Chapter 13

The one in which Kev's confessions reach a crescendo, his clothes go into the shed and Lizzie swings from would-be erotic adventures on a yacht to another bout of counselling...

Thin Ice

1 am – The second black bag of his clothes was heavier than the first. God, I think I sprained my shoulder. It’s a surprisingly long haul from the bedroom, downstairs, along the hall, through the kitchen (with the L-shaped porch the cat can’t turn round in, nevermind get swung in), out across the gravel to the shed. That’s where I’ve dumped it all. I’ve tipped everything out onto the greasy, oil smeared floor of the workshop because I want to hang onto the bin bags. Bastard! They’re of far more use to me now than he is! How long does it take to say “I made a bit of a mistake – goodbye”? I hate him! I hate his guts! And every other part of him. He was always so very boring in bed – a bull in a china shop. Nothing to miss there then. She’s welcome to his sweaty, unimaginative attentions! And the weather’s appalling! Five below at least, the odd bitter flurry of snow, ice everywhere, nearly landed flat on my back twice lugging his belongings across snow-dusted gravel under the glare of the security lights.

     Funny really, when I think about it whilst trying to keep my balance across the frosted stones. He’s always been a wee bit paranoid about his equipment getting stolen and, after the lorry got broken into right outside the house two years ago, we had to have a security firm out, great big outdoor lights fitted, infra red beams in two separate locations and an alarm that goes off (ear-splittingly loud) whenever one of the neighbours crosses to bring fresh eggs or an invitation to the school ceilidh. Yet he doesn’t seem to be worried about losing half his business to me, about making me feel like I want to torch all his possessions, about the possibility of giving everything up and suffering the consequences. Isn’t that worse than being robbed? I think so. Oh yes, I think so.

     Back in the bedroom now. The sheets smell of my talcum powder. He hates my talcum powder. He says it gives him asthma even though I usually only wear it between my toes. Tonight I have it everywhere. ‘Nantucket Briar’, lightly dusting his pillow, I mean the pillow. The Spare One. The one next to me.  

     Lying upside down on the bed, I appraise his side of the room past uncorrected astigmatism. Don’t have the energy for a third run. Probably isn’t necessary - it’s bloody fuzzy but I can tell how little there is left. Empty drawers pulled out, laundry baskets full of clean clothes he hasn’t had a chance to put away yet missing, magazines and phone charging equipment removed. It looks surprisingly good. The place feels like mine, all mine. Heart sinking. Damn. In some ways it’s a great shame that he’s going to come back. Yes, it is. Because he is going to come back, and he does love me, and I know by now the sort of thing he’s going to say: “What’s the problem now? Came home to you, didn’t I? Doesn’t that mean I love you?”

    

2 am - Snow’s starting to build up thick on the Velux. I hadn’t expected that. It seemed too cold and bright for heavy snow – but that could have been the effect of the temporary blindness occasioned by stumbling like some soft porn lady-Santa into the glare of the security lights wearing only a shortie nightie, large sack of someone else’s clothes swinging from one shoulder.

     In this position I can watch the white powdery flakes settle like ‘Nantucket Briar’ on the glass. What the hell is he doing out there? Is he mad? Maybe he came off the road and is stuck unconscious in a ditch somewhere? He could be injured or even dead. My stomach lurches at the thought. What’s the form? Is it natural to be planning a farewell bust-up yet still fretting over the safety of the soon-to-be-ex-lover? Grabbing my mobile, I call up his number, no 1 in my phonebook. A moment’s delay then ‘Call Rejected’ flashes up. This is not what I need. This is definitely not what I need. Something about the phrase (most likely the ‘rejected’ part) has the naked-flame-to-blue-touch-paper effect and I’m back on my feet, pushing on a pair of totally unsuitable silver pumps, unhooking hangers from his side of the wardrobe, furiously filling a third sack for the shed.   

3.12 am – half asleep and dreaming. On a yacht, all cream gloss and silver chrome glinting in water-reflected sunlight. I seem to be wearing a gold bikini and, because it’s a dream, not even a hint of stretch-marked sagginess gets to spoil the effect by trying to drift south over the front of a high-legged tanga. I am lithe, toned and golden. Crewing for me are six blokes I’ve always fancied. I have a collection of these, so periodic substitutions are no problem. Tonight we have Ed the central heating engineer, unknown journalist from channel 4 news who knows all about the Middle East, Gerard Depardieu, Johnny Depp, Daniel the hairdresser, Jeremy Paxman and that very young man with the red hair who came round doing a survey on private car use. Hang on, that’s seven not six. Oh well, let’s make an exception. The weather out here (wherever we are) is always glorious – they can take turns sleeping on the poop deck or something. I’m going to spend two weeks on the ocean, friendly captive guys rubbing sun oil all over me and allowing me to return the favour. They’ll get on fine with one another, I’ll have no female competition and the sex will be endlessly fresh and exciting. Well, for me anyway.

     Suddenly the bloody awful burglar alarm goes off at the foot of stairs.

     Kev’s back.

     Everyone on the yacht disperses in a panic to try and grab their belongings. I think we are about to be torpedoed. Once the God-awful reverberations have stopped, I can hear car wheels crunching snow and gravel. Heigh-ho, dreams are one thing and reality quite another. Maybe I should try telling Kev that? Around about the time I point out that spending most of the night with one woman then coming home to get into bed with the one you’ve chosen to make a life with can result in getting your head kicked in.

     

Limbs feel middle-of-the-night heavy and my shoulder aches like hell, so I’m still upside down on the duvet like a beached starfish when he strides into the room.

      “See my stuff’s in the shed.” He says, in a barely-able-to-contain-my-righteous-indignation kind of voice. “Do you want me out?”

     He’s upside down in my blurred field of vision, a burly, menacing silhouette backlit by the landing light. Didn’t make it onto the yacht, did he? Of course I want him out. I want to drop kick him a long way away from me and my life, away from my beautiful children, my unsuspecting friends, all my warm, fuzzy feelings. Oh yeah. He needs to spend some time wearing a hair shirt and living in a barrel at the foot of a cliff.   

     “No,” I say, and I can’t wait to see where we go next.

     “Good,” he sighs, almost to himself. He kicks off his shoes. I find enough mental co-ordination to roll myself up the bed, place my throbbing head on a pillow and get in under the duvet. It’s my duvet. This was my bed before he came along. I want to be in it before he is.

      “You don’t think having to wait here alone while you spend your night with another woman – a woman you’ve been having an affair with – is bound to unsettle me then? You’ve been fucking ages! How long does it take for Christ’s sake?”

      “I know, I know!” he says, shrugging off his clothes and getting into bed beside me. “We did a lot of talking – and I think I’m leaning towards us.”

     He thinks he’s leaning towards us. I am speechless. Whilst I try to digest the indigestible, mini-me inside my head jumping up and down in total rage, he babbles on like he just returned from a quiz night at the Station hotel.

     “You wouldn’t believe the ice out there! Nearly lost it a couple of times coming over Fern Brae. Must be minus ten or worse. D’you know how many rigs are out there at the moment? Thought I counted upwards of eleven…”

     My heart’s thudding in my chest like it’s going to burst. I have never, NEVER felt this physically stressed before. Giving birth doesn’t even come close. He puts his arms around me. They’re cold.

   

“You’re an idiot,” I tell him. “What have you spent all your time doing?” Part of me (a big part), doesn’t really want to know the answer to this question. I just have a feeling about it. Not a good feeling. No, a long way from that. Maybe I’m primed to think the worst because I’ve reached a point here, tonight, where a future without him, although painful to my heart, beckons like an approachable primary school teacher trying to make the new girl feel welcome. On the other hand, maybe I really do sense something truly disturbing in the offing.

     “Talking.” He says.

     “You were talking?”

     “Yep. Just talking.”

     “Just talking.”

    “Yep. I promise you, I didn’t sleep with her this time.”

     This time.

     This Time.

     THIS TIME? Suddenly all I can see are pies. Lemon Meringue ones. Lemon Meringue pies squashed into yoghurt pots.

     I grew up with a brother less than a year younger than me. We were very close, of course, and yet not that compatible, so as children we fought a lot. I remember from early childhood the uncontrollable rage it is possible to feel towards a sibling, ‘I would kill him if I could’ coming as a white hot, five-year-old realization, closely followed by the sure and certain knowledge that it would be a wholly unacceptable way of dealing with my emotions and mum would certainly stop my pocket money. When, aged 18, he crashed his motorbike and killed himself, I remembered every feeling I’d ever had towards him and wished they could’ve all been positive. It seemed he was gone so suddenly and everything we’d ever fallen out about was utterly meaningless. Perhaps I have a problem with anger? Perhaps the experience of losing my brother makes it hard for me to let my anger out? Perhaps I just…

     “You fucking bastard! You fucking, fucking bastard!” The expletives are accompanied by frantic kicking and tearing out of chest hair. “You left our home, had sex with that whore of a woman and came back for supper? And you brought me yoghurt? How dare you do that! How fucking dare you! I was generous enough to give you space to go and sort it out – I trusted you, again! What kind of idiot am I?”

     He’s managed to extricate himself from the bed-based battering and is lurking somewhere in the shadows. “I thought you knew…” he says hoarsely and there’s genuine fear in his voice.

     “You thought I knew? You thought I’d actually in a million years expect you to leave my arms, go have sex with someone else then come back and call me brave? What the fuck planet are you on Kev? What is wrong with you?”

     I can see him stooping beside the slightly luminous exercise ball, one hand on his pre-existent lower back injury, the other rubbing at the heel marks on his thighs. He’s not saying anything.

     “Kev, if I had even faintly suspected you had done something like that, I’d have waited behind the kitchen door with a wine bottle and broken it over your cheating head! What the hell makes you think you can treat me like that?”

     “Lizzie…”

     “Who the hell d’you think you are?”

    “Lizzie!”

     “What!”

    “I’ve got something else to tell you…”

     I think it was Plato who developed the theory that knowledge is not something we acquire as a result of observing the world at work around us but something we realize on the inside – a fuzzy feeling presumably, that suddenly gels and puts on the mental light bulb. This then, is my moment of Platonic realization. It is also the moment that shit-head Kevin Gates gets the closest he’s probably ever been (except for the time that scrap merchant beat him up) to a very ugly death. I am about to have my pocket money stopped.

     “You brought her here, didn’t you? DIDN’T YOU!”

     Leap out of bed with the intention of grabbing him and beating him to a pulp with a bedside lamp. But it’s too dark to see properly (especially without contacts) so I end up piling into his corner, in the dark, brandishing an alarm clock. I am easily repelled but come back with fists and knees as the alarm clock bounces to the floor beeping pathetically. He doesn’t fight back. He holds my arms when he can, deflects my knees with his own and does it all like a man who knows he just has to go through this.

      Eventually his stoicism reaches me. It reaches me and it puzzles me. Why doesn’t he go? Why doesn’t he just run from the room naked, put on some of those clothes I removed to the shed and disappear out of my life, oil-stained, terrified, speechlessly repentant but without a backward glance? What does he want from me that he will cower naked in the corner of the room while I rain blows on him?

     My arms go limp. One calf is throbbing from an encounter with his knee, complete lung collapse could be imminent.

    

Retreating back to the bed, I curl up in a ball. My breath won’t be back for hours but still I have to pant out the questions.

     “Once? More than once?”

    “Once. It didn’t feel good.”

    “In our bed? “

    “No!”

    “Well don’t say it as though it’s something you would never stoop to! You’ve done some pretty low stooping!”

     “In Eldest’s bed…”

     “What!”

     “Well the bed itself was mine if you remember, from when I was a teenager…”

    “Oh, and that meant you could sleep with another woman on it in our house?”

    “No! Oh God, I don’t know, But it wasn’t in this one – and the boys were away, both of them. Can’t remember where…”

     My eyes seem to be getting steadily more accustomed to the dark, or maybe it’s just that the blood rushing to my head has sharpened my vision. As far as I can see, he’s hunched over a now-empty chest of drawers and he looks like he’s trying to hold himself up. I haven’t seen him like this since I broke the news we were expecting Youngest.

     “I’m really mixed up,” he says and it sounds like he could be crying again. “Maybe I need counselling or something?”

     “You’re getting it,” I remind him. “Later today.”

     He doesn’t say anything else, just sobs quietly while the moment stretches. Gradually I can feel my heart rate slow and pain rushes in where there was just an adrenalin overload. It’s cold outside the duvet. I have loved him for ten years – and I can’t help feeling a certain pity for him, for us. Want to kick myself for feeling that way, of course, but it’s probably unavoidable. He’s right. He really is mixed up. Who isn’t a mess these days? Could it be that, because of his up-bringing, he has only a limited appreciation of the destructive force of these actions?  It might even feel comfortable to him in some twisted way, the hideous, morality-bending stress of it just a blast from his family past. It feels to me as though my poor, messed up Kev bends with the emotional wind and the hurricane blowing at the moment is called Juliet Sanders. It’s a dark, manipulative phenomenon, hell-bent on ruining him, but it makes him feel as though, with hardly any effort, he can fly.

     My arms go out without any conscious thought process initiating the action. I’m still here on the ground and that’s where I’ll stay but I want to hold him, one last time, before she dashes him to pieces against a mountain face.

     He climbs into bed and into my arms. “Please Lizzie,” he says. “I know I’m stupid. Don’t hate me for it.”

    

   6.20 am - For two or maybe three hours we’ve lain, uncomfortably, together.

     “Do you want me to go?” he asks finally.

     “Kev, I can’t think of any other way.”

     “Ok.”

     He gets up quietly, sighing deeply from pain and sadness and sheer lack of rest. I hear him pull out his underwear drawer in the dark. Don’t think he’ll have much luck there, I only left one pair of boxers – they were orange and looked like Eldest’s. He’ll have to wear what he came in with or nothing at all.

     He leaves the room.

     Silence.

     Like a huge sigh of relief, sleep overtakes me.

     When I wake again a short time later it’s to the sound of a car pulling away from the house.

     He’s gone.

     It’s over.

     I lie for several minutes without breathing (or that’s what it feels like) then Youngest’s bedroom door opens and I hear him singing to himself on the landing. I want to see him. I think I want to sing with him. I want something to dissolve the fucking misery.

     Take a hot shower to wash away the night’s stress sweat and polish my pale, traumatised features with newly-purchased Elizabeth Arden soap-free face wash. Follow up with expensive recently-purchased moisturizer and mascara. Spray comfort-purchase perfume in the air and walk through it. Pull on favourite plum coloured velvet pants, now a bit baggy, and grey merino wool sweater (his, now mine). Open lined box containing pale topaz-yellow semi-precious pendant bought by self for self by way of Christmas present. He doesn’t know I have it but, in a strange way, it’s something to remember him by – the Christmas gift he never had time to purchase due to the pressure of leading a double life.

  

    Taking a deep breath, I put on a smile and walk out to hug Youngest, who has emptied the Lego box onto the floor and is now an island in a sea of plastic bricks.

     “Are you going to put all that away when you’ve finished?”

     “Yep.” (he won’t)

    “Have you had breakfast?”

    “No. Couldn’t find any milk.”

   “You can never find anything.”

   “I know. It’s not fair.”

    “Well let’s go and see if I can find any, shall we?”

   He nods, throws down a half-constructed space vehicle probably made by his brother because Youngest hasn’t yet quite seen the point of Lego, and follows me down the stairs. On reaching the kitchen, he nips ahead to snatch a piece of paper from the work surface.

    “What’s that?” I ask, though think I already know. “Give it to me now…”

    “I think it’s a note from Daddy,” he says, handing it over. “What does it say?”

    I have every intention of making up something bland to reassure him (dad’s gone away on business / gone to visit granny for a few days / gone to test the quality of the access platforms in Australia) but no lies are necessary. I can read it to him straight off the page.

     “It says – ‘Couldn’t find any milk. Gone to the village to fetch some. Back soon.”

 

 

The Turning Point

Later that morning - “Now how did I know it would come to this?” Stella’s sitting calmly just under the window, having broken off from the novel she’s been reading whilst (plainly) anticipating my wet-faced entrance.

     I have run up the staircase ahead of Kev and, in floods of tears, thrown open the door to our counselling room. I think of myself as one great big bloody parcel of misery and now here I am, delivered into semi-psychiatric care. Bugger - my mascara’s all over the place.

     Stella motions me to a seat beside the radiator. Next to it is a small table and a box of Kleenex so I guess this is the cry-baby seat. Pulling out a big handful of tissues, I rub them round my face before rolling them up into a ball and squeezing them repeatedly like a hand-exerciser. The cause of my agitation, huge looming monster that he is, appears in the doorway. “Hello” he says, very quietly, with a butter-wouldn’t-melt smile, and mentally I’m pulling back the trigger on a double-barrelled shot-gun.  Stella asks, “So how are things?” and I let go with both barrels.

     “I’ve had it! I’ve had enough! He says he wants to stay but he was out most of the night ‘ending it’ with his other woman! I feel really ill and I can’t go on. I’ve had enough! None of it’s right! It’s like he’s stringing us both along and you have to wonder about a man who can behave that way. We more or less decided he was going to leave but when I went downstairs this morning he’d left a note saying he’d just popped into the village to get some milk! I can’t carry on like this!”

     As I speak Stella’s face begins to lose some of its ethereal calm. By the time I’ve reached my last sentence, she is (discreetly) sucking in her breath and drawing on her considerable reserves of self-control-in-the-interests-of-diplomacy. They aren’t enough and she interrupts anyway.

     “Oh no, no, no, no, no! No, you can’t carry on like that!”

     She’s addressing Kev, who’s now seated himself and has started to weep down the front of his ugly fleece., “No! You can’t string both these women along! Who do you want to be with Kevin? You have to make up your mind or you see what happens?” Now she’s indicating me, Exhibit A, snotty-nosed, panda-eyed, grey from lack of sleep. Kev just stares up blankly from under wet eyelashes so she has to explain. “The decision gets made for you, that’s what. You get kicked out whether that’s what you want or not.” She pauses, still staring at him. “Is that what you want Kevin? Do you want to be thrown out?”

    “No!” he sobs thickly. “I want to stay with Lizzie – but it would almost be a relief if she kicked me out. I deserve it!”

   

     Stella leans back in her chair as though she suddenly knows where she is with this. I can’t say I feel the same way myself.

     “Would it be a relief if I got dramatic and kicked you out in anger?” I ask him. “You can go if you want, you know. I don’t want to do it the throwing crockery and swearing way, but you can go.”

     “Yes, indeed,” says Stella. “We can finish this! Lizzie’s still a young woman, she’ll move on, she’ll find someone else and you two won’t have to live like this any longer. It’s very painful you know Kevin. People can only live with it for so long.”

     We wait while Kev snorts loudly and seems to pull himself together a bit. “I want us to go on,” he says eventually. “But ending the other thing, it’s as difficult as cutting off a limb.”

    Cutting off a limb? I am so sick of his theatricality! “Well for heaven’s sake there should be no need for self-mutilation,” I tell him. “I’ll just exit your life, that’s all.”

    “That would be as bad! It’s still cutting off a limb – just a different one!”

    Stella leans forward again, bright eyed, animated. She’s very experienced in these matters and I sense that she doesn’t like what she’s hearing one bit. Underneath it all, what Kev seems to want is to have his cake and eat it, but he’s dressing up his selfishness with talk of powerful emotional bonds and their painful effects on him. If he’s after anybody’s sympathy, he’s going to be disappointed.

    “No, no, no, no, no!” says Stella again, this time in his face. “Kevin, you have to decide! These women have lives to live!”

     His shoulders are still hunched and I get the awful feeling we could go on like this all day. Stella doesn’t know him the way I’ve gotten to know him recently. Experienced she may be, but I find myself dubious about her ability to get him to make any kind of decision – Kev’s level of emotional confusion is off the scale. Even though he loves me, he may have wrecked our relationship forever. This being the case, deliberately giving the big heave-ho to the only other woman ever likely to listen to his story and forgive his behaviour (on the laughably deluded basis that all this happened because he’d finally met the ‘right woman’) is a terribly difficult thing to contemplate. He might seriously be better off signing up for the Foreign Legion.

    I am quickly becoming suffused with a prickling hopelessness but, when Stella looks my way, she has a determined furrow between her eyebrows.

     “Lizzie?” she asks.

     “Yes?”

     “Could I have twenty minutes alone with him? Could you wait downstairs?” Then she turns to Kev again. “I’m asking Lizzie to wait downstairs because I know I wouldn’t want to hear my husband talk about his feelings for another woman,” she says and I can’t be bothered to tell her the deeply twisted bastard’s been doing that for weeks. Instead I grab extra tissues and run gratefully from the room.

     It’s very, very hard but somehow I manage to resist the temptation to thunder down the narrow staircase and keep on going – through the small green front door, onto the street, perhaps to the railway station, perhaps the airport, God, even the delicatessen in Union Street with its freshly baked chocolate croissants, anywhere, to remind me I have a life of my own to live and I’m entitled to live it free from this kind of pain. Then I remember. Youngest’s hanging around, believing mummy and daddy are seeing the Accountant while he waits in reception. Cracking open the door with the word ‘kitchen’ stencilled on it, I spot him, muddy wellies up on the furniture, back copies of the Reader’s Digest spread liberally around him. Better than the Deli, he and I take tea in cracked mugs, and talk about Nintendos, skateboards and Mrs Harris’s preferred approach to the teaching of maths whilst upstairs Stella helps Kev work out whether to lose an arm or a leg or his entire life to date. I haven’t heard of Counsellors behaving quite like this but I am very, very grateful to Stella. If ever two people needed a third to strongly, quietly take control, it’s us, right now. Even if the desired outcome is still a big, glowing question mark. While Youngest takes a few moments to study pictures of African Shrunken Heads, my mind broadens sufficiently to consider another aspect of the Bigger Picture. I have friends who say that men are slowly but surely making themselves redundant, refusing point blank to do housework on the grounds that it’s bad for their self-esteem yet, at the same time, claiming that the breadwinning role is  something they can no longer handle on their own. It can feel like they have to be cleaned up after like children and want to spend their weekends mooching at whatever takes their fancy (like children). And women? Well, it’s very difficult to avoid forming the impression that we’re still expected to offer what mum used to with the added bonus that we can provide sex too -  as long as we’re not sulking about having to put the bin bags out by ourselves again. So why do we bother? I can’t answer that, but I do know that a love story plays an essential part in making things possible. There has to be a love story. Does anybody’s love story survive infidelity?

    

     Twenty-five minutes later and there are slow, heavy footsteps on the stairs – no voices. What does this mean? Someone fumbles briefly with the door handle and Kev comes in, stricken-faced, eyes red with crying. He pulls me to my feet, causing lukewarm tea from a half empty mug to splash down my plum velvet pants. Looking up at him I realize my pants aren’t the only big wet mess in the room. “I love you Lizzie,” he breathes wetly into my ear. Over his shoulder I can see Stella, planted in the doorway like the manifestation of a strict conscience, ready to bite the unwary and shake them into tearful submission. Once again, and despite everything, I can’t help feeling a little bit sorry for him. I wish neither of us had to go through this. Somewhat unnerved by the seriousness of the atmosphere, Youngest and I fold up the Reader’s Digests and silently grab our coats. No-one tells us not to and Kevin’s just standing there, wiping his eyes, so we shuffle towards the door. It’s a very small room, crowded now with the four of us and all our complex emotional baggage. Squeezing past Stella, I mumble some thanks, but I have no idea whether or not they’re in order. She senses my uncertainty, keeps herself to herself and wishes me luck in a whisper.

     Outside in the rain, Kev takes my hand, hurrying us up stone steps to where the car’s parked. “I know what I have to do now, Lizzie,” he says as we break into a jog. “I have to burn my boats with her…”

Will anything really get burned beyond Kev's fingers? Does Youngest wonder why the accountant made daddy cry? Why the hell is Lizzie bothering, and is there any milk at home?

Many, many more burning questions in Chapter 14...