One Step Too Far

by Tina Seskis

  I answer all the questions they fire at me, about how I met the deceased, how I came to be in his flat, what we’d been doing for the last 36 hours. I realise that it sounds nasty, sordid, and I want them to know that actually it wasn’t like that at all, it was romantic, special, as nice a way as any to pass the time if you have to end up dead. (I start sobbing at this point, and they have to stop the interview for a few minutes.) When I’ve quietened down they ask me about the drugs and I tell them they were my friend’s and that we only did a tiny little bit, we were busy, and at that they stop me, and say, “Do you mean to tell me that you supplied the substance to Mr Monteiro?” and I answer, yes, I suppose I did.

  Although I don’t want to think about any of this, what’s the point, it won’t bring him back, they ask me more questions, about who my friend is, how I met her, what she does for a living, what her full name and address is, that kind of thing. I realise too late that I should have said the drugs were mine, but they press me and I can’t think of what else to say so I tell them the truth and I feel bad that now I’ve got Angel into trouble too, dragged her into this whole sorry mess. Finally they stop the interview and take me back to my cell. They don’t tell me what will happen next, they just lock the door and leave me there, so I lie down, on my back this time, and stare at the ceiling, try to arrange my thoughts. Do they really think I killed him? Have I killed him? He was an adult, he took the drugs willingly, didn’t he? Was there something wrong with the drugs? Was it the drugs that killed him, if so why aren’t I dead? I’m sad for myself now, but most of all I’m sad for Robbie, that he is dead, another life wasted, and I’m sad that my life really is over this time, there’s no way back from this.

  I have no idea what time it is. One of the uniformed officers opens the cell door and asks me politely to come with him, as though we’re in a hotel and he’s showing me to my room – he must be newly qualified, he has that air about him, it’s sweet really. I swing my body off the dirty bunk and sit on the edge and toss my head between my legs, as if I can simply shake off the filth and the shame. The officer waits patiently, and when at last I get up he leads me from my cell and takes me down long cold corridors to another room, maybe the one where I first got booked in, although it all looks the same to me, grey and grim. Here yet another plain-clothed officer awaits me, and he says something like: “Catherine Emily Brown, I am hereby charging you with possession of a Class A drug, namely cocaine. You will be bailed to attend magistrates court and must return on the day you are summoned.”

  I look at him uncomprehendingly. Where was the word murder in his statement? What does he mean by bailed? My left cheek starts pumping, and it’s never done that before. My mouth falls open and I’m aware that in my thin white sleep-suit, with my twitching face and heavy eyes weighed down with misery, I appear like I just don’t get it. So he tries again. “Miss Brown, what I am telling you is that you are free to go.”

  There’s a problem of what to put me in. My beautiful green dress has disappeared – it got taken for evidence and now no-one seems to know where it is, although they assure me it will turn up at some point, and at least they give me my shoes back. I don’t want to leave in my police-issue pyjamas, I don’t want to actually look like a criminal on the loose, even if I feel like one, but the clothes they offer from the lost property department smell revolting. In the end I decide the white outfit is best after all, with my heels, as long as I can order a cab, I’ll have to ask for one at the front desk. They press the buzzer and that’s it, they let me go. I am back on the other side of the counter, the free side. There are people thronging about, it’s busy and someone takes my picture. I startle, not from the flash, but because there in the corner, looking older and thinner and infinitely sad, sits my husband.

  PART THREE

  63

  The world outside the taxi looks overly bright, overly busy, too alive for my brain to comprehend. I sit hunched against the window, facing inwards, moving with the car and my husband from the west of London to the north. I’m not looking good, but I don’t look that bad either. I’m just another young woman on bail, in a white police suit and silver stilettos. I was arrested on suspicion of murder yesterday, but although I’m free for now I know I’m more trapped than ever. The cab is dim and ominous-feeling, despite the freshness of the day, the sunshine outside, another glorious May morning they would have said on the radio.

  It’s funny how easy it is, when you have no other choice, to slip back into your old being, into your old name. Ben still calls me Emily and I don’t bother correcting him, what’s the point of trying to be Cat Brown now I’ve been found, now I’m forced to face my past? I didn’t want to leave with Ben, but also I really desperately did. When I'd seen him waiting there in the police station my heart had leapt and sunk at the exact same time – leapt that maybe he did still love me, after all, sank that how could he forgive me for all I have done?

  I sit quietly in the cab and wish I could evaporate, take my leave like a fading spectre or dying soul, not have to face the look of disappointment and loss in Ben’s eyes, the final death of the last bit of his love for me. Ben sits straight and says nothing further than what he’d said in the station: “Hello Emily, I think it’s best if you come with me,” and then he’d taken my elbow and steered me gently but precisely through the waiting press pack and into the taxi. When his hand touched the thin cotton of my top my whole body had jerked, like I’d been given an adrenaline shot, like my life had maybe restarted. That strange illusory sensation I’d had since my arrest had lifted and I saw myself clear and unfettered for the first time in days, since before the anniversary, before May the 6th, and what I saw beneath the grief was a tiny bit of hope.

  Ben takes me to the small hotel in Hampstead where he stayed last night, after he’d dropped Charlie at his outraged, disapproving parents and travelled down on the first train he could get, to find me before I was lost again. The hotel is clean and basic, serviceable, but it feels too plain, too character-free to be the back drop to our finale. I’m relieved he hasn’t brought Charlie of course, it would all be too much for him, but I find that I ache to see him, that now I’ve seen Ben I have to see my Charlie too, to hold him, kiss him, tell him I’m sorry, and just as soon as I can.

  When we go up to the room it is neatly blank, void, free of our history, and maybe it’s not such a bad place after all. Ben suggests I have a shower, so I do as I’m told, and as I undress I realise I’m filthy, in fact I stink. The shower is like shots of steel and I have it bruisingly hot, bruisingly hard, it’s what I deserve. When I come out I’m red raw, shy in my towel, but I have nothing else to wear. Ben looks me in the eye and says he’ll run to the high street and pick me up something as long as I promise to get into the pristine white bed and rest, watch telly, whatever – do anything but bolt while he’s gone. I look him in the eye and I promise, and he shuffles awkwardly by the door for a moment, as though he doesn’t know whether he can trust me, and finally he says quietly, “See you soon, Emily,” and although I wonder briefly whether I should leave while I have the chance, I lie down on the bed and sleep takes away my decision.

  I hear the firm click of the keycard and the heavy door opens, and Ben is back although it feels like he’s only just left. He has bought me some clothes and they suit Emily, not Cat, but I don’t mind, not really. I wrap the towel back around me, I’m still absurdly self-conscious, and go in the bathroom, where Ben has laid out the clothes for me, and when I come out I look innocent and new in my dark blue jeans and white cotton shirt. I sit awkwardly on the bed and look at my hands, at my dirty nails that the shower didn’t get to, at the space where my ring used to be. Ben sits on the desk chair and we don’t know what to do, how to take it further. There’s so much to say how do we possibly know where to start? After long minutes of silence, of twingeing loneliness, Ben opens the conversation. He gets straight to the point, this is no place for small talk.

  “Emily, you have to tell me what happened
that day. I didn’t want to push you, I thought you’d tell me in your own time, but then you ran away and left me. You owe it to us both to talk about it, even if you have nothing else to do with me ever again.”

  I look at Ben and I know that he’s right, and even though I’ve recently been arrested on suspicion of murder, of a famous footballer no less, this is where the real story is, and I have kept it in for far too long. I look at the love in his eyes and it gives me courage, so after yet more long minutes of gaping silence I finally open my mouth and start to speak.

  64

  15 months earlier

  There was such a selection of chicken Caroline didn’t know where to start. Breasts, skinless breasts, value breasts, thighs, wings, drumsticks, diced, free-range, corn fed, organic, whole birds, quarter birds, poussins (whatever they were). Caroline shivered as she slunk up and down the aisle, past pallid flesh gleaming under shiny packaging and glaring lights, all the way to the tills and back. She couldn’t remember now exactly what the recipe had specified, she’d just written down, “Chicken, 300g,” under the onion and above the soured cream. In the end she went for breasts, skinless, free range, but not organic, those were extortionate. Caroline worked methodically down her list – milk, cheddar, goat’s cheese, yogurt. There was so much choice it took forever to work out what she wanted, make sure she got the right type, right size, best value, the one which was on offer; it was like a giant mathematical treasure hunt. She carried on to the next aisle (tinned tomatoes, beans, ketchup, herbs, pasta) and found bizarrely that she was enjoying this: pushing her trolley, working the aisles, consulting her list, proving at last she was a real person in a proper relationship, not a sad ready-meal-for-one shopper or, worse, a hopeless anorexic who bought nothing but fruit, diet Coke and chewing gum.

  After an hour and a half she was nearly done. She reached the final aisle, the drinks section, and picked up a pack of beer for Bill and three bottles of tonic water for herself, relieved that she'd been able to resist the rows and rows of alcohol, she’d come so far lately. Her trolley was almost full now and she wondered briefly how much this was all going to cost, but it didn’t really matter, she felt pleased with herself, grown-up. As she reached the tills she scanned her list to double-check she had everything.

  Soured cream! She’d forgotten the soured cream. Shit, she thought, that’s way back at the beginning, and she needed it for the chicken dish. She felt a pin prick of irritation at the base of her neck, where she held her tension, but recovered herself as she glided the trolley the length of two football pitches, a beatific half-smile fixed on her face. The temperature was several degrees lower back here and she shivered, and not just with cold. When she couldn’t find any kind of cream, let alone soured – just the vast lines of yogurt, milk and every type of cheese that she’d agonised over earlier – a sharper shard of temper struck further down her neck, in between her shoulder blades this time. Surely cream should be round here somewhere? Where the fuck is it? The supermarket was so monstrous, so full of every kind of everything you could possibly need, it felt overwhelming now, not enjoyable anymore. She hunched into her trolley and looked for someone to ask. The goosebumps on her arms were plainly visible – she had to get out of this fridge aisle, it was ridiculous how cold they kept it. She looked up and down its cathedral length – no-one – and so she left her trolley and stomped off round the corner, past the pies and pasties on the end display, to the meat section. A man in a thick red fleece was sat low on a footstool, laying out packaged lumps of bright red flesh so vivid they looked alive still.

  “Excuse me,” she said, unable to keep the impatience from her voice. The man carried on with his stacking.

  “Ex-cuse me,” Caroline said, louder this time.

  The shop assistant glanced up. He was bald, younger than she’d assumed, with a dark goaty beard that looked lost amongst his fleshy jowls, and a small pursed mouth – like female genitalia, she thought bitchily.

  “Can you tell me where the soured cream is.”

  “Aisle 32,” mumbled the man, looking down at his steaks again.

  “Where’s Aisle 32?”

  The man jerked his head towards the aisle she’d just come from and continued his stacking.

  “I’ve looked there,” Caroline said. “Will you please just show me?”

  He looked up and his expression was openly hostile now, and she thought at first he was going to refuse. Holding onto the lowest shelf for leverage, he humphed his fat frame off the stool and got to his feet, moving lumberingly round the corner like an awakening bear. He waved his arm vaguely, and went to head back to his special offer sirloins.

  “I’ve already looked there,” said Caroline, and this time she couldn’t help herself. “Why can’t you stop being such a rude lazy arse and help me? Isn’t that your job?”

  The man stopped. “Madam, I’m going to have to report you to my supervisor if you speak to me like that again – employees here are entitled to be treated with respect.”

  “Fine,” said Caroline, and she was yelling now. “Go and get your stupid supervisor and I’ll tell him what a lazy ignorant tosser you are.” She realised that other customers had stopped their trolleys and were staring at them both. The man walked away, towards the tills, and Caroline was left with her heaving trolley, but no soured cream still, and everyone staring at her. Shit, why had she let a loser like that rattle her? What if a security guard appeared and asked her to leave? How dare he threaten her?

  As the other customers started to move again, carefully keeping their distance, Caroline made her decision. She abandoned her trolley right there, in the middle of Aisle 32, and fled down to the checkouts, along the back of the tills and out into the half-hearted warmth of the early summer’s day. She stumbled to her car and roared out the car park, so furiously a mother had to grab her toddler out the way. She drove wailing down the main road back to north Leeds, accelerating and braking crazily, and if she missed any of the lights she screamed and slammed her fist against the door repeatedly, until it throbbed. When she got home she lay on the sofa and sobbed into the cheap black leather, until eventually she stopped and turned on Countdown, to help her calm down before Bill came home.

  That night Caroline ordered a takeaway. She told Bill sorry, she’d been too busy to get to the supermarket like she’d promised. Bill said it was fine, he was happy with Chinese.

  Caroline never went to a superstore again. She discovered a medium-sized supermarket, in a nicer part of Leeds only 15 minutes’ drive from the house, and she went there instead. There was less variety, which in her opinion was a good thing: the products they did have were fine, it took a quarter of the time to get around, and she didn’t freeze like she had in the larger shop. She realised that being cold made her anxious, it reminded her of how she’d felt at 15, when she'd weighed less than six stone and could never get warm. Maybe that’s why she’d flipped out that day in the dairy aisle, because of the cold. It was a one-off, she was sure of it.

  Although Caroline didn’t much like shopping anymore she enjoyed cooking these days. She’d bought a few recipe books and took an unexpected delight in having tea ready for when Bill came in from work. It was as if her issues with food had turned in on themselves, and she grew to love cooking the most sumptuous meals, the more calorific the better. Bill had asked her sometimes why her own portions were so tiny, or why she didn’t touch the chocolate profiteroles she’d slaved over, but she’d just get defensive and deny everything, and so in the end he’d stopped asking.

  On the Friday before Bill’s birthday Caroline had done her weekly shop that morning, and was making beef stroganoff followed by banoffee pie for tea. She loved doing something special on a Friday, and as Bill was normally home by four they could eat early and snuggle up on the sofa to watch a movie. Sometimes she couldn’t believe how much her life had changed – how her chaotic life of crises and drama had been replaced by the steady domesticity of hers and Bill’s life together. It was true he wasn
’t as trendy or edgy as her previous boyfriends, nor anywhere near as good-looking as her nearly-fiancé Dominic, but he was a good steady man who loved her, and that was enough these days. She was through with melodrama, definitely so, happy in the tiny terrace they shared, with its newly fitted kitchen and knocked through front rooms and gas effect log fire; she had a part-time job in a designer fashion store in the city centre, and OK, the money wasn’t great and it wasn’t where she’d once been, but it would do for now. She and Bill weren’t well off exactly, but they could afford nights out whenever they fancied it, and the odd weekend trip away. And anyway this more relaxed lifestyle meant there was a greater chance of her falling pregnant, not that she’d quite got around to telling Bill about those plans yet. Caroline smiled to herself.

  As she heard the key turn and the front door shudder, she was stretched out on the couch watching Deal or No Deal. (She’d got herself scarily addicted to that show – it seemed she always needed to be addicted to something, and if now it was cooking calorie-laden seventies-inspired meals like her mother’s and watching vacuously rubbish game shows, surely these were better than her previous vices?) She turned the TV down a little and heard the double thud of his shoes coming off, the rustle of his jacket, the noise of his feet on the stairs, the long and splashy sound in the bathroom, the flush of the toilet, the turning on of the pump that worked the taps. Normally he poked his head round the door to give her a kiss, he must have been desperate for the loo. Oh no! The contestant hadn't take the “Deal” just now, the whopping £38,000 he'd been offered by the banker, and now he’d lost the £250,000 prize. He’ll almost certainly end up with less now, the moron, she thought, doesn’t he realise it’s a pure game of playing the odds? She turned her head and smiled as Bill finally came into the room.