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.
