Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls

by Danielle Wood

  ‘Special treat for your hubby, is it?’ asked Mary-Joy, smoothing on a spatula-load of thick warm wax.

  ‘No, I’m not married yet.’

  ‘Oh, your fiancé then, is it?’

  ‘Ow! Boyfriend, I suppose, is all he is.’

  ‘Oh, that’s how it is, is it? Been together long, have you?’

  ‘Two years. Owwww! Shit!’

  ‘Oh, is it? That’s quite a while.’

  ‘Are you married?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Mary-Joy said, and Paula could just imagine her being the kind of tiny, dainty little bride who could easily be mistaken for a cake decoration.

  ‘But we were married when we’d known each other for just a few months,’ she added.

  ‘Owwwww!’

  ‘You just know, you know? When it’s right? You just know. Now just lift your legs a little higher and try to relax your bottom. That’s it.’

  ‘You didn’t live together first, or anything?’

  ‘Oh no. It’s like what my father said when I wanted a car. He could easily have afforded to buy me one, but he said that if I just got what I wanted for free, then I’d never appreciate it. Now, this little area around the anus here, this can really sting. One, two …’

  ‘Jesus CHRIST!’

  There was a small silence.

  In which Paula recollected her glimpse of the small, silver cross.

  3. Some elementary facts of physics

  According to the Ideal Gas Law (pV=nkT), the pressure that a gas is under is directly proportional to the number of molecules it contains, provided temperature and volume remain constant. So, since we can safely assume Paula and Will’s mouth cavities to be pretty much the same size, and of a roughly equivalent temperature, we need only concern ourselves with how many word-laden oxygen molecules were kicking around in each mouth to find out which set of words was under the most pressure and therefore likely to come spurting out more rapidly. A quick count would have revealed that the number of words it would take Paula, initially at least, to tell Will that it was time he seriously committed to their future together was 163. While Will was only going to need five words (Paula, will you marry me) to make an offer of serious commitment. Which means that the words in Paula’s mouth were under 32.6 times more pressure than those in Will’s, so there really are no prizes for guessing who got there first.

  Paula’s voice came out in a taut little squeal.

  ‘I’ve been doing some thinking, and as you know … obviously … we’ve known each other for two years now, which is quite some time, and long enough, really, for a job interview. I mean, we’ve had plenty of time to get to know each other, lived together for a year, quite compatibly I would have thought. Look, perhaps it’s my fault. Perhaps I shouldn’t have moved in with you, or at least not without clearly setting out some boundaries first. But I was just happy to go with the flow. I thought it would all just happen, naturally. But it hasn’t. It hasn’t happened. And perhaps it’s my fault because I haven’t been clear enough about my needs. So I’m going to be very clear, tonight. And just say it. I need to know whether or not this relationship is actually going anywhere, because if it isn’t, then we need to make a clean break now, so that I can get on with my life.’

  As Will listened to this speech, he felt his balloon deflate by four-fifths of its volume.

  ‘Paula,’ he said, for it was the only word he had left in his mouth.

  Once it was gone, though, he found that he was high and dry.

  Shit, he thought. After all he had done, after all his careful planning, he wanted his proposal of marriage to be just right. Perfect, in fact. He certainly didn’t want to arrive at it like this, by way of an ultimatum.

  ‘Honey,’ said Will, trying to make his words sound as if they were, indeed, coated in honey. ‘Could we talk about something else? It’s a special occasion, lovely restaurant. Let’s just enjoy it, hey?’

  ‘No, Will. I am setting boundaries. I am being clear. I am letting you know precisely what I want, and all you have to do is provide me with an answer. There are only two possible answers, so it can’t be that difficult.’

  ‘Your soup’s getting cold. Mmmm. It’s very good, actually.’

  ‘I want to have children. I’m sorry, but that’s just a fact. You’re lucky. You don’t have a use-by date, but I do. And if I miss the bus, it’s not like there’s another one coming along in a minute. What you have to do, Will, is you have to shit, or get off the pot.’

  ‘Honey, can we talk about something else?’

  Paula was incredulous. ‘No! I want to know. Now. Whether you think this relationship has any future. Or not. I’ve drawn a line in the sand. And this is it. We’ve reached it.’

  ‘I respect that. I do. But can we just not have this conversation tonight? Canwenot do it right this minute? Could we defer for a day, for an hour even, and just …have a good time?’

  ‘Which is all you ever want to do with me, isn’t it?’ she said, crossing her legs and wondering if the Brazilian had been a total waste of time, money and excruciating pain. ‘You don’t want to make a commitment to me, or …marry me. And don’t think that it’s not hard for me to say that word out loud. What girl wants to have to demand it?’

  ‘Come on, try the soup. It’s quite peppery. You’ll like it.’

  ‘I do not want to talk about soup, Will. I want to talk about us. And I want to know how it’s going to be. Do you want to be with me, permanently, or don’t you? That is all I want to know.’

  ‘Not now. Please?’

  ‘Yes. Now. I’ve decided.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t. Please. Just drop it, hey?’

  ‘No. I want to know. Are we going to do the whole thing? Or is this it? Is this the end?’

  ‘Trust me. Please? And drop it?’

  ‘This is not about trust. It’s about commitment.’

  ‘You know, you’re like a terrier sometimes. See something with fur or feathers and you just will not rest until you’ve got it between your teeth.’

  ‘I take it that it’s over, then?’

  ‘No, no, not at all. Not at all. I did not say that.’

  ‘So you do want to marry me?’

  ‘Can we drop this line of questioning?’

  ‘Oh God, how bloody hard is it? Yes, you want to marry me. Or no, you don’t.’

  ‘How about at nine o’clock? And we just relax and have a good time until then.’

  ‘What difference is forty-five minutes going to make to you? If you don’t know by now, you’re not going to get hit by a lightning bolt in the next three-quarters of an hour, are you?’

  ‘Please just drop this.’

  ‘What is it about men that makes them go spastic when a woman — even a woman who lives with them, who cooks their dinners and irons their shirts and scrubs their disgusting skid-marks off the back of the toilet bowl — asks whether or not a relationship is going anywhere?’

  ‘I said “drop it”.’

  ‘Don’t use that tone with me. I’m not yours to tell what to do. I have things I want to do with my life and I don’t want to waste one more minute in a relationship with you if it’s not serious. I think that’s perfectly fair. Absolutely reasonable.’

  ‘Come on, Paula, shut up.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Please shut up. Darling, shut up. Sweetheart, shut up. Trust me, you do not want to have this conversation now.’

  ‘I don’t even know why I’m still sitting here, why I’m bashing my head against this brick wall when it’s clear that you just don’t know how to say it. If you don’t want to marry me, then what’s the bloody point of us sitting here, all dressed up pretending that there’s something to celebrate, when —’

  ‘For fuck’s sake!’ Will shouted, standing up. ‘Here. Look here. See this? It contains an engagement ring. Happy? Are you happy now? Is this how you wanted to get engaged?’

  Hush spread through the restaurant in a rapid, unfurling circumference from the epicentre of
Paula and Will’s table. Other diners fell silent, cutlery suspended, mouths open. They stared at Paula’s stunned and silenced face, and at Will, who stood, looking defeated, with a black velvet cube in his fingertips. They watched the cube move away from his fingers, tumbling through the air, a die that landed numberless, with a splash, in Paula’s soup.

  ‘I … Will!’ she called after him as he threaded his way through tables and chairs to the exit. ‘Will! I will!’

  But he was already through the glass doors, the thin fabric of his white shirt plastering to his shoulderblades in the breeze. And as the door closed behind him, the hush rolled itself right back up to Paula’s feet, allowing her to hear a snicker ricochet from table to table in its wake. There was nowhere for her to look but down at the table, where the splatter-pattern of beef consommé on white linen clearly spelled out just how badly she’d fucked up, and where the mounded shape of the velvet ring-box was resting, like an already-looted treasure chest, in the shallows of her soup.

  MARRIAGE

  Vision in White

  Clocks in international airports do not tell the time. Or not, at least, in the usual way. Gathered together within their auspices are refugees from all quarters of the day: some dazed by the earliness of the morning and others faintly excited to be staying up so late at night. These clocks point their hands at numbers not to signify a particular time of day, but rather to reassure you that the seconds are still being measured, somewhere out there, by the great universal tick-tock. The hour is quite arbitrary, and yet I managed to arrive at precisely the wrong time.

  It was a huge, gleaming chrome kind of airport, somewhere in Asia. I forget where exactly. The floor was a lake of marble with reflected lights shining just beneath its surface. There were kilometres of duty-free shops and cafés and bars — all closed, because I was in transit during those few hours of local time when the airport shut itself down and went to sleep. I was not alone, of course. There were enough travellers to fill three or four jumbos and we straggled the length of a concourse in a listless and fragmented queue. Those first to arrive had grabbed one of the padded, backless benches that were spaced at intervals down the corridor, while the rest of us sat on the floor or stood leaning against a colossal frosted-glass wall. There was nothing to do. The hours we had to kill would die slow, painful deaths. Surely, I thought, the expression ‘terminal boredom’ was used for the first time in an airport closed down for the night.

  For quite some time, I waited. I did all the things that I imagined would be done by a young woman travelling alone on a holiday she had paid for all by herself, with savings from her first proper job. I creaked open my travel diary to the first, virgin page. And then shut it again. I stared for a while at the type on the pages of the too-literary book that I had been sure would be perfect for the plane.

  And then, just for something to do, I went to the Ladies. I sat on the toilet conducting a good close reading of the sanitary napkin advertisement on the back of the door, but remained unconvinced by its wafting, fresh-breeze promises. Still, the advertisement did inspire me to treat myself to the pair of clean knickers in my carry-on bag and to squirt some deodorant around various of my body’s moving parts. I had done all that I could think of to do, and so I prepared myself to return to the concourse and resume my boredom. But when I emerged from the cubicle, I saw something I did not expect to see. Standing at one of the marbled basins was a woman in a wedding dress.

  ‘Bugger,’ she said, in the way only English women can.

  It was not a simple dress. There was sufficient white satin in the skirts and train for Christo to wrap the best part of a one-storey building. There was a mosquito net’s worth of tulle tucked into the warp and weft of her hairdo.

  ‘Bugger, bugger, bugger, shit,’ said the woman, ferreting in her make-up bag.

  ‘Forgotten something?’ I asked.

  ‘Must have left it in the bathroom on the plane. My lipstick. I mean I’ve got others, but they’re all too dark or too bright. It was a really nice peachy colour. Fuck!’

  ‘I’ve got some pale pink,’ I said, holding out a sparkling tube of something called Baby Doll. It had come in one of those gift packs that enable cosmetic firms to offload their most atrocious shades. ‘You can have it if you want.’

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t.’

  ‘It’s all right. I mean I have used it, but I don’t have cold sores or anything.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant. God. Sorry.’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Oh, look, could I? This is the closest thing I’ve got and it’s just far too red to wear with white. I’d look like a bloody geisha. I’ll only borrow, though.’

  ‘Honestly. Have it. I hardly ever wear lipstick and I suspect your need is greater than mine.’

  ‘It is my wedding day,’ she said. Then, looking at her watch, ‘At least I think it still is.’

  She applied the lipstick thickly, and smiled her approval at herself in the mirror.

  ‘Angela,’ she said, turning to me and pressing a hand to her heart.

  ‘Rosie.’

  And so it was that I met Angela Cuthbert (nee Wootton) and began the conversation — reflected in the mirror of the Ladies’ loo — in which I discovered that the reason she had come to be waiting around in her wedding dress in a closed-for-the-night international airport somewhere in Asia was because she had had a vision.

  Angela Wootton had seen herself emerging from the silver chrysalis of an aeroplane like a magnificent white butterfly, stepping out onto the staircase and appearing to unfurl as her skirts and veil billowed suddenly in the mild breeze. Against the backdrop of aeroplane and clear sky, she would be a bedizenment of blinding whiteness, the satin of her gown catching the brilliance of the sun. Her new and as-yet-unmet in-laws would watch from the terminal building as she paused at the top of the staircase to wave. And instantly, instantly, they would love her.

  It was a vision that came to Angela only gradually, as if from a great distance, moving slowly into the centre of her mind. Once it had settled there, though, she moved it just slightly to one side where she could look upon it whenever she wasn’t busy. In quiet moments at work (she was a dental nurse at an inner-city London practice, but wouldn’t have to be for too much longer) she would work on the details, deepening the famous blue of the Australian sky and chiselling the handsome features of the flight attendant whose face was just visible over her right shoulder as she turned to wave. For a time, she enjoyed her vision purely as mental celluloid. But on the day that she went to buy her bridal underwear it turned from a vision into a plan.

  After a couple of hours and four boutiques, Angela had narrowed the choice to two sets. Each of them had boned corsets in white lace that lashed in her waist and pushed her breasts right up. The difference between them was that while one had suspenders attached and went with high-cut lace knickers, the other finished in a scalloped edge at her hip bones and went with low-cut knickers that made her bum look great, but which would have to be worn with stay-up stockings (not always fabulous for the profile of one’s thighs). Now was not the time for a rash decision, Angela counselled herself, remembering hew New Year’s resolution to take shopping more seriously.

  ‘Look, I’m just too close to the issue to be objective,’ she told the shop girl, and went to have a coffee and list the pros and cons of each set on a napkin.

  Inside the warm stone walls of the underground café, she toyed with the chocolatey froth of her cappuccino and wished, not for the first time, that Jeremy’s mother could see her in all her wedding finery. She had been leaning towards doing the first meeting with Jeremy’s parents in lime green three-quarter pants, strappy heels and a white sleeveless polo-neck top. But there in the café, with the turbulent sounds of the coffee machine in the background, a more dramatic idea began to take shape. She nibbled at an almond wafer and wondered if it really were such a silly idea. They were going straight from the reception to the airport anyway. It would be quite dramatic. One
of those things you would never forget. She could do it, you know. She would do it. She would wear her gown all the way to Australia. She would step out of the plane, bouquet in hand, as if she had just that minute walked back down the aisle, ready to be sprinkled with confetti and kisses. She would glide across the tarmac to embrace her mother-in-law, who would say, ‘You look lovely, dear’. And Angela would smile, and blush just a little.

  A Word from Rosie Little on: Brides

  It is not, of course, only women already predisposed to silliness who can be adversely affected by the distant, promising chimes of wedding bells. If ever a sensible woman is likely to become silly, then it will be in her bride period, which begins, naturally enough, with her engagement and concludes shortly after the wedding, when she emerges from a fog of tulle into the terrible clarity of a world where no-one makes comforting noises for an hour while you sob over the thoughtlessness of a grandmother who refuses to buy any of the gifts specified in the bridal registry; a world in which it suddenly seems conceivable that you might forgive the bridesmaid (bitch!) who got drunk at your hen’s night and stole your limelight by bursting messily into tears and declaring that no-one would ever love her enough to marry her; where the problem of seating Uncle Travis’s new young wife (younger than his youngest daughter, you know…) is no longer a valid cause for Camp David-scale diplomacy; a world, in short, suddenly and horribly devoid of the incantation ‘whatever you want, darling, it’s your day’.

  I do not think that it is any accident that the croquembouche is a cake traditionally found at nuptial celebrations. I think it the most perfect of metaphors: all those profiteroles piled high on a plate like so many flaky little brides’ heads, and within each of them (in place of brains) a quantity of custard: thick and sweet.

  ‘Where do your in-laws live?’ I asked her as we left the Ladies and returned to the concourse.