Revenge of the Wedding Planner (25 page)

So there we were, the three of us, stuck in that tiny office at the top of the lighthouse. Me and Julie trying to locate vegetarian chefs, trustworthy security guards, red top hats and designer mobile-phone covers. While Jay spent most of his time lying on his back reading the papers and looking for another job, the Café Vaudeville having decided to terminate his employment rather
abruptly. It seemed they’d made a mistake and didn’t need another barman after all.

I can’t say he was really putting much energy into the search, though. He kept saying he’d love to open his own restaurant some day if he could only find a financial backer willing to put their faith in him. No doubt he had his handsome green eyes firmly trained on Julie’s half a million pounds’ equity. She must have known what he was hinting at but she didn’t pick up on it. I suppose she hadn’t decided yet what she was going to do with him. And you don’t want to go into business with a toy-boy lover, do you? So she just said a restaurant sounded lovely and what a pity she would need all the money from the sale of her flat to buy another property, prices being the way they were. Otherwise she’d have jumped at the chance to go into the restaurant business. I couldn’t prevent a delighted smirk or two from crossing my chops when Julie said that. At least she hasn’t gone so crazy she’s giving Jay O’Hanlon access to her finances, I thought to myself. Good for you, Julie.

Then Jay took up smoking again. Cigars to be precise. I think he did it to spite us because neither Julie nor myself is a big fan of the deadly weed. And he started getting a bit moody with Julie, not answering her sometimes when she asked him a question or pulling away from her whenever she kissed him. Then she’d be whispering to me, had I noticed anything different about Jay and what did I think was wrong with him and what should she do about it? I felt so claustrophobic marooned in the lighthouse with the pair of them, I began to yearn for lunchtimes when I’d be sent out to the shop to buy sandwiches.

I thought of my sisters and Alicia-Rose back in Australia after the holidays and I half wished I was there with them, maybe living in the outback as a mystic or hermit of some kind. And I remembered when Alicia-Rose was about to go through the Departures gate for the second time and she said I was looking tired and maybe I should give a month’s notice to Dream Weddings and set up some little thing of my own. Something smaller and less pressurized, maybe selling wedding hats online? I was touched that she’d noticed how exhausted her old mum was feeling but I didn’t think I’d ever be confident enough to go into business for myself. I remembered holding onto her until the last call was announced and then Bill pulled me away and we were both heartbroken all over again. I went home and moped about the house until I felt sick, and when I called Australia the following day to make sure Alicia-Rose had arrived safely at her destination, she said I was becoming neurotic and I was to cop on to myself. There’s gratitude for you. But I was stunned by my daughter’s confidence and proud as hell of her, at the same time.

And then Jay started having an affair with the French model. Broken nose notwithstanding. And I began to think Alicia-Rose might have been onto something, regarding me and Julie going our separate ways. Oh, yes, I expect you saw that little dalliance coming, but I have to say, I did not. I must have been preoccupied with my own various family dramas but I definitely didn’t think Julie’s toy boy would ever hook up with her best client of all time.

Poor Julie.

She was well out of Jay’s league, wasn’t she, that French model? Even though the rock star was a bit wrinkly and a bit short and his molars were crumbling and he was on heavy withdrawal-medication. And he had breath that smelt like cat food. Sorry, but he did – maybe he ate some weird kind of health food? But he was so incredibly rich! I mean, how on earth did Jay O’Hanlon manage to catch the eye of a top supermodel? Even if the thought had crossed my mind that Jay couldn’t be trusted around other women, I’d never have guessed he would have tried it on with someone of her pedigree or that she would’ve been the least bit interested in a penniless Irish stud. I mean, they’re a dime a dozen, good-looking Irish men. A bit of forthright banter, a few moments of intense eye contact, a roguish way of holding a cigarette inside their curled-up hand. Go into any pub in the land and there’s ten of them standing idly at the bar. You can take your pick, missus, and good luck to you. But with the money and connections she must have had, you’d think she’d have laughed in Jay O’Hanlon’s face. It makes me cringe now, looking back at how naive I really was. I like to see the best in people, that’s my problem. But the truth is some people have no conscience whatsoever when it comes to money, power and sex.

What happened was (and I heard this from the woman herself, mind, just a few days ago when she rang me to say she was sorry for causing so much upheaval), our supermodel called unexpectedly to take a look at our goody-bag samples. We weren’t expecting her because she was an international model! But anyway, she happened to be in Belfast to take part in a photo-shoot for a prestigious
new department store so she took a taxi out to visit Julie and me afterwards. But we weren’t in. Because Julie and myself were up a ladder at the castle Julie had finally chosen for the wedding venue, dangling rubber bats off a piece of invisible thread to get a feel for the puppet show. I know, it sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? But, actually, the bats did look amazingly alive, bouncing up and down with their little wings flapping. And we knew it’d look even better at night, backlit with some yellowish spotlights.

So yes, the model landed out to the lighthouse and who should answer the door but Jay O’Hanlon, topless and wearing his sexiest faded jeans over bare feet. His hair still damp after a quick dip in the miniature sink, and a pot of black coffee and some deep-fried gourmet sausages wafting their aroma up and down the stairwell. It would have been rude of her not to come in and wait, no doubt. And she was as powerless to resist our Jay’s charms as Julie had been before her. A few pleasant words about the new decor in the lighthouse, a sip of black coffee, a suggestive nibble on a fat pork sausage, and our model ends up on the end of Jay O’Hanlon’s legendary doo-da.

Oh, Julie.

The biter, bit.

It started in January, the affair, apparently. I didn’t find out about it until March, and to this day I blame myself for not telling Julie when I
did
find out. I caught them at it one afternoon, you see? Doing horizontal gymnastics on my old sofa bed in the office. The two of them prone on the beautiful cushions I’d chosen with such care and
attention to detail. And paid for with my own money. That Jay, naked as a sandboy. Whatever a sandboy is. And her fully dressed, high heels still on, on her extremely large feet. The only drawback to being six foot tall, I expect? I mean, she had
massive
feet. Yes, fully dressed except for her pink floral cami-knickers which were hanging from the drawer handle of Julie’s desk. The cheek of it! Cheating on Julie Sultana! Doing the wild thing on Dream Weddings’ hallowed premises. Her endless, honey-coloured legs wrapped round Jay’s neck and him smoking a cigar with his eyes closed. She wasn’t saying much but then I saw he had her mouth loosely gagged with one of our stocking samples, ‘Winter White’ I think it was called. She was giggling and panting and I think she mumbled something about a little Irish house with a huge big chimney on it, but then my French isn’t the best and she did have a silk stocking lashed across her face.

I don’t know what I ought to have done, if there’s some sort of handbook available giving guidance on these things. But anyway, I just closed my eyes and stepped back onto the stone staircase. Tiptoed down again all the way to the bottom, went outside and set off along the coastal path for a good long walk. I didn’t phone Julie to tell her what I’d seen. Or to make sure she didn’t discover them too by sending her off on a lengthy errand or something. My mind had gone slightly blank. And so I just sat on an old wooden fence looking out to sea, waiting for them to finish. Had a nice breath of fresh air and felt so pleased with myself that I haven’t ever been tempted to cheat on Bill during our twenty-odd years together. Not even one time. This is not my problem, I kept telling
myself. This is nothing to do with me. And anyway, Julie had stated categorically on several occasions that she didn’t genuinely
love
Jay. It was only the hot sex she was keen on and the idea of having a much younger lover. So it wasn’t exactly betrayal on a major scale,
not really
.

I thought the French model was only amusing herself with a bit of rough from the Emerald Isle and, as soon as the wedding was over, she’d forget Jay and get on with the business of being very rich and famous. And besides, I was still feeling a tiny bit sorry for myself over Alicia-Rose leaving for Australia again. And worrying she might never come back. (She was raving about her new home all over the holidays and I said to Bill, ‘Just you wait and see, she’ll be emigrating for good next, like Ann and Elizabeth.’) And, okay, maybe I was also being a total cowardy-custard.

But, honestly, by then I had lost all faith in my own judgement. Maybe Jay and the model have genuinely fallen in love, I thought to myself. They’re both gorgeous and of a similar age. Maybe this is the real thing at last? And we can’t go around telling people who they can and can’t fall in love with, can we? I mean, that’s what Western civilization is based on, isn’t it? Personal freedom? And God knows I didn’t want to be the one to tell Julie what was going on – she might have punched me in the beak with the shock of it. So yes, I crept back down the stairs and pretended I knew nothing about it. Bubble integrity and all that. It was getting too much for me, all the kinky-bondage shenanigans. Day and night, there was no getting away from it. It was putting me off sex with Bill, to be honest with you. And I didn’t want that to happen, no
way. The day that Bill’s feather-light caresses fail to move me is the day I become an old woman.

So I blocked it out of my mind, and made sure there was plenty of noise when I was coming up the stairs from that day onwards. And I went on washing the dirty dishes in the lighthouse and making hundreds of phone calls and collecting mountains of receipts for our various wedding projects. The rock-star wedding was fixed to take place on 1 May and Julie didn’t find out about Jay’s affair until halfway through the actual marriage ceremony. And when she did find out, well, there were fireworks aplenty all right but they weren’t all in the sky.

16. Alexander

Alexander and Emma got back together over the Christmas holidays, did I mention that? Not officially back together but things were going that way. The signs were there. Bill told his eldest son not to push things, romantically speaking. To play hard-to-get for once in his life, to treat Emma like he was doing her a massive favour by even speaking to her. And to make a few mysterious calls on his mobile phone and then say it was nobody if she asked him who he was chatting to. So she’d think he was seeing other girls. And he was to pin a few posters of curvy celebs in skimpy outfits to his bedroom wall, for good measure. Nothing too obvious, no bimbos with their fingers in their mouths, no. But nice arty black-and-white ones, which’d be more convincing, Bill said. Which I declared was grossly and totally unfair behaviour towards a (hopefully) recovering anorexic young girl. But Bill said all was fair in love and war and that Emma needed something else to obsess about besides calories and inches. And it worked. Honestly, my darling husband might be a humble, hardworking plumber but I reckon he could have been a top psychiatrist if he’d had the education. Never mind knowing your inner self! Nothing gets most people fired up like a bit of serious competition.

Emma went raving mad, went absolutely mad as a
hatter when she saw the sexy posters in Alexander’s room and she tore them off the walls, ripped them to shreds and stamped on them. Quite a feat if you’d seen the state of her at that time. But Alexander just said that was okay, Emma could take the posters down if she wanted to, but he was still ‘so over’ the waif look. And then he nipped into the bathroom to answer a text message. Emma checked his mobile phone later for missed calls and questioned him endlessly about his social life. But he was giving nothing away. He was magnificent, actually. He looked guilty as hell yet he’d done nothing whatsoever except hang about the house for ages contemplating suicide. And driving the rest of us demented with his depressing music played at top volume and his unpredictable mood swings. I was out a fortune on fish and chips around that time too, trying to pamper my son and keep his appetite healthy.

And then Emma started eating again.

Just little bits and pieces at first. A small orange, a finger of toast with a scrape of butter on it, a solitary carrot grated and sprinkled with finely crushed rock salt and black pepper. But it was a start. Next, she stopped weighing her muesli and even cut the workout sessions down to thirty minutes a day. One time, when we were all having fish and chips in the kitchen (yet again), she said she’d send out for a cheeseburger if that was okay, seeing as the rest of us didn’t eat red meat very often. We were stunned. And she did get the cheeseburger too, and she ate every last bit of it. Even the garnish. And no, she didn’t pop up to the bathroom afterwards – we were all holding our breath and checking our watches,
and she didn’t go to the bathroom until the burger would have been safely past the point of no return.

Alexander was delighted with himself and so was Bill. I worried that if Emma did transfer her free-floating anxiety onto her relationship with Alexander, we might end up with a stalker on our hands. Or, worse, if Alexander changed his mind about loving Emma,
she
might not be able to live without
him
. And the situation would simply flip over. But Bill said Emma was almost dead anyway so the poor girl starting to eat again could only be a good thing, and we’d deal with any resulting problems as and when they arose.