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Without Kit, Piglet was jittery. She imagined him in their kitchen—“Are you alright?”—and compared the layers of him—fiancé, confidant, liar—to Darren, standing in her house, shaking with laughter.
Piglet, her sister, and Darren had folded themselves into the backseat of the brown Volvo, their knees knocking together. Piglet’s mother had turned around from the front to look at them. “Well, this is nice,” she said.
Seriously
She wondered what Kit would be eating tonight. I didn’t think we’d be here.
"i" is different
“Not the night before the wedding. And it’s not included in the voucher,” she said, slipping her hand into her purse.
As they ate, Piglet felt the conversation move around her. It was as if she were in water, her body swaying in the tide. She looked at each member of her family in turn, assembled in Oxford, here because of her.
“Kit,” she said, she started. He did not move as she told him. He stood in front of her and nodded at the information passing to him from his eldest daughter. She was in tears but restrained, unmoving. He shifted, uncomfortable with the new knowledge he had been given, sure that her mother would be a better-suited custodian, that she should be having this conversation. Piglet had stopped talking, and he had hardly moved.
“Dad,” she said, “what do I do?” He shook his head, not ready for the question. “It’s not for me to say, Duck.” He sighed, turning his head away. His water rippled slightly in its glass. She looked at him. He could feel her stare. “You’re my dad,” she said. “Yes.” He nodded. “So, what do you think?” she asked. She had moved closer, she had stopped crying, she looked to him for an answer. “These things happen, Pig,” he said, unable to look at her.
She was backing away from him, retreating, returning to herself. She was shaking her head. “Silly of me,” she was muttering. “Silly of me to say.” He was immobile, watching her, and beneath his gaze she felt lesser than she had before. “Relationships can be hard,” he was saying. “And you have to work on things—with marriages, even more so.” She was nodding, she was sitting at her kitchen table, detached from him once more.
Omg </3
“You’ve got a good thing going with him. I don’t think you can just throw it all away,” he said. “Get some sleep. Big day tomorrow.”
On the morning of her wedding, Piglet awoke in the dark, curtains closed, to the feeling of Christmas, to the feeling of a funeral.
Omg
For a moment she stood back, awed by herself, observing the success you could have when you followed the recipe, followed the rules.
There was only enough custard for seventy out of the ninety buns. Why had she eaten the spares from the cone before?
This tower would have to feed the tables at the back: Aunty Irene and friends of parents, with their insisted-upon plus-ones, eating empty choux buns covered in hard, teeth-cracking caramel.
Deal with it
She braced herself. She flipped, and the caramel shifted, crumbling beneath her fingers. She pulled at the cone. She felt it move. She breathed. The footsteps descended the stairs. She pulled, the cardboard came, the footsteps landed in the hall. She righted the tower, and her face broke into a smile as the tower broke into pieces.
So fast paced
She was going to waste, she feared, she knew, the life she had made spoiling around her, turning to rot.
Madness. Demise :(
Old
???? Part 2?
Her mother, watery eyed, a pot of porridge before her—“It’s all I could cobble together from your cupboards.”
how he told her that marriage takes work, how he had told her what she deserved. These things happen,
He laughed, Darren too, and Piglet wondered whether her father would have wanted more for her if she were a boy.
When she stood back, holding up a mirror so Piglet could observe her work from the back, Piglet was not shocked to find she looked like a woman with a head full of pins and glue: falling apart, stitched together.
“Happy?” The makeup artist stepped aside, and Piglet leaned forward to look in a little mirror. She recoiled, burned fingers at her chest. This couldn’t be right: creased eyebrows and flared nostrils looking back at her. Her eyes looked too small, her ears too big. Her nose looked flat and round, and her body beneath was sack-like and soft.
She bent over, and her manicured nails chipped as she struggled to extend the hanging straps, inching them farther toward the stockings, now shrivelling, rolling down her legs like the uncasing of a sausage. As she twisted, a pin fell from her head, tinkling on the tiled floor, and a strand of hair came loose. It hung before her, bouncing like a spring. She was muttering, swearing, and someone knocked at the door.
Omg:(
Madeleine clicked her camera, and Piglet could not imagine a time when she would want to look at a photograph of her mother, hands white with tension, trying to push her into a dress that her parents had bought rather than taking their annual trip to the Algarve.
With both arms sleeved, her body looked apish. She was hunched forward, forced into a half bow. She let her limbs hang, afraid the material would tear if she was herself, if she stood up straight. Madeleine let her camera fall to one side, confirming what Piglet already knew.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” Piglet said.
While Piglet had been half-packed into her lace casing, her father had shaved and changed into his suit. The trousers gathered around his ankles, too long, and Piglet saw, in the mirror on the back of the en suite door, a little wad of white paper pressed to his neck, red-brown with dried blood.
Detail. Observant
He inspected his daughter’s back. She imagined it there, half-dressed, spilling out of the wedding gown like overproved dough, and wondered what it would be like to knock herself back, fold her flesh over, and tuck herself in. “Oh, Pig,” he said. “What have you done?” She did not know how to answer, but he did not need her input. He continued: “This is three thousand pounds of dress, Duck.” “Not now,” her mother said. “She knows. If you could just pull the corset together.” So, her father was there too, with her mother and sister, at her back, trying to hold her together. She could smell him
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Like.. Beautiful
With his eyes bulging, he reminded her of Kit on that night. She stared at him, this man, who would later hand her over, entrust her to someone else, and she saw his frustration with her, she saw his disgust. “You couldn’t have waited, could you?” he said, closing his eyes. “You couldn’t just control yourself, for once?” He shook his head. “You—this dress—greed,”
“You don’t get everything you want just because you want it. You have to work hard for things. You have to behave like a grown-up. If you’re offered a promotion, you do everything you can to get it. If your partner gets himself into trouble, you do everything you can to fix it. And if you’ve been bought a dress worth more money than my car, you do whatever it takes to fit into it.”
“What is it about you and more, more, more?”
and they had told each other how wonderful their wedding would be, their life: how beautiful, how much more magnificent it would be than any of their friends’.
They would be turned together, heads bowed, thumbs brushing lips, cheeks, chins, as they smiled, glanced at the open doors at the back of the church.
Youre gay!
nodding at her sister, inspecting her glassy eyes. “You OK?” She looked from Piglet to her father. Piglet’s head was still shaking as she looked at Franny. Next to her, she saw her father avert his eyes. “You’re OK,” Franny affirmed. “We’re all here, now, so you’re OK.” “You’re here,” her mother said, beside Piglet
“You’re here,” Cecelia said, her effervescent energy corrosive as she kissed Piglet’s cheek. “And looking wonderful”—she leaned back, appraising—“and fashionably late!”
“Now, everyone,” Cecelia bent down and whispered, “are we all ready?” “Yes, yes, yes!” the children cheered. “OK, then.” Cecelia nodded. “What are we to do?” “Steal the show!” the children chanted in unison. “Exactly.”
“OK, I’m going to take my seat.” She smiled, her eyes not meeting Piglet’s. “Be brilliant!”
“Jeremiah, do you have anything to eat on you?” she asked. Her voice cracked. “What?” he asked, his nose wrinkled, as Piglet’s father chattered with the flower girls: “How old are you? And you? Wow, that’s a big number.” Her stomach contracted; she tried to cough the hard lump in her oesophagus clear. “Anything,” Piglet gasped. “A snack or something?” Jeremiah shook his head.
2 convos at once. I love
He was pulling her forward, and she had to fight the urge to yank back, twist her arm out of his, a child refusing, the beginnings
It was happening, she realised, as if in slow motion: their decision to preserve the veneer of their public selves, their immaculate lives, was being confirmed, becoming their union. She heard her father’s voice rise from behind her—“Amazing Grace”—his proud and even tenor clear: how sweet the sound.
When they broke apart, she observed her body. Beneath the meshed lace, her skin was puckered, hair follicles swollen by cold and by the realisation that she was married, that she had made a mistake. Because shouldn’t she be full now? Shouldn’t she be satisfied? Despite everything, she was hollow. She was hungry.
He looked from left to right—department-store dresses and Velcroed shoes; inherited jewels and tailoring—and pondered. What compromised fare would this union produce?
New
??
She felt him, beside her, laughing, tipping his head back in ecstasy—“OK, who put my mum in charge of the rice?”—and knew he hadn’t realized that everything was wrong.
Madeleine moved around her, positioning her body, and told her to smile and smile and smile! You just got married. Kit stood next to her, beaming. When Piglet looked up at him, trying to intuit how he could be so at ease, so thrilled, when she was not, Madeleine called from behind her camera. “Yes! That’s perfect. Hold that look right there.”
Facade
The lawns, a green so verdant that she could almost taste them,
“I’m going to see how they’re getting on,” Piglet said, and Kit’s grip on her hand tightened. “Photos first, no?” he said, his words a question only for Madeleine. “Someone should check on the food.”
would force her head back, expose her throat. “Don’t you think I was embarrassed? Marrying you like a fool after what you’d done.” “Then you made a fool of yourself,” he would say. “No one forced you to do anything.” “Now, I’m not going to force you”—Madeleine was smiling, her chin dipping down in a question—“but it would be lovely to have you both by the front door, between these two pillars.”
There was also, she saw, a small, round hole, charred and blackened—a cigarette burn among the fibres. “Then go,” she said, turning round to Kit, whose head jerked back, his eyebrows contracted. His grip softened. “I can’t go back without you,” he said. “You’re the bride. Wives aren’t supposed to behave like this.” “No,” she confirmed, feeling a warmth in her cheeks. “Neither are husbands.” “What do you mean?” he asked, moving closer, his voice lowered so Madeleine could not hear them. “You lied to me, Kit,” she said, and there was a power in those words, spoken aloud, finally, as piquant as
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Being in it together, she thought, being over it, was like eating a birthday cake that wasn’t yours. You began with good, manageable intentions, but when things started to go wrong, spin out of control, you couldn’t stop yourself.
The consequences you would have to deal with later, but at least it was all gone for now. At least you had worried at the problem until you had eviscerated it into nothing.
