Altar Ego (2 page)

‘These days if your skin’s cleared up, you’re too old to marry, doll. Men are walking down the aisle with a foetus in a veil.’ A great sob rose in Anouska’s pale, pearl-entwined throat. ‘I’m approaching the age of being dumped for a younger wife and, and I’m … I’m not even married yet!’

Her blubbering increased in intensity, just as the dancers reached a delicate moment of soulful groin gyration. As Kate propped her up and I mopped her up, rubber-necking revellers were shooting our table death rays.

‘Hey!’ I said, cheerily – it was time to get this Girls’ Night Out back on hedonistic track. ‘What’s the difference between men and pigs? … Pigs don’t get drunk and act like men!’

Kate rolled her eyes. ‘It’s pointless telling chauvinist jokes,’ she counterblasted, ‘when you still marry them.’

As the strippers pelvic-thrust themselves into a lather, one bronzed hunk slipped and fell. The atmosphere, so frenzied and incendiary, became suddenly maternal. As women rushed forward to cradle and coddle, my thoughts turned to my wedding day … I
was
a woman who’d been on the go, but going nowhere. A ‘new direction’ for me had always ended up horizontal. I’d left a tub ring of men high and dry and been thrown out with the bath water by just as many. But I wanted to be a fish
in
water for a change. Julian, with his buttery blond hair, caramel-toffee eyebrows, burning-blue gas-flame eyes, and that succulent mouth from which rolled a judicious voice – Jules Verne deep, vowels as plump and round as plums – was my chance for a centred, sane life … and by hell was I going to take it. I’d never been so sure of anything in my life.

2
I Don’t

GETTING
MARRIED
? WAS
I
insane
?

The next morning I’d woken, in the bed I’d slept in as a child, to a different feeling altogether. There were so many reasons
not
to. Was marriage really romance’s prophylactic? I never, ever wanted to become a Fellatio Refusnik; to make love to a man out of duty. Okay, sex was good now, but what if our orgasm warranty expired? What then, hmmm?

I’d made it through breakfast okay, even with my dysfunctional parents, but by the time I was in the shower, I was suppurating with anxiety. All my life I’d found it hard to avoid temptation. Soon it would be impossible to
find
any.

Negotiating my knee topography with a disposable razor, I thought how ‘cruising’ used to mean a late-night trawl through the Café de Paris for a Stud Puppy
… Soon
it would mean hunting for a parking spot outside Peter Jones. All my married friends, that’s where I saw them now, cruising round Sloane Square in their orthopaedic People-Movers, an urgent look in their eyes – a lust for linen and light fittings. Ugh. No, I did
not
want to become one of them. Never. Ever.

The blood loss, as I hacked mechanically at my leg hair, was now rivalling the shower scene from
Psycho
. Would I never again get the urge to lambada naked in front of my pets? Never again perform a strip karaoke? Never again seduce the tumble-dryer man with the washboard tum and torn jeans bum? Never again be a painter of towns? Never steal a friend’s fiancé? … Never again give him back again?

No. Now my life would be consumed by much more Important Issues. Locating lost dry-cleaning tickets. Taking dogs I loathed for dental descaling. Perusing Sainsbury’s Homebase stores on Sunday mornings in search of paint-stripper and Polyfilla, before brunching with people I hated merely because our children had a mutual fixation on
Bananas in Pyjamas
memorabilia.

By the time the eyelash-curler was clamped in place, I could clearly see my future (thought admittedly not much else):
obsessing about whether my washing machine has a double-duty agitator, as I run my fingers through what would be left of Julian’s hair and wonder how I ended up living with a man who could wear a tartan flannel dressing-gown, without irony
.

Sweet Jesus. By now I was towelling sweat. After my lip de-fuzzing, hair-gassing with Maximum Hold and Sepia Remembrance eyeshadow application, I perched on the closed lid of the toilet in my tatty silk robe and tried not to have a cardiac arrest. I took deep, even breaths. In … Out … In … Out …

Yes. I felt much calmer now … I then flossed my face and powdered my teeth and ran a bath through my hair.

On the tenth attempt I threaded my legs into white silk stockings. But as the blue satin garter snapped on to my thigh, a horrible realization besieged me. I’d never told my single years how much I loved them.

Tutoring my breasts into uplift with merciless underwire, it hit me that I really was too young to get married. I had a pimple. I still got crushes on pop stars. Hell. I still wanted to be a catwalk model … The fact that I was five foot three, thirty-two-years old and would rather drink battery acid than be seen in a bikini had done nothing to dampen the dream.

But Jesus Christ – I slammed my palm against a sodden forehead.
Was
I really young? When my parents were my age, they were old. My parents. Ugh. Now
there
was a happy marriage: husband and wife, grinding together like teeth; my father wearing that slightly baffled, I want-my-money-back expression he’d worn all his married life. Perhaps like him, I’d develop marital Alzheimer’s and just forget how miserable I was? Holy Hell. It was
then
I’d clambered
on
to the bile-green tiles of my parents’ bathroom ledge, left leg flapping out the window as though trying to pick up a short-wave radio signal.

But the frequency being transmitted was all too familiar.

‘Rebecca?’ it was my mother. ‘Reb-ECC-A?’ her knuckles rapped resolutely on the bathroom door – an irritated maternal Morse code you didn’t need an Enigma machine to decipher.

My armpits spurted into each embroidered socket – proof that I’d completely bypassed the apprehension stage and gone directly to panic. The streak of hair-sprayed misery I dimly recognized in the mirror as myself (Mum had insisted on putting up my chilli-pepper red hair, so I looked as if I had a brioche baked on to my head) pitched backwards off the sill, caromed off the towel rack and whimpered pathetically. ‘Ye-es?’

She jiggled the handle. ‘What in God’s name are ya doin’ in there?’ The key plopped on to the mat and I knew her eye was at the hole. ‘Re-grouting?’

Since my mother had storm-trooped her way back into my life, dragooning me into all the baroque grotesqueries of a white wedding, I’d reverted to little girl-dom. On progeny autopilot, I immediately reinstated the key and unlocked the door.

Parents can be a disappointment to their children. It’s such a shame when they don’t fulfil the promise of their early years. My mother was wearing a micro-mini
two
sizes too small and dressed for cleavage. She’d always done this, upstaged me. She liked nothing better than to spend the evening as the centre ornament of an arrangement of my boyfriends, most of whom were a head shorter than her and happy to be so. My father, on the other hand, drew underwear on the natives in the National Geographic magazines. He has no neck, as though constantly cold and has never kissed me in his life.

‘Well, kiss the b …’ she nearly said ‘beautiful’, but giving me the once-over modified it simply to ‘bride’. She unceremoniously shoved my father over the pastel threshold. He tried to kiss me but got the muscle groups confused and merely collided, teeth bared, with my ear lobe.

By way of a little joke, my mother had dressed him in a long-sleeved T-shirt stencilled with a dinner jacket. That was her technique – endless little digs until both were buried alive in a marital grave. He’d retreated into plane spotting, eyes constantly skyward – ‘Oh, it’s the BA 52. Right on time,’ and reporting neighbours to the ‘Beat a Cheat hotline.’ When my father first met Julian, he treated him to a home movie of the damp-proofing of the tool shed. Grounds for divorce before we even got married, really.

‘Now get a move on, girl.’ She tapped a snakeskin stiletto, which her pet Chihuahua named Brutus, licked morishly. ‘All ya relations are waitin’ to take a look at ya.’

Oh great.
There
was an incentive. Uncle Fester meets the Clampetts.

As my mother finger-licked my hair back into place, reshaped my torn nail and verbally catalogued who’d spent
what
on
which
presents, yet more nightmares engulfed me. My parents were hideous enough. But what about
his
? The Blake-Bovington-Smythes? What the hell did I know about
them
?
Really
know – besides the fact that the upper class have the same number of chins as surnames. What if Julian was a carrier for genetic diseases like Huntington’s? My God. That was something I’d never asked him. And who were all those mysterious business contacts he was always going to meet? … Maybe he had debts? Maybe he had ex-wives? Ex-names, even? Hell, maybe he had an ex-
husband
? Which might mean Aids. Maybe he was an Aids-carrying bankrupt of bad character? With one hour till the wedding ceremony, was it too late for surveillance? Was there still time for him to be followed, photographed and ultimately befriended by a private investigator? How on earth could I have contemplated marriage without a pre-wed? By now I was hyperventilating. My foundation had started to slide off my face. I readjusted my breasts in their cups, as though wearing red-hot underwear.

‘All right, love?’ (I didn’t take it affectionately. That’s what my mother calls everyone.) ‘That underwire’s far too tight … There.’ She re-hooked my Wonderbra on to a less asthma-inducing notch,
re-zipped
my frock and tucked her little canine accessory under her arm. ‘Feel better?’

Yes. Like an astronaut on a space walk who can’t get back into the shuttle.

‘Yeh. Great. Fine. Fab.’ A fake grin rictused to my face.

‘Now get ya skates on, Rebecca. I’m gunna go do an infantry of the guests.’ My mother was always getting words wrong. The premature baby was in the ‘incinerator’. My cousin had a low sperm count meaning his wife had to have an ‘FBI’ baby. And her own sex life was ruined because my father was ‘imminent’.

As she went sighing into the kitchen, on some further stage of mother-of-the-bride martyrdom and I unsutured my smile, a fresh attack of the ‘Will It Work?’, ‘Is He
The
One?’, ‘Will He Now Expect Me To Iron His Shirts?’ ambushed me. But come on, I castigated my reflection as I wiped the brush back and forth across the blusher compact. We’d lived together, bought a microwave and shared a genital infection. Marriage was surely the next logical step?

But Jesus. I rouged more ferociously. Should love be logical? My mother said that marriage was a natural progression – yes – but
forty to fifty years’ progression
? From honeymoon to tomb? Forty to fifty years of looking at the cheezels and chips stuck in his fillings every time he laughed … Shit. By now I either had too much rouge or not enough cheek. With palsied palms I rubbed off the blusher I’d just applied.

Why tinker with a relationship that’s working? Why didn’t we just stay in unwedded bliss? … Stop this marriage! I want to get off! … and I was back on another Window Ledge Odyssey.

Riding the weathered sill side-saddle, asphyxiated by the cappuccino froth of my frock’s lace and tulle, I cased the Crescent for witnesses to my escape. The part of North London where I grew up is architecturally book-ended by the Hospital for Infectious Tropical Diseases and Pentonville Prison. Tall, elegant Georgian houses fraternize (well, slum it really) with the sort of squat, grey-brick bungalows in which my mum and dad live. Meek and defeated, their council flat at 2, Coventry Crescent is the home I’d fled at sixteen, and to which I’d returned in this ludicrous act of wedding-day rapprochement with my parents. It was Julian who kept telling me that blood was thicker than water. But hey, so was egg-nog.

Pulling myself up by the sash cords, I was just jockeying into position to test Newton’s Law, when a kerthump of car chassis on kerb heralded Anouska’s arrival. Her Mercedes sports car had lurched into the Crescent at breakneck velocity. Anouska believed that the speed limit should be quadrupled in visually challenged places. Kosovo, Slovakia, Croydon and everywhere north of Bond Street were tackled at the speed of light.

‘I nearly
died
, doll. I thought I’d missed it,’ she trilled, alighting in a swirl of silken Voyage – the
upmarket
Bag Lady look currently championed by London’s Celebritocracy. The only skill Anouska had learnt at her Swiss Finishing School was sports-car-alighting with minimum knicker-flashing whilst balancing a copy of
Who’s Who
on her highlighted head.

‘No. But
I
might.’

I’d met Anouska through her half-sister Vivian, one of Julian’s law firm partners, and had liked her immediately. She was considerate (the woman faked orgasms ’cause she didn’t want to be impolite), deliciously quixotic and endearingly erratic … but not about to be headhunted by a Space Research Centre. Which is possibly why she hadn’t noticed that I was half out of a window, my wedding dress tucked up around my waist, stockings laddered, tears Niagara-ing.

‘I CAN’T GO THROUGH WITH IT.’

She blinked her false eyelashes. Anouska’s Mac lashes are so long that when driving, she gets mascara streaks on her windscreen. ‘WHAT?’ She re-knotted her Hermés scarf with such agitation that she nearly garrotted herself. ‘But, doll, marriage is so fashionable now. Think of Uma Thurman, Sharon Stone, Brad Pitt and Jennifer what’s-her-name.’ She retrieved her brocaded bridesmaid’s dress from the passenger seat. ‘Don’t move, doll. I’ll be right up.’

But the voice at the door moments later was Antipodean, rough, tough, good in a crisis. Kate
looked
up at me with horror as she barged into the bathroom. ‘Why are you wearing those rid
ic
ulous shoes …?’ She nudged the door shut with her bum and plonked a magnum of Moët on the fluffy pastel bath mat. ‘You’ll get nosebleeds up there. You’ll need to chew sugar to keep your energy levels up.’

Yes! Maybe
that
was it? Maybe I wasn’t suffering from existential angst at all, but altitude sickness! From vertiginous heels. That was why I felt so light-headed?