The Fall of Man

Part I chapter 10

Chapter 10

Earlier this evening, I sat in the living room with the curtains drawn as usual, poring over our large hardback world atlas. An old angle-poise reading light shone over my shoulder, throwing golden light onto the glossy plates of the book. Noah came to me where I sat at the coffee table and pulled himself up onto the sofa alongside. He leant inquisitively over the atlas, casting a blurry boy-shaped shadow over the pages, and his soft fingertip traced the outline of Africa meticulously. I had been scouring the dark continent for safe, unspoilt corners.

“I’m looking for a new place for us to live”, I told him conspiratorially. “Somewhere we could make a home together.”

He gave me a suspicious glance, then focussed back on the page before him, either not trusting my words or not understanding what I was saying. I decided to try a more straightforward approach.

“Noah, I think we should move. Far away from here. And probably not come back. Because of what happened to mummy, and because of how I was behaving before mummy went away, and because of how you’ve not been well ever since.”

I stopped to take a deep breath. Crying in front of the child would just confuse him.

“I think we need to start over, somewhere new and not spoilt; somewhere exciting.”

Noah diverted his gaze from the book to scrutinise me more carefully, before returning his attention back to the atlas, as if weighing up both the plausibility and the sincerity of this suggestion. After a moment’s thought, he left the room silently on padded socks. A few minutes later he returned to the coffee table, and carefully placed a photograph in the centre of the open atlas. The photo was deployed with pride, as a champion card player would lay down the fourth ace in front of a mountain of pooled chips. It was a picture of Joanna, taken three years ago on a trip to Canada.