The wedding is only four months away. I have a feeling that something massive is going to hit me. I feel like I have been fighting in the surf all my life. Now, out beyond the last, the biggest wave, there is open sea.
I tell Sarah about the dress I tried on over the weekend.
‘White, is it?’
‘Cream, actually.’
‘Sounds lovely.’
‘Sarah!!!’ I say. We have nipped out for a coffee. Something has to break.
‘Sarah what?’
‘Just stop it. All right?’
And then, because she is Sarah, she changes the subject, makes me laugh about Gary in security’s hairy neck. I talk about my sister’s children, while she sprinkles the table with sugar and draws her finger through it, and then she asks about the dress. Seriously this time.
Apparently, I can’t do a dropped waist. I’ll have to get on a sunbed now, and go for white.
Once when she was drunk she said, ‘You know your problem? You’ll be all right. That’s your fucking tragedy, you know that? You’ll always be all right.’
But I don’t feel all right, Sarah. Just because I don’t make a song and dance about it. Doesn’t mean I’m always, or even sometimes, all right. You know?
‘I just wanted to get married,’ says Frank.
‘Profiteroles,’ I say, ‘or chocolate mousse. It’s just a decision. A stupid decision, that’s all.’
But there is an extraordinary thing happening in bed. As if he wants to wreck us both, sink to the bottom, while all the invitations and the profiteroles and the satin shoes wash up on shore.
And because I am more miserable about Sarah all the time, because I think she will spoil everything like the bad fairy at the christening, he says, ‘Bring her over. All the two of you do is get hammered and miserable. I’ll cook. Bring her over.’
We don’t just get hammered, we have a laugh. And we talk too. We talk about lots of things. But when I ask her to dinner, it feels odd. And somehow, because I am getting married, the bisexual boyfriend has to come too.
Frank’s flat is better than mine for these things. He has a big living room, split by a kitchen counter, and a table of a decent size. I put candles on the table and on top of the TV. By the time I’m finished cleaning, Frank has all the vegetables on different plates, chopped up and ready to go.
Sarah turns up before it gets dark. She moves sort of sideways and looks at things in the room, picking up an old birthday card, a list of messages, and then Frank’s tax cert. which she puts back down again. She is wearing black, and jewellery. I feel I should change, to put her at ease, but it’s too late now.
Frank has a dish of olives on the table, but she will not eat them. Like it’s all a bit hilarious. When she walked in the door she said, ‘Kisses!’ as if she’d known him for years. But she still hasn’t looked at him. She picks at scraps of paper and touches things. She checks her watch.
‘So married bliss, Frank,’ she says.
‘Yeah,’ says Frank.
‘What do you mean, “Yeah”?’
‘Well, it’s … I don’t know,’ says Frank. ‘It’s such a production.’
And she gives me an arch look, while his back is turned. He comes over to the table with the dips and cut bread. She looks at him then. She gives him a good look, and her eyes falter.
He puts the food on the table.
‘Isn’t he a treasure?’ she says, and I don’t want Frank to cook any more. It makes him look silly. I follow him to the kitchen counter and, ‘Ack ack ack!’ he says, and swipes my hand away from all the vegetables, in their neat rows.
‘So, honeybunch,’ I say. ‘When’s this guy of yours going to show?’
At dinner we talk about sex. Everyone is drunk quite quickly, except maybe Frank who is worried about the food. But when it is all served up, he goes too. Wham. There are two red blotches flaring over his cheeks from the side of his nose.
Sarah’s man sits all hunched over and bundled up in a T-shirt and a knitted thing and a jacket that he won’t take off, so I can’t tell what his body is like, but his hands are very small and unpleasant. He reaches on to his plate and lifts little pieces up with glistening fingertips.
So, his name is Fiach. He works part-time for his father and he takes photographs and he wants to get into advertising but more like short films, blah blah, you know the type. When he turns his head you can see the tail end of a tattoo coming out from under his hair.
But it seems that Sarah is mad about him. She looks at him with her entire face, then she gets embarrassed and looks down at her plate. I wonder what he does to her in bed, or makes her do.
And then we are all talking at once. I say that the real porn on the Internet is the property pages from France. A house in the Auvergne for fourteen grand, that’s the real porn, and Sarah is trying to tell her hitch-hiking story from Italy and Fiach is talking about the first porn shop he went into in London where the women in the magazines were like housewives, all trussed up with clothes pegs and Marigold gloves.
Amazing. We are people who have sex. Frank fills the glasses and I see it all stretching out ahead of me. Couples. I look at the rest of my life and despair.
Now everyone is excited, jumping in with their particular tic: politicians who put things up their bottoms, and the one about the lesbian journalists, and then some film star who took a shit, literally, on a beautiful black woman, this last from Sarah.
‘Oh, come on,’ says Frank.
‘Come on, what?’
‘It’s just because she’s black.’
‘Well, exactly.’
‘I mean, the story is just because she’s black.’
‘Oh, Frank,’ says Sarah. ‘Oh, you poor boy,’ and she squeezes his forearm.
Frank gets up then and goes to the counter and there is a pause around the table. He swings back with the coffee cups and says to Fiach, ‘I was looking for a camera in the duty free last month, but it’s all gizmos and auto-focus. Like for eejits.’
Sarah snorts into her glass of wine. Then she just keeps laughing. Fiach looks at her and says, ‘Don’t bother. I started with a second-hand Olympus. Bog basic. Lovely thing.’
‘Olympus,’ says Frank, but before Fiach can turn away from her, Sarah says, ‘Fiach likes taking pictures. Don’t you, Fiach?’
Then it is her turn to get up. She leaves the room and the two boys talk on about cameras and she doesn’t come back. I think she’s left the flat; I think she’s in the other room doing something dreadful, something I can’t even imagine. I try to think of what it might be, but whatever comes to mind isn’t really dreadful, after all.
Still, the air of it is in the room, the feel of something appalling, until Sarah comes back with her hair brushed and the eyeliner wiped away from under her left eye. She sees us looking, sweeps up her drink and decides to dance. Glass in one hand, she waves the other in the air. The skin of her underarm is dark and stained, and not particularly strawberry blonde. I say, ‘Sarah.’
‘What?’
But, as if she guesses, she lowers her arm, shimmies over and hooks her finger into the neck of Fiach’s T-shirt. She smiles close into his face. Then she gives up and slumps back into her seat.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ she says. ‘Let’s go somewhere. Let’s go for a bop.’
Which is when Frank brings out the brandy, still talking to Fiach about lenses, and I ask Sarah about her mother. Sarah hates her mother, though it is her father who is the manic depressive, probably. But it is the father she loves and the mother she despises, so we talk about this for a while. Then I tell her about Mammy taking the bottle out of the hot press and saying, ‘Well, at least I’m not drinking any more,’ as she pours herself another vodka. But it is an old conversation. It doesn’t work any more. It is time to go — or would be if Sarah weren’t so drunk. She leans back and looks at the boys and tests the edge of her front teeth with her tongue.