My dad looked at me. The blotches on his cheeks had joined up with rage. ‘Grayling said he’d never seen someone hold on to so much hair. I walked six miles on Sunday without stopping.’ I nodded. ‘All right, then. I’ll have the grilled chicken and a side salad. With blue cheese dressing.’
My mum waited until the waitress had gone and turned to me. ‘So where are you up to with everything?’
Jim produced a list and a pen from his pocket.
‘What’s that?’ I said.
‘My list.’
‘You have a list?’
‘I find lists very calming,’ said Mel.
‘I’ll tell you one that isn’t calming,’ Jim said. ‘The guest list. We’ve been trying to keep the numbers down but every person raises a few others. It’s like that mythical beast where you chop a head off and two others sprout up in its place.’
‘Just tell them all no,’ said Julian. ‘If we get married it’ll be just the two of us on a beach. I’m not paying for every piss-taker I’ve ever met to come fill their boots.’ He sat straight and breathed in bullishly through his nose, inflating his lungs to full capacity. It was a way of breathing that said More Oxygen For Me.
I looked at Mel. She didn’t look at me. She didn’t need to.
‘I’ve nearly finished your invites,’ my mum said. ‘And I’ve bought the silk flowers for the table decorations.’
Jim crossed something out on his list.
‘Least I can do,’ my mum said.
Jim’s parents were paying for the wedding.
My mum raised a finger, reached her other hand down under the table and brought out a magazine. ‘And I got this for you, Laura.’ I looked down. Bride Be Lovely. The actor-bride on the front, with her stony whited eyes and rictus grin, looked as though she had been saying BE LOVELY BE LOVELY to herself in the mirror through gritted teeth while getting ready.
‘Thanks, Mum.’
Mel turned to me. ‘Have you picked a dress yet?’
‘I’m going shopping with Tyler at the weekend.’
Julian snorted. He’d first met Tyler at my dad’s sixieth. I could still see his face as he watched her, off her tits on Prosecco, moonwalking across the dance floor to ‘Moves Like Jagger’, shrugging disingenuously. You know what his problem is? Tyler said whenever his name came up. Too much fucking hair gel.
‘Where are you going to look?’ asked my mum.
‘Apparently there’s some kind of bridal village in Cheshire,’ I said. ‘Tyler’s driving me there.’
‘Does Tyler drive?’
‘You know she does.’
‘Well, goodness knows what you’ll end up with if you’re going with that rum bugger,’ said my dad. This was how my dad referred to Tyler—that rum bugger—with more than a hint of admiration. Unlike the rest of them, my dad liked Tyler because he knew a grifter when he met one and couldn’t help but be enthralled when she wrinkled her nose and told him to Get lost and tell her another.
The last time I’d brought Tyler to a family meal she’d gone to the toilet and come back and sat on my dad’s knee and started telling the whole table about how she’d stood on a chair in the coffee shop that day and recited Beowulf (Medieval Literature MA; she’d got a distinction). She said it had gone down well. I wanted her to shut up — or maybe it was because she was perched on my father’s lap and it was making me queasy. I jerked my head, indicating she should get back in her own seat. She did. Only when the mains arrived and I saw her discreetly slide a cod fillet into her lap and wrap it in her napkin, unable to eat it — flinching as the hot fish burned her thin-trousered thighs — did I understand the real reason behind her sudden eruption of intimacy. Zero appetite. Conversation ramped up to eleven. Busted.
‘So we need to plan a date for a rehearsal sometime in August,’ said Jim, pen hovering.
‘Second half of the month’s best for us,’ said my mum. ‘Last chemo session’s on the twelfth.’
My dad was supposed to be giving me away.
‘Great. But see how you feel nearer the time, Bill,’ said Jim.
‘I’ll be fine, pal, don’t you worry. You just make sure you’re around.’
When we got back to Jim’s I went to the bathroom. As I sat on the toilet I heard him laugh. Rushed wiping, flushing, not wanting to miss out.
He was sitting on the sofa, the bridal magazine unfurled across his lap. He looked up. ‘Blitz those bingo wings and be strapless without shame! What a bizarre choice of word that is. Shame.’
‘Well, what could be more shameful than flabby upper arms? I know. These things offer no perspective. They should do a feature on what to do when you’ve fucked the best man or spunked the flower money on ketamine.’
Jim looked at me.
‘I haven’t done either of those things,’ I said. ‘I mean, you haven’t even got a best man… ’
He looked at the magazine. I sat down next him to hunt for more funnies. I thought, How nice it would be to crack open a bottle of wine now and drink it together, getting merry and mocking the ridiculousness. I felt a pang remembering how much we used to dick about together. The time we dressed up as Paula Yates and John Leslie for a Dead Celebrities party. The time we put on too much pink lipstick in Pere Lachaise cemetery and kissed the marble marker of Oscar Wilde’s grave. The time we swam in a loch at lunchtime and had sex beneath a war memorial, causing a group of hikers to call the police. The time we did an impromptu ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’ at a jazz bar and the manager asked if we’d consider being the house band. The time he held my knife. The time I wore his shoes. The time we danced — like, didn’t stop, like constant, deadly dancing — for six hours at a trance festival in Germany; him mostly ballet, me mostly zumba. The times we talked all night, all night — grasping for those ‘meaningful’ conversations (I always meant Every Word). The time I christened him ‘Poirot’ after he drank so much brandy he pinballed along the walls of his flat towards the bathroom — me staggering behind and buffering him when I could — and bellowed several hearty blasts of puke into the sink, the shower cubicle, and finally, finally, the toilet. As I started to mop up with the bathmat he spun towards me, a thin vomit moustache on his top lip, and said: ‘AND WHERE WERE YOO WHEN ALL THIS WES ’EPPENING?’ As he said the word ‘THIS’ he twirled his finger round the outskirts of his face. I had to laugh because his vom-tash and accent (warped by booze-dulled enunciation) combined to give him the air of the Belgian detective. Also, a reckoning there: a responsibility to each other for the state we were in. For the states we got in. Together or apart. A vow of sorts.
Good times.
IT’S MY FUCKING WEDDING
A few days later I was sitting out in the garden ignoring my phone (my mum, ringing to ask about envelopes, the tentative voicemail revealed) when Tyler came tearing round the side of the block. She’d been out all night.
‘GET INSIDE GET INSIDE!’ she yelled. Her cardigan was hanging off, in one hand dangled a pair of ridiculously high wedges that her sister had given her, her other hand was pressed to her chest trapping a large glass jar that looked as though it was full of road grit. It wasn’t winter. I jumped up and ran after her, kicking away the empty whisky bottle I was using as a doorstop. The door banged shut behind us. We pegged it up the stairs.
‘What the fuck’s going on?’
‘JUST HURRRRY!’
She fumbled for her door key with the hand she was holding her wedges in; I shoved her out the way and used my key to open the door. She rammed it open and ran inside. I ran after her, slamming the door and double locking it. She went into the kitchen, opened the fridge and pulled down the plastic flap that sealed off the ice box. She started shoving the jar into the freezer, pulling out ice cube trays to accommodate it.