Beneath the Blonde (22 page)

Greg came and sat beside her, “Sweetheart, we still can’t. This is crazy.”

Saz interrupted Greg, “Don’t they have to read the bans or anything?”

Siobhan kissed Greg lightly on the mouth and leant her forehead against his. “Haven’t you always told me what a groovy country this is? Apparently our passports would have been enough. I brought our birth certificates with me just in case.”

Greg questioned her again, “She saw the birth certificates?”

“Don’t you trust me? I did everything right. It’s all real, babe. I checked.”

“Everything?”

“Yep. Right down to the last teeny tiny little detail.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes! It’s all done, all legal, all above board. It really is possible.” She looked at Saz, “They don’t do the bans thing here.”

Turning back to Greg, she continued, “I called last week and checked everything. Then the nice lady went and checked everything. Again. We can do it, we can have the lot, you and me, Mr and Mrs Siobhan Forrester-Marsden and Greg Marsden-Forrester just like all those silly dream plans we’ve ever had. All those three-in-the-morning talks. The world is actually going to let us do it. All you have to do is say yes.”

Greg was crying when he said yes and Siobhan was crying when she whooped with joy and Saz was crying when she went upstairs to find something to wear for the immediate ceremony. Saz knew her tears were jealousy and betrayal and anger, but she wasn’t certain if she was jealous because she wanted Siobhan or angry because Siobhan and Greg were about to do what the world wouldn’t let her and Molly do or just furious with herself for having let things get so out of hand. Taking her clothes out of the wardrobe to pack, she was hoping the local shops held more variety than her suitcase.

Siobhan was right. Everything was in order. They went to the local courthouse where their forms were checked again, Siobhan and Greg signing a couple more declarations. The ceremony was conducted in a small ante-chamber by a Justice of the Peace who made a lovely speech about joy and love and spontaneity turning into permanence and reality, Siobhan and Greg read the simple vows from a card she gave them and improvised a couple of their own. Siobhan didn’t promise to obey, but Greg did. Siobhan wore a fulllength green satin skirt and a very fitted red Chinese silk top, with maximum cleavage exposure. Removing the
clothes from her bag, she’d confessed to Saz that the wedding was her main reason for coming to Queenstown all along. Greg had told her ages ago that couples on holiday there were able to marry with a minimum of formalities and with maximum speed and ever since she had thought how exciting it would be to get married that way. In response to Saz’s hurried question, she told her that Alex and Steve’s deaths had simply prompted her to turn the whimsical thought into a reality. In Siobhan, the finality of death provoked not despair but an overkill on life.

Answering the other question, Siobhan merely told Saz she’d been interested—”Wanted to find out the difference, babe. Between a boy and a girl. I mean, you have a girlfriend right? It was just sex, yeah? I wouldn’t want to come between you and her, that’s not what I meant. I know you love your girlfriend and I know I drive you crazy, but I do really like you, so I figured, well, I assumed you felt the same as me.” She stopped her ironing long enough to look up and ask, “Did I fuck up?”

Saz shook her head. “No, Siobhan, you didn’t fuck up, you probably didn’t even do anything wrong. I did.” And then she went shopping, hating herself all the way.

Greg wore an old red shirt and a pair of jeans, the shirt ironed by Dan while Saz dashed out and took half an hour to shop. Five minutes in the florist to confirm that, yes, a woman had come in early the day before asking for a huge bunch of yellow roses, they’d even had to send to several other shops in the area to make the number up—she did hope the flowers were ok? Saz assured her they were lovely, the scratches on her back beginning to itch and took another five minutes to get a full description of exactly the same woman Ben Kaserov had described to her. Except this one had bleached blonde hair. Saz remembered the blonde head
in the jacuzzi in LA and felt sick. She looked forward to getting through the ceremony and on to Greg’s aunt’s house where she had decided she would force Siobhan and Greg to go to the police. And if they wouldn’t, then she’d just go by herself. She then took just twenty minutes to buy a long summer dress in pale pink silk for herself and a pink linen shirt for Dan. As he said when he handed over his cash, “I don’t care what you buy, but I do think the two witnessing queers ought to make some sort of a statement.”

So the witnesses were gay and pink and Greg was tearful and casual and Siobhan was, of course, stunning, beautiful, charming and completely over the top. She also—just in case a certain someone was looking—carried the biggest bouquet she could buy. Forty, long stemmed, velvety dark red roses. With a single yellow rose set in the middle.

She really thinks she can get away with it. That no one will find out, that her little secret won’t be uncovered. She thinks she can smother it in white lace and satin and I won’t see.

Of course they don’t do that though. White lace and satin would be too traditional. No, they take the fashionable route. The path that will give them maximum exposure and minimum truth.

I know who is to blame. With their passive attitudes and glib natures, they have created this. A world in which that woman can swan around in red and green on her wedding day. A world in which an occasion of such dignity and solemnity can be reduced to this farce of hurried decisions and cobbled together vows and crude sexual innuendo. My darling is worth more than this, but she has forgotten. Has spent too much time with them. Has changed too much.

That’s ok. She will be alone eventually. Alone and herself again. And anyway, we are going home. Going back to the beginning. A very good place to start. And finish.

When Shona and Gaelene were nine years old their favourite game was weddings. Planning their own. Shona would draw up detailed lists of all the possible variations on dress, attendants, churches, reception venues. The groom would be added at the last moment, an afterthought, primarily there to stand smiling in a suit and take her hand from her first dad and place the shining golden ring on her perfectly manicured outstretched finger. Blissfully unaware of the laws of God and man, she usually nominated her cousin as groom because she didn’t yet like any other boys or, if she was planning her favourite combination—the double wedding for herself and Gaelene, then Gaelene was allowed to marry John and Shona would have whoever they minded least that week at school—Craig or Paul or Shaun or Mike—a seventies’ boy with a seventies’ one syllable name.

The ceremony always started with both girls getting ready at Shona’s mum’s house. The two of them would be grownup ladies now, as old as twenty-two or twenty-three, getting dressed in Shona’s bedroom. This being a really special occasion, they would be allowed, once they were fluffed and flounced, to stand on Shona’s mum’s bed and look at themselves in the longer mirror above her dressing table, the added height of the bed allowing them a magical fulllength view of the total princess picture. Then, fairy-tale perfect, they would go outside to the waiting car—driven by Shona’s first dad, her real dad, come back home to her mother for the occasion and happy to be there, smiling at
Shona’s mum, kissing her like all the fights and the shouting and the holes punched in the thin particle board walls had never even happened. Shona and Gaelene would get in the polished car, a Jag or a Rolls covered in ribbons and flowers, watched by all the girls they were at school with. Watched by the prettier girls, the clever girls, the girls with posh houses with separate loos and the girls with Raleigh Twenty bicycles and mums who didn’t work and dads who didn’t go away, girls with big sisters who were at nursing school in Rotorua or training college in Hamilton and wore mini skirts and maxi coats, girls who had big brothers in the First Fifteen. And these perfect little girls, who hung around in all the wealthy Pakeha groups, who didn’t have Maori friends, Maori family, who went to their cousins in Auckland for the holidays, not just down the coast to their rellies, these Debras and Andreas and Yvonnes with perfect blonde hair and perfect straight teeth would stand there in seething, thwarted jealousy as they stared at Shona and Gaelene, paragons of bridal superiority. And at the church, Gaelene and Shona would walk in, hand in hand, their fathers tall on either side of them, their mothers crying at the front. They would walk up the aisle, all the heads turning to look at beautiful Shona and beautiful Gaelene. At the altar they would say their vows to whoever was waiting, capture the rings and then waltz down the aisle together in a rush of satin and lace, married ladies, irrelevant things like husbands and parents and friends trailing after them. The reception at the rugby club would be the biggest the town had ever seen, the partying would go on all night and the next morning the two couples would leave for their honeymoon—a week in Auckland or Christchurch or, if Shona was really getting carried away, four nights in Sydney. The girls would of course share one room and the boys another. These were the plans of a nine year old.

It was all Shona’s dream. Gaelene didn’t care so much.
Knew her family might be moving to Auckland anyway, didn’t know if she wanted to get married, didn’t know if she cared, didn’t know if it mattered all that much. But it made Shona happy, making the plans, all the details, the dress styles, the shoes, her and Gaelene getting married together. Always the two of them together. And naturally, everywhere they went would be flowers, roses at the church and roses at the rugby club and roses for their first flight in a plane and roses for their first night in a hotel. Beautiful roses, red, white, pink and, of course, yellow. Shining yellow roses for Shona’s favourite colour.

Gaelene had forgotten lots of things about Shona. She’d completely forgotten Shona loved yellow. In fact, she’d pretty much forgotten all about Shona. But that was all right. Shona would help her remember.

Given the days’ notice Siobhan had allowed them, Greg’s Aunty Pat and Uncle Dennis had done wonders. The dining table at the far end of the large blue-painted kitchen looked as if it was about to topple with the weight of chicken, cucumber, egg cress sandwiches, what seemed like several carcasses worth of sausage rolls and a flotilla of butterfly cakes. After the nuptial fuss and hurried photos in Queenstown they’d caught the plane as planned, picked up their hire van at Rotorua and driven the two hours it took to get to Pat and Dennis’s “batch”. On hearing the word Saz had assumed a small cottage by the sea, perhaps a New Zealand version of Derek Jarman’s Dungeness cottage, if a little less horticulturally stimulated. She couldn’t have been more wrong.

The Marsden’s home had been created from the shell of their forty-year-old weatherboard house and added to at weekends and holidays over a three year period until what Pat and Dennis had fashioned was a five bedroom, newly finished, extremely desirable retirement residence. Greg’s aunt and uncle had lived by the coast for the first fifteen of their married years and when Dennis’s work had taken him to Auckland they had chosen to let rather than sell the small house where they had started their marriage. When Dennis retired they had sold the big house in Auckland and returned to the coast, remaking their environment with the extravagant proceeds from the Auckland house sale. Using their old home to create the core of the new house, they had
transformed a small wooden bungalow into a show home. Inside it was all huge windows and wood-panelled flooring. A lifetime of pouring over copies of
New Zealand House and Garden
had left Pat with a wealth of ideas and finally she had the real wealth with which to achieve them. Greg was astounded. Though he had seen photos of the work in progress, he had not expected his aunt and uncle to have achieved so much. Or that they would have done it in quite so much style.

They arrived at eight in the evening, with the sun just setting behind the distant Kaimai range. At first Greg was convinced they had come to the wrong house, shaking his head at the size of the building in front of them, but the number on the letterbox was the same and Siobhan assured him that the woman wiping her hands on her apron and waving at them from the balcony was definitely her—”It is your Aunty Pat, babe”—she whispered to him just before she jumped out of the passenger seat and bounded up the steps and into Aunty Pat’s outstretched arms, shouting and waving her wedding ring hand the whole way.

The whole day had been bitter for Saz. She was unable to run away, stuck in New Zealand with the happy newlyweds, stuck in the plane with the newlyweds, stuck in the car with the newlyweds. She couldn’t talk to anyone about what had happened, Molly, her usual sounding board, being the last person she wanted to confide in and, because Siobhan insisted on celebrating her wedding with her “new family”, her day was given over to doing nothing but dance attendance on Siobhan’s whims. None of which involved coming clean with the police about what had been going on.

Late that night, after poring over the Polaroid wedding photos and listening to the new album, after the praising of the wedding ring, after all the sandwiches and sausage rolls had been finished—carefully made to a special vegetarian
recipe just for Siobhan—after the pavlova had been brought in and crowed over, the endless cups of strong tea finally turned to wine for the ladies and bottles of beer for the men, and just as everyone was starting to settle down, Saz made the mistake of asking Pat about the pretty little blonde girl in the variously aged photos on the wall.

She realized she’d made a huge error as Pat stuttered, “That’s our … daughter … she’s, um …”

Dennis tried a little harder with, “She was … something happened to her … she was …” then he too turned white and his speech ground to a halt.

Greg jumped in to save his aunt and uncle further distress, “That’s my cousin Gaelene. She’s dead. She died years ago. When she was sixteen.”