One Step Too Far

by Tina Seskis

  I stop at a small scruffy hardware store and buy the biggest tin of brilliant white paint and a roller and some brushes. When I get home (home!) only Swarthy Boy One appears to be in. He’s cooking something revolting-smelling at the stove again and he ignores me completely, as though he’s deaf, as I gulp a glass of water at the sink. It’s 1.30 already, I need to hurry. I gallop upstairs, change into a T-shirt and the only shorts I’ve brought with me, lug the old bed and wardrobe into the middle of the room, and start to paint.

  It’s hot again today and the room is stuffy, but I’m filled with abnormal levels of energy – I seem to have developed some kind of crazy nesting instinct, like when I was... I stop myself, carry on working, try not to think. The room is small and I paint over everything – I don’t bother cleaning first, I just paint and paint and paint, over the grime and the dust, until the peach wood-chip becomes thousands of small flesh-coloured nipples, and then I go round the room again and again without stopping until they finally disappear – it’s so hot the paint seems to be drying fast enough to just keep on going. I do the window frame too – in the same paint, it’s all I have – but it doesn’t matter, the effect I’m after is obliteration of what came before.

  I hear the doorbell, one of those old-fashioned sing-song chimes. My Ikea delivery! I race downstairs and yank open the porch door. The man dumps the stuff inside the hallway and there seems to be so much of it I’m worried it’ll annoy my new housemates if I leave it there. I’ve got to hurry. I run back upstairs and carry on painting, like my life depends on it, and maybe it does. When everything is white, I take hold of the revolting old mattress and drag it out the door, haul it along the landing and shove it down the long steep stairs from the top. As it gathers its own momentum the front door opens and a stinking stained mattress practically lands on the mountain of a man who enters.

  “Shit, sorry,” I say.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” he says, but he softens as he sees me at the top of the stairs in my shorts, covered in paint.

  “Hi, I’m Emi- I’m Cat,” I say. “I’ve just moved in. I’m doing up my room a bit.”

  “So I can see,” says the man and I realise he must be Jerome, Chanelle’s cousin. “Here, let me help you with that.” And he picks up the mattress like it’s a box of cereal and throws it out the front, next to the bins.

  “You got anything else you’re planning on chucking down the stairs?” he asks and I think, thank God for that, and say yes please, a bed frame and a wardrobe. Jerome goes into the shed in the back yard and comes back with a sledgehammer. I’m feeling a little alarmed now, not because I’m wearing hardly anything, alone in the house with a titanic stranger, who incidentally is now wielding a hammer at me, but rather that I hadn’t properly thought through how Chanelle feels about the old bed and wardrobe, we didn’t exactly agree on me going that far with the room improvements. I decide that if she doesn’t like my replacement furniture I can always offer to pay her, hopefully she’d be OK with that, so I let Jerome upstairs and he swings the hammer and he smashes up the brown and beige cupboard and dismantles the bed frame and slings the whole lot out into the front garden, just behind the hedge. It takes him ten minutes.

  “You want some help with that new stuff?” he says, and I’m beginning to feel like I’m taking advantage.

  “I’m sure I can manage,” I say, but I’m tired now and I must have said it half-heartedly and Jerome takes the hint. He proves to be a whizz at flat-pack furniture and within half an hour my bed is screwed together and the mattress is taken out of its plastic sheath and tossed on top, as easily as if it were an air bed, just as I’m finishing off putting my three part clothes rail together. Jerome shrugs off my thanks and disappears to his own room and I unwrap my sheets and duvet and duvet cover and there’s packaging everywhere. I make the bed, being sure to keep it away from the still damp walls. I even remembered to buy clothes hangers so I empty my holdall and hang the few clothes I have in my new covered rail. I still have Jerome’s screw driver and although it takes me three times as long as it would have him I stand on a chair and manage to unscrew the curtain rail and I take down the mouldy faded apricot curtains and hang some full-length sheer white cotton ones in their place. The paint isn’t properly dry yet but it won’t matter, they barely touch the walls. I’m determined to finish this so I go and find the vacuum cleaner and get as much crap out of the carpet as I can manage. I change the lampshade to a plain white one. I take all the discarded packaging downstairs and shove it in the front garden with everything else. I’m dog tired now but I go back up to my room and unfold the cream shag rug and it’s perfect, it takes up nearly the whole floor next to the bed, hiding the stains on the carpet beneath, so I can pretend they’re not there. The transformation is complete. In the space of 36 hours I have a new home, new friend, new name, and now a spanking white bedroom. But no child, no husband, says a voice out of somewhere. I ignore it and head for the shower.

  8

  Andrew woke suddenly and leapt out of bed all in one movement, the body next to him still and snoring lightly. He went straight to the small en suite bathroom and showered away the girl’s bodily fluids. He was annoyed that she was still there – he normally made sure they left afterwards – but he’d been tired last night, and straight after he’d finished he’d rolled off and fallen into a heavy dull sleep. Maybe he was coming down with something.

  It was only six o’clock, too early for breakfast, and day two of the conference didn’t start until nine, but he didn’t want to be there when she woke up, it was too intimate, embarrassing. She didn’t look like she was going to wake up any time soon, she’d been completely plastered the previous night, and he realised with a shock that he couldn’t remember her name although he kept trying. He decided to leave himself, go for a walk – hopefully she’d be gone by the time he returned, that would solve the problem.

  He dressed quickly, trying not to look towards the bed as he did so. He made sure he opened the door as noiselessly as possible, and although she grunted and turned over, he made it from the room without her waking. He walked quietly down the long drab corridor of faceless doors, and outside a couple were trays of already rotting food from the night before. Andrew only relaxed once he’d made it to the lift and the mirrored doors had shut him in, offering up a golden reflected image of himself. Andrew knew he was a handsome man, but he could see his looks had dimmed of late, maybe it was his paunch or the fact his hair was showing signs of receding, or more simply that his internal misery was starting to be worn on his face.

  As Andrew walked through the reception he looked straight ahead and ignored the night porter sitting behind the desk – it wasn’t that he meant to be rude, he just didn’t want the man to see the shame in his eyes.

  Outside Andrew had no idea which way to go, it wasn’t really a place for walks, so he arbitrarily turned left, along the already busy main road. He walked for maybe 500 yards, until he’d given up hope of there being a turn-off, but finally he found a smaller road on the left, which after a few more hundred yards narrowed and led into a neat housing estate, a little like the one where he and his wife lived in Chester. Lights were just coming on in some of the houses and Andrew wondered what was going on behind those tidy front doors, with their high-end family cars in the driveways and the marigolds in the straight, unimaginative borders beginning to show their gaudy colours in the half-light. Were everyone else’s lives as fucked up as his was?

  It had all started going wrong early on, when Frances had announced she was pregnant: it was so soon after the wedding he simply wasn’t ready for it. It was such a corny response, his attraction to the new secretary rushing him away from his expanding wife at home towards the office, to the exchanged looks and the thrill of the proximity as she leaned over his desk to take notes on his letters, and the knowing that he couldn’t touch although they both wanted him to, it was forbidden. After a while the lunches started, then the staying late at the office, the intimat
e chats, as the tension grew between them. Andrew held out for as long as he could, but the day they’d had lunch and she'd broken down because her father was seriously ill, he’d offered to take her home, she was too upset to go back to work, he'd said, and he swore that at the time his motives had been honourable. She’d invited him in and as they waited for the kettle to boil she’d cried again and so of course he’d comforted her, and when they'd finally kissed the feeling had been extraordinary, like an adrenaline shot of danger and deceit, a physical reaction that had left him hooked – and wondering what hope his new marriage had.

  When he arrived back in the office much later on that shape-shifting afternoon, there were three messages from Frances and then two more from the hospital. He felt sick. He sensed the disapproval from his colleagues as he rushed away, head down, to his wife. But afterwards his shock at having missed the actual births, but inexplicably was the father of twin daughters, just made his feelings for Victoria more intense. Within weeks he’d resumed the affair, despite the guilt, despite his promises to himself. It wasn’t only his passion for his secretary, it was also the need to escape from his dowdy exhausted wife and their screaming babies. He began to “work late” more often, spend less and less time at home, and eventually Frances stopped asking him when he’d be back, where he was, she just seemed to accept it. So that must mean she doesn’t really mind, he’d reasoned with himself, and this had made him feel better.

  As Andrew continued his walk around the sad early morning Ways and Closes of the Telford estate he finally saw his betrayal for what it was. Abandonment. How could he have been married for less than a year with twin baby girls and become involved with someone else? He’d felt he couldn’t leave Frances physically, it just wasn’t done, so instead he left her emotionally, and in his place remained an insipid vague husband, an apathetic father, to babies who grew over the years into two very different girls, one calm and kind like her mother, the other flighty and neurotic.

  It was only when Victoria finally put her foot down and ended the affair, after years and years of Andrew’s broken promises of, “When the girls are five, six, seven,” that Andrew had started his casual couplings at the dismal work events his sales job offered up. And if there was too big a gap between those opportunities he’d found himself turning to sessions in cheap Manchester hotels with middle-aged hookers. He despised himself.

  Andrew checked the time – quarter past seven, he needed to start heading back. He really ought to call Frances before the conference started and see how Caroline was doing in the clinic – her weight had finally started to stabilise, and she was heading back towards six stone apparently. He felt such grief for his 15 year old daughter, unloved by her mother and abandoned by her father. The clarity of his realisation was as piercing as the fresh spring sunshine as he marched eastwards, along the clogged main road, towards the hotel.

  Emily sat at her desk in her bright square bedroom trying to concentrate on her GCSE maths revision. The house felt strange, characterless, without Caroline there – her twin had always added a kind of electric zing to the atmosphere – but although she missed her Emily felt relieved that Caroline was finally getting some help. She was pleased with their mother’s response too – Frances seemed to have overnight transformed into more of a proper, genuine mother to Caroline, as if a switch had been flicked on, and Emily had felt her mother’s focus shift from her at last. It might even help hers and Caroline's relationship too – Emily had always done her best to get on with her sister, make allowances for her behaviour, after all it was no wonder Caroline was so jealous of her, considering how much she was favoured. It was weird how it was only now her twin wasn’t here that Emily was fully aware of it.

  Emily was a nice girl. She had inherited her father’s whimsical nature but none of his weakness, along with her mother’s strength and stoicism. It was a good combination. She was sweet, in both looks and nature, did well at school, was quietly popular, gently amusing, in fact all round sickening to her younger twin. Caroline was a harder, glittering version of Emily – prettier, cleverer, wittier even, but with none of the lovability, and the irony was that Emily seemed embarrassed to be liked and yet everyone loved her, and Caroline was desperate to be loved and nobody did.

  Emily presumed that that must have been why Caroline had begun to starve herself, to try to take back some control in the midst of such isolation. She knew very little about the illness and was astonished now that none of them had noticed, but Caroline had been clever. When she’d refused to join the family meal times they all assumed that was just Caroline being Caroline; when she started covering herself from head to foot in black, that was Caroline going through her gothic phase; when her cheekbones shone brittle through her pallid skin it was her new choice of makeup. Emily felt ashamed. This was her twin sister after all, she couldn’t believe she’d been so oblivious. She turned the page of her maths book – simultaneous equations. Emily enjoyed doing these, loved the solidity of them, the reliability, the fact that despite the complexity of getting there, there was only one right answer in the end. That’s pretty much how she approached life, she realised, always looking for the right answer and it nearly always coming to her. Even with this situation, although Emily was sad for her twin she felt optimistic, sure that Caroline's cry for help had been heard and now she'd get better. They’d get on better too, Emily was confident of that; she was determined to try harder. She studied the question:

  A man buys 3 fish and 2 chips for £2.80

  A woman buys 1 fish and 4 chips for £2.60

  How much are the fish and how much are the chips?

  Emily half got up from her desk by the window and peeked down into the road – her father should be home soon. She turned towards the door and surveyed her room, with its neatly-made bed and over-sized cushions that Frances had covered in aztec-style fabric, arranged casually along the wall so she could lounge with her friends, like it was a sofa. She was happy with her new posters, of Madonna in a cone-shaped bra and Michael Bolton with his long angular face and flowing hair. She thought they were nicer than the ones Caroline had plastered all over her wall in the room next door, of grungy bands Emily had never heard of like Stone Temple Pilots and Alice in Chains, and shouty intimidating punk-rockers like The Sex Pistols – one thing she had been glad of in the past weeks was not having to listen to Caroline’s music through her bedroom wall, she always played it so loud, particularly when Emily was trying to do her homework. She sat down at her desk again and studied the equation. She'd just worked out that the chips were 50p (finding the price of the fish would be easy now) when she heard her father’s car in the driveway. She called downstairs brightly as she came out of her bedroom.

  “Hi Dad! How was the conference?”

  She paused on the landing, looking down into the open plan living room, with its new leather corner suite and sheepskin rug, as he stood there inert, shiny briefcase under his arm, desolation in his eyes. Then she came slowly down the two half-flights of stairs and put her arms around her father, as he buried his head against her shoulder, like she was the parent and he was the child.

  “Oh Emily, what a pathetic father I’ve been to you girls. Seeing Caroline in that place is just...” Andrew stopped as his voice broke, and after all these years and years the release finally came.

  Caroline looked hostilely at her mother, who sat at the end of the hospital bed in the institutionally-cheerful room, with its yellow painted walls and drab washed out pictures and vile green-checked curtains. A single vase of unopened daffodils stood nakedly on the formica table in the corner, beneath the window and next to the chair on which, in Caroline’s opinion, Frances should have been sat and not on her bed. She was surprised at the strength of her anger. Over the past months her diminishing weight had seemed to diminish her senses too, and all the effort of planning her calorie intake had until now deviated her thoughts away from more dangerous areas where painful feelings lurked – feelings like resentment of her moth
er, derision of her father, hatred of her sister. It was easier to decide whether to have a quarter or a half an orange for breakfast than choose to wish her mother or sister dead first. And now here was Frances snivelling on the end of her bed about how sorry she was, how she’d let her down, about how much she loved her, and Caroline knew she was LYING.

  Caroline felt tired within her own skin. She wanted the whole world to just fuck off and leave her on her own private island of meal planning and calorie counting, a place where for the first time ever she felt safe and in control. She didn’t want to have to face her mother here in this revolting room. She’d spent so many years, tried so many strategies, yearned for Frances to focus on her instead of Emily, to accept her, to love her. And now that she, Caroline, had finally given up on the whole thing Frances was suddenly sniffing around, trying to be some ridiculous maternal saviour.

  “I’m so sorry, my darling, I really had no idea.”

  “You have no idea about anything to do with me,” said Caroline.

  “I’m going to try harder, you’ll see, we’ll get you out of here, we’ll get you better.”