Chapter 12
Victoria had brazenly questioned why I wanted to take a virtual stranger to a wedding but when I lied and told her I felt more comfortable around her than anyone else I knew, it tickled her ego quite considerably and so she accepted with a high pitched scream.
We turned up to the wedding with barely a minute to spare. Victoria had spent about three hours doing her hair, which made her look no different than before but she seemed satisfied with the results, checking herself every fifteen seconds with an approving smile. We had to travel to the wedding on the train, which she disapproved of, expecting something a little classier but it was easily the most convenient form of transport and I did pay for her ticket so she didn’t have too much cause to complain. Besides, she spent the majority of the journey on the phone talking to Ems about everything and nothing. I nearly choked on my button hole when she started banging on about her hairy legs and ‘literally dying’ when she couldn’t get an appointment to have them waxed before the wedding. Sniggers rang round the carriage when she said it but as I sunk lower into my seat and tried to pretend we were mere strangers, both dressed for a wedding by pure coincidence, I remembered she neither possessed shame nor tact and maybe taking her to a wedding wasn’t going to be the best idea I’d ever had but it was too late by then. I could barely have slipped off to the toilet never to be seen again, so I continued on in silence, listening to her yapping away to Ems about how she ended up removing the hairs herself and how she fainted when she drew blood.
When we entered the church I did so with as little noise as possible, daring not to look a single soul in the eye, dragging Victoria into a pew two-thirds of the way back before intently reading the Order of Service like it was page three of The Sun. Once the next couple had arrived and I’d satisfied myself that the congregation had moved on to judging them I scoured the Church in interest, hoping I wouldn’t see any young, single, good looking females in case it turned into an opportunity missed but, from the girls who were there, I’d either been turned down by before or James had previously infiltrated so I returned to my date happy I could give her my full attention.
As is custom, the bride showed up twenty minutes late but when she arrived, Webber made this big song and dance about the delay, doing the old pointing at his watch trick, trying to be as comical as hell but missing the point that the day really wasn’t about him at all. He should have been pleased she’d actually bothered to turn up but blokes are turds at the best of times so you never can trust them to do the right thing, even on their wedding day.
Unsurprisingly, there was a bucket load of oohhing and ahhring when she walked up the aisle, even Victoria burst out crying, grabbing my hand tightly, despite the fact she’d never even met either bride or groom. She then started bleating on about what a perfect couple they were and how he ‘obviously adored her,’ but she might not have said that had she seen him on his stag do with a stripper’s under-crackers wrapped round his nostrils. It made my skin crawl to be fair but I survived long enough to listen to the old reverend do his stuff and watch Webber virtually eat his new bride in front of family and friends. He was pretty god damn forceful with her, so much so that I genuinely believed he was on the verge of throwing her to the ground and doing her there and then but he pulled away fairly sharpish when his new Father-in-Law stepped in before his daughter was impregnated in front of his very eyes.
What I couldn’t get my head around was why they were doing all of it in a church. Webber didn’t even know who Jesus was let alone worship him so I figured it was pretty hypocritical to say your vows in the eyes of The Lord when you won’t be able to tell your kids why Pontius Pilate was such a scumbag. Still, who was I to judge, I was sat next to a woman I didn’t even like, craning my neck to get a glimpse of Jess’s assets, fantasising about what they looked like, so it’s not as if I was all holier than though, not by any means.
Webber had always craved the spotlight so they had about three hours of photos outside the church, mostly of him I might add. Even before they’d finished, half of them had been posted to Facebook with cheesy tags like ‘gorgeous couple’ and ‘true love’, receiving thirty odd likes from friends who weren’t important enough to be invited but still felt important enough to offer their opinion. If it had been my wedding I would have posed for all of ten minutes and then rushed inside to gorge myself on over-priced food and tasteless champagne. But not Webber, he wanted to drag the whole debacle out for as long as possible whilst his new wife tried to calm her Father down after she’d been molested at the altar.
We stood by, as you do at weddings, waiting to be called for our one and only photo whilst milling amongst the graves of the church which meant I had ample opportunity to have a proper inspection of Victoria’s outfit for the day. I hadn’t really noticed it before because she’d had a coat on but as the sun came out she decided to reveal her monstrosity of a dress. Oh, of course, she thought she looked a million dollars, a princess in her eyes, but I thought she looked like a cat who’d just murdered a bird. To start with, it was way too short for both a wedding and her dumpy legs. It lingered just above the knee but when you’ve got legs with barely any definition around the knee caps, you really should be hiding them away. That wasn’t the worst part though; the worst part was the hideous combination of devilish colours and animal fabric. She’d bought this ‘designer dress darling’ which was kind of a subtle leopard print with splashes of dark red across. Woven in and out of the fabric were bits of feather. Come to think of it; it could have been a dead animal for all I knew.
The only saving grace was that the dress was reasonably low cut so I managed to have a good ogle every now and then. She didn’t seem to mind though, she was practically thrusting them in people’s faces every time she spoke to them but you’ve got to do the best with what you’ve got so fair play to her I thought. There are always one or two who get their puppies out at a wedding so why not Victoria, she needed all the help she could get with the dress she had on.
When Webber finally finished his photo shoot we were ushered into the reception hall for the Wedding Breakfast…at six o’ clock in the afternoon. Victoria wasn’t impressed because her surname on the seating plan had been spelt wrong and then again at the table but, to be fair, she was a late addition and it’s hard to spell Ploszlack at the first, second or even thirtieth attempt. She wasn’t on her own though, there were a few names misspelt so love for the happy couple soon turned to anger as disapproving murmurs rang round the room. There’s nothing quite like a fickle wedding congregation.
Victoria and I had been stuck with three other couples and their kids, all of whom were right little shits except for this one girl, Molly, who was rather quite adorable. She was a cute thing, four years old, who spoke with a lisp and was ever so friendly. I really quite enjoyed her company as the day went on, more so than anyone else at the table, but I was wary of enjoying it too much. Parents start to think you’re a pervert if you spend too much time cooing over their kid. They would never believe the reality of the situation; that their child is more interesting than they are but I guess it’s better to be safe than sorry at the end of the day.
Being the adults of the table, the four couples initially went through the customary awkwardness of introducing one other.
‘Hi, I’m Bob and this is my wife Jeena with a J.’
‘Call me Dave and please let me introduce you to Jill.’
‘Why hello, I’m Priscilla and this is George, oh and he are our angels Bethany and Tallulah.’
I immediately questioned the sanity of Priscilla and George for naming their child Tallulah and, as a result, disliked Priscilla from the start; one because she’d named their daughter Tallulah, and you could tell she had chosen the name and not George and two because she asked Victoria and I how long we’d been together.
“Oh, no no we’re not together,” I said in a worried tone.
Priscilla seemed slightly taken aback at the forc
efulness of my answer so she instantaneously felt the need to defend Victoria in some way.
“Oh well, you’d be a lucky man if you were together. Victoria’s a beautiful young woman,” she lied, to which Victoria gave a false bashful smile and flashed her eyelids like a working girl. Straight away, the two of them had developed this false bond born from a lie but they were the type of women to let the lie manifest into an unconscious truth and form an everlasting friendship based on it, or at least until someone better came along.
All six of our companions had high flying jobs so when I announced what I did they didn’t care for me much. Priscilla worked in charity which was ironic considering she was clearly a right selfish cow. My guess was that she bled the charity dry by having a six figure salary but still felt good about herself because she had a charity email address and baked a few cakes now and then.
To be fair to George, he was okay. He was some big shot social worker, a Children’s Guardian or something like that. I’d never heard of it before but I got the impression he did it for the right reasons and was clearly enthusiastic about his work which is why I liked him. I’ve always enjoyed listening to people talk about anything as long as they’re enthusiastic about it and you believe they’re enthusiastic about it.
He was pussy whipped by Priscilla though and, at some point, hadn’t had the balls not to marry her. A lot of blokes get rail roaded into marriage so he wasn’t, by any means, on his own in that department but I did feel sympathy for him especially when, for the third time, she told him off for not watching their children. I wish he’d ordered her to get off her lazy ass and watch the kids herself although I doubted that day would ever come but if it did, he’d end up flipping with catastrophic consequences and Priscilla would be found at the bottom of a river chained to a brick.
The trouble with talking to parents when their children are around is that you can never have a proper conversation with them because they’re always off checking on little Johnny or interrupting the conversation to tell Tallulah not to stick fingers up her father’s nose. Nothing ever flows around kids. You can forget talking about anything but their kids which is why, when the three couples starting discussing local schools and breast feeding, I just sat there slowly getting drunk on the overpriced wine wondering if it would make me tipsy enough to find Victoria sexually appealing.
When she wasn’t fawning over the ‘delightful’ Priscilla and cooing over all the baby talk, Victoria made the effort to speak to me, which was nice of her considering she was my date and all.
“Oh Terence, isn’t this just a wonderful day, don’t you feel all – I don’t know – warm inside at weddings?” she asked.
“Yeah, it’s great,” I replied without much conviction, “although I’m wondering where the food is?”
“Does Telly’s Belly need some food?” she annoyingly asked, stretching over to rub my stomach as she did, forcing me to jump half out my seat. I’d never been one for having my spare tyre rubbed, largely because I didn’t want anyone to realise what a handful it was.
“Someone’s jumpy,” she said.
“No, no, I just don’t like having my stomach rubbed much that’s all.”
“Is that to hide the tubs?” she asked, rudely in my opinion, but perfectly correct nonetheless. As you know by now, she wasn’t one to beat around the bush and said pretty much whatever was on her mind.
“Err, I…maybe, I mean, I don’t have a big belly or anything but…”
“It’s not flat though is it?” she interrupted.
“Oh…well it’s not a six pack no you’re right but it’s not massive, just a little puppy fat that’s all,” I said, trying to convince myself and liking her less and less. Who was she to tell me I didn’t have a flat stomach, hers was three times the size of mine.
“Don’t worry Telly Belly, you’ve got a lot of other qualities and you’re reasonably handsome. Besides, you’re still slimmer than I am,” she said almost apologetically. I kind of softened to her when she said that, not because she was nice enough to throw a veiled compliment my way but more because of the pitiful manner in which she talked about her own weight. She didn’t say it with a great big smile on her face, like she often did; she just said it and looked a little despondent when doing so. I had thought, given that she lived in a world of her own, that she probably believed herself to be supermodel size. I reckoned she was one of those women who bought a size 16 but told everyone else it was a size 10. She may have done so for all I knew but I could tell, from one line, that she had insecurities just like everyone else. Maybe she wasn’t as bad as I thought, maybe she was worth getting to know after all but just as I mulled it over she took her phone out and asked me to take a picture of her and ‘Cills’ together. I realised then that although she had some nice qualities she would always be a phoney and if we had become an item, I would have eventually turned into George and, looking at him with fingers thrust up his nostrils and receiving evil stares from his controlling monster of a wife, I figured that wasn’t a road I wanted to go down and that the wedding was the last I would see of Victoria.
Cills and Victoria had about eighty fake photos together so I took my leave and wondered off to the toilet before dinner arrived or I died of starvation, whichever came first. Even though there were five urinals further away from me, some old guy stood right next to me and, almost certainly, started giving my member a right thorough inspection. I stared blankly at the white tiles, waiting for my dam to burst but I could literally feel his eyes burning into my foreskin and all that did was give me severe stage fright so I just stood there, penis in hand, hoping the old man would finish his business and leave. He must have tanked the champagne though because he splashed away for about two minutes, spraying his god dam pee everywhere. I did my best to steer clear of it but there’s not a lot I could have done in such a situation. If I left without actually going myself, he’d think I was some kind of pansy afraid to pee in front of another man but staying where I was meant my shoes and trouser legs were covered in another man’s urine. Strangely enough however, I preferred that to the perceived embarrassment of what this guy would have thought of me if I’d left him standing there on his own, even though he was the one staring at my Johnson in the most inappropriate of ways.
To make matters worse when I got back to the table, the speeches had started, so I had to suffer the stares of the other weddings guests, wondering what the damp stains were on my trousers as I sat back down next to my date, dressed as a bird murdering cat.
By and large the speeches were a disappointing affair, they nearly always are. The Best Man’s effort was almost coherent but he found it way funnier than the rest of us. When he did the raising-a-piece-of-toast-gag he laughed so hard the veins on his head nearly burst but by the muted applause you could tell most people knew he pilfered it from Gavin and Stacey and thought of him as somewhat odd, except for Victoria of course, who fell about wetting herself until she noticed that Cills had become deathly silent and not appreciating the unwanted attention Victoria was drawing to our table.
The only highlight of his speech was a story about Webber falling asleep at the handle bars of a scooter on holiday one year, severely drunk and with a sixteen year old girl on the back. The Best Man had found him lying in a pool of his own blood and urine. Fortunately both of them were perfectly okay but the story didn’t go down well with her parents. You could see they were wondering what kind of drink-driving, teenager kidnapping ass hole had joined the family, embarrassing them in front of their friends and family, only a few hours after he had tongued the living daylights out of their daughter at the altar.
When Webber stood to talk, he quickly tried to repair the damage by explaining he was also sixteen at the time but I’m not sure many people believed him. People love a scandal so preferred to think of him drunkenly terrorising young women on a scooter, kidnapping them for journeys up and down the streets of a Mediterranean resort before depositing them in th
e ditch and then urinating on himself.
I sort of felt sorry for him, right up to the point when he started saying what a lucky guy he was and how he was going to make sure his new wife was looked after for the rest of his life and what a ‘special bond’ they had and all that mundane stuff. I reckon he meant it on some level but it sounded too cliché for my liking so I joined the rest of the guests in brandishing him a scooter driving paedophile.
He harped on for far too long but then, like I said, he had always bloody well craved attention. Priscilla Queen of the Phonies and Victoria started crying when he pretended to shed a tear. They thought he was a White Knight or something for saying this soppy mush about how is heart ached when he wasn’t with his new wife. Cills even hit her husband for not blubbing at their wedding. The poor guy couldn’t catch a break.
Webber’s friends from the stag do were ready to throw up in their favours, wondering if his heart was aching when that stripper was grinding her jiggly bits up and down his face. Still, it wasn’t the worst speech of the day. The biggest pile of baloney was left to her father who, apparently, had demanded he speak last, probably because he knew he would wax lyrical about half the people in the room, requesting they stand up one by one then giving a brief rundown of their CV before the rest of us were asked to toast them. Needless to say I didn’t get a mention. He limited the adulation to those with money or status so I remained firmly in my seat but the pain of not being asked to rise was lessened by the fact Cills never got toasted either. I could hear the steam hissing from her ears. It was a moment of beauty.
To be fair to the old man though, he may have spent nearly all his time talking about everyone except for the bride but when he did talk about her, he shed some real tears. They weren’t fake ass ones like Webber’s or Priscilla’s, they were snotty, phlegm stuck at the back of his throat tears, of man sized proportions. I could only imagine what he must have been feeling, handing over his one and only daughter to another man, especially one of Webber’s calibre. It’s a big responsibility having kids, so to let some schmuck come in and take that responsibility off you has got to be tough. I did wonder what he really thought of Webber, I mean truly thought of him. Fair enough, Webber would look after his daughter financially and what not, but what about emotionally you know? After all, Webber was a selfish so and so. Still, only time would tell I guess and maybe I was being too harsh on the whole operation, maybe I was a sceptic who would be proven wrong but I’d be surprised if the old man was happy with the situation.
By the time our wedding breakfast was served I’d lost at least a stone in weight. For such a posh wedding they didn’t have the foresight to fork out on canapés or nibbles so the staff had the plates of food snatched from them before they could even place it down on the table. Still, if the wedding breakfast had been sausage, egg and bacon I might have made allowances for the wait but wedding breakfasts are never actually breakfasts and instead we were served unsatisfying melon, a sliver of dry beef, two sorry potatoes and a handful of soggy vegetables before having Eton Mess thrust under our noses, which by all intense and purposes, looked like undecipherable mess delicately placed in a bowl the size of an ant’s bladder.
I could barely touch the beef. Someone, in their wisdom, had decided to cover it in this gloopy sauce which tasted suspiciously like mushrooms so I felt nauseous the minute the smell hit my nostrils. I did my best to eat around the sauce; I didn’t want to see anyone pay over the odds for an uneaten plate of food but the chef had turned it into more of a soup than roast and two veg so I ended up pushing it away and getting dirty looks from Cills as a result.
I had to sneak out with James just to top myself up with Pringles from the boot of his car. He was always fairly useful when it came to food but it should never have reached such desperate measures, there should be some kind of marital law against starving people half to death at the ceremony before feeding them yesterday’s slop. If that had happened to a child, all manner of protection agencies would have come reigning down on the perpetrators.
With an unsatisfied belly of Cheese and Onion Pringles and a couple of tic tacs to disguise the taste, we walked back to the celebrations just in time to find Jess and Victoria deep in conversation. It took just a few seconds for all hell to break loose.
Later I would learn Jess had introduced herself to Victoria, probably because I was ashamed to do so, and during the pleasantries had referred to Victoria and I as an item. Victoria, somewhat annoyingly, told Jess that although she thought I was a wonderful and intriguing human being, by no means was she dating me and had no intention of doing so either. Of course this flummoxed Jess; it was only a few days before that I had refused her entry into the house on the basis I was busy bumping pee holes with someone called Victoria, so she enquired instead as to whether or not we were merely ‘casual partners’. Victoria just laughed and told her the nearest we had come on that front was a few inappropriate and badly worded texts on my part.
When I walked back to the table I had no idea such home truths had been shared by the two, so you can imagine my shock when the first thing Jess said to me was,
“Tel, I thought you said you and Victoria were more than friends?”
“Err, did I? Did I say that? When?” I replied unconvincingly.
“The day I came round to the house and you wouldn’t let me in because Victoria was there?”
“I’ve never been to the house?” Victoria interrupted.
Jess turned to Victoria replying, “A few days ago, Tel wouldn’t let me in because he said you two were….” which is when the penny suddenly started to drop with her.
James pretended he’d heard none of this and was gradually trying to sneak away from the pending mayhem.
“I, err, I. There’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for this,” I said, looking to Victoria for help.
“Oh, please do share it Telly,” said Victoria, loving every second.
“Well… this is a different Victoria,” I said without any conviction whatsoever.
Jess didn’t buy it, Victoria let out a smirk and James, by the very fact he was half way across the room, had guilt oozing from every pour. It didn’t take Jess too long to twig that things didn’t add up and maybe she was more involved in this than she first imagined.
“James…” she quietly said under her breath before rising from her chair and screaming his name like a banshee, this time not caring who heard. There was a small chance he may have got away with it if he’d been calm under pressure and been able to think on his size eleven feet but he must have been pretty scared of Jess because the fear on his face confirmed her suspicions.
“YOU SHIT!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. “YOU ABSOLUTE SHIT!” she continued before turning to my plate, grabbing the unwanted beef and hurling it in his direction. He might not have been great at thinking on his feet but he was fairly nimble on them and, Matrix style, quickly leaned to one side, dodging the oncoming beef missile which continued on its path and onto the lower back of the bride, hitting her dress with some force before apologetically sliding to the floor. Unfortunately, she was bent over talking to her rather decrepit Grandfather at the time and on the beef’s impact jolted forward and head butted him square in the nose, immediately bursting it and causing a river of blood to splatter across the front of her dress. Guests recoiled in horror as the grandfather collapsed on the floor in agony and the bride’s cries rang round a now silent room. The bride, turning to murderously face the perpetrator like a bloodied animal fresh from a kill and hungry for more, saw potatoes and bread raining down on James as he ran round the tables, Jess hot on his heels grabbing more food from plates as she went. Seconds later the bride began to run after the pair, hollering expletives and wailing, ‘HOW COULD YOU?’ at the top of her lungs. Soon enough a family member grabbed her and she fell to the floor, ferociously sobbing into her blood soaked dress as someone else called an ambulance for her grandfather, whose nose continued t
o spill out onto the carpet. James ran from the venue, off into the distance and on his disappearance, Jess finally broke down in a fit of tears, mostly because of the hurt but, I guessed, partly due to the shame of what had just happened.
It was quite a sight if truth be told. Blood, beef and bread littered the floor and the guests turned to each other in shock, wondering what to do next. Was that the end of the wedding some asked? Should they continue on as normal? Would the Grandfather live?
Victoria stood back in wonder, oblivious that she was partly to blame for the harrowing scenes but, engrossed by the scandal, eventually feeling the need to snatch her phone from her bag and tweet as many people as she could about the #weddingdisasteroftheyear. She wasn’t the only one, within minutes several pictures of the brides dress were on Facebook and instead of helping the blood soaked old man; cameras were flashed in his face and then downloaded to the World Wide Web for other people’s amusement.
I stared at the bride with pity, seeing her pain as the best day of her life turned into one big circus but I couldn’t help but see the irony that, with all the blood and beef juice, her wedding dress looked almost identical to the one Victoria had on.