Revenge of the Wedding Planner (10 page)

My sisters.
Her daughters
.

‘Oh, Margaret, please control yourself! You always were the drama queen in the family. Why on earth would I want to parade myself about Belfast and have the entire city talking about me! The merry divorcee? And poor Tone dragged along into the bargain? Are you mad? It would only be harder for the family, not knowing whether to sympathize with me or blame me for your father’s death. Or give poor Tone a hard time about his relative being in the UDR. My money’s on the blame-game. Your father never ate properly after I left him. It was only the milk deliveries that kept him alive all this time. Why single men can’t be bothered to cook is beyond me. There’s nothing to it, just peeling the odd carrot and chucking in a stock cube. Laziness, is all it is. Oh! Got to go, someone’s at the front door, it might be a guest. Bye, love.’

Someone at the door, my bum in chives! I knew she was fibbing to get me off the line. There was a hint of a Devon accent this time too, I noticed. Well, I suppose she was only trying to blend in. When you’re from Northern Ireland you get weary of clocking the concentration on people’s faces as they try to work out which side of the fence (or Peace Line) you’re from. It’s easier to do an accent and deny any connection. I’ve done it myself at Heathrow. I’m very good
at the Bolton accent, if I do say so myself, after watching Peter Kay videos non-stop for several years. I could be Peter’s understudy. If I had the nerve to go on stage, that is. Blimey, Charlie!

‘Bye, Mum.’

But she was already off the line.

My father was dead.

The news finally began to filter through.

Bubble integrity dropped alarmingly as the realization reached my overloaded brain.

Before I’d even put the phone down, I was howling like a toddler who’s dropped his ice cream in the sand and knows there’s no chance of persuading his parents to buy him another one.

‘Dad. Oh, Daddy,’ I wailed, sounding as high-pitched as the seagulls. ‘What a waste of a life! What a terrible waste! You could have taken up fishing or built a model railway in the back garden. What do other men do in their spare time besides watching qualifiers? Oh, God!’ I reached for a handful of Julie’s trademark scented tissues and settled in for a good old mope but immediately there was another phone call.

Without hesitation, I picked up. I was hoping it might have been one of my sisters and that maybe she’d heard about the tragedy already. We could have had a lovely long chat about what might have been, and about those endless summers we spent hanging round the carousel looking for dropped coins in the parched grass.

But it was Alexander (my eldest child) and he was in pieces. Sobbing and crying and shuddering with exhaustion.

‘Mum, I don’t know what to do!’ he wept. ‘Everything’s gone wrong.’

‘Jesus Christ! Alexander, tell me, son. Tell me immediately,’ I commanded him, unable to wait for a single second in case the house was on fire and he needed to be reminded to phone the fire brigade.

‘Oh, Mum!’

‘Is anybody hurt? Is one of the family hurt?’

‘I don’t know what to do.’

‘Alexander Grimsdale!’ I screamed. ‘Tell me
right now
.’

‘It’s Emma,’ he cried, blowing his nose a bit too close to the receiver. ‘She’s broken up with me, Mum.’

I deflated with relief, like a hot-air balloon that’s just been shot down.

‘Oh, Alexander! For fuck’s sake! You nearly gave me heart failure,’ I said. The mere mention of heart failure reminded me of my father and I resumed crying too. ‘Is that all? You’ll make it up with her again, son. Don’t you always? You’ve split up six times this month alone.’

Emma’s a beautiful girl but she was very moody with it around the time she was anorexic. I knew she had an eating disorder the day I met her three years ago because she was very thin and claimed to have an awful lot of food allergies. I mean, I felt sorry for Emma but you can’t help wishing your son had fallen for one of those no-nonsense girls on the hockey team instead. You know the ones with legs like tree trunks and healthy pink complexions? Personally, I have to say that Emma manipulated my Alexander a little bit. He was utterly obsessed with her fragility and her other-worldliness. And she wore the most expensive shoes. At the time, I didn’t trust
anyone who wore designer shoes, I must admit. I thought it showed a narcissistic streak if a person considered their own flippers too good for humble chain-store clobber. But maybe I was just being an inverted snob. (In light of what happened later.)

‘You don’t understand, Mum. Emma’s
pregnant
but she won’t talk to me about it and she says she doesn’t know if she’s going to keep the baby. Mum, you’ve got to see her and talk to her for me? Please, Mum? You’ve got to make her love me again. I want the baby, Mum, and I want Emma to marry me!’

And he blew his nose again, louder this time.

Well, now.

What do you make of that, I thought to myself.

A moody, anorexic and beautiful young woman who’s pregnant with my obsessive son’s baby. What’s a girl to do? I could feel my brain cells dragging out the shutters and nailing them up. Too much to deal with, too early in the day. It was time to be Supermum. That’s what we get paid the big bucks for! (I wish.)

‘Where are you, Alexander? Are you at college? Go sit with some friends, yes? I’ll be right there, my darling.’

But he was at home in his bedroom, it transpired. Reading Emma’s letter and considering an overdose. He was listening to Bill’s copy of Radiohead’s first album. I could hear it in the background. Another few minutes of that and he’d be ready to leap off the attic window sill onto the wrought-iron railings below. Teenage boys are like that, you know. On a hair trigger, emotionally. They’re not faking it to get out of washing the car. They really don’t understand that teen angst is a passing phase and
if they can just hang on in there till they’re twenty-one or twenty-two, they’ll become somewhat desensitized to pain and suffering like the rest of us oldies. Enough to keep going when it all seems rather bleak and pointless, at any rate.

‘Alexander,’ I said. ‘Listen to me, son. Switch off that music at once.
At once
, do you hear me? And go downstairs and set the kitchen table for lunch, for you and me. Yes, just do as I say. I’ll bring home fish and chips and we’ll talk about this properly. It’s not the end of the world. No, it is
not
the end of the world. Emma’s frightened but she’ll come round. You’ve got to be strong, Alexander. She’s going to need a lot of support, whatever happens. Now, can you manage without me for half an hour until I get there? Or will I call your dad? Only he’s on an important job today.’

And he was, too. Fitting a rain-shower for a celebrity client. Tina Campbell, lovely girl who reads the news here. Nice choppy blonde crop, arty jewellery, pink jacket, genuine smile. You’d like her.

I was going to ask Alexander to take in the washing for me as there was loads of it and it might have occupied his attention for a while but then I stopped myself. I didn’t want to go placing him in close proximity to a few metres of strong, plastic cord. That
bloody
Emma, I thought to myself and I almost laughed with hysteria. I’d always thought she was too skinny to conceive.

Alexander said he’d try to hold himself together for thirty minutes though he couldn’t make any promises. I hung up and called a taxi straight away. I think I screamed at them to come ‘immediately if not sooner’, but I can’t
be sure. They know me well enough by now, anyway – they would have understood it was just another domestic emergency in the Grimsdale household. Weeping uncontrollably, I peeled back my ears for the taxi’s beep. Hating myself every second for not being able to drive – for goodness sake, children of seventeen can drive – but there was nothing for it but to clatter down the stairs with my legs feeling like melting jelly and lock up the lighthouse.

It was only as the taxi was speeding off down the road that I remembered Gary was coming out to see me. But Gary had been demoted several steps down the ladder of domestic emergencies and it was all I could do to keep calm in the back seat of one of First Class’s finest motors. I’ll settle Alexander down first, I decided. The children are my top priority, always have been. Then we’d contact Emma and assure her we’d do anything she wanted. We’d mind the baby for her somehow while she went to classes at university, we’d do the babysitting in the evenings. Anything she needed, whatsoever. Even if she didn’t want to be with Alexander any more, we’d still do our bit in practical terms as well as financially. Alexander would have to get a part-time job and start paying his share towards the baby’s upkeep. And if Emma didn’t want to keep my first grandchild… well, I just hoped things wouldn’t come to that. If that happened, I’d rather not have been told about the baby in the first place, thank you very much.

And then, when we’d made some headway in that little situation, I’d have to call my sisters (both living in Sydney, Australia, did I say?) and tell them about Dad passing away. They hadn’t seen him in ten years and I fretted that
it would be too much for them to take in. Organizing a funeral, grieving for the poor man and all the years he’d wasted listening to political talk shows on the radio. Not to mention the expense of it all. I knew Dad wouldn’t have subscribed to one of those nice and sensible ‘Over Fifty’ plans you see on the television, either.

‘How depressing is that?’ he used to say. ‘Saving up for your own friggin’ funeral? Screwed for money, all your life. Right to the bitter end they’re trying to wring it out of you. Well, they can stuff their over-fifty plan, so they can, the greedy bastards. They won’t be getting ten quid a month out of me! They can chuck my carcass on the Halloween bonfire for all I care. Or feed me to the rats. Capitalist
fuckers
!’

Oh, yes.

You can’t buy memories like that.

And I have no idea who to invite, I thought miserably. He has loads of relatives.
Had
loads of relatives. But none of them liked him very much. And he didn’t like them. There didn’t seem to be many frequent visitors to his home, at any rate. Like I say, he could be difficult. Maybe an informal stand-up buffet would be easier on all of us, I remember thinking as I bolted into the chippy a few doors down from our house, on the main road. I almost forgot to pay the taxi driver, I was in such a state. Or would a buffet seem like we were scrimping?

‘Two cod suppers, please.’

‘Nine quid. Cheers, love. Salt and vinegar?’

‘Yes, please.’

Nine quid for two cod suppers? Bloody ’ell, I thought, feeling ever-so-slightly robbed. The price had gone up by
fifty pence since last time. What is the world coming to?

Then it was a breathless dash up to our front door and thank goodness Alexander was still alive, his handsome face all swollen up with frightened tears. I hugged him to me for what seemed like an age but was probably twenty seconds. Together, we made our way to the kitchen, me softly rubbing his back the way I did when he was a baby and couldn’t get a burp up. He was still sobbing too much to speak so I babbled on about the price of everything and we set the table together. Gary rang me as I was in the middle of unwrapping the cod suppers and telling Alexander that everything would be all right. Alexander loves fish and chips, you see. That’s his favourite treat and I was trying to keep things as normal as possible for him while Emma made up her mind about their future. All three of them. Hers, Alexander’s and the bambino’s.

‘Mags? What’s happened to you?’ Gary said crossly. ‘I’m standing here at the lighthouse and there’s nobody in. I brought coffee and cakes. And you’ve got people waiting! They’re awfully cross with you. Come all the way from Dublin, so they say.’

‘Oh, God, that must be my three o’clock appointment, come early,’ I said, closing my eyes.

I’d forgotten all about them.

The couple from Dublin, not my eyes.

‘The motorway’s much improved,’ I added feebly. ‘Um, can I take a rain check on the lunch, Gary? Sorry. My father has
died
and my son needs to talk to me about something extremely important.’

‘Oh, I am sorry,’ he said at once, ‘to hear about your father.’

‘Thank you. Listen, I’ll call you tonight if I have time, to talk about Julie. Okay? And by the way, could you please tell those people from Dublin I’ll give them a buzz tomorrow evening and we’ll arrange another appointment?’

‘Okay, Mags,’ he said. ‘How did he die?’

‘Suddenly,’ I said. ‘His heart stopped.’

Which was rather stating the obvious, I daresay. I mean, is there any other way of dying?

‘I’m sorry for your trouble.’ Gary sighed.

What a gentleman.

‘Thanks. Bye.’

Then I dropped my mobile on the stone floor and broke it.

‘Shit!’ I said, looking hopelessly at the pieces.

‘Mum,’ said Alexander, somehow having managed to filter out the fact that his maternal grandfather had expired in rather tragic circumstances, ‘I love Emma so much, I don’t think I can live without her. How long does it take if you swallow tablets? And do you go to sleep before it hurts?’

‘What?’

My heart twanged in and out again, like a cartoon heart falling in love. Could my six-foot tall,
gorgeous
, firstborn son really be this serious about that skinny little waif, I wondered. It seemed that he could. I was overwhelmed with fear.

‘Don’t even say something silly like that, my darling,’ I scolded him lightly, as if I thought he was only joking.
‘Of course you can live without her. She’s always been very moody, I have to say. Moody little Emma and her designer shoes! Her feet pampered out of it and her poor wee tummy starved. Plenty more fish in the sea, love. That reminds me, have a small piece of this lovely cod before it gets cold. Where’s the vinegar, darling? They didn’t put enough on mine. Did you fetch it from the cupboard? I can’t eat chips if they haven’t got lashings of vinegar on them. No, you start eating. I’ll get it. Oh, doesn’t this smell lovely? Fancy a slice of bread and butter, love?’