My Fake Wedding (Red Dress Ink (Numbered Paperback))

by Mina Ford

  Soon, I’m going to have to think about taking on extra staff. Things couldn’t be better.

  Sam, fresh-faced from playing football, comes round at half one, and at two o’clock Janice picks me up, mounting the kerb in an enormous four-wheel drive, squashing a big dog turd on the pavement and nearly mowing me down in the process.

  ‘Car’s gone in for a service,’ she explains. ‘Jasper’s lent me this bastard for the day. Can’t seem to get the hang of the clutch.’

  We make for Bulimic Brides, or whatever the blimming heck this pre-nuptial haven is called, in Covent Garden. A hush descends on the room as we enter and a woman with electric-blue eyeliner, frosted pink lipstick and cheeks like a bloodhound’s pads over, her neat court shoes sinking into the deep pile of the cream carpet.

  Sam squeezes my hand. ‘You OK?’

  ‘Yep,’ I gulp, even though every nerve in my body is screaming, ‘Run, Simpson, run.’

  Janice, of course, hardly notices my nervousness. She’s too busy fingering taffeta and lace, silk and satin in every shade of white, cream and off-white.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ beams the Bloodhound Lady, showing much more plaque than is strictly necessary for two thirty on a Saturday afternoon. Or any afternoon, come to that.

  ‘Who’s the lucky lady then?’

  ‘I am,’ I say, feeling as though I’m in some kind of pantomime. Any minute now, Sam or Janice is going to shout, ‘Oh no, she’s not.’

  ‘What a lovely couple you’ll make.’ She beams even more. ‘Although I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to wait outside, sir.’ She takes Sam by his broad shoulders, firmly turns him round and shows him the door.

  ‘Look behind you,’ I want to shout.

  ‘Why does he have to wait out there?’ I demand.

  ‘We can’t have the groom seeing the bride before the big day, now can we?’

  ‘Oh, no, he’s not…’ I begin, stuttering and mumbling to try and get the words out.

  ‘I’m not the lucky man, I’m afraid.’ Sam booms with laughter. ‘That’s someone else altogether.’

  I smile at him gratefully. I seem to have lost all power of speech.

  He winks back, a lovely friendly wink that calms me down and makes me feel all gooey inside at the same time. Jesus. What’s happening to me? Surely I can’t be wishing I was marrying Sam? No. I’m getting confused. It’s just nerves, I tell myself. Just nerves. I’ll be OK when we get out of this clotted-cream-coloured hellhole.

  ‘OK,’ trills the Bloodhound, moving briskly towards a rail at the far side of the room and whisking a couple of frocks off it. ‘When’s the big day?’

  ‘Soon,’ I tell her.

  ‘Well, obviously, dear.’ She looks at me as though I’m retarded. ‘But when, exactly? We need to get some idea of what the weather’s going to be like so we can dress you properly, don’t we?’

  ‘Janice?’ I prompt. I’m so jumpy, I’ve actually completely forgotten when this fake wedding I’m having’s going to be held.

  ‘Beginning of September,’ Janice supplies helpfully, fingering a creation in antique rose silk.

  ‘September?’ The Bloodhound looks absolutely horrified. ‘But this is couture.’ She pronounces it koooootewer. ‘I’m afraid that’s going to be impossible. It’s July already. We need six months’ notice at least. We don’t knock them up just like that, you know.’

  She manages to look at me so disdainfully I feel as though I’m the one who’s knocked up.

  ‘You know what?’ Janice has an idea. ‘You should just try some of these on to get an idea of what you like and then we’ll get that fat ponce Didier to copy it for you. He’s really good at stuff like that.’

  Of course. George’s friend Didier. Why didn’t I think of that before? It’d be a darn sight cheaper for David too. After all, he’s insisting on paying for my dress.

  ‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible,’ sneers the Bloodhound. ‘I can’t let you try any of these on if you aren’t intending to buy.’

  ‘Oh.’ I’m crestfallen. Now what?

  ‘Excuse me.’ Sam takes charge, squeezing my hand again and staring the Bloodhound straight in the eye. ‘The young lady said she’d like to try on some of these dresses and so that’s what she’ll do. This other young lady happens to be getting married…what…at some point next year?’ He looks at Janice.

  ‘Oh, yes, definitely.’ She nods back. ‘Very early next year.’

  ‘And I don’t imagine there’s much call for wedding gowns in January, is there?’ Sam asks.

  ‘Er, well, no, not…’ stutters the Bloodhound.

  ‘Just as I thought.’ Sam grins at me and winks again. ‘So you’ll be polite to us now and then maybe, just maybe, if we get the full service today, we’ll be back. But that very much depends on you.’

  ‘Of course,’ mutters the Bloodhound, racing off and coming back with piles of utterly gorgeous dresses. We get peach bellinis in celebration of my forthcoming wedding and from the way she’s acting you’d have thought I was bloody Princess Di.

  Or Fergie at the very least.

  ‘What about this one?’ she asks me. ‘White chocolate, we call this.’

  ‘It’s bloody cream,’ Janice mutters in my ear. ‘Same as all the others.’

  ‘Have you got anything not in cream?’ I’m starting to enjoy myself now.

  ‘Well,’ the woman says, ‘like I said. This is white chocolate.’

  ‘I was thinking oyster pink,’ I tell her. ‘I’m not really having anything traditional, you see.’

  ‘Are you sure, dear?’ she asks. ‘Pink? With your hair…’

  Then she catches Sam’s expression and bustles off towards the back of the shop.

  ‘Here we are.’ She pulls out the most stunning creation in palest rose, threaded with shots of gold. ‘And I thought this, to go with it.’ She holds up a beautiful tiara, fashioned in rose quartz and crystal. It’s so pretty I want it. Wedding or no wedding.

  ‘Try it on,’ urges Sam.

  So I do.

  The dress fits like a glove. It clings to every part of my body, giving even me the most glorious curves. I pop on the tiara, open the curtain of the fitting room and…

  DA-NAAAAAAAH.

  I twirl round and round, secure in the knowledge that I look about as good as is possible—for me, anyway.

  There’s silence from Janice and Sam.

  ‘Don’t you like it?’ I look down aghast. ‘Have I got the back tucked into my knicks or something?’

  ‘It’s perfect, hon.’ Janice looks delighted.

  ‘You look beautiful.’ Sam appears to have tears in his eyes. Taking my hand he leads me to the mirror on the far wall. ‘Look at you. You look amazing.’

  I look at myself. Next to him. And, even though I’m tall, he’s still a good four or five inches taller. We look good together.

  Suddenly, I realise that I fancy him.

  Only a tiny bit.

  But those lustful feelings are there.

  Buggery. And with me just about to tie the knot, too. How inconvenient.

  ‘Amazing,’ he says again, looking at himself next to me and back at himself again.

  Janice breaks the spell.

  ‘Stunning,’ she says. ‘And seeing as it fits her so well, can she buy it now?’

  ‘Well, like I said,’ the Bloodhound explains, ‘we haven’t got time to have it specially made.’

  ‘Can she not take this one?’ Janice wants to know. ‘Fits her, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I’m afraid not, dear. This is the only sample we have.’

  ‘Oh.’ I’m crestfallen.

  ‘You could take the tiara though,’ says the Bloodhound, ever in sales mode. ‘Only five hundred pounds.’

  ‘Oh yes, Katie.’ Janice is excited. ‘Gettit. It’s lush.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I hiss. ‘I really can’t justify spending all that money on fripperies for a wedding that isn’t really real. It’s stupid.’

  ‘It’s fi
ne.’ Sam whips out a Visa card. ‘Stick it on that. My treat, Simpson. Call it my blessing. In lieu of my giving you away.’

  ‘So you won’t…?’

  ‘We’ll just see, shall we?’

  ‘But what about the dress?’ Janice wants to know.

  ‘It’s OK.’ I shake my head. ‘I guess I’ll just get Didier to make me one that looks the same. I’ll go and change.’

  ‘One minute then.’ Sam stops me, pulling something out of his jacket pocket. A camera.

  ‘I take it you don’t mind if I take a photo?’ he asks. ‘Seeing as she looks so beautiful in it.’

  ‘Well,’ the Bloodhound bites her flabby lip, ‘we don’t usually…’

  ‘I suppose there’s always that shop down the road you liked.’ Sam looks pointedly at Janice.

  ‘OK, OK.’ The Bloodhound raises her hands in defeat.

  ‘Take a photo if you must.’

  ‘Say Cheezels.’ Sam snaps me. ‘Lovely.’

  ‘I wasn’t ready,’ I grumble later, sitting in the car, gleefully clutching my sparkling new tiara. ‘I’m going to look horrid.’

  ‘Oh well,’ Sam hugs me, ‘doesn’t really matter. The dress looked fantastic.’

  ‘It can bloody get married without me then.’

  ‘Seriously though, Simpson, at least now Didier will know what it looks like so he’ll be able to copy it.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I hug him.

  He looks pleased, though he won’t come and drink celebra-tory cocktails with Janice and me afterwards, saying he has to meet Joff in the Bedford to talk about the Arsenal/Leeds United match. Janice and I drop him home and Janice says if we’re not going for cocktails she might as well take the Jeep back to Jasper’s. I go along for the ride.

  ‘We can even get him to mix us cocktails if he’s back,’ Janice says. ‘He makes a wicked martini.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  We wait forever for a silver Mondeo to vacate a parking space outside Jasper’s luxury waterside apartment (his City residence) then, just as we’re about to back in, some flash knobhead in a dark blue Porsche appears from nowhere, zooming up behind us and zapping into the space before Janice’s reverse lights have even come on.

  ‘I had my fucking blinker on,’ she yells at me. ‘Can you believe the fucking fucker’s nerve?’

  I tell her that no, the fucking fucker has surprised even me with his arrogance.

  Fucking fucker hops out, strutting like the cock of the rock, flipping a pair of pathetically trendy sunglasses from the top of his head and onto his nose.

  ‘There you go, love.’ He grins cockily. ‘That’s what you can do when you can drive.’

  Janice’s face turns thunderous. For a split second I’m scared that she might be considering doing some damage to his face with the car key. But I needn’t have worried. She has something far more spectacular in mind. Before I have time to fully understand what’s happening, she slams her foot to the floor and wrenches the steering wheel hard left, just missing a parking meter and slamming expertly into the front of the Porsche. The Porsche caves in completely, folding itself around the back of the virtually undamaged Jeep like uncooked pastry round a Cornish pasty.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says to me, worried I may have suffered injury as my head snapped forward and hit the dashboard with a thunk. ‘Had to go nuclear.’

  ‘No problem whatsoever,’ I say shakily, checking that all my bones are still in place.

  Janice winds down the window and bats her eyelids oh so sweetly at the Porsche driver, who is staring in mortification at the remains of his precious understudy penis.

  ‘There you go, love,’ she says sweetly. ‘That’s what you can do when you’ve got money.’

  Then she puts the four-wheel drive into first and calmly cruises the pavement, looking for another place to park.

  ‘Fucking lezzers,’ the man shouts after us. And then, pointing at me, ‘Bit tall for a girl, aren’t you? Ever been mistaken for a man?’

  I lean across Janice and poke my head out of the window.

  ‘Never.’ I waggle my little finger at him. ‘Have you?’

  We cackle all the way to Jasper’s flat, whereupon, on pressing the buzzer and receiving no reply, we assume he must be out.

  ‘I’ll just leave the keys to the Jeep inside.’ Janice unlocks the front door. ‘And we can nick a couple of bottles of wine while we’re there. Have a bit of a celebration round mine. In honour of your tiara.’

  ‘OK.’

  Inside, Jasper’s apartment is beautiful. All open plan, with lots of pale wood and white walls everywhere.

  ‘That’s weird.’ Janice looks at the key and back at the lock.

  ‘What?’

  ‘S’not deadlocked. Usually when he goes away he deadlocks it. Doddering old fool. He’d forget his head if it wasn’t screwed on.’

  As we go inside, though, something else strikes me as weird. ‘What’s that noise?’ I lift my head towards the ceiling.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That plinky plonky noise.’

  She listens. ‘It’s Nina Simone. Stupid old buffer’s favourite.’

  ‘It’s loud though,’ I say. ‘Sounds like he’s having a party or something.’

  ‘He’d better not be. Not without inviting me.’

  ‘Do you think he’s OK?’ I say. ‘I mean, he might have fallen over. Slipped on a banana skin or something while waltzing with himself, all lonely and sad.’

  ‘He’s got a cleaner,’ she reminds me. ‘And he’s not that old.’

  I hold my hands to my heart in mock horror. ‘He could have been felled by a heart attack as he tried to open a simple tin of mushy peas,’ I say. ‘The poor sod.’

  ‘Don’t.’ She looks as though she’s going to burst out laughing.

  ‘He could have gassed himself as he put his last fifty pence into the meter, just to keep warm,’ I say. ‘Or choked on a custard cream…’

  ‘Stop.’ She holds her sides. ‘Come on. Let’s go and see where the party is. It’s probably the neighbours upstairs. They’re pretty wild.’

  The party is in full swing, it seems. And it would appear that it’s in Jasper’s flat after all. As we round the bend in the spiral staircase we discover that the music is coming from his study. Popping our heads round the door, there’s nothing stopping us from coming face to hairy arse with all the glory of Jasper’s slack backside. He’s stark bollock naked, erection in one hand, camera in the other. And, sitting on his desk with a notebook and pen in one hand and with her legs so far apart we can see what she had for breakfast, is a hussy with a huge diamond stud in her nose and tits that stand up on their own.

  ‘Fuck,’ we both say at the same time.

  Hearing us, Jasper swings round.

  ‘Darling,’ he says to Janice. ‘I didn’t hear…’

  ‘Clearly,’ she says coldly, grabbing my hand and pulling me back downstairs.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I ask her as we get outside.

  ‘Yes,’ she says slowly. She’s as white as a sheet. ‘Although I think I’m going to throw up.’

  I hand her a tissue as she chucks all over my shoes.

  ‘Try not to worry,’ I say comfortingly. ‘I mean you did only want him for his cash, didn’t you?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ she says. ‘Of course. Although I am a bit shocked. I didn’t think the stupid old buffer had it in him.’

  Something’s wrong. She’s strangely calm.

  So why is she being sick? She’s not even that upset.

  ‘Bang goes my country house in Winchester then,’ she says bitterly. ‘And you know, Katie, I’ve given him five blow jobs. It wasn’t exactly fun.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ I soothe.

  ‘I even swallowed twice,’ she says. ‘Think how bloody daft I feel now.’

  I tell her that I know she feels daft. But at least she’s not crying. I was worried she might start volleying off bucketfuls of tears. I thought there might be snot everywhere. But no, it’s only money. It cle
arly isn’t that bad.

  ‘Actually, Katie,’ she looks me straight in the eye, ‘it is that bad.’

  ‘Why?’ I ask her. ‘You aren’t in debt, are you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What then?’

  Something about the way she’s looking at me gives me a very bad feeling about this.

  A very bad feeling indeed.

  ‘Well, I was so fed up of waiting for him to pop the question I tried a new tactic,’ she says, her bottom lip wobbling just ever so slightly.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I plumped for Plan B. And plump is about bloody right.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Janice, you aren’t fat. Would I have asked you to be my bridesmaid if you were a great tub of lard?’

  ‘I don’t mean now.’ She looks at me derisively. ‘I mean in a few months’ time. Six months to be exact. In six months, I’ll be the size of a house.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m up the stick. Got a mouse in the chimney. A bun in the oven. I’m up the bloody duff.’

  ‘But how?’

  ‘Shagging.’ She looks at me seriously. ‘That’s how. Oh fuck, Katie. What am I going to do?’

  ‘Have a baby?’ I say weakly.

  ‘Well, it’s a bit late for anything else now,’ she says. ‘Talk about history bloody repeating itself. I’m my bloody mother all over again. The poor, poor cow.’

  ‘But you’ve got a good job,’ I tell her.

  ‘Which I hate.’

  ‘You’ll be able to afford to look after it at least,’ I say. ‘You’ll be a great mother. Just make sure you don’t sell it to George.’

  She manages a weak smile. ‘You think I should chuck in my job and go on the social?’ she says. ‘Isn’t that what single mothers do?’

  ‘You could get a nanny.’

  ‘Oh God.’ She ignores me. ‘Me. A single mother. Of course I’ll have to get the poor little sod’s ears pierced, even if it’s a boy. And I’ll have to wear cheap and nasty shoes and paint purple blotches on my legs so the other single mums won’t think I’m up myself.’