Altar Ego Read Online Free Page B

press ‘puree’. ‘I’ll get Simon. He’s trained in dealing with …’ she looked at each of us in turn, ‘… emotional retards.’
    The only person who didn’t live in constant fear of Vivian’s enthusiasms was her husband Simon – a high-octane Harley Street marital psychotherapist. They have two ‘gifted’ children. (Vivian, who ingested gallons of fish oil during pregnancy to optimize brain development, seems unaware that an Infant Prodigy is nothing more than a rug-rat with unbelievably ambitious parents.) Simon is a Dad Evangelist; they have genitalia consciousness evenings with their toddler, for God’s sake. Another thing Anouska shouldn’t have told me.
    My mother seized me by the shoulders and looked into my eyes as though trying to diagnose glaucoma. ‘Now listen here, Rebecca. Ya farver and me,’ she enunciated in a spittle-saturated avalanche, ‘have been ’itched for near on firty-five years …’
    ‘God,’
sotto-vocce
’d Kate from the bathtub. ‘You don’t even get that for first-degree murder.’
    ‘Oh shut up, Kate.’ Anouska balled Kate’s gown and over-armed it at her head. ‘That’s admirable, Mrs Steele. You should get some kind of medal.’
    ‘Or maybe remission,’ Kate’s muffled voice added.
    ‘Ya can’t back out now …’ My mother’s plea trailed off so plaintively that I faltered and turned to her, actually expecting heartfelt emotion. ‘Ya’ll have to give back all them presents!’
    ‘Oh, mum …’
    ‘I’ve done everyfink right for ya Special Day …’
    ‘
My
special day. This is not my day, Mum. It’s yours … You chose the guests, the cake, the vicar with halitosis …’
    My mother appropriated the champagne bottle and chug -a-lugged indignantly. ‘What about the caterers? I’ve given them a £2,000 deposit already. The dress, the invites. The sugared almonds! The booze,
magnums
no less, of bloody Frog stuff! The bleedin’ photographers …’ She scoffed another gulp. ‘The cake. It’s a bloody great cake with four tiers’ – she stopped pacing for a moment to address the toilet-roll holder, wistfully – ‘linked by stair-bloody-ways with little figures of blokes in dinner jackets and bridesmaids in white and a fountain! Spoutin’ champers! … Have ya any bleedin’ idea what I’ve spent on you?’ Her voice pitched to incredulity.
    ‘
I
didn’t want this wedding,
you
did,’ I retaliated. ‘All that talk about shelf-life. All those veiled, cosy little chats about which of my old friends were getting hitched and who’d had a baby … I wanted a registry office, with joss sticks and Mozart where we wrote our own vows about not hindering each other on our personal journeys … But oh no. You had to have the Big White Wedding …’
    ‘Oh-oh, Vivian Alert,’ Kate warned. ‘Ten o’clock high.’
    We turned to see my Matron of Honour practically ripping the bathroom door off its hinges in her desperation to bring her orthodontically enhanced, ruthlessly amiable husband to the rescue. Best man Simon launched into one of his upbeat lectures. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s pissants who can see the bright side of other people’s troubles.
    ‘Are you in touch with your inner self on this, Rebecca?’
    Simon was big on ‘getting in touch with’ your inner anything. The only inner self I ever got in touch with was during tampon insertion.
    ‘It’s common to get all tied up in knots about tying the knot,’ he clichéd. It struck me for the first time how much Simon, bald, pale and tubby, resembled a giant mozzarella. ‘Whatever your emotional misgivings, you and Julian can work them out.’
    Kate groaned. ‘Why is it that people are always using the word “work” next to the word “marriage”?’
    Simon loomed over Kate in the bath tub. His tie, patterned in what appeared to be leashed Dobermans, whipped her face. ‘Kate McCready, you’re a commitment phobe. A pathetic individual who’s never got over being rejected