You Had Me at Hello (2 page)

‘OK.'

I should let this go, try when he's in a better mood, but I don't.

‘We'll have The Beatles and Abba and stuff for the older generation on there, though? They're not going to get it if it's all fuck-you-I-won't-do-what-you-tell-me and blaring amps.'

‘“Dancing Queen”? No bloody way. Even if your cousin Alan wants to mince around to it.' He purses his lips and makes a ‘flapping hands at nipple level' Orville the Duck gesture that could be considered gratuitously provocative.

‘Why do you have to behave as if this is such a hassle?'

‘I thought you wanted to get married on our terms, in our way. We agreed.'

‘Yes, our terms. Not your terms,' I say. ‘I want you to have a chance to talk to our friends and family. It's a party, for everyone.'

My eyes drifted to my engagement ring. Why were we getting married, again? A few months ago, we were tipsy on ouzo digestifs in a Greek restaurant, celebrating Rhys getting a decent bonus at work. It came up as one of the big things we could spend it on. We liked the idea of a bash, agreed it was probably ‘time'. There was no proposal, just Rhys topping up my glass and saying ‘Fuck it, why not, eh?' and winking at me.

It felt so secure, and right, and
obvious
a decision in that steamy, noisy dining room, that night. Watching the belly dancer dragging pensioners up to gyrate alongside her, laughing till our bellies hurt. I loved Rhys, and I suppose in my agreement was an acceptance of: well, who else am I going to marry? Yes, we lived with a grumbling undercurrent of dissatisfaction. But like the toad-speckles of mouldy damp in the far corner of the bathroom, it was going to be a lot of upheaval to fix, and we never quite got round to it.

Though we'd waited long enough, I'd never really doubted we would formalise things. While Rhys still had the untamed hair and wore the eternal student uniform of grubby band t-shirts, distressed denim and All Stars, underneath it all, I knew he wanted the piece of paper before the kids. We called both sets of parents when we got home, ostensibly to share our joy, maybe also so we couldn't go back on it when we'd sobered up. Not moonlight and sonatas but, as Rhys would say, life isn't.

Now I picture this day, supposedly the happiest day of our lives, full of compromises and swallowed irritation and Rhys being clubby and standoffish with his band mates, the way he was when I first met him, when being in his gang had been all my undeveloped heart muscle desired.

‘For how long is the band going to be the third person in this relationship? Are you going to be out at rehearsals when I'm home with a screaming baby?'

Rhys pulls the wine glass from his lips.

‘Where's that come from? What, I've got to be a different person, give up something I love, to be good enough for you?'

‘I didn't say that. I just don't think you playing should be getting in the way of us spending time together on our wedding day.'

‘Ha. We'll have
a lifetime together
afterwards.'

He says this as if it's a sentence in Strangeways, with shower bumming, six a.m. exercise drills in the yard and smuggling coded messages to people on the outside. Won't. Let. Me. Come. To. Pub …

I take a deep breath, and feel a hard, heavy weight beneath my ribcage, a pain that I could try to dissolve with wine. It has worked in the past.

‘I'm not sure this wedding is a good idea.'

It's out. The nagging thought has bubbled up right through from subconscious to conscious and has continued onwards, leaving my mouth. I'm surprised I don't want to take it back.

Rhys shrugs.

‘I said to do a flit abroad. You wanted to do it here.'

‘No, I mean I don't think getting married at the moment is a good idea.'

‘Well, it's going to look pretty fucking weird if we call it off.'

‘That's not a good enough reason to go through with it.'

Give me a reason.
Maybe I'm the one sending desperate messages in code. I realise that I've come to an understanding, woken up, and Rhys isn't hearing the urgency. I've said the sort of thing we don't say. Refusal to listen isn't enough of a response.

He gives an extravagant sigh, one full of unarticulated exhaustion at the terrible trials of living with me.

‘Whatever. You've been spoiling for a fight ever since you got home.'

‘No I haven't!'

‘And now you're going to sulk to try to force me into agreeing to some DJ who'll play rubbish for you and your divvy friends when you're pissed. Fine. Book it, do it all your way, I can't be bothered to argue.'

‘
Divvy?
'

Rhys takes a slug of wine, stands up.

‘I'm going to get on with dinner, then.'

‘Don't you think the fact we can't agree on this might be telling us something?'

He sits again, heavily.

‘Oh, Jesus, Rachel, don't try to turn this into a drama, it's been a long week. I haven't got the energy for a tantrum.'

I'm tired, too, but not from five days of work. I'm tired of the effort of pretending. We're about to spend thousands of pounds on the pretence, in front of all of the people who know us best, and the prospect's making me horribly queasy.

The thing is, Rhys's incomprehension is reasonable. His behaviour is business as usual.
This
is business as usual. It's something in me that's snapped. A piece of my machinery has finally worn out, the way a reliable appliance can keep running and running and then, one day, it doesn't.

‘It's not a good idea for us to get married, full stop,' I say. ‘Because I'm not sure it's even a good idea for us to be together. We're not happy.'

Rhys looks slightly stunned. Then his face closes, a mask of defiance again.

‘You're not happy?'

‘No, I'm not happy. Are you?'

Rhys squeezes his eyes shut, sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose.

‘Not at this exact moment, funnily enough.'

‘In general?' I persist.

‘What is happy, for the purposes of this argument? Prancing through meadows in a stoned haze and see-through blouse, picking daisies? Then no, I'm not. I love you and I thought you loved me enough to make an effort. But obviously not.'

‘There is a middle ground between stoner daisies and constant bickering.'

‘Grow up, Rachel.'

Rhys's stock reaction to any of my doubts has always been this: a gruff ‘grow up', ‘get over it'. Everyone else knows this is simply what relationships are and you have unrealistic expectations. I used to like his certainty. Now I'm not so sure.

‘It's not enough,' I say.

‘What are you saying? You want to move out?'

‘Yes.'

‘I don't believe you.'

Neither do I, after all this time. It's been quite an acceleration, from nought to splitting up in a few minutes. I've practically got hamster cheeks from the g-force. This could be why it's taken us so long to get round to tying the knot. We knew it'd bring certain fuzzy things into sharper focus.

‘I'll start looking for places to rent tomorrow.'

‘Is this all it's worth, after thirteen years?' he asks. ‘You won't do what I want for the wedding – see ya, bye?'

‘It's not really the wedding.'

‘Funny how these problems hit you now, when you're not getting your own way. Don't recall this …
introspection
when I was buying the ring.'

He has a point. Have I manufactured this row to give me a reason? Are my reasons good enough? I weaken. Perhaps I'm going to wake up tomorrow and think this was all a mistake. Perhaps this dark, apocalyptic mood of terrible clarity will clear up like the rain that's still pelting down outside. Maybe we could go out for lunch tomorrow, scribble down the shared song choices on a napkin, start getting enthused again …

‘OK … if this is going to work, we have to change things. Stop getting at each other all the time. See a counsellor, or something.'

He can offer me next to nothing here, and I will stay. That's how pathetic my resolve is.

Rhys frowns.

‘I'm not sitting there while you tell some speccy wonk at Relate about what a bastard I am to you. I'm not putting the wedding off. Either we do it, or forget it.'

‘I'm talking about our future, whether we have one, and all you care about is what people will think if we cancel the wedding?'

‘You're not the only one who can give ultimatums.'

‘Is this a game?'

‘If you're not sure after this long, you never will be. There's nothing to talk about.'

‘Your choice,' I say, shakily.

‘No,
your choice
,' he spits. ‘As always. After all I've sacrificed for you …'

This sends me up into the air, the kind of anger where you levitate two feet off the ground as if you have rocket launchers on your heels.

‘You have not given anything up for me! You chose to move to Manchester! You act like I have this debt to you I can never repay and it's bullshit! That band was going to split up anyway! Don't blame me because you DIDN'T MAKE IT.'

‘You are such a selfish, spoilt brat,' he bellows back, getting to his feet as well, because shouting from a seated position is never as effective. ‘You want what you want, and you never think about what other people have to give up to make it happen. You're doing the same with this wedding. You're the worst kind of selfish because you think you're not. And as for the band, how fucking dare you say you know how things would've turned out. If I could go back and do things differently—'

‘Tell me about it!' I scream.

We both stand there, breathing heavily, a two-person Mexican standoff with words as weapons.

‘Fine. Right,' Rhys says, eventually. ‘I'm going back home for the weekend – I don't want to stay here and take this shit. Start looking for somewhere else to live.'

I drop back down on the sofa and sit with my hands in my lap. I listen to the sounds of him stomping around upstairs, filling an overnight bag. Tears run down my cheeks and into the neckline of my shirt, which had only just started to dry out. I hear Rhys in the kitchen and I realise he's turning the light off underneath the pan of chilli. Somehow, this tiny moment of consideration is worse than anything he could say. I put my face in my hands.

After a few more minutes, I'm startled by his voice, right next to me.

‘Is there anyone else?'

I look up, bleary. ‘What?'

‘You heard. Is there anyone else?'

‘Of course not.'

Rhys hesitates, then adds: ‘I don't know why you're crying. This is what you want.'

He slams the front door so hard behind him, it sounds like a gunshot.

In the shock of my sudden singlehood, my best friend Caroline and our mutual friends Mindy and Ivor rally round and ask the question of the truly sympathetic: ‘Do you want us all to go out and get really really drunk?'

Rhys wasn't missing in action as far as they were concerned: he'd always seen my friends as
my
friends. And he used to observe that Mindy and Ivor ‘sound like a pair of
Play School
presenters'. Mindy is Indian, it's an abbreviation of Parminder. She calls ‘Mindy' her white world alias. ‘I can move among you entirely undetected. Apart from the being brown thing.'

As for Ivor, his dad's got a thing about Norse legends. It's been a bit of an albatross, thanks to a certain piece of classic children's animation. Ivor endured the rugby players in our halls of residence at university calling him ‘the engine' and claiming he made a
pessshhhty-coom
,
pessshhhty-coom
noise at intimate moments. Those same rugby players drank each other's urine and phlegm for dares and drove Ivor upstairs to meet the girls' floor, which is how we became a mixed-sex unit of four. Our platonic company, combined with his close-shaved head, black-rimmed glasses and love of trendy Japanese trainers led to a frequent assumption that Ivor was gay. He's since gone into computer game programming and, given there are practically no women in the profession whatsoever, he feels this misconception could see him missing out on valuable opportunities.

‘It's counter-intuitive,' he always complains. ‘Why should a man surrounded by women be homosexual? Hugh Hefner doesn't get this treatment. Obviously I should wear a dressing gown and slippers all day.'

Anyway, I'm not quite ready to face cocktail bar society, so I opt for a night in drinking the domestic variety, invariably more lethal.

Caroline's house in Chorlton is always the obvious choice to meet, as unlike the rest of us she's married, and has an amazing one. (I mean house, not spouse – no disrespect to Graeme. He's away on one of his frequent boys' golfing weekends.) Caroline is a very well paid accountant for a large chain of supermarkets, and a proper adult: but then, she always was. At university, she wore quilted gilets and was a member of the rowing club. When I used to express my amazement to the others that she could get up early and exercise after a hard night on the sauce, Ivor used to say, groggily: ‘It's a posh thing. Norman genes. She has to go off and conquer stuff.'

He could be on to something about her ancestry. She's tall, blonde and has what I believe is called an aquiline profile. She says she looks like an ant eater; if so, it's kind of ant-eater-by-way-of-Grace-Kelly.

I have the job of slicing limes and salting the rims of the glasses on Caroline's spotlessly sleek black Corian worktop while she blasts ice, tequila and Cointreau into a slurry in a candy-apple red KitchenAid. In between these deafening bursts, from her regal perch on the sofa, Mindy is gifting us, as usual, with the Tao of Mindy.

‘The difference between thirty and thirty-one is the difference between a funeral and the grieving process.'