by Sharon Owens
My sugar levels bottomed out and I felt as weak as a newborn kitten.
I sat down on a chair and gave up.
‘Julie, I resign,’ I said blankly. ‘I’m too old for this shit. I’m going home.’
She looked at me and I saw a smile turn up the corners of her mouth.
Could it possibly be?
Yes?
Yes!
Praise the Lord.
At last, Julie Sultana had come to her senses.
‘Well, fuck this for a game of darts,’ she said calmly. ‘Let go of me, lads, the show’s over. Right! I want you lot to round up whoever’s left, give them a goody bag and get them back on the coaches. And you there, you waiters, please start closing up the buffet. Dump the food in the skip and pack away those glasses carefully. They’re designer glasses and I want them all counted. Mags Grimsdale, your resignation is not accepted. I don’t blame you for any of this. It was my own fault for being such an idiot. As soon as Bill comes, you can go home with him and I’ll stay here and sort out this sorry lot. Okay?’
I could have sunk to the ground and kissed her feet, I was that relieved.
‘Oh, Julie,’ I said, ‘I’m so happy you’ve come back to us!’
Together we walked to the marquee entrance and looked up at the moon.
I was on Cloud Nine.
Whatever that is.
Or I would have been on Cloud Nine.
Had it not been for the sight of my beloved Bill coming driving in the castle gates and immediately colliding with John’s out-of-control Volvo. A loud smash and Bill’s Chrysler went over on its side and rolled down the hill towards the cliff edge. My beloved husband didn’t even have time to register shock, I’m sure of it. One second he was just doing what he does best, trying to locate me in the crowd and bring me home. The next, he was rattling and rolling towards a very low stone wall and a sixty-foot drop into the ocean. John went on out through the castle gates, clipping one of them on his way. It all seemed to be happening in slow motion.
My heart turned inside out with horror.
‘Fucking hell,’ said Julie, her hands flying up to her mouth.
‘Bill!’ I screamed, clutching Julie’s arm so tightly I probably hurt her. ‘Bill! Don’t be dead, don’t leave me! Bill! Oh, my God, somebody make it stop! Bill!’
And so on.
It was the worst moment of my entire life. I was frozen to the spot. We all were. The departing guests, the traumatized young waiters, the experienced security staff, even Julie herself. We all stared in paralysed horror as Bill’s car slowed down and suddenly came to rest against the wall, battered and broken, all the windows smashed.
You could have heard a pin drop.
‘Mags, we have got to be brave now,’ said Julie in a strangely calm whisper. ‘Come on, we’ll go to Bill together. Hold my hand and take a deep breath.’
Julie half pulled me and I half ran to Bill on legs that felt like concrete pillars. Every step drained me and there was cold sweat on my face and on my back by the time I reached him. Julie looked into the car first while I stood nearby whimpering and doing a great impression of Charlotte Sultana in the early years. Bill was still moving, just about. Out of the corner of my eye I could see him brushing some broken glass from his face. His hand was covered in blood.
‘He’s alive, Mags. He’s okay, he’s still breathing.’
Julie beckoned to me to come forward.
I swiftly threw up on the grass, then cautiously pulled Bill’s crumpled car door open. He was slumped there, gasping, all twisted and uncomfortable-looking, covered in blood, bits of broken glass, clumps of mud and neatly mown grass.
‘Bill, are you all right?’ I said hopelessly. ‘Can you breathe?’
‘Just about,’ he croaked. ‘I think my leg’s broken. And my collarbone. And my hand. And I feel very cold.’
‘That’ll be the shock, love. I’ll call an ambulance, Mags,’ Julie said, brushing a stray piece of cake from her cleavage and slurring her words a bit after so much vodka. ‘Don’t worry, Mags! And don’t move him in case he has spinal injuries!’ She hitched up her dress and ripped a mobile phone out of the garter on her leg. I was in no state to even remember I had a mobile with me. Thank heaven for Julie Sultana!
‘Bill, my darling!’ I wept, dropping to my knees beside him, holding his lovely firm hand (the one that wasn’t broken) in mine.
He closed his eyes and coughed gently. He tried to say something but all he could do was swallow and moan.
‘Talk to me, my love. I think you should try to stay awake and talk to me. Bill, please, please, please talk to me!’
And he did say something.
‘Never a dull moment with you, Mags Grimsdale,’ he whispered. ‘Whatever happens, I love you.’
And then he lapsed into unconsciousness. Julie got a waiter to round up some blankets from the First Aid tent and we made Bill as comfortable as we could. Then I knelt there, holding onto his hand, praying for the ambulance to arrive. Thinking to myself that it was the third ambulance that had had to be summoned in this sorry escapade. Because Gary had needed one when he had his car accident on the way down to Galway, and of course Jay had needed one when Gary broke his nose in the Café Vaudeville.
All the while, Julie stayed right beside me with a fire extinguisher (just in case the Chrysler caught fire) and constantly told me everything was going to be all right. She even got some of the men to tie a rope around the car and lash it to a stone outbuilding, just in case the ground underneath us was unsafe. The wedding guests were kept away from the scene and ushered out of the grounds as quickly as possible. She’d also called the police and let them know John was at large in the area, chasing another car while under the influence of (presumably illegal) drugs.
I kept kissing Bill’s forehead and thinking I wasn’t ready to lose him. Thinking I wasn’t anywhere near ready to cope without him, say the worst did happen. And then feeling weak with shame for even considering my own future at a time like that. But there was no denying I needed Bill as much as I loved him. He was my best friend, really. Despite the wide circle of family and friends that I was blessed with, Bill was the one I got my strength from, he was my soul. I broke down and wept quietly with relief as the ambulance arrived, and again when they told me Bill had a strong pulse and no obvious internal bleeding.
‘A lot of pain and some broken bones but he should be okay.’
‘Thank God,’ I kept saying, ‘thank God, thank God, thank God.’
And so it was back to hospital waiting rooms and the smell of disinfectant. Julie never left my side. She stayed with me all night and she never mentioned her own heartbreak once. We held hands at one point during Bill’s operation (on his leg because the break was messy and jagged), which was kind of weird. But also nice and reassuring. Then at daybreak we sipped hot tea and nibbled on a biscuit or two from the vending machine to keep our stomachs from grumbling. Well, we hadn’t eaten for what seemed like an age.
‘I’m really sorry I didn’t tell you about Jay earlier, Julie,’ I said, as the sun rose over the roof of the nurses’ apartment block.
‘That’s okay,’ she said, patting my arm. ‘I probably wouldn’t have listened anyway, Mags. To tell you the truth, I think I went off the rails a bit there. I must have looked an awful eejit to you and everyone else.’
‘No, not at all,’ I said. ‘He was very handsome and nobody would have blamed you for getting carried away. I’m only sorry it didn’t work out. I mean that, now. I’m not just saying it.’
‘Water under the bridge.’ She smiled sadly. ‘Just one of those things.’
And so the subject of Jay O’Hanlon was officially downgraded from life-changing watershed to mere office gossip.
Then I was allowed to see my husband.
Bill had one collarbone broken and the other one fractured, a badly broken leg, three fractured fingers, severe bruising on his face and neck, part of the glove-compartment door embedded in his knee, and a sp
ot of short-term memory loss. He was on the strongest painkillers the hospital staff could legally administer. But his wonderful, loving, caring personality was still intact and we both shed more than a few tears of gratitude.
‘Oh, Bill, what are you like?’ I wept when I saw him in the bed.
‘You should see the other guy,’ he whispered. ‘Ah, well, at least I’ll get a few days off work.’
Julie left us there together and went back to my house to check on the boys. We’d phoned them the night before and they were anxious to visit as soon as Bill was up to it. Meanwhile, John had been stopped by the police sometime around midnight as he tore through a neighbouring village. He’d been arrested and charged with dangerous driving. He went quietly in the end, so I’m told, and apologized profusely for causing Bill’s many injuries. He hadn’t even realized Bill’s car had flipped over, he was in such a state. He said he was thoroughly ashamed of himself and offered to go back into rehab.
Sophie and Jay, well, they made a clean getaway and caught the next flight to Paris. She in her bridal gown and Jay in his white shirt. Lucky sods were on the plane before the police could detain them as witnesses. Who’d have thought, in the middle of all the drama and confusion, that Sophie and Jay O’Hanlon would have had the foresight to bring their passports (and her credit card) with them to the castle? Proving for once and for all that not all supermodels and toy boys are as stupid as they look.
And me? Well, I sat at Bill’s bedside chatting to him and saying how it was all my fault, and how I’d stop being so needy and stand on my own two feet for a change, and did he want any more water or lemonade, until I collapsed (again) and was carried out of the ward by my three handsome sons and put in my own bed at home and told to stay in it. They switched on my telly, bought me a lorryload of magazines and sour worms from the corner shop, and ordered me to rest. I slept for eighteen hours. First lie-in I’d had in a long, long time. The only thing I did do was call Alicia-Rose to tell her what had happened but also to tell her she wasn’t to come rushing back to Belfast. That her dad was going to make a full recovery.
18. See You in Court
I didn’t give a lot of thought to Dream Weddings in the days that followed my husband’s brush with death. A brush with death all the more galling because he’d dearly loved the Volvo S80 up until that point, but he didn’t want one driven at speed up his crotch, thank you very much. And having the shards of plastic removed from his knee was agony, he said. Sheer bloody agony. Still, on the bright side, he was making a good recovery and Alexander was able to take on the smaller jobs for him, for the time being, having just passed his driving test on the first attempt. I was overjoyed that my eldest son hadn’t inherited my hopeless driving skills. So even though Julie had given me a few weeks off work, I was still quite busy fielding phone calls from Bill’s customers, washing and ironing Andrew’s and Christopher’s rugby kits, calling Alicia-Rose in Australia each day and getting used to living without Bill while he still remained in hospital.
God, I hated the loneliness of being alone in the house on those bright May mornings and afternoons. Yes, just one week on my own and I was getting cabin fever. Jesus knows how some women manage it for fifty years, pottering about making jam and ironing handkerchiefs. They ought to be canonized! In fact, I don’t think I’d have survived without Diagnosis Murder and countless cups of hot chocolate. That Barry Van Dyke would do in a pinch, wouldn’t he, I thought to myself. Not for me, no. I’ve found my hero. But for all the other ladies out there who are still looking for theirs, Barry’s quite the pin-up.
The Coven rescued Julie in the end, and took her to stay with one of them for a while. Well, they did have no small hand in getting Jay and Julie together in the first place, I suppose. Amanda and Rebecca (the prosecution lawyers, do you remember?) got right on the case. They hired a lawyer friend of theirs to help Bill and he turned up some juicy details from the police report. It turned out John was high on cocaine when he knocked poor Bill into the middle of next week, and he was currently banned from driving for five years anyway. But even though the stupid guy could well have killed my other half, his team of lawyers told our lawyer he was hoping to get off with a charge of reckless driving. And maybe he’d admit to ‘driving under the influence’ on the grounds he’d been severely provoked in his actions and was under extreme stress at the time. And also he’d promised to go back into rehab for his drug problems and give lots of interviews telling young people that drugs didn’t work. And although they didn’t say as much, I knew they were all hoping the shockingly lightweight jail sentences that reckless drivers receive in this country would be to their advantage. Of course, we were asked if we wanted to settle out of court. But Bill was determined that the case should go ahead because he said celebrities shouldn’t be allowed to buy their way out of trouble. He said he wanted John to serve time. Not usually a vindictive man, my husband. But you’ve got to remember he was on heavy medication. And so both camps withdrew to build their respective cases and we all waited for a court date to be scheduled.
Meanwhile, Julie and Dream Weddings carried on as usual. There was some talk going about the city, naturally, about how the wedding of the century had ended in disaster. But as most of the guests were from out of town, there was nowhere for the press to dig their claws in. And the pictures of Julie stuffing Sophie’s head into the haunted-house wedding cake never saw the light of day because John’s people paid them all off. One million dollars for every reel of film. To me, an insane amount of money just to save himself from the embarrassment of being jilted at the altar. But then again, as Amanda and Rebecca pointed out, he had no choice if he wanted to salvage his rock-star reputation.
‘Who would buy the silly twat’s albums,’ they said wisely, ‘if it was known that he was cuckolded for months and then abandoned at the wedding, while he stood up like an eejit in a red velvet coat with skulls embroidered across his back, and just let it happen?’
Who, indeed? The popular music market is very fickle.
So, as I say, the whole world and his dog knew the wedding had been called off but without a set of juicy pictures to go with it, the story sank into the background after a couple of days. And was overtaken by a scare story about the amount of fat and salt in the average packet of crisps. Litres of oil, apparently, we’re all pouring down our necks each year. Maybe that’s why I still get the odd pimple at my age, I thought, and immediately decided to go cold turkey on the sour cream pretzels. It was nearly as difficult and stressful as burying my father had been. I woke up in the night yearning both for a handful of crunchy salty pretzels, and for a lovely cosy non-threatening dad in carpet slippers and a zip-up cardigan. Just an ordinary father who grew tomatoes in the greenhouse and read gardening almanacs and maybe kept an allotment or a small quiet dog.
I sincerely hoped Emma hadn’t got wind of the oily crisps outrage because it might have set her progress back months. Those shocking pictures of young children drinking big plastic bottles of bright yellow cooking oil made even my stomach heave. And I adored crisps. But Alexander told me Emma had more or less given up watching ‘lifestyle’ telly and reading glossy gossip magazines, as part of her recovery programme. And that she was now reading quality novels in her spare time and they were thinking of rescuing a tiny dog from the animal shelter to take for walks. They’d asked the owner of the flat if they could keep a small pet and he’d said yes, they could, as long as it didn’t make a lot of noise. And that if a ground-floor apartment with a small garden ever came up for rent, he would let them know.
Anyway, I was having a little lie-down in my bed one evening about eight days after the accident. I was feeling quite worn out from the twice-daily hospital visits by then. God knows how some families manage to care for their relatives for years and years on end. But I was half asleep and wondering how Bill would manage the stairs when he came home, and if we should get a stairlift installed, when there was a loud knock at the front door. There was nobody else in the ho
use at the time (Andrew and Christopher were at a pop concert in the Waterfront Hall with a bunch of their mates) so reluctantly I dragged myself out of my cosy bed and went down the stairs to answer it.
‘This had better not be some jolly lady collecting for charity or, worse, some underweight young man who can’t speak English selling flipping dusters and making me feel sorry for him,’ I said crossly to one of Bill’s guitars, ‘because I’m so not in the mood for it today.’
Quick tip for you: always keep a dish of pound coins beside the front door for such eventualities. It saves you a lot of time running round the house looking for your purse while some stranger loiters in your front porch, possibly casing the joint for a burglary later on. Then, you can just hand over two quid, grab the dusters or whatever, say thanks and shut the door without getting into a lengthy chat-situation with them. Sorry to sound so cruel and detached but there you are. Ditto carol singers, cold callers, et cetera.
But anyway, to my great surprise, it was Julie.
‘Hello there, Mags Grimsdale,’ she said sheepishly. ‘How’ve you been?’
‘Hello yourself, Julie Sultana,’ I said. ‘I’m okay. Come in.’
‘How’s Bill?’
‘He’s much better. He’s coming home tomorrow. Just in time for Alexander’s wedding. The doctor says he can go if he feels up to it.’
‘Oh, how lovely for you!’
‘Yes, I can’t wait to have him home. It’s weird going to bed without him.’
‘I know the feeling,’ she said in a small voice.
