A Spot Of Bother

94

Katie was booked in to have her hair done.

Quite when this had been arranged she wasn’t sure. There was nothing wrong with her hair that couldn’t be sorted out by a quick trim with the bathroom scissors and a decent conditioner. Clearly she’d been running on automatic when she was time-tabling everything.

Thank God she hadn’t organized bridesmaids.

She told Ray she was going to cancel the appointment, he asked why and she said she didn’t fancy getting herself tarted up like something out of a bridal catalog. Ray said, “Go on. Give yourself a treat.” And she thought, Why not? New life. New hair. And went and had most of it removed. Boyish. Ears on show for the first time in seven years.

And Ray was right. It was more than a treat. The person in the mirror was no longer simply a wife and mother. The person in the mirror was a woman in charge of her own destiny.

Mum was horrified.

It wasn’t the hair specifically. It was the combination of the hair and the canceled florists and the decision not to arrive at the register office in a limousine.

“I’m just worried that-”

“That what?” asked Katie.

“I’m just worried that it won’t be…that it won’t be a proper wedding.”

“Because I don’t have enough hair?”

“You’re being flippant.”

True, but Mum was being…strange that there wasn’t a word for it, given how often parents did it. Translating every worry into a worry about something not being done properly. Not eating properly. Not dressing properly. Not behaving properly. As if the world could be set to rights with decorum. “Well, it’s going to be a lot more proper than the last wedding.”

“So you and Ray…?”

“We’re getting on better than we’ve ever done.”

“That’s hardly a ringing endorsement.”

“We love each other.”

Mum flinched slightly, then changed the subject, just like Jacob did when that word cropped up. “Your father and Ray, by the way-”

“My father and Ray by the way what?”

“They didn’t have words, did they?”

“When?” asked Katie.

“The other day. On the phone.” Mum seemed quite troubled by this possibility.

Katie racked her brain and came up with nothing.

“Ray rang to talk to your father. But afterward your father said it had been a wrong number. And I wondered if there’d been a misunderstanding of some kind.”

A bearded man appeared at the door to ask about the positioning of guy ropes.

Katie got to her feet. “Mum, look, if it makes you feel better, why don’t you ring some florists. See if anyone can do something at short notice.”

“OK,” said Mum.

“But not Buller’s.”

“OK.”

“I swore at them,” said Katie.

“OK.”

Katie went into the garden with the bearded man. The central pole was up at the far end of the garden and sails of cream canvas were being hoisted into the air by five other men in bottle-green sweatshirts. Jacob was running in and out of the coils of rope and the stacked chairs like a demented puppy, deep in some complex superhero fantasy, and Katie remembered how magical it once was to see an ordinary space transformed like this. A sofa turned upside down. A room full of balloons.

Then Jacob slipped and knocked a trestle table over and got his finger caught in the hinged legs and screamed a lot and she scooped him up and cuddled him and took him to the bedroom and dug out the Savlon and the Maisie Mouse plasters and Jacob was brave and stopped crying, and Mum came up and said she’d sorted out the flowers.

The two of them sat next to each other on the bed while Jacob transformed his red robot into a dinosaur and back into a robot again.

“So, we shall finally get to meet Jamie’s boyfriend,” said Mum, and the pause before she said the word boyfriend was so tiny it was almost imperceptible.

Katie looked down at her hands and said, “Yup,” and felt very bad for Jamie.

The day was getting on. She and Jacob drove into town to pick up the cake and drop off the cassette at the register office. She’d wanted to start with a bit of “Royal Fireworks” then segue straight into “I Got You (I Feel Good)” as soon as the knot was tied, but the woman on the phone said rather snootily that they “didn’t do segueing,” and Katie realized it was probably too complicated anyway. Some great-aunt would collapse and they’d be getting her into the recovery position with James Brown yelping like a randy dog. So they decided to go with that Bach double-violin piece from the compilation CD Dad gave her for Christmas.

They popped into Sandersons and Sticky Fingers to pick up the personalized tankards and the industrial-size Belgian chocolates for Ed and Sarah then drove home, nearly destroying the cake when a group of kids kicked a football in front of the car.

They sat down for supper, the four of them, Mum, Dad, her and Jacob, and it was good. No arguments. No sulks. No skirting round difficult subjects.

She put Jacob to bed, helped Mum with the washing up and the heavens opened. Mum fretted, the way parents did about bad weather. But Katie took herself up to the loft and opened the window over the garden and stood there as the marquee cracked and slapped and the wind roared like surf in the black trees.

She loved storms. Thunder, lightning, driving rain. Something to do with that childhood dream she used to have about living in a castle.

She remembered the last wedding. Graham getting that weird allergic reaction from her shampoo the day before. Ice packs. Antihistamines. That van taking the wing off Uncle Brian’s Jag. The weird woman with the mental problem who wandered into the reception singing.

She wondered what was going to go wrong this time, then realized she was being stupid. Like Mum and the rain. The fear of having nothing to complain about.

She closed the window, wiped the water off the sill with her sleeve and went downstairs to see if there was any wine left in the bottle.