The Queen of Bloody Everything Read online

  He sighs. ‘No, next.’ He feigns patience. ‘You can’t plan a wedding in weeks.’

  I haven’t said yes, I think. But an affirmation is apparently not a requirement. ‘Where?’ I ask then, trying to imagine myself walking down the cold, wide aisle in St Mary’s. Or will he want the Catholic church? No, he’s not even religious. Hates God as much as you do, though he has more justification, for it is God who administered all those beatings, according to his stepmam.

  ‘Here,’ he says. ‘London.’

  I let myself loosen in relief, a sign he mistakes for something else.

  ‘Why? Don’t you want to?’

  I cannot be negative, I tell myself. I cannot let even a drop of water fall onto his bonfire, his inferno of an idea.

  ‘Of course I do,’ I say. Then turn it back on him for ever doubting me. ‘Why wouldn’t I?’

  And I am good at this, can convince us both.

  So that when he opens another bottle of Moët I am already there with my empty glass, ready to toast us for the seventh time.

  So that when he racks up the lines to celebrate I lower my head over the mirror and watch myself breathe in our brilliant future.

  So that when he tells me he can’t be bothered with a condom, that we should stop bothering from now on, instead of panic, I make a pact with the universe that if I conceive a child tonight it will be the most golden ever born. That I will love it like you never loved me. That it will grow up in a clean house, with a neat life, and order all around.

  Then maybe you will understand.

  In the morning we lie, cocooned still in chemistry, heads hammering, hearts still racing as if borrowed from mice.

  ‘We’ll tell them,’ he says. ‘Go back and announce it.’

  I open my eyes, turn to him. ‘Tell who?’

  He pauses. ‘Our parents.’

  I feel a wave of nausea slosh through me. ‘Oh God. Really?’

  I feel his chest stiffen under my fingers. ‘Why? Changed your mind, have you?’

  ‘No, no. Just, I didn’t think you’d want to bother.’

  ‘You’ve got to be fucking joking. Now he might finally get it into his thick head I’m not bent.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘We’ll do them all at once. One hit, get it over with.’

  ‘In the same house?’ My head fills with a Hogarthian portrait of squalor and gin.

  ‘Are you mental? No, just on the same day. Christmas Day,’ he says then, another pearl pulled from the ether. ‘One for lunch, one for dinner.’

  I give in then, because he has decided, it is done. But there is one final straw to be clutched at. ‘Do we have to stay?’

  ‘No, we can drive home. You won’t be drinking, will you?’

  I frown. Won’t I? Why won’t I?

  Then I remember. The condoms left in the drawer. The coming hard and high up inside me.

  The golden child.

  I pull the sheets back frantically and fling myself out of bed.

  I make it to the toilet just in time.

  Lunch at the McGowans’ is overcooked and underseasoned, but what it lacks in flavour, it makes up for in glutinous abundance. The anaemic bird, a turkey I assume, sits listlessly in a sea of potato products including, unusually, Alphabites.

  ‘Noel likes them,’ Siobhán tells me, nodding at one of her twins. ‘But don’t let him have an F or we’ll never hear the end of it.’

  I look at his plate, see the U, C, and K sitting there and want to laugh but my mouth is fat with claggy mash.

  Later, in the kitchen, she eyes my glass of ginger ale with suspicion. ‘You up the duff, then? That why you’re doing it?’

  ‘No,’ I say quickly. ‘God, no – I mean, just no. I’m driving, that’s all.’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry if you were. I was four months gone before Darren made it legit. Mam got over it in the end. And Dad’s still kidding himself the kids were premature.’

  ‘Right.’ I smile then, a bid to bond, but she raises a painted-on eyebrow as if I’ve just looked right down my nose at her.

  The same look her dad gave me when Jimmy told them the wedding was in London.

  ‘Not good enough for ye, are we?’

  Jimmy closes his eyes, braces himself. Just for a second, but I see it. ‘It doesn’t make sense to come back here. We live in London. All our friends are in London.’

  ‘All your fancy friends,’ Brendan sneers.

  ‘Don’t think you’ll be getting me near Peckham,’ Deirdre adds. ‘Dirty place. Dirty people.’

  ‘It’ll be in town,’ Jimmy tells her. ‘Westminster. We can probably use the chapel at the Houses.’

  My eyes widen and I have to stop my turkey-crammed mouth gaping.

  He looks at me and looks away quickly. ‘We’ll need permission, but it’s doable. It’s a thing,’ he insists.

  Mr McGowan snorts then, red-faced, and I am unsure if it is derision, or an attempt to cover up pride. But whichever, the subject is over.

  Now there is only you left to tell.

  ‘You’re overworrying,’ he told me, as he sat on the sidelines and watched me dress that morning, eyeing me with the air of a referee or adjudicator.

  ‘You don’t know what she’s like,’ I said evasively.

  ‘I do,’ he said, taking a pair of knickers out of my hand and putting them down on the bed, taking my wrists in his hands. ‘She’s a fucked-up Trustafarian with a drink habit.’ He pulled me towards him, kissed me roughly.

  I winced at his description – my description, words that tumbled out of my mouth on the back of four lines and a bottle of Bollinger. But I still kissed him back. Because that way it’s me and him tied together, do you see? Not us, Edie. Not me and you. And that is what I remind myself as the gold carriage clock on the mantelpiece counts down the time until tea.

  It’s gone four when we leave the McGowans’, our boot heavy with unwrapped tat that will be tipped into the nearest skip when we get far enough away.

  ‘Thank fuck that’s over.’ Jimmy belches and I wince without thinking. ‘Christ. What’s wrong with you now?’ he demands.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘It’s just cold.’ Compared to the furnace of his stepmam’s front room, that saw his dad sweating dark rings into his blue shirt and Siobhán in a strappy summer top, when outside the frost still clings to the cracked concrete and hoars the Ford Cortina on the front drive.

  I wait for him to offer me his coat, but instead he just climbs into the car, dropping heavily onto the seat with a groan.

  ‘Come on then,’ he goads through the windscreen. ‘One down, one to go.’

  I come to, hurry around the back of the car and behind the wheel.

  ‘Quicker we get there, quicker we can get home.’

  But it’s getting there I am scared of.

  As we turn onto West Road I feel unease slip down my spine and I have to clutch the steering wheel so hard my knuckles blanch.

  But the Lodge is curtained; a closed eye. They are away – of course they are away, I think. In America.

  ‘We should break in,’ Jimmy says. ‘Fuck for old times’ sake. That would show him.’

  Show him what? I want to say. And how? What will you do? Tell Doyle to tell the news crew to tell him? It’s not sixth form any more.

  But we are in Saffron Walden now, and different rules apply, old rules.

  When I get out of the car, he pushes me against the metal, kisses me. ‘You’re mine, Di,’ he says. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

  It’s not a question. Not really. But I have to answer anyway. ‘I know,’ I say. And I do know, can feel it, this desperation of his. In the way he grips me, in the way he puts his hand on the small of my back, steers me up my own front path, in the way he pushes me forward when you open the door, tells you in a single breath that we are getting married and getting pregnant, before I can change my mind, or you can change it for me.

  ‘Really?’ you say. ‘Well, you’d better come in.’

&nb
sp; And, so, steeling myself, holding a breath so deep I might be about to swim the Styx, I cross the threshold, and into this other world.

  The house has changed. The kitchen sink is clogged with rice while food-dirty plates sit abandoned on the sideboard, the television, the tops of shelves; the worn linoleum floor is spattered with an arc of passata; and in the bathroom the smell of ammonia makes me gag, forcing me to flush then retreat, pulling the door to whilst cursing the environment and your fucking conscience.

  But it’s not just that. Underneath all the absent-minded littering and the deliberate destruction, the gingerbread house itself is crumbling, falling apart at its icing seams. The ceiling is yellowed from years of impassive smoking; the walls stamped with soil and ink handprints in increasing height and span from six to sullen teen; the guttering choked with dead leaves and live animals, so that water has been cascading down the kitchen wall causing a bloom of mould to creep above the coat rack. And without David calling round disguised as Mr Fix-It, shelves teeter, hooks dangle from Rawlplugs, a bulb buzzes and flickers off and on, off and on, and I am reminded of the kitchen disco on the day we arrived.

  But I’m not seeing it through six-year-old eyes any more. I am not even seeing it through my own, but through Jimmy’s.

  And everywhere I am seeing an absence.

  An absence of taste.

  An absence of order.

  An absence of discipline.

  All things he has found wanting in me, and worries will return if I spend too long here, soak up too much you.

  But in the end it is not that that breaks me – breaks us, Edie. It is something else entirely.

  I see the flicker of disgust when he walks into the kitchen. But if he is truly affronted he hides it under a bright, shining cloak of wit and charm and gratitude, and you, fool that you are, drunk as you are, let him court you from your sofa throne.

  ‘Oh, you are adorable,’ you say, and I curse you again for the internal lexicon you still carry with you from Cambridge prep.

  ‘I thought Toni was coming,’ I say then.

  You flap your hand, send a plume of smoke swirling, gathering dust motes as it does so. ‘Away. With Susie.’

  ‘So you were on your own?’ I ask. ‘For Christmas lunch.’

  You shrug. ‘It’s only a day,’ you say. ‘Like any other.’

  ‘Not any more,’ Jimmy says then. ‘We need a toast. To me and Dido.’

  ‘Yes,’ you blurt. ‘A toast!’ Though I assume your enthusiasm is more to do with wine than weddings, given your refusal to meet my eye.

  ‘No, don’t get up,’ Jimmy tells you. ‘I brought a bottle. Two, actually.’

  ‘Good boy,’ you praise, and watch him go out to the hall.

  Then you turn to me. ‘What the fuck, Di? Marrying him is one thing, but a baby?’

  ‘And?’ I say. ‘You had one.’

  ‘That’s not the same.’

  But there is no answer to that as Jimmy comes back in bearing two bottles, one champagne, one brandy.

  ‘Christ, what are you two?’ Jimmy demands. I bristle until I see he is still, thankfully, smiling. ‘Some kind of local coven?’

  ‘No,’ I say.

  ‘Pretty much,’ you counter, letting Jimmy pour you a sparkling glassful into a dull, tarnished tumbler. A tumbler that has clearly already seen the best part of the bottle of Scotch that sits on the stove top. ‘Aren’t we all?’

  ‘That’s what I say,’ Jimmy agrees, sitting down next to me, and pulling me into him. ‘Witches, the lot of you.’

  And he kisses me then, pushing his tongue past my tight lips to prove that witches are no threat to him.

  ‘So can I call you Mum?’ he asks, leaning over to you, leering.

  ‘You can try,’ you drawl. ‘But I only answer to Edie.’

  He laughs. Raises his glass, elbows me to do the same, then smiles straight at you. ‘To Mrs McGowan,’ he says.

  Then you look at me, plaster a smile on smeared lipstick, a wide, practised, fuck-the-world grin. ‘To Dido,’ you say.

  And fuck the world we do.

  By seven I have agreed to let you walk me down the aisle, though you refuse to give me away – I am not property, you remind Jimmy, though you look straight at me when you say it.

  By nine I have agreed to have one glass, just a small one, and besides, by the time we get home Jimmy will be too far gone to do anything, so I won’t be getting pregnant tonight.

  By eleven I am drunk and not driving anywhere. I stagger upstairs for a lie-down, listening through the ceiling as you and Jimmy recalculate the Budget, recast the cabinet, redraw the world in a better light.

  ‘Come to bed,’ I plead.

  ‘Later,’ he says, then clarifies. ‘You go—’

  ‘He’ll be fine,’ you interrupt. ‘Go on. Night-night.’ And you blow me a kiss so extravagant you knock over a glass, sending a slug of brandy spattering across the carpet, though the whole thing is so stained now – with paint, with ash, with whatever – the liquid gets lost in a pattern, quite at home.

  So I go.

  And I lie down, and listen, and let myself imagine a wedding, an affair so precise in its detail, so exquisite in its embrace, that it will be remembered for all time by everyone who comes. Of course it is an affair woven entirely from fiction – from books and films and the Hello magazines I flick idly through at the doctor’s and dentist, dismissing the fools who buy it, yet devouring every page of gossip like the glutton I really am. Because do you know how many weddings I’ve been to, Edie?

  Just one. One wedding, Edie. Don’t you think that’s strange for a woman my age?

  At first I blamed you for having the kind of friends who wouldn’t, or couldn’t.

  Then I blamed myself for having so few friends at all.

  Because despite every attempt by you to instil into me the hypocrisy of marriage – no opportunity missed to dismiss the handover as patriarchal hegemony, the flowers as environmental sabotage, the white dress as an outright lie – despite my own nascent feminism, a wedding had topped my to-do list since that hand-in-hand snapshot in someone else’s garden in the summer of 1976.

  I had imagined every detail, painstakingly planned it all until it ran like oiled clockwork in my mind. Not the dress, you understand, not the flowers or the favours or any fancy that might come and go with fashion or the season. But the words.

  I knew exactly what he would say at every stage of our grand romance, had the dialogue down word for precious word. The proposal when, eyes brimming with pride and pathos, he would tell me I was his everything, his lodestar, his muse; that his world turned only for me. The walk down the aisle to the altar – alternately a decaying Gothic church, a sand-silted chapel skirting a beach on the Lizard, the bunting-draped back garden – when he would feel faint at my grace and beauty, the significance of my approach, before taking my own shaking hand and whispering to me that he has never loved me more. The wedding bed, where he would tremble as he undressed me, make love to me not for the first time, but with such presence I would feel we were finally, truly, one.

  Not once did I realize this was Pernod-vomit-inducing pie in the sky; an adolescent confection borne of classroom Brontë and behind-the-bike-sheds Shirley Conran.

  And not once did I imagine it would be Jimmy in the starring role.

  I wake at gone one in the morning, my bed still empty; music – Carole King, I think – still murmuring below.

  I sit up and the room tilts, spins. I am still no drinker, despite Jimmy’s best attempts. Oh God. I should have said no, I think then. He told me to, encouraged it, but that won’t matter. I should have been better behaved, been the good girl I know I am, always wanted to be. Not the one you designed.

  Then I hear it. The high, affected laughter – yours – then his: lower, deeper, insistent.

  Something’s not right. There is a groaning sound, and the clatter of something being knocked or spilled.

  My stomach drops and rises in swift succ
ession.

  Something is happening.

  I stand, stagger to the door, then slowly, carefully, down the threadbare tread of the stairs until I can see far enough over the banisters.

  And there you are. Both of you. You, your back against the wall, your neck tilted up, all catlike, arched, coquettish, and he leaning over you, curl-haired, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, ready to devour his prey.

  I could have shouted then. Could have stopped it before it happened. But I was mesmerized, gawping slack-jawed like a child at the circus.

  And so I watch as he leans in, and you reach up.

  I watch as your lips meet.

  I watch as his hands snake around you, one around your back to keep you in place, the other pushed against what little chest you possess.

  I watch as you, for a second, pull away, and I think you’re going to tell him to stop, slap him, demand to know what he’s thinking.

  But you don’t. You laugh, let your head loll, then lift it for a second embrace.

  I can’t decide which is worse: that he kissed you. Or that you let him. That you kissed him back. Or that you’re doing it again. Once – once would have been a mistake careless. Once, I could have believed your lies later. But twice, there is intent.

  He moves a hand down then, goes to push it inside your gossamer top, and I finally find my words.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I ask. As if I am five and watching cows or sheep rut for the first time.

  He looks up, sways for a second, comes to. ‘Oh, fuck.’

  Then, leaving you wavering, confused, he staggers to the stairs, grips me. ‘I’m sorry. Shit, Di. I’m drunk. And a fool. I fucked up. I forgot – ’ And then, oh, you will love this, Edie, then he says, ‘ – I forgot which one was you.’

  ‘Liar,’ I say.

  ‘I’m not,’ he pleads. ‘Edie, tell her. Tell her I called you “Di”.’

  But you do not tell me that. Instead you tell me that he’s a predator, a predator and a charlatan. He tells me you’re pathetic, a gin-sodden armchair socialist playing at poverty. You tell him to fuck off to the council estate where he belongs. Tell me you only did it to prove what a shit he is. That you did it for me, don’t you see? For me.

  Maybe you did, once. But that second time wasn’t for me, to prove a point. It was for you, for your fragile ego and fat ambition and indiscriminate libido. And that is all I can see, think. And so then I do something so stupid I can hardly bear to think of it now. I muster my own loud voice, but use it, to my shame, to defend him: to tell you that you started it, dancing in front of him, all eyes and tits. Then I storm out and sit in the car and refuse to come in.