Revenge of the Wedding Planner

by Sharon Owens

  ‘Come on, darling, calm down. Are you hormonal at all? Let’s check the calendar and you can take some Primrose Oil and Vitamin B-complex. Yeah?’

  Oh, it would have to be complex, wouldn’t it?

  So he went to check that chart we keep on the inside of the wardrobe door, with my PMT days blocked out in blue marker. On ‘blue days’ I try not to do anything silly, like punching people (who might happen to annoy me in some way) hard in the face. I felt like a monkey in a science lab. No wonder Josephine and the others thought I was pathetic. My own husband thought I needed to be monitored. And sedated with sour worms and pictures of drunken celebrities lying in the gutter with their knickers on display. Or not. And that was when I really saw red. As red as our bedroom curtains, actually. Toffee-apple red. Fire-engine red. Lava red.

  So what did I do?

  Did I do the sensible thing and get into bed with a cup of tea and try to forget my bad mood by pouring scorn on the photo-shopped pictures of Z-list celebrities?

  Did I, bog-roll!

  ‘I won’t get into bed, Bill, my darling! I’m going out for a walk!’ I shouted into his stunned face. ‘And don’t you dare come after me! I’m capable of going for a walk by myself. I can do that, at least! And I can order granite headstones and drawing-room conversions if I want to. And I can cover up my boss’s affairs if I want to. And you can’t tell me what to do! I’m not mentally retarded even if the whole lot of you think I am!’

  I shouldn’t have said that.

  It’s ‘learning difficulties’, isn’t it? Or ‘special needs’? I have special needs all right, I thought to myself, because I’m a married woman with four children, a massive house to keep clean and tidy, a recently dead father, a long-term disinterested mother, an important and demanding job and an emotionally damaged boss who’s cracking up.

  ‘Mags? Are you feeling all right? Crikey, this is a bad one! Eh? You only get PMT this bad once in a decade.’ And he consulted my chart, his finger running down the page, his forehead creased into a massive frown.

  ‘Shut up! You’re badgering me and I can’t stand it! I won’t stand for it, do you hear me, Bill Grimsdale? Oh! Leave me alone!’

  Well, Bill ran out of the room and downstairs to the yard, accidentally dislodging one of his precious guitars as he went. He started kicking the back gate and swearing like I don’t know what. I knew he needed some air and he was only going down there to stop himself from calling me some names I richly deserved, but I couldn’t go after him and say sorry because I was erupting like a volcano myself. I wanted to thump him for being such a sensible Spock-like male! My own darling husband and I was furious with him! Jealous, really. I was jealous of him and his logical brain and his trim figure and his calm personality. Bill will never have fashion dilemmas and blue days. He has beautiful ankles. And he never makes a lot of extravagant promises he’ll never be able to keep, to ungrateful people who don’t even appreciate his kindness. He has no idea what it’s like to be a woman on the verge.

  I slammed out of the house in an absolutely stinking mood and I marched straight down the road into a hair salon that I’d never set foot in before because it looked so expensive, and I told the stylist to give me a chin-length, raven-black bob with a peacock-blue streak down the front. Sorted, I thought smugly. Julie’s not the only one who can do mad things. I’m crazy myself, don’t you know? Every bit as barmy as she is. I nearly had a heart attack, though, halfway through the colouring process, when I thought I’d left my credit card in the house, but thank goodness it was tucked safely into my cardigan pocket. I keep it on my person, if I can, in case my handbag is grabbed in the street. I loved that credit card more than life itself, the moment I felt its tiny flat body against my fingers. I kept my hand on it until I was offered a cappuccino and biscuits, in fact.

  Oh, but it’s a great feeling when you have eight grand’s worth of spending power on your actual person. You could almost do anything if you only had the imagination. Two solid hours I sat in that red leather chair, mesmerized by the drone of the hairdryers and the glamour of the teenage stylists. No wonder some celebrities are as thick as two short planks, mind you. How can they possibly keep up to date with current affairs when it takes so long for a plain old haircut? Enjoyable and all as it was. I tried to read a newspaper but the dye fumes kept putting me off my train of thought.

  However.

  In for a penny, in for a pound. The black bob with the blue streak in it looked utterly fabulous when it was finished. I told myself it would be no bother at all to have to use straightening balm and straightening irons on it every morning from now on and I paid up, leaving a huge tip. But the new look went only part of the way to dispelling my boiling rage so I’d no option but to keep going. I needed to do something big, something really big to channel my anger. Something painful. To punish myself for being such a total idiot.

  The tattoo I’d always wanted! A set of angel’s wings on my back… a small set of angel’s wings. Bill didn’t like tattoos. He said they inevitably turned into hopeless green smudges after twenty years. And that only very reckless and short-sighted people went in for them. Not literally short-sighted, you know what I mean.

  Cheeks flushing with fear, I took a taxi into the city centre and without hesitation I had the angel’s wings done on my back, in a little tattoo parlour beside the Linenhall Library. Twenty-three years after first deciding I wanted them. Just a tiny set of wings, mind you, not a Robbie Williams-sized one. That would have been vulgar on a lady. But hey, it was bloody sore all the same. I knew Bill would go mental worrying about contaminated needles but it all looked very respectable and sterile in there and, honestly, I was past caring. If I do cark it, I thought, at least I won’t have to worry about turning into a boring old granny with that stick-insect Emma lording it over me in my own house. And then, blood from the tattoo sticking to my T-shirt, I went into a fancy boutique nearby and I bought this designer pair of midnight-black, real suede, pointy-toed boots for an amount of money that would normally make me spit with disgust. Some charity could have built a decent-size school in Ethiopia for the money I spent on those boots. I don’t know what came over me. I was far too old for a blue streak in my hair and pointy-toed boots, not to mention a tattoo, but I wanted to spoil myself for a few hours. I was projecting ahead, I suppose. Seeing my forties going the way of my twenties and thirties. Endless walks to and from the school gates, making costumes for school plays, taping messy drawings to the fridge, having no nights out. Which didn’t make any sense because I love my children more than anything and I have never cared for fripperies like blue hair and designer boots, but maybe I was feeling guilty about Bill’s and my savings going up in smoke?

  Anyway, it was done. If I’d lived in London I would have looked like a kick-ass fashion designer or a top columnist in some sassy magazine. They’d probably have stopped me in the street to ask my opinion on something topical and shown it on the ITN news. In Belfast, however, I resembled a bit of a sad case. I walked round the shops for a while, feeling too cross to go home but too shy to sit in a coffee house by myself. Some teenage Goths saw me loitering in the park and they said, ‘Cool hair,’ and I thought I still had an edge to me and I was all delighted. But then they spoilt the compliment by laughing rather loudly when they’d walked on. I was tempted to buy some cigarettes and sit on a wall smoking them, but I have never even liked the smell of tobacco so that was a non-starter. I went into the Palmhouse and thought of the night Bill and I made our first baby and I wept for a while beside the hyacinth display until some tourists came in the other door and I backed out again, mortified.

  Eventually I got hammered drunk (it takes only three gins and tonic) in our local pub off Larkspur Avenue and, to cap it all, I called Gary on my mobile and told him what was going on in the Galway spa. I told him everything, nearly. That Julie was terrified of getting married because her own mother and father were bonkers, and that Charlotte had had a protracted breakdown and that Sidney had take
n his own life. And also, there was this handsome young guy called Jay O’Hanlon who worked in the spa and he was a bit of a looker and Julie was feeling very vulnerable and was possibly attracted to him and might even have kissed him already. Just kissed him, mind. But it meant nothing if she had, she was only having a harmless little dalliance to bolster her fragile self-esteem. And I did stress Julie’s vulnerability because I didn’t want Gary to be cross with her. So, I ’fessed up, big time. Except for the small details of the hayloft romp and the multiple orgasms and the handcart bondage, obviously. And Julie’s screams of delight in the ice-cold water trough and the fact that she’s infertile. Well, you’d need to be heartless altogether to mention that lot, wouldn’t you? I didn’t want Gary Devine to crash his car on the way down to Galway. By all accounts, the traffic over the border is chronic at the best of times. Well, they don’t have as many cops as we do here in the North.

  Gary was so furious he ran out of the farmhouse without even replacing the receiver. I heard it clattering onto the maple floorboards and then Gary roaring his head off in the background.

  ‘Joo-leeeeeeee!’

  Oh, dear.

  I had another gin. And then another.

  Next thing I knew, I was being shaken awake at closing time. It felt really weird to be walking home in the dark with blue hair in my eyes and brand-new boots on my feet. I kept missing my step because the boots were so soft I couldn’t feel the pavement through them. It must be heaven to live like this all the time, I thought. To never feel hard cheap shoes cutting into your toes and heels. No wonder rich people seem so relaxed and confident all the time. They don’t have to keep patching up their crippled feet with sticking-plasters. I was talking to myself as I turned into our avenue, like a hormonal drunken teenager or something. I almost expected my mother and father to tell me off when I got home. But then I remembered my father wouldn’t be shouting at me or at the DUP political broadcasts ever again.

  ‘Oops, don’t think about that or you’ll be off caterwauling again,’ I whispered to myself, finger laid against my lips. ‘Crying for ever and a day like the legendary Mrs Charlotte Sultana.’

  I hoped Bill wasn’t going to lecture me about liver damage. I’d completely forgotten about the tattoo even though my back was definitely a little tender. I kept thinking I must have bumped up against a hand dryer or something in the ladies’ room.

  But no, the hall was deserted and silent. I stole in like a cat burglar and immediately tripped over something big and flat, fell headlong onto the rug and hurt my knee. When I switched on the lights, Emma’s stuff was piled up in the hall. All thirty-nine boxes of it (I counted them – though I might have been out by a box or two because of my blurred vision). And she and Alexander were in bed together in his room. I could hear them chatting away, nineteen to the dozen. I thought that at least I didn’t have to worry about Emma getting pregnant because she was pregnant already. And it was kind of comforting to have the suspense taken away like that. The kitchen was strewn with dirty dishes as the other kids had made their own supper but not tidied up. The grill was greasy and there were crumbs everywhere. Bacon sandwiches. No doubt they’d taken advantage of me going AWOL to buy a packet of bacon slices at the corner shop and devour it. I don’t cook meat very often, you see, what with Bill and myself being vegetarian. I’m more of a salads and sandwiches person.

  Bill…

  Had he left me? Of course not. As he often says, at times like these, he has nowhere else to go. But I know he’s only teasing me. Bill was in our bedroom playing his favourite bass guitar with the volume turned down very low. You can’t play the guitar loud in a terraced house anyway or the neighbours will call the police, but somehow the softness of the notes seemed ominous to me. I think it was Joy Division, and he plays that when he’s really down, which is about once in a decade. Bill didn’t see me because he was facing out of the window as I tiptoed up the stairs. I watched him for a while from the doorway, thinking how handsome he was and how he might have been famous if he hadn’t married me and had four children. I started to cry again then. Only this time I knew it was going to be a proper, headache-inducing marathon of crying so I bolted myself into the main bathroom and pressed my face into a folded bath towel so nobody in the house would hear me.

  A few moments after that, Julie called my mobile to say that Jay was lying asleep beside her in her room at the spa, and that he’d lost his job for shagging a client. Julie’s words, not mine. They’d been caught doing the wild thing in the showers, apparently, but Julie wasn’t annoyed in the least. She said Jay was far too good for the spa anyway and he never should have been working in a bar in the middle of nowhere in the first place. She told me she’d tied Jay’s ankles together in the ladies’ changing rooms when they thought the last swimmer had left the pool area, but then one of the cleaners came in and caught them mid-climax. And that Jay had leapt up, overbalanced (always a risk with bondage) and fell heavily onto the bench, bruising his world-class appendage. Poor Jay! Maybe if he’d kept his family jewels in his shorts a little more often, they wouldn’t have come a cropper over a wooden bench. But anyway, he’d got his marching orders. Then Julie said she’d be home soon because she was missing the lighthouse terribly and had I told Gary they were finished yet?

  I didn’t reply. I couldn’t speak because the room was spinning. God, I was pissed that night. I forgot to tell Julie that Gary was on his way down to Galway. I felt a bit sick, to be honest, so I just said I’d talk to her some other time, and best wishes to Jay O’Hanlon, and cheerio. And then I switched off the phone and went on crying. It hadn’t even dawned on me that Gary might be almost at the spa by then. I mean, it takes about seven hours to drive from Belfast to Galway. And you could knock two hours off that, easily, if you thought the woman you were going to marry was making a fool of herself with a handsome toy boy. Poor Gary. But anyway, there was a big pile of fresh towels on the mat beside the radiator and they were all nice and warm, and, to tell you the truth, I think I dozed off for a bit. Well, half dozing and half sobbing, I suppose. I really was very tired.

  Of course, my big sob scene was ruined twenty minutes later when I attempted to subdue my swollen red eyes with cold water from the mixer tap. Bill heard the gurgling in our ancient copper pipes and he knew I’d come home. Or at least, that was my interpretation. In fact, he knew already that I’d returned. He’d been tracking my movements all day.

  ‘Mags, love?’ he said, knocking lightly on the door. ‘Mags, are you okay in there?’

  I thought of ignoring him, but really, how long could I stay locked in my own bathroom with no food or bedding? And besides, I was so weary I would have sold my soul to the devil for twelve hours’ unbroken sleep in my lovely ivory bedroom. I unbolted the door and stood there, refusing to look up at him. I couldn’t bear for Bill to see my puffy old eyes beneath such a beautiful silken curtain of blue hair.

  ‘Wow, that’s beautiful,’ he said after an initial slow intake of breath and I knew he was turned on like never before. He’s always had a little thing for Toyah Wilcox, you see.

  Once a Punk, always a Punk.

  He touched my fringe with the back of his hand and whistled softly. The silence between us was charged with electricity, just like in the Limelight Club twenty-odd years before. But of course I’d messed that up too, hadn’t I? Because now we couldn’t celebrate my new hairstyle with a bit of a Punky romp because we’d had a fight earlier in the day and he wasn’t sure of me any more. I’m a sulker, I’m ashamed to admit, and when I’m in a bad mood it takes me days to drag my libido out of the doghouse. Bill knows this. The moment passed and we both sighed heavily.

  ‘I’m sorry I shouted at you,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean a word of it, you know I didn’t. I’m just so tired, darling. I’m wrecked, actually.’

  ‘That’s okay. I’m just glad you’re back in one piece,’ Bill said softly and he put his arms around me and kissed the top of my head. ‘You smell of cigarette smoke,’ he sai
d, smiling. ‘Off boozing on your own? What am I going to do with you?’

  ‘I’m sorry, darling. I had a few drinks in the pub. The funeral, you know, and saying goodbye to my sisters again, and the worry over Emma and Alexander…’

  ‘I know. It’s okay. Forget it. Can you remember how many gins you had? Should we be on our way to the hospital?’

  ‘No, I think I’ll survive. I had three drinks. Or five, maybe… definitely no more than five. Were you worried about me when I took off?’

  ‘Well, yeah, I was. Obviously. But I followed you and saw you going into that fancy salon. Then I lost track of you for a few hours. Later, I phoned the pub and they told me you were there. I asked them to let me know when you were on your way home and I was looking out for you from the bay window.’

  ‘So you did see me coming in?’

  ‘Yes, I did. I thought you might want to take a moment to compose yourself before apologizing to me.’

  You see? I told you! The man is Spock’s long-lost twin!

  ‘Actually, Bill, I missed you. The minute I stormed out of the house I missed you but I was in such a rotten mood I just had to keep going. I won’t do it again, I promise.’

  He smiled a kind of lopsided smile then, as if he wanted to believe me but couldn’t quite bring himself to.

  ‘Do you want that cup of tea now?’ he asked, reasonable to the last.

  I nodded and shuffled past him into our bedroom. ‘That would be heaven,’ I sighed, ‘and then I’ll have a nice hot shower and get this awful smoke out of my lovely new hair. I can’t wait till they ban smoking in the North.’

  After which, I collapsed onto the covers and fell asleep before the kettle was even boiled.