Altar Ego (3 page)

‘High heels,’ I retorted, ‘were invented by a woman who got sick and tired of being kissed on the forehead.’

Striding towards the window, Kate planted a wet one mid-brow, then frisbeed a paperback of
How to Do Your Own Divorce
at me with such force that I nearly made my appointment with the pavement. ‘Why not save time and money and just marry a divorce lawyer?’

‘It’s just as well I don’t have sensible shoes. If I
did
, it would be time to take my shoelaces away.’

Kate’s eyes flickered on to high beam. ‘Really? Why?’

‘What else can a woman do, who’s running out on her own wedding?’

‘You little beauty! … I did wonder why you’re half out the window. Atta girl.’ She dropped her crumpled bridesmaid’s gown on to the toilet-pedestal splash mat as though it were toxic. ‘Peach is
not
my colour.’

‘But God, Kate.
Julian
.’ I buried my face in my damp palms. ‘I love him so much, but isn’t there some other way I can prove it? If only he’d get sick, so I could give him a kidney … I mean, what a betrayal.’

‘Not being true to
yourself
. That’s the ultimate betrayal; the ultimate infidelity. If you’re apprehensive about getting married then …’

‘I’m not apprehensive about getting married. I just don’t want to be married.’

‘You have a great job, a great boss,’ she winked, ‘… a fully charged vibrator, a car that rear-demists and a washing machine that only floods the kitchen two or three times a month. What the hell do you need a bloody husband for?’

‘Right now I need a drink,’ I said. ‘Just one.’ One magnum, that is. Clambering off the ledge in my clonky white shoes, I broke a varnished nail popping the gigantic cork and swigged as though rescued from the Sahara. ‘What the hell are
you
wearing anyway?’

Kate’s only interest in clothes was that they were flame retardant. Today, her Cumberland sausage thighs were squeezed into ill-fitting trousers made from natural fibres. But before she had time to lecture me on the misogynistic superficiality of the fashion industry, the door wheezed on its hinges once more.

Anouska scurried into the bathroom, kicked the door shut behind her, searched in vain for an ashtray before upending the soap from the dish, closed the
toilet
seat, sat down on it, rummaged in her cavernous bag for a fag, swilled down some champers, crossed one perfectly waxed leg over the other and lasered me with her coloured contacts. ‘Bottom line, you can always get divorced.’

‘Don’t be silly.’ Kate removed her red-flamed specs. ‘Have you got any Band-Aids? … You make it all sound so quick, so easy. A drive-through McMarriage,’ she admonished, rifling through the haemorrhoid and foot-fungal creams in the cabinet. ‘Husbands are disgusting. They shed more nose hair than a moulting Labrador.
Drain-clogging
amounts of nose hair.’ She retrieved a packet of plasters. ‘They dribble piss on the porcelain … Post Urinal Drip Syndrome. Matchsticks covered in earwax; clipping toenails during foreplay …’

‘Oh, right. Like
you’d
know,’ I interjected. ‘You think Mutual Orgasm is an insurance company. Give me a fag, Annie.’

‘But you don’t smoke, doll.’

‘I do now.’

Kate perched on the edge of the bath and waved away Anouska’s cigarette smoke with a windscreen-wiper motion. ‘I’ve just had a dry spell … That’s all …’

‘Um …’ I corrected her, ‘it’s called a decade.’

‘Success puts men off,’ Kate said, truculently. She confiscated Anouska’s cigarette, stubbed it out on the bath enamel and flicked it window-ward.

‘Ugly women who can’t get laid always say that,’ snapped Anouska.

‘Some men find me very attractive, I’ll have you know.’ Kate peeled open a Band-Aid and wrapped it around the bridge of her glasses before pushing them back on to her nose. ‘Not that it bloody well matters of course …’ she said defensively, commandeering the champagne.

‘Yesterday’s spinster is today’s feminist.’ Anouska ostentatiously lit up another Cartier. ‘I do
not
want to have to hastily organize another Girls’ Night Out on Valentine’s Day so that I won’t be tempted to kill myself, okay?’

From across the Crescent came the warble of an organ gasping into life. ‘Oh God,’ my voice see-sawed with emotion. ‘What the hell am I going to do?’

‘Flee!’ Kate demanded. ‘Do a runner.’ She started peeling me out of my wedding dress.

‘Stop that!’ Anouska clawed at Kate’s dirty, dishwater-blonde hair. Kate swatted her away. Anouska sprang back. A Feminist and an It Girl wrenching either arm, I accordioned between them. It was like Strindberg meets Mr Bean. Which is how my mother found us. She took in my chipped varnish, the clumps of my red hair caught on a nail by the window, the skew-whiff lipstick, the low tide in the champagne bottle, one false eyelash dangling like a suicidal caterpillar from a smudged and tear-swollen eye.

‘What the flippin’ hell’s goin’ on?’ Her eyes glinted
like
metal. Her painted talons strained around a tumbler of lager and lime. Brutus snarled menacingly.

‘… Mum.’ I gulped in air, a palpitating fish on the deck of a boat. ‘I’m … I’m having second thoughts …’ I blurted. ‘Not second, really.
142
nd.’

‘
What?
’ She growled, sounding suspiciously like her pampered little canine. ‘Of course ya goin’ frew wiv it, Rebecca.’ Her voice set me on edge, like a knife scraped on a plate. ‘You’ve lived with Julian for five bleedin’ years. Ya love him, don’cha? Love should end in marriage.’

‘Oh believe me,’ muttered Kate, ‘it does.’

‘Marriage, well, it’s a natural progression, ain’t it? And then kids …’

‘God! Just because I’m in my thirties everyone keeps asking me when I’m going to have my first baby. Why? Just because you’re sixty, do I keep asking when you’re going to get your first incontinence pad?’

I bit my lip. Another Doris Day Mother and Daughter moment. It brings tears to the eyes, it really does.

‘I am
not
sixty!’ my mother huffed, vacuuming in her cheeks all the better to pout her collagened lips. ‘This …’ she sniffled into her lace handkerchief, an escapee from a Jane Austen novel, ‘is ya chance for Once In A Lifetime Joy.’

‘Oh for God’s sake, Mum. I’m thirty-two. I’ve found Once In a Lifetime Joy
zillions
of times … But before, I could always leave him if the sex went off.’

‘Ya silly cow! Sex is
not
the most important fing in a marriage!’

‘Maybe not for your generation. I mean, if the sex was bad,
you
wouldn’t know. We’re the first generation of wives who’ve had a lot of sex before marriage. Been there, licked that. We
know
what we’ll miss …’

‘You’ve ’ad a lot of sex before marriage?’ my mother interrogated, tartly.

‘Mum I know that the kind of cloud nine, euphoric feeling of love will pass …’

‘Yeah,’ Kate slipped in acerbically. ‘Maybe even by the first morning of the honeymoon.’

‘How
much
sex before marriage? Who …?’ My mother’s kohl-rimmed eyes narrowed. ‘The fact that yer damaged goods is even more of a bleedin’ reason to marry quickly.’ Brutus, mimicking his mistress, bared his furry fangs in contempt. ‘Exactly how shop-soiled are ya?’

I felt a cold wave of malevolence rise in the pit of my stomach. ‘Remember, when I was fifteen, that thing I told you was an elbow moisturizer? Well, it was my cervical cap.’

‘Elbow moisturiser?’ Kate guffawed. ‘A diaphragm looks more like a Frisbee for your Mum’s Chihuahua.’

‘Or a rubber yarmulka for a tiny Jewish doll,’ Anouska giggled.

Anouska, Kate and I spluttered into helium-filled laughter. We bent double with illicit chuckles and chortles.

‘You people are sick …’ My mother’s eyes were hard as boiled sweets. ‘You lot need psychiatric help. I want you and yer 2,000 quid dress out that door and up that aisle, pronto.’

‘Yoo-hoo.’ The smile on the well-groomed head that bobbed around the bathroom door epoxy-resined in place at the sight of the mayhem within. ‘What’s going on?’ asked Anouska’s half-sibling, Vivian.

‘Cold feet,’ explained Kate wearily, lowering her bulk into the empty tub and lolling, spreadeagled. ‘Nuptial frostbite. Lost all feeling from the knee down – maritally speaking.’

Vivian shook her hennaed head in sad disbelief. Although looking like one of those women who come to your house to demonstrate something, she is actually a highly respected solicitor, Earth Mother of two, charity fund-raiser, skilled dinner-party hostess and housewife superstar (she has damask linen napkins and
launders them herself
after every meal). What can I tell you? The woman sun-dries her own tomatoes. She obviously employs a team of people to sleep, eat and have sex on her behalf. Vivian had her last baby induced so that she could make a meeting. Networked the labour ward, then went back to court twenty-four hours after her episiotomy – making every other Working Mother bite right through her briefcase. Vivian is a good woman – in the worst sense of the word.

‘Talk to her!’ my mother yapped, her bouffant listing perilously.

The whole room strained to hear Vivian’s words of wisdom. ‘Um … did you like the Magimix?’

‘Abou’ the flippin’ marriage!’ said my mother in a voice brittle enough to qualify for osteoporosis pills. ‘You are the Matron of flippin’ Honour, ain’t cha?’

Julian’s idea. Vivian is not my friend. Like his collection of Bartok and Boz Scaggs albums, I’d simply acquired her by cohabitation.

‘You young people are so impatient,’ Vivian condescended. ‘You move on because you can’t keep up the romance,’ said the Woman Who Does Everything More Successfully and Fabulously Than Every Other Woman in the Known Universe. ‘But that first flurry of passion evolves into something so much richer.’

‘This from one half of a couple whose idea of foreplay is to give each other enemas,’ I retaliated.

If we’d been sitting at a table, Anouska would have kicked me under it. ‘Becky!’ Anouska scolded, ‘I told you that in confidence.’

Vivian gasped. ‘You
told
her?’ Suddenly arctic, she flounced to the door. I was tempted to put Vivian into the blender she’d given me as a wedding present and press ‘puree’. ‘I’ll get Simon. He’s trained in dealing with …’ she looked at each of us in turn, ‘… emotional retards.’

The only person who didn’t live in constant fear of Vivian’s enthusiasms was her husband Simon – a high-octane Harley Street marital psychotherapist.
They
have two ‘gifted’ children. (Vivian, who ingested gallons of fish oil during pregnancy to optimize brain development, seems unaware that an Infant Prodigy is nothing more than a rug-rat with unbelievably ambitious parents.) Simon is a Dad Evangelist; they have genitalia consciousness evenings with their toddler, for God’s sake. Another thing Anouska shouldn’t have told me.

My mother seized me by the shoulders and looked into my eyes as though trying to diagnose glaucoma. ‘Now listen here, Rebecca. Ya farver and me,’ she enunciated in a spittle-saturated avalanche, ‘have been ’itched for near on firty-five years …’

‘God,’
sotto-vocce
’d Kate from the bathtub. ‘You don’t even get that for first-degree murder.’

‘Oh shut up, Kate.’ Anouska balled Kate’s gown and over-armed it at her head. ‘That’s admirable, Mrs Steele. You should get some kind of medal.’

‘Or maybe remission,’ Kate’s muffled voice added.

‘Ya can’t back out now …’ My mother’s plea trailed off so plaintively that I faltered and turned to her, actually expecting heartfelt emotion. ‘Ya’ll have to give back all them presents!’

‘Oh, mum …’

‘I’ve done everyfink right for ya Special Day …’

‘
My
special day. This is not my day, Mum. It’s yours … You chose the guests, the cake, the vicar with halitosis …’

My mother appropriated the champagne bottle and
chug
-a-lugged indignantly. ‘What about the caterers? I’ve given them a £2,000 deposit already. The dress, the invites. The sugared almonds! The booze,
magnums
no less, of bloody Frog stuff! The bleedin’ photographers …’ She scoffed another gulp. ‘The cake. It’s a bloody great cake with four tiers’ – she stopped pacing for a moment to address the toilet-roll holder, wistfully – ‘linked by stair-bloody-ways with little figures of blokes in dinner jackets and bridesmaids in white and a fountain! Spoutin’ champers! … Have ya any bleedin’ idea what I’ve spent on you?’ Her voice pitched to incredulity.

‘
I
didn’t want this wedding,
you
did,’ I retaliated. ‘All that talk about shelf-life. All those veiled, cosy little chats about which of my old friends were getting hitched and who’d had a baby … I wanted a registry office, with joss sticks and Mozart where we wrote our own vows about not hindering each other on our personal journeys … But oh no. You had to have the Big White Wedding …’

‘Oh-oh, Vivian Alert,’ Kate warned. ‘Ten o’clock high.’

We turned to see my Matron of Honour practically ripping the bathroom door off its hinges in her desperation to bring her orthodontically enhanced, ruthlessly amiable husband to the rescue. Best man Simon launched into one of his upbeat lectures. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s pissants who can see the bright side of other people’s troubles.

‘Are you in touch with your inner self on this, Rebecca?’

Simon was big on ‘getting in touch with’ your inner anything. The only inner self I ever got in touch with was during tampon insertion.

‘It’s common to get all tied up in knots about tying the knot,’ he clichéd. It struck me for the first time how much Simon, bald, pale and tubby, resembled a giant mozzarella. ‘Whatever your emotional misgivings, you and Julian can work them out.’

Kate groaned. ‘Why is it that people are always using the word “work” next to the word “marriage”?’

Simon loomed over Kate in the bath tub. His tie, patterned in what appeared to be leashed Dobermans, whipped her face. ‘Kate McCready, you’re a commitment phobe. A pathetic individual who’s never got over being rejected by some married man and is jealous of anyone else enjoying a normal relationship.’