One Step Too Far (24 page)

53

When Ben came back from the kitchen he was still fucking fuming, but he was almost as angry with Emily now, for leaving, than with Caroline, for coming. It seemed too much to bear at this time of all times to have to confront someone who looked like Emily, sounded like her, yet wasn’t her.
She shouldn’t have run away, how self-centred was that?
He was so drunk now it was like his wife’s absence was a physical void, as if his stomach had been gouged out and there was nothing but a gaping hole where his insides should have been. He put his hand to his midriff – yes, he was still all there, he hadn’t been cut up in the night. He glared at Caroline lounging on his sofa in her too-short skirt, and wished she would just fuck off, what did she want anyway. He went over to the wicker chair that he swore he hadn’t sat in since that first magical night at Emily’s flat, years ago now, and it was so battered and uncomfortable to sit in, they really should get rid of it. No,
he
should get rid of it, there wasn’t a
they
anymore. He wished again that Caroline would just take the hint and get the fuck out of there, but he was reluctant to ask her directly to leave, in case she made one of her scenes, and he couldn’t face that tonight.

“Where’ve you been?” said Caroline, and her voice was slurred.

“In the kitchen,” Ben said, and he wondered dimly how Caroline was also drunk, he’d only just brought in her second glass of wine – but he hadn’t spotted the half bottle of whisky empty on the floor.

The TV continued its fake emotional assault on them. They watched a little girl with a big voice murder a Whitney song, and then a group of grown men in dungarees dancing with wheel barrows, until Ben thought he really couldn’t stand any more, he had to go to bed, and on impulse he pressed the remote and the screen went black. The silence blared. Caroline huffed and as she turned to glare at him he realised she looked ill again, pale-faced and fragile under her makeup.

“What did you want to talk to me about?” he said eventually – maybe she’d leave once she’d told him. Caroline bent her head and twisted her fingers.

“I wanted to say sorry,” she said.

“About what though?” Ben persisted.

Caroline looked awkward. “About what happened,” she said. “I’m sorry about everything.”

“Not as sorry as me,” Ben said, but he said it without pity, just bottomless sadness.

“Do you think she’ll come back?” Caroline asked. She waited as the question spun around the room and he took so long to answer that she thought he hadn’t heard her.

“No, not now,” he said, and it was the first time he’d acknowledged it and it was devastating, so he got up to leave the room, he couldn’t cry in front of Caroline of all people, but he stumbled over the whisky bottle and fell awkwardly, almost on top of her. The sofa was low and deep and squashy and although he tried to get back up it seemed too much effort all of a sudden, and so he slumped there, drunk and defeated.

Caroline shifted over and put her arms around him and held him quietly while he sobbed, out of his mind on beer and grief and loneliness. He found her touch weirdly comforting – although she was so different in temperament to her twin, she felt like Emily, even smelled like Emily, as well as looking like her, obviously. Ben hadn’t held anyone except poor Charlie for so long it was disorientating, and reminded him of happier times – so when she started stroking his hair and saying there, there, it would all be OK, he even thought in his drunkenness that maybe she
was
Emily, and when she leaned in to kiss him he let her and he even kissed her back and it all became so urgent and animal-like it was as if he didn’t even notice that it wasn’t his wife, but her flawed malignant twin, until it was too late. Afterwards he realised what he’d done and screamed at her to get out and leave him the fuck alone, and then he staggered from the room and fled upstairs, slamming the door behind him.

54

Gorgeous Robbie has blood congealed in his nose, the bed is cold and his skin is blue. There is absolutely no doubt he's dead. I don’t scream, instead I leap out of the bed and run to the window, naked, panting – like a dog. I am so horrified I can’t think straight. I cannot,
cannot
look at him again, the image is stuck in my brain and I know it’s another vision of hell that I will never be rid of, another life I have ruined, for daring to love him. I gag at this thought, but manage to hold the vomit in my mouth long enough to reach the bin and then it spews everywhere and I sink to the floor, and for the second time in two days I'm covered in my own sick and I wish this life would just hurry up and end now. As I stand up my legs are wobbly and my chest is rising and falling faster than I knew it could, and my breath is getting shallower and shallower until I know I’m hyper-ventilating but I can't seem to stop. What can I do? Who can help Robbie? (
No-one, it’s too late.
) Who can help me? (
Ditto.
) I can’t call Angel, Simon, not even my mum or dad, my phone is dead and I don’t know any of their numbers. There are only two numbers I know off by heart that could possibly help me – my old house in Chorlton, and 999. I desperately want my husband, I want Ben, he’ll know what to do, and so I dial the Manchester number almost without thinking, and as the call connects I remember myself, what on earth would I say, and after three rings I hang up. My hands are shaking but I just about manage to call 999 and after a few seconds an efficient sounding operator comes on the line.

“Fire, police or ambulance?” she asks.

I don’t know. He’s dead, I know that much, what good can an ambulance do?

“Hello?” she continues. “Do you want fire, police or ambulance?”

I pant and talk at the same time. “There’s somebody dead here.”

“Are you sure? Are they still breathing?”

“He’s cold and blue. I think that makes him dead.” And I start to give great gusting sobs down the line, for Robbie, for his poor lost life. It’s horrendous.

“What’s your address, love? Tell me your address.”

“I don’t know. I’m somewhere in Marylebone.”

“OK, we’ll get that number traced. Stay on the line, pet, try to calm down. What’s the deceased person’s name?”

“Robbie. Robbie Brown.”

“And your name?”

“Catherine Brown.”

“Are you his wife?”

“No,” I wail. “I’ve only just met him.” The room starts to whirl and I assume I’m fainting and then I realise it’s the blue lights down in the street and the police are here already.

Thank God.
Until I remember I’m still naked, covered in vomit, and I run to the bathroom, am in and out the shower before it has time to get hot, and by the time I’ve wrapped one of Robbie’s sheet-sized towels around me, the police are banging on the door.

I open up just before they’re about to break it down, and they storm straight past me and one of them heads to the bedroom. Within a couple of seconds he calls, “Jesus Christ, come and look at this Pete.”

The policeman called Pete goes towards the bedroom but stops stock still, at the threshold, as he sees poor dead Robbie, the drugs paraphernalia on the bedside table. He lets out a cry of horror and then turns to look at me, and there is hatred in his eyes.

55

In the night maybe someone had come in and cleaved Ben’s head in two; and then he remembered Caroline turning up, the amount of beer he’d drunk, what he’d done with his missing wife's twin sister. He felt disgusted, repulsed, but there was no time to get to the bathroom, and he vomited endlessly into the waste-paper basket until there was nothing left apart from spice-reeked bile in his throat. Thank Christ Caroline hadn’t followed him up to the bedroom, hopefully she’d have fucked off by now – she wouldn’t hang around surely, not after how nuts he’d gone afterwards. No, he’d never see her again, not ever, no matter what might happen in the future.

Ben lay in a stupor for hours and hours and when he finally got up it was lunchtime and Caroline had left, thank God. He had a shower hotter than his skin could bear and scrubbed himself raw but still he felt dirty, wrong in his skin, defeated: Emily would never come back to him now. He didn’t know what to do with himself. All he could think of was to clean up, try to remove every last molecule of evidence, make it not true. He threw out the congealed remains of the takeaway, loaded the crockery and glasses into the dishwasher and ran it on its highest setting, even though it was half-empty. He disinfected the coffee table; got the vacuum and hoovered the carpet; sponged and blow-dried and turned over the cushions on the sofa, stained as they were with shame. He threw the beer cans, the whisky and wine bottles into the recycling bin and when he was finally done he made himself a strong black coffee, sat down and turned on the news. When the phone started ringing he ignored it, in case it was Caroline, but then he changed his mind – what if it was
her
– but it cut out anyway before he could get to it. He still wasn’t thinking straight and so when he saw Caroline’s face staring out at him from the TV screen he thought he was mistaken, hallucinating even. Then when he realised it was definitely her he couldn’t take in the pictures or the words and he wondered blankly what had happened, what terrible thing she’d done now. It was like his mind had too much information to process and refused to reboot, and it was only when they said it a third time, Catherine Brown, not Caroline Brown, that he realised he had finally found his wife.

56

Pete and his colleague don’t know what to do with me, still in my bath towel, and after some anxious conferring and calls for back up they finally tell me they’re arresting me on suspicion of murder. The words don’t make any sense to me, so I nod and let them caution me, I don’t give a shit what they do to me now.
Poor poor Robbie, so young, so full of life, what the hell have I done?
I start sobbing again. A woman police officer arrives, I think they called her specially, and she takes me into the bathroom to search me, and I drop the towel and all she can see are my long white legs and my torso patterned with tiny shiny rivulets of sick. It takes all of 10 seconds and then she says I can get dressed, but after more whispered debate she tells me I have to put on clean clothes out of Robbie’s wardrobe, we mustn’t touch anything to do with the crime scene. That’s what she calls it, a crime scene, because a murder has been committed, by me apparently. Finally the policewoman, butch with her clumpy boots and short sensible hair, cuffs my hands in front of me, and she seems apologetic almost – she knows I’m not up to fighting or running away – and the metal feels cold and alien and painful, and yet it comforts me. As they finally lead me barefoot from the flat, down the lushly carpeted stairs and out onto the morning street I feel small and frail next to the police officers, as if I’ve shrunk a few inches in the night. As the one called Pete marches me to the police van I see the waiting photographers and realise this is a news story. I will be found now, my family will know where I am, discover what I’ve done, know that I’ve ruined yet another life. They must be taking me to a police station, and the thought makes me faint.

In the van I’m put in a cage, like an animal. I’m so low down I can smell the diesel fumes, can feel the road close by, beneath the slack motion of the van's suspension, and I start to feel nauseous again. I’m so defeated I try to lean my head back, but funnily enough there’s no head rest, so I lie it awkwardly against the side of the van and at every bump it hits the metal, hard, and the shot of pain is dull although it should be electric, and I know I deserve it. I’m hazily aware of stopping for traffic lights and changing lanes and rounding corners but I feel a weird out of body sensation, as though I’m looking in on myself, am some villainous protagonist in a movie. After maybe 10 minutes the van picks up speed and it absolutely hammers round a corner, turning left, going briefly onto two wheels or so it seems, and now it’s a right hand bend this time, and then the brakes are applied and it yanks to a halt, and I hear some talking through the window, and now we’re off again, more slowly this time, and after a few more yards we stop and the back doors are being opened and the pin sharp May sunshine, fresh after Saturday’s rain, floods into the van, into my eyes, and I close them quickly, there’s no place in me for brightness.

I’m told to get out the van and as I do so I stumble and brush against the door and get black grease on Robbie’s jeans. For some reason this bothers me so I say sorry, I’m not sure to whom, and try to brush the mark off, and the woman PC says, “Come on, madam,” not unkindly, and she holds my shackled arm and leads me towards the steps that take us up into the massive building. We enter reception, if that’s what you call it in a police station, and there are officers everywhere, staring at me, I seem to be a big story for some reason. I’m buzzed straight through and am taken into a hideous little room that stinks of misery, and they send a doctor and ask me all these questions about my health, my mental health, whether I’ve ever self-harmed, whether I’m suicidal now. It’s depressing. I tell them that it depends what their definition of self-harm is, but they just look at me stonily and when I refuse to be drawn on whether I’m planning on killing myself they mark something down on their pad and move on to asking me if there’s anyone I’d like to be informed of my arrest. I almost think that’s funny, presumably the whole country knows by now, judging by all the photographers outside Robbie’s flat, and I wonder vaguely how they got there so fast. When they ask me if I want a solicitor I’m too tired to think and so it feels easier to say no. So they take me to a cell and when they finally leave me alone I find that I’m beyond feeling, beyond caring, I’m in a place deep in my mind that feels safe and warm, where nothing can go wrong, because it already has, every last thing that can.

57

Angel was so busy chatting to her new friend Philip that she didn’t notice for ages that Cat wasn’t around. She'd assumed Cat was with Simon, and so when instead she'd spotted him talking to a willowy woman with glossy black hair cut straight across her brow, Angel went over and asked him where Cat was. Simon hadn’t seen her leave either, it had been crowded in the bar and he’d been waiting to be served, so when by 1.30 Cat still hadn't come back Angel tried to call her, but her phone just went to voicemail.