by Beth Miller
It was an important date to Alex and me, too.
‘It’s the night before our wedding!’ he said, excited. ‘I think these fireworks are actually in our honour, and nothing to do with some boring new millennium.’
‘Definitely.’
I was thinking about the other day-before-the-wedding, when I’d made the decision to phone Alex. I wondered how it would all have turned out, if Alex hadn’t answered the phone, or if he had said, ‘Who is this?’ or had told me that, regrettably, he had a new girlfriend and he wished me and my husband well? Once again, I was overwhelmed by the sheer luck of it all. I realised that I had never asked what it had been like for him, those weeks after the cinema and the kiss, when I shut down. In between crashing blasts of coloured lights, I asked him.
‘The worst ten weeks of my life, you mean?’ he said, grinning. He pulled me closer and rearranged my scarf so it was properly round my neck.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘You were worth waiting for. Though I didn’t realise quite how long you’d keep me waiting. I thought you were just a bit freaked out by the kiss, and the cinema and everything. I thought in a couple of days, you’d get back in touch. So I sent you a message, and left a voicemail. I even called the landline a few times, but your dad always answered, so I had to hang up. After a few days, I thought, maybe she isn’t going to contact me again. Well! I wasn’t having that, was I?’
An enormous golden firework exploded over our heads and we both said, ‘Ooooh!’
‘What did you do?’
‘Obviously I didn’t know where you lived, you’d never told me, but you had told me the name of your school.’
‘Oh no! I forgot to phone the school. I wanted to apologise for walking out without any explanation. It went out of my head.’
‘I have this feeling that, by now, they’ve heard all about it.’
‘You’re probably right. I feel bad, though. I’ll call them next week. Go on.’
Pink and purple sparkling sprays lit up the sky.
‘Well, they were certainly protective of you. I asked for you a few times, but the secretary always said that you were off sick.’
‘Did you actually manage to get in?’
‘No, I was stuck outside in the cold, talking into an intercom, begging some unseen harridan to let me talk to you.’
‘Oh dear, I’m sorry. She is a bit scary.’
‘I waited outside your school every afternoon for a week, which made me pretty unpopular at work but there was no sign of you. I started to think maybe you really were ill, that the stress of meeting me had made you ill.’
‘I was ill. I couldn’t eat, and my mind was so confused. I did take a few days off.’
‘Then I went back to our café, five o’clock every day.’
‘For how long?’
‘Two weeks. You never came.’
‘Oh, Alex.’
‘I know. What a sap, right? Kim couldn’t stop teasing me, and I didn’t even care. I thought about you every day. I even lost interest in other women, which hadn’t ever happened before, not since I was about thirteen.’
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I focused on the fireworks which were now crowding together, one scarcely fading before the next burst into noisy bloom.
‘Basically I spent a lot of time at Kim’s, being horribly teased, and pointlessly speculating about what you might be thinking.’
‘When did you give up?’
People in the crowd started cheering, and looking up, I realised that the fireworks had stopped.
‘Eliza, I never gave up.’ Alex smiled. ‘Weeks, months, I sent you a message nearly every day. And I was right to. December the fifteenth, the day before your wedding, and I was thinking, perhaps I should do that romantic Graduate thing – it’s a film, I must add it to the list – of rushing into the ceremony and grabbing your hand and getting on a bus. But of course, I didn’t know where or when you were getting married. Anyway, I assumed you didn’t want an intervention. I sent one more text, wishing you luck. And then my phone rang. I saw it was you before I picked it up, and I was in such a state, I nearly pressed the off button.’
‘Do you remember what I said?’
‘It’s engraved on my heart. You said, “My name’s Aliza with an A, and I love you.”’
‘And you said, “I love you too.”’
‘And then,’ Alex said, and pulled me even closer, ‘the shit really hit the fan.’
Midnight, Brockwell Park. We all chanted together: ‘Ten! Nine! Eight!’ and when we reached zero, everyone screamed and called out ‘Happy New Year!’ and more fireworks went off overhead. It had got so cold, I couldn’t feel my feet.
Alex whispered, ‘It’s our wedding day!’ Then he kissed me. I kept my eyes open but no one was watching us, they were all kissing too. I closed my eyes. It seemed very warm, suddenly, and I let myself melt into the kiss.
Eleven
1 January 2000
Kim and Vicky were waiting for us outside the register office. Alex threw his arms round Kim. ‘Thanks so much doing for this, Kimbo.’
‘You’re welcome, man, even though I have a hangover the size of the Millennium Dome.’
I leaned in to kiss Vicky on the cheek. After only two weeks living in the Real World I’d learned how much casual friendly kissing went on amongst people who weren’t related. Yesterday afternoon, I’d met a group of Alex’s friends at the Prince Albert pub, and every single one of them had kissed me, which took ages, and put me on edge worrying about whether they would all do it again when it was time to go (they did). Alex assured me I’d get used to it, and I felt perhaps I was already starting to, as I made the first move with Vicky. But I just got a mouthful of hair as she stepped back.
It was going to be a long slow process to make new friends, and I had secretly been hoping that Vicky could be a ready-made one, despite our shaky start at Christmas. After all, we had the two brothers in common.
‘I’ve met my new sister,’ I told myself on the way home from Vicky’s house on Christmas Day, hoping that it would feel like that at some point in the future. Today, though, when I smiled at her, Vicky didn’t smile back.
‘You can’t wear that coat,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t go.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, touching my collar, feeling self-conscious all of a sudden. ‘No one will see it.’
The red of my dress looked like fire, but the material was thin, so I was wearing my only coat, the long brown woollen one, over the top.
‘Kim’s got his camera, you don’t want to be wearing that frumpy thing in your wedding photos.’ Vicky took off her white furry jacket and pushed it into my arms. ‘Something borrowed,’ she said.
I took my coat off and put on hers. It was no warmer than mine but was much softer. It smelled of Vicky, of her flowery perfume. I handed her my coat in exchange but she didn’t put it on.
‘You’ll freeze,’ I said.
‘Not being funny darling, but I’d rather catch pneumonia than wear your granny coat. No offence.’
‘Is Mum looking after Holly?’ Alex asked, changing the subject.
‘Yes,’ Kim said. ‘She was hoping to come, of course, but with Holly having a bit of a temperature, she kindly offered to stay with her.’
‘And let’s face it, it was a bit short notice, weren’t it?’ Vicky said. ‘She looks better in my coat, don’t you think, Ally? Bit more glamorous?’
I realised she was talking about me.
‘Very nice, Vicky,’ Alex said, winking at me. ‘Well, shall we go in?’
The ceremony was brief, but moving. Alex and I faced each other and held hands as the registrar, a black middle-aged woman with a sonorous voice, intoned the words we had to repeat. I stumbled over ‘I know not of any lawful impediment’, which made Alex smile. I don’t think I’d ever said the word ‘impediment’ out loud before.
But then Alex had to say, ‘I call upon these persons, here present, to witness that I,
Alex Symons, do take thee, Aliza Bloom, to be my lawful wedded wife’, and his voice cracked on the word ‘wife’, which set me off. He put a plain silver ring on my finger, to go with the Accessorize ring, and we looked at each other, and smiled. The whole thing passed much too quickly for me, and my eyes were blurry with tears. Kim took photos of us with his new digital camera, and the registrar took some of the four of us. We then went to Brockwell Park to take more pictures, Alex and I standing under a bare-branched tree, but we didn’t stay long, it was so cold. We hurried over to the Prince Albert, and I got slightly drunk on red wine while watching Vicky’s attempts to flirt with Alex. He constantly rebuffed her, kept drawing Kim and me back into the group, but she persistently tried to exclude us from their conversation.
Later, we relocated to the Roundhouse for chocolate cake. I’d eaten a few items of non-kosher food in the previous two weeks, so it shouldn’t have been a problem, but I was churned up thinking about what was to come, and the crumbs dried in my throat. Alex caught my eye, and got to his feet.
‘Thanks, guys, you’ve been stars,’ he said, ‘but I need to get my tired bride home.’
‘It’s only four in the afternoon, what’s she got to be tired about?’ Vicky said, then added, ‘Ow!’ as Kim elbowed her.
‘I think Eliza needs a little lie-down,’ Alex said, winking at me.
‘Let her go, then,’ Vicky said. ‘No reason why you can’t stay a bit longer.’
‘Well, Vicky,’ Alex said, ‘in fact, both Eliza and I need a lie-down,’ and he turned his dazzling smile to me, his new wife.
We laughed about Vicky all the way back to the flat, but once he’d unlocked the front door, we fell silent. He took my hand and led me to his room. For two weeks I’d slept alone in here while he stayed in the spare room. I couldn’t stop trembling in his arms as he gently unzipped my red dress, kissing my neck so softly I scarcely felt it. I closed my eyes, so that I felt, rather than saw, my dress fall to the floor. He whispered to me to get into bed and I slid gratefully under the covers in my underwear. I couldn’t look at him, kept my face turned away from him as he undressed. When he got in beside me, I knew he was naked.
I took a breath, then turned to face him. He put his arms round me, pressing the length of his body against mine, and I gasped, I actually gasped, from the shock of something so unfamiliar. I couldn’t stop shivering, and he stroked my back with gentle fingertips to calm me, softly kissing my face and neck. I don’t know how long we lay like this, but my feelings inside of me made it seem that I would burst. We whispered ‘I love you’ to each other, though I could scarcely say the words as I was breathing so fast, and he seemed to be having difficulty breathing too. He rolled away from me and I couldn’t understand why, but then I saw that he was putting something on himself. I knew about condoms, of course – I was sheltered, not stupid – but had never seen one. To my surprise, and his, I was fascinated to watch him slide the condom on. There was so much I had never seen before, until this night: a grown man naked; an uncircumcised penis; my own naked body through someone else’s gaze.
To even more of both our surprises, I gently took hold of his penis. How extraordinary it felt, even with the condom over it. Silky and hard and warm all at the same time. I stroked my hand up and down it.
He pressed against me. ‘Are you ready to try?’ he whispered. ‘I don’t normally go this fast but I can’t wait much longer.’
In answer, I held him tight against me. He slid my pants down and moved across me, and pushed himself into me. It felt like such a tight fit, and then it didn’t, and I was barely aware that I was making tiny gasps of surprise and pleasure, my fingers tense against his back. Then he was moving faster, seemed deeper inside me, and then he let out a great yell that I had not expected.
‘Oh my god,’ he said, kissing me. ‘I’m so sorry, that was so quick, are you OK?’
‘It was wonderful.’
‘Didn’t it hurt?’
‘A little bit. But it was so… wonderful.’ I didn’t know how I could ever describe the complex sensations of the heat of his body, the astonishing otherness of him, the flatness of his chest against the curves of my own, the pleasurable warmth in my secret unknown place. ‘Wonderful’ would have to cover it.
‘But you can’t even have come.’
‘Come?’
‘You know. Orgasm.’
I winced, embarrassed, against him. ‘No. I don’t know how.’
‘I’ll help you. Give me ten minutes, and we’ll try again.’
I laughed, delighted. ‘We can do it again, so soon?’
He moved against me, and my whole body tingled. ‘We sure can, Snow White.’
Alex’s list of food for Eliza
Cheeseburger and fries. American classic. A good one is a thing of beauty.
Sushi. I’ve only recently got into sushi but think you’ll like it. There’s more to it than raw fish.
Lamb rogan josh. Curry with yoghurt, which I know is meat and milk. But the meat is cooked for a long time so it’s melt-in-the-mouth and probably not that different from lamb you already like.
Rare steak. OK, here the meat has not been cooked for a long time. Yes, Eliza, there might be blood on the plate… but you have got to love the taste!
Oysters. Well-known aphrodisiac. Also, utterly delicious.
Bacon butty. The thing that vegetarians dream about. Ultimate comfort food. I know a great greasy spoon, reckon it serves the best bacon sarnie in London.
Twelve
February 2000
‘Cheesy,’ Alex said, his face almost hidden behind an enormous bunch of red roses. ‘But it’s your first Valentine’s Day, you ought to get to enjoy some of the clichés.’
He was up and dressed while I was still in bed, slowly coming to the surface. I struggled to a sitting position, and he gently placed the roses in my arms. Then he bent down and kissed me. I managed to jump only a tiny bit. It was barely noticeable, I think.
Red roses weren’t a cliché to me. It’s not that it was forbidden to celebrate Valentine’s Day. We just didn’t. My family considered people who did celebrate it, like the Rosens down the road, to be a bit odd. My parents gave each other romantic gifts on Tu B’Av (the Day of Love). I liked it when they did that, it was a rare chance to see my dad being soft. Last year he gave Mum a bunch of cornflowers, wrapped in paper. The flowers were all different colours, not only the usual blue, but pink and white too. Mum saw me looking at them, and gave me some in a jar for my room. I suspect she thought, as I did, that I might never find a man I wanted to marry, might never be given flowers. Neither of us knew that within a few weeks I’d have met both Nathan and Alex.
Mum would be glad to see the enormous bunch of roses today. Well, she wouldn’t be glad, of course. She’d be extremely unhappy. But somewhere deep down, she might be happy that someone loved me enough to buy me flowers.
I laid the roses carefully on the bed next to me and opened Alex’s card. He sat on top of the duvet, smiling expectantly. Luckily I’d got him a card too. It was impossible not to notice that Valentine’s Day was coming; every shop in town was plastered in hearts. I’d looked at the BBC website, which Alex said was a trustworthy source of information. I was becoming rather reliant on it for navigating my way round the Real World. It told me some Valentine’s traditions, such as not signing your name. But when Alex eagerly opened my card, white with a big red shiny heart on the front, his face fell. ‘Oh. You haven’t written anything in it.’
‘It’s from your secret admirer!’ I said, my own big red shiny heart sinking as I realised I’d made another secular misstep. There were as many rules out here as in my old world, but the ones out here weren’t always clear. ‘The BBC said not to sign it!’
‘Yes, but you’re meant to put a message, you just leave off your name,’ he said.
Oh.
Alex’s card to me said, ‘I can’t believe that we found each other, against the odds. These two months have been the happiest of my li
fe. I love you.’
Oh, again.
‘I was kind of looking forward to finding out what you think of me,’ he said.
‘You know what I think of you.’ I went to put my arms round him, but he stood up and put my card on top of the dressing table. Flat, not standing up.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t.’
Of all the lists Alex eagerly compiled in the Re-education book, the one I most dreaded us working through was the food one. I’d always been curious about films, TV, and music, and I was enjoying learning some bits of recent history that had been absent from my school curriculum. As for the internet, bring it on! I was becoming addicted to it. Mind you, Alex was rather dismissive of it. ‘Cats and porn,’ he said. ‘That’s what the internet is best at. Repeat after me: cats and porn.’
‘Cats and porn,’ I said obediently.
Porn was also on one of Alex’s lists – a blushingly rude list I had only glanced at once, called ‘sexy things to try’. I’d have preferred looking at cats, but I resolved to be brave. Try everything once, as Alex said. We looked at a couple of porn sites together – mild ones, apparently, but if that was mild, only Ha-Shem knew what the rest was like. The only thing that stopped me dying from embarrassment was that, most of the time, I had no idea what was going on.
‘I’ve put it in the right order, I think,’ Alex said, as I read through the food list. He didn’t seem to notice that I was hyperventilating. ‘We’ll start gently, take time to get you used to things, before we move on to the big guns.’
Start gently? Every item on the list was a total violation of my upbringing. The list made a mockery of everything I hadn’t eaten for the last twenty-three years. For all that I considered these items to be edible, he might as well have written:
