Spectacles

by Sue Perkins

Is what deliberate?

  Dad:

  You. You look like Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen.

  And then the bride walked up the aisle. I will never forget the face of my sister-in-law-to-be as she walked past our assembled family: two keening women, a man holding a digital watch timing how long it was taking her to get to the altar, and a tardy, dishelleved lesbian dressed like Beau Brummell. It was a face that said, Is it too late for me to pull out?

  Welcome. Welcome to Clan Perkins, love.

  But back to Mel’s wedding – Mel, who is nearly two years older than me. The groom was (and still is) a wonderful man called Ben, who is six foot five inches worth of utter magnificence. Their ceremony was a perfectly beautiful, simple affair at the local church, followed by a reception at the village hall. I don’t think I’m breaking any confidences by revealing that Mel was four months pregnant when she walked down the aisle. As a result, she was having alterations to her dress every single week in the run-up to the actual day. Forty-eight hours before the event the seamstress finally gave up on any attempt at finesse and simply installed a couple of giant side panels which made room for last-minute expansion. Even so, on the morning of the ceremony the bridesmaids were frantically unpicking seams to make way for a little extra baby spread.

  So, I was the maid of honour – a maid in psychedelic jim-jams thanks to Mel. This job carried with it responsibilities. (I know, have the people closest to me learned nothing by now? If there are responsibilities to be dished out, give them to responsible people, not the distracted moon child in the dirty glasses.)

  My prescribed role was to give a speech celebrating the bride. After Gorillagate? I don’t think so. Truthfully, it felt strange. Public speaking was something I did for work. I didn’t want this to feel like work; I wanted it to be real and raw and heartfelt. So I decided not to prepare anything. When the time came, I got up, stood in front of the assembled crowd and

  immediately realized I’d made a huge mistake.

  As I began speaking, there was this sudden tightening in my throat. My breathing became shallow. I must be going down with something, I thought and carried on. The tightness persisted, moving deep into my chest.

  I’d never actually been called upon to describe my relationship with Mel before; I’d only ever spoken about it in terms of what it wasn’t …

  Are you best friends? No.

  Like sisters? No.

  Twins? No.

  Just work colleagues? No.

  Are you lovers? GET OUT OF TOWN – THAT’S GROSS!

  Yet here I was, finally, having to define it. Having to stand there and give my account of what she meant to me, this other strand of my double helix. The more I spoke, the more I started to connect with what I was really feeling.

  Loss.

  I know, I really am an A-grade arsehole. There I am, putting myself and my emotions in the centre of my mate’s BIG DAY. I felt all the joy of the occasion, for sure, but it was accompanied by a profound sense of something being over. It felt like a death. I was a mourner, as well as a celebrant, at the wedding.

  I was so overcome that I spent the next three hours clinging to the bride like a luminescent koala. So much so that in every photo it looks like it was Mel and I getting hitched. The three hours after that I spent clinging to the groom so it looked like Ben and I were getting hitched. As a result there’s not one single photo of that day where the newly-weds are actually pictured next to each other – photo-bombed as they were by me, the Girl in the Pink Pyjamas.

  When Mel went into labour I paced up and down my front room like a laboratory animal. Occasionally she was able to get word out from the hospital: she’d had a curry, she’d been induced, she’d been induced again. For three days she wandered the corridors of the hospital hooked to a drip, desperate for some cervical reaction. Something. Anything. Then everything went quiet.

  Radio silence.

  Those hours felt the longest of my life. We’re never, ever not in touch. Finally the phone rang. There was a weak voice at the end of the phone – familiar but battered. An old friend. A new mother.

  Breaking into a hospital is very hard to do. Trust me, that night I tried. I busted through fire doors and circumvented matrons; I even managed to make it as far as the inner sanctum of the maternity unit. Sadly, my progress ended there. There were even alarms going off. Bloody security. Storm in a teacup, I’m telling you. There really was no need for that armlock and all that shouting.

  The next day I opted to go through more-official channels and turn up at visiting hours. I was shocked by how tired Mel looked. But radiant too. How could she manage that? How you could look ruined and complete at the same time?

  Once mother and baby were back at home later that night, I dropped round. We lay on the bed on a bedspread made by my mum for Mel’s thirtieth. We’d lain there a million times – laughing and gossiping – but this time, instead of talking, we were silent, in a kind of awe at the little thing she had created. Mel bent her head forward and lightly touched her daughter’s nose with her own, and I watched her watching her child.

  She’s done it, I thought, this friend of mine. She’s crossed the Rubicon. She’s gone somewhere I can never go, somewhere beyond the reach of my understanding or experience. We’ve gone everywhere hand in hand together. But I can’t go here. Not here. I can’t go here with you and share it. It was one of the most beautiful and painful experiences of my life, that hour on the bed with my darling mate and her hours-old child. I could feel that love, that transcendent love, but as if through glass. I could see it, but I couldn’t get at it.

  I think that night was perhaps the first time I had to contend with the painful reality of being a grown-up – that messy, unarticulated feelings stay with you for ever without finding resolution. You just live with this unnamed weird stuff. We all do. So I did what I’d seen proper grown-ups do – I swallowed it down, all of it, took a deep breath and moved on.

  Over the ten years we had gigged together we had gone from performing to no one to performing to thousands and back, in 2003, to performing to just a few disinterested people again. Our final ever tour date was at the famous Haymarket Theatre in Leicester. There were fewer than a hundred people dotted around the stalls and circle. That night we said the words in the right order but there was no joy behind them. We simply couldn’t inhabit the fun any more. There was no work on the horizon and there was no interest in us any more. We knew it was over. Our double act was done.

  Until our own little cake-baby arrived some seven years later.

  When it comes to Mel and me, I genuinely forget where her experiences end and mine begin. Writing this book, I was about to recount an anecdote from school involving a pair of pants and a discus, and then realized it wasn’t my anecdote at all. It wasn’t my life, but hers. Such is the hive mind, the collective consciousness we have become over the years.

  Sometimes when we’re drunk we’ll try and articulate all that stuff – that awkward stuff that sits at the margins of love and friendship. But mainly we leave it alone, leave it all unsaid and carry on regardless in a thoroughly British fashion. What I do know is that this kinship will always remain. It is constant. It is a love that cannot be weathered, not by time, not by circumstance.

  Nothing can alter it.

  Unless, of course, UKIP get into power and has her sent back to Eastern Europe.

  Four

  * * *

  CORNWALL

  The Ballad of Pickle and Parker, or How I Fell in Love

  They say a dog is a man’s best friend. Well, Nicola, Sarah, Emma, Mel, Neil, Gemma and Andy are my best friends, and what’s more
they don’t shit on the carpet and whine outside my bedroom door for food at 5.30 a.m.*

  It was all Emma’s fault. She started it. She got a beagle called Poppy, and there was something so intoxicating about the constant exhaustion, commitment and inability to have a second to oneself that it made me want one of my own.

  I’m nothing if not impulsive, so the following week my sister and I duly headed to the same breeder in Cheshire – a redoubtable woman called Janet, all flush-faced and tweedy. She was the sort of woman who displayed rosettes on the wall rather than family photos, and who just might have kept a Shetland pony in her living room. I suspect she would have found even a no-nonsense approach a little frilly for her tastes.

  I had barely set foot through Janet’s door when I was greeted with the now-familiar gust of wet dog and Dettol. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a miniature pinscher thundered towards me and began making breakfast of my trouser leg.

  Janet:

  You all right?

  Me:

  Yes, thank you.

  Janet:

  Well shut t’ bloody door then.

  Me:

  Oh yes, sorry.

  She sizes me up for a few seconds while the dog yaps incessantly at my heels.

  Janet:

  Will you BE QUIET, Jasper! [To me] See there, over t’ way?

  She motions across the street with her free hand, the other attempting to wrestle the dog’s jaws from my ankle.

  Me:

  Yes …

  Janet:

  Little bastard over there, hangs himself from the beams every night, watching me.

  Me:

  Really? Your neighbour … hangs himself?

  Janet:

  Auto-erotic something. I don’t know. Dirty bugger. I just shut me curtains. Out of sight and all that. Do what he likes then. I don’t mind. Anyway, come and meet Prunella.

  Me:

  Prunella?

  Janet:

  The bitch. Now mind yourself down t’ stairs – they’ve gone to shit.

  I wander into a field behind the house, towards a large enclosure. I honestly have no clue what I’m looking for. I’ve never had a dog before, so the idea of looking for something more than just the standard four legs, tail and face, is totally new to me.

  Janet:

  Right. Pups are only couple weeks old, so don’t go near ’em. You can have a peak through int’ kennel, but more than that and I’ll give you what for.

  I peer through the wooden slats and the effect is instant. My skin slackens, my eyes widen and what feels like the distillation of a million Disney films starts working simultaneously on my heartstrings. Even the usually pragmatic Michelle stands there for half an hour with her hand over her mouth, entranced.

  Janet:

  They’ve all gone, been sold – bar t’ little one. Runt. We’ve had to bottle-feed her, but she’s right as rain now. You want me to put tha name down or what?

  Me:

  Yes.

  I speak without thinking. It’s not a conscious response. All rationality has left the building. In fact, from that point on rationality never returns.

  Janet:

  Right. Back in a month then. I’ll show you t’ door. I said MIND T’ STEPS!

  When I returned four weeks later I was once again led to the field outside, to the wooden hut where I’d first seen the litter.

  I waited in silence with Janet, even though I had no idea what I was waiting for. It would have made for the most tedious episode of Springwatch ever recorded, that’s for certain. Finally, after many minutes, a single pup emerged, stretching and yawning as she hit the daylight.

  ‘Ooh, here she comes. She knows she’s for you all right. Come here, girl.’

  With one motion, she scooped up the dog, who was so small she fitted on her outstretched hand. She stayed there, surfing Janet’s palm, legs wobbling to the sides and outsize ears flapping in the breeze, giving the horizon that bored thousand-mile stare that I would come to know and love.

  ‘Right, here you are …’

  Whereupon Janet transferred her into my hands, this little warm thing that smelled of milk and sawdust. Eight weeks old. 2.26 kilos.

  The exact weight of love.

  Janet, meanwhile, had taken a large pair of what looked like bolt cutters and was trimming the dog’s nails as she wriggled in my arms. I had no idea what on earth to do next. It was a singularly odd sensation. I’d never been in love and not known what to do about it.

  Me:

  What … what do I do?

  Janet:

  Don’t look at her, touch her, do owt for her – she’s a dog – not a human. Be strict with the little bugger.

  She turns to the dog.

  Janet:

  Right you, don’t give me that look. I’m glad to be shot of you. Needy, you were, terribly needy. Go on and piss off, and don’t be a pain. Don’t give her grief, like you’re wont to. Go on.

  As she turns away from us, I see a single silvery tear making its way down her cheek.

  I put Pickle, as she was to be known, in the car, in a crate like I’d been told, and instantly knew I’d done wrong. She gave me a look – the sort of look that Damian gave his nanny in The Omen just before she hangs herself from the light fitting. I know now this was Pickle’s first attempt at mind control. She became much more effective at it over the eleven years she allowed me to live with her. Within a minute I’d buckled. She was out of the crate and in my sister’s arms, and from that moment on it didn’t matter what grate or luggage rack or obstacle blocked her way – she would always find a way to barge through from the boot onto the passenger seat. That was her seat. She was the co-pilot.

  Once home, I tried to give her boundaries – NO to the sofa, NO to the bed, NO to my entire dinner – but within a week of arriving at my house she merely had to flash me one of her celebrated withering looks before I’d be racing for the treats jar or rushing over to adjust the contours of her bedding for greater comfort. It wasn’t just mi casa su casa. It was my bed your bed, my food your food, my life your life. I would go to sleep with her curled at my feet and would wake to find her head on the pillow next to mine, paw over my shoulder, staring at me intently. She was the only creature I’ve ever met that was as wilful, stubborn and downright odd as I am.

  Pickle redefined contrary. She would have broken Cesar Millan in a heartbeat. If there was something a dog was supposed to do, she refrained from doing it. It wasn’t that she overtly refused; she just found the request itself nonsensical. She didn’t come back when called or run for balls or play with other dogs. Why on earth would you want to do that? She would just sniff things, wee on them, then run off in the opposite direction everyone else was heading in.

  If she was bored (heaven forbid), she would systematically destroy anything and everything I was fond of. If I watched too much telly, she’d eat her way through the cables. Problem solved. If I headed for the door without her, she would eye up the CD rack, and one by one would crunch the plastic cases between her jaws. Let me tell you from experience – Led Zeppelin and PJ Harvey sound exactly the same once a six-month-old hound has been at them.

/>   Now I had a dog, I had to do the one thing I had avoided all of my life – exercise. I began walking on Hampstead Heath every day, and for the first time I got it. I got how beautiful it all was, you know – outside. I grew to appreciate the subtle shifting of colours and textures as one season greeted another. I started to love the reddy slush of autumn, the reassuring suck of December mud, the white winter sun struggling for definition in the white winter sky. And then I’d look forward to the fat spring grass and the paths slowly turning to powder in the heat of whatever summer we had.

  It was a love affair. A love affair between me and my dog. And then it became a love affair between me and my dog and the Great Outdoors. And then, just when I thought I couldn’t feel any more goddam love, there came the biggest love of all.

  And with her came another bloody beagle.

  Parker.

  I met Kate in the summer of 2003. We would occasionally bump into one other, and as we had friends in common we’d share the odd wander until our paths home diverged. That year there was an Indian summer, and I remember the sun stretching out across endless balmy evenings. The grass was high, and lovers, drunk on cheap fizzy plonk, rolled around on the margins of the meadows. By autumn we had started to arrange to meet, rather than relying on haphazardly finding one another. Once a week. Then twice. Then more. For an hour. Then two. Then more. By November we were walking four hours a day, seven days a week. Even the dogs were exhausted.

  Something felt wrong. Very wrong. I phoned Michelle.

  Me:

  Gel, there’s something wrong with me. I don’t feel right. I can’t sleep and I feel sick to my stomach. I just sit around …