by Claire Allan
I watched as they huddled over a low table, their shoulders around their ears with stress and Pearse being very unlike Pearse and avoiding any eye contact whatsoever with anyone just in case they might recognise them. I recognised this situation as something Very, Very Bad but I knew I couldn’t approach them and it almost killed me. In fact, I had to ram several large chunks of cupcake into my mouth to stifle my urge to say something I might have regretted.
I sat there for ten minutes while they supped their coffee and spoke in hushed but urgent tones. There was a lot of headshaking (both Pearse and Toni) and, I’m not entirely sure, but I think there might have been some crying (Toni). There was definitely some overly dramatic hand-gesturing (Pearse) and I’m sure I heard the word “ruined” mentioned.
They left and I waited a suitable amount of time before leaving myself. Damn Fionn for having the day off. I couldn’t phone to see what the gossip was and there was no chance I was phoning Elise to see if she knew anything. It would be a cold day in hell before I went to her begging for some gossip, not when I had been so used to being the purveyor of fine gossip myself.
I went home, dumped my bags in the hall and immersed myself in a big dose of Home and Away – which reminded that I really, really should phone Darcy. Then again, as she was having her meeting with Gerry, I wasn’t sure that me calling her would be a good idea. No, I would wait (perhaps impatiently) for her to call me. And while I was waiting I would seize the day and book the restaurant for my dinner (not date) with Owen.
Emailing Owen was fast becoming one of my most favourite pastimes. It felt a bit like writing in a diary, only this diary would write back and tell me I was witty, or that I’d made it laugh and that it was looking forward to seeing me.
There was something about Owen – and it might just have been the relative anonymity of the fledgling friendship – that allowed me to open up in a way I hadn’t done in a while. I wasn’t all psychotic about it. I didn’t pour out my innermost fears and hopes. But I was honest. There was no bullshit involved. In fact, as I typed him a message telling him exactly how I would not be shaving my legs in advance of our dinner date and to warn him off any form of footsie, I smiled to myself. I knew he wouldn’t recoil in horror. I knew he wouldn’t think of me as a tease, or a reformed tart. I knew he would just find it funny.
When he emailed back to tell me he would support me by not cutting his toenails so he wouldn’t be tempted to even think of rubbing his razor-sharp claws along my hairy legs, I laughed out loud. Yes, like a loon, in my flat, laughing at a computer. It was wonderfully freeing.
“I will be washing my hair though. And putting on some make-up and trying not to throw myself in front of any taxis,” I typed.
“Grand job,” he typed back. “Because my back’s been giving me gyp this week and I’m not sure I could save you if I tried.”
A very, very cheesy voice in my head (which I battered down with a glass of wine) had the urge to reply and tell him he already had saved me. Instead I recommended he try some Radox in the bath but warned him to shower first to avoid the skin-soup scenario, explaining my aversion to same.
When he replied that he always showered before a bath my heart did that flip-floppy thing and I went and had a shower/bath combo myself as a sign of some kind of serendipitous unity.
Fionn sent a text message just after eight. “Wedding still on. Bridesmaid dress fitting tomorrow at 11. Make-up trial at 12. Meeting the choir at 2. Will chat 2morro!”
There was no text from Darcy. When I tried to call her there was no answer. And I tried a few times. I tried at eight, and again at eight thirty. Then I tried at eight forty-five and nine fifteen and then in a fit of worry I tried at nine thirty-two, nine thirty-four, nine thirty-five and nine thirty-seven. I calmed down momentarily before trying again at ten fifteen and texting her to ask her to call me as soon as she possibly could. I went to sleep with my landline and my mobile phone resting on the pillow beside me and jumped at every small noise in the hope it would be Darcy telling me she was absolutely fine and had not thrown herself into the Liffey in a fit of desperation. As the night progressed I found myself in a quite disturbing mind-loop, wondering if it would be the PSNI or the Guards who would turn up at my door to tell me she was a goner. I would then have to phone my parents who would probably be really put out at having to come home for a funeral, asking me if I could bring her over there instead as mourning was so much easier in the sunshine.
As dawn broke, somewhere around four thirty, I promised myself that I didn’t care about my job or Owen or my flat or anything as long as Darcy was okay.
I phoned again, imagining the shrill call of the phoning ringing out in her dark and empty flat, and almost died of shock when she answered, her voice heavy with sleep.
“Darcy, darling, are you okay?” I asked, my voice catching in my throat.
“I’m fine,” she whispered. “I’m just fine. I can’t talk just now. I’ll call you in the morning.”
“It is morning,” I said, almost defiantly, like a parent whose initial relief at finding a lost child is suddenly replaced by anger that they had the cheek to get themselves lost in the first instance.
“Proper morning,” she whispered. “Not stupidly-early-in-the-morning morning.”
“I was worried!” I stammered.
“There’s no need,” she said, “none at all.”
35
I had tried and failed to get back to sleep so when Fionn arrived at just gone ten with a couple of bottles of water and some fruit I was not a pretty sight to behold. My hair had morphed into some kind of kinky afro from all the tossing and turning during the night and the bags under my eyes were of such a size and shape that they easily could have accommodated all of Fionn’s honeymoon luggage.
Fionn, on the other hand, looked fresh as a daisy. Clearly whatever storm she was expecting to have brewed with Alex had failed to materialise.
“You look like shit,” she said, her voice reaching a new pitch of Bridezilla-ness.
“Thanks,” I muttered as she handed me a bottle of water and ordered that I drink. “It’s all part of the plan,” I lied. “The worse I look today, the better I will look when I escort you down the aisle.”
She raised her perfectly shaped eyebrow at me. She didn’t look convinced.
“Trust me,” I said.
“If I must,” she huffed, sitting down at my dining table.
“Speaking of trust,” I said as I lifted a hairbrush and tried to tame my hair. “Alex? Rebecca? Tears and snotters? Fisticuffs? Naughty Steps?”
She shook her head. “It was a bit rough but we worked through it.”
“I asked about your big talk, not your sex life,” I said with a wink.
She snorted. “Just so you know, we are not having sex at the moment. I have him on a ban so that by our wedding night he is gagging for it.”
“You do know you’ll probably be too tired on the night?”
“No way. No such thing. I’ll be consummating our marriage on the day itself if it kills me. Even if I have to whisk him away mid-reception for quickie.”
“In that dress, there will be no such thing as a quickie. I’m already mentally preparing myself for having to help you get to the toilet all day, and I’m a girl. I’m used to buttons and zips and corsetty doodahs. Alex will be stumped.”
“Where there’s a will there’s a way,” Fionn said with a wink and I realised she was very successfully moving this topic of conversation away from where it needed to be – which was the ramifications of her meeting with Rebecca.
I steered the conversation back, unsubtly and in a cut-the-crap kind of way: “Rebecca? Alex? What happened?”
“I think he was relieved that I took matters into my own hands,” she said.
I went to speak, opening my mouth just before she jumped in.
“And no, I don’t think that means he’s a cowardly fecker. He didn’t want to hurt her. He said he tried, and tried, to let her down gently b
ut that he didn’t want to do anything that would jeopardise his relationship with his daughter.”
“And what did he say about her saying he had made her all the same promises?” I knew this was potentially a very dodgy line of questioning but it was one I couldn’t ignore.
She stiffened a little. “I know you might think I’m off my head but I believe him when he says this. He never made her the same promises. He tried. When he found out she was pregnant with Emma, he wanted to step up and be the man. He wanted to be a good daddy to his wee girl and in those early days he thought the only way to do that was to be together with her mammy. So he tried and he wanted it to work, but, you know, it just didn’t.”
I felt something in me rise up. Sure wasn’t that just what had happened with me and Pearse? Okay, so no, it wasn’t just what had happened between us. I hadn’t got pregnant and he hadn’t tried to make it work but nonetheless we had both found ourselves in a pretty unsatisfactory place trying to make something work which deep down we both knew never would. I felt myself choke up a little.
“He said he wanted to love her. He wanted them to be together. But he couldn’t lie and in the end it wasn’t fair to him, or Rebecca, or Emma. Most of all, probably, Emma. So when Rebecca said he made her all those promises, she wasn’t wrong, but he was trying to make it work. He’s not trying to make it work with me – it is working. Does that sound smug? I don’t mean it to sound smug.”
I shook my head, wiping a sneaky wee tear from my face. “You don’t sound smug at all.”
It was I who felt smug an hour later, wearing the most gorgeous dress in the world ever, as the very lovely shop assistant twirled me around checking for the fit.
The dress was as beautiful as I had remembered it. In fact, it may just have been that little bit more beautiful. It was, perhaps, the most beautiful thing I had ever set my eyes on and I had set my eyes on plenty of beautiful things in my time. I’d once even seen Colin Firth in the very real flesh and he was about as beautiful as they came.
“Ooooh,” I breathed as I did a twirl, narrowly avoiding a stab in the leg with a funky little pin with a coloured top. The shop assistant looked at me, her mouth full of other delightful little pins with coloured tops and made a noise which I interpreted as “Stand the feck still, woman!”
“It is lovely,” Fionn said, standing back and admiring me in my sleep-deprived beauty.
“It is more than lovely. It’s gorgeous. Like properly gorgeous. Gorge-malorge, in fact.”
“Okay, it’s gorge-malorge. Does that make you happy?”
“Indeed it does,” I said, stopping myself just before I did another twirl and knocked the poor assistants to the ground.
I’m not one for wearing a lot of make-up. A slick of Clarins foundation, a brush of loose powder, some blusher and a sweep of mascara if I was feeling adventurous and wanting to adopt a slightly wide-eyed and alert look. Normally the entire process takes all of two minutes (with an extra ten seconds if it is a mascara day). I was not used to spending half an hour in a chair having make-up layered onto my face, bit by bit, colour by colour, fake eyelash by fake eyelash. I had to fight the urge to laugh as my lips were glossed, and the urge to sneeze while my nose was powdered. I passed the occasional glance in Fionn’s direction and she was serenely sipping from champagne and chattering to the petite perfectly coiffed girl layering the make-up on her face.
“So, are you excited?” The equally petite and equally perfectly coiffed girl layering make-up on my face asked.
“I can’t wait. It’s going to be brilliant.”
“I love doing weddings,” she said dreamily. “It’s so romantic. Are they madly in love then?”
I paused for a second. Where they madly in love? They were certainly in love. And they were both a little on the insane side. But was it mad and passionate and everything I had always thought I wanted? Well, it was and it wasn’t. They were clearly a good pair and if Rebecca was true to her word I was sure they would be very, very happy together. In fact, even if Rebecca wasn’t true to her word I was pretty sure they would be happy together. They were made of strong stuff. I felt yet another bubble of emotion rise up inside me and I bit it back.
“They are great together,” I answered, glancing over at how bright Fionn’s eyes looked and how she flashed her left hand as she spoke with a palpable pride. “It’s going to be wonderful.”
I got a bit of a shock when I saw myself in the mirror when Miss Petite had finished with her brushes and sponges and (it felt like) trowels. I looked like I had always wanted to look. Blemish-free. Defined. Sculpted. Highlighted. Beautiful. I’m sure I gasped, as in properly gasped. Part of me was waiting for Gok Wan to walk in with his TV crew to tell me I looked fabulous, darling. I wouldn’t cry – not even when I looked across at Fionn who looked perhaps the most beautiful I had ever seen her look – but what I did do was book the very same make-up artist to touch me up before my dinner (not date) with Owen.
By mid-afternoon I was sitting in the third row of St Eugene’s Cathedral marvelling at the impressive stained-glass window before me. A choir in perfect pitch was singing a hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck-standing-up rendition of “Ave Maria”.
Alex sat beside Fionn, holding her hand. Every now and again he glanced in her direction and a small smile crept across his face. She was entranced by the music of the choir and he was entranced by her. Not for the first time I felt myself well up. I really was getting daft in my old age.
It was only when I got home, made myself a cup of tea and sat down in front of the TV that I realised that not once during my time in the church had I wished it was me.
That’s not to say I didn’t wish it was me, but I seemed to be evolving into some sort of better human being. My only thoughts in the church that afternoon were that it was going to be a lovely ceremony. It was going to be a great day and yes, even with whatever difficulties they faced, they were going to be happy. I congratulated myself with a chocolate biscuit and a quick email to Owen.
“Restaurant booked. I’m even going to wash my face and get my make-up done.”
An hour later I had a response:
“Does that mean I have to shave then? God – you women are so high maintenance. You’ll never know the hardships us men go through.”
I typed in a hasty response:
“Yes, please shave. For reasons I will go into at a later date I have an aversion to overly hairy men. It’s okay – I understand that you men have it tougher than us, the stronger sex.”
He replied: “Want to test that theory with some arm-wrestling?”
Now, either this was flirting – like proper sexy flirting and not just harmless flirting – although in fairness I could think of better things to wrestle with. That is, if I was planning on wrestling anything, which I absolutely was not. Therefore I decided I would not reply with “Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough”. That would, I guessed, have given entirely the wrong impression.
“Nah,” I typed instead. “I might break a nail and you know what we ladies are like. We can cope with childbirth but we pale at the very thought of a shattered nail.”
His response was almost instant. “I’m exactly the same. A martyr to me cuticles.”
I snorted so loud that a spray of tea shot through my nose and threatened to short-circuit my laptop. And when I stopped laughing I looked at his words again and thought about his hands and felt all funny – in a nice way.
I was thinking about just how exactly funny he made me feel when my phone rang. Absentmindedly I lifted it and muttered a hello.
“And you,” Darcy’s voice raged, “have the cheek to be annoyed at me for not answering my phone to you. I’ve been ringing this shagging number all day with not one word of a response! And do you ever actually switch your shagging mobile on?”
Darcy was in a bad mood. A scary bad mood.
“Sorry, I was out. Wedding stuff.”
“Don’t talk to me about wedding stuff! Sure I got
my invitation today to ‘Darcy and Guest’. Guest? Do you know anyone called Guest? Cos I sure as feck don’t. Apart from the David Gest guy off the telly. You know, the funny-looking one and I don’t want to bring him to the wedding!”
I wasn’t sure if she was joking, or just actually flipping her lid.
“Well, Fionn wasn’t sure . . .”
“Am I an embarrassment without a man on my arm?”
“I’ve no man on my arm either, don’t forget!”
“Ah,” she said, her voice filled with a certain amount of glee, “but you have a date with your knight in shining armour!”
“It’s not a date,” I protested, but I don’t think I was even fooling myself.
“Whatever,” Darcy puffed. “Anyway, how did the wedding things go?”
“It went well. My dress is gorgeous. The make-up was gorgeous. The music was –”
“Gorgeous?”
“How did you guess?” I said wryly.
