‘Seriously?’ Ramona said, always ready with the wrong word.
No, she danced off in clown shoes squirting a custard gun.
‘Seriously.’
‘Why …?’
James mustered every last scrap of nonchalance he didn’t possess.
‘Wasn’t working out. It’s pretty friendly, it’s fine.’
He sensed Ramona’s desperation to ask who-dumped-who, but even her level of crass shrank from it. For now.
‘OK … well, I’ll put you down for one place then?’ Harris said.
James wrestled with the stigma of divorcing loser. Wrestled with it for only seconds.
‘Actually I was going to bring someone else. If that’s OK?’
Ramona’s jaw clunked open again.
‘Someone …? There’s someone new already? Oh. Is that why …’
James felt totally, completely justified in having not told them the truth. This was agony.
‘It didn’t help,’ he said, in a brusque, heartbreaker manner.
James turned back to his screen and congratulated himself on a job done, if not a job well done. He’d take plenty of time getting his lunchtime sandwich so that the analysis would be done by the time he returned.
So all he needed now for the birthday party was a one-night-hire-only girlfriend. Sounded like the kind of thing Laurence could help with.
‘Welcome to Sleeping Beauty. I am Sue and I can make your fairytale dreams come true!’ the boutique owner chirruped, which Anna thought was a fairly mental claim. Wasn’t Sleeping Beauty in a persistent vegetative state for a century?
Sue looked like a backbench MP in a skirt suit and pearls and Anna guessed her sales techniques would be brisk, despite all the wispy pouffiness around them.
Aggy and their mother’s eyes shone at her words, and Anna knew she was a lone cynic in the realm of true believers. It was an enchanted grotto for those who wanted to walk down the aisle looking like a Best Actress Oscar nominee.
The salon
The air was heavy with a sweet freesia scent, like some kind of sedative love gas. Michael Bublé crooned from hidden speakers, no doubt using subliminal hypnosis techniques.
Promise me your heart, give me your hand … and the long number on the front … now the expiry date, yeah baby.
There were racks of giant gowns, stiff and sticky-outy with net and bustles and laced corsets and an ‘aristocrat before the French Revolution’ attitude to making a bit of a show of yourself.
Sleeping Beauty could have been called Go Big Or Go Home. It was one big Pavlovian memory-trigger to Disney fantasies, in a world where the magic wand tap was the swipe of the Visa card.
Brides-to-be disappeared into a changing room through a crystal beaded curtain, to reappear transformed. Anna tried to imagine uttering the words ‘something simple’ in here, and failed.
‘You must be my bride,’ Sue said to Aggy. ‘I can tell you’re going to suit everything. Some fresh-faced young women simply make natural brides. And a sample size ten; the world’s your oyster when it comes to choosing a style.’
Anna itched to say: ‘What happens to the old broiler chickens then? Do you not flog them stuff?’
Aggy near-gurgled at the flattery. Physically, Aggy was a more angular, shorter version of her sister, but what she lacked in height and width she made up for in noise.
Aggy worked in PR, specialising in event management, and she was superbly suited to the job. She’d been organising things to her liking since she was very small, and her wheedle power was second to none. You wouldn’t mistake Aggy for an academic: today she was in a puffa coat, high-heeled boots and carrying a Mulberry Alexa. She lived life in caps lock. GETTING MARRIED LOL!
There were two years between the sisters, and in some ways, a chasm of difference.
‘This must be the beautiful mother of the beautiful bride,’ Sue said, speaking to their mum as if she was serving her a soft-boiled egg in an assisted living facility. ‘And this is the gorgeous sister and chief bridesmaid.’
‘Judy’ and ‘Anna’, they said in turn, as Sue clasped their hands and gazed at them with expression set to ‘purest bliss’.
Aggy had booked an hour-long private appointment, and whilst Anna hated a stalking sales presence, Aggy revelled in the attention.
Anna shrugged her grey duffle coat off. Her family characterised her as a tomboy in contrast to her sister’s girly-girliness, but she felt it was a simplification. She liked some girly things. Romance – in art if not in life, so far – and dresses and shoes and fizzy wine.
She just didn’t like the full range of girly things that Aggy did. Such as nights spent on the sofa with Vogue, toe separators, Essie polish, spoon wedged in Ben & Jerry’s Peanut Butter Me Up, white iPhone welded to her ear on the gossip grapevine. Instead of Cinderella’s pumpkin coach, Aggy travelled in a Fiat 500 with rubber eyelashes on the headlamps and a bumper sticker revealing the worrying news for Saudi oil barons that it was Powered by Fairy Dust.
Anna was glad she liked Aggy’s intended. Aggy was capable of marrying lots of men Anna wouldn’t like, but luckily it was the affable, laddish Chris, a painter-decorator from Hornsey. He sincerely loved her sister and also knew when to say, ‘That’s henshit, Ags.’
They were tying the knot in the splendour of the Langham Hilton ballroom this Christmas.
Since the family dinner where Aggy arrived wearing a diamond solitaire the size of a glass brick and her sister and her mum did lots of squealing, Anna had felt the tiniest bit nervous.
The one thing Aggy couldn’t successfully manage was her own expectations. Anna was pretty sure the way the wedding was being organised was thus: Aggy choosing exactly what she fancied (which was usually at the top price point), and finding a way to pay for it afterwards.
Chris looked increasingly hangdog each time Anna saw him. Chris would’ve been happy with an Iceland party platters buffet at the Fox & Grapes, driving them to the venue in his company van, furry trapper’s hat sat on head, ear flaps flapping, singing along very loudly to Smooth Radio.
At this rate, Anna feared her sister might end up adjusting her priorities too late to save causing damage to sanity, relationship and credit rating.
‘Bubbles before we start!’ Sue said, pointing to a silver tray with three flutes and a bottle on the marble-topped coffee table, next to a pile of glossy bridal magazines and a bowl of water with floating lotus flower candles.
Aggy was only a mouthful through hers when Sue cried, ‘Let’s get you into the first dress!’
Aggy and Sue disappeared through the beaded curtain and Anna and her mother exchanged smiles and tapped their feet.
‘Do you think Aggy’s in for the long haul here?’ Anna said eventually, scanning the scores of lampshade skirts.
‘Of course she is, Aureliana! It’s till death do you part.’
‘No, I