with her coloured contacts. ‘Bottom line, you can always get divorced.’
‘Don’t be silly.’ Kate removed her red-flamed specs. ‘Have you got any Band-Aids? … You make it all sound so quick, so easy. A drive-through McMarriage,’ she admonished, rifling through the haemorrhoid and foot-fungal creams in the cabinet. ‘Husbands are disgusting. They shed more nose hair than a moulting Labrador.
Drain-clogging
amounts of nose hair.’ She retrieved a packet of plasters. ‘They dribble piss on the porcelain … Post Urinal Drip Syndrome. Matchsticks covered in earwax; clipping toenails during foreplay …’
‘Oh, right. Like
you’d
know,’ I interjected. ‘You think Mutual Orgasm is an insurance company. Give me a fag, Annie.’
‘But you don’t smoke, doll.’
‘I do now.’
Kate perched on the edge of the bath and waved away Anouska’s cigarette smoke with a windscreen-wiper motion. ‘I’ve just had a dry spell … That’s all …’
‘Um …’ I corrected her, ‘it’s called a decade.’
‘Success puts men off,’ Kate said, truculently. She confiscated Anouska’s cigarette, stubbed it out on the bath enamel and flicked it window-ward.
‘Ugly women who can’t get laid always say that,’ snapped Anouska.
‘Some men find me very attractive, I’ll have you know.’ Kate peeled open a Band-Aid and wrapped it around the bridge of her glasses before pushing them back on to her nose. ‘Not that it bloody well matters of course …’ she said defensively, commandeering the champagne.
‘Yesterday’s spinster is today’s feminist.’ Anouska ostentatiously lit up another Cartier. ‘I do
not
want to have to hastily organize another Girls’ Night Out on Valentine’s Day so that I won’t be tempted to kill myself, okay?’
From across the Crescent came the warble of an organ gasping into life. ‘Oh God,’ my voice see-sawed with emotion. ‘What the hell am I going to do?’
‘Flee!’ Kate demanded. ‘Do a runner.’ She started peeling me out of my wedding dress.
‘Stop that!’ Anouska clawed at Kate’s dirty, dishwater-blonde hair. Kate swatted her away. Anouska sprang back. A Feminist and an It Girl wrenching either arm, I accordioned between them. It was like Strindberg meets Mr Bean. Which is how my mother found us. She took in my chipped varnish, the clumps of my red hair caught on a nail by the window, the skew-whiff lipstick, the low tide in the champagne bottle, one false eyelash dangling like a suicidal caterpillar from a smudged and tear-swollen eye.
‘What the flippin’ hell’s goin’ on?’ Her eyes glinted like metal. Her painted talons strained around a tumbler of lager and lime. Brutus snarled menacingly.
‘… Mum.’ I gulped in air, a palpitating fish on the deck of a boat. ‘I’m … I’m having second thoughts …’ I blurted. ‘Not second, really.
142
nd.’
‘
What?
’ She growled, sounding suspiciously like her pampered little canine. ‘Of course ya goin’ frew wiv it, Rebecca.’ Her voice set me on edge, like a knife scraped on a plate. ‘You’ve lived with Julian for five bleedin’ years. Ya love him, don’cha? Love should end in marriage.’
‘Oh believe me,’ muttered Kate, ‘it does.’
‘Marriage, well, it’s a natural progression, ain’t it? And then kids …’
‘God! Just because I’m in my thirties everyone keeps asking me when I’m going to have my first baby. Why? Just because you’re sixty, do I keep asking when you’re going to get your first incontinence pad?’
I bit my lip. Another Doris Day Mother and Daughter moment. It brings tears to the eyes, it really does.
‘I am
not
sixty!’ my mother huffed, vacuuming in her cheeks all the better to pout her collagened lips. ‘This …’ she sniffled into her lace handkerchief, an escapee from a Jane Austen novel, ‘is ya chance for Once In A Lifetime Joy.’
‘Oh for God’s sake, Mum. I’m thirty-two. I’ve found Once In a Lifetime