How to Find Your (First) Husband

by Rosie Blake

  To Ben – the BEST (first and last) husband.

  Prologue

  Dorset

  ‘Do you, Isobel Graves, take Andrew Parker to be your lawful wedded husband?’

  This was it.

  I looked across at him, sucked in all my breath. He was facing forward, wasn’t looking at me. His hair was spiked up at the front. I liked it when it was spiked like that. I swallowed and looked back at the priest. ‘I do.’

  ‘And do you, Andrew Parker…’

  ‘Andrew James Parker…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘James is my middle name.’

  He was so proper! I grinned; I liked the name James.

  ‘Oh sorry.’ The priest fiddled with his collar. ‘…Um…and do you, Andrew James Parker, take Isobel…’

  Then his eyes went wide so you could see all the whites round the middle bit and there was a pause as he panicked, looking at me for my middle name. I shook my head quickly, my hair snapping from side to side, and the priest continued with a sigh, ‘…Graves to be your lawfully wedded wife?’

  ‘I do,’ Andrew said in his most solemn voice. My heart skipped: pitter, patter.

  ‘In sickness and in health?’ the priest checked.

  We both nodded a ‘yes’.

  ‘Good,’ he commented.

  Sniggers could be heard behind us. Then someone said ‘ssh’ and it went quiet again.

  ‘To death you do part?’

  We nodded again, slightly less enthusiastically. I could feel God looking at me from the clouds to see if I was for real.

  The mood was serious. It was like everyone there was holding their breath in all at the same time.

  ‘Do you have the ring?’ the priest asked.

  Lyndon walked forward and placed the ring in the priest’s out-stretched hand, bowing and shuffling backwards to his place in the front row.

  ‘Excellent,’ the priest stated. ‘So then…’ He paused, sticking the ring quickly on my finger.

  I sucked in all the air, waiting for the words, the words I had thought about for the last week, the words I had scribbled all over my diary. The words I knew would come.

  ‘I now pronounce you man and wife. You may…’

  There was an explosion of laughter, and the priest started stuttering the next bit, embarrassed. ‘…kiss the bride.’

  There was general whooping and a lone ‘Woooo!’ was heard. Over the noise I could hear my own breaths buzzing in my brain.

  Andrew Parker drew back my veil to reveal my flushed face (it was hot under there; Beth had told me it was when she got married but I hadn’t believed her until now). And then he leaned right in, really close, right up to my face and he smelled of chewing gum and…That was it. All of a sudden. A kiss from Andrew James Parker that bashed the top of my lip.

  My nostril felt wet. Someone had started playing ‘Three Blind Mice’ on a violin. People threw leaves at us for confetti. Andrew walked off. But I was happy, all warm inside my tummy. Sort of stunned as well as I didn’t think it would feel like this. And now everyone was cheering us and smiling and Harry started shaking Andrew’s hand and then Sammy and Lyndon decided to lift him up and carry him around and then all the girls were surrounding me because they wanted to know what the ring looked like and what the kiss had felt like. They were all unmarried, apart from Beth who got married last term, but then Chris left the school and she had only seen him once, in town, but he had been with his mum and she’d been too embarrassed so hadn’t even waved, just pretended he wasn’t there. I would never do that to Andrew.

  I looked across at him – my husband. He had taken his shirt off and was wearing his school tie as a bandana. I looked down at the ring someone had made out of a yellow pipe cleaner and smiled.

  Two weeks later, I wondered what had gone so wrong.

  Yesterday Andrew Parker had been seen in the playground pushing Jenny Murray around on those big plastic barrels. I’d seen red and pushed Sammy Layton round on the barrels as he was always begging me to push him. Then Katie Sanderson saw us and told Andrew Parker that I was going out with Sammy Layton now and Andrew Parker came storming over to me, his bottom lip quivering, a hand swiping at the wave in his hair. Slowly he raised one hand and pointed straight at me.

  ‘You, Isobel Graves, are no longer my wife and you won’t be able to find a new husband, from this day forth till death you do part.’

  Then there was a clap of thunder and, as the rain beat down and everyone rushed inside, I watched him turn on his heel and leave me. Water streamed down my face, my arms broke out into goosebumps.

  My first husband walked out on me.

  Chapter 1

  Los Angeles

  ‘Twenty per cent off all shellfish today. It’s prawntast— Shit.’

  ‘Stop dropping them, Iz.’

  ‘I can’t keep hold of them in these stupid claws.’

  ‘Prawns don’t have cla— Hello, sir, twenty per cent off all shellfish today. It’s the plaice to be…They don’t have claws, Iz, they have like pink arms or something.’

  ‘Well, then what the bejeezus are these?’ I stood up, waving various pink appendages at Mel’s massive prawn face. I couldn’t make out her eyes.

  ‘They’re the arm-legs; it’s like a whole limb thing going on. They are like the fish version of spiders or something.’

  ‘AGGGGHH, I don’t even care.’ My voice was muffled inside the giant prawn costume and I felt more leaflets fall to the floor in my frustration.

  ‘STOP DROPPING THEM, Iz.’

  ‘Is it lunch yet?’

  ‘Sweetheart, it’s not even time for your “elevenses”.’ She tried to do the quotation marks with her big fish claws, almost decapitating a coiffured passer-by. ‘Oh hello, madam, it’s twenty per cent off today on all shellfish. It’s an eely, eely good deal.’

  ‘What’s with the fish puns?’ I asked, adjusting my prawn head and smiling at a little girl in a sundress nearby who couldn’t see my smile and ran screaming behind the legs of her father as the massive prawn focused in ON HER.

  ‘I like to mix it up, Iz, leave the punter wanting more. I am like the most dynamic prawn since, shit, has a prawn ever done anything?’

  ‘It’s a prawn, Mel, I don’t think prawns do anything.’

  ‘Well that’s lazy, they’ve got enough limbs for some­thing. Hello, sir, care for twenty per cent off today? Thank Cod for us, eh!’

  I exhaled loudly in my prawn head, my breath clogging the inside making me feel sweaty and boxed in and disgusting. The sun was dazzling in a way that only the LA sun could, some girl in hotpants and a tiny crop top just rollerbladed past, smirk­ing at our sad little prawn party for two. The manager of the store, the most enormous man with five chins and a gut that rested over his thighs, was bound to come out at any moment and give us another lecture about the promotion we were run­ning. And we still had about five hours of this hell to go.

  ‘Where did Celine go?’ Mel asked, turning in a slow circle so that her prawn tail whipped round and tripped up a boy dressed in dungarees too busy sucking his thumb and staring to move out of the way. He started crying and ran away to tell his mum. Mel obviously hadn’t felt anything and was oblivious as we could barely see a metre in front of us through the little pink mesh panel over our eyes.

  I tried to shrug, but the outfit was so heavy nothing moved.

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘So typical of her. She’s probably chatting up some sexy man and we are left doing all the work.’

  ‘How come she’s the mermaid anyway?�
�� I asked. ‘It’s not right. Why are we never the hot character? Do you remember that job in the mall where we spent all day on our knees pretending to be dwarves and she was Snow White? She’s not even white, she’s orange.’

  As if our talking had summoned her, Celine swanned over dressed in a long fishtail skirt, all green and turquoise chiffon frills, two stars placed precariously over her fake-tanned boobs. A man nearby wearing a baseball cap on backwards slammed himself into a rubbish bin he was gawping so hard.

  ‘He-ll-o, ladies, celeb spot, I am pre-tt-y sure I just saw Amanda ­– Gossip Girl season two wearing a pink playsuit,’ she said, fanning her face, framed with abundant gold curls, with a fan that looked like a seashell. She looked like she was on a beach in Hawaii, not outside a supermarket in downtown LA handing out leaflets to the general public.

  Celeb spot?

  There was silence.

  ‘I must have er…missed that season,’ said Mel from inside her prawn costume.

  ‘We can’t see out of these things anyway,’ I grumbled, trying to fold my prawn arms but taking about six limbs with me. I dropped the remaining leaflets. ‘Aaggghhhh! I hate this bloody job.’

  ‘Stop dropping them, Iz.’

  ‘Hey,’ trilled Celine. ‘It’s not so bad y’all.’

  ‘That’s because you’re not dressed as a piece of seafood with a ginormous prawn head,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Hey, you look totally cute,’ she laughed.

  I wanted to smack her mermaid face with all my arms and legs. I wobbled as I walked towards her. She would have looked afraid if she could move her face more than a centimetre, but her Botox-addled forehead was frozen. She backed away, fish tail swishing from side to side.

  ‘Hey, babe, no need to be on such a downer. Mel is enjoying herself, aren’t you, Mel?’

  The other prawn turned. ‘I am having a turbotlly AMAZING time.’

  ‘God, I need a coffee,’ I said pulling off my prawn head which made a different child run behind the legs of her mother, her long plait streaming behind her as she fled.

  I leaned down, human head with a prawn body, the outfit limiting my movements, and started attempting to scoop up the dropped leaflets. My long brown hair fell around me and I tried to swipe it back with a claw.

  Just how had my career plumbed these depths?

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said, depositing my massive prawn head on a spare chair. ‘Do you mind if I put this here?’ Amazing how a hollowed-out giant fish head could clear a table of people pronto.

  Ordering a cappuccino, I sat down carefully, trapping my numerous appendages under my chair to avoid tripping people up. One guy smirked at me as I lost control of a leg. When done I placed both elbows back on the table, my reflection in the cafe glass window staring unsmiling back at me.

  The waitress slid my drink across to me, her gaze fixed on one of my six arms.

  ‘Thanks,’ I muttered, tearing a sugar sachet open and sprinkling its contents over the chocolate-striped froth.

  I’d been in LA for two years. I’d been doing jobs like this for most of that time. It was easy money in many ways: dress up, smile, be nice. I knew things could be worse, but it was so far removed from what I had hoped. I had big dreams, had arrived fresh from England with stories of LA and the glamorous world of television. I was going to be a TV presenter; with my experience reporting news items and real-life events, my adorable English accent and my buoyant enthusiasm, I was going to make it. I wasn’t going to be handing out leaflets as a life-size prawn.

  I took a sip, froth sticking to my lips, as Mel walked in, holding her prawn head under one arm. Her red hair was sticking to her forehead as she scanned the tables for me. I gave her a weak wave and she swiped at her fringe, grinned and came over, appendages wobbling, smirky guy rolling his eyes as if to say, ‘Oh man alive, there are two of them.’

  Looming over my table, she put her free hand on her hip. ‘Is someone a sad-face shellfish?’

  ‘Shut your face,’ I said, mouth twitching, not wanting

  to meet her eye.

  ‘Who’s a sad shellfish?’ she said in a baby voice. ‘You

  are. You are.’

  When I didn’t respond, she shrugged. ‘Do you want me to do the Prawn Dance? I’ve been working on it for a while. Okay, fine, since you left me five minutes ago but I think it’s good.’

  ‘No, I’m okay,’ I said.

  ‘Too late,’ she said, breaking into a routine: prawn legs and arms waving about uselessly, out of time, culminating in the ‘Prawn Body Pop’ where she knocked over someone’s empty glass on the table behind us.

  ‘Sit down, woman,’ I said, pushing out the chair and giggling.

  ‘Sorry,’ she called to the waitress as, scowling, she came to remove the glass and wipe at the table.

  ‘Coffee, please, us fish get up a thirst,’ she laughed, earning herself another scowl. ‘So what’s wrong, babe?’

  ‘Er, I really hate it when you call me “babe” – we are so not “babe” type friends.’

  ‘Okay, homie, I hear you,’ she said in a solemn voice, raising her prawn arm.

  I sighed, tapping my teaspoon on the edge of the cup. ‘I’m being a dick,’ I said. ‘It’s not like today is any worse, ignore me.’

  ‘Ha, I love that you are being so English when you’re depressed. “I’m being a dick,”’ she parroted at me, her head lolling as she put on a dreadful low English accent. ‘’kay…’ she said in her own voice again. ‘So am totally thinking hot yoga – should I or should I not?’

  I stopped her with a prawn claw and an annoyed expression. ‘Hello, I didn’t ACTUALLY mean ignore me. Shit, give me three minutes of self-pity time.’

  ‘Oh sorry, sorry, right, well yes today is fine. I mean it’s not fine in the sense that we perhaps didn’t dream that we might one day be LA’s finest talking Man Prawns, but we are used to this ritual humiliation, yes? Do you remember that New Year’s Sexual Health Campaign – we could be dressed as worse, Iz.’ She shivered with the memory. ‘Ribbed for your pleasure. I genuinely thought I might never recover from that one. We HAD to drink through it.’

  ‘Er, you spent the entire time asking men to rub lube on you and cackling in drunk hysteria.’

  ‘Not my finest hour,’ she admitted.

  ‘Didn’t you just think,’ I started in a quiet voice, interrupted by the plonking down of Mel’s coffee, ‘didn’t you just think we would have stopped all this by now? It was meant to be temporary money – you know, while you became a dancer and my show reel went out.’

  Mel’s mouth turned down and I felt guilty for making her mood plummet. Then she shrugged at me. ‘I still kind of believe that will happen; we’ve just got to stick at it and have some faith.’

  ‘I guess,’ I said, draining the last of my coffee and then ducking as Celine swept past, tail flapping, head swivelling left to right as she scanned for us in the street outside.

  ‘Oops,’ Mel giggled.

  ‘Do you ever wonder how long we will be d—?’

  ‘I don’t get how mermaids have sex,’ mused Mel, cutting me off.

  ‘Sorry?’ I stopped mid-flow. Mel was clearly not focused on me and my problems.

  She tilted her head to indicate outside. ‘Just looking at Celine there and I don’t get it, physically, how can they manage it?’

  ‘You know mermaids don’t exist, Mel,’ I confirmed.

  ‘Well yeah, but if they did, I don’t get how they would do it. Where is the access?’

  ‘Access?

  ‘You know, like…’ She held up two claws…

  ‘Yes, I can imagine.’ I held up a hand, interrupting. ‘Maybe merpeople make babies just by hugging?’ I suggested.

  ‘How awful.’

  ‘Dreadful,’ I agreed. ‘Um…can we possibly, if it’s not too much of a problem, talk about me ag
ain?’ I asked.

  Mel dragged her eyes back to my face. ‘Yes sorry, sorry…just worried about the logistics.’

  ‘Clearly.’

  ‘Anyway, am totally focused…shoot!’ she said, trying to click with her claw.

  ‘Okay, so I was asking how long do you think we will have to be at all this and when do you think we will be doing what we rea— Actually, do you know what,’ I said, throwing up my hands, ‘I’m boring myself.’ I sipped at my coffee and looked at Mel. ‘So do you think there’s a hole?’

  ‘What, in your life?’ Mel asked, forehead creasing.

  ‘No, in the mermaid.’

  Mel considered this, sipping slowly at her coffee, ‘Honestly, Iz, I just don’t know.’

  Chapter 2

  Four hours later, I’d showered and thrown on some cotton shorts and a vest top. My hair was scraped back off my face and, as I stared at my reflection in the mirror, I felt marginally more myself. Rubbing moisturiser into my skin, lightly tanned from some recent good weather, I breathed out slowly, feeling my shoulders drop. It had been a long day. Despite Mel trying to cheer me up by pretending to be ‘Killer Prawn’ – chasing Celine down the promenade growling at her and snapping her claws. Celine had started screaming, dodging Mel’s diving limbs as her hair flowed behind her and her boobs bobbed up and down. She had lost one of her seashells and wouldn’t speak to us for the rest of the afternoon, even when Mel apologised by bringing her a fork, called it a thinga-me-bob and sang to her from The Little Mermaid. The hours dragged by and I got hotter and more uncomfortable as the sun sat stubbornly overhead, its rays uninterrupted by any passing clouds.

  Emerging downstairs, I snuggled on the sofa next to Stewie who had gallantly suggested he cook and had brought back a Chinese takeaway. Nibbling on a piece of cold prawn toast (rub it in, Stewie, why don’t you?), I tried to show an interest in the movie he was watching (something about a robot who could love) but got bored and reached for a magazine. Flicking aimlessly through its pages I became more and more depressed that I didn’t have a ‘Bikini-Ready Body’ – WHAT DOES THIS EVEN MEAN?, did not know ‘10 ways to impress my man’ and didn’t have enough of this season’s yellow in my wardrobe. Flinging it to one side, I rested my head on Stewie’s shoulder.