‘Great. I’ve only got one left to try then we’ve got to go and choose some more.’
‘Fuck me,’ she said, folding up the paper. ‘What a thoroughly intolerable process. We should have brought some mandy along for this. Seriously. It’s sending me under.’
She clicked her fingers. The sales assistant, over by the stairs, jerked her head and started to walk over.
‘Tyler!’ I said. ‘Do not — I cannot believe you just—’
I retreated and hid inside the cubicle, listening to Tyler saying, ‘Look, we’re going to be spending an obscene amount of money in here (Pretty Woman) so be a doll and go get that bottle of Asti Martini, would you?’
‘It’s Hardy’s.’
‘No shit.’
When I emerged in the next dress, Tyler stood up and proffered me a full flute. She circled me, trailing the fabric with her free hand. ‘Yes, okay,’ she said. ‘So this is a lesson I suppose in terms of What We Don’t Want… ’
I looked at the bottle on the table and saw half of it was gone. I necked my flute and held it out for her to refill.
‘You know what this needs to be?’ Tyler said, waggling her finger up and down the length of me.
‘What?’
‘RED.’
‘Look around you, Tyler. It’s wall-to-wall white in here. It’s like John and Yoko never moved out.’
‘Now there’s a cool couple.’
‘A cool married couple.’
‘Don’t start.’
I’d been batting back with a list of modish marrieds every time she fronted me with the ‘marriage just isn’t cool’ line of argument. Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter. Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer. Tom Waits and Kathleen. Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis (even though they’d split up). Now I could add John and Yoko.
Tyler looked unconvinced. ‘Uh oh,’ she said, ‘here comes the cavalry.’
The sales assistant was walking towards us with an armful of dresses, followed by another assistant freighted with netting and frills. ‘I’m sure there’ll be something you like here!’ the sales assistant said brightly, which translated as You’d Better Fucking Buy Something After Having So Much Wine.
There wasn’t anything I liked — but that didn’t stop us taking our time with the next onslaught of options whilst working our way through another bottle of sparkling something or other. Soon, Tyler was trying on dresses, too — dresses that, predictably, all looked much better on her.
I stared at myself in the full-length mirror. ‘I look like I’m in fancy dress.’
‘Now you’re talking,’ said Tyler, wine sloshing from her flute onto her collarbone as she almost tripped over the train of the dress she was wearing — a pearlised number with puff sleeves. ‘Hey, that’s what you should do! You should be a ZOMBIE BRIDE. I’ll do your facial lesions. There are tutorials online… ’
The sales assistant appeared by the cubicles. ‘Anything you ladies like?’ she said, looking at me.
‘Another one of those, please,’ said Tyler. She’d put the empty wine bottle upside down in a vase of silver twigs.
The woman began: ‘I’m sorry but… ’
‘Fuck’s sake,’ Tyler said, hitching up her dress and waddling into the cubicle. She reemerged after a few seconds proffering a crumpled tenner.
‘I’m afraid you don’t understand,’ the sales assistant whispered. ‘This isn’t a bar.’
‘If it were a bar it would be a very shit one,’ Tyler said. ‘I would give it one beer mat out of a possible ten and that would be for the free parking.’
The sales assistant looked at me.
‘Okay,’ I said, channelling my mum, ‘I’m going to go away and have a little think. Tyler, take some photos of me before we leave.’
I paraded a few ill-fitting monstrosities around the fitting area while Tyler clumsily snapped away with her phone. ‘Send one of those to Jim, would you?’ I said afterwards, one leg in my jeans, trying not to fall against the closed curtain. ‘The most flattering one, if such a thing exists. Just so he thinks I’m doing something pro-active.’
‘I don’t have his number stored.’
‘Oh.’
‘What’s he wearing for the wedding, anyway?’
‘Probably just one of his work suits.’
‘So why are you making all this effort?’
I took a breath. ‘You know, it tears me up when you and Jim do this.’
‘Do what?’
A hotel bar in the Lake District. Me, Jim and Tyler on our first and only holiday together. Jim and I had only been together a few months but I knew it was serious enough to warrant an introduction to my best friend. We should all go away together! I thought. Somewhere clean. The Lakes seemed like a good choice. I booked us two rooms at The View by Ullswater, and Jim drove us there in his new hatchback.
We’d had a long dinner with lots of wine and by the time we adjourned to the residents’ bar we were pretty much wedding-drunk (an ironic observation now…). Things had been going okay. Jim and Tyler had slowly relaxed after scoping each other out with questions about their upbringing (Jim to Tyler) and favourite poems (Tyler to Jim). I was feeling very hopeful about everything, like a well-oiled axle between two shiny wheels that would speed me joyously through the rest of my life. Easy to be happily morbid when you’re drunk in good company. I kissed Jim on the cheek and he squeezed my knee under the table.
‘Look, there’s a piano,’ said Tyler, nodding to a barkish old hulk propped up against the wall. She looked at Jim. ‘There’s a piano, Jim.’
Jim looked. ‘I can confirm that that is a piano, Tyler, yes.’
Tyler let her thumb glance off Jim’s elbow. ‘Well, you should play it then. You being all piano-y.’
I laughed nervously into my drink. Jim looked at me and took a swig of wine. He’d told me it happened a lot, people asking him to play (If I was a plumber they wouldn’t say, Go on, do something with a pipe, would they? But musicians are constantly on call… I thought it a little churlish of him. A little). Then he stood up and walked over to the geriatric instrument, pulled over a chair from a nearby table and sat down. Tyler sat back in her seat, pleased.
I tensed. I’d heard him play the second-hand Steinway upright in his flat a few times drunk, but never anything in public. The concerts he’d played so far had been abroad and it had been too early for all that. I was worried what Tyler might think, what — dare I think it? — what ammo it would give her. She didn’t like how often I was staying over at his. She’d brought up the matter of rent a few times, swiftly dropped it. Still.
Jim ran his fingers along the keys in opposite directions. The room filled with noise — a good rhythm and a cascade of sounds. He turned to look at us. ‘It’s not quite tuned but it’s not as bad as I thought,’ he said. His fingers were hitting the keys as he talked. ‘Hang on… almost got it… ’ His fingers fluttered, up and down, in ever decreasing breadth until he was down down down to one note which he struck struck struck with a DONK DONK DONK. ‘There,’ he said, and grinned. ‘Found the room.’
My pelvic floor twitched.
‘What do you mean, found the room?’ said Tyler.
Jim, playing again, up and down and up and down, smiled at her — bizarrely in that smile he’d reminded me of Tyler, as though something had in that moment been transferred — and said, ‘There’s always one note that makes the room resonate. It’s something you want to avoid.’
Tyler rolled her eyes, raised her glass and struck the side with a flick of her middle finger. The glass sounded with a short ping. ‘Look, I found it, too.’