her, this one. You couldn’t walk around for ever with lovely wavy hair and loads of money in your purse that was real designer and not off a market stall. Keisha was sure of it – things had to come back around again sometime.
    She was so annoyed she went in and sat on the toilet seat for a while, just to calm down. She wondered was the white guy still going off on one outside. She had to watch herself. Chris was in a funny mood, she was in a funny mood. It was times like this that things happened, and not good things. She knew that now.
Charlotte
    The first Charlotte knew anything was wrong was when the music stopped. She stood in the middle of the dance floor, like someone caught out in musical chairs – quick, run – dazzled by the lights.
    It was Dan who was shouting. When they’d first met he never shouted, not even when shares dipped and he lost millions of pounds at work, or when she drove his Alfa Romeo into the gatepost.
    ‘It’s not fucking cancelled,’ he was yelling – bellowing. ‘That’s a twenty-grand expense account, mate . Your machines are buggered up.’
    Dan was over in the so-called VIP section of the club, not much to look at, and having an argument with a short dapper black man in a shiny suit, diamonds winking in his ears. Or diamanté, at least. There was another white guy there too, walking quickly away from the group, his back to them, and a short girl with flat fake hair and fake boobs was screaming in Dan’s face, ‘Don’t you fucking speak to him like that!’ Another girl with an afro and a silver dress, a tall pretty girl, was crying.
    Dan shouted again – she couldn’t hear what the black guy was saying to him. ‘Just run it through again! There’s thousands on there.’
    She remembered it suddenly. Dan two months ago, in that restaurant. The long wait, the waiter rude, the food cold. Then the crash, the broken glass. Afterwards, Dan looked surprised more than anything, like he didn’t understand what had happened. It slipped . It must have slipped.
    ‘Maybe they stopped the card,’ she said out loud, but no one would have understood her thickened voice, and anyway, she was too far away. Dan had a company credit card, but half the time