Revenge of the Wedding Planner (6 page)

Charlotte didn’t care about the neighbours, though. Couldn’t have cared less about any of them at that point in her life. Her depression was instantly cured and she had quite a portfolio of property to sell, what with the house and the betting shops, so she was going to be fine financially. Despite the house being built the wrong way round and the betting shops being located in slightly dodgy areas. Her heart was yelping like a randy rooster under those black widow’s weeds and she couldn’t get the mourners shifted out of the mansion fast enough when Sidney was finally planted. She practically ripped the paper plates out of their hands and shoved them through the double doors of the mansion, their mouths still full of egg mayonnaise.

Later that day Charlotte took a taxi (with Julie in tow) back out to the grave and, with the aid of a litre of petrol,
set fire to the bouquets the undertakers had left on Sidney’s plot for the sake of respectability. (She hadn’t ordered any.) In their place, she dropped a cardboard box containing his Hank Williams records, his bronze bust of Johnny Cash, his brown-glass ashtray that was shaped like a vintage car and his awful oil painting of the racehorse.

‘Goodbye, Sidney,’ Charlotte said softly to the burnt-out fake grass covering the grave and then she spat on it for good measure. ‘And good riddance to bad rubbish.’

It was the only time Julie had ever seen her mother spit. Charlotte always used to say that the government should reintroduce the death penalty for spitters as a clever way to rid society of all idiots and perverts (who were spitters to a man), so it was quite a shock for Julie to see her dear mater pucker up with such unfettered gusto.

Yes, marriage is a curious thing.

Which is why I didn’t quiz Julie in the Café Vaudeville that day when she told me she was leaving Gary. You can’t really blame Julie for not wanting to marry Gary, can you? Even though he was gorgeous in every way and even though he treated her like a princess. As they say nowadays, Julie has some ‘serious issues’ where marriage is concerned. I mean, I’ve seen Julie blanch visibly at the mere mention of Savoy cabbage. And she won’t travel in a dark blue BMW, no matter who’s driving it. And we don’t use brown envelopes at Dream Weddings. At the time in question we had pale blue and pale pink ones printed up specially with our logo on the top-left corner. Every cloud, mind you.

Julie’s a magnificent wedding planner, the best in the business. Why? Because she thinks weddings are a complete and utter waste of time. She thinks any woman who wants to get married is soft in the head.

‘Half of all marriages end in divorce,’ she says, ‘and most of the marriages that do survive are like those dried-up Cheddar cheese sandwiches. Dreary but better than an empty plate. Well, I won’t be stuck with a dried-up sarnie, Mags, no way. I want a lifetime pass to the gourmet buffet table.’

May I remind you those are Julie’s words, not mine.

I reckon guys like Sidney are few and far between, and that most men are only doing their best. But that’s why Julie never gets flustered if the cars are late, never gets in a twist about the flowers or the catering arrangements. Because at the end of the day, she just doesn’t honestly
care
about weddings. She does a good job for her clients, I’m not saying she’s an absolute maverick. She does care about the reputation of Dream Weddings and she works long hours and most of the time the brides are delighted with our services. But she retains enough cynicism to stop herself from getting completely obsessed with the subject. And I don’t think anyone in her shoes would be any different.

Shame about Gary, though. I wasn’t looking forward to that little chat, I can tell you.

5. The House on Eglantine Avenue

I had a great life as a teenager. Oh, boy, did I enjoy myself or what? In the space of about six months when I was eighteen I discovered liquid eyeliner, the coolest group on the planet (Bauhaus), the unbeatable combination of Pernod and blackcurrant and the sensuous caresses of my husband-to-be, Bill Grimsdale. Every night of the week, or so it seemed, I was down at the Limelight Club pushing and shoving my way through a sea of rock fans, cigarette smoke and raging hormones. I got kicked in the face once by a crazy mosher high on adrenaline and possibly drugs and I didn’t even care. The music was so loud it interfered with my heartbeat and sometimes I forgot to breathe if there was a really good song on. I loved the Pixies, the Banshees, the Fall. Basically anything that was loud, outrageous and exploding with emotion and angst.

That’s the thing about Goths, for those of you who don’t know any personally. We’re lovely people: pacifist, artistic and generally vegetarian. We’re no threat to the fabric of society whatsoever. Take Punks, for instance. The music is great. ‘Making Plans for Nigel’ by XTC is particularly excellent, but the fans are unpredictable, I find. Could be pussycats like my Bill, could be insane like the mosher who nearly blinded me. It’s impossible to tell on first appearances. Take my advice and be polite to
Punks because your condescending expression could just be the final straw for one of them. Nu-Metal fans and the School-Rock brigade, now they really are a bunch of immature idiots with far too many tattoos and body-piercings. Not likely to attack you but they will probably take a leak in your topiary tubs. And of course your vacant-stare, always-in-a-gang, baseball-hat-loving ‘Chavs’ are the ones most likely to stab you for a tenner and spend it on lottery tickets. Never turn your back on a bunch of Chavs, they’re the most dangerous of the lot. I’d rather get stuck in a lift with a group of Hell’s Angels. But Goths are harmless enough.

Small point: Goths are not to be confused with people who are simply wearing black clothes. If you have a tan of any kind you don’t qualify as a Goth. If people never laugh at your shoes you don’t qualify as a Goth. If you don’t find the moss-covered ruins of ancient castles emotionally uplifting, forget it. And of course, true Goths are never violent in any way.

What else can I tell you?

I failed my A levels but I didn’t care. They were useless subjects anyway. I can’t even remember what they were called now. Social something-or-other and Media-whatnot. Not worth the paper I bought to write my essays on. I was considering trying to get onto some practical course at the Tech, like hairdressing, although I hadn’t yet managed to pass any exams. But Bill said not to worry about formal qualifications. He explained that he was a fully trained plumber and making relatively good money. He’d already worked out that deferred gratification was just that: deferred. So he’d got himself trained and he’d
passed his driving test and he was out on the road earning a living when most lads his age were still learning how to open a tin of spaghetti hoops on campus and sticking up posters of Betty Blue.

From day one we were inseparable. I fancied Bill so much it was embarrassing. He’d only have to touch me and I’d vibrate with pleasure. And he seemed to feel the same way though I was quite skinny then and wore far too much eyeliner. I was always getting red eyes from my mascara bleeding into them in the heat of the club. On the plus side, I did get accepted onto a hairdressing course and life went on as normal. We spent all our spare time together and friends joked that we’d be getting married soon and could they come to the wedding? It was hard to find a private place to ‘court’ so we became expert at having a quick fumble standing against a wall and with all our clothes on. And then I forgot to take my pill and the jokes became a reality.

I wasn’t embarrassed to be pregnant so young. My mother was very disappointed in me and, strangely, that was the main reason I felt I was doing the right thing. She was vaguely unhappy most of the time (until she left my father) so any advice she gave me was bound to be seriously flawed, in my estimation. I told everyone (well, I boasted really) that I was ‘up the spout’ and I had my long hair cut into a nice crisp bob to prove how grown-up I was.

We got married in a civil ceremony in the City Hall when I was eight months pregnant with our first child. I was nineteen and Bill was twenty-one. Two of the cleaning ladies at City Hall stood in for us as witnesses, still wearing
their lilac tabards with name-badges attached. Valerie and Lil were their names. They kissed us on both cheeks afterwards and threw some confetti they’d found left behind on a window sill. Lovely women, I wish we’d kept in touch. We went across the road to the Wimpy for a beanburger and a Coke when we’d signed the register, proudly wearing our matching wedding rings, pleased as punch with our outrageousness. Bill said to the girl behind the counter, ‘I’ll have a beanburger as it comes, please, and
my wife
will have extra pickles.’

We didn’t invite our families and friends to attend the ceremony because it was our special occasion and we wanted to keep it all to ourselves. We wanted to keep our wedding day pure and not get it bogged down in arguments over seating plans, and prawn cocktails versus vegetable soup. And anyway, neither one of us was particularly religious, and Bill was reared a Protestant and I was reared a Catholic and it would have been awkward.

My parents are a bit odd that way, slightly prejudiced. They can’t help it, it’s the way they were brought up. One of my dad’s ancestors, a mild-mannered farmer from county Tyrone, was mistaken for an IRA man and murdered in 1919 by the Black and Tans. With his own pitchfork, to add insult to injury. So Dad blamed everything that ever went wrong in this country on ‘the British presence’. He was a good man, my father, but he never could get past the political situation, which I think was a great pity. He once threw a perfectly good punnet of strawberries in the bin because there was a tiny Union flag on the label. Lovely big strawberries, they were. And we didn’t have a lot of money in those days.

He shipped our family over the border to Donegal for a fortnight every year to escape the 12 July Orange Order parades. The lot of us weighed down with flasks of tea and picnic blankets. You do know, of course, about the countless road blocks and general anarchy that occasionally kicks off in this place during the marches commemorating Prince William of Orange’s triumph over the Catholic rebellion of 1690? I think my father was almost hoping there’d be a civil war back home in the North just so he could justify investing in that old caravan in Mullaghmore. Glued to the radio, he was, from seven in the morning till midnight. Even took it down to the beach and tucked it in behind the blue nylon windbreaker. Come the news pips, he’d raise his hand for silence and any child who spoke during the bulletin would get a light slap on the back of the head. The barest sniff of a riot and he’d be on his feet, shouting, ‘Hush now, weans, it’s startin’, it’s startin’! Our Lord in his infinite mercy bless those left behind!’ We used to go to the amusements and hide, even if we had no money left for the carousel, my two sisters and me. He was that embarrassing. Dad hated Ian Paisley (the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party) with a passion. I think he hated ‘Big Ian’ a lot more than he ever loved us.

Such a pity.

Protestants don’t bother me, I have to say. Or Protestantism as a concept, pure and simple. So they have extremely plain churches and they can get divorced and still hold their heads up in public. What’s wrong with that? They’re not quite so indoctrinated as Catholics are on religious matters, but a lot more likely to join the army
and get themselves killed. Swings and roundabouts. Mind you, I’ve always found Protestants to have exceptionally clean homes. You could eat your dinner off the floor, usually. My dad always said that was the guilt manifesting itself for what they did to Ireland for eight hundred years. Our own house was fairly rough and ready. We’d a sack of coal in the corner of the sitting room and Mum never decanted milk or lemonade into jugs.

Everyone understood about the wedding, I must say. In fact, they were quite relieved. Probably the thought of a heavily pregnant bride wearing black lace and biker boots wasn’t exactly their idea of a big day out. We couldn’t afford a luxury honeymoon and anyway the whole honeymoon thing was a bit of a turn-off for both of us. We were used to kissing and cuddling in the dark urban streets of Belfast. Fully dressed and only half sober. Until I got in the family way, of course. Then I gave up the Pernod and so did Bill, out of solidarity. White sandy beaches were not appealing to us back then, perched as we were on the verge of parenthood. We rented a doll-sized terrace on the Ormeau Road and bought a baby’s crib and a kettle.

And then a lovely thing happened.

Our relatives (Bill’s mostly but some of mine too) got together, held a whip-round for us (the little cross-community angels) and collected several thousand pounds. We were itching to nest-build so we used the money as the deposit on a wreck of a house on Eglantine Avenue. A big Victorian house with two bay windows, three reception rooms, and one bathroom but space for three more. Six bedrooms! It had been let to students and was in a
terrible state. The doors had been kicked in, the carpets were soaked with beer and wine, the kitchen sink had been split in half with a brick and the 1950s loo was a health hazard. But Bill had been told by a builder-friend of his that peace was surely coming to Belfast after twenty long years of conflict and that property prices would really take off in the nineties. This builder was buying every house he could, fixing them up quickly and letting them out again. Less than ten thousand, some of the inner-city terraces were selling for in 1985. He said he’d be a millionaire when the troops pulled out and he was right. A millionaire, several times over.

I wish my father had bought a small property in Belfast all those years ago instead of that ancient caravan beside the sea. He was still glued to the radio, still expecting a civil war, the day peace was declared in April 1998. He said it was only a false sense of security and banned my mother from going into the town centre for six months in case she got caught up in any trouble. Mum got so bored under house-arrest she gave up her interest in local politics on New Year’s Eve 1999 and left my father for another man. The rep from British Telecom, actually. Dad gave the guy short shrift on the doorstep but Mum noticed a twinkle in his eye and slipped him her mobile phone number. They hooked up a few days later and within weeks she’d gone to England to be with him. She went on to have a fantastic facelift in Harley Street with her redundancy pay from the hosiery factory where she’d been working since the linen mill closed down. She lives in Devon now and runs a sweet little B&B with her BT lover. Roses round the door, basket full of wooden
badminton rackets in the hall – the works. Good for her. It might not last for ever, she says, but in the meantime she’s having a whale of a time. Dad said, ‘What else could you expect from the British?’ They’d taken his country and now they’d carried off his ‘beloved wife’ into the bargain.