Darling Read online

  The next part was the hardest: who to invite. Thomas was easy – his mum lived in the Idaho nursing home minutes from where his dad was buried; she wandered along disinfected corridors hoping she might end up in England on days when she remembered where she was from. His sister thrived in New Zealand but, despite having three children under five, was no more a masochist than an air-mile millionaire so would not come back for years yet; no one else of the same blood mattered. Friends could come, could not come; Thomas insisted that he would have all he wanted either way.

  Not so easy for me. I had told him: no mother, father, sister or brother. I had friends, of course, but those for whom I cared most were scattered. Then, through vexing tears, I told him that I had in fact lost touch with all wider family. We had to be our own nest. No, I did not want lesser-spotted aunties chirruping around me when my own mum and dad had so long ago fallen off their perch. As for my friends, I could not risk seeing an ounce of doubt, disbelief or cynicism in the eyes of those who should be wishing us well; I might buckle, even under just an ounce of it.

  On I wept as Thomas held me, listening and still. I had been sure, anyway, that neither of us were worried about drawing up lists of attendees. We were dizzy with ourselves; wanted only us, witnesses and us, no one else to exclaim their judgements – So soon! So fast! So black! So white! So, kids? None of it, not on our day.

  Just us.

  I used the invitations that he had bought in our wedding colours – ackee (or dry prairie) yellow and Idaho sky (or Caribbean Sea) blue – as a wedge to prop up my uneven table back at my house and we invited only his neighbours, Guy and Allie, as witnesses. An acclaimed potter and an actor, each more talented than sane, they tended to appear over the fence during the odd crisis moment in their creatively lived suburban lives. Thomas and me marrying would make the merest colourful dot for one day, a single Hirst spot to roll into the corner of their wall-sized Caravaggio. Guy could double as our photographer, being a visual type. Sorted.

  In three weeks we would be one.

  The Thursday before the wedding I had a hair appointment. Having endured a nondescript weave for a while, I decided I wanted to go back to my roots for my wedding; literally to the scalp, with long, narrow braids surging from it. I had always liked them: the visual drama, the Medusa connotations, the sheer amount of female skill and effort that went into creating each plait – I sometimes had a sisterhood of one Trinidadian, two Ghanaians and a Bajan working my head all at once – the femininity was woven into you, the cultural history made part of you. Plus, it really was just fun to whip them around your head all day long.

  Nothing less would do for my wedding day. Plaits were the don of hairstyles. However, the elaborate do tended to attract unseemly interest: strangers, people on buses and manning tills would reach up unprompted and touch my hair.

  ‘Happens, innit?’ agreed Trish, lead plaiter for the day. ‘Get ready. We gonna make you look fresh!’

  I was right in the window, my least favourite seat. All High Desford could walk by and watch me getting my hair done. Part of the beauty of transformation lay in its mystery, a fact that I wanted to yell at the young men who walked up to the window, tearing at burgers and proceeding to stare at me like I was ITV.

  ‘Bugger off!’ I mouthed at them.

  They were lucky I was not Trish, who had slipped away to get a better comb. Trish was fierce. Trish would chase them down the street and bawl them out until they begged for a beating instead.

  They must have sensed it, as when she neared the plate glass they wandered off, trailing stale mince, masticated bun and the aroma of half-baked disappointment.

  I had, since my teens, been amazed by the hoohah surrounding the fertile black female. We were seen as either-ors: diva or drudge, Dahomey Amazon or post-colonial night nurse, lightning rods for the whole ho/madonna issue. We were each of us a continent of contention.

  ‘Lena! Joy! Ameyo!’ yelled Trish. ‘Our two o’clock’s arrived – bring me the good scissors and some more Pink Oil.’

  Our hair alone was the most politicised on the planet – how does she wear it? Like she wants to be white? Like she’s blacker than night? Is it real? Is she for real? Who does she think she is? And how can we tell her that she’s not it?

  And oh, our bodies! They were a battleground, but one all too often advertised – not least by ourselves, and a drop more than the rest of the multicoloured ocean of modern women – as a holiday destination. We were touted as dark recreation: a hilly climb of big bums, big tits, big lips – a caricatured sex safari in this porno age. Or maybe a meaty foreign takeaway. And did you want fries with that? I might be from Basingstoke but to some, black and white, men and women alike, I was Mother Africa on her knees.

  Much later, Trish raised a mirror to the back of my head:

  ‘There you go, all done. Beautiful. Gosh, man, can’t believe you’re getting married!’

  ‘Am I exotic?’ I asked Thomas back at home, head sore after six hours of talented pulling. ‘To you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Exotic. Erotic. Erratic … and just you, and I love it. Why?’

  ‘Oh. Nothing,’ I said, exhaling. The worst answer would have been the lie. His honesty was the special sauce on life’s all-beef patty, and that night his loving eased me until way past midnight.

  Saturday. Wedding day. Stevie was in his tiny suit and wet-wiped KAFOs and Lola slouched in a peach bodycon number she had insisted on pulling on at the last minute; she would end up looking naked in the photos, or disappearing altogether.

  On a warm September day we stood by a folly that was weeping flowers, set in a garden that stretched on and on. Lovely to excess; I swayed when I saw it. My dress, which pooled into a satin sweep on the ground, had a low cutaway back, something I had never worn before. In wearing it I offered him an untouched part of myself; no one would ever know me more.

  Yuh gon marry a man yuh jus buck up on inna supermarket? Yuh tek care now, yuh jus be careful.

  The ceremony was to be short and secular. The air was taut, suspended.

  The vows did not in themselves make me cry. The words were good and right and true; nothing could make me want to smile more. But when I thought about it, stood right inside the fact that Thomas had secured a full seventy acres of green space to surround us – trillions of well-anchored grass roots and who knew how much lucky clover? – then the waters rose and my throat worked harder. I looked at Lola and saw that she too was crying and this made Stevie cry and next thing Thomas’s eyes did not look so dry either. All of us, weeping by our lake – on this sunniest of days, the dampest wedding of all time!

  We walked back up the long drive, just the two of us, with Stevie and the others going ahead on some glorified golf buggy, draped with bunting and chains of silver bells. The diamanté Converse tucked under my dress had been a last-minute decision, but a good one.

  ‘So, Mrs Waite,’ he said.

  ‘So, husband,’ I said.

  ‘You are so … God.’

  ‘You look exactly like you did on the day I met you.’

  ‘What, twelve weeks ago?’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ I said. ‘Taken aback and terrified. Happy. But definitely terrified.’

  ‘Because I just knew …’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  We laughed ourselves quiet again, frightened of breaking whatever it was that had woven itself about us with our vows.

  ‘I did know,’ he said.

  ‘I love you,’ I said. That inaugural moment: the first time I had gone first.

  ‘I love you, Darling.’

  A kiss. Then:

  ‘And I have a surprise for you!’

  I tried not to jolt as he pulled me close and whispered it with a few pecks, kissed it into my hearing, but it happened anyway. By the time we had walked back, twenty-five of our ‘loved ones’ would be there, waiting to celebrate our union.

  ‘But—’ I said.

  ‘I know! You said no family, and mine can’t travel
anyway,’ he said. ‘But. Every wedding needs a party.’

  ‘But,’ I said. ‘I have no family and my friends aren’t—’

  ‘Relax,’ he said. ‘Husband here. It’s mainly my closest colleagues and friends, now our friends; just those who insisted on being here to see us happy.’

  ‘But—’ I said once more.

  My phone, in my ivory clutch, began to buzz.

  This was it. Now, here, this was it.

  ‘Oh God.’

  Thomas stopped walking, reached out his arms to pull me to him.

  ‘I didn’t mean to—’

  ‘Wait! Please.’

  I fumbled for the phone, my French-manicured fingertips faltering as it vibrated.

  ‘Sorry, someone’s trying to—’

  ‘Who, today? Leave it.’

  I nodded and pulled out my mobile.

  I was moments from the collapse.

  ‘Darling?’

  ‘It’s fine, I just—’

  ‘Forgive me. I knew you would fret if you had to arrange it yourself. But how could I miss the opportunity to show off my bride in that incredible dress. Look at you!’

  In seconds everything would unravel. But he looked so glad, so proud I could say nothing but:

  ‘Thank you.’

  Thomas held open the door of Haresfield Manor’s main reception room. I walked in, not to shouts of ‘surprise!’ but to the curious and well-meaning faces of Thomas’s acquaintances: mostly white couples, a young Indian family and one portly Ghanaian lecturer.

  I scanned every face. No sign.

  I breathed out in a thin stream: not here, not yet. No worthy bride could begrudge her other half this celebration, not with ‘Celebrate’ actually playing through the surround sound and Stevie raising and lowering his superlegs in time to the beat all over the dancefloor. I pushed Thomas towards his clapping colleagues. He had not wanted to keep a secret, or even risk a surprise; he had only wanted to create memories for me, for all of us, without creating stress with the finicky details.

  I looked about me and, pausing only to nip into the restrooms and swap the trainers for kitten heels, I tried. It should not have been so hard; there was all that managed delight, that polite bliss all about us. The excitement of the wedding reception was meant to prepare you for the abundance of family life, they said. But we were already living that so the night was, I had decided, more of an affirmation within Thomas’s – now our – circle. That we were a we, and they were a they, and we were all of us an us.

  At least for one night.

  My phone buzzed again and this time, emboldened by bridal champagne, I did turn it off. I could never be found here, in this grand and distant house.

  ‘Your wedding day,’ I told the mirror above the sinks, and turned to go back into the room.

  Stevie was charming everyone. He was pumped on icing and kept dancing and leaning to the right and wobbling to the left and guests flinched and raised hands to their mouths until everyone learned that he was just having a bloody good time. Lola missed the near-impromptu speeches – who had ordered speeches? – and seemed to be having an evening-long make-up crisis in the loo. The speakers crackled now and then and the top tier of fruit cake – Only tree week til yuh marry im? Yuh goh soak the fruit in rum as soon as yuh stop saying yes, yuh see? – had slid an inch off the base layer of chocolate sponge in transportation. But I told myself to remember that this was love à la folly, a ridiculous, beautiful eighteenth-century rotunda of a folly, which had no doubt been amazed to find itself all gussied up with syringas for Idaho and lignum vitae for Jamaica, and that it was a kind of fuck-me-love-you-forget-them-here’s-to-us sort of a day.

  I tried to forget my silenced phone.

  We celebrated like every bride and groom we had spent three weeks planning not to be. We ate from the manor’s Elysium Package menu; we toasted and were toasted, we drank and were drunk. At midnight, we nearly forgot to catch our long-distance taxi ride home. The new Waites. We had gone off-message; become all cheese, euphoric. A happy family, putting down the tips of radicle roots that could break rocks.

  We departed to waves of well-wishing from a small sea of strangers. My buoyant husband led us out, his daughter drifting behind him. And Stevie, swimming in exultation: the happiest life of my day.

  I checked my face in my phone camera, to make sure I really was here. There I was. A glossed-up, glitterish front-page bride, a cut-out-and-keep best version of me. I wanted it to last forever.

  Lola

  DONE LIST 3

  Nightmare over. And just begun.

  It was never supposed to happen. None of this was supposed to happen. She was never supposed to go through with it. I’m still in shock.

  Who has fucking wedding chicken these days? No one. I know that and I’ve never even been on a restaurant date yet, unless you count Maccy Ds, not like all those amazing places Dad gets all fancied up to take her to. Chicken. Why not serve it in cardboard buckets with a ketchup sachet while she’s at it? I don’t mind that she’s black but I do mind that she’s such a fucking cliché.

  What a wedding. I could not believe that my dad had invited even one of his and Mum’s friends to their stupid reception. What was he thinking? No one wants to see some old guy clinging on to a big ugly embarrassing mistake while his daughter watches, no one.

  It’s not as if the guests were even their family. Where were all the black people? Not even a brother or sister. Thought they all had a load of brothers and sisters, but the woman has no family. Absolutely none, not adults anyway. That is meant to be a black thing, isn’t it? Hey ma sista blahblahblah. No, fuck it, forget it. I don’t like what she does to my head.

  The oldies totally missed the point. They think I cried at their wedding because it was all so lovely, because Darling was so beautiful, because I was so happy to have a mother figure at last, because we were so blown away to now be a family and ten more different colours of steaming crap.

  I did cry, but not for that.

  I cried because I could not believe my dad – my dad – would go ahead and marry someone like that.

  I cried because none of it was fair, or right, or asked for.

  I cried because I would be kept outside of everything important again.

  I cried a little, at one point, because I nearly chipped a tooth on a sugared almond. Hey, DW, if you were a wedding favour … #clichémeup

  I cried because I could – now, why now? – finally picture my mum’s face, outside of photos, when I still sometimes panic that I have forgotten how to see her. And she looked hugely pissed off.

  I cried because I did not believe in love any more.

  I definitely did not cry because of the way dear Darling’s discount dress shimmered in the rapturous sunlight, setting off the crystals cascading down her bloody bodice …

  I was just really fucking unhappy. I even called AT from the loos.

  I realise now that Will was the person I should have called first.

  Harrowing. Just so you know, kids. Don’t do it.

  Will called me, again! This time it was nothing to do with Caro or Ellie or all that, he just wanted to talk to me.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about you,’ he said.

  I couldn’t believe it, I said something completely stupid like:

  ‘Really?’

  And then he said he had heard my dad had gone and married the black woman.

  Then – it was amazing – he said exactly this:

  ‘You don’t deserve it. You’re too fucking gorgeous to have to worry about all this bollocks, seriously.’

  I said I wasn’t and he said:

  ‘Oh come on, you’re fit as. I’ve got bloody eyes.’

  And I didn’t know what to say so I said:

  ‘Thank you.’

  We talked a bit more about our summer plans and the other festivals coming up but the whole time I could hardly talk straight. Gorgeous – fuck, did he actually call me ‘gorgeous’? We chatted on and I was worr
ied he was getting a bit bored until I said:

  ‘You’ll never guess what she’s called.’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Darling White.’

  ‘Ha! You’re taking the piss, right?’

  ‘No, unfortunately. Although technically she is now Darling Waite.’

  ‘Mm, technically,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry, babes, stay strong. Listen gotta run, OK? See you later.’

  And he rang off and I just sat for a bit, thinking.

  Oh my God, Will Benton thinks I’m gorgeous.

  Everyone thinks they are being such devoted parents, not going on a honeymoon.

  But honeymoons were made for people with kids who do not, ever, want to hear their parents screwing. For the love of God, Dad, go already. #endthetrauma

  I hear them having sex all the time, here in our house and I tell them, all the time ‘you kept me up last night’ and I ask them, ‘Why don’t you go out for a change?’ It just doesn’t work. I know Mum is not here, I know that, but she may as well be – all the things from their time together are still here, all over the place, hoping for lifelong protection. And I’m here and I’m part of her and they’re always up there, going over the top together. It’s like Darling wants me to hear them, but I can’t believe that’s true, or I’m screwed.

  People think that bulimia is a laughing matter. It is not. It sounds like a good idea, at first, if you want to get slim and not change a thing. That’s just how it gets you. Personally, I used to think of it as ‘the lazy girl’s diet’. The foolproof, have-your-cake-eat-it-and-lose-it-again regime. No matter that your stomach’s sore and you can’t even taste the chocolate or chips or scotch egg or whatever for the panic washing around your gums, the gross bitter taste of digestive juices and total fear. You will have to rid yourself of it soon or it will be too late. It will all have been for nothing, worse than nothing, a big step backwards, another horrible pound on. Then the scales lie anyway and you’ve gone up two pounds because you are bloated and retaining water, so you have to eat more – until you are virtually sweating out the calories – to throw up more, get more sore and bloated and then you end up needing the release when all you wanted was to be thin and pretty, never mind ‘gorgeous’. Nothing funny about that.