Married By Christmas (6 page)

‘I don’t think you usually have a reindeer-pulled sleigh at a Valentine’s wedding,’ Anna said into his chest, willing him to say something that would make the knot of uncertainty and anxiety in her chest melt away and for all the things that mattered to her so very much not to matter any more, because that would be the easy option, the approach that any sensible, pragmatic person would take. Much easier than trying to explain to Tom why cancelling their wedding now would break her heart. ‘Listen, when I was a kid and everything was going to crap all around me, and I was stuck in the home, where the other girls beat me up and made my life a misery, I made myself this silly little girl’s promise about a fairy-tale Christmas wedding, a silly dream that I promised myself would one day come true. And I know it’s stupid, and frivolous, and shouldn’t really matter now. I know that. But even though I know I’m no longer that little girl, in my head, she is still there, staying awake all night in the home because she’s terrified about what might happen if she closes her eyes … I just … I don’t want to let her down, Tom. She got let down a lot.’ Anna hesitated before confessing her other worry to Tom. ‘And I don’t know, I get the feeling that if we don’t get married this Christmas it just won’t happen at all.’

Tom cupped her face in his cold hands, kissing the tip of her nose, and Anna melted into him, feeling a wave of relief that he understood.

‘Now you are just being silly,’ he said and Anna froze.

‘Silly?’ she asked.

‘Yes!’ Tom chuckled again. ‘Why wouldn’t we get married? We’re not cancelling the wedding, we’re just postponing it. Of course we’ll get married one day.’

‘One day?’ Anna looked crestfallen. ‘So that’s it, you’ve given up. It’s over, it’s postponed and we’ll get married “one day”?’

‘I just don’t see what else I can do,’ Tom said, uncomfortably.

Anna sighed, wondering why the plan that she had pretty much already implemented hadn’t occurred to him.

‘Martha said you need Charisma’s signature to annul the marriage in time. So it’s obvious! Fly to New York to find Charisma and get her signature so the wedding can go ahead!’

Tom sighed, which wasn’t exactly the romantic, ‘do or die, never give up, anything for you’ response that Anna was hoping for.

‘Well … I mean look, let’s be realistic. Even if I did do that, the chances of me finding her are virtually nil. She left Vegas for New York eight years ago, she could be anywhere in the world now. And if I go off on some crazy wild goose chase all that would mean is that we’d be apart at the very time we need to be together, and if I didn’t find her, which I won’t, you’d be even more disappointed and there’d be even less time to cancel stuff and get back the deposits. And I know it’s a pain, but I promise you,
promise
you, that I’ll get all of the deposits refunded, rebook everything exactly as you want it and we’ll get married
next
Christmas, how about that? Just think, a whole extra year to make me do wedding-organising stuff!’

Tom’s smile faded in direct proportion to how quickly the expression of acute disappointment and hurt spread across Anna’s face.

‘If you won’t do it, I will,’ she said, turning on her heel and going back into the flat, unwittingly almost flattening Liv behind the front door, which rebounded off her nose.

‘What?’ Tom followed. ‘What do you mean, Anna?’

‘I mean, the flight’s booked, the visa’s sorted, I’m about to pack my bag. I’m going to New York to try and sort this mess out and make sure we get married by Christmas, because I’m not ready to let this go, Tom. I can’t stop trying until I know there is no hope left. I just can’t. I’m not that sort of person. Now, Liv’s coming with me to the airport, so you’d better go. I’ll let you know when I have any news.’

‘Wait,’ Tom said, struggling to keep up with the rapid turn of events. ‘You’ve booked a flight, already?’

‘I want to marry you, Tom,’ Anna said. ‘I want to marry you this Christmas. And I haven’t given up hope yet.’

‘Then, right, well, book me a flight too, we’ll go together,’ Tom said, realising far too late that he had done and said much, much less than Anna had expected from him.

‘The flight’s full now, it’s too late,’ Anna said. ‘Look, go home. Stick to your schedule for the wedding, help Liv with the final details. Let me at least try and get this sorted out.’

‘But, Anna,’ Tom said, ‘it should be me doing this.’

‘I know,’ Anna said sadly. ‘It should be. But it isn’t, is it?’

‘Do you think you’re doing the right thing?’ Liv said, watching Anna make her final arrangements. Tom had only been there for a total of ten minutes but somehow it felt like everything had changed, and if it felt like that for her what must Anna be feeling like?

‘Of course I am,’ Anna said. ‘If I don’t do this, if I don’t at least try and sort it all … I’m not the sort of person to give up because something is a bit difficult, am I? If I were then I would never have made it this far.’

‘I know, but the way he looked when he left. Like …’ Liv tried to put into words the look on Tom’s face, but she couldn’t find the right ones and she couldn’t help worrying that in her determination to fix things, no matter what, Anna had inadvertently broken what she and Tom had. Perhaps she had gone too far this time, even for Tom? But still, he hadn’t tried to stop her, he hadn’t said, ‘If you do this it’s over between us.’ He’d just … looked bewildered.

‘You really need to talk to him some more.’

‘I know and I will,’ Anna said. ‘But for now a few hours apart, some time to get our heads straight, is just what we need. I mean we haven’t even talked about why he never mentioned being married.’

‘Exactly!’ Liv paused for a second while she examined her motivations for what she was about to say, and decided that she was saying it to be a good friend. ‘Don’t you think you should be talking about whether or not you should be getting married instead of rushing across the Atlantic to try and make it happen? A lot has happened and only a short time before the wedding. Don’t you think you need to talk about why you are finding out about this now, instead … Well, I don’t really know how to describe what you are doing any other way than madness.’

‘That’s one opinion,’ Anna said, hurriedly rolling her underwear into neat little saugages which lined up in her case, and then swiftly reorganised them into similar coloured groups, without even giving it any conscious thought. ‘But on the other hand, nothing has happened at all. Nothing that a signature can’t undo straight away.’

‘I just wonder if you need to try more to communicate what you really feel,’ Liv tried again, her mother’s advice about leaving Anna and Tom to it ringing reproachfully in her ears.

‘I do need to communicate with him, and I will,’ Anna said. ‘Which is where you come in, because while I’m not here you have to be me. Once I know where I’m staying, I’m going to need that awful Martha woman to FedEx me the papers, and you are going to have to make sure the wedding stays on track. It’s lucky really that we are mostly the same size, because there’s a final dress fitting that I’ll need you to go to, and you’ll have to take over all the last-minute arrangements for me. Of course I’m a bit taller and bigger in the bust than you, but I’ve thought of that – all you need to do is stand on a book, wear my bra and stuff it with socks, that should work.’

‘Anna …’ Liv was seriously considering deadlocking the front door and throwing away the key. ‘I wouldn’t be your friend if I didn’t ask you one last time. Are you sure that you are really prepared to go to the United States of America, population three hundred million and counting, to try and find a needle in a haystack, in order to still marry Tom in a week’s time?’ ‘I know how much this means to you, but you’ve got to look at the big picture here. You’ve got to look at this incident in the context of your entire life. If you still love Tom, and you still want to marry him, he will still be here in a month or two or three. The world won’t stop turning if you don’t marry him on Christmas Eve!’

Anna stared blankly at Liv, as if she’d just spoken to her in Swahili.

‘You were on the other side of the front door when I was talking to Tom, you know why it matters to me, you know that without having to eavesdrop, you know better than anyone. You are the last person I should be justifying this to.’

‘I know, I know, but I just want to protect you from making a mistake. What I’m trying to say is, are you sure you are being rational?’

‘No,’ Anna said, turning on her heel and going back into her bedroom. Liv watched as Anna took her suitcase down from the top of the wardrobe and laid it open on the bed, then opened a drawer and transferred a selection of already neatly folded clothes, which Liv knew would be a pre-prepared capsule wardrobe, perfect for impromptu trips to the US of A. ‘No, I’m not being rational, or logical. I’m doing what my heart is telling me to do. And like I said to Tom, where would I be today,’ Anna continued, ‘if I’d just given up trying when things got a bit tricky?’

Liv shrugged. That was a hard motivation to fault even if in her heart she knew that this time Anna was going too far.

‘Look –’ Anna paused for a moment, holding a bouquet of freshly ironed socks labelled Monday to Sunday, retrieved from the drawer in date order ‘– I’ve given a year and a half of my life to Tom so far, and most of it has been really great. It’s been the nearest I’ve had to normality since you and your family took me in and I know how lucky I am that he wants to marry me, even though I am not some Amazonian sex worker who enjoys gluing tassels to her bits and bobs and sliding up and down a pole. Tom still wants to marry me, and I want to marry him, so why not do everything I can to make it happen the way that I want it? To marry him on Christmas Eve, exactly as planned, not in six months’ time, or however long it takes for him to get his effing act together.’ Anna paused again, re-collecting her composure, which just for a moment had shown signs of cracking.

‘I’m getting married by Christmas, Liv, if it kills me. I am not going to let this one thing that I have always wanted, all of my life, be swept aside by some … some big-titted tart!’ Anna lifted her chin in a moment of defiance, before Liv saw that familiar uncertainty in her eyes again.

‘Look after him while I’m away, won’t you?’ Anna asked her. ‘Maybe pop round on the way back from the airport and see how he’s doing. Help him understand why I’m doing this, because I know he doesn’t.’

‘Shouldn’t you be the one to do that?’ Liv suggested.

‘I’m going,’ Anna said, glancing at her watch. ‘I’ve got to now.’

‘Anna,’ Liv tried once again, ‘this is madness. Where are you even going to start?’

‘New York of course,’ Anna said, rolling her eyes. ‘Where else?’

Chapter Four

Anna supposed she was lucky to get the very last seat on the flight, which had been almost fully booked when she’d begun the reservation process, although she was slightly put out that she was sandwiched between a charming if slightly more robustly built than was comfortable lady on her left, sporting an ‘I Heart London’ T-shirt, and whoever it was who’d managed to reserve the last aisle seat on her right, in the seconds that it took for the website to process her payment. As Anna smiled at the lady, who was already tucking into a packet of crisps, cheerfully brushing crumbs off her ample bosom, she wondered if perhaps she should have gone mad and shelled out the several thousand pounds for first class after all. She had thought of it as she’d sat there, at the kitchen table, toying with her never previously used emergency credit card (because, after all, if ever there was an emergency this was it), while she was doing her best to process everything that had just happened, bypassing the nervous breakdown stage. Why shouldn’t she wallow in the disintegration of her life whilst lying on a flat bed and being brought endless amounts of gin? Anna asked herself. But the same Anna who’d often gone without meals and knew how to make five pounds last all week would not allow such wilful frivolity, not even under these exceptional circumstances. After all she still didn’t have a room booked in New York. It would be the early hours of the morning by the time she arrived, nearer to three or four by the time she’d gotten through customs and found a cab – who knew how much she might have to spend to secure a room in a decent hotel, or what it might cost to start to look for Charisma, or even how long it might take for her to admit that she was engaged in a wild goose chase of epic proportions, accept defeat and go home. So, as much as it pained her, Anna had made the sensible choice, the Anna choice, to wallow in her misery in economy class, even if it did mean silently resenting the person who’d nabbed the very last aisle seat seconds before she could for the entire seven-hour flight.

Boarding was almost complete and Anna was starting to feel optimistic about getting her aisle seat after all when she heard a male voice approaching, and knew, just knew, that he was coming her way, intent on sitting next to her and irritating her for the next seven hours and fifteen minutes.

‘’Scuse, ’scuse me, love, yep, yep, if I could just squeeze past here … thanks, thanks, oops sorry! Cheers, brilliant, thanks!’ The next thing Anna knew, a large and weighty rucksack had been deposited unceremoniously on her lap, while the owner of a pair of jeans whose button flies were rather disconcertingly at her eye level, spoke to her as he stowed something away in the compartment above their seats. ‘Don’t mind if I just … just while I? Thanks, love. Brilliant.’

Unimpressed by being referred to as ‘love’, Anna hefted the rucksack, which she was sure wasn’t official hand-luggage size, onto its owner’s empty seat, hurriedly rooting around for the headphones that she was now certain she would need to block out her less than appealing travel companions.

‘Oh thanks.’ An arm, with a tattoo of a dragon winding its way around his forearm, reached down and grabbed the bag. It was followed by a torso in a red and white checked shirt and then a curtain of long straight dark hair, belonging to a man who Anna quickly realised, with swiftly multiplying horror, she knew, and what’s more, desperately wished with all her heart that she would never meet again.

Wondering if would be possible to avoid detection, and the inevitable ensuing humiliation that was bound to follow for the full seven hours of the flight, Anna grabbed the in-flight magazine, opening it at eye level, so that it covered the entire right side of her face, hopeful that her unexpected travelling companion wouldn’t notice that she appeared to read only with her right eye.

‘Managed to get my ukulele on,’ Miles Harker, owner of the jeans and tattoo, and the unwitting co-defendant of the single worst date Anna had ever been on, said, as he unzipped his bag and threw a battered-looking old-school iPod onto the seat. ‘But they made me put my guitar in with the luggage. I said to them, if you hurt my baby, man, you’ve not only ripped out my heart, but you’ve basically fucked my life. Didn’t seem that bothered.’

Anna sat stock still, staring at the back of the seat in front of her, trying to come up with a plan, any plan to avoid detection. Perhaps if she managed to somehow slip on the eye mask one-handed, whilst still keeping the magazine in situ, and then maybe she could drape that crappy blanket thing they gave you over her face, he’d never know who he was sitting next to. Bitterly, Anna wondered why, out of all the people in the world, it was Miles Harker who’d bagged the last but one seat on the midnight flight out of Heathrow, next to her. Of all the seats, of all the flights, of all the terrible times to bump into Miles Harker, the universe had decided to put him here, now. Perhaps he wouldn’t notice or remember her, Anna thought, wildly hopeful. After all, though he’d had a starring role in it, it hadn’t really seemed to bother Miles that together they had experienced the worst blind date in the history of bad blind dates. It was a faint hope though. Of course Miles would recognise her, not because she was especially beautiful, but because the last time he had seen her she most certainly hadn’t been. In fact, if anything she had mostly closely resembled a living Picasso, her features swollen and misshapen and relocating themselves to quite the wrong position on her face.

Anna winced as she felt Miles’s weight ease into the seat next to hers and jammed her legs into ‘I Heart London’s in a bid to ensure they didn’t brush against Miles’s, for fear that he might somehow recognise her knees from the power of touch alone.

‘The Big Apple, huh?’ Miles said amiably, clearly yet to notice that he was being most decidedly blanked. ‘So good they named it twice, and all that. I’ve been before of course, but not like this.
This
trip might be the most important thing I’ve ever done, and if it’s not, well it’s a hell of a city to drown your sorrows in, right?’

Anna wavered, torn between her innate inability to be rude, even to men who had previously almost caused her sudden and untimely death, and her desire to be anywhere else on the planet right now.

‘Hello?’ Miles persisted cheerfully, resolutely failing to take offence. ‘Anyone in?’

Anna sighed and reluctantly, lowered the magazine.

‘Hello,’ she said heavily, unable to bring herself to look him in the eye.

‘Shit, it’s you!’ Miles exclaimed, apparently happy to see her, pushing his dark hair off his face and grinning. ‘Angie, right? No … Alice … no … something prim and a bit Julie Andrews … Oh that’s right,
Annie
! It’s Annie! Bloody hell, what are the odds? Hi, Annie, how are you, over the rash thing now? Shit, I’m really glad you’re not dead, that would have been a bummer. Like, imagine the karma, dude!’

Anna rubbed her hand across her forehead, acutely aware of the sudden interest all the other passengers in their immediate vicinity were showing them.

‘Oh, it wasn’t that kind of rash!’ Miles said, catching the eye of a woman across the aisle who was staring at them with naked curiosity, perhaps imagining that they couldn’t see her ogling them at less than three feet away. ‘Not a sex rash, it was an allergy rash, actually more of an allergy swelling. Like, you know, anaphylactic shit, wasn’t it, Annie? I bought her a cocktail, without knowing she was allergic to kiwis, her lips blew up like a pair of massive fish lips, then her head ballooned. It was totally gross. There was a rash all down her neck, and she almost stopped breathing. I had to take her to A&E. Spent all night there while they gave her a shitload of drugs. We couldn’t even talk because, well, Annie sounded a bit like the Elephant Man; she looked a bit like him too, bless her, once the hives came up, size of golf balls. I mean normally, yeah, I do spend the night on a first date, but not normally with one of us on life support.’

Miles grinned as he turned back to Anna, his stubble darkening in the creases of his smile, his blue eyes twinkling.

‘Anna,’ she said, miserably. ‘My name is Anna. Not Annie.’

‘Wow,’ Miles said, as if he’d only just really looked at her, turning his back on the woman across the aisle to study her determinedly stand-offish profile. ‘You look a lot better without your head swollen to four times its natural size. I’ve got to be honest, I wasn’t surprised when you didn’t call me. I mean apart from me nearly killing you with exotic fruit extracts, it hadn’t exactly been the world’s hottest date, anyway, had it? I think that’s why I bought you the cocktail; I thought it might cheer you up a bit. Shame neither of us knew you were allergic to kiwi. How someone gets to the age of thirty without ever having encountered kiwi, I’ll never know.’

‘I was twenty-eight,’ Anna retorted. ‘And I never liked the look of kiwi – it’s furry on the outside and green on the inside, that’s just not natural. And anyway, I was completely cheerful on that date, as cheerful as any person could hope to be whilst having their eardrums violated in the kind of dive that Dettol was invented for.’

As the plane began to taxi towards the runway, Anna remembered all too well how uncomfortable she’d felt sitting, in her white linen dress and neat heeled pumps, in a bar in the West End, which was situated in some basement of a pub that felt, for polite middle-of-the road pop fan, Anna, a little bit like being trapped in the noisy part of hell. Simon, who was just as much of a brother to her as Liv was a sister, had sworn blind when he’d set her up with the singer from the band that he was planning to employ at his wedding that Miles Harker was her perfect man.

‘I’m telling you, darling, this man is exactly what you need,’ he’d said over a Sunday lunch at Angela’s house. ‘He’s like your very own human antidote, and he’s extremely good-looking too and quite well built. The arms, oh the arms in a cut-off shirt are to die for darling. If I wasn’t an almost married man …’

‘Then why don’t you set him up with Liv?’ Anna had asked Simon. Angela nodded enthusiastically in agreement at her suggestion. ‘Liv’s single, and she’s much nicer than me. People like her.’

‘Liv,’ Simon said, winking at his sister. ‘Already has her eye on someone she’s just met at the gym.’

‘Oh really?’ Angela said. ‘What’s her name?’

‘And think of the sex,’ Simon said, neatly deflecting Angela’s attention away from her poor daughter. ‘I can see you two together. Him rugged and rough-hewn, you angelic and prim. Him passionate and base, you uptight and sort of frigid. I bet you’d have really great sex. Besides, apart from Liv, you are the last single straight woman in the whole of London.’

Anna was not remotely persuaded by the promise of great sex, sex was something she’d had limited experience of and what’s more, what little she had encountered was decidedly underwhelming. What had finally clinched the deal was Simon’s description of her as the last single woman in London. What if Liv did hook up with her mystery man, what would her life be like then, not to mention her plan, which at the time had only allowed her a scant three years to find a man, fall in love, go out with him, swap keys, move in, wait to be proposed to, have a decent engagement, get married at Christmas (as per childhood dream) and allow a year of togetherness, before having the first of two children. No, it hadn’t been the promise of hot sex that had finally persuaded Anna to go on a date with Miles, it had been cold hard fear.

All Anna had known about Miles, as she’d hurried through Leicester Square one summer’s evening to meet him, was that he was a musician, a singer/song-writer to be precise, played in various bands and did quite a lot of high-profile session work to support himself financially, as he worked on breaking his own career with the sort of single-minded determination that Anna admired, even though she thought it was the law that once you were over the age of twenty-five you could never be a pop star.

First impressions were pleasing, Anna had noted, when she stopped just across the street from where Miles was waiting for her, bang on time, leaning up against a wall, his hands tucked in his pockets, one biker-booted foot resting against the wall, the other tapping away to some tune that only he could hear. He was tall, the very same muscular arms that Simon had waxed lyrical about were on display, encased along with the rest of his very promising-looking torso in a plain black V-neck T-shirt. He was very far from her usual type, which Anna had to admit was a nebulous concept, and one she hadn’t entirely nailed down herself, what with his tattoos and his longish straight dark hair, which on that evening had been tied back into a ponytail, showing off a small silver hoop through one ear. He was undeniably handsome though, with a strong profile, a good Roman nose, a defined jaw. And as Anna waited to cross, she couldn’t help but notice that the girls that walked past him on that summer’s evening almost all gave him a second glance, and some gave him two or three. One had even walked a few steps past him, paused and then turned on her heel to walk back in the other direction, hopefully tossing her long hair over her shoulder on the return trip in a bold, if failed, bid to get his attention. Miles had not noticed the girl, remaining deep in thought about something, or possibly, now that Anna knew him a little better, napping, as she was fairly sure he never thought very deeply about anything very much.

Still her hopes, while they had not been sky high, had not been at rock bottom either, as she crossed the road to meet him, wondering what this man in his torn jeans and biker boots would make of her, with her golden hair neatly coiled in a bun at her neck, sporting a pristine white linen pencil dress and a pair of matching heeled peep-toed pumps.

As it had turned out though, Anna would never know what Miles thought of her, because they’d spent the first hour of their date unable to hear each other over the dreadful noise, and the next eight hours in Accident and Emergency while a team of doctors tried their level best to stop her from suffocating on her own tongue.

Still, at least Miles had stayed with her for most of the night, until the dawn broke over the city, and the steroids and antihistamines kicked in sufficiently for the hospital to finally let her go home, armed with an epi-pen just in case she ever encountered a kiwi again. And he had insisted on escorting her in the cab until it reached her address, even making it wait while he walked her to her doorstep, where they had stood awkwardly for a moment or two, Anna’s lips still too misshapen and swollen for her to be able to say anything coherent, even if she had wanted to.