Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
First published 2012
Copyright © Amy Huberman, 2012
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover illustration by Alannah Cavanagh, cover design www.headdesign.co.uk
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-14-196089-0
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Acknowledgements
Amy Huberman is an actor and writer. She lives in Dublin with her husband. Her first novel, Hello, Heartbreak, was published in 2009.
For Brian
Had I the heaven’s embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams
William Butler Yeats
‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’
I was actually never getting out of here. Ever. This was it: I was going to live out the rest of my short and rather uninspired life here, with her, in this tiny dressing room. I was never going to swim the Channel for charity, rescue orphaned baby elephants in Thailand, get onto The X Factor on a wild card and end up winning, or become a professional tennis player. I’m pretty sure the only time I’d actually ever picked up a tennis racket was to swipe the cobwebs down from the ceiling, but now that I knew I was never getting out of here, all I wanted to do was to go pro with the tennis. And be interviewed by Graham Norton about my staggering sporting career, the vast sums I’d raised for charity and my inspirational relief efforts with the UN. (I would enter on one of my rescued elephants, which had learned to paint like Picasso with his trunk and use sign language.)
No, that was not how I saw things panning out.
‘I’m just not sure it fits me here,’ she moaned, circling her chest with splayed hands.
No shit, Einstein. She was showing so much cleavage, it looked like a bum mooning out of a car window.
Humph. I wasn’t even going to get the Last Rites. Or a Last Meal, like all those lucky people incarcerated on Death Row. (A chunk of Brie the size of a semi-detached house and a bag of Tangfastics. For the record.) Was I being a touch over-dramatic? Maybe.
‘Perhaps if I just whoosh them up a bit more.’
Oh, God, now the bum was in my face. I mean the boobs. The bum-boobs were now in my face. And there was I thinking I was finally going to expire from lack of food, when in fact I was going to die from boob suffocation.
‘How did the suspect die, Detective?’
‘Breast asphyxiation. Quite common among stylists in this age bracket. Very sad. I heard she was just about to go pro with the tennis too.’
Wow. I’d been watching far too much CSI. Wasting my life on it instead of practising my serves and volleys. You see, things like that will separate the champs from the chumps in the end.
She gave her boobs another ‘whoosh’. Oh, God, there was no talking to this woman. And now I was trapped in a department-store fitting room with her for ever.
I looked at my watch. Another half an hour had slipped away, and with it the last vestige of any hope of ever making it out of there. I slid down the wall and landed on the fitting-room floor. Five forty-five? How was that possible? I really was going to be late now. Later than late for a very important date. But there was just no budge on this Mad Hatter.
‘What if we tried it with a different bra? Or surgical bandages? Maureen Noonan tried that for the golf night last month and she looked fantastic! She said the collapsed lung was well worth it and she’s down to every other day with her inhaler.’
I glanced at my watch again.
‘Grace, am I keeping you?’ Mrs Macnamara asked.
I wanted to shout, ‘Eh, yes! We’ve been in here trying to squeeze Rosie O’Donnell into Rosie Huntington-Whiteley’s wardrobe for the past five hours!’ But I didn’t, of course. What was I, stupid? I couldn’t lose my job now. Not with the state of the jobs market. (And there were shoes in Topshop I had my eye on.)
‘Well, it’s just … it’s my friend’s wedding-rehearsal dinner this evening down in Wicklow, and I’m a bridesmaid so it’s sort of important I’m there …’ I trailed off. I sounded like a malfunctioning sat-nav – must have been the lack of food and fresh air kicking in. ‘B-r-i-d-e-s-m-a-i-d,’ I repeated, all robot-y, prodding the side of my numb jaw.
‘There’s nothing for it. I’m going to have to give up my Coronation Street Battenberg slice in the evenings,’ she said, ignoring me. ‘Feck it now altogether! How am I going to be able to look at Deirdre’s face every night without something sweet to take the edge off it?’
If she was going to fit into that dress in six weeks’ time, she was going to have to give up more than her Coronation Street Battenberg slice. She was going to have to get her jaw wired and seven-eighths of her stomach removed. Pure and simple. And I wasn’t sure there was any nice way of saying that. But when I recommended she try on a bigger size, she looked at me like I was an assassin and told me that if Dolores Mangan from the Tuesday Tulips Golf Society found out she was wearing a sixteen, my life would not be worth living.
Humph. What was left of my life. Because, as I’ve touched on already, I was never getting out of here!
She had always been one of my more … ‘tricky’ clients. The first time she came to me, she wanted me to find her a pair of stiletto runners. That’s right: runners with a stiletto heel. The woman is nearly sixty. She’d seen them on Katy Perry at the EMAs and now she wanted them for the ten-kilometre Walk In the Phoenix Park charity luncheon for the Irish Donkey Society or something, because she’d heard that Helen Naughton had ordered an Alexander McQueen shift dress she’d seen on Cheryl Cole and this was the only way she could think to trump her. No: there wasn’t much logic to it.
I had to keep telling myself things would get better. That this was only a stop-gap. That my life would not be reduced to stuffing middle-aged women, like sausagemeat, into tubes of turquoise taffeta for ever.
Out of all my clients, Mrs Macnamara was the worst. She was the Moriarty to my Holmes, the criminal mastermind of fashion crime. I spent my life trying to outwit her in so many ways, like Holmes himself, sans pipe, to ensure justice in the world of style.
Sometimes it had got messy. For her birthday party last year we might have ended up in a physical brawl. There might have been a number of headlocks involved. And one Chinese burn. One. I just couldn’t let her go to her own party dressed as a Pussycat Doll. And a Chinese burn was the only way I could get her to drop the leather bra.
She thanked me for it in the end. Only when Nicole Scherzinger ended up ‘slated’ in the ‘Rated or Slated’ column of Starz the following week. But still. The incident was so bad I developed two new worry lines between my eyebrows that randomly formed the image of a tiny Chinese man when I frowned.
But today was the worst I’d ever seen her. She was choosing a dress for her daughter’s wedding and, honestly, it was like having all your teeth pulled out one by one with no anaesthetic when you already had a headache. And two broken arms. And the flu. And your period. And a really bad paper cut.
And I was already running seriously late!
‘Okay, pretend you’re in the church and the bride arrives. Cue uplifting music, cue sopranos heralding the arrival. Blah, blah, blah. Then you see me. Cue Dolores Mangan looking like she might vomit from jealousy. Grace Harte: Is. This. The. Outfit?’
I thought I was going to vomit. Did that count?
‘Mrs Macnamara, I have to say again, I really do think not clashing with the bridesmaids is quite important. Seeing as it’s your daughter’s wedding.’
‘Exactly. My daughter’s wedding. As in, it’s my right to look the best. I only have Luleeluleelu’s best interest at heart, you know, Grace. She hates the limelight so I’m very willing to stand up to the plate and make sure she doesn’t get overwhelmed.’
Luleeluleelu? I hope to God that was a pet name. Or I was calling Child Services. Or Lisa, to laugh about it at length.
‘Now, if the bridesmaids want to wear a wishy-washy pink then by all means let them. I certainly won’t stand in their way. But I am not going to spend the next four weeks in Marbella turning half-caste, only to come home and slither down the aisle in some dishwater-coloured piece of shite. Do you get me, Grace? Well? Do you?’
I wanted to say that, no, I didn’t get her at all. But I was too queasy, hungry and tired for an argument. And I was partially paralysed down my right side from being scrunched in a ball on the fitting-room floor for far longer than would be deemed safe by any doctor the world over. Or an actor-doctor on Casualty, at least.
I nodded numbly.
‘Just ask your own mother,’ she rambled on. ‘I’m sure she made sure she looked her best on your big day.’
Huh?
‘Oh, I’m not married,’ I said, wondering what made her think that I was, seeing as I had no wedding ring on my finger. Neither had I mentioned a husband, which I think is a pretty important requisite when it comes to being married.
‘You’re not married?’ she shrieked.
Christ alive, suddenly she was wailing at me like she’d just seen her entire family shot dead. She seemed to be having palpitations. Balls, I didn’t know the twenty-four-hour nurse-line number.
‘But you’re a very pretty girl,’ she said, gasping for breath. ‘And, oh, Jesus, didn’t you tell me you were, you know … turning?’
Turning? Turning what? Turning white from lack of food and air? Turning blue from being forced to sit in a Cambodian jail stress position for so long? Turning against religion in this godless dressing room?
She paused and looked around the fitting room furtively. Really? Really? Did she think there was another person in this tiny shoebox we somehow hadn’t noticed before now? She closed her eyes, like she was about to implode, then exhaled dramatically. ‘Turning … thirty!’
She said it like I had contracted a terminal illness. Then she sort of withered against the wall and, bless her, she looked all worried and vulnerable and I suddenly wanted to hug her and tell her that it was all going to be okay.
‘You’re so brave,’ she whimpered, after I did end up hugging her and telling her that me turning thirty without being married was really not that big a disaster. We stood there in an awkward embrace as I patted her back while she stroked my hair.
‘I mean, I know there’s others out there far worse off, like all those people who lost their homes in the floods,’ she sniffed, ‘but there you are, trucking along like a trooper, as best you can. My Luleeluleeluloopsypop will be married before her twenty-sixth birthday, would you believe? Lucky, lucky Luleeluleelu. But I suppose we can’t all be that fortunate.’
She cupped my face in her hands, leaned into me and, sounding just as sombre as Humphrey Bogart saying goodbye to Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, said, ‘My God, but sometimes life can be very hard.’
I mumbled about us always having Paris, clearly losing all reason.
She looked confused.
Who could blame her?
Though she had my cheeks mushed together quite firmly, I managed to articulate a proper response: ‘Well, thank you for your concern, but I do actually have a boyfriend.’
‘Oh?’ she said, dropping my face. ‘Who is he? What does he do? How long have you been together? My Luleeluleelu’s fiancé is a financial accountant,’ she added smugly.
A financial accountant? Was there any other kind? That was unless I’d missed something and the world of commerce had gone back to bartering farm produce.
‘His name is Robbie,’ I said, smiling. ‘He works for a music promotions company. Oh, and we’ve been together seven years,’ I added, thinking that would shut her up.
It didn’t. It only fuelled her fire.
‘Seven years!’ she squealed.
Jesus, this woman was carrying on worse than I had when I’d found out that CBS was cancelling the original 90210.
‘Good God, Grace. Seven years together, turning thirty, and still no ring? That boy is nothing but a time-waster. Do you want me to call him?’ she asked, in a frenzy. ‘Tell him how devastated you are? Tell him to ship up or shape out? Slap him around a bit? Climb down off the pot? Shit or get off the fence?’
Oh, God, not this again. ‘Eh, very kind of you, but I think I’m just going to hang on in there, if that’s okay with you?’ I said, crossing my fingers in a mock gesture that clearly went over her head.
‘Suit yourself,’ she huffed. ‘It’s only your own life you’re wasting. Now, back to me. Make. Me. Fabulous!’
I bit my lip and got back to work, smiling to myself. Imagine if Robbie’d been here to hear all that nonsense! My time-wasting no-good boyfriend!
Robbie Cotter was more than just my boyfriend: he was my whole world. We’d been together for seven fun, fantastic years and we’d even just bought our first house together. He was the one person on the whole planet who could lift me and turn me to mush at the same time. (Well, that’s not entirely true: Marc Jacobs has the same effect, but Robbie knows about it and he’s cool with it.)
No matter what crazy, crap or mundane nonsense goes on in my day, as soon as I turned the key in the lock at home and heard him call, ‘Here’s my girl!’ I knew everything was going to be okay. He could dissipate a bad mood in seconds with one of his infamous ‘Robbieisms’. And it wasn’t just me he could make laugh: he made everyone laugh. The whole world and its mother were mad about Robbie Cotter, and I knew how lucky I was to be a part of that world.
Now if I could just get everyone to shut up and mind their own business about why we weren’t engaged, we really would be laughing.
Finally, finally, I got out of there. I’m not saying I was nearly as brave, or that the incarceration was remotely as long, but I felt a little like that Burmese lady Aung San Suu Kyi. (Though I wasn’t expecting Bono to honour me at the Mansion House or anything.)
Despite my protestations, Mrs Macnamara ended up choosing an outfit two sizes too small that made her look like a superhero from Sesame Street. Some sort of caped sparkly body-con dress with a canary yellow rectangular hat. Ugh, I didn’t care any more. It was her funeral/daughter’s wedding/Sesame Street superhero spin-off. I just needed to get out of there and down to Wicklow ASAP.
Just as I was making my final bolt towards the door, she stopped me in my tracks and peered down her nose at me. ‘Grace, I know we don’t always see eye to eye in terms of style. I can be a bit fashion-forward at times.’
I bit my lip.
‘The thing is, though, in spite of … everything, I do think you’re a nice girl. So I’m going to give you some advice from the heart. Dump that man. He’s wasting your most fertile years, darling. All too soon those cutesy looks of yours will be more Rita Sullivan than Rita Hayworth. So it’s time to sell, sell, sell, dear, while anyone’s still interested in buying.’
Arrrgh! I was starting to fume.
‘Well, let me tell you a little something in return.’ I coughed. (I really needed to give up my odd sneaky cigarette.) ‘Life is a box of chocolates, Mrs Macnamara, and I can assure you that my Robbie is most certainly not the Turkish Delight, or the coffee one that no one really likes – except my mum.’
That was crap. I should have said he was a secret member of the Avengers or something.
‘Well, I have absolutely no idea what you’re on about, Grace, but I don’t have time to stand here and listen to you prattling on about confectionery.’ And with that she turned on her heel and spun out of the swing doors.
Right, well, HA! That showed her!
I think.
Took me far too long to get home. My legs were still numb and pins-and-needlesy from being squashed into that shoebox for so long. I ran home like a cartoon cowboy with ox-bow-shaped legs, wondering if I had dislocated my hip.
Was possibly being a bit of a hypochondriac as usual. Like last week when I was convinced I’d developed a sixth toe on my right foot. Turned out I had a pebble caught in my sock. ‘Ow, ow, ow.’ I waddled around the corner and scuttled up to our front door. I still smiled every time I slid the key into the lock.
Our home. Our home.
‘Christ alive!’ I shrieked. Although I should’ve been used to it by now, considering this happened every time I passed through our hall: Bette Davis jumping out at me.
Not the Bette Davis. That would be so weird, considering she’d been dead for twenty-two years. Bette was the cat, a possessed little toe-rag that had come with the house and refused to move out. She quite liked Robbie. She despised me. I was the Joan Crawford to her Bette Davis, and she picked on me mercilessly. That’s what we were called at seven Maple Street, Bette and Joan, and the bitter feud between us was even worse than the one between the original pair. ‘Euch, Bette, get out of my way or I might just “forget” to leave your food out.’
She slunk over to the coat-stand, not taking her eyes off me for a nano-second, and proceeded to pee into a pair of my shoes.
‘That’s it, you little slapper!’ I growled. ‘You can roam the streets for your dinner tonight!’
I pegged it past her and raced up the stairs. I didn’t have time for cat-wrestling right now (sessions have been known to last hours): I was running seriously late for the rehearsal dinner as it was.
I barrelled through my wardrobe, knowing this was my last chance to wear something fantastic before I was zipped, stitched, buttoned and trussed up into the hell of Bridesmaid Revisited tomorrow. For Rebecca Madigan of Newlands Park, Dublin 14 – the bride-to-be and one of my best friends in the whole world, a wonderful person with the biggest heart of anyone I knew, fantastic shiny brown hair, and a talent for singing Chesney Hawkes’s ‘The One And Only’ backwards (seriously – it was amazing) – had absolutely no dress sense. What. So. Ever.
She wore gnome-shaped drop earrings and orange wellies with jeans. Once I even caught her going to the shops in an apron because she said it looked like a cute little dress.
It didn’t. It looked like an apron.
Just thinking about her dress sense, I needed to lie down in a dark room and sip some iced water while someone stroked my hair. You see, where Rebecca was into crazy clothes, I was crazy into clothes. I always had been. I could ‘speak clothes’ before I could speak English, and my earliest memory was of having a canary yellow Babygro with brown polka dots inflicted upon me when I was barely out of the womb. Mum said it was impossible to have memories from such a young age, but I wasn’t so sure. I reckoned if it was that traumatizing, it’d stick. I was convinced I’d been such a ‘vomity baby’ because I was repulsed by my clothes, not because I had colic, as my mother suggested.
I lived and breathed clothes. I adored clothes. If I could have eaten them I would (sometimes I’ve been known to kiss them, but I make an effort only to do that when I’m on my own). Whenever I couldn’t sleep, I counted dresses. When I couldn’t concentrate, I looked up net-a-porter.com to clear my head. If I was stressed, I went upstairs and rearranged my shoe-rack. Fashion was my currency, my fresh air, my joie de vivre! My ‘thing’.
I loved old clothes, new clothes, and everywhere-in-between clothes. They got me charged; they got me excited; they got me wired. Rifling through an uncharted rail of dresses; picking up a display shoe and twirling it in my hand; holding up chandelier earrings to a lobe and admiring myself in a shop mirror. Jesus, it was like a junkie getting a hit. It might actually be an official addiction: if I didn’t get my little hits, my skin went all itchy and I started to crave starchy foods. And if I went too long altogether it was like a scene from Trainspotting, except with hallucinations of shoes and handbags crawling across the ceiling.
There was nothing in the world that a hit of Grazia wouldn’t do for me. The girls had often said that if they could eat chocolate while having sex, it would make the whole experience simply mind-blowing. But for me, combing through the Fashion Charts on page seven of Grazia while doing the deed might lead to the best orgasm ever. I’d yet to convince Robbie, and he seemed a little freaked out by the whole idea, bless him. He didn’t really get it. And I was glad about that. I mean if he got fashion as much as I did, I’d be a little suspicious. Wouldn’t want Lisa saying he had ‘a touch of the Des Fergusons’. Des Ferguson was her dad and she was convinced he was gay (in fairness, he gave her cause to think that). Much better for our sex life in general that Robbie was unaware of how hot a trend polka dots were this season.
I simply adored what clothes could do, what they could mean, how they could make you feel. The beauty of different forms and colours, the intrigue they could imbue in the female form, the fun and frivolity they could express of someone’s character. I loved all things edgy with a vintage feel. Mixing modern lines with classics. There was no denying I took inspiration from my old-school Hollywood heroines. Robbie said it only ever got a bit odd when I’d quote certain lines to him from the old black-and-whites.
‘You fancy a glass of wine with dinner tonight, Gracie?’
‘ “Gimme a whiskey, ginger ale on the side. And don’t be stingy, baby.” ’
‘What? But you don’t drink whiskey ever since you puked on your mountains, lakes and rivers lecturer after the freshers’ ball in college … Oh, right, Greta Garbo.’
I think he finds it quite charming, really.
For someone who’d always wanted to get into fashion when I ‘grew up’, doing a geography degree at Trinity probably hadn’t been the smartest decision. Unless I was thinking of opening a shop that sold an earth-platelets-limestone-rock-formations-inspired clothing line. I’d only put geography on the CAO at the time to annoy my mother. She’d kept harping on at me for being a daydreamer, for having no real focus in life, and for making what she described as ‘random choices’. I suppose she was talking about the time I brought my granny to my Debs, or decided to breed and sell carrier pigeons from our garden in Stillorgan. In hindsight, studying geography for four years just to cheese off my mother was probably a little petty.
Doing a post-grad in film was far more up my alley. I had no idea what I was going to do with it, but I loved learning all about my screen idols and being allowed to watch them in action for hours on end. The Jean Harlows, the Bette Davises, the Rita Hayworths, the Elizabeth Taylors, the Audrey Hepburns, the Grace Kellys. The suspense, the drama, the bittersweet heartaches. The fairytale costumes. The beauty of the ‘old movies’ appreciated as works of art. I often got frowned upon for handing in assignments that weren’t exactly ‘relevant to the course’: I suppose ‘Elizabeth Taylor’s Amazing 65 Costume Changes in Cleopatra’ or ‘Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn’s Fascinating 25-year Secret Romance’ were a little out of left field, but I passed anyway.
My sister Tanya had been just as disparaging about film studies as Mum had been about geography. ‘Well done, Grace. You now know how to watch movies. A year well spent.’
I suppose my move into styling had been a bit random too. I spotted a styling competition in a copy of Woman’s Way I was reading at the dentist’s. A lady called Maeve from Swords swore she’d let a member of Joe Public style her, she was so desperate to change her image. ‘Desperate’ was only the tip of the iceberg – brown cord trousers, a turquoise short-sleeved polo neck and a red gingham hair-band with a built-in nylon peroxide fringe. I’d forgotten to vote in the last general election, so this was my belated attempt at doing my civic duty.
Got Maeve from Swords sorted, and it just went from there, really. Now I was working part-time for a fairly bland personal-styling agency, run by a nice, if also a little bland, middle-aged woman called Eleanor Holt.
The height of the excitement thus far had been styling the Ukrainian ambassador’s wife for the St Patrick’s Day parade. More often than not, however, it was far more banal and routine, like a ladies’ luncheon or a charity do, or some ‘incredibly fabulous’ party the women had been invited to at which they needed to impress everyone else. Women like that lunatic Mrs Macnamara.
I swear to God, those women should give seminars in committed combat, perhaps to professional sports people experiencing a lull in their competitive urge. There were absolutely no lengths to which they would not go to ‘look the best’, no hemline too short, no earrings too dazzling, no headpiece too feathery. And there was always one person carved out as their rival whom they simply had to out-dress. It was like some sort of Middle-aged Women’s Gladiatorial Luncheon-type style-off, and the competition was as fierce as an episode of America’s Next Top Model, if a touch wrinklier, more feathery and with a substantially higher control-pants-to-contestant ratio.
I worked for Eleanor to tide me over: I’d gone back to college again, this time for something really useful and less ‘random’.
Origami.
Yes, ladies and gents, origami was the new post-boom business and economics degree.
Only kidding.
Pig farming. Because, lads and lasses, pig farming was the post-boom ‘property portfolio’.
No, sorry, I was just messing. (I had to stop doing that. Perhaps that was why no one really took me seriously and I didn’t have a proper job and the only thing I could afford from Asos was hair bobbles.) I’d nearly finished an MA in creative business. I’d thought it was a smart move, trying to anchor my flighty fashion passion with some sort of grounded, useful business acumen.
I wouldn’t have said it was the most exciting or interesting thing to sacrifice a year of my life doing. (Once I asked my tutor if business models were girls who only modelled office wear just to see if I could make him laugh. Didn’t work. In fact, he didn’t break a smile for eight months solid. I’ve often wondered if that was some sort of record. Or if he had a difficult childhood, like Marilyn Monroe.)
Robbie had been so incredibly supportive when I did eventually decide to go back to college, which was the main thing. Unlike Tanya, who’d just mocked me. ‘Creative business? What’s that? How to decorate a spreadsheet?’
And Mum said, ‘Well, can you not pop off to Kildare Village with the girls at the weekends if you want to get more into fashion?’ She couldn’t entirely grasp why I’d want to go back and study again after all the study I’d already done. But Mum still wanted me to be a Blue Peter presenter, so anything else would fall short of the mark for her. I was still getting rabbit scissors, ribbon and odour-free glue for Christmas.
I’d always been quite ‘creative’. Painting the living-room carpet pink aged four because I ‘wasn’t mad on the brown’ had given me that reputation. I suppose. It wasn’t that I ever wanted to design clothes, or paint them different colours per se, but I had figured out that I wanted to work in fashion, plain and simple. But not in a clichéd Devil Wears Prada kind of way. Not that I was ever going to get that opportunity, let’s be honest: that only even happens in rom coms and chick-lit novels. And working for Eleanor Holt was certainly nothing like working for Miranda Priestly.
On the whole, business-studies lecturers were not exciting. Neither was business studies full stop. But I figured it was worth it to give myself the tools I needed if I was ever to start up my business, or get ahead in the fashion industry in any serious capacity. What exactly I wanted to do was still One of the Great Mysteries of Life, as Robbie put it.
‘Do you think you’d like to be a fashion buyer?’ he’d say.
‘A boutique owner?’
‘A fashion blogger?’
‘An accessories designer?’
‘A hat maker? How about a hat maker? Who wants to be a milliner?’ he’d say, going all Chris Tarranty.
‘Hmm, I’m not sure,’ I’d say, chewing the inside of my lip while tilting my head and looking up in a very cute Audrey Hepburn kind of way (most people think that’s an adorable natural trait but actually it’s a look I’ve been practising and perfecting in front of the mirror since I was a teenager).
‘Maybe you could sell trendy garden wear that you could also go dancing in, like if you’d been doing the gardening and had to go straight out in a hurry.’
Jesus! Like I said, if he got it, he’d be gay, right?
I can hardly blame him for being confused, seeing as I didn’t really get it myself. I was hoping some unbelievably convenient opportunity would drop on to my lap out of nowhere, or a brilliant fortune-teller would tell me what I needed to do. Or I’d have a light-bulb moment while trying on the most perfect pair of shoes. Something handy and convenient and dramatic, like what happens to confused people in the movies (any day now I was going to watch science programmes on the Discovery Channel to broaden my mind).
But failing all of that, hopefully I’d just ‘figure it out’.
Anyway, enough about my not-so-illustrious career. Task in hand. Find a dress! After much twirling and flittering in front of my fairy-light-framed full-length mirror, I finally decided on my old reliable Audrey Hepburn Breakfast at Tiffany’s LBD Givenchy copy. I’d found it in a charity shop in London yonks ago and the man who ran it tried to convince me it’d been the star’s actual dress from the movie. The real McCoy. Ha! I asked him if that was the case why was he only charging twenty-six pounds for it when I was pretty sure the original had fetched nearly half a million at an auction in London. It sort of went against me when he upped the price to thirty-two seventy-five to save face.
‘Look, look,’ he said, shoving a badly stitched tag on the inside of the dress into my face that read ‘Audrey’s Dress, Hands Off’. Oh, God love him. Like the labels your mum used to stitch into your knickers when you went off to Irish college – without the ‘Hands Off’ bit or the cool kids would probably have had her pegged as a bit of a ‘spa’.
People always give out about black, saying it’s safe and boring. But not so, in my opinion. And especially not if you had a mop of red hair. There wasn’t a classier combination in the world, if you asked me. A landscape of inky ebony with a cherry on top. It was my proud collusive ginger nod to Rita Hayworth’s Gilda. One of my all-time favourites.
I wasn’t actually cherry red, although I had toyed with the idea in the past. My mother warned me that if I ever dyed my hair she would chop off my hands, which I always thought was a touch confrontational. I told her to stop watching Crimes in Thailand on the Discovery Channel. Plus I’d have to learn how to paint on my favourite pillar-box red Chanel lipstick with my feet and that would just be annoying. A stroke of winged black eyeliner above the lashline would be even trickier.
I sang ‘Bette Davis Eyes’ as I applied my mascara. ‘Aaaah!’ I screamed, swiping the mascara wand right across my forehead. Bette Davis was on the bookshelf, staring at me in the mirror.
I pegged it downstairs to my car and spent far too long trying to wedge the suitcase into the boot. Why didn’t cars come with shoe-racks, for crying out loud? That way we wouldn’t have to consider strapping our groceries and/or other luggage to the roof.
‘Selling anything?’
Oh, no! No, no, no! I didn’t have time for this now. Ian, our sixty-eight-year-old neighbour, who always asked us if were selling anything. What did he think we were – black-market traders?
‘What have you got in there?’ he asked, peering around the edge of the open boot.
‘Shoes, Ian. What size are you?’
‘A twelve on my left foot and a seven on my right.’
Oh. I wasn’t expecting that. How odd. I looked down at his feet. Really odd.
‘Er, well, these are a size seven …’
‘I’ll take them!’ he piped.
Seconds later he was handing me seven euro twenty-nine and I was handing him a pair of electric blue peep-toes. It was fine. I was bored with them anyway. Plus, it left more room for the damn suitcase. I clicked the boot shut, just about, and sped off in the direction of Wicklow, wondering if I could get Ian to make me an offer for the manky green hoodie Robbie insists on wearing every Sunday.
Or Bette Davis.
He could have her for free.
‘Grace’s here!’
‘Grace, you’re late.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, as I scooted up the aisle of St Brigid’s Church. The priest stood there holding a Bible in one hand, the other, palm facing outwards, raised in the air. I really wanted to run up and give him a high-five. But I was trying to be all ‘low-key’ on account of being late, so I decided against it.
I unravelled my scarf and loosened the top button of my shirt. Churches always made me feel slightly claustrophobic. I put it down to the time my sister locked me into a confession box so I wouldn’t be able to rat on her to Mum that she’d gone down to the local chipper to snog Peter Gunnigle. Four and a half hours I was in there! Tanya ended up with a crick so bad she had to wear a neck brace for a week, which eased the blow a little.
I was finally rescued by the cleaning lady who, as it turns out, was just as traumatized as I was when she eventually found the source of ‘Don’t think you can get away with this! I’m gonna hunt you down! You are so dead!’ She’d been convinced it was the ghost of her husband’s ex-wife. Made the whole experience even freakier when she made me swear on my life I wasn’t possessed with the spirit of Irene Ennis.
There they all were, lined up around Rebecca and Tony on the altar in a lovely little horseshoe, and I nearly got a lump in my throat seeing them. My God, they were actually getting married tomorrow! I could still see Rebecca in neon green cycling shorts doing Take That routines in my front garden. (Ages ago. Years ago. I wasn’t friends with a simpleton/excitable courier.)
There was Lisa, grinning at me like a lunatic, her long blonde hair tumbling over the shoulders of her cute little navy tea-dress. Lisa always looked immaculate. But she was a style slut. She admitted it. She was the Russell Brand of trends: she just couldn’t keep it in her pants, her skirts, her jackets, shoes, whatever, and whored herself over more trends than Russell Brand’s had hot dinners. Or something. Maybe hot dinner ladies. Anyway, she got bored easily. This month it was Kate Middleton. Next month it might be the Queen herself. But let’s hope not because I really don’t think solicitors are allowed to wear tiaras.
She had such a broad grin that her cheeks had somehow reduced her normally humungous blue eyes to mere dots at the back of her head, and her face was glazed, like she’d been looking at psychedelic prints for too long. In actual fact, she’d been looking at Killian for too long.
There he was, ‘Killian-the-lash’, my best mate’s new man. I felt a flush of excitement, like I was about to meet a celebrity I’d heard that much about him. Lisa had also resurrected the title ‘lash’ from 1992, when it was last used, as she felt no modern appellation did him justice. Oooh, he was a hottie all right. Tall and sallow with a cool military haircut, short at the sides and longer on top. He was very Shoreditch: funky black-rimmed glasses, shirt buttoned right up to the neck, skinny jeans with Converse. He could have been a member of the Arctic Monkeys.
I gave her a big wink, two thumbs up in approval, and did a mock-orgasm face for good measure. I should possibly not have done that when Killian-the-lash was looking. Along with everyone else. Including the priest. In a church.
Killian-the-lash squirmed and went bright red. And I couldn’t blame him. He was already here under duress, the poor love. Whatever about going to the wedding of a bride and groom you’d never met before, being made go to the rehearsal Mass with the entire bridal party, all of whom were complete strangers, was just humiliating. But Lisa had warned him she wouldn’t put out for at least another three to four weeks if he didn’t come as she was dying to show him off. She drove a hard bargain, that one. But I could tell she was absolutely mad about him, which made me smile.
Poor old Killian. I wondered did he always suffer from high colour, or was he just currently in a state of prolonged, extreme mortification? We’d see if his face went back to normal later on.
Oh, and there was Mel, Rebecca’s sister. She had a crazy laugh, said, ‘That’s gas,’ to everything, smelt of radishes and always wore a ‘VOTE LABOUR’ badge on her lapel. She wasn’t into politics, just part of the Anti Too Posh To Push movement. But apart from that she was a lovely girl. Actually, she was laughing right now and there was absolutely nothing funny going on. The priest looked rather unnerved.
Then there was Alan, Tony’s best man. Alan was a pervert. He hadn’t been convicted or anything, but he was a pervert. A legal pervert, if there was such a thing. Actually, there was such a thing. Alan.
Robbie and Tony just laughed at his antics and said he was ‘a bit mad’. But having a three-way with two of your mum’s best friends while your mum had popped to the shops to get some Jamaican Ginger Cake was more than ‘a bit mad’. So was hooking up with grannies on Sex Roulette online.
He winked down at me. Euch. Perv. It annoyed me that he was really good-looking. And he knew it, which was even more annoying. If he could have worn a badge that said, ‘I am really good-looking and I get loads of sex. Go me!’ he would have done. He really would.
Though they were all very cute – Tony, the groom, Killian-the-(glowing)-lash, Alan-the-perv, and even the priest, Father Neville (are you allowed to say priests are cute? Probably not, but I don’t want to be mean and leave him out) – none of them was as cute as Robbie. He was just so edible, with his messy sandy brown hair, and his strong, tall frame in his I’m-a-groomsman-tomorrow-and-I’m-taking-this-very-seriously suit and crisp white shirt. Mmm, mmm, mmm!
I was now acutely aware that I still hadn’t eaten, and that Robbie, although a fine specimen of a man, was not actually edible. (Did we get to eat some of the Communion at the rehearsal Mass? Was that sacrilegious? It was just that I needed to get some carbs into me.)
‘Okay, Grace, because you’re late, you have to walk up the aisle to us, on your own, the full length of the church, doing your best bridesmaid walk like you’ve practised,’ Robbie called down to me.
Humph! I had not practised … not really … well, sort of … Okay, fine, I’d practised it at home a few times.
‘Robbie!’ I protested, by which time it was too late, as everyone had already started clapping in support, including Father Neville.
‘Come on!’ Father Neville cajoled. ‘Do it in honour of your dearest friends. For whom your love has brought us all here together tonight.’ I could see Killian-the-(now purple)-lash slowly inching backwards towards the side exit. Perhaps a four-week sex ban wasn’t so bad.
‘And don’t rush it either. Take your time,’ Robbie ordered. Erm, hello? Why was Robbie now the devil? Must talk to Father Neville later about some sort of mild exorcism.
‘Come on!’ they all hollered, a bunch of pre-wedding altar bullies.
I started to sweat again. Probably because I caught the edge of a confession box out of the corner of my left eye.
But as I walked up the aisle, staring at Robbie as he smiled down at me, I was completely overwhelmed by one thought and one thought only.
Why wasn’t it us?
Wow. I really, really wish I’d invented see-through Blu-Tack. That way I could have been a multi-millionaire like Rebecca’s granddad.
Why hadn’t I listened in science class? Instead of sketching Oscar dresses inside my homework notebook, could I not have listened to Mr Graves? Even though his voice sounded like air whining out of a balloon. And he had a face like a saggy arse. But, alas, the only thing I managed to pick up was that if you put a Mentos into a bottle of Diet Coke, and shook it up for a bit, the Coke shot twenty-five feet into the air. But no one was willing to give me any money for that.
The Ritz was a vision of sumptuous opulence. It was exactly how I imagined the Beverly Hills Hotel, a.k.a. the Pink Palace, in California where Carole Lombard and Clark Gable used to escape for secret rendezvous while his divorce was coming through. So romantic! (Except for Clark’s wife. I grabbed Robbie’s hand and thanked God he didn’t have a wife.) It was also the place Joe DiMaggio gave Marilyn Monroe what she described as her ‘best Christmas ever’ by setting a Christmas tree, a log fire and Champagne on ice in her room as a surprise.
Well, we would be having our best Christmas ever. Normally we did the Twelve Pubs of Christmas and got so drunk we would sneak into Robbie’s parents’ house and tie his dad up in tinsel while he was sleeping. It was an annual tradition we all loved (Robbie’s dad just refused to admit it). But this year was going to be different. It would be the first Christmas in our new home now that we had got all grown-up and bought a house. (Well, sort of. In instalments. Over the next, say, 250 years.) But it was so exciting and we were dying to decorate it like the Griswolds’ and, who knew, maybe even tie each other up in tinsel. (Actually, that sounded like a great game.)
I suddenly felt a bit flushed and giddy. I stood up on my tippy-toes and gave Robbie a little kiss, holding on to his big strong arms in case I stumbled with the weight of my cosy fuzzy head.
The giant Christmas tree in the foyer of the Ritz stood over us like a magnificent peaked blanket of twinkling stars. ‘Can we get a tree like that for our house?’ I said.
‘Grace, that tree is our house.’ He laughed.
Wow. We were just like The Raccoons.
‘Get a room!’ said Rebecca, handing me a keycard for Room 308. Handy.
‘This place is incredible,’ I gushed.
‘I know, right? Thank God for see-through Blu-Tack.’
‘So, lads,’ said Alan-the-perv, sidling up and looping his arms around Robbie and Tony’s shoulders. ‘Shall we hit the streets of Enniskerry for Tony’s last official night as a single man?’
Jesus, should I call the local Garda station and tell them to drive around the town with a siren and a Tannoy, saying, ‘Women of all ages, calmly and quietly retreat to your houses. Lock your doors, shut your blinds, disconnect your phone lines, keep your lights off and put on twenty-seven pairs of pants. We repeat, twenty-seven pairs of pants!’
‘Thanks, Alan.’ Rebecca giggled. ‘But I think chaining him naked to the railings of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association Dublin Headquarters on his stag was more than enough of a farewell to his bachelor days. Besides, we have our family meal tonight, but you guys go off out.’
No! Don’t drag me into this! I didn’t want my name to be dirt in Enniskerry. What if I ever wanted to run for mayor here? Rebecca was not a lateral thinker. ‘Lock up your daughters!’ Tony said.
‘Yeah, to my bed with handcuffs,’ Alan said.
I snorted my Champagne up my nose. Euch, the visual! Why did he have to give us the visual?
‘Well, you boys stay here and have a “respectable” few drinks. I’m borrowing my girls for a while.’
Oh. My. God. The honeymoon suite in the Ritz was ridiculous. I climbed into the giant bath in the middle of the room and folded my legs underneath me, soaking up all the finery, dancing my fingers over the gold taps. Lisa and Rebecca climbed in after me with a bottle of Dom Pérignon and three glasses.
‘This bath is bigger than my sitting room,’ I cooed.
‘This bath is bigger than my apartment,’ Lisa trumped.
We clinked our glasses and sat back against the cool white porcelain.
‘I cannot believe you’re getting married tomorrow,’ I said.
‘I know. It’s so mad!’ Rebecca sipped the smooth bubbles from her glass. ‘That’s why I wanted to pause this moment right here and make a toast to my oldest, bestest friends in the world before tomorrow. Before we’re officially grown-up.’
Uh-oh. Lump in my throat.
‘No tears!’ they warned.
‘I know!’ God, I hated being ‘the crier’. I had to toughen up. There had to be some sort of programme out there in which people pick out all your bad points and use them to criticize you with the promise of making you a stronger person. Actually, that just sounded like an episode of America’s Next Top Model.
‘To be honest, I never thought you were ever going to get over Wilhelm Schreider,’ I joked, trying to distract myself from tears. Tyra would have been proud.
‘To be honest, I haven’t. But I guess you kinda have to move on once your school exchange has imposed an official restraining order against you, and the Bundespolizei need to be notified any time you’re travelling through Germany.’
‘Hear, hear!’ We laughed and clinked our glasses again. ‘Bundespolizei!’
‘I think I’m going to marry Killian.’ Lisa sighed through a Champagne haze.
‘Aw, that’s sweet. And creepy, since you haven’t even slept with him yet.’
‘Well, tonight is the night, ladies! Actually, Bec, can we use this room … pretty please?’
Daggers.
‘I was joking!’ I wasn’t sure she had been. Lunatic.
‘I haven’t felt this way since Aidan.’ She sighed again.
‘Eh, that was only last month, you looper.’
‘I know, but I can really feel it this time. The connection. I think he does too.’
‘What if he’s crap in bed?’
‘I’ll teach him.’
Flashback to Lisa aged eight, setting up a stall outside her house, giving ‘kissing lessons’ and charging 50p a go. Some might call that Early Signs of Prostitution. Other, more open-minded and generous, people might look on it as healthy entrepreneurship and/or a service to the community.
I still wasn’t sure. Mum had put a ban on me playing with her for a week. A whole week! That was like years in a child’s life. It felt like someone had removed my right arm. Lisa and I did everything together. We got our mums to buy us the same clothes, we wore our hair in the same styles, we fell in and out of love with Blake from Home and Away simultaneously. Like I said, everything.
The end of our seven-day sabbatical was marked by a set-up snog with Cathal MacInerny. And she only charged me 25p. Mates rates. Ah, she was the best pimp in town. And she was my best friend.
We’d grown out of the pimping phase, thank God. (And I even managed to find Robbie all on my own, with no money changing hands.)
‘So when exactly did you know that Tony was the one for you?’ the one-time pimp asked Rebecca, sipping from her crystal Champagne flute. Very pimpin’.
‘There was no one defining moment, really.’ Rebecca was grinning from ear to ear. ‘Although some might say, i.e. Grace, that “Any man who can still love you when you’re covered from head to toe in chicken pox and your face is the size of Terminal Two from getting your wisdom teeth removed is the man for you.” ’
‘Hey, I did not say that! What I actually said was, “Any man who can still love you when you are covered from head to toe in chicken pox and your face is the size of Terminal Two from getting your wisdom teeth out, and you insist on wearing green-leather dungarees is the man for you.” ’
‘Do you know what?’ she mused. ‘I just knew that I never wanted to be apart from him.’
‘Awwwww,’ we chimed together, my head suddenly feeling all soft and fuzzy from the love trip. And from necking Champagne like it was water.