Little by Little

It’s the small things. Of course, it’s the little, seemingly insignificant things. Big things have a habit of being conspicuous. Big things are like grizzly bears. They don’t gradually insinuate themselves into your lives. They don’t delicately become a part of the very fabric of your life. They are either miles away in their usual habitat, or they are wrecking your home as they smash their way towards you, intent on eating you from the feet upwards, with no regard whatsoever for your pitiful screams. The neighbours may be banging on the wall to keep the noise down, but the bear? It gives no shits about your plight. Not a single one.

But then, that’s life for you.

The neighbours knew. They had to. And yet they never said a word. Better to stay out of it. Everyone knew. It was a badly kept secret; Stanley Bradshaw was a bitter, mean man. So, why was Carrie the last one to cotton on to this? Why had she not known? Why was it that she never saw it coming?

Stanley was no bear. Not even in the world of men. He barely qualified as a man, if the truth was ever to be told. He was stunted in every way possible. A gnarled stump in a forest of trees. 

And yet Carrie loved him.

Love was how Carrie was built. She was made to love. Didn’t know any other way. She was aware that there were other ways, but they may as well have been snot covered space monsters, such was the alienation she had towards the alternatives. She was Carrie and she loved Stanley. To cease loving would be to stop breathing.

Now, as she considered the concept of Stanley, she realised that her love was trapped in a time capsule. Whenever she thought of him, she said loved. There was no love, only a memory of a feeling. A way of being that no longer made sense to her.

She wanted to cry, but she didn’t know how. Or rather, she didn’t know the why of it. This shocked her. She couldn’t grieve for Stanley. He didn’t deserve any more of her. And so it was her that she mourned. The Carrie who had thrown herself away in a trash can of a man. The nature of her discardment was piecemeal. Stanley had taken an emotional knife to her and made of her a jigsaw that he threw away one piece at a time. Carrie chuckled mirthlessly at this. Stanley knife. Even his name was a glaringly obvious clue. 

How could she put herself back together? That was just one of a never ceasing train of queries. She was tied to the tracks, and question after question crushed her. Intuitively, she knew that were she to retrieve all of those jigsaw pieces, they would never fit together again. That woman was gone. She was no longer herself. Neither was she any other woman. Instead, she was caught in a terrible limbo courtesy of her Stanley.

The problem was that once you spent enough time with another human being, you were defined by them. Carrie looked across the dining table and tried to see herself in the man she had devoted herself to, but she couldn’t. He had consumed her, but taken not a morsel of her into himself in any meaningful way. 

He’d used her, and he was intent on using her all up.

She tried to see the good in her situation. This was her life after all. And this was supposed to be for keeps. She cast her mind back to her childhood and the blueprint she’d been gifted as to how it was to be a wife. The legacy not only of her mother, but also her father. Two parts of a loving whole. 

Her father had been a quiet man. She had so wanted him to talk more. To speak to her. To speak for her. There had never been an absence with her father though. If anything, the sparsity of his words was daunting. There was a terrible power in the quiet of him. Her need for him to talk was to sooth and reassure her. Only now, did she see that her mother had given her that in spades, not only directly, but also as a part of a couple that had ceased being two people long before she could remember. 

Her mother had the words. She translated some of what her father was. He relied upon her to do so, knew that she would do a better job of it. His power laid elsewhere. There was a shared devotion to their family and their home. Cassie often felt sad that she was their only child. 

A brother was what had been needed. Everything would have made so much more sense then. The intensity of her parents’ love wouldn’t have been dimmed as such, but Carrie would have had a sibling to share it with and in sharing it, she would have felt more as though she were worthy. She sometimes wondered whether all only-children felt this way. The product of two adults with so many hopes and fears. The vehicle of two sets of unfulfilled dreams. Too much responsibility to shoulder alone. No choices to be made. Never mind learning how to share toys. This was the biggest lesson Carrie had been deprived of.

But she had been loved. She’d been loved and protected from a harsh world that didn’t care how it might hurt the soft and transitory people trying to make something of their fleeting existence. Her folks had loved her and made sure that she knew that she was supposed to be deserving of that love. Not by virtue of what she did and how she acted, but simply because she was Carrie, and there was no one in the world like her, nor would there ever be. 

She was special and she was loved.

Her folks had also taught her that you got out of life what you put in. They needn’t have formulated the words to describe this universal truth, she could see it enacted in their lives. They told her all the same. Her mother would smile and say that the best bit was that you never knew what you were getting in return, or how and when it would turn up. 

“Just keep going”, she’d said to Carrie. Then she’d talked about prayer, “God helps those who help themselves, which is to say that you don’t just kneel at the end of your bed and ask for something. You’ve got to mean it. And meaning it means you live it. You work at it and you give it your all, OK?”

Carrie had nodded solemnly, then she’d gone out into the world and lived it with every fibre of her being. She’d been given the recipe for a successful life and all she had to do was follow it to the t. Well, she’d missed one vital ingredient and only now did she understand that she had substituted it with Stanley. 

She didn’t want to admit that she had gotten it wrong. Not even to herself. Most of all to herself. For an age, she’d soldiered on because it felt wrong to blame Stanley. But now she was coming to realise that some people were built differently. Some people had bad wiring and they were all cold inside. Some people were incapable of love. Not just showing love, but receiving it. 

It hurt Carrie to think of that. How it would be never to accept the warmth of another person’s love. Even a badly treated dog could be won over with gentle care and affection. It was never too late for a dog. What was so wrong with some people? 

What was wrong with Stanley?

She observed him now. Carrie had never observed anyone in the entirety of her life, but now it was required. A part of her detached itself and she became a scientist. Stanley was the subject of her academic study.

It didn’t take long for her to establish that the reason she was doing this wasn’t with a view to reconciliation. What she was doing here was learning. Stanley may have been beyond redemption, but surely she wasn’t.

Initially, she noted the small, but terrible and sometimes brutal things that he did. Stanley was a mean man, and until very recently Carrie had filtered all of that meanness out. She had worn thick filters of love and now she wondered how she’d seen anything of Stanley at all. 

If Carrie was to explain what sort of a man he was, she would state that Stanley kicked cats. This wasn’t an occasional attribute. It wasn’t that Stanley was capable of kicking a cat. Nor was it that he had once kicked a cat. No, Stanley was a cat kicker and he’d had plenty of practice at it. 

He was mean to dogs too. 

Carrie thought that were he to think he’d get away with it, he’d probably kick children. Hard. Not for the first time was she thankful that she and Stanley had never been blessed with children. Turned out that the lack of children was the blessing. There was a lesson here. God in His heaven had seen the monster that Stanley was, and saw fit to end that particular line of monsters.

The list that Carrie compiled of Stanley’s misdeeds was extensive, soon becoming self-populating. There were so many bad things that Stanley did, that it was easier to point out the good things that he did. Mostly, his good deeds were done in a public light. Every Sunday he portrayed a piety that dissolved as soon as his back was to the church. When he was abroad, he could summon a smile that dazzled. Carrie hadn’t once seen that smile when it was the two of them. After an age of crushing disappointment and numerous inquests as to what was wrong with her for never having earned that smile of his, she was now seeing the reality of Stanley. His callous smirk was merely fool’s gold. She was still to ascertain whether she was the fool. Holding onto a hope that it was Stanley who was the idiot. That she had acted in good faith and everything she had given was to life and not to the murderous thief Stanley had turned out to be.

Stanley’s thievery became more and more apparent, and as a result, Carrie began to notice the absences. This was the revelation that helped her turn a corner that at last afforded her a glimpse of blessed escape.

Now she sat at the other end of the barren wasteland of the dining table and saw things for how they really were. Not once had Stanley made her a cup of tea. When they went out together, they were never together. He walked a distance ahead of her and she trotted along in his wake. Right now, as she surreptitiously studied him, his lack of interest in her was evident. She stifled a sigh as she thought of the myriad ways he showed his lack of love for her. 

How had she allowed herself to succumb to this lazy, casual torture? How had she managed to sleepwalk into this trap, allowing herself to be imprisoned by a hateful man who hadn’t wanted a wife as much as a cellmate that he could take his self-loathing out on.

How had Stanley approximated the actions of a man in love? How had he charmed her into this state?

Carrie realised that it didn’t matter. None of it was real. Not one bit of it. Not even her.

That was the tough part. Working out whether she had enough left in her to be real ever again. The awful truth of it was that it felt easier to carry on as she was. Theirs was a bad habit that she wasn’t sure she wanted to kick. A sad, tired addiction that she couldn’t find a better alternative to. Bitter sugar that made her fatter and lazier. 

Did she want this?

That was the question that haunted her now. She had been with Stanley for so long that she knew no different. She had slipped so easily into this existence. To leave Stanley would be to choose the hardest path of all. It shamed her to accept that she was ready and willing to reject that path. To reject love.

The very thought of being with another man frightened her. She knew it shouldn’t. Almost anyone would be better than Stanley. Then it dawned on her. What she was overlooking. Herself. Her. Self. Before she did anything else, she needed to learn to love herself again. To remember the loving and nurturing home she was a product of. 

She needed to wake up and when she did, she’d be free at last. Easier said than done though. The bars of her prison may have been imaginary, but they were stronger than steel. Belief could do that. Stanley had co-opted her into building her own prison. That was the worst trap of all. There was seldom an escape from the prison of belief.

Carrie was seeing now though. Saw Stanley for what he really was, and this filled her with loathing and fear because Stanley was constantly cruel even when things were going his way. To defy him would be to open a door to something truly dark. She already saw that in his eyes, and so she trod very, very carefully. Going through the same subdued motions that she always had. Following the same appeasing rituals and routines so that Stanley wouldn’t suspect a thing.

Her mother’s philosophy on prayer was the inspiration for what she did next. Carrie would do the hard yards. She would help herself. When the bare bones of a plan came to her, she was warmed by a smile she had forgotten that she was capable of. It was all she could do to supress that smile and the growing excitement that came with it. 

The timing of her final act with Stanley was important. She wanted everything to be just so. As she worked upon her plan, she was reminded of birthdays and other special occasions and how important that had once been to her. Well, this was going to be a big surprise and it would make up for all those lost opportunities to celebrate. Carrie was making up for lost time. Making the most of everything she had ever done. Everything she’d given. She was owed for all of that. Sometimes it was a case of taking matters into your own hands.

The observant scientist in Carrie made several educated assumptions and they paid off one after another. The gist of these assumptions was that Stanley was inherently lazy. All Carrie had to do was to keep up the pretence of her existence, and his lack of care or thought would provide her with the smoke screen she required. Besides, the changes she made were so very small. She’d learned her lessons well. The small things were what counted in the end.

On the final day of Stanley’s rein of cruelty, Carrie put on her favourite dress and wore a little make up for the first time in a very long time. She had had to buy the make-up on the sly, appropriating funds little by little so that Stanley wouldn’t spot any change in her or her behaviour. 

He neither noticed nor cared for the effort that Carrie had made.

The first thing Stanley did notice was the difference in the meal that had been placed before him. Aesthetically, the meal fit the bill. It was exactly as expected, his usual gammon, mash, peas and parsley sauce. However, the mouthful that he’d absently delivered with his fork was an unpleasant glue that made his words ridiculous.

“This is cold,” he growled in a strangely comical way. 

When he saw the look of triumph painted upon Carrie’s face he instinctively sought to remove it, spitting the glob of cold food at her. The ball of food missed her face and hit her shoulder. Carrie looked at the mess and then at him, barely containing her disdain for this pitiful man.

“They say that revenge is a dish best served cold,” she said with a confidence that surprised even her.

Stanley didn’t say anything, his anger was already getting the better of him. This was all against the run of play. He was no longer in control of his game, and all he had left to him was the brutal expression of his fear. 

Carrie’s scientist watched the subject of her experiment dispassionately as it behaved exactly as predicted. The cool, calm of the observation detached Carrie as the experiment unfolded. She was mercifully dissociated from what happened next. Stanley, sensing that he was about to lose the focus of all his hate and abuse, exercised what he viewed as the ultimate form of control over his long-suffering wife. She was never to leave him. That wasn’t an option for her. She was his and that was all there was to it. He wouldn’t share her with the world. Never.

Carrie had other ideas though. 

Carries wanted the world to know what Stanley really was.

And now it did. 

Courtesy of the discreet cameras arrayed around the room, and a live feed Carrie had linked to several local businesses. The footage was also emailed to the local police, but on a twenty four hour delay. By then, the game was up for Stanley. A small, but very motivated mob paid him a visit and meted out the revenge Carrie had planned for him. The cameras, having done their job, stared blindly beyond Stanley’s painfully deserved demise. 

With a little push from Carrie, life gave Stanley back what he had given…