A Summer Fling (52 page)

The groom was easy to spot with his one eyebrow. He had a smart penguin suit on with a peach cravat. He looked designer-untidy and good-looking but not at all like any of them had imagined as a match for Dawn.

‘That’s never him, is it? Calum?’ asked Anna, eyebrows raised to the max.

‘I think it must be,’ whispered Grace.

‘I want to hijack Dawn at the door and run off with her,’ said Anna. Sweet, daft, pretty, ethereal Dawn didn’t belong with this lot. Surely?

‘We may all be wrong, of course, and she’ll be blissfully happy with him,’ said Grace.

‘Yeah, and the moon is made of Red Leicester,’ said Anna.

The church settled. Five minutes ran over the allotted time, then a tinny ‘Here Comes the Bride’ made everyone’s nerves ping, but it was only the best man’s mobile phone going off.

He stood up and turned to everyone, throwing his stick-thin arms wide. ‘Sorry folks,’ he said, and turned the phone off. ‘Killer, you pillock,’ shouted someone from the middle, causing a low rumble of laughter.

Raychel wasn’t sure if she should have been praying for Dawn to come to her senses and run off with that Canadian guitarist, but she did anyway in the silence.

Then the organ music started full pelt and with hearts full of all sorts of mixed emotions, the four friends stood and turned to see a veiled Dawn, a beautiful, tall Dawn in an exquisite gown and carrying a teardrop bouquet of peach flowers, walk slowly down the aisle. Tears bombarded their eyes. They tried not to look at the two bridesmaids in satsuma orange behind her, one with her cleavage pushed so up and out that it almost got to the altar before the bride.

They saw Dawn smile at them through the veil. It was the smile of a woman saying, ‘Thanks for coming,’ not a smile that said: ‘This is the happiest day of my life.’

As she got to the altar, Dawn smiled back at Calum but inside she was screaming. She wished she had been brave enough to blurt out the truth to her friends last night when she had started crying into her jasmine rice. Why didn’t she beg for them to help her while she had the chance? There was nothing for it now but to go ahead and get married because if she hadn’t been brave enough or big enough to halt proceedings before, she wasn’t going to be able to do it at this stage. If only someone else would do it for her.
Pleeease!

‘If anyone here prethent knowth why thethe two thould not be joined in holy matrimony, thpeak now or forever hold your peath,’ lisped the vicar.

There were a few humorous coughs from the groom’s side. The vicar scowled as Calum turned around to them and flicked the Vs, before remembering where he was and apologizing.

Had Dawn’s four friends looked down, they would have seen that all of them had their fingers crossed. Each one was wishing or praying or calling to cosmic forces that if this wedding was going to be happy, let it go ahead. And if not,
please God,
let something stop it in its tracks.

In that prolonged silence, Dawn waited for Al Holly to throw open the door, stride down the aisle, pick her up and run out. But he didn’t. The vicar began to speak again. Calum and Dawn knelt at the altar. Someone had written ‘SH’ on Calum’s left sole and ‘IT!’ on his right which set a lot of shoulders shaking. But Dawn wasn’t laughing. She had switched onto automatic pilot, reciting vows that no longer meant anything to her, and was way past the point of caring that she would be damned for it. Her dress wasn’t magical after all. How could she have believed that tripe Freya had spouted?

The bride and groom exchanged the rings they had picked from the Argos catalogue and the church erupted as Calum and Dawn were declared man and wife. Her four friends exchanged dry glances. That was that then. Dawn was married. For better or worse. It was done. As the bride and groom went to sign the register with the tangerine twosome trotting behind, the music began for the hymn, ‘
Guide Me, Oh Thou Great Redeemer
.’

Grace’s lovely voice cut through the out-of-tune cacophony as clear as a nightingale’s. It was her favourite hymn. Privately Christian, Grace prayed every night and never doubted that He had pulled her through her darkest hours. She only hoped He would do the same for young Dawn. Anna’s throat was full of tears and she had to mime her singing. It didn’t help that Dawn emerged emulsion-white from the vestry door as the hymn ended on a dodgy descant from some cocky Crookes. She couldn’t have been wearing a more fake smile if she’d tried.

The Crookes piled out of the church for the photographs, a huge percentage of them lighting up fags as soon as they got into the grounds. Anna saw the massive mamma in baby pink nudge the bride hard and tell her to, ‘Cheer up, it’s your bleeding wedding day!’ No one suggested a picture of Dawn and her friends. It seemed the bridesmaids were directing the formations.

Christie drove in convoy with the others to the reception. The pub car park was full and she had to pull in on the road, but at least it would be easier to get out.

‘I think there must be more people here than there were at Princess Di’s wedding!’ Grace commented.

‘I think there must be more people here than there were at Princess Di’s funeral,’ said Anna.

‘Yes, and I wonder how many of them Dawn actually knows,’ replied Christie, accepting a small sherry from a waitress but passing on the ‘canapés’, a selection of Rubik’s cube-sized pork scratchings, foot-long sausage rolls, potted beef sandwiches on quartered oven-bottom cakes and sizzling-hot roast potatoes that took the fingerprints off anyone who happened to pick one up.

The diners were squashed at the tables. Grace didn’t verbally comment on the meal, but the eyes she raised to Christie as she lifted up the plastic slice of meat on her fork before putting it back down again didn’t need accompanying words. Anna noticed the line of furry dust on the skirting boards behind her. Not the cleanest of holes, this place. Her eyes found Dawn and saw that her meal was virtually untouched. Calum was hooking up a piece of her meat onto his fork and she was telling him to go ahead. She looked like a Degas dancer on a Lowry background: totally and utterly out of place.

After the meal, when tar-strength coffee was served up, Calum said that he ‘wasn’t one for speeches so he was just going to toast the bride’ and that was it. The best man more than made up for it with embarrassingly near-the-knuckle stories of Calum’s past love-life that were meant to reassure the bride that Calum would never stray, but ended up doing quite the opposite, much to the amusement of the, by now, loud and swaying Crooke family and entourage.

People started to move into the main bar, Dawn included. She needed some air.

‘Where are you off to?’ said Muriel to the bride. ‘I’ve got some aunties and uncles that want to meet you.’

‘I’m off to the toilet,’ said Dawn. ‘I’ll be back soon.’

‘All right,’ said Muriel, holding her glass up for Ronnie to fill. She was ticking off the minutes now to the karaoke.

On the wall, outside the toilet, there was a full-length mirror. Dawn passed it, then doubled-back and stared at herself. What looked back at her was the most miserable bride in the world, a truly unhappy woman. She would have no sweet memories attached to this dress. She could bag it up and return it tomorrow to Freya and not think twice about it. And she was sure Freya must have got her measurements wrong, because she could hardly breathe in it, it felt so tight around her body.
Be brave,
Freya had said. She hadn’t been brave at all; she had been stupidly and idiotically weak. As in the words of that last hymn:
I am weak but Thou art mighty
. She might as well have been singing that line to the entire Crooke clan. She had been pushed and shoved and cowed and controlled by them all because she wanted their love and their acceptance, enough to lie down like a sacrificial lamb. And all she had really earned was their resentment for being such a walkover. She looked again in the mirror and her eyes sprang open. She was going barmy. Her reflection was dressed in white and the colour wasn’t draining her at all because she looked tanned and healthy. She had a simpler affair on, ballerina length, cowboy boots, a Stetson and a waistcoat studded with rhinestones. Behind her was Al Holly, also in white. The smiles were bursting out of their faces because the couple in that mirror were in love. No woman should wear a wedding dress for a man she wasn’t in love with and she knew she would never feel the way about Calum Crooke that she had grown to feel about Al Holly.
What am I doing?

Oh, Dee Dee, what are you doing?

Dawn’s eyes blurred over with tears and when she dabbed them dry with her fingertips the image had gone and she was Dawn in a floor-length ivory gown again, alone, crying.

Dawn didn’t really need the toilet, she just wanted to escape a long line of Crooke second cousins three times removed. She did, however, desperately need to
breathe
. She felt as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of the whole building and replaced with something heavy and cloying.

Who’s that man? The man in the hat?

Charlotte’s words bounced into her head and suddenly Dawn understood what she had seen in that photograph.

We just want you to be happy.

‘Oh God, can I? Dare I?’ she asked the bride in the mirror. The bride nodded.

Dawn slipped out of the fire exit at the side of the toilet door and into the bright sunshine of the day.

Inside the toilet, Denise was reapplying her lipstick at the mirror, while Demi was squirting perfume down her cleavage.

‘Killer looks well in his suit, doesn’t he?’ she said. ‘I might have a go at him later when Liam isn’t looking. Did you hear him coughing when they said “Anyone here know why these two shouldn’t be wed”?’

‘I half-expected Clampy to turn up at that moment.’

‘I wouldn’t have put it past her. Did our Calum ’fess up to Dawn in the end about him shagging her on his stag night?’

‘I doubt it. He’s never ’fessed up before, has he? Stupid git, he was cutting it too near the bone there.’

They both froze as they heard the flush in the end cubicle, which neither of them had noticed was occupied. Bending to take a fearful look under the gap at the bottom of the toilet door, they saw a flash of white material touching the floor.

‘Shit!’ mouthed Demi. ‘It’s Dawn. Out!’

She and Denise teetered outside, giggling nervously. Despite their promise to stay sober, they’d both had at least one bottle of Lambrini each since leaving the church.

*

At the other side of the car park, Dawn saw the welcome sight of Anna, Grace and Raychel clustered around Christie who was having a cigarette. Christie was trying to cut down and didn’t smoke much these days, only when she felt the need to have a few calming puffs in her lungs. This was one of those days.

‘Hello, love,’ said Grace as the beautiful bride strode out towards them. ‘Are you having a lovely day?’

‘No,’ said Dawn, desperately clutching at Grace’s hands. ‘Oh, girls, I’ve made the most dreadful mistake. Can you help me?’

‘Are you serious?’ said Christie.

‘I’ve been pathetic, I know I have. I’ve married Calum because I was too scared to back out but I don’t love him. I love Al Holly and he’s asked me to go to Canada with him and I said no but I want to more than anything and I have to because he’s the one in the photo and I’ve been ignoring my own feelings and what Aunt Charlotte said and what she saw and what my mum and dad were trying to tell me . . . I know none of this makes sense to you but it does to me because I’ve seen myself in the mirror and I know where I should be.’ She took in a well-needed breath. ‘Yes, I’ve never been more serious in my life. Help me!’

Christie dropped her lit cigarette to the floor and killed it with her yellow heel.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘We’d best get cracking then, hadn’t we?’

They sprang into action like a well-oiled military elite force trained from birth for such manoeuvres.

‘Get in the car,’ said Christie, fishing out her keys from her yellow handbag. ‘Quick.’

They moved as one into Christie’s BMW, Grace in the front, the other three squashed up in the back with Dawn’s frock, which was so big it almost constituted another person. They did a totally synchronized belt-up and Christie slammed the automatic gear lever into drive.

‘Where am I going? Direct me!’ she said, looking in her rear-view mirror at the pub. Their exit hadn’t been spotted, despite the squeal of her wheels as she took the corner like James Bond.

‘Is that the right time?’ said Dawn, pointing to the clock on the dashboard.

‘To the minute.’

‘Oh Jesus. I’m going home first. Turn left here and follow. I’m picking up a suitcase, then I’m catching a bus.’

‘Would this be a tour bus full of cowboys?’ asked Raychel.

‘Yes, it would.’

‘Marvellous!’ said Anna. ‘What time does it leave?’

‘I’ve got half an hour. Oh God, what will Calum’s family say?’

They noticed she was more worried about his family than the man himself.

‘Sod his bloody family. This is the time to think about yourself for once.’ This from Anna.

‘Am I doing the right thing?’

‘God knows!’ said Grace. ‘But you’re young enough to take a chance, love. And anyone looking at your face over the past few weeks could tell you were doing the wrong thing.’

‘I should have stopped this wedding months ago!’ said Dawn, dropping her head into her hands.

‘Well, that’s as may be,’ said Grace. ‘But you’ve stopped it now. We’d all be a lot wiser if we could visit our past selves.’ As she knew only too well.

‘I bet there’s a hold-up,’ said Dawn, because the traffic stream seemed to thicken as they hit town. But there wasn’t. As if by magic, every traffic light either stayed on or turned to green at their approach. Christie broke the speed limit but reckoned the risk of a fine would be worth it.

‘Right, stop at the second to the last house on your right!’ commanded Dawn.

Christie screeched up to Dawn’s front door. Raychel pulled Dawn out of the car because her frock was making it impossible for her to get out unaided. She was shaking too much to get the key in the lock so Grace snatched it from her and did the honours.