Sunday 20 May 2012

A PUNCH UP THE PAVILION

I'm going to blog soon about reading aloud and current vogue for literary 'slamming' and 'gritting' and so on: i.e. the newly sexy live authorial reading with the lights down and the stories short.

Not all writers want to stand up and read in front of a paying audience, and not all readers want to go to live events. And there is no way that any writer, no matter how ebullient, extrovert and vocally gifted, can rival live music or actual drama, in my humble opinion. But sometimes this is the best/only way of reaching your potential readership.

It's four years since I read this piece at the Brighton Festival and it marked a turning point in my writing. I realised that I could 'do' short, and that people liked it. And I realised that there is humour in even the worst things that can happen to you. In this case, being punched by a stranger at my own wedding.  

So here it is - A Punch Up the Pavilion.


Our invitations say: “We’ve had the booze, the fights, the kids and the cardigans. Now it’s time for the wedding.”
The Pavilion is the venue.  The red drawing room. Hence the frock – floor length scarlet. strapless satin, with a bit of a train. The black taffeta shrug doesn’t quite fit, it’s a teeny bit tight.  My shoulders have a faintly gladiatorial look. I had the whole ensemble made - for the grand sum of sixty quid - by a retired midwife with face piercings. So we’re not talking Liz Hurley levels of outlay here. 
I’m wondering if it’s all a bit too Goth?
My mother envisaged me in raw silk separates, cloche hat, cream roses: Gatsby garden party styled by Next.   Since I passed the 40 mark, she’d rather I were swathed in neutral shades, as if I was an object of minor interest in a National Trust property, in need of protection from out-of-season dust.
My friend Bernadette – a serial divorcee, and an expert in bridal dos and don’ts – told me to “hold the moment” at some point during my big day. “You must take a step back, and think – this is it,” she said.  “It is your one and only wedding day. A once-in-a-lifetime experience.” Bernadette has had a once-in-a-lifetime experience three times, so she knows what she is talking about.
This is it, then. 
I’m standing on the windy lawn at the back of the Pavilion. The weirdly corporate little ceremony is over. We’ve processed out of the drawing room with Ella Fitzgerald in the background. The children are leaping around me, my son in his grown-up grey suit, hands in his pockets like a boy in an old photograph, my daughter in her wreath of pink lilies, gold hair down to her shoulders. My legal “husband” is corralled by the Irish relatives, not able to think of much to say to them. Everyone is smiling, smiling.  There are blank spaces between the groups of ill-assorted guests.  
A swift breeze whips my hair across my eyes so I am blinded for a moment and I don’t see her coming.  

And then she is there, standing right in front of me. Addled by bridal celebrity, my brain just gets an image, no information attached.  A woman with a set face, white and undernourished. Her thin hair is stretched tight against her skull, as if she hates it and has strained it back for a punishment. She is small-eyed and zipped into a light blue padded jacket. 

We look at each other.
“Are you the bride?” she asks.
“Yes, “I say, flushed and grinning. “I am.”
Then, there is a black thud, obscuring everything. My head goes down, my hands go up to clutch my face.  My bouquet of oriental lilies falls, and no one catches it. A scream from my daughter. There is a dull, hard pain. Gasping, I open my eyes, and there’s the world at ground level. Gobbets of chewing gum and sun shrivelled grass.  The woman is standing quite still.  I can see her jeans and her smart new training shoes, complete with price tag. Pale blue to go with the jacket.
“She’s punched her!” shouts somebody.  “Arrest that woman! She punched the bride!” 
I look up. The guests are now united, surging towards us. The woman turns and legs it, hurtling across the grass, powering herself forwards with her arms. My mother tries to chase after her, her angry feathery headgear fluttering in the wind.  My mother is restrained. Other guests give chase as well, but the woman is faster. She leaps the wall by the bus stop, and disappears.  I feel completely alone, cut off in my sudden little violent space.

Then I remember Bernadette. “Hold the moment”.  Hold the buggering moment. Not much point in that now. I straighten up and look at my hands. No blood. No damage done. My nose feels twice its natural size, but is still there. I look around me, at all the anxious faces. Everything ruined.On my once-in-a-life-time wedding day.
At the Arts Club, bottles of chilled cava are lined up on the bar, ready to toast our journey into married old age.  Later, there will be a salsa band and sixteen kinds of salad.  
“Come on everyone,” I say, hitching up my skirt so no one treads on my mini-train.  “I need a drink.”  
And off we go, tripping along through the Laines, an ungainly crocodile of wedding folk:  me, husband, sobbing children, Irish relatives and incompatible guests. Then we dance all afternoon and most of the night.
                                   



                  *  *  *  *                                
Afterwards, I found I wasn’t the only one. There were other brides, other punchees. She used to go to the drop-in centre for street drinkers next door to the Pavilion. She’d been unlucky in love, as in most other areas of life.

Brides seemed an obvious target, smugly ponced up in their cream-cake crinolines. Over privileged and easy to identify.  I sort of saw where she was coming from.

I wear a thick gold ring now, like a knuckle duster.  And I wonder what she did next?  If she moved on from punching brides and settled for something safer. Or if, her trainers still that pristine shade of arctic blue, she kept on running.