Revenge of the Wedding Planner (16 page)

Bill…

Had he left me? Of course not. As he often says, at times like these, he has nowhere else to go. But I know he’s only teasing me. Bill was in our bedroom playing his favourite bass guitar with the volume turned down very low. You can’t play the guitar loud in a terraced house anyway or the neighbours will call the police, but somehow the softness of the notes seemed ominous to me. I think it was Joy Division, and he plays that when he’s really down, which is about once in a decade. Bill didn’t see me because he was facing out of the window as I tiptoed up the stairs. I watched him for a while from the doorway, thinking how handsome he was and how he might have been famous if he hadn’t married me and had four children. I started to cry again then. Only this time I knew it was going to be a proper, headache-inducing marathon of crying so I bolted myself into the main bathroom and pressed my face into a folded bath towel so nobody in the house would hear me.

A few moments after that, Julie called my mobile to say that Jay was lying asleep beside her in her room at the spa, and that he’d lost his job for shagging a client. Julie’s words, not mine. They’d been caught doing the wild thing in the showers, apparently, but Julie wasn’t annoyed in the least. She said Jay was far too good for the spa anyway and he never should have been working in a bar in the middle of nowhere in the first place. She told me she’d tied Jay’s ankles together in the ladies’ changing rooms when they thought the last swimmer had left the pool area, but then one of the cleaners came in and caught them mid-climax. And that Jay had leapt up, overbalanced (always a risk with bondage) and fell heavily onto the bench, bruising his world-class appendage. Poor Jay! Maybe if he’d kept his family jewels in his shorts a little more often, they wouldn’t have come a cropper over a wooden bench. But anyway, he’d got his marching orders. Then Julie said she’d be home soon because she was missing the lighthouse terribly and had I told Gary they were finished yet?

I didn’t reply. I couldn’t speak because the room was spinning. God, I was pissed that night. I forgot to tell Julie that Gary was on his way down to Galway. I felt a bit sick, to be honest, so I just said I’d talk to her some other time, and best wishes to Jay O’Hanlon, and cheerio. And then I switched off the phone and went on crying. It hadn’t even dawned on me that Gary might be almost at the spa by then. I mean, it takes about seven hours to drive from Belfast to Galway. And you could knock two hours off that, easily, if you thought the woman you were going to marry was making a fool of herself with a handsome
toy boy. Poor Gary. But anyway, there was a big pile of fresh towels on the mat beside the radiator and they were all nice and warm, and, to tell you the truth, I think I dozed off for a bit. Well, half dozing and half sobbing, I suppose. I really was very tired.

Of course, my big sob scene was ruined twenty minutes later when I attempted to subdue my swollen red eyes with cold water from the mixer tap. Bill heard the gurgling in our ancient copper pipes and he knew I’d come home. Or at least, that was my interpretation. In fact, he knew already that I’d returned. He’d been tracking my movements all day.

‘Mags, love?’ he said, knocking lightly on the door. ‘Mags, are you okay in there?’

I thought of ignoring him, but really, how long could I stay locked in my own bathroom with no food or bedding? And besides, I was so weary I would have sold my soul to the devil for twelve hours’ unbroken sleep in my lovely ivory bedroom. I unbolted the door and stood there, refusing to look up at him. I couldn’t bear for Bill to see my puffy old eyes beneath such a beautiful silken curtain of blue hair.

‘Wow, that’s beautiful,’ he said after an initial slow intake of breath and I knew he was turned on like never before. He’s always had a little thing for Toyah Wilcox, you see.

Once a Punk, always a Punk.

He touched my fringe with the back of his hand and whistled softly. The silence between us was charged with electricity, just like in the Limelight Club twenty-odd years before. But of course I’d messed that up too, hadn’t I? Because now we couldn’t celebrate my new hairstyle with a
bit of a Punky romp because we’d had a fight earlier in the day and he wasn’t sure of me any more. I’m a sulker, I’m ashamed to admit, and when I’m in a bad mood it takes me days to drag my libido out of the doghouse. Bill knows this. The moment passed and we both sighed heavily.

‘I’m sorry I shouted at you,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean a word of it, you know I didn’t. I’m just so tired, darling. I’m wrecked, actually.’

‘That’s okay. I’m just glad you’re back in one piece,’ Bill said softly and he put his arms around me and kissed the top of my head. ‘You smell of cigarette smoke,’ he said, smiling. ‘Off boozing on your own? What am I going to do with you?’

‘I’m sorry, darling. I had a few drinks in the pub. The funeral, you know, and saying goodbye to my sisters again, and the worry over Emma and Alexander…’

‘I know. It’s okay. Forget it. Can you remember how many gins you had? Should we be on our way to the hospital?’

‘No, I think I’ll survive. I had three drinks. Or five, maybe… definitely no more than five. Were you worried about me when I took off?’

‘Well, yeah, I was. Obviously. But I followed you and saw you going into that fancy salon. Then I lost track of you for a few hours. Later, I phoned the pub and they told me you were there. I asked them to let me know when you were on your way home and I was looking out for you from the bay window.’

‘So you did see me coming in?’

‘Yes, I did. I thought you might want to take a moment to compose yourself before apologizing to me.’

You see? I told you! The man is Spock’s long-lost twin!

‘Actually, Bill, I missed you. The minute I stormed out of the house I missed you but I was in such a rotten mood I just had to keep going. I won’t do it again, I promise.’

He smiled a kind of lopsided smile then, as if he wanted to believe me but couldn’t quite bring himself to.

‘Do you want that cup of tea now?’ he asked, reasonable to the last.

I nodded and shuffled past him into our bedroom. ‘That would be heaven,’ I sighed, ‘and then I’ll have a nice hot shower and get this awful smoke out of my lovely new hair. I can’t wait till they ban smoking in the North.’

After which, I collapsed onto the covers and fell asleep before the kettle was even boiled.

Next morning, Bill had gone to work by the time I woke up, my head throbbing with a massive hangover. My cardigan had been taken off and laid on the dressing-table chair. My lovely new boots were side by side under the bed. Not a mark on them after the day I’d had. I guess that shows you what top-quality boots they were. I was wearing my slinky black PJ bottoms and there was a big glass of water on the bedside cabinet. And a basin on the floor alongside a box of tissues and a couple of old towels spread over the carpet. Memories came filtering back to me slowly, very slowly. Oh, dear, I had asked for double gins the night before and I’d had five of them! Ten gins! And I’d been moaning about my woes to the barman like some middle-aged man having a mid-life
crisis. What a madwoman, I thought with a flash of burning shame, before convincing myself that pub measures were tiny and therefore I’d had only about five proper gins. Which wasn’t too bad considering the pressure I’d been under in recent days. And I daresay the staff have heard it all before and they only half listen anyway. There was a note from Bill on the pillow beside me. Yawning, I opened it.

Bad news.

Gary
had
crashed his car on the way down to Galway. I really shouldn’t have told him like that, I thought, feeling a severe twinge of guilt. Luckily, he hadn’t been seriously hurt, though his leg was broken badly, with multiple fractures, and he’d had a spot of concussion. A lorry had pulled out in front of him and he’d hit a telegraph pole, swerving and ending up on his side in a field of potatoes. He’d phoned Bill from the hospital first thing that morning to let us know he was okay. I thought it was strange of Gary to phone our house, but most likely he wanted me to pass the message on to Julie. Poor Gary, still trying to make contact with Julie even from the misery of his hospital bed. He’d been taken to Drogheda General at the time but was soon to be transferred to Belfast by ambulance. The car was a write-off. Bill said he would leave it up to me whether Julie was notified or not. He seemed to think it would be a good idea to leave a message for her at reception in the spa, but he didn’t think we should get involved beyond that. I immediately phoned the spa and left a message for Julie and then, it being a Saturday, I crawled out of bed and ventured downstairs to see what my family were up to.

More bad news.

Alicia-Rose was dancing round the kitchen waving a letter in her hand. Singing a pop song by Men At Work. Turns out she’d secretly applied for a year’s studentexchange programme in Australia and had just been accepted. Oh, goody. One of my precious, gorgeous children was leaving home for the first time. The start of the end of my perfect family life. No, no, no! Suddenly, I stopped caring about Julie altogether.

11. A Souvenir from County Galway

Oh, Julie! Julie Sultana, what were you thinking of?

I mean, I’d almost stopped caring about Julie. Because of the shock and anxiety caused by Alicia-Rose’s proposed trip to the Land Down Under, any interest in my boss’s personal life from that point onwards was purely academic. Well, that was the plan anyway.

Get this.

Julie got my message all right about Gary’s car accident and in a rare fit of compassion she decided to come home to Belfast and make it up with him. For a while. Just until his leg mended. I couldn’t believe it when I heard. If Julie was ever going to leave Gary Devine, she should have done it that day. It made no sense at all for her to cosy up to Gary again when she’d cheated on him with Jay O’Hanlon with such energy and enthusiasm. After all the hoopla she made about me telling him it was over between them, I ask you! But no, Julie must have decided her life wasn’t complicated enough at that point. So, she made it up with Gary and he was delighted. According to Julie, she just felt too sorry for Gary to dump him when his leg was broken. But I thought that she knew, deep down in her soul, that he was the man for her. Anyway, they patched things up quite easily.

I mean, Gary didn’t know about Julie
sleeping
with Jay and he didn’t know that Julie had told me to break it off
with him, so there wasn’t much explaining to do, really. Just an apology (over the phone) for taking off to Galway without him in the first place and another apology for not filling him in years ago on the ‘Charlotte and Sidney Marital Meltdown Roadshow’. But to add a little twist to the proceedings, Julie brought Jay O’Hanlon back to Belfast with her in the white Mercedes convertible and she installed him in the all-mod-cons apartment in the converted flourmill in Saintfield. A souvenir of her stay in Galway at the spa with the shocking-pink armchairs in the foyer.

As you do.

And then she drove on over to Gary’s house, had a lovely hot bubble bath and collapsed into their rustic-style bed, exhausted.

‘Love the hair,’ Julie said to me when she popped into the lighthouse to open her mail on the Monday morning. It was her first day back at work since meeting Jay.

‘Do you think I’m too old for a blue fringe?’ I asked nervously. Julie doesn’t flatter me, as a rule. She thinks I look like ‘a gypsy matriarch in mourning for her wildcard husband’, most of the time. But she doesn’t mind because I make her look so good, by comparison.

‘Na. Go for it, kiddo. Forty is the new thirty, Mags. Or, in my case, twenty-five! Oh, I shouldn’t tell you this but my thighs are so stiff I can barely walk. It’s not easy doing the splits on a glass coffee table. I’m telling you, those lighthouse steps nearly killed me this morning.’

Poor Julie.

She was so proud of herself.

‘We take naughty pictures of each other,’ she said then, winking at me.

I didn’t say anything. But I sincerely hoped she was storing the Polaroids in a safe place. We didn’t want a sex scandal on our hands, after all. It would have been very bad for business. Or maybe not, but then we can’t all be Paris Hilton.

‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘I have about a million things to ask you about these latest bookings.’

And for a few blissful hours it was business as usual. Except with Jay safely settled in front of the flat-screen telly in the Saintfield apartment, and a giant pepperoni heating through in Julie’s formerly pristine designer oven. Julie had left her toy boy some money and a copy of the
Yellow Pages
and told him just to phone out for a takeaway whenever he was hungry. There was a video store nearby and a small supermarket where he could buy milk and bread, cigarettes and magazines. Julie had any amount of CDs and DVDs in the sitting room and a few pieces of gym equipment in the second bedroom. So, hopefully, her new lover wouldn’t be bored. Well, not a bit of him! Jay took to Belfast life like a duck to water. He must have thought he was in heaven as he’d recently been evicted from his digs in Galway and had been kipping on a friend’s (broken) couch. He knew how to turn on the power shower in Julie’s luxury bathroom and he knew where the pretty glass mugs and the Earl Grey teabags were kept. And he didn’t know a sinner in the city. So there was no way he could get himself into any trouble while Julie wasn’t there. So far, so good.

Then, after lunch, Julie popped into the Royal Victoria Hospital on the infamous Falls Road in Belfast and prepared to wrap Gary round her little finger. She
bought him a huge bunch of pink roses and a heart-shaped box of chocolate and champagne truffles. She told him she’d been a bit silly, and yes, she’d flirted with one of the barmen at the spa in a fit of crazy desperation (related to her being forty-one and only just coming to terms with it), but nothing serious had happened between them. The engagement was still on and there was nothing to worry about. Which was amazingly brass-necked of Julie considering she still had bitemarks on her bottom from her latest Sharpe-inspired role-playing afternoon with Jay. That old military jacket was seeing more action in 2005 than it ever had in its heyday, I can tell you.