Chapter 20

Split Personalities

May 6^th  - So we make it down to the Off-Road Training School in South Wales on the GS. M6, three lanes of solid traffic, hurricane-force winds. Inside a full face helmet, no-one can hear you scream.

    While we’re away, I at least realize some positive things:

§         I don’t think I would get on the back of a motorbike with anyone but Kev. (Ok, this is small to the point of possible insignificance, but after everything that’s gone on, positive thinking exists but only at very low levels)

§         I wouldn’t  put up with the vegetarian hotel (which turned out to be vegan and non-alcoholic),

§         nor wander the rainy streets of a tiny Welsh village with no shop,

§         nor listen politely while ‘the guys’ discussed gear boxes and advanced motorcycling techniques at the local pub (attractive because it served both alcohol and meat) for anyone but him.

§         And it felt surprisingly good to see him doing something he enjoyed that wasn’t tree surgery or fornication.

    On the way down, at a truck stop near Leeds he’d reached across a picnic table and taken my hand. Then he’d brought it to his lips and kissed it. I had found I was able to give him my first truly warm smile in ages.

Still, my reactions to sharing this new territory with only-marginally-less-distasteful Kev remain unpredictable.

     It could be that, although it is slowly poking its head out of its shell once more, my trust in Kev is still a bit shaky, it could be that I simply find it difficult to take a back seat, it could be that I’ve reached a point in my life (with the help of Kev’s absence of loyalty) where I feel like my horizons are broadening without my even having to think about it. You know, I really don’t have a clue why it seems like such a good idea but, as soon as we’re home, I find myself booking some Compulsory Basic Training on a motorbike. The experience of travelling the Yorkshire Dales with the wind in my face and the smell of the countryside all around me has led to a yen for the front seat, the one where you can see where you’re going, the one with the handle bars and all the controls. And right now, the girl who didn’t learn to ride a push-bike till she was nine thinks to herself “how hard can it be?”

May 13^th - The appointed day for bike training has arrived and I am bullish. I’ve watched Kev closely on several occasions lately, as we’ve biked the highlands pricing jobs and, as far as I can see, there’s very little to it beyond twisting a thingy on the right handle bar to make it go and knocking it into gear with your toe ( don’t yet know if which toe you use is important or what order the gear positions are in). The small matter of how the brakes are applied also eludes me, but I am confident that this, along with many other mysterious things, will be explained at the CBT centre in the ice-rink car park.

      I am wearing all the gear, including steel toe-capped boots and a bandana with skulls on but the armour in my jacket makes it a tad uncomfortable to drive in. It seems to sit by itself in the driving seat whilst I, a fleshy inconvenience, thrash around inside it trying to control the vehicle. Have to pull over, yank off my boots and carry on in socks eventually – impossible to feel the pedals past the steel re-inforcement.

The training bikes are bottom-of-the-range 125s but still, I hadn’t expected them to be so goddam heavy. Even with one, steel-reinforced ninja foot planted firmly on the ground I feel like I could keel over at any moment. “Keep it on the balancing point,” I am instructed, and while I wrestle with this difficult concept another important nugget of knowledge is delivered. I learn for the first time that the bulky assemblage of mechanical parts requiring constant balancing has a clutch. The clutch is a hand-operated lever. One of the brakes (there are two, very different ones) is also a hand-operated lever. One lever is on the left and one is on the right and they both have to be squeezed, to the appropriate degree, at the appropriate time. I find it very easy to get these things ever-so-slightly wrong. I find I am inclined to twist the hand-grip which is the throttle (now, is it on the left, or the right?) whilst, at the same time, squeezing hard on the front brake. Consequently, a situation develops which involves my trying desperately to hang on to 125 CCs of pulsating machine whilst it vigorously attempts to buck and flip its way out of my terrified grasp. My instructor has frightened eyes and my fellow trainees ride swiftly from the vicinity.

     An hour goes by but my co-ordination remains so poor that I can’t even manage a modest circle in first gear, stopping under control once in a while and re-starting smoothly. Eventually, the instructor takes me to one side for some remedial tuition in clutch control. This is largely futile, but it’s nearly lunchtime and, when everyone begins to park up, they leave me circling alone, hoping that, with no-one in the way, I’ll get the hang of it better. What they don’t know is that I’m tiring fast and all I can think about is frothy moccachino and that delightful sweet potato and parsnip soup regularly on offer at my favourite eaterie. Steering the bike towards the small group now huddled in front of a flip chart held aloft by the instructor, I attempt to pull in close and glide gently to a halt. Drifting up, I can smell the collective apprehension. I swear I won’t let it get to me but, damn it, if feigned confidence isn’t a costly business. Fine, the bike glides gently enough to a halt but then I stick out my leg in a see?-now-I-can-do-it kind of way, which allows the bike to come over just a little too far and drop to the ground, pitching me sideways as it falls, headfirst into a (thankfully) dense Leylandii hedge. Like Barbershop singers, the trainees utter a harmonized “oo!” and my instructor rushes to my aid, fully prepared to resuscitate. Yes, I have sustained an injury – I have scratched my wrist, in the space between the cuff of my armoured jacket and my lovely leather gauntlets. For God’s sake, let me go and sip nourishing sweet potato soup in a café till the tremors subside!

     After lunch I resume circling with renewed enthusiasm but, sadly, no noticeable increase in skill, and by 2.45 I have been responsible for another incident related to pressing and twisting inappropriately along with failing to balance the bike. I have broken off the clutch thingy completely and a man called Dave has unfolded a deck chair so I can sit in it with a cup of hot sweet tea. As I sip, my fellow trainees pull away one-by-one for an afternoon getting used to the town roads. Strangely, I am not invited.

     I tell Kev I have been told to come back and finish the training when I’m feeling better. I also tell him I have absolutely no intention of doing any such thing as today I felt great but I still couldn’t ride a fucking motorbike. He laughs. I now know how good he is on Satan’s two-wheeled machine of doom. Good enough to become an instructor, I suggest, and help keep people like me off the roads. He says he will give the idea some serious consideration.

May 21^st - Since then things have been quite good. Youngest’s behaviour at school has stabilized and Eldest’s had a birthday – his sixteenth.

     I have discovered that, once they’re sixteen, and as long as you’ve been separated for more than five years, you can buy a DIY divorce from the local Sheriff’s Court and have it served on your ex. No fuss, very limited expense and a pleasantly satisfying element of surprise. Eldest’s father has never done what he promised in this regard when we separated and I am tired of being a meaningless Mrs. So the paperwork’s in the post. It strikes me that this could so easily have been the Spring I simultaneously put the two fathers of my children out of my life for good. Who says the fabric of society is perished?

     Kev’s away back down south now, trying to buy a new chipper. This shows some faith anyway. Well, in the continuance of the business, that is.

     I always worry about Kev when he’s away on his own. Of course, I now have a completely new set of reasons to worry about him, but the old ones were substantial enough. On his way to a trade show abroad, he’d wandered out of the Gatwick terminal building to get some sunshine wearing a headset in order to engage with his tape-based French course. This meant that he gave the impression he was talking to someone via the headset. Immediately he sat down, he’d been surrounded by security guards with guns and asked to take his hands slowly from his pockets. It was frightening, he’d said. On another occasion he’d agreed to travel to Germany to look at access equipment with a man he didn’t know who said he was an agent for the company concerned. The man got drunk, offended the German hosts and Kev had told him what he thought of him. This was not a good move. Kev needed a lift home. The man was Glaswegian and had his own recycling operation. Kev had been worried he’d wind up an ingredient of the sludge at the bottom of a tub-grinder.

     Driving up to the house in the rain, I manoeuvre the Pick-Up as close to the back door as possible. Eldest has ‘helped’ me round Tesco, having highly developed acquisitive impulses and therefore a knack for filling Supermarket trolleys.

    Of course, it’s not easy to fit twelve full carrier bags on the back seat of a pick-up and I commonly forget this. Sometimes we have his friends on board and, when they mooch on back from Maplin Electronics, they find they have to fit themselves in around the shopping and the back seat starts to resembles a bizarre adaptation of ‘Twister’. It’s not surprising I suppose that sometimes they whine and I have to turn the stereo up.

    Just the two of us today though – he’s on study leave and his friends aren’t – so the journey home has been relatively comfortable. Only one near miss, at the same bloody roundabout. Some smart Alec in a Mercedes deciding it was ok to change lanes suddenly with me and my myopia peeling along behind him and only two wheels fully in contact with the road surface. Luckily there’d been plenty of space to one side of him (can’t remember which side or whether the Highway Code says I’m allowed to narrowly avoid an accident by overtaking hectically on a roundabout. Kev will know.)

     I struggle into the kitchen with four carriers on my arms and the keys between my teeth. Eldest is hot on my heels, showing off with an impressive five carriers dangling from stick-like limbs and a bottle of Evian tucked under his chin. Managing to press the Playback button on the phone with the pinkie of my left hand before staggering to the far end of the room, I heave my bags onto the table.

     At first the words are just so much slowly enunciated background noise. They float into my head like sticks of dynamite on parachutes, an innocuous cloud, until their meaning’s grasped.

     “Message for Lizzie,” says the voice. “It’s Juliet. Just to let you know Kevin spent all last Friday afternoon with me at my new house. I think he’s still a bit confused, don’t you? We made love and he came inside me. He wants to have a baby with me. I may be pregnant. If I am, I’m going to keep the baby. Good luck.”

     It’s too short, too loud and over with too quickly for me to do anything about it. When I glance over at Eldest, we’ve both stopped emptying our carrier bags in bewilderment. I begin again, borderline feverish, clattering cat food off the work surface, allowing the next, thankfully harmless, message on the machine to kick off, and chattering over the top of it to try and pretend nothing important has happened. “If you just leave the potatoes out I’ll put some on right now – oh and put the chocolate somewhere so Youngest won’t come across it accidentally or none of us will get any! Have you got the Mr Sheen ‘cos I haven’t…?” My laugh sounds like advanced hysteria but it’s not hysteria I feel, just emptiness. A desert landscape with a gale blowing through it. Eldest heard it all, though I know he’s not going to say a thing about it. Not unless I do, anyway. Instead he finishes unpacking into the fridge and disappears in the direction of his bedroom. I have never, ever, felt more humiliated. Kev is somewhere south of Birmingham, staring into the churning innards of a £25,000 state-of-the-art chipping machine. He answers his phone at the third ring.

    “What’s up is…I got in to find a message on the machine. It was from Juliet.”

    “She says you were with her last Friday afternoon. She says you two made love, that you came inside her and that she might be pregnant. Is this true Kev? Cos if it’s true you needn’t bother coming back home. We’re done.”

   “Don’t say that Lizzie – it’s not true! At least, I was there. I had to go, I had to finish it properly or something, God I don’t know… but the rest, she’s making it up, I guess she’s angry, we sat on her stairs. I told her what she was doing… well… it was no way to get what she wanted…”

   I’m standing frozen with the phone ready to slip from my weak grasp at any moment and I have an awful feeling about this. Kev’s reasoning during recent weeks has been almost childlike. Before requiring him to provide any answers, I’ve made it clear that, if he’s slept with her again we’re over. He’s so breathless, distressed, panicked he would say anything to get himself out of such serious, serious trouble.  

   “I’ll ring you when you’ve finished shopping,” I tell him. “Tonight. After eight.” And put the phone down.

    I spend the rest of the day lost in fantasies about how life could be without him. Recalling  all the male friends (and boyfriends) I’ve had over the years, I try to imagine any single one of them behaving like this. No, I just can’t picture it. Kev is definitely special. I try taking out the photo albums. With my heart thudding, I try really hard to recall all the good feelings. But they’re slipping away fast, washed downstream amid the white-watered turbulence of betrayal.

    Sitting by the woodburner with milky coffee, strains of Eldest’s guitar practice overhead. What the hell must my son think of me, I wonder, putting up with this? Am I as twisted as Kev is? No, okay that’s quite impossible – he’s pretty much in a league of his own – but am I twisted in my own get-up-just-to-get-knocked-down-again kind of way? I could start over, buy a little house in the town, fill it with friends, go on dates, weekends away, holidays. I could get a different job instead of using all my energies to support Kev in only-when-I’m-not-too-busy-shagging-desperate-housewives arboriculture. I could move abroad and use my English teaching capability. Heck, I could start my own goddam business! And there’d be peace of mind, and she’d leave me alone, and Byron would be safe and I could show my boys how not to treat a woman if you want to keep your life in one piece. It all sounds so worth it!

     Suddenly I have to distract myself to prevent the impetuous purchase of an apartment abroad via the internet. Byron gets a vigorous and therapeutic brushing to the point where his pelt is becoming sparse and his eyes have taken on a haunted look.

  “Why are you still lying to me Kev?”

 “Because you said you’d throw me out and it’s the last thing in the world I want! Look Lizzie, I had to go and find out whether it all came from, well, the place I love you, or whether it was something else. I had to know for sure.”

  “And did you find out for sure?”

  “And your conclusion was…?”

  “I want to stay with you. I don’t want to be with her. You and I, we’re for real.”

  “But you see, Kev, I always knew that,” I tell him, with more than a hint of exasperation in my voice.  ‘Because I don’t get into relationships I’m not deadly serious about. I know if I sleep with someone that’s a heck of a commitment in itself. How come you don’t know that?”

  “I don’t know, Lizzie. I feel really messed up.”

  “Kev? Did she know exactly why you’d come back to have sex with her one last time?”

  “So you did it, then told her it was completely over. Like that last shag convinced you - you could leave her behind. I hate her for trying to hurt me, but I can understand why she’s so fucking angry!”

  “Oh God Lizzie, please don’t dump me! I’ll do anything – I’ll get counselling, I’ll never look at another woman again, just don’t dump me!”

    “But Kev, look at how this all stacks up…”

    “I know, I know, on paper you should never have anything to do with me again but…”

    “But what?”

   I break it. “There can’t be any different places for it to come from Kev. I don’t want a man like that. I wouldn’t go near him with a barge pole. That’s why from the very start you had to tell me over and over again that you weren’t going to behave like your dad, and that I was, well, safe. You told me I was the love of your life. Cheap sex shouldn’t be able to hold a candle to that.”

  “You are the love of my life!” he insists. “And the simple truth is I’m a complete shit! But I want us to get over this. I want us to start collecting some fantastic new memories. Please don’t let this finish us!”

  “Kevin Gates, it’s like you’re two different people! There’s you, my Kev, who I know and love, then there’s this Mr Hyde alter ego! Y’know, I’ve given him a name – I call him Shane. Shane lives in a caravan (in order to avoid housework), lies in bed until two every day, only talks to women if he thinks it will get him piece-of-meat sex and believes single motherhood is only natural. I am so not in love with Shane! And you Kev, you don’t like him either but someone recently convinced you (God knows why) that it’s ok to be Shane – he’s not a lesser being at all, in fact he’s superior to all the fools out there trying to be good people!”

  “Steady on Lizzie Burns! There are two of you too you know! The other one (don’t know what to call her – ‘Elvira’ or something) wears one of those helmets with horns and carries a flame-thrower which she’s not afraid to use! Sometimes you terrify the life out of me!”

  “Oh drop it Kevin! Haven’t I always stood up for you? What about the customers who don’t want to pay? What about the big organizations who try and make you work for nothing? What about your divorce and how you’d sit in a corner looking hopeless? What about bringing the boys up straight, and keeping the books right and taking on the future? I, no, we need ‘Elvira’ to do any of that! Without her we’re just a pair of soggy, drop-out, country-dwellers with no business backbone and a significant shortage of moral fibre!”

  “I know you stand up for me!” he says. “You do it very, very well – but you know, when you get the bit between your teeth like you did when you thought you could learn to teach English and we’d uproot to the continent and I’d just give up the only job I know how to do…”

  “You wanted to give it up!”

  “I know I did! But suddenly you were going to be calling all the shots and you do that so bloody well! Who would I have been then, Lizzie? ‘Gerald’ – the old fart with no job and a woman who doesn’t really need him. A man who wears socks and sandals and a hanky-hat on the shores of the Mediterranean. I can tell you, I was more comfortable with Shane than I was with Gerald. Sorry. I’m really sorry. But that’s the truth.”

  Even more silence. Aeons of silence. “Lizzie? You still there?”

  I sigh deeply. “Yep.”

  “So what’re you thinking? Are you going to chuck me?”

  I sigh deeply again. “God Kev, I’m so confused…”

  “Tell me about it!”

  “Ok, I will! You see I think there’s a third one of me – there’s Lizzie, ‘Elvira’ and…and Daisy.”

  “When I was a girl (all those many years ago) and my hair was still fluffy and I wore dresses with puffed sleeves, Auntie Mavis took me out one day to a place where there was a green field full of Daisies and we sat for hours in the sunshine making chains. I wore them all. I loved the flowers. I had bracelets and anklets and circlets in my hair and (this is the only way I can describe it), my heart was full all afternoon. I so much want to be Daisy again, Kevin, I want to be Daisy with you. But I can’t do that at the moment, in fact, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to.”

 “Because Daisy’s sitting in that field, in the sunshine, with a bucket of poo on her head! If you come back to me now Kevin/Shane/Gerald, you’ll be living with ‘Elvira’ for a while – I don’t know how long. She’ll have her finger on the trigger of the flame-thrower and from time-to-time she may even point the damn thing. You’ll have to hang on to the belief that me and Daisy can subdue her. You up for that?”

 “If that’s the way it is, that’s the way it is.”

 “And honesty’s how we keep ‘Elvira’ calmly performing routine maintenance on her weaponry rather than using it. Ok?”

 I take a deep breath. “So tell me, did you tell Juliet Sanders you wanted to have a baby with her?”

 “Well then why did she say it? What’s she talking about? Does she think it makes it even more painful for me if I think you wanted children with her?”

 “I don’t care what weird, ‘non-conventional’, polygamous or plain bigamous ideas your up-bringing left you carrying, but I am absolutely not prepared to go on with you if you have a child out there, conceived while you were supposed to be in a life-partnership with me. That’s my bottom line on this!” He doesn’t say anything, so I go on. “I already have difficulty knowing you made promises you’re now breaking to stay with me! Half of me says the only right thing to do is send you off to make good those promises and let me look after myself. I can, you see. I can look after myself.”

   “Just a minute! If you made serious promises you should seriously consider whether you aren’t somehow, I don’t know, obliged to go and make that person happy.”

 “How the hell can you be so sure of that? I hate to be patronising but you know the woman announced from the first she wanted a baby and it seems that’s still very much on her mind and you’ve been…”

 “Listen to me, Lizzie! I was trying to put the whole thing behind me and I believe I have! She was spinning me a line, engaging my sympathy, trying to make me feel she could do what she was doing and still be a good person – I know that now. She was at a place in her life where she needed attention and I was in the wrong place, at the wrong time, in the wrong frame of mind. It’s over now. She’s just very, very angry.”

  “Angry enough to carry on trying to get at me? I don’t want to live with her hostility.”

   “Yeah, right! Like I can believe that this time!”

  “You can, you can believe it.”

  “Why? I mean, how do I know that?”

  “I’m climbing out of something. I’m making progress. I know it may not seem like it but we’re making progress - you know we are Lizzie! I love you. I love you very, very much, and I’m coming home…”

Has love survived? Is Kev worth it? If it's over, what exactly is it that's over? If there's a future, what kind of future is it, and to whom does it belong? Chapter 21, the sort of final installment, out this week...