Married By Christmas

by Bailey, Scarlett

  There was an atmosphere here that she had never felt anywhere else before, like a low-level electrical buzz that charged the air with an extra fizz. Even pressing one palm and her nose against the window, Anna struggled to make out the street below, but suddenly, inexplicably, she felt excited. Here she was in perhaps the greatest city on earth at the best time of year, Christmas time, her time. The only time when Anna could look back at her childhood, and know that once, a long time ago, she had truly been loved by her mother, that one Christmas she remembered when everything had been perfect.

  The alarm on her phone had sounded, alerting her to the fact that her final dress fitting was about to commence, which meant that by now Liv should have arrived at the home of her dress designer, Dana Dabrowski, and would even now be slipping out of whatever maddeningly boyish outfit she insisted on wearing, and into Anna’s beautiful dress.

  Anna sighed wistfully, sinking down onto the bed. She had mixed feelings about letting someone else put her dream dress on, but there you were, needs must. And at least it was Liv who was to be her surrogate. In all of the world Anna didn’t think there was another person who she would have allowed within six feet of the dress. The two of them were so close that really it was the next best thing to putting it on herself.

  Bracing herself, Anna pushed her tangled hair out of her face, getting her bearings as she looked around the room, remembering that she didn’t have the suite to herself, and somewhere out there, there was a man she barely knew, lurking about and quite possibly naked. Still in her crumpled and travel-stained outfit that she’d arrived in, Anna smoothed down her skirt, tucked her shirt back in and went to look for Miles. He wasn’t hard to find, as his largely nude form was the first thing Anna saw when she opened the bedroom door. He’d crashed out on the sofa, without bothering to convert it into a bed first. She could see, however, that he had removed his shirt and jeans, and quite possibly his underwear, although Anna was grateful for the fact that she couldn’t tell that conclusively, as a sheet – that he must have found in a cupboard somewhere – was just about covering his modesty. He lay on his stomach, his face buried in the sofa cushions, one arm trailing loosely on the floor, like a little boy who’d fallen asleep mid-play. Frankly, Anna could have done without being confronted by his naked torso and bare legs at that time of the morning, or any time of day for that matter, considering her position. After all, how quickly would she lose the moral high ground with Tom if he knew that she was sharing her hotel room with a virtually naked man? It would make his past-wife misdemeanour seem positively tame by comparison. Not that Miles wasn’t nice to look at. The contours of his arms, as distastefully tattooed as they were, and the muscles in his back were pleasant to observe in an objective sort of way, if one didn’t mind objectifying half-naked men whilst they were unconscious, which Anna found with some small surprise, that she didn’t.

  Realising perhaps a little late that she was dwelling rather inappropriately, she half-closed her eyes, as if that made her looking less real, and squinted her way back to the bedroom, firmly shutting the door behind her. She would have locked it too, but there didn’t seem to be a key. Well, she thought to herself, at least Miles looked out for the count, so she’d be safe for a little while. Anna took her iPad out of her bag and booted it up then used Facetime to call Liv, having, just prior to boarding the plane, emailed her wedding dress designer to make sure that Liv would be online when Anna arrived in New York. Despite her emotional and physical exhaustion, the last thing Anna had done before she had allowed herself a few hours of sleep was to secure access to the hotel’s Wi-Fi connection, in preparation for this morning’s video fitting. Was it a good thing, Anna had wondered to herself, before she finally drifted off into exhausted oblivion, that somehow she always, without fail, managed to be quite so prepared, no matter what the circumstances? She told herself the same thing she always did when she became a bit worried that she was bordering on becoming pathologically organised, that it was just her. She did whatever it took to avoid surprises, and just look what kinds of stuff hit the fan when she didn’t know what was coming. Secret ex-wives, that was what. There were only two long rings before Liv answered, peering out of the screen, as if she were looking down a rabbit hole. ‘There you bloody are!’ she whispered, her mouth lagging a little behind the words that came out of the phone.

  ‘Why are you whispering?’ Anna asked her in a whisper.

  ‘Because I’m standing in Madam Dabrowski’s bathroom in my pants,’ Liv hissed. ‘Whispering seems somehow appropriate. Why are you whispering?’

  ‘Because I don’t want to wake … anyone,’ Anna said, deciding at the last moment not to mention anything about nearly naked Miles languishing on the sofa. Liv was one of those people who was compulsively honest, a trait that Anna both loved and admired in her, but it was imperative that Tom did not find out about her New York lodger. As tempting as it was to make him jealous by flashing around her very own personal rock god, Anna didn’t want to risk either Tom being so cross with her that he called off the wedding entirely. Or even worse, not being jealous at all.

  ‘Where are you staying?’ Liv asked her, confused. ‘In a dorm?’

  ‘No, in a suite in the Algonquin, it was all they had left,’ Anna explained. ‘But the walls are surprisingly thin.’

  Liv looked sceptical, but, as ever, took Anna at her word, falling back on the unwritten and unspoken law that they never, not ever, told each other a lie.

  ‘Well, anyway, as I’m standing in my pants here, can we just cut to the chase? I tell you what, top of my list of “Things I Thought I’d Never Do” is me, stuffing your bra with tissues, lots and lots of tissues, in order to try on your wedding dress. Nope, never saw that coming.’ Liv held the camera away from her at chest height so that Anna could see the full extent of her humiliation. ‘I think this might be the single lowest point of my life. Well, apart from that time I thought Danny Evers had left a Valentine’s card in my locker and it turned out it was meant for you.’

  ‘Leeev!’ Dana Dabrowski’s voice came from the other side of the door. ‘You come out now, we put on dress, yes? I have next client in thirty minute. She not like Anna, she a real fat beeeetch.’

  ‘OK, I’m coming, I’m coming!’

  Anna found herself staring at Dana’s bathroom ceiling for a few seconds, and wondered vaguely if she was reposing on the toilet lid, before Liv propped her up somewhere, perhaps on the sink, and slipped on a red silk dressing gown that Dana kept hung up behind her bathroom door. She crammed her feet into Anna’s simple white satin wedding shoes and tottered uneasily across the bathroom tiles with Anna back in her arms.

  ‘There you are!’ Dana said, as if she had just laid eyes on Liv for the first time, hugging her to her ample bosom, which Anna found herself getting an alarming close-up of.

  ‘Hello, Dana!’ she called out a little loudly, thinking she might need the extra volume to make herself heard over Dana’s considerable cleavage. ‘I’m here.’

  ‘Anna!’ Dana released Liv and her heavily made-up eyes, complete with false lashes, peered out at Anna from the tablet. ‘The things they can do these days with the technology,’ she said wresting the device from Liv’s hand. ‘Well, come then, come, my Anna. Come with Dana and I put you on the mantle, yes? And you see how beautiful your dress is. Your friend Leeev, she a little short, and a little flat around the chest, but she give you the idea and you know you can trust me to have all the measurements just right for you, yes?’

  ‘YES, I KNOW I CAN TRUST YOU,’ Anna said, speaking extra loudly, and slowly, forgetting that Dana was Polish and not deaf, and in fact had a better grasp of English than many English people did, a secret that Anna knew because she’d heard Dana on the phone to someone, speaking without a trace of an accent, unless you count upper-middle-class Surrey. All the eccentric broken English was an act for her clients, it seemed, and as a person who spent almost a lifetime composing a persona that she thought people would find most easil
y acceptable, Anna didn’t mind Dana’s act in the least, in fact she positively loved her for it. It was a little bit like meeting another member of a secret club. Many people, Liv and Angela in particular, had been surprised when Anna had tracked down the obscure dressmaker in the deepest darkest corner of Surrey instead of going classic Vera Wang or Sarah Burton at Alexander McQueen. But Anna had been adamant, knowing exactly what her vision for her dress was, and knowing she would only really achieve it if she found a dressmaker who could interpret it for her. A client had told her about Dana, showing her her own wedding photos featuring her in a 1950s-inspired bright red dress. It was a miracle, the client had told Anna. Somehow this crazy little Polish woman had seen into her head and made her vision a reality. After that, there was no way Anna wanted anyone else to recreate her dream for her.

  It had been a bit tricky, getting to Surrey once a month, but it had been worth it and Anna couldn’t wait to see the final finishing touches that Dana had put to her dress. This, perhaps even more than the wedding day itself, was the moment that she had been waiting for. This was the moment that the drawing she had done of her wedding day when she was nine years old became reality.

  ‘You step in, yes?’ Dana told Liv. ‘You need to take a big step, yes? Like a spaceman on moon. No stepping on the fabric, you step on the fabric, you die. Yes?’ Dana delivered the death threat with a smile and a merry twinkle in her eyes, but Liv was totally sure that she meant every word. Conscious of her best friend peering at her expectantly from the mantelpiece, she gripped Dana’s hand and took a huge and ungainly step over the yards and yards of material, that at the moment looked like nothing more than an ungainly mass of white froth on the floor and wobbled uncertainly into the small circular void that was waiting in the centre of the whirlpool of duchess satin and velvet.

  ‘Good, now, are you steady?’ Liv nodded and Dana let go of her hand, then bent down, her cheek perilously close to Liv’s bottom, as she fussed around at her feet, gently pulling the dress up over her hips and waist, and finally her enhanced bosom. ‘Breathe in!’ Dana commanded and, as she obeyed, Liv felt all the air, and life, being compressed out of her as Dana laced her into the dress with brutal efficiency. This was one way to die, Liv thought, as she was certain she felt her ribs cracking under the strain of the boning of the corset, but perhaps it was the best way to go, smothered to death in her best friend’s wedding dress. At least she’d be a very thin – very pretty – corpse.

  ‘There.’ Dana took a step back, clasping her hands together. ‘You pleased, Anna, yes? You in love with your Christmas princess dress?’

  Pursing her lips, Liv glanced in the mirror, preparing to be horrified by what would surely be the awful juxtaposition of seeing herself – eternal awkward tomboy – crowbarred into a world of hyper girliness. For a second or two she wondered who the beautiful woman was staring back at her. She looked straight out of a fairy tale. And then Liv gasped as she realised it was her own reflection, her jaw dropping as she saw herself as never before. If there had been a man present, by all the laws of the universe and romantic comedy, he would have instantly fallen in love with her, having suddenly been made aware of what a great person she was inside, particularly now she had a cleavage.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Liv whispered, looking down at the dress, and then back up at her reflection. ‘I look … beautiful!’

  ‘Oh it’s perfect!’ Anna called out from the mantelpiece. ‘Dana, you’ve done it, you’ve made my dream dress! It’s so exactly what I wanted, I’m going to cry. I am crying, these are tears. Liv don’t you cry, not unless you’ve got waterproof mascara on. What am I talking about, you never wear mascara. Blub all you like. But not on the dress, salt stains.’ Liv smiled to herself. The last thing she felt like doing was crying. She felt like laughing out loud, and she would have, except that she was certain Anna and Dana would take it the wrong way.

  ‘Take me closer,’ Anna commanded from the mantelpiece, her hands clasped together under her chin. ‘I want to see all the exquisite details!’

  Liv stood perfectly still, watching herself in the mirror, as Dana picked up the iPad and began to pan it around her.

  Anna really had imagined something magical and even Liv, whose idea of dressing up, excepting her ill-fated attempt to get Tom’s attention, was wearing a sparkly top with jeans, couldn’t help but be enchanted by the garment. It really was the perfect dress for a Christmas Eve wedding, the only dress for that one particular day of the year in fact, and now that Liv had seen it, she couldn’t imagine that any other dress – or any other day – would do. The white velvet bodice, which had been shaped to fit Anna’s ample curves exactly, was covered in fine silver embroidered snow-flakes, hundreds and hundreds of them, each one a little different from the last and each with a tiny crystal at every point, which sparkled and shimmered under the lights. By rights it should have looked ridiculous – like some mad gypsy bride meets meringue confection – but the snowflake theme was so elegantly created it was breathtaking. It flowed its way down to where the full duchess satin skirt began, the opulent material gleaming faintly beneath the final layer of chiffon that Dana had floated expertly over the top, and which was hand-embroidered and beaded with the same incredibly delicate gossamer design right down the hem. There Dana had let the chiffon fall a little longer than the underskirt, and then had meticulously cut around every single snowflake, with delicate precision, creating a beautifully ragged hemline that melted into a short train. It was the kind of dress that Liv would never have been able to imagine herself, but now she had seen it, could never imagine anything more beautiful or perfect.

  Liv lifted her head above Dana’s bustling, barely conscious of Anna’s exclamations of delight and satisfaction as Dana proudly showed her what seemed like every individual stitch, and noticed how her tawny skin contrasted with the pristine white of the gown, how the bodice cinched and accentuated the curve of her waist and hips, and how, with her cheeks a little flushed, her dark eyes sparkling, her nude lips parted as she gazed at herself, it turned out that actually, she was quite gorgeous. Shame really that a girl couldn’t get away with wearing a kick-ass wedding dress to work, or the supermarket, or kick-boxing, if a kick-ass wedding dress was what it took to make her look like a girl.

  ‘Now, the jacket, Leeev,’ Dana said, interrupting Liv’s thoughts to slide a three-quarter-length sleeved velvet bolero jacket, with covered buttons stitched on with silver thread, over her arms and bare back. ‘And finally the veil.’

  Liv found herself holding her breath as Dana floated a mist of finest net over her head, edged with the same exquisite snowflake motif, and then held it in place with a perfect crystal tiara.

  As Liv looked at herself, once removed from reality by the veil that gave her features a soft focus, she felt certain that she wasn’t looking at herself any more, but instead at some Snow Queen, one perhaps recently released from a set of wardrobes. And quite unexpectedly, she discovered that she did have a tear in her eye and, more than that, her heart was throbbing with a sudden urgent sense of loss. This was Anna’s dress, the dress in which she would one day soon marry Tom. It was the final beautiful omen that Liv had to face to realise once and for all that Tom would never be hers. She’d told herself that a million times over the last eighteen months, but it was perhaps only now, standing here in Anna’s dress, that she really understood it,

  ‘It is perfect.’ Anna’s voice filled the air from the tablet, which Dana handed to Liv before exiting, sensing perhaps that the two women needed a moment to themselves. The veil hiding her tears from Anna, Liv took a breath and held the phone up at shoulder height so that Anna could see the dress reflected full length in the mirror.

  ‘You see,’ Anna whispered in her ear from three thousand miles away. ‘You see why it has to be a Christmas wedding. Just like I always wanted a Christmas wedding, with my Christmas dress, and this is it. Just the way Mum and me drew it on that last Christmas.’

  Liv bit her lip, willing the
tears to stop falling, if her own heartbreak wasn’t enough it was knowing that, despite everything, the one memory that Anna cherished above all others was that one happy Christmas she’d spent with her mum, the one when she’d been free of drugs for a few weeks, and they’d had a warm place to stay and even some presents. And how much, even now, Anna still loved that version of her mother, still steadfastly entwining her memory into her wedding, even though she hadn’t seen or heard from her since she was nine years old.

  ‘I completely see,’ Liv said softly, wishing she could extend an arm and put it around her friend, as all sensible and rational thoughts about the marriage being the thing, rather than the dress and the party, evacuated her head in an instant.

  ‘You look lovely in it,’ Anna said, sweetly. ‘Maybe a bit too lovely, come to think of it. I might have to have a word with Dana, make sure your bridesmaid’s dress is a bit frumpier …’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Liv chuckled. ‘This dress would make anyone look good, but imagine you, with your hair, and your skin, and boobs that aren’t extra-absorbent fourply. Oh, Anna, you will be the most beautiful bride there has ever been. Sod Tom. If we can’t get hold of his stupid wife and get her to divorce him I’ll just find someone else to marry you. You need a Christmas wedding and I’m going to make sure you have it.’

  Anna laughed. ‘Thanks for doing this, darling,’ she said, and when Liv looked she saw Anna’s eyes were sparkling with tears again. Confident that her teary moment had passed, at least for now, she ever so carefully lifted the veil off her face so that she could see Anna more clearly.

  ‘You don’t have to thank me,’ Liv said. ‘I know you’d do the same for me, and for God’s sake don’t cry! Look, this will work out somehow, I know it will, because I know you. You are unsinkable.’

  ‘What, like the Titanic?’ Anna half sobbed and half giggled. ‘No, seriously though. I know it’s a pain for the world’s last dedicated pedestrian to get to the far side of Surrey in one morning. All those trains and buses, all that public transport, it must have taken you hours.’