Revenge of the Wedding Planner

by Sharon Owens

  That’s the thing about Goths, for those of you who don’t know any personally. We’re lovely people: pacifist, artistic and generally vegetarian. We’re no threat to the fabric of society whatsoever. Take Punks, for instance. The music is great. ‘Making Plans for Nigel’ by XTC is particularly excellent, but the fans are unpredictable, I find. Could be pussycats like my Bill, could be insane like the mosher who nearly blinded me. It’s impossible to tell on first appearances. Take my advice and be polite to Punks because your condescending expression could just be the final straw for one of them. Nu-Metal fans and the School-Rock brigade, now they really are a bunch of immature idiots with far too many tattoos and body-piercings. Not likely to attack you but they will probably take a leak in your topiary tubs. And of course your vacant-stare, always-in-a-gang, baseball-hat-loving ‘Chavs’ are the ones most likely to stab you for a tenner and spend it on lottery tickets. Never turn your back on a bunch of Chavs, they’re the most dangerous of the lot. I’d rather get stuck in a lift with a group of Hell’s Angels. But Goths are harmless enough.

  Small point: Goths are not to be confused with people who are simply wearing black clothes. If you have a tan of any kind you don’t qualify as a Goth. If people never laugh at your shoes you don’t qualify as a Goth. If you don’t find the moss-covered ruins of ancient castles emotionally uplifting, forget it. And of course, true Goths are never violent in any way.

  What else can I tell you?

  I failed my A levels but I didn’t care. They were useless subjects anyway. I can’t even remember what they were called now. Social something-or-other and Media-whatnot. Not worth the paper I bought to write my essays on. I was considering trying to get onto some practical course at the Tech, like hairdressing, although I hadn’t yet managed to pass any exams. But Bill said not to worry about formal qualifications. He explained that he was a fully trained plumber and making relatively good money. He’d already worked out that deferred gratification was just that: deferred. So he’d got himself trained and he’d passed his driving test and he was out on the road earning a living when most lads his age were still learning how to open a tin of spaghetti hoops on campus and sticking up posters of Betty Blue.

  From day one we were inseparable. I fancied Bill so much it was embarrassing. He’d only have to touch me and I’d vibrate with pleasure. And he seemed to feel the same way though I was quite skinny then and wore far too much eyeliner. I was always getting red eyes from my mascara bleeding into them in the heat of the club. On the plus side, I did get accepted onto a hairdressing course and life went on as normal. We spent all our spare time together and friends joked that we’d be getting married soon and could they come to the wedding? It was hard to find a private place to ‘court’ so we became expert at having a quick fumble standing against a wall and with all our clothes on. And then I forgot to take my pill and the jokes became a reality.

  I wasn’t embarrassed to be pregnant so young. My mother was very disappointed in me and, strangely, that was the main reason I felt I was doing the right thing. She was vaguely unhappy most of the time (until she left my father) so any advice she gave me was bound to be seriously flawed, in my estimation. I told everyone (well, I boasted really) that I was ‘up the spout’ and I had my long hair cut into a nice crisp bob to prove how grown-up I was.

  We got married in a civil ceremony in the City Hall when I was eight months pregnant with our first child. I was nineteen and Bill was twenty-one. Two of the cleaning ladies at City Hall stood in for us as witnesses, still wearing their lilac tabards with name-badges attached. Valerie and Lil were their names. They kissed us on both cheeks afterwards and threw some confetti they’d found left behind on a window sill. Lovely women, I wish we’d kept in touch. We went across the road to the Wimpy for a beanburger and a Coke when we’d signed the register, proudly wearing our matching wedding rings, pleased as punch with our outrageousness. Bill said to the girl behind the counter, ‘I’ll have a beanburger as it comes, please, and my wife will have extra pickles.’

  We didn’t invite our families and friends to attend the ceremony because it was our special occasion and we wanted to keep it all to ourselves. We wanted to keep our wedding day pure and not get it bogged down in arguments over seating plans, and prawn cocktails versus vegetable soup. And anyway, neither one of us was particularly religious, and Bill was reared a Protestant and I was reared a Catholic and it would have been awkward.

  My parents are a bit odd that way, slightly prejudiced. They can’t help it, it’s the way they were brought up. One of my dad’s ancestors, a mild-mannered farmer from county Tyrone, was mistaken for an IRA man and murdered in 1919 by the Black and Tans. With his own pitchfork, to add insult to injury. So Dad blamed everything that ever went wrong in this country on ‘the British presence’. He was a good man, my father, but he never could get past the political situation, which I think was a great pity. He once threw a perfectly good punnet of strawberries in the bin because there was a tiny Union flag on the label. Lovely big strawberries, they were. And we didn’t have a lot of money in those days.

  He shipped our family over the border to Donegal for a fortnight every year to escape the 12 July Orange Order parades. The lot of us weighed down with flasks of tea and picnic blankets. You do know, of course, about the countless road blocks and general anarchy that occasionally kicks off in this place during the marches commemorating Prince William of Orange’s triumph over the Catholic rebellion of 1690? I think my father was almost hoping there’d be a civil war back home in the North just so he could justify investing in that old caravan in Mullaghmore. Glued to the radio, he was, from seven in the morning till midnight. Even took it down to the beach and tucked it in behind the blue nylon windbreaker. Come the news pips, he’d raise his hand for silence and any child who spoke during the bulletin would get a light slap on the back of the head. The barest sniff of a riot and he’d be on his feet, shouting, ‘Hush now, weans, it’s startin’, it’s startin’! Our Lord in his infinite mercy bless those left behind!’ We used to go to the amusements and hide, even if we had no money left for the carousel, my two sisters and me. He was that embarrassing. Dad hated Ian Paisley (the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party) with a passion. I think he hated ‘Big Ian’ a lot more than he ever loved us.

  Such a pity.

  Protestants don’t bother me, I have to say. Or Protestantism as a concept, pure and simple. So they have extremely plain churches and they can get divorced and still hold their heads up in public. What’s wrong with that? They’re not quite so indoctrinated as Catholics are on religious matters, but a lot more likely to join the army and get themselves killed. Swings and roundabouts. Mind you, I’ve always found Protestants to have exceptionally clean homes. You could eat your dinner off the floor, usually. My dad always said that was the guilt manifesting itself for what they did to Ireland for eight hundred years. Our own house was fairly rough and ready. We’d a sack of coal in the corner of the sitting room and Mum never decanted milk or lemonade into jugs.

  Everyone understood about the wedding, I must say. In fact, they were quite relieved. Probably the thought of a heavily pregnant bride wearing black lace and biker boots wasn’t exactly their idea of a big day out. We couldn’t afford a luxury honeymoon and anyway the whole honeymoon thing was a bit of a turn-off for both of us. We were used to kissing and cuddling in the dark urban streets of Belfast. Fully dressed and only half sober. Until I got in the family way, of course. Then I gave up the Pernod and so did Bill, out of solidarity. White sandy beaches were not appealing to us back then, perched as we were on the verge of parenthood. We rented a doll-sized terrace on the Ormeau Road and bought a baby’s crib and a kettle.

  And then a lovely thing happened.

  Our relatives (Bill’s mostly but some of mine too) got together, held a whip-round for us (the little cross-community angels) and collected several thousand pounds. We were itching to nest-build so we used the money as the deposit on a wreck of a house on Eg
lantine Avenue. A big Victorian house with two bay windows, three reception rooms, and one bathroom but space for three more. Six bedrooms! It had been let to students and was in a terrible state. The doors had been kicked in, the carpets were soaked with beer and wine, the kitchen sink had been split in half with a brick and the 1950s loo was a health hazard. But Bill had been told by a builder-friend of his that peace was surely coming to Belfast after twenty long years of conflict and that property prices would really take off in the nineties. This builder was buying every house he could, fixing them up quickly and letting them out again. Less than ten thousand, some of the inner-city terraces were selling for in 1985. He said he’d be a millionaire when the troops pulled out and he was right. A millionaire, several times over.

  I wish my father had bought a small property in Belfast all those years ago instead of that ancient caravan beside the sea. He was still glued to the radio, still expecting a civil war, the day peace was declared in April 1998. He said it was only a false sense of security and banned my mother from going into the town centre for six months in case she got caught up in any trouble. Mum got so bored under house-arrest she gave up her interest in local politics on New Year’s Eve 1999 and left my father for another man. The rep from British Telecom, actually. Dad gave the guy short shrift on the doorstep but Mum noticed a twinkle in his eye and slipped him her mobile phone number. They hooked up a few days later and within weeks she’d gone to England to be with him. She went on to have a fantastic facelift in Harley Street with her redundancy pay from the hosiery factory where she’d been working since the linen mill closed down. She lives in Devon now and runs a sweet little B&B with her BT lover. Roses round the door, basket full of wooden badminton rackets in the hall – the works. Good for her. It might not last for ever, she says, but in the meantime she’s having a whale of a time. Dad said, ‘What else could you expect from the British?’ They’d taken his country and now they’d carried off his ‘beloved wife’ into the bargain.

  Anyway, Bill worked a miracle on the house on Eglantine. He really did. Ripped out the kitchen the day after we moved in and we had to live on sandwiches for a few weeks while he replaced it with freestanding pieces from various salvage yards. We had a Belfast sink years before they became popular again, a pine dresser with shiny red plates in neat rows and a big wicker basket full of red apples on the kitchen table. It’s all country-chic nowadays in the magazines but Bill had the vision, twenty years ago, to transform that house – and he was so sexy-looking when he was covered in rubble and dust! Combined with an exquisitely shaped bare back and Billy Idol looks, well, let’s just say we had no problems conceiving a sister for Alexander after he was born in 1985. Alicia-Rose, we called her – she was born in 1986. And then two more boys after that, Andrew and Christopher, 1987 and 1988. (None of it was planned, naturally, but I think we were such a perfect match hormonally it was inevitable we’d have four children within four years.) Alexander, Alicia-Rose, Andrew and Christopher. Our children! We were a proper family with a laundry basket on every landing and neat rows of shoe-shelves that Bill made for the cupboard under the stairs in the hall. A bottle-green carpet in the playroom for the boys (in what had been the drawing room) with beanbags and a big television. A white four-poster for Alicia-Rose with yellow fairy lights on the ceiling. It was all so utterly perfect.

  And when the youngest started school in 1992, I looked about for a little part-time job and that’s how I met Julie.

  At the time I did wonder why a glamorous woman like Julie would want to hire someone like me to share a very small office with her. (We started off in a Portakabin on the Boucher Road.) But now I know it was because she glanced into my shopping basket during the interview and saw a packet of custard creams nestling beside my hat and gloves. The only thing she’d felt any affection for in her life to date.

  6. The Smith Wedding

  So next day, good as her word, Julie simply dropped off the radar. I woke up in Bill’s arms, missing her already. Our bedroom is gorgeous, I just have to tell you about it before I go any further. The walls and the ceiling are painted a very soothing shade of ivory. (Bill relented on the colour front eventually.) There’s a clear-glass chandelier from Homebase, though it really does look antique, and we have a magnificent nickel-coloured Victorian-style bed complete with curly headboard and footboard, handy to hang vintage handbags on. Fat white pillows and duvet, and a fluffy red wool throw and cushions for warmth. The curtains are red too and there’s a big silver-edged mirror opposite the window. Two white bedside tables with stacks of CDs on them in wicker baskets and no less than four alarm clocks in case we sleep in. A huge white-painted wardrobe with white hatboxes on the top, full of my junk-jewellery and the children’s keepsakes: their first shoes, first winter mittens, first cuddly toys, school reports and photos.

  None of the kids are Goths, by the way. That would have been pushing it. We never dressed them in black, not even for family funerals. All four are completely conservative dressers by nature. Alicia-Rose is a vision with her poker-straight blonde hair and diamanté-studded jeans. She’s very fond of white – sometimes we tease her that she looks like a commercial for Philadelphia cheese. The boys wear baggy jeans and casual tops mostly.

  We enrolled them all at non-denominational private schools and we were tremendously proud of them. Alexander was studying architecture at Queen’s. Alicia-Rose was at Art College. The two youngest boys played rugby for their school in national competitions. I loved my children so much it made my heart ache sometimes. For years I had been dreading the day they all moved out and scattered across the country or maybe even the globe, God forbid.

  So, with Julie vanishing off to the top-notch spa in Galway (the one with the shocking-pink armchairs), I had to attend the wedding of Janine Smith on my own. And then I was going to have to call Gary and tell him Julie and himself were no longer an item. I wished I could just ask someone else to live the next twenty-four hours for me, and go back to sleep. But obviously that wasn’t going to happen so I sat up and reached for my robe.

  ‘Oh, Bill, I’m not looking forward to this particular wedding,’ I said grumpily. ‘I’d better book a taxi now to take me to the bride’s house and I hope she’s not had second thoughts about the pink tulle. They look like the sort of family who might turn nasty if anything goes wrong. I so wish Julie was going to be there.’

  ‘Where is Julie?’ Bill mumbled from deep under the duvet. ‘You didn’t say she was going away.’

  ‘She’s visiting her mother,’ I replied, quick as a flash. ‘Just took a notion.’

  Julie’s mother, Charlotte, lives in Dublin nowadays in a one-bed penthouse apartment in Malahide village. She runs a tiny fashion boutique there, about eight foot across at its widest point. But she’s used to confined spaces, I daresay, after that three-year sit-in, in her bedroom in the back-to-front mansion all those years ago. The boutique’s painted lime-green inside and furnished with turquoise cabinets, and oval mirrors with pink and red glitter frames. She stocks French jeans and handbags, as well as cute peep-toe shoes from Italy. Everything Charlotte sells comes gift-wrapped in the softest tissue paper and accompanied by a free keyring in the shape of a glass strawberry. That’s the name of her boutique: the Glass Strawberry. Charlotte’s hair is about one inch long and dyed pillar-box red. She has loads of celebrity friends and you’d never guess she was the type of woman who once spat on her husband’s grave and danced a jig on the table when she first heard he was dead. Just goes to show how the human psyche can recover from difficult circumstances. She’s never remarried, though. She says one life sentence is enough for any woman and two would be foolhardy. She has a miniature dog of some kind for company. His name is Jasper.

  ‘Look, I’ll move my plumbing jobs to tomorrow and I’ll drive you to the bride’s house,’ Bill said sleepily. ‘Will that do?’

  ‘Would you really?’ I gasped, absolutely delighted. ‘That would be fantastic, Bill! The rest of the week, there’re only p
hone calls and paperwork to get through. It’ll be a cinch.’

  Famous last words.

  ‘Sure, no problem. I’ll wait outside in the car all morning. And you can take a couple of spare frocks from the lighthouse stockroom with you in case the bride has changed her mind about the pink whatsit.’

  ‘Bill Grimsdale, I love you,’ I said, almost in tears.

  ‘Love you too,’ he said and went back to sleep for half an hour.

  I raced happily down to the kitchen, put the kettle on and made a big pot of tea. I could hear the kids stirring in their rooms, feet padding into various bathrooms. I used to love mornings in that big house when the sun was filtering through the lace curtains in the breakfast room. Listening to the clatter and crash of cereal bowls and juice glasses. The best thing about teenagers is that they can dress themselves and brush their own teeth. Well, usually they can. Unless they’re already twenty minutes late for school and then it takes them half an hour to tie their shoelaces and comb their hair. And if you shout at them to hurry up, they forget their science projects and games kits and have to come back again to fetch them.

  So there we were, an hour and a half later. The children off to school. Bill and myself all tidy and presentable, cruising back from the lighthouse with the boot of the car full of demure white silk and some tasteful accessories, when my mobile phone rang. It was Gary.