One Step Too Far

by Tina Seskis

  Charlie is dawdling, checking out every tree, every puddle, every gate, and Caroline lets him, it seems she’s in no hurry either. I’m in front, pushing the buggy, and the rhythmic bumps of the paving stones under the wheels sooth my nerves. I feel slightly calmer, less anxious now. I’m a few yards ahead of them, near the junction and I’m daydreaming, planning our route, trying to decide whether to go to the swings or the duck pond first, it’ll be nice to show Caroline. Maybe we could pop into Unicorn later and get something for tea, she’d like it in there, perhaps even have coffee afterwards at the new cafe opposite. I’m oblivious to what she and Charlie are up to behind me, I'm distracted by my plans. So when above the noise of the traffic I hear something behind me, a crash and a splintering of glass, I don’t know what’s happened but I just know it’s not good, and I turn and look back up the road, towards my sister and Charlie.

  A half bottle of – what, vodka? – lies smashed on the ground. She must have had it under her coat, she must have dropped it, she’s still drinking, she’s drunk. The thoughts come all at once. Great jags of glass soar up from the pavement where the base of the bottle is still intact, and the angles catch the sunlight and glint menacingly.

  “Mind Charlie’s paws,” I shout, but I’m too late, the puppy steps on a shard and lets out a pitiful prolonged howl. It makes holes in my soul. Caroline just stands there, looking down at the glittering pavement as Charlie whimpers, his paw held aloft, like in evidence.

  I start to run towards my sister and my poor bewildered puppy – and then I remember Daniel, I’d just let him out of his buggy so he could walk a while, but again I’m too late, I know I am. I turn and see my son, just ten yards away from me, standing, teetering, on the edge of the pavement, outside the off-licence at the end of our street, right where it meets the busy main road.

  “Daniel!” I scream, and my little blonde boy, so vivaciously alive, so full of potential, turns around and gives me the biggest cheesiest smile of utter utter joy, he loves buses. Then he turns back and looks across the road at the people standing at the bus stop opposite. Their expressions are horrified, their arms are waving in windmill patterns of helplessness.

  Time slows down, as if the wind has dropped. I see the beautiful blue of the sky, like a backdrop, the gesticulating arms and mouths, slow and silent. I see a cyclist slide past, this side of the road; watch him look back at my son, over his shoulder; see him wobble, push his bike to the ground, but I know there’s no point, he won’t get there either, and I can’t bear it. I watch a bird fly across the scene, so slowly it might fall out of the sky. I see Ben this morning, kissing Daniel goodbye, ruffling his hair, saying, “See you later, little man,” but he won’t, he was wrong. I watch myself as they put Daniel to my breast, the flood of love thumping through me. I see the back of my son, his cobalt blue puffer coat, his little beige cords, his new navy shoes, his golden blonde hair. I notice the colours somehow, and they are gorgeous in the sunshine.

  And then I pull myself together. I start to run towards my boy as the blood drains down my body and leaves my limbs shivery, but before I can get there Daniel waves cheerily at the people at the bus stop and takes one more step, into the road.

  There is no room in my heart for anything other than silence. The quiet is oppressive, it is grief distilled, and it is unbearable. It is universal, I suppose, that moment of bereavement. It makes the whole world stop, for how long I cannot tell you, an excruciating respite from all that’s to come. And then the screaming – within me or outside of me? – starts, and it doesn’t seem to stop.

  Ben takes me in his arms now, in our anonymous hotel room so far from Chorlton, and we weep together for our son, perhaps for the first time. Although here is the only place I want to be I still feel lost and desperate and as if the world has turned on the wrong axis somehow and day has become night and good has become evil. I’ve never vocalised what actually happened before and the sobs resonate out of the room and down the corridor, the horror is as big as a bus, as big as the number 23 that hit my beautiful boy in front of my very own eyes, that turned his blonde hair and blue eyes into blood and mush and unravelling brains.

  Ben says nothing and holds me and we cry and cry and we’re both weeping for our dead son and for our own ruined lives, just when everything had all felt so utterly perfect. I was never superstitious before but maybe Daniel’s death was a sign – don’t wish for too much, don’t expect too much, life doesn’t work like that. Eventually we lie down together on the hard white bed and somehow we manage to fall asleep, still wrapped in each other’s arms, still wrapped in misery.

  66

  They must have drugged me but still I wake up screaming. I shriek and shriek, it’s horrific but I can’t seem to stop. Ben rushes to my side and his face is ashen and the grief hangs around his eyes, and even in my delirious state I realise I’ve broken his heart too.

  “I’m sorry, so sorry,” I sob and then I continue shrieking again. It seems my mother is also in the room and she rushes off to fetch the doctor, to give me another shot of something I suppose. When I cry and say, “Where’s Caroline?” everyone looks at me like I’m mad, and then I remember Daniel’s little smashed body again and I howl like an animal. The doctor comes eventually with his glinting needle and the image recedes again into the inky depths of my consciousness, to be lodged there forever.

  It is three days later and I’m no longer in hospital, no longer sedated, and Ben tells me gently that I need to talk to the police, have to make a statement. “Will Caroline have to go too?” I say, and again Ben looks confused, and says, “What’s Caroline got to do with it?” I think then that perhaps I imagined it all, maybe I wasn’t watching Daniel anyway, maybe my twin sister is in no way implicated, wasn’t even there. And then my sanity kicks in and I know that of course she was there, but it seems no-one saw her behind me, they must have been too fixated on the excruciating scene in front of them – the annihilated toddler, the maniacal mother, the distraught bus driver – to clock a clone of myself bolting in the other direction. When I notice Charlie limping ever so slightly I dully check his paws, and there in the front left one, gleaming like a diamond, is the end of a tiny sharp shard of glass. I pull it out and Charlie yelps, and I decide there’s no point complicating things, what difference does it make now, it won’t bring Daniel back, and I put the shard in the bin.

  I wake up early and my belly aches and my world feels empty, although Ben keeps telling me, quietly, sensitively, that we mustn’t give up hope, we have another life to think about. I shuffle to the toilet and as I sit down something feels wrong and I stand up again and screamingly bright blood is gushing down my legs. I screech for Ben and he comes running and I unlock the toilet door and stare up at him, naked yet gaudy, painted with pain. He looks at me with such devastation that I realise I’ve let him down again now, that now I’ve taken both his children from him.

  How I make it to the funeral I don’t know. I’m still bleeding and can barely stand but I make it there somehow, I have to say goodbye to my boy. Everyone looks at me as if what was she thinking, not holding his hand by such a busy road, and the shame feels livid. No-one can comfort me. When I see my little boy’s coffin, white and gleaming like a brand new shoebox, draped with flowers – someone had thought to get pink, Daniel’s favourite colour – I grab Ben’s hand for support and squeeze it hard. His hand doesn’t respond, not for at least half a second, and I realise with a shock that he blames me too. I feel like I’m going to pass out but we get through the service and when the coffin starts moving away from me, travelling ominously behind the curtain, that’s all I can cope with and I scream and scream and as Ben tries to restrain me I run down the aisle towards my boy, and then I change my mind, what good will it do, I’m too late, again, and I turn on my heel and run the other way now, out of the chapel into the grim grey world where the sun will never shine again.

  67

  On a rainy and blustery June morning, just over four weeks after his
son had died, Ben went back to work. He didn’t have to, his boss told him to take as long as he needed, but he didn’t know what else to do. He couldn’t reach his wife, she seemed lost to him now, and he found that he seemed to annoy her somehow, whatever he said, whatever he did, and he thought maybe it was better to give her some space for a while, let her have some time to herself. He simply didn’t know how to cope with her, his own grief was so agonising, and he found he needed the distraction, craved the safety of the neat columns of numbers, the debits and credits that he was meant to balance, as if any of it mattered. Going to the office was painful: not the work itself, but the pitying looks from his colleagues who meant well but didn’t know what to say, and so pretended instead that nothing had happened and said nothing about any of it. Even worse, they would try to censor their own conversations when he was around – would chat about what they’d been up to at the weekend, and studiously fail to mention their own kids, and Ben knew they were doing it for him, but he wanted to yell at them that it didn’t make it any better and to stop being so bloody stupid, but of course he didn’t.

  He was lonely, wherever he was, whoever he was with. He felt the anger build inside him, and more often than not it was aimed at his wife. She still refused to talk to him about it, tell him how it had happened, and although he never wanted to push her, he couldn’t help sometimes wondering what the hell she’d been doing, how could she not have been watching their son on the Manchester Road – it was so busy, he was only just turned two – and the more he tried to suppress the thought the more it grew inside him, creeping and insistent and insidious, like moss under a dank dead tree. It didn’t help that Emily seemed to hate him now, seemed glad that he’d gone back to work, and he wondered what he was doing wrong – after all he had no blueprint of how to look after the mother of his dead child.

  He couldn’t understand Emily’s sadness about the unborn baby either. Last night, on the first occasion he’d tried to talk to her about what they might do next, Ben had tried to be practical, had even suggested tentatively that they could maybe try again soon – Emily seemed to find it easy to get pregnant, he’d said, this time next year everything might be different.

  “What do you mean?” she’d said quietly, her body tight and clenched as she perched on the silver wicker chair by the window. “How can I even think of having another baby? You think I can just replace Daniel? Replace my unborn baby?”

  “No, of course not,” Ben had said. He’d hesitated, aware that carrying on could be dangerous. “But we didn’t actually know the baby, so it’s not like we’ve lost him like we’ve lost Daniel.”

  “Yes we HAVE,” she’d cried then. “We’ve lost his first smile, his first steps, his little personality that never had the chance to grow. You don’t understand do you? I should be twenty weeks pregnant, halfway to holding him in my arms, he should know the sound of our voices by now, but he doesn’t, because he is dead. A week and a half ago it should have been Daniel’s christening, but we had to cancel that because he’s dead too; tomorrow Daniel should have been going to Nathan’s birthday party, the present’s still upstairs; in July we should have been taking our son on his first proper beach holiday, he was so excited to be going on a plane. Every single day I should be making him breakfast, getting him dressed, playing with him, taking him to playgroup, bathing him, reading to him, putting him to bed, looking after him, loving him. Do you want me to go on?”

  “No,” Ben had said. “I don’t. Why are you acting like it’s all my fault? What have I done?”

  “Oh, nothing,” Emily said. She stood up. “You’ve been a bloody saint, as usual. It's me who's the villain round here, isn't it? She should have been watching him, that’s what YOU think, that’s what everyone thinks. You think it’s all MY fault, don’t you?” She had looked at him with hatred then, or so it seemed. “DON’T YOU?”

  Ben had been shocked – Emily never shouted, had always been so mild-mannered even when they argued, it was like he was looking at a stranger. Her face was twisted and ugly, and he tried to suppress the rage he felt, his sudden urge to grab her by the shoulders and shake her, shake some sense back into her. She saw his hands clench as he got up to leave the room and she ran at him then, beat her own fists at him, out of control suddenly, and he'd tried to stop her, pin her arms against her side and hold her tight until she calmed down – and maybe if he’d succeeded it might all have been different, but she shook herself free and flailed at his face, catching him with her nail, and as he let her go to cup his ear, contain the squelching blood, she ran from the room.

  Ben stared rigidly at his computer, endeavouring to send his thoughts away from their confrontation last night, back to his spreadsheet, but he found his heart was racing and his palms were sweating again, so he stood up abruptly from his desk, saying he was popping out for a sandwich, although it wasn't even 11 yet. Out on the street he turned blindly right, in the direction of his favourite cafe; then right again into Rochdale Road, on automatic pilot now, not thinking at all; but then as he went to enter the cafe someone was coming out, and although he already had his hand on the door he found he couldn't face it after all, and he turned abruptly away, onto New George Street; and when he reached the end of there he went right, randomly, he had to go somewhere. He slowed down at last. He needed to ring her.

  “Hello,” she said, and her voice was cold.

  “Hi,” he whispered, barely able to get the words out. “Are you OK?” and as he said it he regretted the question.

  “Oh, yeah, great,” she said and he winced at her sarcasm.

  “I’ll come home early, I’ll cook dinner,” he said. “What do you fancy?” and again he wished he could take back his words, unsay them.

  “Nothing,” she said eventually, but she wasn’t bitter this time, just blank, which was worse in a way.

  “OK, I’ll work something out.”

  Emily said nothing.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “It’s a lovely day, maybe you could do a spot of clearing up in the garden.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. I – I was just trying to think what might make you feel better.”

  “Ben, nothing will make me feel better,” she said, but the way she said it wasn’t self-pitying or accusatory, just desolate. Her voice was thick. “I’ve got to go. Bye.”

  “Bye,” he said, to a dead line, and he stayed mute and stupid on the pavement opposite the old fish market, staring up at the sculptured panel of the woman with a babe in arms and a little boy by her side, until he could tell someone was staring at him, perhaps wondering whether to ask him if he was all right, and so he moved at last, fast and purposefully back to the office, his sandwich forgotten.

  68

  “At what point did you first think of leaving me?” says Ben. We are lying side by side, not touching now, and it is late afternoon in the hotel in Hampstead, and we are both staring at the ceiling, as if maybe the answer lies there.

  I take ages to answer. “Probably that moment in the chapel,” I say. “When you didn’t comfort me, that’s when I thought it was over for us, that you’d never forgive me. I didn’t know then how it would happen, but I just knew Daniel’s death would destroy “us” too.”

  Ben looks at me puzzled. “When didn’t I comfort you?”

  “You wouldn’t hold my hand, you didn’t respond,” and as I say it out loud I realise I haven’t been entirely rational.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” says Ben. “Of course I was angry. At you, at the world, at the bus driver. The only person I wasn’t angry with at the time was Caroline.”

  His face grows troubled. “So that’s what she meant when she said sorry.”

  “What do you mean? When did she say sorry?”

  Ben takes a breath and tells me that on the anniversary of our little boy’s death he went to the Peak District and walked for hours over mountains and across fields, and then camped a
lone, it was all he could face without me, without Daniel. Then on the next night, he’d been at home on his own and Caroline had turned up to say sorry for something, but he didn’t know what, there were so many things she could have been apologising for. He tells me quietly that he’d let her in and got paralytic with her and that they’d ended up having sex – my husband and my own twin sister.

  “Emily, I’m so so sorry,” he says. “I just missed you so much I almost convinced myself she was you. I thought I’d never see you again, and I was trying to get back to you, back to us somehow. And then when it was over I had to face up to the fact that it was her not you, and it felt like I couldn’t hate the world or myself any more.” He stops and looks desperate, like something irrevocable has broken inside him.

  Although I’m horrified, repulsed, mad at him, I work it out instantly. “So this was Saturday night?”

  “Yes,” he says, and it feels insane but I tell him unflinchingly about meeting Robbie and how much he looked like him, Ben, and that despite all the bad stuff I’ve done since I left, the first and only time I had been unfaithful to him was exactly when he was having sex with my sister.

  Ben is silent for ages. “I can just about stand you being with him,” he says. “If that’s how I was able to find you.”

  “But look what I’ve done. I’ve killed him. He’s dead now, and he didn’t deserve that,” and I start to weep again, for Robbie this time, another bright boy whose life has ended because of me.