One Step Too Far Page 3

  “Whoops, sorry,” she said.

  “Yes!” shouted Dave and he went to hug her but decided at the last minute to high-five her instead, and Jeremy said well done and Ben smiled and looked sheepish, and then he wandered off to the canteen.

  As the day wore on the cloud hung stubbornly, and the temperature dropped as if it would rain. Emily had retreated back to her corner with her book and yet another cup of tea, while Ben and Jeremy spent ages playing chess and Dave got whipped at table tennis by Jemima, a little ball of a girl who’d done over 300 jumps apparently. When Emily looked at her watch for the umpteenth time and saw it was gone four she put down the book and for the first time felt a glimmer of hope – maybe it was getting too late for them to jump now, it would be getting dark soon. Where was Dave – she’d go and ask him if they could think about leaving, surely there wasn't any point hanging round for much longer. Just as she stood up, feeling better at last, the head instructor appeared at the shed doorway and he was pumped up, as if they were at the Somme and he was about to send them over the top. “Cloud’s lifted,” he shouted. “Get kitted up now, quick!” As everyone ran like excited children Emily dragged behind, her legs feeling loose, as if they weren’t quite attached to her body. Ben was already there, seemingly in charge, and he was more confident now, less shy and geeky, almost handsome in his black jumpsuit. He helped her into her harness, turned her round and hoisted the parachute onto her back.

  “Bend over,” he said. He tightened the straps at the top of her legs and as she stood up, somewhere in that 90 degree trajectory, she fell in love.

  Emily didn’t see Ben for another three months after that. She’d flung herself out of a plane with the memory of his fingers on her thighs, and she’d been shy, embarrassed afterwards. He was so unsuitable really, a chess-playing parachuting accountant, and she shuddered at what her sister Caroline would make of him. In the car on the way home, she'd gazed at his boil lovingly now, willing to lean forward and kiss it, convinced he could feel her lips hot on his neck in his mind. But when they reached Chester he didn’t even look at her, simply said bye over his shoulder, and she got out the car and stood on the pavement, hesitant, until Dave revved the engine impatiently, and reluctantly she shut the door. As the car drove off, black smoke spewing, she stood watching the clouds dissipate, looking down the now empty road for long stretched out seconds, before she shook her head with frustration and turned away.

  Emily assumed she’d bump into Ben at work, but so far she hadn’t – nearly 3,000 people worked in the building, she'd discovered. She even considered another parachuting weekend, but held off (please God no), confident each Monday morning that this week she’d see him. His apparent disappearance made her more infatuated, more determined – which was quite unlike her – but then she’d never been smitten before. She even found she grew to enjoy the waiting – she’d wake up in anticipation, relish the daily thrill of scouring the basement canteen for his curly dark head, glance around reception on her way in and out, nerves on high alert, every day offering up countless possibilities for them to meet, every day thwarted.

  Emily awoke late on a dark February morning where the rain was so heavy deep puddles gleamed orange from the street lamps. Either her alarm hadn’t gone off, or she’d slept through it, she wasn’t sure which, she was so hungover. Her head was killing her, but she had to go in – she had an important meeting that afternoon, and besides it was Friday, only one more day to get through before the weekend. She made herself a strong tea, ate a banana and took some pills, then stood for 15 minutes under the shower and although by the time she came out she felt marginally better, she was running horrendously late now. She threw on the easiest outfit, a plain red belted dress and boots, scraped her wet hair back and didn’t bother with makeup, she could do that when she got to the office. She put on the orange anorak she usually wore for walking and it looked terrible with the dress, it was too short and the wrong colour, but she didn’t care, it was raining for God’s sake.

  By the time she parked her car an hour later she was still feeling wretched. She didn’t feel ready to face work, let alone face Ben walking towards her, away from the office, takeaway coffee in hand, girl in tow. This was not one of her many scenarios of how they might meet. She panicked, blushed, said hi and hurried off. He was more attractive than she remembered – his hair had grown, his suit was well-cut, shoes polished, dark brown wool tie not quite that of a newly qualified accountant. He hadn’t seemed particularly pleased to see her – friendly but unmoved. The girl was not his girlfriend, she knew that much – not his type, not her! She’d convinced herself that once they did finally see each other again, it would all just happen – they’d stop, have a chat, arrange a coffee, and that would be it. Instead she’d looked about as awful as she possibly could have, and he’d been with someone else. It was a shambles.

  For three months Emily had been fine, but now she wasn’t – she just couldn’t wait any longer. She threw off her revolting anorak, flung it on the back of her chair, sat down and considered her options. Visit the 17th floor expressly to see him – wander about until she found his desk, ask to talk to him privately, trawl around for an empty room, all eyes on them? Hideous. Pretend she had other business on the 17th floor, saunter up and say hello as she passed? Too contrived – and as she didn’t know where he sat she could hardly saunter. Look up his number and call him? Better, less public. Or send him an email? The easiest but in a way the most tortuous – what if he didn’t reply? What if he didn’t get it? She needed to start this right now, today.

  She looked up his email address in the directory. “Hi Ben,” she wrote. “Good to see you today. Will you have a drink with me tonight? It’s important. Let me know, either reply to this mail or here’s my number. Thanks, Emily.”

  She hit send and sat back in her chair, relieved. She’d done it, it was happening at last. She felt absolute resolve that she’d done the right thing, after all it was obvious he’d liked her. She checked her schedule – nothing apart from the meeting after lunch that she’d come in for, he’d have called her by then.

  By five o’clock Emily was desolate. She’d been so convinced there’d be an email waiting for her back at her desk that when there wasn’t the doubt flooded in. What the hell had she been thinking, being so forward? She re-read her email: “It’s important.” OK, could be, maybe she needed to talk to him. About what? About parachuting of course. “Have a drink?” The connotation was unmistakable. My God, he’d think she was a maniac, a stalker. And anyway he had a girlfriend, she’d seen them together – and even if he was single she’d looked so utterly crap that morning he couldn’t possibly have fancied her.

  “EMILY?” Maria, who sat next to her, leaned over and made exaggerated crosses with her hands across Emily’s face. Emily looked up, stricken. “Are you deaf? Can I borrow your stapler, someone’s had mine. Hey, what’s up?”

  “Nothing, I’ve got a headache.”

  ”You look like shit, why don’t you go home?” Maria said.

  “I’ve just got to finish this report, then I’m out of here. Here you go.” Emily handed over the stapler and turned away, her eyes filling, tears dropping onto her keyboard. She checked her email one more time – nothing – and then pressed the computer’s off key without bothering to log out. “Bye,” she said to Maria, as she stood up and hurried to the lift.

  At home Emily couldn’t settle. She checked her phone constantly, as though the call could have crept up on her while she wasn’t looking, despite it being in her pocket, despite her having changed the settings so it would ring and vibrate at the same time. Maybe he’d emailed her, she thought, if only she could check her emails at home. But he’d call now instead, wouldn’t he, she’d given him her number. Why hasn’t he called? She felt nauseous in that over-hungry, post-hangover way, but she couldn’t rouse herself to even make a sandwich. She looked in the fridge and found some cheddar, cracked with age, and some stale breadsticks in the cupboard, and s
he ate purely to take the edge off her hunger. She flicked through the TV channels, picked an old episode of The Simpsons she’d seen before, but she found she couldn’t follow the plot. Her mother rang – the thrill of the phone going and the disappointment of it not being Ben meant she couldn’t face picking up. She ran a bath, but lying there made her hot with shame. In the end she went to bed and finally found some solace, after ten o’clock, when she knew that he really wasn’t going to call tonight so she might as well stop thinking about it, and she fell exhaustedly into the seventeenth century underworld of her latest book.

  The buzzing and the ringing woke her. She grappled for the phone, on the table next to her bed – 11.28. “Hello,” she said.

  “Emily? It’s Ben. Hello? Er, it’s Ben – from parachuting. I’m so sorry to call so late, I’ve been on a course all day and then I was out at the pub and then for some reason I logged on when I got home and saw your mail.”

  “Oh,” Emily said.

  “What’s important?” Ben persisted, and she thought he sounded a bit drunk.

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter now.”

  “D’you still want to have a drink tonight?”

  “It’s 11.30,” Emily said. “It’s too late. There’s nowhere open.”

  “I could come over. Are you still in Chester?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Where are you?”

  “Trafford. What’s your address?”

  “That’s miles away. It would take you hours.”

  “I’ll get a cab. I could be there in an hour...”

  Emily was silent.

  “If you’d like me to?”

  Emily still hesitated. It was more than she could have hoped for, but now she was ambivalent. It was so late. She hardly knew him. What was she getting into?

  “Yes please,” she said, in the end.

  “I’ll see you soon,” he replied, and the tenderness in his voice reassured her.

  An hour and seven minutes later the buzzer rang. Emily had put on jeans and a slouchy jumper and piled her hair on top of her head. She was bare-foot and wary-looking when she opened the door. He was still in the same dark suit, his brown tie loosened. He smiled and moved past her, as far away as he could get in the cramped hallway and he smelled of beer and damp, it was still raining outside. They went into the kitchen, where the strip light was unflattering, made them both look pale, exposed.

  “Sorry, after all that I’ve got nothing to drink,” she said, and her voice was high-pitched, unnatural. “Would you like a coffee? Or I can make you Horlicks?” And she tried to laugh, but it wasn’t much of a joke.

  Ben said yes, coffee would be great, and then said nothing more as she made it, and she couldn’t think of anything to say either. She slopped the kettle and swore gently as the water scalded her, but she continued pouring and stirring anyway. She took the milk from the fridge, offered him sugar and led him into the sitting room. She put the coffee on the table that she’d hurriedly cleared of the papers and books and crap that normally lived there and sat down on the sofa. Ben sat in the only other chair in the room. The distance ached between them. She stood up again and put on some music – Radiohead. The notes sounded mournfully, expanding into the space. How could it be that she'd sent him a note effectively asking him to be her boyfriend, and he’d been so keen he'd rung her in the middle of the night and now he was here in her flat and they didn’t know what to do, how to take it forward? Conversation eluded them – Ben was shy and Emily was teetering on the very edge of the next stage of her life. She literally didn’t know what to do, how to take that step.

  The body dropped like a stone under her. It fell maybe fifteen feet before wrenching violently to a halt, bouncing, then hanging from its ankles. The body writhed and wriggled, its long legs trying to untangle themselves from the ropes that bound them. She looked down, horrified. The shock completely over-whelmed the adrenaline that had been pumping through her and she was now rigid with terror. With a snap the body came free and it turned 180 degrees in the air, the bright red and yellow finally revealing itself, as Jeremy continued downwards away from the plane, slightly more gently now, a little more how she’d imagined it. She looked into the eyes of the instructor and understood now what the training had been about, why she’d been told to sit right at the very edge of the door, half in, half out. “Are you OK?” shouted Greg above the roar of the engine. Emily shook her head. She wished she’d jumped first, so she hadn’t had to witness it from above, because now she couldn’t do it. Greg smiled at her kindly, squeezed her arm, then shoved her hard into the void.

  “What are you thinking about?” said Ben.

  Emily remembered then where she was, here in her hastily tidied sitting room with this geeky parachuting accountant, how parachuting had caused all this trouble in the first place.

  “I was wondering how you can bear to fling yourself out of a plane the second time, once you know what it’s like.”

  “You just had a bad experience,” said Ben. “Jeremy is 6’3” with zero co-ordination, he wasn’t your best role model. He’s not really cut out for parachuting.”

  “It wasn’t just him that terrified me though,” she said. “It was worse being pushed out of the plane – I can’t believe the instructor did that, it’s cruel,” and even as she remembered it, from the safety of her living room, it reminded her of something long forgotten, made her feel unnerved, distressed all over again.

  “He had to do that,” said Ben. “Otherwise you’d have missed the landing area. It was actually perfectly safe.”

  “It really didn’t feel it. I don’t feel safe now.”

  “What do you mean?” Ben said, and he seemed alarmed, as if he’d made a mistake to come here so late after all.

  “I don’t mean like that.” She hesitated for long slow seconds, took a gulp and paused again, and then she surprised herself as she looked straight at him and said it.

  “I just mean I don’t know how I’m ever going to go back to a place where I’m not totally crazy about you.”

  Ben smiled. “I was hoping you’d say something like that,” he said, and he got up from the silver wicker chair that Emily had found in a junk shop and sprayed herself. Emily stood too and moved slowly around the glass coffee table towards him. They stood three feet apart just looking at each other, still anxious, their bodies aching, and then – who moved first they never could work out – they were holding each other very tightly, and they stayed like that for a very long time.

  5

  I sit in the kitchen of Finsbury Park Palace, with its country style oak cupboard doors and marble-effect formica worktops, and I have a vodka tonic in front of me and I swear I’ve never had that drink before. Although the floor is gritty under the soles of my ballet pumps, the kitchen is cleaner than I’d imagined it would be, from the outside, but the sweet stench of bins is making me want to retch. How much rubbish does this house produce, I wonder pointlessly, thinking of the over-flowing dustbins in the front garden. Angel sits across from me, too pretty and sparkling for these surroundings, and her fringed waistcoat over skinny jeans makes me feel dowdy and old. A thin swarthy boy with lank longish hair is cutting odd-looking vegetables next to the sink, his name’s Fabio I think Angel said, but he keeps his head down and doesn’t take part in our conversation. The surly black girl is nowhere to be seen, and Angel says no-one else is back from work yet.

  ”You feeling better now, babe?” says Angel, taking a long sip from her drink.

  “Yes, thanks so much for helping me.”

  “Don’t worry, it was nothing,” she says, and smiles her angelic smile. “Where are you from anyway?”

  “I’m from near Chester, originally, but I’ve been living in Manchester most recently,” I say. “I just split up from my boyfriend and felt like I needed a change of scene. I’ve lived round the Manchester area my whole life and so thought I should give London a go, before I’m too old.” I giggle nervously.

  I’ve rehearsed all this, have m
y back story sorted, close enough to the truth to feel authentic. I spit it out all in one go, before I’ve been asked, and it sounds fake, apologetic.

  “Too old! You’re never too old for London,” laughs Angel. “You might be too old for sharing a crappy house with a bunch of lunatics though – you look far too posh for this place.”

  “No, no it’s fine,” I say. “I just can’t afford too much rent until I get myself sorted, plus I thought it would be a good way to meet new people.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far, babe. The people who live here you’d normally cross the road to avoid. Don’t worry about him,” she continues, nodding towards Fabio’s bent head as I look over, embarrassed. “He doesn’t speak English.” Angel scrabbles in her bag. “Want a ciggie, babe?”

  “No thanks. I don’t smoke.”

  “You mind if I have one?”

  I nod yes, it’s fine, although the heat and the bins and the hunger and the vodka are making me feel increasingly nauseous. I realise I left the Chorlton cottage 14 hours ago and I’ve barely eaten. My jeans feel sticky and my feet hurt and I desperately want to lie down, but I don’t want to be rude. I take a gulp of my drink.

  “I love your name,” I say pointlessly, trying to keep the conversation going. I find I’m still polite like that, now that I’m Catherine.

  Angel laughs. “All I did was drop the “a” babe, it’s amazing what it’s done for my image.”

  A thought enters my head. I feel silly but there’s something about her that makes it OK to ask. “Angel, would you mind calling me Cat? I’m just totally stealing your idea, but I’ve always hated the name Catherine.”

  “Whatever babe,” smiles Angel, and my name changes for the second time today.