Jim turned back to face the piano. ‘Anyway, now I’ve got it… ’ He launched into a casually glorious, soaring, swelling, hell perfect rendition of ‘At Last’ by Etta James.
‘Fuck,’ I said under my breath.
I looked around to see the bar staff standing by the door, rapt. I looked at Tyler. She was watching Jim, her glass poised midway between her mouth and the table, her face a crisp twist of angry awe. It took a lot to make Tyler forget about her drink.
‘French onion soup!’ Tyler declared. ‘That’s what we need to recover. Soup and a pint of real ale, like the ursines drink.’
We walked from Salford — where we’d abandoned the car post-Cheshire — to one of our favourite pubs, a Victorian chophouse that was tiled like a swimming pool and staffed by bartenders in bowties. The onion soup there was the best in town — rich and murky as pond water, served with a dumplingy cheese crouton the size of a baby’s fist. Tucked away in the slats and canopies of the beer garden, we dissected the day over ale and then red wine.
‘I’ve got the decorators in!’ Tyler said loudly, raising her glass. It was a phrase I’d told her was a traditional English toast for whenever you were drinking red wine. As a gag it had enjoyed a remarkably good innings.
‘Just get a normal dress from a normal shop,’ Tyler said. ‘That place was heinous.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s almost as if they want to put you off.’ I swirled my wine. The legs lingered in thin, filmy waves on the sides of the glass and then retreated back to the pool at the bottom.
‘Why ever would they want to do that? Put you off a barely evolved pagan ceremony for needy morons?’
‘I’m not a needy moron. Well, maybe I’m needy sometimes, but aren’t we all?’
‘I’m not.’
‘Yes, you are.’
‘I’m not.’ She grabbed my wrist. ‘Tell me. Tell me I’m not needy, Laura. Say it. Say you’re not needy.’
I picked her hand off my wrist. ‘No.’
She drained her glass. ‘I just don’t get it. What is this need for a special dress?’ She said ‘special dress’ in a little-girl voice. ‘Why don’t you just wear your favourite dress — the maroon lacy one? It’s not as though we’re the kind of people who take photos of ourselves all the time when we’re out in a desperate need to document our lives.’ I thought of the photo I’d sent earlier to Jim. ‘I think it’s so fucking tragic when people do that. What, so they can sit there when they’re eighty, pointing through albums mid-air with a virtual-reality glove, saying And here’s another glorious moment I failed to participate in because I was too busy taking a fucking photo. Wear the maroon. In ten years you’ll have forgotten you didn’t buy it especially. And you know what, Lo, it’s your fucking wedding.’
This one was from Tyler’s friend Agnes, the only friend from Crawford she’d ever kept in touch with — although Agnes had recently ‘gone over to the dark side’ (childrearing). Apparently Agnes had been so bombed on speed at her own wedding that when the photographer and members of her family were hassling her to get out of her room to have some photos taken Agnes had emerged enraged, her train hitched halfway up her legs, stood at the top of the grand central staircase and roared at the foyer of assembled guests below: ‘LISTEN UP, PEOPLE: IT’S MY FUCKING WEDDING.’ Tyler, boshed on the same speed, stood on a chaise longue and applauded. The phrase had since been applied to any situation where you were going to do something your way because it was your thing.
‘The whole idea of marriage is preposterous, though, in the modern age,’ Tyler went on.
‘Everything’s preposterous when you look at it too long,’ I said. ‘Especially the word “preposterous”.’
She swigged more wine and banged her glass down on the table. The glass base hit the wood with a jarring crack. ‘But there’s no ceremony for friendship, is there? Does friendship mean nothing in this world? Nothing to you?’
I lit up a cigarette and took the first drag back hard into my throat, so hard it made my eyes water. I looked at her. ‘Take a day off from this. An hour, even.’
‘Why? Because you know it’s true?’ I looked at her. She looked back. ‘If you go ahead with this wedding then you realise that what you’re actually saying is that your friendship with me is not meaningful and durable. That,’ she sipped her wine victoriously, ‘is the logical conclusion.’
‘Believe me, if I could marry you too, Tyler, I would.’
Would I? Probably not.
‘Did you know there are now as many unmarried parents as married parents in the UK? Things are changing. You don’t have to fuse the nuclear family any more.’
‘I don’t want to fuse the nuclear family.’
‘So why marry Jim at all? Why this insistence on upheaval?’
I looked at her and kept looking at her as I brought my glass to my lips. I had to make light of it, had to. ‘I dunno, variety?’
‘You’re ruining my life for variety’s sake?’
‘I’m not ruining your life! There’s more to your life than me! And I’m marrying Jim because I love him, I do, and this feels like… ’ I couldn’t say ‘adventure’. ‘… progress.’
She smacked her forehead with her hand. ‘Progress? What about our hard-earned system? Have you forgotten about that? Isn’t marriage just another example of everything we’ve always fought against, as in the shit people do because they think they should rather than because they actually want to?’
I held her chin and turned her face to mine. ‘Listen to me, Tyler. I want to marry Jim. I have not been coerced or conditioned—’
‘But how would you—?’ She looked like a Cabbage Patch doll, her mouth squished in my hand. I released her.
‘And I want to be part of a team against the world again. When I was a child—’
‘Oh, the formative anecdote… Come on then, Fred fucking Savage, let’s have it.’ She looked into the middle distance, made her eyes all dreamy. ‘That was the day I realised… ’
I slapped her arm. ‘When we were in his van going out on a Sunday my dad used to say We’re the J-Team! Like the A-Team.’
She nodded. ‘I am aware of The A-Team. It’s one of my people’s cultural gifts to the world.’
‘So I want to be part of a new team against the world.’ I quailed at my own schmaltziness but I knew it was true — the idea, at any rate.
‘Teams are awful. Families are awful. People are awful. Why perpetuate the awfulness?’
‘So why don’t you live alone? Why have me around?’
Neither of us said it but it was there, unspoken. It flashed in her eyes at the same time it went through my head but I was afraid of saying it and I knew she was, too. We used to be a team. She lit a fag.
I reached for the fag packet and lit one up, too. ‘You can get a new housemate.’
‘Who? I don’t know anyone else. I don’t like anyone else.’
She wiped her nose on the back of her hand. Two jackal-faced men came out of the pub and perched on the seats at the end of our table without asking. It irked me but I didn’t say anything. Tyler picked up her phone, read something and put it back down on the table. The men didn’t speak to each other, and I saw them clock Tyler with interest. She registered them, too. An audience.
‘So I was at this party the night before last in an old mill,’ she began. ‘That was where all the trouble started. I was fiercely bored as I so often am in this weary little city.’ Curls had snapped out from the kirby grips above her temples. Her fingernails were filthy where they were missing polish, all coal seams and saffron crescent moons. ‘Around 2 A.M. someone put a metal pole through the amp—’