Animals (10 page)

The dress was too small and I couldn’t zip it up over my boobs. I held the top part over my bra and slid open the curtain a little way. The sales assistant was walking towards us across the store, carrying a tray with two wine flutes on it.

‘Now remember,’ she said when she got close, ‘we offer a full alterations service. We don’t expect anything to fit right at first.’

I nodded and looked at Tyler. ‘So what do you think?’

Tyler made a baffled pig-face.

‘Try and imagine it without my body in it.’

Tyler frowned. I looked at the sales assistant. At the wine. At Tyler. At the wine. The sales assistant said: ‘Would you ladies like your fizz while you deliberate?’

‘YES,’ we said.

She handed us a glass each and took the tray away. I took my drink into the changing room while I put on the next dress, which this time fitted around the top but not the hips. I waddled out to see Tyler halfway through the paper.

‘There’s another Austrian girl been held hostage by her father in a basement,’ she said and patted her nose, winced. ‘I’m such a loser.’

‘Now now,’ I said, ‘it’s all relative.’

She didn’t look up. The top of her head was a dark vortex. ‘Well, it’s all rela
tives
if you’re Austrian …’

‘What about this dress?’

‘Oh, it’s awful.’

‘Great. I’ve only got one left to try then we’ve got to go and choose some more.’

‘Fuck me,’ she said, folding up the paper. ‘What a thoroughly intolerable process. We should have brought some mandy along for this. Seriously. It’s sending me under.’

She clicked her fingers. The sales assistant, over by the stairs, jerked her head and started to walk over.

‘Tyler!’ I said ‘Do not – I cannot believe you just –’

I retreated and hid inside the cubicle, listening to Tyler saying, ‘Look, we’re going to be spending an obscene amount of money in here (
Pretty Woman
) so be a doll and go get that bottle of Asti Martini, would you?’

‘It’s Hardy’s.’

‘No shit.’

When I emerged in the next dress, Tyler stood up and proffered me a full flute. She circled me, trailing the fabric with her free hand. ‘Yes, okay,’ she said. ‘So this is a lesson I suppose in terms of What We Don’t Want …’

I looked at the bottle on the table and saw half of it was gone. I necked my flute and held it out for her to refill.

‘You know what this needs to be?’ Tyler said, waggling her finger up and down the length of me.

‘What?’

‘RED.’

‘Look around you, Tyler. It’s wall-to-wall white in here. It’s like John and Yoko never moved out.’

‘Now there’s a cool couple.’

‘A cool
married
couple.’

‘Don’t start.’

I’d been batting back with a list of modish marrieds every time she fronted me with the ‘marriage just isn’t
cool
’ line of argument. Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter. Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer. Tom Waits and Kathleen. Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis (even though they’d split up). Now I could add John and Yoko.

Tyler looked unconvinced. ‘Uh oh,’ she said, ‘here comes the cavalry.’

The sales assistant was walking towards us with an armful of dresses, followed by another assistant freighted with netting and frills. ‘I’m sure there’ll be something you like here!’ the sales assistant said brightly, which translated as You’d Better Fucking Buy Something After Having So Much Wine.

There wasn’t anything I liked – but that didn’t stop us taking our time with the next onslaught of options whilst working our way through another bottle of sparkling something or other. Soon, Tyler was trying on dresses, too – dresses that, predictably, all looked much better on her.

I stared at myself in the full-length mirror. ‘I look like I’m in fancy dress.’

‘Now you’re talking,’ said Tyler, wine sloshing from her flute onto her collarbone as she almost tripped over the train of the dress she was wearing – a pearlised number with puff sleeves. ‘Hey, that’s what you should do! You should be a ZOMBIE BRIDE. I’ll do your facial lesions. There are tutorials online …’

The sales assistant appeared by the cubicles. ‘Anything you ladies like?’ she said, looking at me.

‘Another one of those, please,’ said Tyler. She’d put the empty wine bottle upside down in a vase of silver twigs.

The woman began: ‘I’m sorry but …’

‘Fuck’s sake,’ Tyler said, hitching up her dress and waddling into the cubicle. She reemerged after a few seconds proffering a crumpled tenner.

‘I’m afraid you don’t understand,’ the sales assistant whispered. ‘
This isn’t a bar
.’

‘If it were a bar it would be a very shit one,’ Tyler said. ‘I would give it one beer mat out of a possible ten and that would be for the free parking.’

The sales assistant looked at me.

‘Okay,’ I said, channelling my mum, ‘I’m going to go away and have a little think. Tyler, take some photos of me before we leave.’

I paraded a few ill-fitting monstrosities around the fitting area while Tyler clumsily snapped away with her phone. ‘Send one of those to Jim, would you?’ I said afterwards, one leg in my jeans, trying not to fall against the closed curtain. ‘The most flattering one, if such a thing exists. Just so he thinks I’m doing something pro-active.’

‘I don’t have his number stored.’

‘Oh.’

‘What’s he wearing for the wedding, anyway?’

‘Probably just one of his work suits.’

‘So why are
you
making all this effort?’

I took a breath. ‘You know, it tears me up when you and Jim do this.’

‘Do what?’

A hotel bar in the Lake District. Me, Jim and Tyler on our first and only holiday together. Jim and I had only been together a few months but I knew it was serious enough to warrant an introduction to my best friend.
We should all go away together!
I thought. Somewhere clean. The Lakes seemed like a good choice. I booked us two rooms at The View by Ullswater, and Jim drove us there in his new hatchback.

We’d had a long dinner with lots of wine and by the time we adjourned to the residents’ bar we were pretty much wedding-drunk (an ironic observation now …). Things had been going okay. Jim and Tyler had slowly relaxed after scoping each other out with questions about their upbringing (Jim to Tyler) and favourite poems (Tyler to Jim). I was feeling very hopeful about everything, like a well-oiled axle between two shiny wheels that would speed me joyously through the rest of my life. Easy to be happily morbid when you’re drunk in good company. I kissed Jim on the cheek and he squeezed my knee under the table.

‘Look, there’s a piano,’ said Tyler, nodding to a barkish old hulk propped up against the wall. She looked at Jim. ‘There’s a piano, Jim.’

Jim looked. ‘I can confirm that that is a piano, Tyler, yes.’

Tyler let her thumb glance off Jim’s elbow. ‘Well, you should play it then. You being all piano-y.’

I laughed nervously into my drink. Jim looked at me and took a swig of wine. He’d told me it happened a lot, people asking him to play (
If I was a plumber they wouldn’t say,
Go on, do something with a pipe,
would they? But musicians are constantly on call
… I thought it a little churlish of him. A little). Then he stood up and walked over to the geriatric instrument, pulled over a chair from a nearby table and sat down. Tyler sat back in her seat, pleased.

I tensed. I’d heard him play the second-hand Steinway upright in his flat a few times drunk, but never anything in public. The concerts he’d played so far had been abroad and it had been too early for all that. I was worried what Tyler might think, what – dare I think it? – what
ammo
it would give her. She didn’t like how often I was staying over at his. She’d brought up the matter of rent a few times, swiftly dropped it. Still.

Jim ran his fingers along the keys in opposite directions. The room filled with noise – a good rhythm and a cascade of sounds. He turned to look at us. ‘It’s not quite tuned but it’s not as bad as I thought,’ he said. His fingers were hitting the keys as he talked. ‘Hang on … almost got it …’ His fingers fluttered, up and down, in ever decreasing breadth until he was down down down to one note which he struck struck struck with a DONK DONK DONK. ‘There,’ he said, and grinned. ‘Found the room.’

My pelvic floor twitched.

‘What do you mean,
found the room
?’ said Tyler.

Jim, playing again, up and down and up and down, smiled at her – bizarrely in that smile he’d
reminded
me of Tyler
, as though something had in that moment been transferred – and said, ‘There’s always one note that makes the room resonate. It’s something you want to avoid.’

Tyler rolled her eyes, raised her glass and struck the side with a flick of her middle finger. The glass sounded with a short ping. ‘Look, I found it, too.’

Jim turned back to face the piano. ‘Anyway, now I’ve got it …’ He launched into a casually glorious, soaring, swelling, hell
perfect
rendition of ‘At Last’ by Etta James.

‘Fuck,’ I said under my breath.

I looked around to see the bar staff standing by the door, rapt. I looked at Tyler. She was watching Jim, her glass poised midway between her mouth and the table, her face a crisp twist of angry awe. It took a lot to make Tyler forget about her drink.

‘French onion soup!’ Tyler declared. ‘That’s what we need to recover. Soup and a pint of real ale, like the ursines drink.’

We walked from Salford – where we’d abandoned the car post-Cheshire – to one of our favourite pubs, a Victorian chophouse that was tiled like a swimming pool and staffed by bartenders in bowties. The onion soup there was the best in town – rich and murky as pond water, served with a dumplingy cheese crouton the size of a baby’s fist. Tucked away in the slats and canopies of the beer garden, we dissected the day over ale and then red wine.

‘I’ve got the decorators in!’ Tyler said loudly, raising her glass. It was a phrase I’d told her was a traditional English toast for whenever you were drinking red wine. As a gag it had enjoyed a remarkably good innings.

‘Just get a normal dress from a normal shop,’ Tyler said. ‘That place was heinous.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s almost as if they want to put you off.’ I swirled my wine. The legs lingered in thin, filmy waves on the sides of the glass and then retreated back to the pool at the bottom.

‘Why ever would they want to do that? Put you off a barely evolved pagan ceremony for needy morons?’

‘I’m not a needy moron. Well, maybe I’m needy sometimes, but aren’t we all?’

‘I’m not.’

‘Yes, you are.’

‘I’m not.’ She grabbed my wrist. ‘Tell me. Tell me I’m not needy, Laura. Say it. Say you’re not needy.’

I picked her hand off my wrist. ‘No.’

She drained her glass. ‘I just don’t get it. What is this need for
a special dress
?’ She said ‘special dress’ in a little-girl voice. ‘Why don’t you just wear your favourite dress – the maroon lacy one? It’s not as though we’re the kind of people who take photos of ourselves all the time when we’re out in a desperate need to document our lives.’ I thought of the photo I’d sent earlier to Jim. ‘I think it’s so fucking tragic when people do that. What, so they can sit there when they’re eighty, pointing through albums mid-air with a virtual-reality glove, saying
And here’s another glorious moment I failed to participate in because I was too busy taking a fucking photo
. Wear the maroon. In ten years you’ll have forgotten you didn’t buy it especially. And you know what, Lo, it’s
your fucking wedding
.’

This one was from Tyler’s friend Agnes, the only friend from Crawford she’d ever kept in touch with – although Agnes had recently ‘gone over to the dark side’ (childrearing). Apparently Agnes had been so bombed on speed at her own wedding that when the photographer and members of her family were hassling her to get out of her room to have some photos taken Agnes had emerged enraged, her train hitched halfway up her legs, stood at the top of the grand central staircase and roared at the foyer of assembled guests below: ‘LISTEN UP, PEOPLE: IT’S MY FUCKING WEDDING.’ Tyler, boshed on the same speed, stood on a chaise longue and applauded. The phrase had since been applied to any situation where you were going to do something your way because it was your thing.

‘The whole idea of marriage
is
preposterous, though, in the modern age,’ Tyler went on.

‘Everything’s preposterous when you look at it too long,’ I said. ‘Especially the word “preposterous”.’

She swigged more wine and banged her glass down on the table. The glass base hit the wood with a jarring crack. ‘But there’s no ceremony for
friendship
, is there? Does friendship mean nothing in this world? Nothing to
you
?’

I lit up a cigarette and took the first drag back hard into my throat, so hard it made my eyes water. I looked at her. ‘Take a day off from this. An hour, even.’

‘Why? Because you know it’s true?’ I looked at her. She looked back. ‘If you go ahead with this wedding then you realise that what you’re actually saying is that your friendship with me is not meaningful and durable. That,’ she sipped her wine victoriously, ‘is the logical conclusion.’

‘Believe me, if I could marry you too, Tyler, I would.’

Would I? Probably not.

‘Did you know there are now as many unmarried parents as married parents in the UK? Things are changing. You don’t have to fuse the nuclear family any more.’

‘I don’t want to fuse the nuclear family.’

‘So why marry Jim at all? Why this insistence on upheaval?’

I looked at her and kept looking at her as I brought my glass to my lips. I had to make light of it, had to. ‘I dunno,
variety
?’

‘You’re ruining my life for variety’s sake?’

‘I’m not ruining your life! There’s more to your life than me! And I’m marrying Jim because I love him, I do, and this feels like …’ I couldn’t say ‘adventure’. ‘… progress.’

She smacked her forehead with her hand. ‘Progress? What about our hard-earned system? Have you forgotten about that? Isn’t marriage just another example of everything we’ve always fought against, as in the shit people do because they think they should rather than because they actually want to?’