Revenge of the Wedding Planner (20 page)

Still, Julie seemed happy and that was the main thing.

Meanwhile, I had given up crying in the family bathroom and was feeling strangely calm. I think I finally understood Bill’s lifelong theory that tears are a waste of energy and that emergencies require meticulous planning instead of pointless tantrums. I didn’t remind him of the night he’d cried until three in the morning about Emma’s lost baby. He was trying to block it out of his mind and, to be honest, so was I.

We were also trying to convince ourselves that our beloved only daughter, Alicia-Rose, wasn’t really going to leave us for a year and go to Australia. We told each other she would back out at the last minute and say she’d changed her mind. After all, we said, how could she leave her palest pink bedroom with the dinky bathroom hidden behind silver shutters? And most of all, how could she ever leave my five-star laundry service and home-cooked dinners every night of the week? And so, each time she brought home another funky bikini or pair of trendy flip-flops, we cooed over her latest purchase and said how
lovely she would look on the beach. We never thought for one second she would actually get on the plane and fly away.

But she did.

Halfway through September she calmly bought her ticket and traveller’s cheques and off she went. Waving goodbye to her felt like an out-of-body experience. Bill and I just about managed to hold it together in the airport until she was safely through the Departures gate. Then we limped out to the car and Bill sat silent for half an hour while I kept saying, ‘Did she really board the plane, Bill? I can’t believe it. Should we go back inside and check that she actually did board the plane? I mean, she might be sitting in there, afraid to come home and tell us she bottled out? I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it, Bill. I just can’t
believe
it.’

And so on.

Bill told me to hush, and that he’d drive home in a minute when his hands had stopped shaking and sweating so much they slid off the steering wheel. In the end, we sat there for three hours listening to Radio 1 with our mouths open. Then we went back into the airport terminal and asked after our beautiful daughter at the information desk. But there was no sign of her. Yes, she had been on the flight. Yes, it had set off on time with no problems or delays. Our Alicia-Rose had grown up and left us and we were both in a profound state of shock for several days. I tried drinking a few nightcaps of gin and tonic to block out the pain but it didn’t work. I just woke up in the middle of the night with a raging hangover and murderous abdominal cramps. So much for lapsing into
a lovely alcoholic oblivion, I thought sadly. Clearly, my adult metabolism had moved on from the Pernod-and-chips diet of my youth. A future of stone-cold sobriety stared me in the face and there was no escape from my stomach-churning sense of loss. I didn’t like it one bit.

I went into Alicia-Rose’s bedroom once and switched on her bedside lamp for a few minutes, knelt down by the side of her bed and said a prayer for her safety. Bill saw me kneeling there and he didn’t even laugh. That’s how serious it was.

‘Say one for me while you’re at it,’ he said gently and I just nodded.

It was around that time I started going back to church. Not to attend Sunday service, no. I don’t really like kneeling in crowds, I must say. A bit claustrophobic. It’s years since I’ve been to Mass (apart from weddings and funerals) because I prefer to pray in private. But in the quiet times between services I would go in, sit at the back of the church and think about things in general for half an hour or so. Maybe light a candle occasionally if there was nobody else about to see me. And, I thought, maybe if I’m sitting here, God will give me a little feeling of reassurance; he’ll let me know that Alicia-Rose and Emma and everyone will be all right. Well, I said to myself, there must be more to life than just getting by? There must be some point to all of this struggle and heartbreak and pain and love and loss? Why do I love Bill and my children so much if all we are is a bunch of living things competing with one another for food and shelter?

And though it absolutely kills me to admit this, I enjoyed the atmosphere in the church. It’s an old one,
very Gothic in style, lovely stained-glass windows. Shafts of coloured light streaming down onto the long wooden benches when the sun came out. So, even though I’ve seen
The Da Vinci Code
and I’m a fervent supporter of birth control being made freely available in developing countries and all that liberal stuff (and by the way, where did they raise the money for all these fabulously beautiful churches in Ireland in the seventeenth century when so many of the people were dying of hunger?), I decided to put my common-sense head away for a few minutes each week. And just concentrate on being spiritual and praying for Alicia-Rose out in Australia with the poisonous spiders and the crocodiles and the blistering sunshine. I mean, you worry about your children all the time anyway but somehow the fear is a lot worse when your precious child is on the other side of the world. I even knelt to pray at the ridiculous outdoor grotto dedicated to St Bernadette, which is something I always swore I would never do. And I’d even told Bill that if he ever caught me doing it, caught me looking sideways at that neon-painted grotto, he was to shoot me. Or, failing that, take me to the Royal Victoria Hospital for an urgent brain scan.

What can I say?

It was a difficult period in my life.

I was lonely.

There, I’ve said it.

I had a rich and active life with a full-time job and a husband to love and four children to worry about, and I was still lonely. Bill was busy training Alexander to be a plumber and teaching him to drive because you can’t be
a plumber if you can’t drive yourself to call-outs. So he didn’t phone me during the day any more, like he used to.

And Julie was busy telling lies to Gary on a full-time basis and spending every minute she could merrily mounting and dismounting the bold Jay O’Hanlon. He was insatiable, she told me. He never got tired. Well, I thought, how would he? He has all day to lie about, relaxing and showering and resting his mighty doo-da at Julie’s expense. Ten minutes after a frantic ‘wreck the flat’ bout of sweaty animal sex, she said, he was ready to begin again. She was chuffed with herself for teaming up with such a devoted stud. Even when Jay got her name tattooed on his arm one day (incidentally, in the same parlour I’d gone to, though I hadn’t told Julie about it yet), she thought it was all some kind of major joke. She laughed and laughed at the fact her name was written in black ink on a barman’s arm. I took Jay’s tattoo as an alarm bell, though. A red flag of warning, but Julie didn’t flinch. I mean, tattoos are pretty permanent, aren’t they?

‘He can get it covered over when we split up,’ she said casually, tucking into a ready-made pasta salad from Marks, one lunchtime in the lighthouse.

I was munching my favourite snack, their sour cream pretzels. I have no idea how much money Julie and I have spent in that store over the years. An absolute fortune no doubt, but it was worth every penny. Sometimes, it’s only the promise of a lemon drizzle cake or a stone-baked pizza that stops you from signing yourself in somewhere.

Anyway.

‘He can have it disguised with leaves or roses or something when we go our separate ways. Keep your wig on, Mags. Honestly, he’s such a nutcase!’

As if being a nutcase was a good thing.

I wondered if Julie was subconsciously falling for Jay because he was so ‘off the wall’. Because she’d been brought up by a couple of ‘eccentrics’ and that’s why it felt so normal for her to be with Jay. I mean, he didn’t work at all and he didn’t go out of the flat much and he rarely got dressed. But then again neither did Julie’s mother when she decided to drop out of the real world for ten years.

I was sure it was only a matter of time before Gary was able to drive and socialize again and then he’d find out about Jay, and the whole thing would end in tears. Belfast is a very small town. There are no secrets here. But, unfortunately, that means if you
do
grass somebody up there’s nowhere to hide. So we generally keep our mouths shut. Therefore I was pretty sure nobody would actually
tell
Gary that Julie was doing the dirty on him. But he was bound to clock them himself in a café or bar or just sitting at the traffic lights somewhere. I worried about it more than she did, but even I didn’t think Julie Sultana’s toy-boy tryst would end up in a shocking outburst of violence in the Café Vaudeville! Oh, well, as Julie said during our little stint in A&E at the City Hospital (which made a pleasant change from the Royal Victoria), nobody could possibly accuse her of being dull and boring. She was a lot of things, but she wasn’t dull and boring. Every cloud.

We’ll get to the Café Vaudeville incident in a little while.

October arrived and the nights began to draw in.

And then we got our biggest commission of all time. The people from Dublin turned up again at the lighthouse. Poor Gary, he’d been so distracted the day he called to take me out for lunch, he hadn’t recognized them. It turned out the guy was a major rock star and I do mean
major
. He was a fully paid-up by-the-book, larger-than-life, eyeliner-and-platform-heels American rock star who was living in Ireland for a while. Enjoying the good life on his country estate in County Kildare. Or until the novelty of being off heroin wore thin, at any rate. His doe-eyed girlfriend was a top French model, about ten inches taller and four stone lighter than he was. Your classic ‘bucket and spade’ combination. And they wanted to use a wedding planner that none of their friends or acquaintances had used before. So they’d chosen us from the
Yellow Pages
.

All I can say is, thank goodness Julie happened to be at work that day because I would’ve passed out on the stairs if she hadn’t. It’s not that I get star-struck, not really. I just think most celebrities come from another planet. It’s kind of hard to relate to a person who goes to the corner shop for caviar and crackers in their own helicopter. Well, maybe not the corner shop, but you know what I mean. And it’s impossible to know what to say to them. You can’t exactly waffle on about the price of home-heating oil, can you? When they own an island in the Caribbean. Now I come to think of it, if it wasn’t for celebrity gossip, what would we even talk about with one another?

Julie was magnificent, the way she handled those multi-millionaire
cooler-than-cool dudes. She didn’t raise an eyebrow throughout the entire meeting. It was amazing. Me? I had three hot flushes, my mind went blank twice and I almost said ‘Fuck me,’ when the rock star described his budget. Not because I fancied him, no, dear. But because I was totally stunned by his extravagance. A heck of a lot more than it cost Bill and myself for a civil wedding and two beanburgers in 1985, I’ll tell you that! I can’t reveal their names because we had to sign a secrecy clause. But I’m sure you can guess who I’m talking about. The photographs were already promised to a glossy magazine and none of the guests were going to be allowed to take cameras into the venue. It was so secret we had to arrange the entire thing without any of the guests finding out there was even going to be a wedding (until about twenty-four hours beforehand), never mind the tabloid press getting tipped off. Heavens, no. They would have ruined everything by hovering above the ceremony in some light aircraft and whipping up a sandstorm. Well, a gravel-and-cigarettes storm, maybe?

However, I can tell you some of the details. They wanted their wedding ceremony to be held in the grounds of a ruined Irish castle, and the reception in a luxury marquee which would be erected nearby. What ruined castle exactly, we didn’t establish on our first meeting. Somewhere remote enough to be considered terribly private and exclusive but not so remote the guests couldn’t actually find it. Right away, I knew there’d be a muddy swamp of regulations to wade through – some of our by-laws date back to the Stone Age. Ditto, a good few of the local council bigwigs. Still, I hoped they’d be so
besotted with the idea of a celebrity wedding taking place in their backyard that they might be prepared to compromise a little on the details. Money talks, isn’t it the truth?

The marriage ceremony itself? Well, they fancied something whimsical and poetic specially composed just for them. And for the wedding to be co-celebrated by a pagan Druid in full regalia and an open-minded magistrate who didn’t mind being upstaged by a pagan Druid. Again, a little money would probably go a long way towards easing any misgivings the magistrate might have, we decided. And we wondered to ourselves whether we knew anyone who needed a new roof on their local community centre, and did they happen to have a ruined castle nearby? You know how it is when you’re working backwards?

Oh, dear, now this kooky little arrangement could lead to all sorts of problems, I thought to myself. But of course I smiled politely and so did Julie, as if we get Druids and open-minded magistrates traipsing in and out of the lighthouse on a regular basis. I knew the papers would have a field day whipping up fears of a pagan revival and condemning the worship of false gods and all manner of jiggery-pokery. No doubt, we’d be invited onto
UTV Live
and asked to explain ourselves to some fire-and-brimstone religious minister. I’m sure Julie was relishing the prospect of so much free advertising for Dream Weddings but I (being the practical one) feared the loss of our more conservative clients. And they do tend to be the ones with the healthiest bank balances.

Needless to say, the rock star and his French-model girlfriend didn’t have to worry about any of that. Their
main concern was making sure they had enough room for their entourage near the altar. Apparently, they couldn’t get married without five personal assistants, three make-up artists, two hair-stylists, one fashion designer, one nutritionist, four pet-minders and a lighting expert from Norway within hand’s reach. (They’d hired the Norwegian themselves because they knew it gets pretty dark in Ireland when the clouds roll in, thus requiring a lighting expert from a Nordic background.)