My excursion to the offices of The Highland Press last week hadn’t gone too badly. I’d really hit it off with the pleasantly efficient lady running admin and was promptly offered a job. Only reception work, but it would have been an escape from the house and the ‘Situation.’ Kev, however, said £5 per hour was ridiculous and I was worth one hell of a lot more at home. He also suggested I go out and try my hand at pricing the tree work jobs. I’m to take a camera and plenty of notes. Of course, I fully intend to do this, but I haven’t given up my own plan to broaden my personal horizons which I consider the only positive response to my recent summary dismissal as Kev’s semi-precious significant other.

     The concept of Victim Support still interests me and that’s why I’m out here on Academy Street in the Killer Wind From Hell, inappropriately dressed and struggling with the kind of very high heels I haven’t worn in at least nine years.

     After tottering a good three hundred yards, my stockings (optimistically entitled ‘Hold-Ups’) start to inch their way down over-moisturised legs. Yanking them up through the folds of my dress is a highly inelegant procedure, and will very soon make great big holes in them. Another fifty yards and the situation worsens significantly. Wish to God I’d had any practice at all in wearing what I consider to be bizarre ‘lady-clothes’. What is it all about? Of course we’re all, man or woman, much more comfortable mid-winter in soft cords and stout boots, anything else is just completely and obviously ridiculous! So why, for us girls, does ‘making a good impression’ mean dressing up to make yourself feel exposed, vulnerable and nervous about the potential under-performance of your leg-coverings?

     Said leg-coverings begin to settle round my ankles in enormous wrinkles. Diving into the very, very small Building Society on the corner, I pant “Sorry!” and force the door closed on the meteorological ferocity outside. The place is about the size of a generously appointed telephone box but at least there are only female staff in at the moment, and they’re safely tucked away behind glass. Wish the same could be said for my undergarments.

    “I’m on my way to an interview,” I announce breathlessly. “And I’m wearing these bloody awful things called Hold-Ups which are falling down…” At this point, I throw the hem of my frock up in the air, catch it under my chin and proceed to do a thorough job of re-positioning wayward elastic. Once sorted, I smile winningly and adjust my coiffure. Two small, blank faces staring out at me over paperwork suggest a little further explanation is required. “You see, I’ve got to give a short presentation,” I babble. “And I’m terrified my stockings will fall down in the middle of it!”

    There are giggles behind the screens and a voice from somewhere out back shouts – “Won’t harm your chances, that, dear!”

     Back out on the street, Hold-ups and I make it another two hundred yards before the situation deteriorates to crisis point. We make it across the bridge while I hang on to them through my dress but, by the time I’ve had to huddle suspiciously close to a line of school children queuing to cross at the lights, adjusting my skirts and appearing to fiddle with my knickers, I am desperate for somewhere else to dive into and do a proper job. Last chance before the Victim Support office are the Inland Revenue Offices coming up on the right, complete with helpfully yawning automatic doors. Leaping into the foyer like something untidy the weather fetched in (which I am), I am faced with twin, burly security guards in uniform, who eye me with understandable suspicion. But I have to do it, I absolutely have to, so I shout “Stockings falling down!” turn my back, hitch up my skirts and yank. The broad-yet-useless elastic makes a dramatic thwacking noise against ice cold thighs. When I turn to deliver a polite “Goodbye,” there are grins and a certain level of amusement, which I steadfastly ignore. I am on a mission. A mission of emancipation. I require release from the life I have led thus far, a life which has been lived largely in support of my nearest and dearest and which, despite this or even maybe because of it, has culminated in domestic catastrophe. There’s no going back and under-performing hosiery or mocking government bouncers will not deter me.

The interview takes place in a very small room containing three other people and a flip chart. Effortlessly fielding questions about my own strengths and weaknesses and what I feel I can offer Victim Support, I am lulled in to an early sense of false security. Then they hit me with the killer. They refer to their requirement that I give a short presentation on how I might up the profile of their services locally. During what little thinking time I’ve been able to give the subject inbetween dredging the darker corners of my imagination for revolting things to send Juliet Sanders in the post and even more revolting ways of making Kev wish he were dead, I’ve come up with a design for a nice new lapel pin. Sadly there are only two colours of marker next to the flip chart so my finished drawing is rather lacklustre. Maybe that’s why the three of them sit there, heads tilted slightly to one side, expressions unenthusiastically blank. The exhausted elastic of one of my stocking tops is hanging below hem level by the time I’m re-seated and the head one, Donald, is saying reassuring things about everyone being valuable in their own way. Donald is well-dressed, thoughtful and obviously due to retire any day now. My moonstone is stuck in my cleavage and I am so not going to get his job.

That Evening – It seems Kev called in at the BMW garage on the way home from work tonight. When I finally make it into the bedroom, after trying to coach Eldest through some unadventurous poetry analysis for an English test, it is full of large, dusty rectangular boxes and Kev is standing naked amid a sea of black leather.

    “Oh I enjoyed it. So did the Revenue. Don’t think I got the job though.”

    “I said too many of the wrong sorts of things and then my stockings fell down.” I indicate the black Lederhosen which he has flung over one arm. “So what’s all this Kev?”

    “You might want to get your kit off.” He says.

     Half an hour later, I stagger downstairs, stiff-legged due to un-wraxed body-armour, resembling a cross between Emma Peel and a small, black alien with an oversized silver head. Eldest is stunned.

     “I thought you didn’t approve of motorbikes because of what happened to your brother?” he says, accusatory.

    Youngest puts his head down on the kitchen table and pretends to sob. “Motorbikes are dangerous! Cars don’t see you on the road! You don’t have any protection! Only nutters ride them!” he repeats, just like we taught him to, when he began to show even the slightest interest in bikes.   

Bedtime – The bedroom now reeks of leather. Kev’s lolling backwards and forwards on the exercise ball trying to make his lower back strong enough to pull a wheelie. When he’s had enough of that he rolls onto the bed beside me with a grunt, and lies puffing as if in pain till I ask him what the problem is. “Could do with a bit of a massage,” he says into the pillow.

    The physical rigours of tree surgery have always meant that my hands-on manipulation of Kev’s musculature has been a necessity rather than an indulgence. He used to suffer the most awful cramp in his legs after climbing with spurs, jumping out of bed in the middle of the night, screeching and hopping up and down the landing in a loud and disturbing attempt to dissipate the pain. I wonder that Eldest doesn’t think parental sex becomes excruciatingly painful as you get older. Then there were all the strains and pulls and bruisings and the general stresses of the job which made his neck stiffen up rigid as an ironing board. I have become very good at releasing Kev’s tension and the fact that I don’t feel very tender and nurturing at the moment simply isn’t a problem. I can stick my elbows in him as hard as I like and ultra-vigorous head massage is quite enjoyable, especially when it makes his features go all squishy. For the lower back, where he’s sensitive, I stand up holding on to the headboard, pressing my heels into his collapsing vertebrae and twisting. Of course the whole thing turns him on. What with that, the smell of leather and his delight at possessing 1200 CCs of pulsating fire-wheeled BMW along with all the gear necessary to ride it, I find myself locked before long in a tit-for-tat situation involving my shoulders, the headboard, and the sort of massage where ankles are used to keep his ears warm while my pelvis gets a right good flexing.

     Funny how the pain in the butt only reasserts itself after he’s come, thrown my virtually lifeless form back down on the bed and rolled over to think about work tomorrow.

   “It probably is, but it’s not your fault. It’s my own stupid fault.”

   “I want to tell you not to be so hard on yourself but…”

   “I can’t. You should be really hard on yourself. You should beat yourself up.”

    “Not going to toss and turn all night are you?”

   “Just put everything out of your head and go to sleep.”

   “Alright then! Think about those jobs you’re going to look at tomorrow. For God’s sake don’t under-price them – we don’t want to be working for nothing. Oh, and thanks for putting the invoices out. It can’t be easy concentrating.”

  “It so bloody isn’t.”

   He reaches for my hand under the duvet and holds it gently, stroking his thumb across my fingers. “D’you hate me Lizzie?” he asks after a moment.

  “Are you sure one day you won’t just snap and cut my throat while I sleep?”

  “No. I’m not sure.”

  “Will you hold off while we work things out?”

  “How long for?”

  “Say…forty years or so?”

     Wandering round Tesco in that awful, mood-altering artificial light caused me to think of how much nicer things had been before my Kev had become a ghastly philanderer.

     It was near the crisps that it had all come back to me. Up until then the afternoon hadn’t been too bad – bought a pair of sparkly shoes with velvet heels in M and S and had a make-over in Debenhams involving ‘Bad-Gal’ mascara and ‘lip plumper’ which made me look like many-legged insects had settled on my eyelids and my lips had been unevenly botoxed.

    Right at this moment, I am standing in front of the two young guys who were driving the Clio. I am crying and ‘Bad-Gal’s running in black rivulets down my face. Insurance details? No. Insurance generalities are all I can offer – that is, I know I have some. I’m ok, but it was a close one the way those tinned tomatoes came off the back seat.

     They want to know how it happened. A meaningfully consequential series of events is hard to identify, but I do my best. Something about queuing in the dark to get onto the Kessock roundabout with thoughts of my shattered love story running round my head and Natasha Bedingfield asking how many frogs she was gonna have to kiss before she found her Prince had affected my ability to differentiate between the reality of my position behind the wheel in heavy traffic, and my desire to be slumped on a sofa with a large gin. The red Clio had lurched onto the roundabout and, looking to my right for approaching buses/lorries/scooters/waiters bearing strong alcoholic beverages, I had advanced also, only to feel the engine cough and die suddenly. Coming to, I had noticed my suggestive proximity to the tiny red bug of a car just beyond my vast, chrome bumper and wondered – did I stop, or was I stopped?

    It had been very hard to tell. The Clio was so far below that no evidence of collision had been visible. On the other hand, there were cans of tomatoes in my foot well.

     Everything had then begun to happen in slow motion. The Clio took forever to move off round the roundabout with me following – headlights illuminating a hatch, on the back, all bent to hell, and two figures inside, animated. They had exited the roundabout onto the bridge approach and, when they indicated left into a lay-by, I knew I had to do the same.

     “I’ve only had it a week,” says the tallest young man, hardly older (or so it seems to me) than Eldest.

     “God, I’m really sorry – it was all my fault, I’ve spent an hour and a half at the Retail Park and I don’t think I know where the hell I am.”

    “Not sure. I think my Insurers pay your Insurers. Why don’t we just swap phone numbers? I’ll ring you as soon as I get home.”

    Once we’ve reassured each other, I give him my name, address and telephone number, take his, and climb back into the pick-up to find a six-pint container of milk bleeding-out on the back seat.

Half-an-hour Later – Kev’s been manually hauling blocks of Douglas Fir out of an ungrateful customer’s back garden for several hours. The customer has told him it isn’t his fault if his back garden is totally inaccessible and he doesn’t see why he should have to pay extra just because Kev and Gary have stuck at it, in the sleet, for all those hours in order to leave his garden tidy.

     He’s washing his hands while he tells me this. When he stops for breath, I decide to deliver the news of my road traffic incident without preamble.

     The tap’s still running but now he’s slumped in the stainless steel bowl like a wilted sunflower.

     There are some relationships which, even without proposals, promises, rings, solemn vows, and families throwing confetti, will simply last forever. Sorry. This doesn’t mean it’s possible to meet Mr Right and live happily ever after. It means that, if you’re not very, very careful, someone is liable to come into your life you simply cannot ever free yourself from. I think it’s called Love. Less of a bond, more of a dreadful bind. And it cuts both ways.

      Today is the day the (so-far) love of my life finally gets round to discussing my many and various failings, the ones, remember, which meant he was forced to test the water and see if it was possible to shack up with somebody else instead.

§         Apparently I can be too ‘feisty’ and argumentative and I have a very sharp tongue.

§         It shocks him if I complain to a waiter that my food’s cold.

§         I don’t understand the pressures he’s under and

§         I need to stop ‘nipping his head’ with my anxieties.

§         Eldest gets between us and he feels I side with Eldest too often and

§         Everything in the communication sphere is difficult because I’m good with words and he isn’t.

§         He needs more time away from work and he needs my help to manage that.

     I guess it’s supposed to be an exercise in honesty but, given the circumstances, I can’t help feeling we might be taking a long, long journey down the justification highway. Look at it this way:

• Can his sleeping with someone else behind my back and bringing me yoghurt really be my fault at all?
• When I put up with the kitchen being a DIY bombsite for three years, using a door on two stools as a work surface, did my eventual impatience to render it functional before the kids left home ‘nip his head’ to such a degree the idea of cheating on me suddenly seemed fair?
• Can he really think he’s the only one the business stresses out?
• And does not being that good with words mean you have to betray your partner’s trust to get your point across?

    Stella treats him with kid gloves. Maybe she likes him? Maybe she likes me and thinks she has to move heaven and earth to save this relationship for me? When she looks at me for a response I have nothing to say. It slightly embarrasses me that a man can behave like this and, because I love him, I have to sit with him while he does it. I feel like I want to jump up and apologise to Stella on his behalf – something like, “Well, you know, he’s not himself at the moment! It’ll be coming out all wrong, maybe we can come back when some time has elapsed…?” I’d give anything to know what she’s actually thinking. Does she think he’s a sensitive, badly-used soul whose head should never be nipped? Or does she think I’m the world’s biggest loser for sticking with him?

    The session feels like it goes on forever. After a while, I remove a little part of my consciousness and sit it down in a quiet corner with an imaginary mug of tea to think. It’s as though he’s locked on a self-destruct course – first the lies and the cheating and the using someone for sex, then the hunting around for justifications which, given we’ve recently embarked on the path towards reconciliation, can only set us back. I don’t believe for a moment this is really what he wants. So how come he’s trapped between a rock and a hard place?

    And then it suddenly hits me – the irony of it, as sweet as honey. He’s stuck because I love him. If I didn’t love him, I’d have put him out of my life like a bag of garbage at a very early stage - probably the morning he broke the news. The bonfire would’ve been of his belongings rather than hedge clippings and he would’ve been able to dismiss the situation as the result of a very bad relationship which had to end. He’d be able to say that everything had been wrong but only he had been brave enough to end it. To Juliet he would have been able to present himself as the victim of a bad relationship with the wrong person, which would’ve left her free to imagine herself the right person and to hate me unreservedly for making Kev unhappy.

     To me he would have been the biggest bastard in the world and hanging onto that thought would have filled me with anger, adrenalin and energy – just exactly what’s required to help one start a new life. But with the allure of free sex, the excitement of having to see each other on the quiet and the fact that I was in Edinburgh and therefore as easy to minimize as an unwanted pop-up, Kev had completely overlooked the, rather important, little fact that I loved him. Completely overlooked it! Even in the odd quiet moment when thoughts about us must have flitted through his mind, he had sat on them quickly believing, I suppose, that all was totally lost because he had cheated on me and the fact of this could not be undone.

     Perhaps he thought I was going to kick him out for sure – and panic does not sit well alongside rational deliberation. Panic makes you want to tell face-saving lies and then run away.

     Problem was, when the ‘inevitable’ happened and the truth about what had been going on behind my back had emerged, it had turned out we loved each other rather a lot, that in fact we had a great deal to lose and that there was no way we could part easily – if we could part at all, ever.

     So here he is. Stuck in the middle. A bastard to me because he lied and cheated and a bastard to her – because he lied and cheated. If he’s digging for an explanation which will make him look less bastardly he’d better take off his jacket and roll up his sleeves. We’re talking major excavation.

     Somewhere very far away, Stella’s voice is saying my name. She’s saying my name in conjunction with those of my children, some figures relating to our annual turnover and sundry observations on the nature of family-foundational commitment. Mentally re-joining the proceedings and sensing a requirement to contribute, I manage to come out with a few suggestions of how I, myself, may improve the quality of our family life along the lines of worrying less about the kids and spending more quality time with faithless Kev.

Immediately the words are out of my mouth however, I realize I have offered to do the complete opposite of what fairness, kindness and common sense dictate in this situation. I have offered to pander to my errant partner’s weak side, to reward cowardly, self-indulgent, ego-boosting infidelity and to neglect my wonderful children in order to do so. Whilst I sit silently cursing myself, the conversation once more moves on without me and when I finally catch up again, Kev is telling Stella about the bike. She seems as delighted as he is about the purchase, sort of clapping her hands gleefully. He deserves it, she tells him, and they exchange supportive smiles. For a short while we discuss the possibility of selling everything up and moving abroad and all I can then think of to do is to babble in a brain-disengaged fashion about how much we enjoy our therapy sessions.

    Suddenly she stands up. “Well now, I don’t think you guys need to come back,” she announces, somewhat to my surprise. “Not unless you want to of course! You just need to lighten up a bit and have some fun together! Get out on the bike, work less and talk more. Come back anytime if you think I can help you…”

     We drove to town in the lorry this morning. Co-directors of a tree surgery company travelling in to relationship counselling in the 8.6 tonner. Kev’s going on to the chiropractor to have his buttock manipulated, then to Foyers to clear a precipitous bank-side of declining Birches.  

    I’m going home on the bus nursing my incredulity.