Forever Is Over

by Wade, Calvin

  “Who’s baby will it be then, do you think, if it’s not yours?”

  “Did Kelly tell you it was mine?”

  “Yes.”

  “If anything had happened, could she even know she was pregnant by now, if I’d have slept with her before the crash?”

  “Possibly, if she was late for her period now, she’d have a good idea.”

  “There won’t be a baby though, Jemma, she’ll have just said it as a way of getting back at you for marrying me. I suppose for us, because we’ve been married for a fair while, it’s old news that we’re together, but for Kelly, it’s still raw. I don’t approve of what she’s doing but I can understand it.”

  “True, I hadn’t thought of it like that. Do you think in time she’ll move on? She’s Melissa and Jamie’s only blood relative on my side of the family, other than me. I was going to take her with me today, to pick Jamie up from nursery but then she kicked off so I sent her packing.”

  Richie got down on his hands and knees and started helping me with the broken pieces.

  “Not like you Watkinson girls to kick off!”

  “Yeh right! I suppose at least there’s an element of subtlety about Kelly’s kick offs whilst I just go ape! Richie, I’m really sorry I thought you were capable of sleeping with her.”

  Richie took my hand.

  “Jemma, I should never have betrayed your trust by turning up to meet her. I always knew I was in the wrong, I just didn’t want to admit it to you.”

  I squeezed Richie’s hand back.

  “Richie, I’m glad you went. It’s helped us sort our relationship back out. We needed a crisis, I don’t think we’d have undone the knots without one. Fancy coming to bed?”

  “It’s not even eight o’clock! What about the mess?”

  “You can wear a condom!”

  ”Very funny! This mess.”

  “Come back down in five minutes and clear it up!”

  “You’re on form tonight, Jemma! Ten minutes! I’m getting better!”

  “Come on then, we can even make a bit of noise with the kids not being here!”

  “Go easy on the noise or I’ll be back down in two minutes!”

  “OK. Make sure you put your party clothes on as soon as you’re ready to go and put it on properly, not inside out or back to front.”

  “I’m not sixteen!”

  “I’m not saying you are, I’m just saying it’s an art form you haven’t mastered.”

  “That reminds me, I went to the Doctor’s last night.”

  “For your check up?”

  “No, although I need to sort that out soon. I went to book a vasectomy.”

  “You’re kidding me!”

  “No, I decided to take the bull by the horns or to take the horn from the balls!”

  Sometimes, if you spend a couple of years chipping away, the walls do come down! I was delighted. I knew I did not want any more children and I knew there would be no pangs of regret, no broodiness, my childbearing days were over. Pregancy was my second biggest fear behind death.

  “You brave thing, Mr Billingham! About bloody time!”

  “I needed to pluck up the courage!”

  “Well come upstairs and I will make sure that your bravery is suitably rewarded!”

  Richie

  I sat on the toilet, with my trousers and my boxer shorts pulled down to my knees, with my thumb and my forefinger of my left hand, placing and maintaining my penis on my left thigh. I just looked at my scrotum in despair. I cupped my right hand underneath and I shuddered when I felt it. How could I have missed it? HOW COULD I, OF ALL PEOPLE, HAVE MISSED IT? I felt so stupid. I used to be so obsessive about checking. I used to drive myself mad wondering if it all felt the same today as yesterday. Why did I stop doing that? This could cost me my life, not only that it could cost my wife a husband and my children a father, just because I had been lazy about checking. Knobhead! I’ve already been given a second chance by fate and a third chance as I survived a fatal car crash. Why did I keep expecting fate to save me from my own neglect?

  I was shaking. I didn’t want Jemma to see me like this. Things had settled. We needed some tranquillity in our lives. We did not need another rollercoaster ride. It was always rollercoaster rides with us. Someone else should not have been pointing this lump out to me. I should have been spotting this. For fuck’s sake, this was my job to check. A two minute job. No-one was asking me to climb Everest. A simple bathroom routine, that’s all it needed to be and I had failed to see it through. Idiot.

  What should I do now? Should I tell Jemma? Last time, I had not told Kelly, but had that been the right thing to do? Did I regret that? Probably not, but this time it was different, Jemma hasn’t recently killed anyone. I was going to have to tell her.What will she think? She’ll think I am a fool. I am a fool. It’s like crossing the road without looking, you just don’t do it. What an idiot!

  What if this time I’m not as lucky? What if I die? What will I go through before I die and what will I go through after? Nothingness. What is nothingness? Is it possible to have nothingness? Is there any existence without a brain and without your senses and without a heart and lungs? I had always thought not, but could there be any way you could be aware that you were trapped inside infinite nothingness? Could there be a God? Should I have heeded his warnings? I was scaring myself now. What was life like before I was born? I’m really not ready to die. Nowhere near ready. Don’t let this happen to me, let me cling on. My children are still babies.

  I told myself off, ‘Stop doing this to yourself ’. It might be curable, I knew from last time, that in most cases it was. This could just be a wake up call. A warning sign. Another lucky escape. It didn’t feel like it though. If you play Russian Roulette for long enough, you eventually find the bullet.

  Until now, why had I always felt so immortal? I looked at it again. It was still there. Could it not just go away?

  Roddy

  Perfection only exists as an image when seen through rose tinted spectacles. I saw just as much of Kelly before her crash as I did after, but the defects that had probably always been there, became more apparent after the crash , once I had made the transition from friend to ‘boyfriend’. I didn’t find Kelly’s defects abhorrent, in fact it was quite the opposite, I found them strangely re-assuring. In a relationship, you want to be on an even keel, not looking up at someone on their pedestal. The Richie thing had always been an issue for me. To an extent, I knew I was the understudy, taking the place of the guy who had been designated the role, but had chosen not to take it up, so I was hoping Kelly would resolve her issues with Jemma quickly, but without any desire on either sisters part, for regular contact. At that stage, I still felt I was punching above my weight and when you feel that way, you don’t want a prize fighter circling the ring.

  Several days after Kelly’s crash, I had no more holidays to take, so had come back down to London to return to work at Dillons, whilst Kelly continued her recuperation in hospital. I did not feel comfortable leaving her up there on her own. Our relationship had crossed over from platonic to mildly physical, in that we had kissed, but I did not have enough faith in myself or our blossoming relationship, to think that it would continue to flourish from a couple of hundred miles apart. I was wrong. We have Alexander Graham Bell to thank. We spoke to each other every evening without fail and after seven long days, Kelly told me excitedly one evening that, all being well, she would be discharged the following day and would be making her way home to Ealing.

  The following evening, about half past six, my phone rang. I knew it was Kelly. I was ready to pick it up after the first ring, but let it ring a further half a dozen times, as I didn’t want to appear overly anxious. Once I picked up, the emotion in Kelly’s faltering voice automatically made me assume that our relationship had somehow managed to crash in those dangerous sixty one seconds after take off.

  “Hello.”

  “Roddy, it’s Kelly, I’m home.”

  “Great.
Everything OK?”

  A pregnant pause. I asked again.

  “Kelly, what’s the matter? Is everything alright?”

  Another pause. “Kelly?”

  “No, Roddy, everything isn’t alright. I’ve done something stupid.”

  “How stupid are we talking?”

  “Very.”

  “What was it?”

  “I don’t want to tell you over the phone, Roddy.”

  That did not sound good.

  “Do you want me to come around?”

  “Yes…don’t hate me, Roddy, you’re all I have left.”

  I wanted to tell Kelly that I couldn’t possibly hate her, that I had loved her since I had first clapped eyes on her and I would continue to love her until my spirit died, but masculine pride stood in my way. “Depends what you’ve done, Kelly!”

  Richie

  “We’re home!”

  Jemma and Melissa came through the door not looking like they had had their best ever trip to the cinema. They looked emotionally drained. Jemma had wanted to accompany me to the surgery for the vasectomy, but some things a man has to do alone, so she had left Jamie with my Mum and Dad and taken Melissa to see a special showing of the ‘Titanic’ movie.

  “Was the film good, Melissa?”

  “It was very sad!”

  I was sat on the settee and Jemma came over and gave me a sympathetic peck.

  “It was actually a bit too sad,” Jemma explained, “we weren’t expecting that, were we honey? Both Mummy and Melissa did a lot of crying, but I have been trying to explain to Melissa on the way home, that the boy in the film was only pretending. He has not really died.”

  “They just had to pretend he has gone to heaven, but he hasn’t really.” Jemma added.

  “Good,” I said, “I’m pleased about that.”

  “Melissa, how’s about you go and get your pyjamas on, sweetheart.” Jemma said.

  “Can you come up with me, Daddy?”

  “No,” Jemma said, “Daddy is feeling a little bit sore after his operation, so we need to be nice to Daddy. It would help Daddy, if you were a very kind little girl and went upstairs on your own and put your pyjamas on.”

  Melissa was a crowd pleaser.

  “OK,” she said before running up the stairs.

  Jemma waited for Melissa to disappear before she began questioning.

  “How was it, babe? Are you really sore?” she enquired in a tone fit for a three year old or a man who has just had a scalpel to his scrotum.

  “Not good.”

  “Agony?”

  “Jemma, I couldn’t have the vasectomy.”

  Jemma’s tone went from overly sympathetic to overly pissed off.

  “What do you mean you couldn’t do it, Richie?”

  “There was a complication, Jemma, I couldn’t go through with it.”

  “You mean you bottled it! I had a feeling you might! When I dropped Jamie off at your mother’s, I told her I had a feeling you wouldn’t be able to go through with it. I knew you’d get squeamish about it and then wriggle out of it. You men are just pathetic! You’re bloody lucky we’re the ones who have to give birth! We can’t just call a stop to it when our bits are about to go through pain. We just have to tough it out. Have you re-arranged it?”

  “No, it’s not as simple as that.”

  “I bet it isn’t! They’re probably busy dealing with real men who have the guts to go through with it. They probably don’t want to book you in again in case you do the same thing again. Honestly Richie, you are a big girl’s blouse!”

  “Jemma, it wasn’t me that cancelled the vasectomy. If I could have done, I would have had it done. I’m not saying I’m brave, but I’m a little bit braver than you give me credit for.”

  “Was someone sick?”

  “I don’t know. Possibly.”

  “Richie, stop being so mysterious and just tell me what’s happened!”

  “They found a lump, Jemma.”

  “A lump?”

  “A lump on my right testicle. My only testicle.”

  “How could they find a lump? You check.”

  “Jemma, with everything that’s been going on in our lives recently, with the kids being born and the crazy sleeping hours, then the things that have gone on between you and me, I just haven’t checked. I haven’t even thought about checking.”

  “But you have already had testicular cancer, Richie! Surely you, of all people, should be checking!”

  “I know that, but I haven’t checked.”

  “What do they think it is?”

  “They’re not sure. I need to go for checks. It could just be a cyst.”

  “Let’s hope so. Bloody hell, Richie! I can’t believe you didn’t think to check!”

  “Jemma, I have spent years checking but then after a while, when everything is OK, you forget what you went through, you just don’t check as much, then you don’t check at all. You having a go at me isn’t going to make me feel any more stupid than I already do.”

  “God, Richie, I hope you’re alright.”

  “So do I. Last time I went through it, it was cancerous, but it all turned out OK, even if the news isn’t good, there’s been so much progression medically over the last ten years, I am sure I’ll be fine. I just want to know what I’m dealing with.”

  I was doing my best to persuade us both that this was only a minor problem, but I failed miserably on both counts. A fulminologist will tell you whether or not lightning strikes the same place twice, but I knew myself cancer could. It had gatecrashed my body before and I had no doubt it was back. I had a bad feeling about this, a feeling that it would not be as simple this time around. I knew I had to be tougher though. I was a teenager last time around, this time I was a married man with children. I would not be collapsing in floods of tears, I would be strong and whatever it threw at me, I would defeat it. If cancer was looking for a fight, it had picked on the wrong man.

  Roddy

  Thirty minutes later, I was knocking on Kelly’s door, having persuaded myself that I’d now have to listen to some story about her sleeping with some handsome young Doctor or even worse, with Richie. Nothing disastrous would have surprised me. I was mentally prepared.

  Kelly opened the door wearing her dressing gown. It was a white, silk thing with red hearts plastered all over it. It looked like something a boyfriend would have bought her at Christmas. I immediately imagined her flashing at me like a dirty old man, opening up each side of the dressing gown and pulling them wide apart like wings, exposing her naked breasts and pubic hair, before sexily urging,

  ‘Feast your eyes on this, big boy!’

  That didn’t happen! Kelly’s eyes were red and her nose was damp and running, even after the crash, I had never seen her look so vulnerable.

  “Hi Roddy! Come in, can I get you a tea or a coffee?” she asked.

  “Go on then Kelly, I’ll have a nice cup of tea. Put the kettle on and you can start telling me what all this is about. Two sugars please.”

  Kelly had converted me to tea. I was more of a coffee drinker before. I think it’s Northern tradition that you can’t retire for the day until you have had your quota of ten cups. It’s an unwritten law once you are North of Birmingham!

  Kelly looked at me with those big, sorrowful green eyes.

  “Roddy, I’m scared to tell you. I know I need to, but I’m scared. I need to tell you because I need you to carry on being the friend you’ve always been, the person who I can tell anything.”

  I noted the use of ‘friend’. This did not sound good. This sounded very much like Kelly was teeing up a return to us being ‘just good friends’. I put a brave face on it.

  “Kelly, you told me years ago what happened to your mother and I will not mention that to a living soul until my dying day. If you can tell me that, you can tell me anything, despite what I said on the phone, whatever you tell me, we will still be friends.”

  Seeing Kelly in the flesh made it so much more difficult to pl
ay the tough guy.

  “It’s different telling you things now though, Roddy. Everything’s changed.”

  Seemingly Kelly wanted to wait until the tea had been brewed and poured before she broke the news. I’m not sure what her logic was with this, maybe she thought that a sugary drink would lessen the shock, maybe she just liked the drama, I don’t know, all I do know is that I had to suffer five minutes of bookstore chit-chat before we finally moved out of Kelly’s kitchen with two mugs of tea and a plate of biscuits in tow and sat down on the sofa. The teapot was abandoned in the kitchen with a knitted purple tea cosy wrapped around it to keep the cold out. At long last, it was time for Kelly to open up,

  “I went to Jemma’s this morning….”

  Murder sprang to mind. If Kelly had killed a second member of her family, I think even my love for her would have been tested.

  “….I know you wanted me to. I know you thought it was important to do that, to put things right with Jemma. That’s why I went, Roddy, honestly it was, but just seeing her again brought all those angry feelings back.”

  “Why?”

  “It’ll just sound stupid to you, Roddy.”

  “Try me.”

  “When I met Richie, the other day, almost straight away, I knew he wasn’t the man that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. Time changes people and we had both moved on from where we had been as teenagers. Having said that, I didn’t want him to be married to my sister!”

  “That doesn’t sound stupid, Kelly! No-one in your shoes would want that to happen, but it has happened. It’s how you deal with it that matters.”

  “I knew you’d say that, Roddy, but that’s easy for you to say as an outsider. Back when I was in love with Richie, properly in love, when we were teenagers, he didn’t tell me he had cancer but he told Jemma. It feels like she hatched a plot to steal him off me and when I went round to her house, it just felt like she was evidencing how her plot had worked. I was bombarded with photos of Jemma, Richie and their kids. When you’ve spent years abroad, dodging the authorities after committing a crime to save her skin, you don’t want to return to England to discover the sister you helped has married the boyfriend you left behind.”