All She Wants

by Jonathan Harvey

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  Brandy miniature – In case nerves get the better of me or get overexcited or just fancy a drink.

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  Paracetamol – In case get headache with stress etc.

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  Needle and thread – In case dress gets ripped. (Make sure thread matches dress. Would look a holy show if ivory dress had black thread on it like some big meff’s dress. Yuk!)

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  Stain removal kit – In case some bastard spills red wine on frock. Maybe no red wine? Mind you, beer will look just as bad. Maybe dry wedding? Greg says no. Stain removal kit it is. Though might be too pissed to care . . .

  Best Man Forgets Speech – Greg is going to print all speeches off on computer so there is always back-up.

  Official Photographer Doesn’t Show – Subtly encourage relatives to invest in new cameras in run-up to wedding so lots of professional equipment to fall back on. Must start slagging off people’s cameras soon.

  DJ Doesn’t Show – it’s Our Joey. Not gonna happen.

  Some nights I’d dream that everything on the list had gone wrong and the back-up handbag wasn’t handy. I’d wake in a cold sweat and have to switch the light on to convince myself it had only been a dream.

  A few weeks before the wedding, Our Joey came home from work and announced that he and Greg were going to Torquay for the weekend. My face must have looked a picture because he laughed and said, ‘Duh! Representing Skippy Skips at the National Waste Management Convention?’ As the office secretary he had booked them into a nearby hotel which, instead of having rooms that had numbers, had rooms that were named after famous West End musicals. He was going to be staying in Mame and Greg was to be staying in Me And My Girl. He’d found the hotel in the back pages of Gay Times, which Mum had enjoyed displaying on the coffee table over the last few months in a fan formation, as she felt it impressed anyone who dropped by. He seemed to think it was hilarious that my lovely Greg was going to be surrounded by screaming queens every evening after the conference. Greg asked if I wanted to join him, but biting my tongue to stop retorting, ‘Only if we stay in West Side Story’, I informed him I couldn’t. That particular weekend I had the final bridesmaids dress fittings, which I needed to be at as Debs had been threatening to make her dress ‘really slutty’ as she and Alex had recently split up and ‘weddings are brilliant places to pull’. I wasn’t keen; I wanted my bridesmaids to look tasteful and demure. I asked Greg if he realized what sort of place he was going to be staying in and he laughed and said, ‘Well, at least you know I’m not going to be playing away.’ Actually, it was a reassuring thought. Not that I ever felt Greg would be unfaithful to me. The kind ofguy who made rocky road pie and gave you his mother’s engagement ring surely wasn’t going to go eating from a different tray of muffins, if you follow my cake-based analogy.

  Our Joey was really looking forward to the Waste Management Convention. But something told me he was looking forward to staying in the gay guest house more. He kept reading things out from the brochure – ‘If you’re stuck for something to do, ask our resident drag queen, Tequila Mockingbird, she knows all the local attractions’ – and he went out and bought three new outfits and loads of new underwear. Clearly he was intending to pull. I had to have a word with him: ‘Joey, you’re going away on business. Not funny business.’

  He tutted and scowled.

  Mum intervened: ‘Don’t deny him the right to express his sexuality in a positive way, Jodie.’

  Our Joey gave a victorious grin, then went to pack his two matching pull-along knock-off Louis Vuitton suitcases, which he’d got from Brenda the Fence especially for the occasion.

  Well, God alone only knows what Our Joey got up to in Torquay, but he came back from the weekend, which had been successful for me – I’d convinced Debs to go with a nice floor-length number; I’d practically got her in a burka – and announced that he’d decided waste management wasn’t for him and he was handing in his notice at Skippy Skips. On further questioning he just said he’d been bored rigid at the conference and that skips now ‘did his swede in’. When he left the room, Mum leaned over me and proffered the conspiracy theory that what had actually happened in Torquay was that an internationally famous gay man had been staying at the guest house, had met Our Joey, fallen head over heels in love with him and Our Joey was planning on running away with him to Hollywood. When I asked which celebrity she was thinking of she shrugged and said, ‘Graham Norton or Tom Cruise.’

  Dad looked up from his paper. ‘He’s not a fruit, is he?’ he asked, incredulous.

  Mum tutted. ‘Graham Norton? Oh Malcolm. You need to get with the flaming times, love!’

  Dad whistled through his teeth and shook his head, as if to say, ‘Would you believe it?’

  I was more shocked that Mum had used the word ‘flaming’.

  When I saw Greg that night over cocktails in the Blue Lagoon he seemed to despair of Our Joey’s sudden turnabout, but he couldn’t really throw any light on his reasons for wanting to leave Skippy Skips. He said Our Joey was up late in the hotel bar both nights, singing show tunes with Tequila Mockingbird, and had subsequently yawned his way through the majority of the conference, something I said was unprofessional. Greg just shrugged and admitted, ‘Well, it was deathly dull.’ When I asked him how he’d got on at the hotel he just smiled and said, ‘Well, I won’t be rushing back.’

  I looked at him and could just imagine the thrill the blokes at the hotel must have got when he’d first walked in. Whenever he walked in, in fact. I bet tea was spilt on tablecloths when he was ordering his kippers for breakfast. The hottie with the blond curls sitting with that campy one with the snub nose and freckles. I bet they thought Our Joey was punching above his weight and they’d give it three weeks. The idea made me smile.

  ‘You’re so gorgeous when you smile,’ he said (he might have sworn as well) and I melted. Even now his good looks had the power to shrivel my insides. The thick lips, the plaintive eyes like brown planets floating in white skies. I even thought the little mole on his neck was cute, though Mum had commented that he might be prone to melanoma later in life. God, she could put a dampener on things. In two weeks from now I was going to be his wife. I really was the luckiest girl on the planet.

  Greg started telling me about everything he’d learned at the convention. How he’d always told his dad that websites were the way forward and how he’d insisted the company would have to invest in a graphic designer to rebrand them, but that his dad was dead set against it. He said the technical revolution had come, and they needed to grab hold of it or kiss goodbye to the business. As I yawned, I considered his first response to the convention was correct: it was deathly dull. And what was even more clear to me was that our Joey had made a wise move by getting out.

  The Saturday before the wedding was a big night. I was having my hen party and Greg was having his stag do. Me and the girls were going on a pub crawl down Wavertree High Street and Greg and co were doing something similar in town. Hayls and Debs were in charge of my hen night and they’d decided it would be hilarious if we all dressed as St Trinian’s Girls. I thought this an amusing choice: a load of ex-comprehensive schoolers going out dressed as posh public-school types, and wondered if some ex-Roedean girls might be going out on a hen night dressed as the cast of Grange Hill.

  On the Saturday afternoon me and Hayls had popped down to Allerton Road to shop for pleated miniskirts, fishnets, white shirts and straw boaters. We were just coming out of a school uniform shop (that amazingly didn’t sell fishnet stockings, can’t think why . . .) when I bumped into a familiar face. Well, obviously it wasn’t just a face, that would have just been plain weird, it was Mrs Mendelson. I was a bit embarrassed to see her and tried to hurry past, hoping she’d not clocked me, but I heard her familiar klaxon of a voice bellowing out, ‘Jodie? Jodie McGee? Is it you? Of course it’s you!’

  So I swung round and gave a very convincing performance of someone going, ‘Who’s that call
ing me?’ – looks around pavement, clocks fat old bird in nylon flower-print kaftan – ‘Oh why, it’s my old drama teacher, Mrs Mendelson!’

  ‘Mrs Mendelson!’ I said and leaned forward to hug her. She smelt of lily of the valley and Pernod. She clutched my hand as I stepped back. She looked a bit misty-eyed as she said, ‘What happened to you, Jodie?’

  ‘Er . . .’ I pretended I didn’t know what she meant, though I understood completely.

  ‘You just disappeared. There one week, gone the next. You had so much promise, Jodie, handbags of potential. You really could have gone professional.’

  I blustered a bit.

  ‘One knock and you were down,’ she said, no doubt referring to my dreadful Acacia Avenue audition and my subsequent non-attendance at her classes. Truth be told I’d been too mortified to show my face. ‘I really had more faith in you than that. Didn’t have you down as a bolter.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Mendelson,’ I heard myself saying. There was a slight pause, so I tried to be bright and breezy and started telling her how I was getting married the following week and that this was my friend Hayls, and she’d better speak up as Hayls was a bit hard of hearing – Hayls was thrilled when I said that. But Mrs Mendelson didn’t appear to be listening. She just interrupted and said, ‘Never give up, Jodie. Come back to it one day. You’ll have to. You’re too good not to. You’ll need to.’

  You’ll need to? It was like she was seeing my future and I didn’t like it.

  With that she steadied herself on her walking stick, then turned and walked away. I felt terribly sad all of a sudden. She was right, I had bolted at the first sign of failure and it was a regret of mine. Acting at her drama classes had made me so happy, so alive. At first I had missed the fulfilment it gave me, but then I’d found fulfilment of a different sort going out with Greg. And surely that was a more practical, more real kind of happiness than pretending to be other people in a room above a betting shop on Allerton Road. Of course that made me happy, but it didn’t mean anything. It’s one thing being a big fish in a small pond and being good for Mrs Mendelson, but it was another actually going out there in the real world of showbiz and making a name for yourself. That was never going to happen, not to someone like me. So the happiness I’d found – in the real world of being me and not someone else – was surely the better kind of happiness to have. Wasn’t it?

  Yet she’d seemed so sure. As if she knew. Like when I saw the gypsy who told me I’d win an Oscar. Maybe I would go back to acting. I’d have to if I was going to win an Academy Award. I wasn’t going to win one stacking shelves in the local supermarket.

  There was something about my crossing paths with Myrtle Mendelson that unnerved me for the rest of that day. It was an odd feeling I couldn’t shake off. And although I went through the motions of the hen night and drank enough alcohol to sink Venice, it didn’t even touch the sides. At the end of the night I felt stone cold sober. I even got my key in the door on the first attempt. That was unheard of for me after so much Tia Maria. My legs were weary from being on my feet all night in high heels (and fishnets) and I kicked off my stilettos as I came into the through lounge. I got a bit of a shock when I saw Our Joey sat on the corner settee staring into space. He didn’t even have the lights on. I flicked them on and he jumped a bit, a startled deer in the headlights.

  ‘Joey, what’s wrong?’ I asked. I knew him well enough to know something was up. I went and sat next to him, rubbing my ankles through the fishnets. He looked at me oddly.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘It’s hard to take you seriously with pretend freckles painted on your face and your hair in bunches.’

  ‘Answer the question, knobhead.’ But I said it nicely, the way you can when it’s your favourite/only brother.

  ‘Are you sure you’re doing the right thing?’ There was an element of restrained alarm in his voice, which unnerved me in the same way as Mrs Mendelson had.

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Marrying Greg.’

  That completely took the wind out of my sails. It was one thing Mum questioning me all those months ago, but even she’d warmed to the idea by now. But Our Joey? No. This wasn’t happening. Our Joey knew me better than anyone on earth. Probably better even than Greg did. We’d shared so much. I would never have said something like that to him if the boot had been on the other foot. It hurt. It really hurt.

  ‘Why d’you say that?’ I asked, worried now about what the answer might be. Had Greg done something bad on the stag do? Had he kissed a stripper? What?

  Our Joey shrugged. ‘Dunno. Just wanted to check you were OK really. You’ve been so excited about it all, but it’s been like you were excited about getting married and . . . well, not much else.’

  ‘I’m excited about getting married to Greg,’ I said defiantly.

  ‘But . . . but . . .’ He was clutching at straws here, I could tell. ‘But you said you wanted to go to the Maldives on your honeymoon. And you’re going to North Wales.’

  ‘Joey, I could go to Bootle and still be happy, as long as I was with my Greg. And anyway, d’you know where the Maldives is? It’s fucking miles away. I looked on the map.’

  ‘And you’ve gotta move in with his dad.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So you should wait till yous can afford a place of your own.’

  ‘We’re moving into his granny flat.’

  ‘His poor arl granny. Where’s she gonna go?’

  ‘He hasn’t got a granny, and well you know it. And anyway, we won’t be on top of each other. We’ll hardly ever see his dad.’

  ‘So you’re happy?’

  I nodded. ‘Like you need to ask.’

  ‘I do. You’re me sister.’

  I sighed. ‘Joey Will you stop worrying about me? I’m dead happy.’

  This appeared to appease him and he visibly relaxed. ‘Well, that’s boss then. Nightcap?’

  ‘I don’t suit them.’ This was a running gag of ours. ‘Oh, you mean a drink?’

  He winked, got up and headed to the kitchen. I knew there was something he wasn’t saying, though. I got up and followed him to the fridge, where he pulled out two cans of lager.

  ‘Joey. Did . . . did Greg do something tonight?’

  ‘Like what?’ he cracked open the cans.

  ‘You tell me. You were on his stag do.’

  ‘What, like rim the stripper?’

  ‘So there was a stripper?’

  He nodded. ‘There was a stripper.’

  My heart sank to my aching feet. He had. He’d snogged her. He was probably with her now, having one last fling. Our Joey could see the panic on my face.

  ‘He didn’t do nothing.’

  ‘That’s a double negative. That means he did.’

  ‘Get that down your screech and relax,’ he said, handing me one of the lagers. ‘Greg Valentine’s never so much as glanced sideways at another woman in all the time he’s known you.’

  Bless him. Our Joey knew just the right thing to say sometimes.

  ELEVEN

  ‘There’s nothing worse than lack of sleep through excitement. A face full of slap can hide black rings under your eyes, but your nerves’ll be shot to bits.’ Mum said the night before the wedding, as her mate Maureen slid a foil strip out of the inside pocket of her swing coat and popped a few pills out of it onto the kitchen counter.

  I’d always wondered why Maureen had such a glazed look in her eye, now I knew. Mum took the breadknife and sliced one of the pills in two, like a seasoned pro. She slipped me half and necked a whole one herself.

  I looked at it anxiously.

  ‘What would Idaho Manchester say?’

  ‘She’s got a face like a smacked kipper,’ said Mum, being uncharacteristically ungenerous. ‘You’re not telling me she doesn’t need Idaho’s Little Helper to see her through the day?’

  We washed them down with shot glasses of neat vodka.

  ‘Jesus,’ I said as I felt the hot hit of vodka slipping down,
‘when did I move into the Valley of the Dolls?’

  Mum tucked the remaining half into her cardigan pocket, and when she saw me looking amazed she shrugged: ‘Your father snores something terrible. Now, Night Nurse chaser.’

  Maureen rubbed her hands as Mum poured a shot glass of the bright green liquid.

  ‘No, it’s for our Jodie,’ she said. ‘You’ve got to drive, Maureen. You don’t want a repeat of last Easter.’

  Maureen had driven her moped into a bus stop at two in the morning while returning home from an all-night chemist, claiming her Tony was ill in bed with a fever and she’d needed emergency Lemsips. It was one of those things that people rarely mentioned, like Our Joey’s police caution or the time her from number eight was caught with a frozen turkey under her rain mac a week before Christmas. And chilblains no doubt. I swallowed the green gunk and started to feel woozy almost instantly.

  The next thing I knew I was waking up in my own bed, in my nightie, feeling incredibly calm and refreshed as daylight streamed in through the curtains. I lay there for a moment, warm, cosy and content. It was the day of my wedding. Anything life could throw at me now I was ready for, I would be unfazed, I would be calm, collected, centred. The tiny bit of tranquillizer no doubt still floating around my system threw any sort of anxiety out of the window and allowed me to get on with the job in hand. The job of getting married. If I could ever be bothered to actually get up that is.

  The first face I sawwas Our Joey’s. He tapped on my bedroom door and crept in singing a gentle rendition of ‘I’m Getting Married In The Morning’, like Eva Cassidy with tonsillitis. He was carrying a tray holding my wedding day breakfast: two poached eggs on toast with Marmite – my absolute favourite. I knew that he’d made it, because he was much better at poached eggs than Mum, and these were perfect. The tray looked lovely, and even the cutlery matched, which was unusual for our house. And beside it on the tray was a mug of builder’s tea. Fantastic. I sat up and he slipped it onto my lap with a wink.