—or a frying pan, a cast iron frying pan—
‘So here goes – three out of three methinks . . .’
—a ball-peen hammer, or a mace—
‘Are you there, Moriarty?’ says Sam.
‘Here!’ says Dexter, and like a ninja he twists at his waist, ducking down and to the right.
The third blow is an insolent poke in the shoulder with the blunt end that sends Dexter sprawling backwards into the coffee table. The prod is so impertinent and precise that he’s convinced that Sam must be cheating, and he tears his blindfold off to confront him, finding instead Sylvie leaning over him, laughing, actually laughing regardless of what it does to her face.
‘A hit! A palpable hit!’ shrieks that little shit Murray, and Dexter clambers to his feet, his face a grimace of delight. There’s a little round of patronising applause.
‘YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!’ crows Sam, teeth bared, his ruddy face screwed up, two fists pulled slowly towards his chest in victory.
‘Better luck next time!’ drawls Helen, the wicked Roman empress.
‘You’ll get the hang of it,’ growls Lionel and, enraged, Dexter notices that the twins are holding finger and thumbs to their foreheads in an L shape. L for loser.
‘Well I’m still proud of you,’ pouts Sylvie, ruffling his hair and patting his knee, as he sinks into the sofa next to her. Shouldn’t she be on his side? When it comes to loyalty, he thinks, she’s still one of them.
The tournament continues. Murray beats Sam, then Lionel beats Murray, then Lionel gets beaten by Helen, and it’s all very convivial and jolly, these neat little bops and taps with the rolled-up newspaper, all much jollier than when it was Dexter out there getting clubbed around the face with what felt like a length of scaffolding. From deep in the sofa he watches and scowls and, as part of his revenge, quietly sets about emptying a bottle of Lionel’s very good claret. There was a time when he could do this kind of thing. If he was twenty-three again he would feel confident and charming and self-assured, but he has lost the knack somehow and his mood darkens as the bottle empties.
Then Helen beats Murray and Sam beats Helen and now it’s Sam’s turn to try and strike his sister, and there is at least some pleasure and pride in watching how good Sylvie is at the game, effortlessly avoiding her little brother’s desperate swipes, twisting and ducking at the waist, supple and sporty, his golden girl. He watches, smiling, from deep in the sofa and just when he thinks they’ve all forgotten about him:
‘Come on then. Your go!’ Sylvie is holding out the baton towards him.
‘But you just won!’
‘I know, but you haven’t had a chance to bat yet, poor thing,’ she pouts. ‘Come on. Have a go. Take me on!’
The Copes all love the idea of this – there’s a low, pagan rumble of excitement, bizarrely vaguely sexual, and clearly he has no choice. His honour, the honour of the Mayhews is at stake here. Solemnly Dexter puts down his glass, stands and takes the baton.
‘You’re sure about this?’ he says, kneeling on the carpet an arm’s length away. ‘Because I’m a pretty good tennis player.’
‘Oh, I’m sure,’ she says, grinning provocatively, shaking out her hands like a gymnast as the blindfold is tied.
‘And I think I might be quite good at this.’
Behind him, Sam ties his blindfold tight as a tourniquet. ‘We’ll see, won’t we?’
The arena falls silent.
‘Okay, are you ready?’ says Dexter.
‘Oh yes.’
He grips the baton with both hands, arms level at his shoulder. ‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m ready when you . . .’
Momentarily an image flickers in his mind – a baseball player on his mound – as he slices diagonally with the bat, a tremendous uppercut that swishes audibly through the air and from behind the blindfold the impact feels fantastic as it sends tremors along both arms and into his chest. A moment of awed silence follows and for a moment Dexter is sure that he has done very, very well. And then he hears a crash, and an appalled cry goes up in unison from the whole family.
‘SYLVIE!’
‘Oh my God!’
‘Sweetheart, darling, are you okay?’
Dexter tears off his blindfold to see that Sylvie has somehow been transported to the far side of the room, slumped over in the fireplace like a marionette with all her strings cut. Her eyes are blinking wide and her hand is cupped to her face, but it’s already possible to see the dark rivulet of blood as it trickles down beneath her nose. She is moaning quietly to herself.
‘Oh my God, I am so sorry!’ he exclaims, horrified. Immediately he crosses towards her, but the family has already closed in.
‘Good God, Dexter, what the hell were you thinking?’ barks red-faced Lionel, drawing himself up to his full height.
‘YOU DIDN’T EVEN ASK IF SHE WAS THERE MORIARTY!’ shrieks her mother.
‘Didn’t I? Sorry—’
‘No, you just lashed out crazily!’
‘Like a madman—’
‘Sorry. Sorry, I forgot. I was—’
‘—Drunk!’ says Sam. The accusation hangs in the air. ‘You’re drunk, man. You’re completely pissed!’
They all turn and glare.
‘It really was an accident. I just caught your face at an odd angle.’
Sylvie tugs on Helen’s sleeve. ‘How does it look?’ she asks in a tearful voice as she discreetly removes her cupped hand from her nose. It’s as if she’s holding a fistful of strawberry sorbet.
‘It’s really not too bad,’ gasps Helen, her hand clasped to her mouth in horror and Sylvie’s face crumples further into tears. ‘Let me see, let me see! The bathroom!’ she whimpers, and the family haul her to her feet.
‘It really was just some kind of flukey accident . . .’ Holding her mother’s arm, Sylvie hurries past him, eyes fixed straight ahead. ‘Do you want me to come with you? Sylvie? Sylv?’ There is no reply and he watches in misery, as her mother escorts her into the hall and up the stairs to the bathroom.
He listens to the footsteps fade.
And now it’s just Dexter and the Cope menfolk. A primal scene, they glare and glare. Instinctively he feels his hand tighten around his weapon, the tightly rolled-up copy of today’s Daily Telegraph, and says the only thing that he can think of to say.
‘Ouch!’
‘So – do you think I made a good impression?’
Dexter and Sylvie lie in the guest room’s large soft double bed. Sylvie turns to look at him, her face unmoving, the small fine nose throbbing accusingly. She sniffs but says nothing.
‘Do you want me to say I’m sorry again?’
‘Dexter, it’s fine.’
‘You forgive me?’
‘I forgive you,’ she snaps.
‘And you think they think I’m alright, they don’t think I’m some sort of violent psychopath or something?’
‘I think they think you’re fine. Let’s forget it shall we?’ She turns onto her side, away from him, and turns out her light.
A moment passes. Like a shamed schoolboy, he feels as if he won’t sleep, unless he gets some further reassurance. ‘Sorry for . . . fucking up,’ he pouts. ‘Again!’ She turns once more, and lays one hand fondly on his cheek.
‘Don’t be ridiculous. You were doing fine until you hit me. They really, really liked you.’
‘And what about you?’ he says, still fishing.
She sighs and smiles. ‘I think you’re okay too.’
‘Any chance of a kiss then?’
‘I can’t. I’ll start bleeding. I’ll make up for it tomorrow.’ She turns away again. Satisfied now, he sinks lower and puts his hands behind his head. The bed is immense and soft and smells of freshly washed linen, and the windows open out onto a still summer night. Stripped of quilts and blankets, they lie beneath a single white cotton sheet, and he can see the wonderful line of her legs and narrow hips, the curve of her long smooth back. Tonight’s sexual potential evaporated with t
he moment of impact and the possibility of concussion, but still he turns to her and places one hand beneath the sheet and onto her thigh. The skin is cool and smooth.
‘Long drive tomorrow,’ she mumbles. ‘Let’s go to sleep.’
He continues to look at the back of her head, where the long fine hair falls away from the nape of her neck, revealing the darker whorls beneath. You could take a photograph of that, he thinks, it is so beautiful. Call it ‘Texture’. He wonders if he still might tell her that he loves her or, more tentatively, that he ‘thinks he might be in love with her’, which is both more touching and easier to back out of. But clearly this is not the time, not now with the plug of bloody tissue still on her bedside table.
He feels he ought to say something though. Inspired, he kisses her shoulder, and whispers. ‘Well you know what they say—’ He pauses for effect. ‘You always hurt the one you love!’
This is pretty clever, pretty adorable he thinks, and there’s a silence while he waits, eyebrows raised expectantly, for the implication to sink in.
‘Let’s get some sleep, shall we?’ she says.
Defeated, he lies back and listens to the gentle hum of the A259. Somewhere in the house right now her parents are tearing him to pieces and he realises, appallingly, that he has a sudden desire to laugh. He starts to giggle, then laugh outright, struggling to maintain the silence as his body starts to shake, making the mattress shudder.
‘Are you laughing?’ murmurs Sylvie into her pillow.
‘No!’ says Dexter, screwing his face tight to keep it in, but the laughter’s coming in waves now and he feels another surge of hysterics starting to build in his stomach. There is a point in the future where even the worst disaster starts to settle into an anecdote, and he can see the potential for a story here. It’s the kind of story that he would like to tell Emma Morley. But he doesn’t know where Emma Morley is, or what she’s doing, hasn’t seen her for more than two years now.
He’ll just have to remember the story. Tell her some other day.
He starts to laugh again.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Third Wave
THURSDAY 15 JULY 1999
Somerset
They have started to arrive. An endless cascade of luxuriously quilted envelopes, thumping onto the doormat. The wedding invitations.
This wasn’t the first wave of weddings. Some of their contemporaries had even got married at University, but in that self-consciously wacky, rag-week way, a let’s-pretend parody of a wedding, like the jokey student ‘dinner parties’ where everyone wore evening dress to eat tuna pasta bake. Student wedding receptions were picnics in the local park, the guests in Oxfam suits and secondhand ballgowns, then onto the pub. In the wedding photos the bride and groom might be seen raising pint glasses to the camera, a fag dangling from the bride’s rouged mouth, and wedding gifts were modest: a really cool compilation tape; a clip-framed photo-montage; a box of candles. Getting married at University was an amusing stunt, an act of benign rebellion, like a tiny tattoo that no-one ever sees or shaving your head for charity.
The second wave, the mid-twenties weddings, still retained a little of that tongue-in-cheek, home-made quality. The receptions took place in community centres and parents’ gardens, vows were self-composed and rigorously secular, and someone always seemed to read that poem about the rain having such small hands. But a cold, hard edge of professionalism had started to creep in. The idea of the ‘wedding list’ had begun to rear its head.
At some point in the future a fourth wave is expected – the Second Marriages: bittersweet, faintly apologetic affairs that are over by 9.30 on account of all the kids. ‘It’s not a big deal,’ they will say ‘just an excuse for a party.’ But for the moment this year is the year of the third wave, and it is the third wave that is proving the most powerful, the most spectacular, the most devastating. These are the weddings of people in their early-to-mid-thirties, and no-one is laughing anymore.
The third wave is unstoppable. Every week seems to bring another luxuriantly creamy envelope, the thickness of a letter-bomb, containing a complex invitation – a triumph of paper engineering – and a comprehensive dossier of phone numbers, email addresses, websites, how to get there, what to wear, where to buy the gifts. Country house hotels are being block-booked, great schools of salmon are being poached, vast marquees are appearing overnight like Bedouin tent cities. Silky grey morning suits and top hats are being hired and worn with an absolutely straight face, and the times are heady and golden for florists and caterers, string quartets and Ceilidh callers, ice sculptors and the makers of disposable cameras. Decent Motown cover-bands are limp with exhaustion. Churches are back in fashion, and these days the happy couple are travelling the short distance from the place of worship to the reception on open-topped London buses, in hot-air balloons, on the backs of matching white stallions, in micro-lite planes. A wedding requires immense reserves of love and commitment and time off work, not least from the guests. Confetti costs eight pounds a box. A bag of rice from the corner shop just won’t cut it anymore.
Mr and Mrs Anthony Killick invite Emma Morley and partner to the wedding of their daughter Tilly Killick and Malcolm Tidewell.
In the motorway services Emma sat in her new car, her very first car, a fourth-hand Fiat Panda, and stared at the invite, knowing with absolute certainty that there would be men with cigars and someone English in a kilt.
‘Emma Morley and partner.’
Her road atlas was an ancient edition, with several major conurbations missing. She turned it through one hundred and eighty degrees, then back ninety, but it was like trying to navigate with a copy of the Domesday Book and she slapped it onto the empty passenger seat where her imaginary partner should have been sitting.
Emma was a shocking driver, simultaneously sloppy and petrified, and for the first fifty miles had been absent-mindedly driving with her spectacles on top of her contact lenses so that other traffic loomed menacingly out of nowhere like alien space cruisers. Frequent rest stops were required to stabilise her blood pressure and dab the perspiration from her top lip, and she reached for her handbag and checked her make-up in the mirror, trying to sneak up on herself to gauge the effect. The lipstick was redder and more sultry than she felt she could carry off, and the small amount of powder she had applied to her cheeks now looked garish and absurd, like something from a Restoration comedy. Why, she wondered, do I always look like a kid trying on her mother’s make-up? She had also made the elementary mistake of getting her hair cut, no, styled, just the day before, and it was still falling into an artful arrangement of layers and flicks; what her mum would have called a ‘do’.
In frustration she tugged hard at the hem of her dress, a Chinese-style affair of rich blue silk, or some silk substitute, which made her look like the plump unhappy waitress in the Golden Dragon Take-away. Sitting down it bulged and stretched, and the combination of something in the ‘silk’ and motorway jitters was making her perspire. The car’s air-conditioning had two settings, wind-tunnel and sauna, and all elegance had evaporated somewhere outside Maidenhead, to be replaced by two dark crescents of sweat beneath her arms. She raised her elbows to her head, and peered down at the patches and wondered if she should turn around, go home and change? Or just turn around. Go home, stay home, do some work on the book. After all, it’s not as if she and Tilly Killick were still the best of pals. The dark days when Tilly had been her landlady in the tiny flat in Clapton had cast a long shadow, and they’d never quite settled the dispute over the non-return of the returnable deposit. It was hard to wish the newly-weds well when the bride still owed you five hundred quid.
On the other hand, old friends would be there. Sarah C, Carol, Sita, the Watson twins, Bob, Mari with the Big Hair, Stephanie Shaw from her publishers, Callum O’Neill the sandwich millionaire. Dexter would be there. Dexter and his girlfriend.
And it was at this exact moment, as she sat pointing her armpits at the air-conditioning vents and wond
ering what to do, that Dexter drove by unseen in his Mazda sports car, Sylvie Cope by his side.
‘So who’ll be there?’ asked Sylvie, turning down the stereo. Travis – her choice for a change. Sylvie didn’t much care for music, but made an exception for Travis.
‘Just a whole lot of people from University. Paul and Sam and Steve O’D, Peter and Sarah, the Watsons. And Callum.’
‘Callum. Good, I like Callum.’
‘ . . . Mari with the Big Hair, Bob. God, people I haven’t seen for years. My old friend Emma.’
‘Another ex?’
‘No, not an ex . . .’
‘A fling.’
‘Not a fling, just an old, old friend.’
‘English teacher?’
‘Used to be an English teacher, writer now. You talked to her at Bob and Mari’s wedding, remember? In Cheshire.’
‘Vaguely. Quite attractive.’
‘I suppose so.’ Dexter shrugged hard. ‘We fell out for a while. I told you about it. Remember?’
‘They all melt into one.’ She turned to the window. ‘So did you have a thing with her?’
‘No I did not have a thing with her.’
‘What about the bride?’
‘Tilly? What about her?’
‘Did you ever have sex with the bride?’
December 1992, that horrible flat in Clapton that always smelt of fried onions. A foot massage that had spun wildly out of control while Emma was at Woolworths.
‘Of course not. What do you think I am?’
‘It seems like every week we go to some wedding with a coach-load of people you’ve slept with—’
‘That’s not true.’
‘—a marquee-full. Like a conference.’
‘Not true, not true—’
‘It is true.’
‘Hey, you’re the only one for me now.’ With one hand on the steering wheel, he reached across and placed the other on Sylvie’s stomach, still flat beneath the peach shot-satin of her short dress, then rested it on the top of her bare thigh.
‘Don’t leave me talking to strangers, will you?’ said Sylvie, and turned up the stereo.