One Step Too Far

by Tina Seskis

  “Hi, love,” she said.

  “Hello,” said Bill, and leant down to give her a quick kiss. Caroline’s hand snaked around his neck but Bill stood up. “I’m tired, love,” he said. “How’s your day been?”

  “Fine,” said Caroline. “I spent £76.38 at the supermarket, I’m getting much better at budgeting. Dinner will be ready at five – we’re having one of your favourites.”

  Bill sat down in the big easy chair, although he normally sat on the end of the couch so Caroline could put her feet in his lap while they watched the last few minutes of the game show together. He’s tired, she thought, it’s been a long week. He picked up the Sun.

  “Aren’t you watching this? It’s at the exciting bit.”

  “Nah, I’m a bit bored of it to be honest.”

  Caroline shrugged. “Emily rang this morning. She’s invited us to the christening, it’s on June the 6th, she’s said they’d better get on with it before his voice breaks. Ha ha.”

  “OK,” said Bill, and continued reading. He smelled minty from the shower and Caroline thought again how nice it was to have someone to take to her nephew’s christening, someone who was steady and pleasant and who definitely wouldn’t make a scene. He looked good in a suit too – although she did notice his girth was expanding a bit, maybe she’d been over-feeding him. Bill was an almost-handsome man: regular features, everything in the right place, an impressive physique, but his hair was thinning a little and his head was ever so slightly too big for his body. But he wore clothes well, was interested in them – that’s how they’d met, through him coming into the store where Caroline worked. His openness about fancying her, pitiful at first, became flattering after a while, and when he'd eventually asked her for a drink she found herself saying yes, she supposed so. That first evening was pleasant rather than scintillating, but she'd agreed to another, after all there was no-one else on the scene, and soon they were sleeping together, and to her surprise he was amazing in that respect. She took to staying more and more often at his house, which he’d renovated himself, and before long she’d bought a new toothbrush and left some clothes there and was hardly ever going home. Her latest therapist had told her to accept people as they were, and she’d embraced the advice, embraced Bill’s imperfect looks and eager love for her, their life together. For the first time ever she was properly, sensibly happy, she was sure of that.

  “£10 – what a total loser, he could have had 38 grand!” she shrieked.

  Bill looked up at Caroline. “I don’t know why you watch that crap,” he said.

  “It’s part of my routine,” she said, still not rising to him, surprising herself. “I know it’s pointless, but I just can’t help myself. I’ll go and cook the rice – dinner will be 10 minutes.”

  She swung her forever legs off the sofa as Bill watched her. Then he turned off the TV and shut his eyes.

  Caroline had already laid the table: taupe oblong mats with silver round ones on top, matching cutlery. She was about to light the candle, but something stopped her – Bill didn’t seem in that kind of mood, and besides the nights were drawing out now and it wasn’t really dark enough. She poured Bill a beer and a tonic water with ice and lemon for herself. She drank tonic in vast quantities these days: it felt like a real drink almost, and it seemed to help somehow.

  Bill sat down and she dished up the stroganoff. “Thanks, looks great,” he said. As they ate there was a hint of awkwardness to their silence, unusually for Caroline she couldn’t think of anything much to say. She got up and put the radio on, and they listened to mediocre easy listening, Zoom by Fat Larry’s Band and an unfamiliar Michael Jackson ballad. As Bill stood to clear his plate, he said, “By the way, I promised to pop round to Terry and Sue’s this evening, they’ve still got a problem with their boiler.”

  “I thought you’d fixed that?” said Caroline.

  “The pilot light keeps going out, so they have to keep relighting it and it’s a hassle. I shouldn’t be long.”

  “OK, which movie do you fancy watching later?”

  “I don’t mind – you pick something. I’d rather get fixing this boiler out of the way so I can relax. I’ll see you later.” He squeezed her perfect rear perfunctorily and left.

  Sue and Terry lived next door. Sue was loud and super-cheery, and she always wore the same thing – leggings and smock-like lace-up tops, which showed off her huge bosom, wench-like. She wore her hair short and was out of proportion, her body massive and her feet and head tiny either end. Terry was well on the way to obesity too, but their two boys were solid rather than fat, and totally football mad, and Terry was always ferrying them off to training or matches, he was a real pushy dad according to Bill. Caroline had never met anyone like Sue before – loud, overweight, under-educated – and she barely said hello when she saw her in the street, and she assumed Sue had spread the word of how stuck-up she was as no-one else was very friendly either. When half-thoughts surfaced of what was she doing here, living with a man like Bill, with Sue and Terry for neighbours, she pushed them resolutely down. She was good at living in denial. She was happy.

  Caroline lay in bed restless, Bill snoring lightly beside her. It was five in the morning and she couldn’t sleep. She looked in the half-light at the pale boring walls, the horizontal striped curtains that she knew in daytime were deep blue and aqua and just the wrong side of garish, at the country-style wardrobe, and she wondered again how she’d ended up here, in this house, in this life. She rolled over onto her stomach but that hurt her ribs, despite the softness of the mattress, so she sat up and turned on the spot lamp on the bedside table, angling it away from Bill’s eyes, and although he stirred a little he didn’t wake up. She watched him sleeping, his big hairy chest rising and falling, like a laid-out independent mammal, quite separate from his handsome square face – and then she turned away to retrieve her book from down the side of the bed. She’d been living officially with Bill for over six months now, and it was going well, he brought out the best in her, calmed her down. The rest of her life was OK too – she enjoyed her job, had made some new friends – but there was an unease she felt and she wasn’t sure what it was. Was she succumbing to this life because Bill was who she really wanted, because she was where she ought to be, or was it because she felt it was time to settle down and he'd happened to come along? Her desire for a baby surprised her – as did her uncomplicated love for her only nephew across the Pennines in Manchester. Although she knew she’d been a complete bitch when Emily was pregnant, amazingly her bitterness and jealousy had vanished once the baby had been born – he was pure, unadulterated, adorable. He even made her feel closer to her twin, closer to wanting what Emily had, closer to making her, Caroline, feel that life could turn out normal and that she could perhaps live the kind of ordinary happy life that other people did. She’d even started to chart her temperature now, although she hadn’t quite told Bill yet, and she always ensured she was at her most desirable at exactly the right times. She sometimes worried that Bill had twigged though – he seemed so much less enthusiastic about sex these days, maybe men have a built-in radar for ulterior motives. They had talked about starting a family, she reassured herself, in fact he'd been the one who'd suggested it, but as she lay there now she realised he hadn’t mentioned it in quite a while. Caroline felt sure he wouldn’t mind once it happened though, not once there was a baby growing inside her.

  As Bill continued sleeping she studied him again, noticed the dimple in his chin, the shadow thrown long and sharp by the focussed light of the spot lamp, the kindness around his eyes. So what if he snored, she’d get used to it. She moved towards him, wrapped her body around his comforting bulk, and although he grunted and half-shook her off she stayed there, until she drifted off herself.

  The doorbell rang just after Bill had left for work, and Caroline was up for a change, already on her second black coffee. She assumed it was the postman – who else would be calling this early – so when it was her neighbour Terry she wasn�
��t expecting it.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Bill’s not here.”

  “I know, it’s you I want to talk to.”

  Caroline felt uneasy. Terry looked awful, what could have happened that he wanted to talk to her about? She was annoyed, she needed to wash her hair and it took ages to blow-dry, it was so long these days.

  “You’d better come in,” she said, and ushered him through to the kitchen. She didn’t offer him a drink – she didn’t want to prolong his visit, they had nothing to say to each other.

  Terry pulled out a chair and sat his bulk onto it, at an angle away from the table, and he looked precarious, like he might tip off it. He stared at her but still she didn’t comprehend. “Well?”

  “Did you know that your Bill is carrying on with my wife?” he said at last.

  Caroline looked at the browning cactus on the window sill behind Bill’s vast expanding outline. That plant needs water, she thought, it’s dying.

  “What do you mean?” she said.

  “Exactly what I say. Your Bill and my Sue, they’re having an affair.”

  Caroline struggled to find any feelings, she was so taken aback. The first one that hit her was revulsion. How could he sleep with that whale of a woman, with her massive rolls of fat, hanging like flesh jewellery around her neck and wrists, her horrible heaving bosom. The second was inadequacy – what with her skinny frame and supermodel’s chest she was the antithesis of everything Sue was. The third was confusion – how, when, where? And then she remembered the boiler, and the leaking tap, and the broken oven, and realised for the first time that it was always on Friday nights, after they’d had dinner but before they watched a movie together and, depending on her charts of late, even had sex themselves.

  “Caroline?” Terry said. “Are you all right? Here, sit down.”

  “Where are you on Friday evenings? Where are you and the kids?”

  “We’re at football training, we don’t get back ‘til eight. That’s when it’s been going on, and sometimes in the mornings too, according to Sue.”

  It all seemed so obvious now, but Caroline had never remotely suspected because she couldn’t imagine anyone finding Sue attractive, let alone Bill. She thought now of Sue’s sparkly eyes, her cutesy fat face, her infectious laugh, and she felt fucking furious. Bill knew she never spoke to the neighbours if she could help it, there was no reason for her to ever ask Terry how his boiler was, as if she cared. He’d been getting away with it, right next door, right under her perfectly turned up nose.

  Caroline couldn’t bear to hear any more. She moved towards the door. Terry stood up and followed, as if an invisible cord linked them, all the way to the front door. “You’d better go now,” she said, and her voice was over-loud, harsh.

  Terry started snivelling. “She says she wants to leave me, to be with Bill.”

  “Well, that’s up to her,” said Caroline. “It’s nothing to do with me how she feels.”

  “Are you some kind of robot?” said Terry. “Don’t you even care?”

  “I don’t know,” said Caroline simply, and she shut the door.

  Caroline meant to ring in sick, but she hadn't managed it. Instead she found herself sat in the kitchen, rooted, literally unable to move, staring at the chair Terry had occupied, which was still pushed out at an awkward angle, making the place look untidy. She felt frozen – not sure how to feel, what to do, where to go. After perhaps two hours she finally felt able to stand, and she went over to the cutlery drawer and selected a small lethally sharp knife with a cruel curved end, a parer she thought it was called. She studied the knife, held it at every angle, until finally the sun outside, beyond the dying cactus, caught its steel rivets and flashed warning signs at her. She looked at her wrists – the veins stood proud, livid, like blue scars. She felt the point of the knife against her chin, her cheek, her forehead, her neck, her wrists again. She left the kitchen and made her way precisely, carefully upstairs to the bedroom she'd shared with Bill only a few hours before. She sat on the bed and stared sightlessly at the vile pine wardrobe for long absent minutes; she gazed longingly at the three inch knife, admiring its beauty, feeling its potential; she held it to her wrist again and pressed, just a little; she returned her eyes to the wardrobe.

  And still Caroline sat there, doing nothing, feeling nothing, undecided still.

  At long long last an emotion kicked in. It was pure unfettered rage.

  With a guttural roar she hurled herself at the wardrobe, yanked it open and attacked the contents, knife held aloft, like a dagger. The more she ripped and scraped through his shirts and jackets and jeans with her tiny lethal weapon the more angry she felt, and her screams of rage and abuse could be heard by Sue next door, curled up weeping in the adjacent room, like a giant bean bag. Finally Caroline stopped, and she knew she had to leave before Bill got home, before she did the same to him, before she ripped his heart out. Grabbing her bag and phone and car keys she fled from the house, her breath jumpy and unregulated, her eyes wild but dry.

  65

  I lie in bed, content and drowsy. Ben has just got into the shower and I enjoy that brief interlude, before the little voice calls “Muuuummy,” and it’s time to get up. The sun is rampaging through the curtains and it feels warm already, but nicely so, snoozingly so. It’s a Thursday morning in early May, and I can’t help but feel how unbelievably lucky I am, with my gorgeous husband and beautiful boy, living in our lovely cottage in this amazing part of Manchester, so friendly and laid-back, so full of life, close to the city centre yet also near to the wilds of the Peak District where we love to go on the weekend. I can’t believe that one random decision – to go parachuting of all things – has led me to here, to right now, to this bed in this house, with the memory of my husband warm inside me, and my child still sleeping obligingly.

  I must have dozed off because now it’s 7.30, I really must get up, but my mind keeps drifting – I think it’s the sunshine, I swear it’s rained solidly for a week, and today’s the first proper Spring day after a cold hard winter. I can’t stop feeling ridiculously grateful to the whole entire world, maybe it’s my hormones, I was like this last time. I’m not even worried about my nutty family for a change, they seem to have all settled down at last, with Mum climbing mountains and Dad finally picking himself up after the shock of the divorce, and taking up badminton of all things. And Caroline is perhaps the greatest surprise of all. Yet another stint in rehab seems to have worked this time, thank God, and she seems at peace with herself at last. She has a nice partner Bill, and OK he might not be as glamorous as her previous boyfriends, but he’s real and decent and seems to love her. I’m so pleased for her. We don’t see her much now she’s in Leeds, but when we do it’s fine – she seems to have taken to Ben finally, and adores our darling child. Best of all, I've stopped worrying about upsetting her at last – my fretting about getting married or pregnant in case I offended her used to drive Ben mad. In fact I feel all right telling her about this new baby, hopefully she'll be pleased from the start this time, she seems to love being an auntie.

  I sometimes wonder how amidst all my family’s dramas I’ve turned out so normal, how I’ve been able to cope with Caroline’s various crises and my parents’ divorce without any of it affecting me that badly. It’s not that I’m hard-hearted, or at least I hope I’m not, I just seem to have a very solid core somehow. And of course I was lucky I met Ben, and he has been that person who complements me in every way, and to this day makes my heart soar and my flesh sing, and I wonder whether other people’s marriages are like ours.

  The sing song cry comes at last, and I am glad of it, can’t wait to see his little face still crumpled from sleep explode into a smile of love, for me, his mother. I pull back the duvet and almost run from the room.

  It’s just gone two now, I’ve given Charlie his lunch and we’re dressed and finally ready to go, only 10 minutes later than planned. I’ve collected all the
paraphernalia you need to take a two year old to the park – nappies, wipes, snacks, change of clothes in case he jumps in the puddles, bread for the ducks. Although I adore being a mother, I’m not great at the practicalities, am in no way one of those super-mums who finds time to purée freezerfuls of organic food whilst holding down a directorship. Never mind, love is all you need, that’s what I tell myself anyway, how I make myself feel less inadequate, and love is what I have tried to give him, from the moment they handed him to me in the delivery room. My only child has been adored from the start.

  As we’re about to leave there’s a knock at the door, and I assume it’s the postman, but instead I’m shocked to see Caroline, looking pale and uncharacteristically scruffy – it’s a Thursday afternoon, shouldn’t she be in Leeds?

  “Hi, Caz,” I say, flustered. “How... how lovely to see you." She stares at me, mute, so I say, "Are you OK?” and go to hug her but she shrugs me off. Although it's true we were closer for a while, more like you’d expect twins to be, when she turned to me after the bombing, it didn’t last long, I guess we’re just too different. In fact I’ve long since given up trying with her, and I feel guilty now. She still hasn’t said anything, and I wonder again what’s wrong.

  “What are you doing here, Caz?” I say carefully. “Is everything OK?”

  “I’m fine,” she breezes, but I don’t believe her. “You off out?”

  “Yes, it’s such a lovely day we’re off to the park." I pause, and although for some reason I don't really want to, find myself asking if she'd like to come.

  “Ooh, happy families, how super,” she says, but then she smiles and I’m not sure if she’s being bitchy or just being Caroline. “Sure, why not?”

  So she takes Charlie and I take the buggy, it’s a long way for a two year old to walk there and back, and we set off down the sun-filled street. The blossom on the trees is pink and tissue-like, as if God stuck it on in the night, and it contrasts with the flat mid blue of the sky, and although I still think the world is a fantastic place a sense of unease has wormed into my day.