After Ever After Read online

  ‘Ready,’ he said a little uncertainly.

  ‘Come on, girls, let’s roll!’ I said excitedly. ‘I’m getting married in ten minutes!’ I sang, and as we left the house Fergus had grown up in, the winter sun broke through the clouds and made the rain-soaked pavements shine as if they were laid with gold.

  In the last second before he stood up, Fergus drained both his champagne glass and then mine, whispering, ‘What’s yours is mine an’ all that …’ I smiled. I knew how much he was dreading this moment, how he’d holed himself up for weeks on end fretting about getting it just right.

  ‘Look, relax, all you have to do is thank the bridesmaids, say what a babe I am and sit down,’ I’d told him, secretly much more worried about my dad’s effort and his best man’s hilarious line in dirty ‘gags’, as he referred to them.

  ‘No, Kits, you don’t get it. This is my moment to tell everyone what you mean to me. And I’m not blowing it.’

  As it had turned out, Dad hadn’t done so badly. He’d gone through the book I’d bought him and pretty much read ‘Father of the Bride Example Speech A’ verbatim, and I was grateful for the bland pleasantries and borrowed anecdotes. He’d even omitted mentioning my mother beyond how much we both missed her, and I knew it cost him, but on today of all days, my perfect day, I didn’t want the spectre of her death hanging over us. If Dad didn’t understand then I knew that Mum would.

  ‘A speech.’ Fergus’s clear voice cut through the murmur that filled the hall as he prepared himself. ‘If there was ever a reason that I nearly didn’t propose it was the thought of standing up in front of two hundred of my friends and family and making a speech …’ Fergus winked at me and I knew he was thinking of the empty beach and guest list of two that we had had to forgo.

  ‘Get on with it then!’ Colin the best man shouted, and a rumble of chuckles rolled around the room. Colin perked up, visibly heartened after his joke about the sex mad mother-in-law had fallen so flat.

  ‘Um, right.’ Fergus studied his dog-eared cue cards for a moment, his black hair falling over his winter-sky-blue eyes, and my heart leapt to his defence. My Fergus, so constantly confident, now suddenly shy and vulnerable.

  ‘So, anyway. I had to think of reasons that were good enough to make it worth my while …’

  ‘She’s up the duff!’ Colin hollered and the stony silence that greeted him sent him back into his shell as a failed stand-up. It was funny, really. No one here, not even Georgina’s stuffed-shirt heavy mob, believed that a twenty-first-century couple would get married over an unplanned pregnancy. And that wasn’t the reason at all, not at all. I tallied up my tear-fuelled tantrums over the last couple of weeks and was certain that I was in the midst of a particularly prolonged bout of PMT.

  ‘Ha, no.’ I saw that my husband’s long fingers were trembling. ‘No. It’s simple really. In the last thirty-odd years I have often wondered what kind of woman would make me want to marry her. When I was about eight I decided it was Princess Leah in her gold bikini.’ Two hundred people smiled. ‘And she pretty much headed the field for the next ten years or so. But truth be told, as I grew into a man I never thought I’d fall prey to the big “C”. Commitment. Things happened and eventually I stopped believing in love. I thought that that kind of love existed only in storybooks and on movie screens and I knew I didn’t want to settle for less.

  ‘It seems foolish now, but I had a kind of a “vision” of my perfect woman. I mean, I didn’t know what she looked like, or what her name was, I only knew that when I met this person I’d know her, know that she was my soulmate. After a long time looking I thought I’d never find her.’ Fergus caught my hand and held it tight. ‘And then I met Kitty and I knew I’d found her. I thought it would probably weird her out too much to tell her that in the first half an hour after we’d met, so I tried to keep it to myself. In fact I more or less sat on the information for all of a week and then I couldn’t keep it to myself any longer. Imagine, then, how happy I was, how lucky and blessed, to know that Kitty felt the same way about me.’ I smiled up at him, nodding.

  ‘Kitty makes me laugh, laugh so much I can’t breathe. She makes me sing, and I mean literally. You know you’re happy when you find yourself attempting a Craig David song in a tuneless baritone first thing in the morning and you don’t even know who Craig David is. Then you know you’ve found someone you have to hold on to. Although my neighbours might not think so. I really can’t sing.’ A ripple of laughter swelled at the back of the room and spread through the guests until it broke against the top table. Fergus seemed visibly heartened.

  ‘Kitty makes me hold my breath. Every day when I know I’m going to see her again, even if she’s just been in the next room, I’m so excited about the prospect that I forget to breathe. She’s simply the most beautiful person I know, and today more than ever.’

  The guests let out a collective ‘ahhhh’ and a ripple of applause swept around the room. Fergus pulled me to my feet and put his arm around my waist, drawing me into the strength of his body.

  ‘Most of all, Kitty inspires me. She makes me want to be more than I already am, she makes me want to strive to be the kind of man that she deserves – and that’s why I asked her to marry me. And because if I had to make a speech, at least I knew I could use it to tell you about the magic that this woman has brought to my life.’

  A whoop of cheers and laughter hit the ceiling and filled the room. Even Dora gave a little smile.

  The corners of Fergus’s mouth curled up as he kissed me.

  At last, I thought. At last, I’m saved. My prince has come.

  Chapter One

  It’s raining. Gene Kelly skips off the kerb opposite my house and splashes in a puddle, happy again, apparently, and, what’s more, ready for love. I blink hard twice and look at the faintly luminescent hands of Ella’s cow-jumping-over-the-moon night light-and-clock combo. Four twenty-five a.m. I am not surprised to see Gene, it’s usually around this time that I start to hallucinate. I rub my eyes (one at a time) and return my gaze out of the window to the rain-soaked street now empty of musical stars and quiet again, so empty and so quiet in a way I’d never known in my native Hackney. One year on and small-town life is still taking some getting used to.

  Ella has been asleep for twenty minutes or so, the side of her face half lost against my breast and her small fingers closed tightly around the neck of my nightshirt, gently snoring in dream-free abandon. I really should go back to bed now, but if I get out of this stupid rocking chair that Fergus had made for me to nurse her in, there’s a chance that it may creak. It doesn’t always creak, usually only every twelve or so rocks, but I lost count when I was getting her back to sleep and I can’t be sure what number I got up to. And even if I get out of the chair successfully and manage to lower her into the cot without waking her like it says in The Book; (Chapter One: Everything You Need to Know about Motherhood, page 32: … maintain body contact with your baby for as long as possible as you lower him into the cot. This enhances the feeling of well-being and reduces the trauma of separation. Well, that’s all very well, but they don’t tell you how you don’t wake your baby up whilst standing on tiptoe and attempting a bend at the waist that would tax the abdominal muscles of a twenty-year-old who hadn’t recently acquired a whole new layer of padding to their stomach. But I digress.) even then there’s a creaky floorboard by the door, to add to which, even if I do manage to remember where it is and even if I do succeed in skipping over it without landing on the other creaky floorboard in the hallway, I might breathe out and that would wake her up again.

  During the day, six-month-old Ella can sleep through the TV, the radio, the workmen, emergency service sirens – not that you hear them so much round here – but for some reason as soon as the sun sets, and especially when her mother thinks it might be time to get some sleep, she becomes a Ninja light sleeper, ready to leap into action at the slightest snap of a twig. In fact, so convinced am I that any attempt to return her to her cot will be
futile, I’m tempted just to stay in this ridiculous chair all night and go to sleep dreaming about Gene, even if I do wake up with a dead arm and a crick in my neck that would have me looking permanently to the left. However, The Book, which, let’s face it, is the nearest thing I have to maternal advice, says you can’t totally abandon your normal life to cater to your baby’s every whim (lie), so as my normal life is lying in the dark staring at the ceiling waiting for Fergus’s next snore, I should try to return to the bedroom.

  I hold my breath, rise silently from the chair, tip myself and Ella precariously over the cot rails and lower her on to the mattress, feeling the ever increasing threat of a recurrence of my birth-related back injury shoot down my spine. Ella screws up her face and whimpers a little, but then her fist uncurls and her breathing becomes even again. I look at her for a moment, feeling that peculiarly new emotion, that overpowering helpless love that was born the day she was; but then I do tend to love her even more when she’s asleep. Crossing my fingers I leap over the nursery threshold with the grace and light footfall of a ballerina. No creaks greet my bare feet as I land. I stand for a second more and listen for movement from the cot. When I hear none I think ‘Oh good, she’s still asleep,’ and ‘Oh God, I hope she’s still breathing,’ at the same time. I resist the urge to make the dangerous return journey to double-check and breathe out a barely audible sigh of relief.

  Ella’s wail crescendos like a siren call into the night and even though I can’t see him I just know that Fergus is turning his back on the bedroom door and stuffing his head under the pillow.

  ‘Okay, darling, I’m coming,’ I say wearily.

  Ella and I settle back into the stupid chair and I put her on the breast in direct contravention of the rules given by The Book on page 142 (NEVER use the breast to comfort or quiet your child). As her sobs subside into snuffles, Gene Kelly and the other one, the one that might be Princess Leah’s mum, start to tell me they’ve danced the whole night through. Good for them.

  Not so long ago the only reason I’d have been up all night would have been the pharmaceutical speed that Dora somehow acquired through some dodgy contact or other. We’d be dancing all night in some club, and then we’d get breakfast in a dingy café on the way home, and then we’d go for a walk down by the River Lee and the ducks would make us paranoid. Even more recently I’d be up all night with Fergus, talking and kissing and making love, yes, really doing it that way, the by-the-book romantic way. Now we’re lucky if we get five minutes before breakfast and even then I’m fairly sure it’s got more to do with his morning hard-on than me. It’s just, what’s the word … perfunctory.

  When did all this happen? When did I start on the path that brought me here, hollow-eyed and missing in action? Or rather missing myself in the middle of the action.

  Let me think … I’d known Fergus for two months before he asked me to marry him, another three months before the wedding and then, well, Camille forced me to take the pregnancy test the week after we got back from honeymoon and by then I was almost eight weeks gone. Another seven months and a bit for Ella to appear on the scene and she is now six and a bit months old. It has taken me something like eighteen months to come to this.

  Under two years to go from city girl to nursing mother, dyed-in-the-wool single chick to married and frumpy. It took me ten seconds to fall in love with Fergus but has taken me eighteen months, a marriage certificate, a mortgage and a baby to reach the first clear-minded thought since the moment I met him.

  I don’t really know who he is.

  I know he’s not an international crime baron, or a spy, I know he doesn’t have a secret and glamorous life. I know he’s an IT consultant in the City. I know he’s got an Irish grandmother on his father’s side which he sees as justification to describe himself as a Celt and occasionally adopt a faux Irish accent that used to drive me mad when we first met and still does but in an entirely different way. What I mean is, what I think must have happened is that shortly before Ella was born the storm blew itself out of our whirlwind romance and left me dumped like my old friend Dorothy in a strange land where I don’t understand the language. The land of marriage, motherhood and my new home town of Berkhamsted. Smalltown Land. Smalltown Middle-Classville. Landrovertown. You get the picture.

  Now Fergus.

  I can remember very clearly, the way that women do, the night that I met Fergus. It had been raining like it is tonight, but different rain. Summer rain, light and cooling in the city. The sort of rain that might precede a thunderstorm. I remember every detail the way girls do remember everything about the day they meet their true love.

  We’d finished work about an hour earlier, or at least I had – finishing on time in the human resources department of a major record label was difficult, especially with our borderline personality-disorder boss, but Camille made an art of working late, and not because she was dedicated to her work. Camille was still working on a spreadsheet she should have finished hours ago, a routine consequence of her endless office-hours phone calls to her mum, with whom she enjoyed the kind of mother–daughter intimacy that I had only daydreamed about. (But Mum, do I need two eggs or three? Do I sift the flour? Mum, Mum, what do you think about invisible panty liners? The black ones? That sort of thing.) Still, I consoled myself when jealousy crept up on me, if my mum were still alive there would be a good chance I wouldn’t make it to parties on time, so there’s always a bright side.

  ‘Oh God, oh God, wait for me,’ she’d cried as I blotted my lipstick and checked my evening outfit inch by square inch in my make-up mirror. I looked at the back of her head. She was never ready on time. Never in the five years I’d known her.

  ‘Come on, Camille, if we don’t leave soon all the celebs will be gone!’ Maybe it wasn’t fair to pick on Camille too much. If it hadn’t been for her we’d never have got invites to this latest industry party. Camille knew everyone who counted and everyone who counted was in love with her. From executive producers to post-room boys, Camille had inside tabs on everyone and everything at Starbrite Records.

  Which was great, because we only worked as assistants in the human resources department and our brushes with glamour would have been few and far between without her contacts. There was no mystery to how she did it: her hundred-watt smile and ‘it could be you’ eyes swung it every time. Maybe if her fan club knew just how much she loved her boyfriend they wouldn’t have put out quite so much with the freebies and VIP passes, but Camille had an ingenious way of never letting it come up.

  ‘I know, I know, I’ve just got this one last set of figures to put in and then I’m …’ She caught sight of one of her cornrow plaits over her shoulder. ‘Hey, listen,’ she said, changing her own subject with her usual continuity carefree aplomb, ‘what do you reckon to me going blonde the next time I get a weave done?’

  I shook my head at her and shoved her out of her chair. ‘Budge over. I’ll finish this and you get ready.’

  She smiled at me gratefully, probably certain that my infamous impatience with tardiness of any kind would force my co-operation eventually and result in me finishing her work for her.

  ‘Cheers, you’re a doll, but really – blonde, maybe? Like her from Destiny’s Child?’

  I gave her a quick appraisal and tried to imagine her with blonde hair instead of the shiny black plaits that framed her oval face now. Camille was a beautiful girl, slim and sexy in a way that belied her couch potato loved-up weekends. She somehow emanated a bronze glow that made her dark skin faintly luminescent, powering the sparkle in her almond-shaped, amber-coloured eyes. I couldn’t see how blonde extensions could improve on that.

  ‘Maybe something different from plaits, but not blonde. Stick to the natural look, babe,’ I’d said. ‘It suits you.’

  ‘Natural-ish look. One day my own hair will grow long enough to do something with …’ she said wistfully, and applied the lipgloss that was the only cosmetic she wore, or needed to wear.

  Dora had been with us that
night; she’d been waiting in the foyer with her dark glasses on and her mac pulled conspicuously around her body like protective armour. Other departing Starbrite Records people raised eyebrows in her direction as they left, probably wondering if she was one of the over-the-hill (over twenty-one) hopefuls that occasionally hung out in the lobby desperate to give an impromptu concert to a passing executive, receptionist, cleaner – whatever. I just put it down to her eccentricity, the same attitude to life that had made her dye her eyebrows blue when we were fifteen and that had made her dye her naturally honey-blonde hair black two weeks before that night.

  Things had happened to Dora when she was a child, things that meant she ended up in care, things which made her and me the weirdest two kids at school and instant soulmates, protecting each other from the jibes of the lacy-topped socks girls and their permed perfection. We told only each other about the things that had happened to us, and because of that I understood her perfectly. I never questioned her latest tangent in lifestyle, because that was the kind of person Dora was: a ship sailing close to the wind but always coming back safe to the port of our friendship after every near miss.

  All my life I have half pretended that I’m a very intuitive soul, but I don’t remember knowing that by that time Dora was already caught deep in addiction. I think it was partly because it was never like I’d seen it in films, dramatic, horrifying and didactic. She looked well, she held everything together okay, and she earned good money, so I suppose she didn’t need to go robbing old ladies to support her habit, not when heroin was only twenty quid a pop. Can you imagine? I always thought it was so much more expensive than that. Anyway, I tell myself that the change in her was so gradual as to make it almost imperceptible. Honestly, though, there is also the fact that I was too busy waiting to be in love to notice at first. We all drank a lot and we all dabbled sometimes, looking for something else to temporarily occupy that empty space we imagined was allocated for the contentment a relationship would bring.