Altar Ego (4 page)

‘Normal? Like you, you mean?’ Kate yanked on his tie, strangulating him. ‘Mr
“Toddler Genital Awareness Workshops”
!’

Simon, stunned into uncharacteristic silence, wheeled around to glower at his wife.

‘Anouska!’ Vivian, shoving her anger-gorged visage into her half-sister’s face, lost no time in getting in touch with her Inner Bitch. ‘You little cow!’

‘You’re right. If only I’d married a Marquis. But oh, no. I just had to hold out for the Duke.’ Anouska mopped up the mascara rivulets on her cheeks. ‘The
Marquis
Who Got Away … story of my life. And now look at me. My only friends are my looks …’

‘Yes,’ retaliated Vivian. ‘And they’re leaving.’

Anouska dissolved into a torrential downpour of tears.

Word of my volte-face seemed to have reached the congregation. I could see them across the road, craning in our direction. Delegates were being gingerly dispatched to the flat to dip an investigative toe in the familial waters. The organist, having worn holes in the keys playing hymns, lurched wittily into ‘Why Are We Waiting?’ … Oh, that was just what we needed – an organist with a sense of humour.

‘The expense!’ my mother kept incanting, positioning her formidable cleavage in Simon’s face. Honestly, my mother would flirt five minutes before the Apocalypse.

A knock heralded the arrival of my father. ‘It’s time, um, to um, give you away,’ he yelped, strengthening his resemblance to a startled Pekinese.

Kate snorted in derision. ‘
Give you away
. You see? Marriage is nothing but an institution invented to protect the property rights of patriachs over land and cattle and …’

My mother, leaning over Kate, turned on both taps. As Kate clambered, swearing like a trooper, on to dry land, the Humorous Organist switched to what sounded suspiciously like a Liberace medley. The
crowd
were oozing out of the church. The doorbell buzzed maniacally.

‘Becky, what are you going to do?’ Anouska pleaded.

My eyes jumped around the room. Another Happy Couple were due to be married in half an hour. Brides were probably backing up around the block. ‘I don’t know!’ Sweat was squeegee-ing out of me, my beaded tiara was askew.

‘Well, ya better hurry up and bloody decide.’ My mother’s lips secateured the sentence with brutal efficiency, sending shredded words flying. ‘The salmon starters will have swum upstream by now.’

Kate ferociously towelled her hair. ‘What the hell do you intend saying when the vicar asks if you’ll take this man to be your lawful wedded husband? … “
Um … Gee … Can I sleep on that
?” Just say “
No!
” And say it now!’

Anouska embraced me. ‘Think of it, doll. The hush of the guests as you enter. The beating of your heart. The caress of the veil. The swish of silk around your legs …’

All eyes were focused expectantly on me now.

‘Look …’ I began. How could one person produce so much sweat in April? I splashed cold water on the back of my neck. ‘In some ways I agree with Kate …’

‘Hallelujah!’ Kate gloated.

‘What? You can’t be serious.’ Anouska shrieked. ‘Don’t trust her. The woman’s not natural. I’ve been to her house.
She doesn’t have bathroom scales!
’

‘… and in some ways I agree with Annie. Sex with the Right Man,’ I continued, ‘is a beautiful and moving and lovely thing …’

‘Absolutely.’ Vivian beamed at Simon and squeezed his hand, appeasingly.

‘… and sex with a stranger on a train in the dead of night is even better.’

‘Exactly,’ whooped Kate. Her victory jump brought her down hard on Brutus’s tail who rocketed, yelping, from the room.

‘For God’s sake, stop crying on your veil,’ hissed my mother. ‘Use toilet roll!’

‘You’ve done that?’ an astonished Anouska asked me.

‘What …?’ The alcohol was kicking in. ‘Had sex with the right man?’

‘… No, with a stranger on a train? Why didn’t you ever tell me? … I tell
you
everything …’

‘Obviously,’ snapped Vivian, sulkily.

‘Rebecca!’ shrilled the Cleavage with whom I reluctantly share a genetic inheritance. ‘Ya just throw-in’ away the Happiest Day Of Ya Bleedin’ Life!’

Hmmm. I thought about what she’d said. Watching all my friends get drunk on cheap champagne then making contrived, innuendo-laden speeches about wedding tackle while my relatives danced badly to cover versions of The Clash, simultaneously wolfing down food which could either be prawn cocktails or tent tarpaulin as ex-boyfriends threw up on their
shoes
– was this really love’s greatest possible manifestation?

‘If ya won’t fink of me,’ my mother added tragically, ‘fink of Julian! … What’s he supposed to do? Marry one of the bridesmaids?’

My heart flopped like a pole vaulter into a mattress. Although wearing the thick butterscotch emulsion of foundation, my face in the mirror was wedding-dress white. I couldn’t run out on him. That would take, not exactly balls, but iron ovaries. I looked around the room, at the chaos I’d caused. I couldn’t back out. What had I been thinking of? Imagine it – my darling Julian’s heartbreak and humiliation; the ‘How could you possibly do this to my son?’ recriminations from the Blake-Bovington-Smythes; the cost, already running into thousands of pounds, the disinheritance dramas …

Besides, hadn’t I sewn enough wild oats to feed a large continent? It was time to make a clean sweep of a dirty mind. And marriage does have its good points, I rationalized, confronting my reflection once more. What a relief not to have to get naked in front of a stranger ever, ever again. Not to have to bikini wax every five seconds. Or lie on my side to make my breasts look bigger. A husband is the person who knows all about you and still likes you anyway. Of course I should marry. I’d done everything else. Except bondage. And I didn’t particularly want to do that. Marriage is an immunization against
loneliness
… Isn’t it? Okay, living alone meant I could sleep diagonally, but who would I beat at Monopoly? Did I really want to become one of those females who pretends to be fulfilled by the new medieval-history lecture series they’ve signed up for? I’d turn into one of those women who got bath salts every birthday and Christmas. A Gobi Desert of bath salts. Forever doomed to tick the box marked ‘Single’. Spending my child-bearing years in a board meeting then trying to conceive with a turkey baster at the age of forty-five? Forever doomed to wear full make-up and high-rise heels to the supermarket
just in case I met somebody
. No. No. It was enough to make your nipples go numb.

The very thought of having a husband was starting to relax me – like looking at tropical fish. Besides, Engagement, Marriage, The First Baby – weren’t these the traditional greetings-card milestones of life? Well, weren’t they? Especially with Julian. My darling had a very high MIQ – Marriage Intelligence Quota – unique in pre-millennium man. I had found my Duke of Right, a man who shopped and mopped. A man who’d located my G and
his
E spot. Yep. Julian had a well-read penis and he was emotionally articulate. How rare was that in a red-blooded bloke? Then
what the hell was stopping me
? I looked at the sapphire cluster ring glistening on my engagement finger. Of
course
I was going to get married.

‘Shit,’ I said, looking down. ‘My face is on my frock.’
I
daubed at the foundation stains on my wedding dress.

‘We can fix that, love.’ My mother brightened. In a paroxysm of good cheer, she started fussing and clucking.

‘God,’ I acquiesced. ‘My hair!’

Anouska descended with mousse and root lift. Vivian pared down my torn nails and reapplied Estée Lauder lacquer while Mozzarella Man jettisoned Kate out of the bathroom. My mother attached the stain-edged veil and blotted at her blue-eyeshadowed orbs.

Restored to my former pristine condition, with something old (bra), something new (a polo mint to disguise alcoholic consumption), something borrowed (Anouska’s Janet Reger G-string), something blue (a joke about wedding tackle I’d saved up for the reception), I waited until friends and family had vacated the bathroom, took a deep breath, then launched myself out of the window, like an acrobat through a flaming hoop; tumbling through space like Alice, only missing giving my mother’s hideous Chihuahua a cardiac arrest by a measly half centimetre.

3
The Undress Rehearsal

JULIAN ROUNDED THE
corner of Coventry Crescent in his black morning suit, looking like a band leader who’d lost his orchestra.

‘Becky?’

I stared up at him in mortified silence from my prone position amidst the dustbins.

‘Rebecca?’

I gawped at him some more, my mouth opening and closing soundlessly, like a fish.

‘Something’s wrong,’ he joked. ‘I can tell by the tone of your voice …’ Wearing an expression of mild, donnish surprise, he leant down and detached me from the pavement, scraping old tea bags and vegetable shavings from my posh white frock.

‘Well, that’s it. We can’t get married now,’ I said, two octaves higher than usual. ‘It’s bad luck to see the
bride
before the wedding. Besides …’ a throb of a sob was lurking behind my tonsils, ‘half of all marriages today end in divorce, did you know that?’

‘Yes. And more ought to.’ He held his six-foot-two frame erect, as though posing for an invisible camera.

‘God, if only I could divorce my parents … Parents really should be seen and not heard, don’t you think?’

‘Is that what all this is about?’ He brushed the gravel and grit from my palms. ‘Is that it?’ His verbal approach was not unlike a bomb defuser’s advance on an anti-personnel landmine.

‘We can’t get married, Julian. Your parents hate me.’

‘Who cares?’ His fingers pressed into my shoulders – pale, tapered, pen-wielding fingers. ‘We love each other.’

‘So did Romeo and Juliet … And look what happened to
them
…’ The low brutish clouds bulged with rain. I was freezing cold. But cold in a way that had nothing to do with the weather. Julian took in a big swig of damp, chill air. I leapt in before he could speak. ‘Everything’s turned out to be so
ordinary
, Jules. Why couldn’t we have had an underwater wedding, wearing aqualungs. Or parachuting nude. Or … Marriage is a state of mind, anyway. And in my mind, we’re already married. So why bother with a stupid ceremony?’

‘It’s not a state of mind,’ Julian said patiently. ‘The wedding kiss signifies the union of souls, exchanging the breath of life …’

‘No, no Julian.’ I backed away from him and straight into a tepid pile of dog shit. I’d forgotten how much there is in Islington. Most of it Brutus’s – a case of old familiar faeces. ‘You’re a
man
! You’re supposed to be vile and cowardly and refuse to commit.’

I plunged into the alley, a long, undressed wound behind the Crescent, overlooked by beady-eyed windows. Julian followed, his new leather shoes exhaling sadly with each step.

Catching up, he turned my face to his and gave me one of those looks that men have polished over the centuries. That ‘Oh God. Is This Really The Only Other Sex Available To Me In The Universe?’ look. He sighed deeply. ‘On the whole, if you’re going to get cold feet about marriage, it’s best to put the wedding on ice a day or two
before
the guests Concorde in from the four corners of the globe. Or, at the very worst, the morning of, before relatives have had their hair done and heart operations postponed.’

The wind mourned through the solitary tree marooned in the cracked asphalt. ‘I … I … just can’t go through with it.’

Julian’s fists clenched into two tight balls. ‘Don’t you love me any more?’ His breath steamed.

‘Of course I do.’ And I did. And had done from the moment we’d first met five years ago when Kate, who was then Events Director at the ICA, had booked him to give a lecture on torture in Turkey. Julian is a human rights lawyer. He airs the world’s dirty linen for a
living
. His job is to ferret out illegal arms dealers and major fraudsters and, more often than not, remove them from the House of Commons. Julian is my Rebel
With
A Cause My Knight in Shining Armani. He’s front-page news making. He saves lives, rights wrongs, frees the world’s underdogs from their kennels. How could you
not
fall in love with a man like that? And he loved me because I was an antidote to the grimy sombre side to his life. He loved me because I made him laugh. Because I had 157 synonyms for sex. And a penchant for dancing naked in his father’s full-bottom judge’s wig. I was his Eliza Doolittle in a leopard-skin miniskirt.

‘Then
why
?’ Julian looked at me, eyes wide with dismay.

‘I’m sorry,’ I pleaded with a thin, tin-opener voice I didn’t recognize. What the hell was wrong with me? Nothing an exorcism couldn’t fix. It was as though my brain disc had been wiped, and the cerebral software of, I don’t know, Sarah Ferguson installed in its place.

‘Look, I’m used to your contradictory, impulsive nature, Becky. In fact, I love you for it. But you suddenly appear to be sporting a personality borrowed straight from Scarlet-bloody-O’Hara. Why in God’s name are you doing this?’

How could I tell him that I loved him too much to marry him? Because I’d make a totally lousy wife. Which meant that it was best for me to marry someone
I
didn’t like much so I didn’t feel too shitty about ruining his life.

Clocking Julian’s devastated face, I tried to dredge up feelings of remorse, truly I did. If only I could get in touch with my Inner Adult. But the further I got away from that bloody church, what was blubbing to the surface was euphoria, liberation, relief. I couldn’t get over the notion that a wedding is just like a funeral – except you can smell your own flowers. I had PMT – Pre-Monogamy Tension. And I had it bad. But how to broach the truth, in all its wounding complexity?

‘Well, it’s all to do with being a Fellatio Refusnik …’ Julian’s eyebrows collided on his forehead. I’d just have to let actions speak louder than words. Clinging to his arm like melted marshmallow, I steered him through the corroded gate into the little weed-choked wood that runs by the canal.