‘That’s piffle,’ my father says to the police officer. ‘Rilla is a good girl. She would never do such a thing.’ He looks genuinely confused. It’s like my teenage years have left no impression on his memory.
My mother’s chin is trembling though. She’s pulling out a hanky that she has tucked into the sleeve of her sari blouse. My mother has the tendency to burst into tears. In family pictures she can be seen in the background with a hanky covering her eyes. Of course, since every family picture is crammed with the GIF, you would have to really be searching – a Where’s-Wally-scale search – to find her.
Now my father is patting her on her back and making shush-shush noises. It’s my wedding day, I’m getting arrested, and it’s just been revealed to everyone that I am a kleptomaniac. But no, my father is comforting my mother. Everything is upside down.
‘Darling, what’s going on?’ Simon asks. He has tucked a Hot Cocoa rose in the lapel of his new grey suit just for me, and his eyes, his eyes are even now looking lovingly at me. I swallow painfully. I don’t want to hurt him, but I know I’m going to. He places a hand on my shoulder. He is medium height, though this still makes him a good few inches taller than me. His dark hair falls over his forehead just the way I like it. ‘This is just a mistake, isn’t it? We should really get on with it. There’s a crowd of people waiting.’
The thing with Simon is he always thinks the best of me (and he hates to keep people waiting). He’s loyal, doesn’t worry a lot about little things and he rarely has any problems with other people. Which basically makes him the opposite of me.
‘I did something stupid. I’m so sorry.’ Suddenly my shoulders are slumped and there is a crack in my voice. I hate this kind of thing in myself. You think you are dealing with a situation in one way and then your body betrays you and it turns out you are not dealing with it at all. I realize that right about now I could do with a hug, but no one is offering me one.
‘This won’t take long, sir,’ the police officer says to Simon. ‘Now if you just—’
‘We’re about to get married though.’ Simon frowns. ‘You can’t just take her away. What’s your proof anyway?’
‘I am not at liberty to discuss the details, sir.’ The officer smoothens his moustache.
‘Can’t you wait till they’re married?’ My mother’s hands are clasped, beseeching. ‘At least wait till they’re married. Please, you have to!’
My mother – the only one in this room who really knows me, besides my sister Rose – has always said that no one will want to marry me. I’m just too rude, clumsy, stupid, standoffish, unfeminine and ungroomed. At the moment she just wants to make sure that I get married quickly, before Simon finds out what I’m really like. The one thing she is sure would never happen is now actually starting to look like it never will. There is an ominous twitch in her cheek.
One of the aunties, Auntie Dharma, is counting her beads. ‘I told you not to fix a date when Mercury was retrograde. Shani is in the house of marriage.’ She is wearing a salwar-suit, her chunni placidly on her head, and a long thin white plait lying mousily on her back. She is skinny, her face as wrinkled as a prune, and her large eyes goggle from behind thick black spectacles. She calls herself a spiritual healer and works in a local meditation centre. She believes luck in marriage comes from your karma in a past life.
The other auntie, Auntie PK – the journalist who only ever wears khadi cotton, only ever in shades of beige, and doesn’t pluck her eyebrows or wax her upper lip or armpits – is looking cross and saying that someone will pay for this. She means some man somewhere in an air-conditioned office drinking a macchiato before changing for his tennis game. Her short spiky hair is standing up all around her head.
I breathe deeply. I can get through this, I’ve been through worse. And this isn’t the first time I’ve been arrested. But the walls of the white room are closing in on me. There are too many people between me and the door. I look hopelessly at the window. This is when Rose steps in.
Rose. My beautiful sister Rose, in her long silver dress – silver is really her colour, not mine, her beautiful hair blacker than black, her eyes dark as coal, her rosebud mouth, a glow all around her body, walks up to me and gives me a hug. I swallow painfully. A tear escapes but it disappears in Rose’s hair – or she brushes it away for me, knowing I hate people seeing me cry. It is just like Rose, she knew I needed a hug. No one else did. But she did.
She pulls back now and looks into my eyes. ‘It’ll be all right. Okay? Okay?’
I swallow and nod. I try to take deep breaths.
She cups my cheek in her hand. ‘This is not a big deal. You’re bigger than this.’
‘We’ll get a lawyer,’ Simon’s father John Langton cuts in. He is short and broad-boned, his hair cut neatly so that all the strands are exactly the same length. His eyes are a pale grey, so that they seem to look through you, not like Simon and his mother’s dark blue.
‘You are a lawyer,’ Simon reminds him.
‘We’ll get a lawyer,’ his father says.
At the police station, things happen quickly. Since what I have stolen costs less than two hundred pounds, I am told that I will be turned away with a police caution. Though, if I accept these terms, this will still count as a conviction and I will have a criminal record. (It’s true I’ve been arrested before but, since I was underage at the time, I didn’t get a criminal record.) When the officer interrogating me suggests the caution, I say, ‘I will take this under advisement.’ I have been waiting all my life to say these words. I confer with my lawyer, and I take the caution and the criminal record that comes with it. When we come out, my lawyer (organized by my nearly-father-in-law), a middle-aged woman called Gudrun, who is built like a Rottweiler, tells me to get a grip on my life.
‘Grow up. Get therapy. Next time, you’ll get fined or do time. And it’ll get really difficult to get a job. Kosher?’
Various members of my family are standing about outside the police station, waiting to pick me up. Simon is pacing up and down, ignoring everyone. The moment he sees me, he rushes up to me and engulfs me in a hug. He holds me tight and I stand rigid, not feeling like I can touch him right now, though I can feel the thudding of his heart.
He pulls back finally and searches my eyes. ‘Rilla, we can still do this. They didn’t want to give us another slot, but they did in the end. Let’s do it now. Okay?’ He’s still looking at me like I’m the most important person in the world. He has taken his jacket and tie off and he probably has no idea where they are. I love this about him. I love that he doesn’t care where half his clothes are.
‘Simon,’ I whisper, ‘I shoplifted. Don’t you see? That’s not normal.’
‘You’re under a lot of stress. The wedding, and the warning about not completing your MA. It happened. It happens to a lot of people.’ He looks firm. ‘If you just put one foot in front of another, it’ll be over soon. Then we can deal with the rest of it.’
‘Don’t you see?’ my voice cracks. ‘I can’t do this. I’m – not ready.’
‘You want to postpone the wedding? Okay, okay, look, we can do that. We’ll do whatever you want. Whatever you need.’ He is scanning my face, trying to sound re-assuring, though I can see none of this is making sense to him, none of it is really sinking in.
I look at him wordlessly. How can I explain it to him? How can I find words for something that I can’t fully understand myself?
I mutely shake my head. ‘The thing is, Simon,’ I blurt