The Armchair Bride (2 page)

‘What if we make each other’s resolutions?’ I say.

‘No way am I fathering a child with you.’

‘You’re never going to let me forget that, are you? I’d been drinking and my sister had just told me she was pregnant. I felt left out.’

Andy looks triumphant.

‘I’ve got it. By the time you reach forty, you need to have found yourself a man.’

I bristle. He’s hit my Achilles heel full on. It’s not that I think I’ll
never
get married. What bothers me is the way every other girl I ever knew seems to be miles ahead. Some have second husbands. I’ve yet to snare my first.

‘In
four months
, you expect me to find someone? I’ve spent most of my adult life looking.’

‘That’s the deal. Now quick, you do me.’

I think for a moment. Before long, people across the country will start the inevitable countdown, the one that ends in an explosion of streamers and the inescapable let down of another year starting off exactly like the one before. I read somewhere more people jump off tall buildings on this night than at any other time of the year. I can see why.

The music stops, men jeer, women laugh and someone lets off a premature party popper. In this one moment, the room brims with hope.

Ten, nine, eight …

‘Quick,’ Andy says. ‘Or it won’t count.’

Seven, six, five …

‘I don’t know what to say.’

‘Say anything. It doesn’t matter.’

Four, three …

‘OK, you have to become famous.’

Two, one …

‘What?’

Shrill bagpipe music and cheers drown out a recording of Big Ben.  

Should auld acquaintance be forgot ...

Andy still looks like I spoke in a foreign language.

‘When I tell people my best mate is Andy Grimshaw, I want everyone to look impressed,’ I say.

‘In six months? What do you suggest I do? Screw Brad Pitt in the middle of Sunset Boulevard while Tom Cruise holds my coat?’

He looks unimpressed.

‘You said I could choose whatever I wanted. You expect me to find a man in four months; surely you can get someone to notice you in five. Go to Hollywood, hang around the studios. It’s what you always said you’d do.’

‘Hollywood?’

‘London then. I’ll pay your bus fare.’

‘Unless you’ve forgotten I have a full-time job.’

‘Not as of now, you haven’t.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m your manager, I’m letting you go.’

‘You’re
firing
me?’

For auld lang syne my dear, for auld lang syne...

If Andy’s having problems believing what he hears, he isn’t the only one. I’ve no idea what has hold of my head, but I can’t stop. Somehow, in this moment, it all sounds right.

‘I’m letting you go. Giving you time and space to live your dream.’

‘You can’t do that. I’ll appeal. I’ll take you to an industrial tribunal.’

‘I’ve still got the photos of you pissing in the punch at the closing party for
42nd Street
, I’m not afraid to use them.’

‘You wouldn’t!’

‘You’ve always hated this job,’ I say. ‘You said yourself you’d leave if you could afford to. Well this is my gift to you. I can manage the rent for a bit while you concentrate on acting full-time. Call it a sabbatical.’

I take hold of his hand.

‘If it doesn’t work out, you can always come back.’

I’m enjoying this more than feels right. A plan forms - I will become his Svengali, but before Andy points out I appear to have taken leave of my senses, someone yanks aside the tablecloth.

‘There they are.’

Penny has come mob-handed with Angela, who still has hold of the mistletoe and now looks even more like the sort of woman who eats boys like Andy for breakfast.

‘Come to mummy,’ she says.

Andy runs for his life and I follow.

Past higgledy-piggledy rows of chairs draped with spent streamers. Past abandoned tables strewn with empty plastic cups, and out into the night.

On the street, we stare at each other, neither really sure what has been agreed. Andy flags down a passing cab.

‘Where to mate?’ says the driver, happy to land his first double clock fare of the year.

‘Did you mean what you said?’ Andy whispers.

I could so easily shake my head and laugh, tell him it was a mad minute and that of course I didn’t mean it.

‘Did
you
?’ I say.

He nods. ‘You’ve been on your own too long, Lisa. It’s getting weird. I won’t always be around.’

‘Then yes,’ I say. ‘I meant what I said too.’

The driver turns around.

‘You know the clock is running?’ he says. ‘Whether you sit here all night, you’ll still have to pay me.’

‘Canal Street,’ Andy sits back in the seat. ‘Take me where the poor boys dance. I’m one of them now.’

Two

The alarm clock rings. Why did I even set it? I lie very still in bed convinced that at some point in the last few hours there must have been a major road traffic accident. My head hurts and when I try to open my eyes, the light stings. Best to settle for shallow breathing, just taking in enough oxygen to stave off major organ failure.

‘What the hell happened last night?’ I croak to myself.

‘I have no idea,’ a male voice says and I freeze. I’m not alone. For all I know, this isn’t my own bed.

I lie still and try to decide my next move. Run for the door? Pretend to have fallen back to sleep? How did this even happen?

I replay highlights from a faint and fuzzy argument with Andy after we talked our way into an already full gay club. He pushed a glass of something into my hand and I necked it in one. I have long since accepted my lack of will power and can only imagine the evening continued in much the same vein.

Slowly, I force open one eye and feel a rush of relief to see my
Hello Kitty
collection. I’m on home ground. No need to run for any doors. There’s a glass of water on the bedside table which I down in one.

‘No!’ The whispering man gasps. ‘My contact lenses. You’ve swallowed my contact lenses.’

Wincing with the effort of sitting up, I find I’m sharing the bed with Andy and an empty whisky bottle. Black swirls dance before my dry eyes.

‘What did you say?’ I splutter, aware of something in my throat.

‘My fucking contact lenses were in that water. I’ve only worn them once.’

‘They didn’t suit you. You looked like something off one of those creepy American teen wolf dramas.’

‘Exactly,’ he says. ‘Have you not been on Gaydar? Everyone wants that look these days. Or someone to dominate them. Or both.’

I swallow down a sick burp. ‘You’d need to add a million Photoshop filters to pass off as a teenager. A pair of cheap contact lenses won’t fool anyone.’

Andy sits up.

‘I’ll have you know they cost me twenty quid. I’m well aware it’s a drop in the ocean compared with your daily make-up budget.’

He mimes quotation marks in the air.

‘And anyway, if they look so stupid, how come I spent the evening attached to a Polish waiter called Nelek?’

‘When was this? I don’t recall any Polish waiters.’

‘It was after we got to the club. You slumped in the chill-out room and did this big speech about how all the people you know are married and how you’ve been left on the shelf.’

My toes curl so tight they might snap.

‘Then you stood up and asked if anyone fancied giving you a quick dusting.’

‘Did anyone offer?’ My voice is a whisper.

‘It really wouldn’t have mattered if they did. I was sat with Nelek, minding my own business when you decided to serenade us with
The Wind Beneath My Wings
.’

‘I didn’t know they did karaoke.’

‘They don’t, but that didn’t seem to stop you.’

‘Why didn’t
you
stop me?’

“You seemed to be having such a great time and I knew in the end you’d shut up. You almost always do.’

I close my eyes. ‘How many verses?’

‘Just the one.’

‘Thank God!’

‘But you chucked in at least six choruses. Every time we thought you’d finished, up you’d pipe again.’

A flashback skips unannounced into my head. A mad red-haired bird who looks like she’s been dragged through several bushes backwards then forwards then dumped in a ditch. Smeared lipstick and a pint in both hands.

‘Did
anyone
join in?’

Andy leaps up and over to the mirror, his recovery verges on remarkable.

‘Eventually a couple of Chinese queens joined in, and that seemed to really cheer you up. When you’d taken your bow and kissed a few hands, you thanked everyone, told them they’d been a great audience, and passed out. I had to get Nelek to help pour you into a cab.’

‘I can never show my face in there again.’

‘It’s not as if anyone knows you,’ Andy plonks himself back down beside me.

‘You promise?’

‘I promise.’

The shame is crippling. Thank God, I didn’t make a show of myself at the staff party. Andy gathers me to him and I lay my head on his chest. He smells of stale sweat, but I’m too weak to protest. He clears his throat.

‘I’d be more concerned about what happened when we got back to the theatre, if I was you,’ he says and my stomach flips.

‘I was all for coming back here, but you came round and insisted the taxi take us back to the party. You said you wanted to wish
everyone
at work a proper Happy New Year.’

‘Say you’re lying.’ I already know he isn’t, thanks to another flashback.

Bemused faces, horrified faces, management faces.

‘You were quite insistent.’

‘Why didn’t you stop me?’

‘Do you even know what you’re like with a drink in you?’

I want to die. The vivid recall of an impromptu sing-song plays out in my head. My arms draped around the neck of my boss Brian before I forced him down onto a chair and climbed astride to belt out
Hey Big Spender
with my skirt up around my ears.

‘Andy,’ I say after minutes spent staring at the ceiling and hoping it might crash down and end my shameful life. ‘Is there any chance nobody saw?’

‘None at all, Lisa, and for those who did miss out, there’s always Facebook.’

I say nothing else, instead I will the headache/brain tumour to take a grip and finish me off. My eyes close and before long, I drift into a fitful sleep.

I’m on a yacht, serving spaghetti hoops to laughing women in elegant frocks. For some reason, I’m naked and telling lame ‘
knock knock
’ jokes. Someone asks me to give them a song and someone else offers to accompany me on a silver baby grand, which appears from nowhere. I agree and launch into
The Wind Beneath My Wings.

When next I wake, it’s dark and Andy has gone, though he’s tidied up, tucked me in and placed a bucket on the floor next to the bed. The bongo player in my head sounds to be on a break and my alarm clock comes into focus. 5.05. I pull an old T-shirt and sweat pants from the linen basket to shuffle into the kitchen. Next to the kettle, there’s a note from Andy.

It’ll be fine. Everyone was drunk.

There’s nothing on TV apart from films I’ve seen a hundred times already. All my teatime quiz shows have been suspended in favour of movies about wizards, aliens and evil aunts who live in castles and torture small children. I channel hop and end up staring at a harrowing documentary about old people with hypothermia.

When it gets too much, I mute the sound and grab my laptop. Andy’s left a second note on the keyboard.

Four months to find Mr. Right. Don’t forget.

I don’t need any mirror to tell me I look ancient. My two sisters bagged the good genes, sharing a peaches and cream complexion. I, on the other hand inherited the sort of colouring popular amongst corpses and actors who play heroin addicts. In the summer, if I so much as glance through a window at the sun, my face fills with freckles and turns lobster pink. In the cold light of a January evening, I’m translucent. My skin tone all the more noticeable thanks to hair that stops short of pillar-box red. Hours of effort with a hairdryer, straightening irons and every styling product known to man, woman or beast is wasted. Today, I know that I must look like a badly creased and very old Little Orphan Annie tribute act.

I sink into my favourite armchair. It belonged to Dad. After he died unexpectedly of a heart attack at 64, Mam went into a frenzy of ripping out the old and filling her house with new things. A woman who lived to scorn IKEA, became their best customer. Bleached pine and white ash replaced the chocolate browns and floral patterns of my childhood.

One weekend, shortly after Dad’s funeral, I took the train south to Birmingham to spend a weekend helping sort through his things. I arrived as my Uncle Brendan hauled Dad’s favourite chair into a skip. I’m normally so restrained, so terrified of making a fool of myself in public, but I started to sob, great gulping, howling gasps for air. I didn’t care who heard. Curtains twitched and Mam, who’d been counting on me for comfort, ended up sitting me down with a cup of hot sweet tea and promising that Brendan would fit the chair in the back of his Landrover and drive it back to Manchester.

Dad’s chair is blue and battered. Andy and I live out our lives against a backdrop of oatmeal and magnolia, so it sticks out like a badly bruised thumb, but Andy knows I wouldn’t give it up for all the money in the world. It holds too many memories. In my darkest moments, I talk to Dad through this chair. I still see him sitting in it and placing my hand where his once lay makes everything better on those days when your period is late, your best friend doesn’t call or you feel like shutting the curtains and hiding from the world. Days like today.

My laptop whirs and clunks into life and I absent-mindedly trawl through email and news sites before calling up PlaceTheirFace. A flashing message informs me in the last month, three of my former school friends have created new profiles. Do I want to read their stories and find out how they - like almost everyone else I once knew - have wonderful lives? It’s such a miserable day outside and I already feel so incredibly fed up, it won’t hurt.

I had a hard time of it at school and didn’t make friends easily. Patronising school reports informed my parents that “
Lisa worries too much about what others may think
”. Despite this, they laboured under the impression that
I’d
be the one to go on to bigger and better things. There wasn’t much competition. My elder sister Sue’s waters broke mid way through her English exam. Amy, two years my junior, had a first class degree in male anatomy before she was fifteen. Compared to them, I was
a saint. Mam and Dad took me on day trips to Oxford and stood in awe before the dreaming spires. For birthdays I got book tokens.

Under pressure to perform, I studied hard. Ignoring invites to classmates’ houses and after-school discos and left school laden with qualifications but light on friends. I went to university more out of obligation. Not Oxford or Cambridge - they wouldn’t have me - instead I escaped to Manchester and Mam pretended to be proud. Even if I was studying drama. Which even she knew was a bit rubbish.

I first logged into PlaceTheirFace about two years back and only out of curiosity. Sharon at work used to rave about it.

‘It’s a real giggle,’ she said. ‘Half the girls in my class are on their second ASBO.’

Maybe I’m the big success story, I told myself. The one who got away. My heart sank as I scrolled through page after page of
happily married
classmates. Some posted photos of their wedding days, their kids and wisteria-fronted cottages.

It left me feeling like a big fat failure. Every sensible cell screamed
log off
. But I, of course, knew better and kept going back, and what started small grew until it threatened to take over my life. I drew up a list of those who made no mention of any significant other.

It was depressingly short.

Other names came to mind - girls who had yet to discover the on-line hall of shame. Driven by the need to be sure I wasn’t alone in having a less-than- perfect life and with way too much time on my hands, I typed names into search engines and scoured local newspaper website archives of wedding photos and announcements.

And all this research threw up one awful result. I’m one of two social misfits. Two girls left firmly on life’s shelf. Me and Helen McVeigh. Little Helen McVeigh with the lazy eye and a stutter. My best friend at school.

I didn’t want any Tom, Dick or Harriet to know I was still single, so cobbled together an on-line profile that made me sound happy, grounded and successful. I may have added a serious boyfriend and a picture of an engagement ring from some foreign website.

Girls I’d not heard from in years sent cute messages, congratulations and invites to stay in touch. I finally became popular.

‘Have you never thought this is all a bit weird,’ my friend Sharon asked over chai latte in a fancy Manchester cafe.

‘Nobody tells the truth about themselves on line,’ I said as I upgraded my college degree to first class with honours.

‘Fact of life.’

‘Why do you even care?’ she said and I looked at her cradling her new baby daughter and knew she’d never get it. Her life was one long whirl of clothes that don’t show sick, mother and baby groups and people that tell her how wonderful she is to balance a return to work with her family life.

‘I’ve got issues,’ I said. ‘It’s this or a room with bouncy walls.’

‘You need to get out more. Somewhere normal people go.’

‘Are you suggesting I’m not normal?’

She didn’t answer and her look said it all.

At school, Helen and I were the quiet ones, in awe of the pretty girls, or
The Swans
, as we called them. These were the girls who wore make-up, smoked cigarettes and French-kissed boys tin the bushes at the back of the playing fields. The Swans took their orders from Ginny Walters. Her father was a butcher and once, she poured pigs’ blood into my schoolbag. It was my birthday and Mam had bought me a new t-shirt with a tiger on it - like the ones worn by the girls in Abba.

Helen and I stayed friends long after school and she’d visit me in Manchester for weekends. But then time got in the way. Some weekends I’d have to work extra shifts. Or she’d agree to do some sponsored walk and I’d be stuck with a housewarming party or she’d have a baby shower. With one thing or another, we’ve not been in touch for a bit and I’ve a horrible feeling I forgot her last birthday.

My mobile sings into life - it’s Andy.

‘Hey big spender, fancy joining us for a hair of the dog?’

I ignore the obvious attempt at sustained psychological damage. ‘Who’s us exactly?’

‘Well just me, actually. Nelek promised he’d meet me here, but he’s rung to say he’s been called in to do an extra shift.’

‘So I’m the booby prize?’

‘Do you fancy coming or not?’

‘I feel like death.’

‘Me too, let’s die together.’

Rather than face a night on my own, I agree to meet up and busy myself with getting ready. I shower, tie my hair back into an acceptable knot and throw concealer at my face. There’s little point in doing any major renovation work, I’m unlikely to meet the man of my dreams in the sort of bar Andy frequents. Not for the first time does it cross my mind that a single woman of my age really ought to visit fewer gay bars. Much as I love my extended family, I need more contact with eligible and available straight men.

I ring Sharon - I hardly saw her at the staff party thanks to spending half of it under a table and the other half the worse for drink.

‘Fancy meeting up for a quick drink? Andy’s been stood up and needs my support. I wondered if you fancied tagging along.’

‘Oh Lisa, I’d love to, but we’ve got to baby-sit Rob’s sister’s kids tonight. They had Bethany last night.’

‘That’s OK, some other time though? Andy’s sort of backed me into admitting I ought to get out and about more in places where single, straight men gather.’

‘He’s right,’ she says. ‘How about we meet up on Saturday?’

‘Oddly enough, I am free,’ I sigh and draw a circle around the date on our new calendar -
Oil Rig Workers of the North Sea
- twelve men covered in soot and oil with their shirts off.

I’m about to switch off my computer and call a cab when something pings.