One Step Too Far (4 page)

“Nothing, I’ve got a headache.”

”You look like shit, why don’t you go home?” Maria said.

“I’ve just got to finish this report, then I’m out of here. Here you go.” Emily handed over the stapler and turned away, her eyes filling, tears dropping onto her keyboard. She checked her email one more time – nothing – and then pressed the computer’s off key without bothering to log out. “Bye,” she said to Maria, as she stood up and hurried to the lift.

At home Emily couldn’t settle. She checked her phone constantly, as though the call could have crept up on her while she wasn’t looking, despite it being in her pocket, despite her having changed the settings so it would ring and vibrate at the same time. Maybe he’d emailed her, she thought, if only she could check her emails at home. But he’d call now instead, wouldn’t he, she’d given him her number.
Why hasn’t he called?
She felt nauseous in that over-hungry, post-hangover way, but she couldn’t rouse herself to even make a sandwich. She looked in the fridge and found some cheddar, cracked with age, and some stale breadsticks in the cupboard, and she ate purely to take the edge off her hunger. She flicked through the TV channels, picked an old episode of The Simpsons she’d seen before, but she found she couldn’t follow the plot. Her mother rang – the thrill of the phone going and the disappointment of it not being Ben meant she couldn’t face picking up. She ran a bath, but lying there made her hot with shame. In the end she went to bed and finally found some solace, after ten o’clock, when she knew that he really wasn’t going to call tonight so she might as well stop thinking about it, and she fell exhaustedly into the seventeenth century underworld of her latest book.

The buzzing and the ringing woke her. She grappled for the phone, on the table next to her bed – 11.28. “Hello,” she said.

“Emily? It’s Ben. Hello? Er, it’s Ben – from parachuting. I’m so sorry to call so late, I’ve been on a course all day and then I was out at the pub and then for some reason I logged on when I got home and saw your mail.”

“Oh,” Emily said.

“What’s important?” Ben persisted, and she thought he sounded a bit drunk.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter now.”

“D’you still want to have a drink tonight?”

“It’s 11.30,” Emily said. “It’s too late. There’s nowhere open.”

“I could come over. Are you still in Chester?”

“Yes,” she said. “Where are you?”

“Trafford. What’s your address?”

“That’s miles away. It would take you hours.”

“I’ll get a cab. I could be there in an hour...”

Emily was silent.

“If you’d like me to?”

Emily still hesitated. It was more than she could have hoped for, but now she was ambivalent. It was so late. She hardly knew him. What was she getting into?

“Yes please,” she said, in the end.

“I’ll see you soon,” he replied, and the tenderness in his voice reassured her.

An hour and seven minutes later the buzzer rang. Emily had put on jeans and a slouchy jumper and piled her hair on top of her head. She was bare-foot and wary-looking when she opened the door. He was still in the same dark suit, his brown tie loosened. He smiled and moved past her, as far away as he could get in the cramped hallway and he smelled of beer and damp, it was still raining outside. They went into the kitchen, where the strip light was unflattering, made them both look pale, exposed.

“Sorry, after all that I’ve got nothing to drink,” she said, and her voice was high-pitched, unnatural. “Would you like a coffee? Or I can make you Horlicks?” And she tried to laugh, but it wasn’t much of a joke.

Ben said yes, coffee would be great, and then said nothing more as she made it, and she couldn’t think of anything to say either. She slopped the kettle and swore gently as the water scalded her, but she continued pouring and stirring anyway. She took the milk from the fridge, offered him sugar and led him into the sitting room. She put the coffee on the table that she’d hurriedly cleared of the papers and books and crap that normally lived there and sat down on the sofa. Ben sat in the only other chair in the room. The distance ached between them. She stood up again and put on some music – Radiohead. The notes sounded mournfully, expanding into the space. How could it be that she'd sent him a note effectively asking him to be her boyfriend, and he’d been so keen he'd rung her in the middle of the night and now he was here in her flat and they didn’t know what to do, how to take it forward? Conversation eluded them – Ben was shy and Emily was teetering on the very edge of the next stage of her life. She literally didn’t know what to do, how to take that step.

The body dropped like a stone under her. It fell maybe fifteen feet before wrenching violently to a halt, bouncing, then hanging from its ankles. The body writhed and wriggled, its long legs trying to untangle themselves from the ropes that bound them. She looked down, horrified. The shock completely over-whelmed the adrenaline that had been pumping through her and she was now rigid with terror. With a snap the body came free and it turned 180 degrees in the air, the bright red and yellow finally revealing itself, as Jeremy continued downwards away from the plane, slightly more gently now, a little more how she’d imagined it. She looked into the eyes of the instructor and understood now what the training had been about, why she’d been told to sit right at the very edge of the door, half in, half out. “Are you OK?” shouted Greg above the roar of the engine. Emily shook her head. She wished she’d jumped first, so she hadn’t had to witness it from above, because now she couldn’t do it. Greg smiled at her kindly, squeezed her arm, then shoved her hard into the void.

“What are you thinking about?” said Ben.

Emily remembered then where she was, here in her hastily tidied sitting room with this geeky parachuting accountant, how parachuting had caused all this trouble in the first place.

“I was wondering how you can bear to fling yourself out of a plane the second time, once you know what it’s like.”

“You just had a bad experience,” said Ben. “Jeremy is 6’3” with zero co-ordination, he wasn’t your best role model. He’s not really cut out for parachuting.”

“It wasn’t just him that terrified me though,” she said. “It was worse being pushed out of the plane – I can’t believe the instructor did that, it’s cruel,” and even as she remembered it, from the safety of her living room, it reminded her of something long forgotten, made her feel unnerved, distressed all over again.

“He had to do that,” said Ben. “Otherwise you’d have missed the landing area. It was actually perfectly safe.”

“It really didn’t feel it. I don’t feel safe now.”

“What do you mean?” Ben said, and he seemed alarmed, as if he’d made a mistake to come here so late after all.

“I don’t mean like that.” She hesitated for long slow seconds, took a gulp and paused again, and then she surprised herself as she looked straight at him and said it.

“I just mean I don’t know how I’m ever going to go back to a place where I’m not totally crazy about you.”

Ben smiled. “I was hoping you’d say something like that,” he said, and he got up from the silver wicker chair that Emily had found in a junk shop and sprayed herself. Emily stood too and moved slowly around the glass coffee table towards him. They stood three feet apart just looking at each other, still anxious, their bodies aching, and then – who moved first they never could work out – they were holding each other very tightly, and they stayed like that for a very long time.

5

I sit in the kitchen of Finsbury Park Palace, with its country style oak cupboard doors and marble-effect formica worktops, and I have a vodka tonic in front of me and I swear I’ve never had that drink before. Although the floor is gritty under the soles of my ballet pumps, the kitchen is cleaner than I’d imagined it would be, from the outside, but the sweet stench of bins is making me want to retch.
How much rubbish does this house produce,
I wonder pointlessly, thinking of the over-flowing dustbins in the front garden. Angel sits across from me, too pretty and sparkling for these surroundings, and her fringed waistcoat over skinny jeans makes me feel dowdy and old. A thin swarthy boy with lank longish hair is cutting odd-looking vegetables next to the sink, his name’s Fabio I think Angel said, but he keeps his head down and doesn’t take part in our conversation. The surly black girl is nowhere to be seen, and Angel says no-one else is back from work yet.

”You feeling better now, babe?” says Angel, taking a long sip from her drink.

“Yes, thanks so much for helping me.”

“Don’t worry, it was nothing,” she says, and smiles her angelic smile. “Where are you from anyway?”

“I’m from near Chester, originally, but I’ve been living in Manchester most recently,” I say. “I just split up from my boyfriend and felt like I needed a change of scene. I’ve lived round the Manchester area my whole life and so thought I should give London a go, before I’m too old.” I giggle nervously.

I’ve rehearsed all this, have my back story sorted, close enough to the truth to feel authentic. I spit it out all in one go, before I’ve been asked, and it sounds fake, apologetic.

“Too old! You’re never too old for London,” laughs Angel. “You might be too old for sharing a crappy house with a bunch of lunatics though – you look far too posh for this place.”

“No, no it’s fine,” I say. “I just can’t afford too much rent until I get myself sorted, plus I thought it would be a good way to meet new people.”

“I wouldn’t go that far, babe. The people who live here you’d normally cross the road to avoid. Don’t worry about him,” she continues, nodding towards Fabio’s bent head as I look over, embarrassed. “He doesn’t speak English.” Angel scrabbles in her bag. “Want a ciggie, babe?”

“No thanks. I don’t smoke.”

“You mind if I have one?”

I nod yes, it’s fine, although the heat and the bins and the hunger and the vodka are making me feel increasingly nauseous. I realise I left the Chorlton cottage 14 hours ago and I’ve barely eaten. My jeans feel sticky and my feet hurt and I desperately want to lie down, but I don’t want to be rude. I take a gulp of my drink.

“I love your name,” I say pointlessly, trying to keep the conversation going. I find I’m still polite like that, now that I’m Catherine.

Angel laughs. “All I did was drop the “a” babe, it’s amazing what it’s done for my image.”

A thought enters my head. I feel silly but there’s something about her that makes it OK to ask. “Angel, would you mind calling me Cat? I’m just totally stealing your idea, but I’ve always hated the name Catherine.”

“Whatever babe,” smiles Angel, and my name changes for the second time today.

6

When Ben woke early and Emily wasn’t there beside him, he assumed she’d had another of her sleepless nights, and would be found downstairs on the couch, reading. She seemed to be re-reading all the old classics lately, Ben had noticed, absolutely ripping through them, and he wondered whether it was a way for her to escape out of herself, into a world so familiar (whether it be the American South or Hardy’s Wessex or the Yorkshire moors) that she didn’t need to think about her life, here, now. There were many different ways to block pain, Ben realised, and he felt it was best to leave Emily to it for now, to be there quietly in the background, helping take care of Charlie, until she was ready to come back to them both.

Ben shifted onto his side and managed to find his way into sleep again, a fidgety, disturbed, damp slumber under the heat of the winter duvet they hadn’t yet swapped for the summer one, even though it was late July. That used to be Emily’s job, and she was normally vigilant in her timing, providing a soft cashmere throw at the foot of the bed for those in between days when the lighter duvet was not quite protection enough from the cold. It was these small slippages that seemed to add to their pain – to the feeling that nothing was quite right nor ever would be again. The lack of clean shirts, the running out of breakfast cereals, butter, bleach, bread, the unopened post, the weeds in the window boxes. All these things Emily had taken care of,
before
, not because Ben was lazy or she was in any way a martyr, she just always had been the organised one, and Ben had been such a fantastic cook and tidier-upper they had each been happy with the arrangement. Now Emily did nothing, not that he blamed her, of course.

It was only when the alarm went that Ben stirred from these semi-conscious thoughts. He kicked his sweaty legs out from the duvet and lay sprawled there a moment, wondering what to say to his wife when he went downstairs. He decided to have a shower first, he felt so revolting, and then he’d go and get Charlie, and they’d go and say hi to her together. It still gave him a thrill of excitement, the thought of seeing her, despite all this time and all that had happened. He’d make her a cup of tea, and try to get her to eat some toast with heaps of butter and a smear of marmalade, the way she liked it, and then he would kiss her and Charlie goodbye and set off on his four mile cycle to the office. Life must go on, Ben told himself, although he sometimes worried that Emily didn’t agree.

The shower was fierce and Ben had it at maximum temperature despite the weather, it was so hot already outside. He found that standing under the searing stream with his face turned into it helped him forget, for a second or two at a time, as if his brain was being cauterised. Emily never commented on his lengthy showers any more, even though she used to be so conscious about stuff like that. She seemed oblivious to what Ben did these days, as if she’d lost interest in even him now. Ben wondered whether they’d ever get back what they’d had between them, one day far in the future.

It first occurred to Ben that his wife was gone when he opened the stripped oak door to the living room and she wasn’t there. He didn’t need to check the kitchen or the downstairs cloakroom, he could feel the screaming emptiness throughout the house. He didn’t know what to do next – call 999, wail, throw himself out the window? He went back up to their bedroom and opened the packed wardrobe. It looked much the same as usual. Maybe she’s just gone for a walk, it’s a lovely day, he thought. He decided to give Charlie his breakfast and then make himself a proper cappuccino, he could always ring the office and say he was running late, and by then Emily would be back, surely.