Naomi Wood

Naomi Wood

Wedding Day

My ex Nick was getting married to a woman called Esther. Esther wanted our daughter Paola to be a bridesmaid at their wedding, and at first I had refused. Nick hadn’t been much of a dad, that he should suddenly want his daughter for the ceremony struck me as a little rich.

I asked him if Esther didn’t have a niece.

Only Paola would do. I supposed Esther had some fantasy about them looking like a family.

Eventually I agreed, on one condition: that he would leave his wedding and deliver Paola back to our flat. Of course, Nick said that my deal was wrong, that Esther would be angry and hurt, but I didn’t care. In my life, I had always been a good woman, controlling what I wanted. But recently, I had started to notice my bad energy, and I began to follow it, wondering where it would take me.

Nick had asked me to drop Paola at the church, and we were a little late. There’d been a shooting the previous night, and the taped-up street meant the bus was going slow. From the upper deck, we watched men in hazmat suits crawling on the road like babies.

“What are they doing?” Paola asked. The bus shifted its hydraulics.

“Looking for evidence.”

“What?”

“They’re looking for evidence,” I said louder. It was the mask. “Bits of clothes, things like that. To show who did it.”

“Who did what?”

“Who hurt the person.”

Paola frowned and I realized I hadn’t told her that someone had been hurt. Paola was six—I was unsure how much information she needed. She held onto Rabbit tightly.

I had only recently understood that having a child felt like being in a long and dependable love affair. Despite how much I had given up, which was certifiably a whole life, I had turned into a worshipful mother. My ex-colleagues in particular found this perplexing.

It is not very interesting to be in love with your children; it is commonplace, this sacrificial love, and yet whenever I thought of Paola I thought about my heart; how all my feelings for her were in that tender, silken, sewn-up pocket. O, my heart!

A hazmat grasped a scrunchie from the gutter with what looked like a litterpicker and placed it in a zipper bag. He lobbed it to another man, who caught it in his glove. Behind the visor I saw the other man smile.

A long time ago, when I was a child, my aunt-by-marriage had been murdered by a man she’d never met. She was a glamorous woman with dyed blond hair and toned arms. She always smelled of toast, which I understood later to be the smell of tanning lotion: buttery and rich, like something about to burn. The detectives told my uncle how uncommon her killing was, how unlucky. The uncle, anyway, soon re-married.

The bus pulled away and we left the scene.

Outside the church, Nick seemed nervous. He looked smart in his coat-tails, a favour pinned to his lapel. Leonard appeared behind him, wearing a navy suit that had a high white shine. Leonard was Nick’s uncle, and also my friend. We hadn’t stopped our friendship after the split, which made other people feel odd. An ex-girlfriend, an older uncle. What did we have in common?

“See you at six,” I said to Nick.

Leonard took me aside. The way he stood so close made me look for his wife—the textile of his suit was in my vision. “Don’t do this,” he said. “You can’t make the groom leave his own wedding.”

“It’s up to Nick.”

“That’s not true,” said Leonard. “It’s up to you.”

Nick’s eyes were on us. He had never liked our friendship; he mistrusted us—especially when it had extended beyond our relationship. Leonard was rich and took me out for expensive lunches.

“So you bring her home,” I said to Leonard.

I knew there was no way Nick would allow this.

I said goodbye to Paola. The bridesmaid skirts felt rough against my arms, and I kissed her passionately, as if we were the ones getting married. There was a rush of feeling, a tear, an opening. I caught a streak of white beyond the velvet grass, and wondered if it was Esther, arriving in her bridal gown, the light curious, shedding like the light from a bone, but it was just another woman in a pale summer dress, passing by the church.

* * *

The bus took me back through the crime scene alone this time. I read what had happened in a discarded paper: a man had shot a teenage girl from a car window; they didn’t know if it was mistaken identity; what. The hazmats were still there, more police had arrived. If the girl had been white (peppy, ordinary grades, hair scraped back) there would have been an outcry, but there was only this coverage deep in the free paper. I watched the burning city membrane, the intimate boundary; white hipster bars, black grocers, Muslim butchers, and south London seemed suddenly the most segregated place in the world.

Paola and I lived in a two-bed on the arterial road leading into the city, host to ambulances and freight trucks from Dover. In the flat the traffic noise was oceanic, but I was happy here. Upstairs lived Elizabeth, an ancient woman who had banged a broom on her floor whenever Paola cried as a baby (colic, reflux; each health visitor had said something new). In March the ambulances going to King’s had been crazy; thirty an hour sometimes, and Beth had thumped her broom then, too, as if I was also responsible for all this excess morbidity.

In the flat I wondered what to do. Amber, our childminder, had told me I should spend the wedding day with friends, but I’d said I would do it alone, even if it did mean being lonely. I had the notion that by the day’s end I might be transformed.

For months I had woken thinking how Nick was finally leaving me. Esther was a safe choice: Nick had told me as much; she was a successful person, owned her own house, her friends were all the same group from university. I did not feel challenged by her, but in the nights and early mornings, before Paola hopped into bed with me, I felt bereaved. I knew that after today Nick would be gone in a way that would not be changed.

By now the confetti would be dirty on the road, and Esther would be his wife. They’d be heading to the reception venue a few streets from here, an artist’s studio in New Cross. I texted Sadie, Leonard’s wife, asking her to send me a photo. A selfie arrived of her and Leonard, the shot taken from above, so that they looked thinner than they were. They were, anyway, a striking couple. Leonard was a tall man, handsome, bald, his wealth almost professionally concealed. His wardrobe only slyly exhibited its expense—his shirts, his immaculate shoes, the invisible brace he wore on his lower teeth.

Leonard had said Esther, who worked in PR, was smart. He told me she had the highest grades in her graduate class at business school. I don’t know how he knew all that.

I bore no ill will against Esther. Esther was fine.

Maybe a little trashy, I’d said to my mother.

It would take twenty minutes to drop Paola here, but I knew already Nick would not have prewarned his wife. He was not a brave man. He would spring it on her, at ten to six. He’d been so unhappy when I told him my condition. Too bad, I thought. Too bad if I imposed some conditions on his life. Too bad if he didn’t like them.

I cleared away Paola’s toys then tidied her bedroom. I threw out some drawings and put the good ones in a file. I thought about cooking but wasn’t in the mood. I felt a sly energy. I studied my reflection, wondering what I was planning. Maybe Nick would avoid the argument with Esther, and send Leonard back with Paola after all.

With nothing else to do I got into bed. I used my vibrator and had a powerful climax and dozed off with it still inside me. When I woke the sun had gone and the light in the room was pale blue.

I ran a bath. In the mirror, before the steam took the picture, I looked at myself again. I wondered if I was a bad person. Leonard had said as much. Don’t be a bitch, he’d said, at our last lunch.

I imagined Nick returning to the flat, and maybe—the old alliance—we’d laugh at the overdone flowers; the cooked-up festive mood; the endless speeches. We would laugh at all the trouble Esther had gone to and how much everything had cost. He would tell me how much he still hated weddings.

Nick and I had not been married. I can’t remember if one of us had been reluctant and the other had followed suit, or whether we had both been ambivalent. We had always endured our friends’ weddings with something like canned restlessness, though sometimes we were moved, and we took the other’s hand, thinking un-satirically of what our love might mean, like this. I had been thinking about it a lot recently, about whose decision it was not to marry, and how maybe it had been a mistake.

In the bath I used the expensive products I kept out of Paola’s reach, the ingredients baroque—fig, vetiver, bay. The water was so hot it left a pink reef on my skin.

We had slipped up only once since Nick had been with Esther. I thought of that time: very rough, kinky, his hand almost smothering my mouth. After that, we only ever met up with Paola outside. I felt that this was Esther’s condition— only ever outside.

I changed into my favourite jeans, and cut the tags off a white T-shirt that gave off a whacky artificial light. I texted Leonard for a picture of the bride and groom. Three dots appeared then went. I didn’t know who I was making more crazy—Leonard, or Nick, or myself.

When Nick told me he was getting married, I said that Esther would want her own babies. It was a warning shot, fired in the dark.

I took a walk. I walked to Paola’s school. Because of the virus, she hadn’t been there very much. For half a year it had mostly just been us in the flat. It was a Catholic school and there was a huge sculpture of Christ on the façade. On the gates was the school motto: Ora et Labora. Paola liked to run these words on the walk home along the polluted route: ora, labora, gregora, sheshora. “Fedora,” she had said, stopping, “hey, isn’t that a word?”

I told her it was a hat.

I turned onto the high street, still feeling nervous about being outside. People wore their masks under their noses and their chins. I picked up some coffee beans. The roaster, or barista, or whatever, was a white guy with a long red beard, dense freckles, a working man’s apron; he wore no mask. He tried to talk to me, and I was confused about what he wanted. There is a wedding, I wanted to say, a wedding I could not stop!

He asked me—Brazilian? Ethiopian?

He watched me sorrowfully, as if I was failing at something.

“Brazilian,” I said.

Outside, a missing-person poster was cable-tied to a lamppost: a woman with curly blonde hair, bad skin, cracked-out teeth. The poster had been here before lockdown and the printers’ ink had dripped under the laminate. Opposite was a new fancy restaurant where rich white people, probably in advertising, came to eat. I had known these people once.

I stopped at the nail salon to kill some time. I often came here with Paola because she liked hanging out on the busted-up sofas with the other kids. Sometimes I let her get her nails done too: rainbow colours, kid colours.

A Vietnamese woman in a black mask waved me over. I’d had her before. She was a tall woman with ears like doubled-over gloves she usually hid behind her hair. She organised the payment beforehand.

“Where’s your girl?”

I told her she was at her dad’s wedding. As she filed my nails I realized I had come here so that I could talk, and I was pleased she had questions. Who was Esther? How had they met? Why had we not been married?

“Silly!” she said, making me think of Amber. “Not to marry him!” She applied the paint in steady strokes. “Do you like her? This woman? Esther?”

“I don’t know anything about her.”

Nick had told me, in a moment of indiscretion, that Esther was not much interested in sex. Too sensitive, he said. I took this to mean she found it painful. How would that work, with him, knowing what he liked?

Looking out at the lamppost, I said, “Did they ever find that girl?”

“What girl?”

I gestured, but she didn’t answer.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” I asked. I don’t know why.

“What?”

It was the mask, again. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

“I’m married,” she said, wiggling her ring finger. The large diamonds were arranged in a pirouette. She rested my hands under the dryer.

I told her we had been together for six years, and after our daughter was born he’d left after four months. I knew I was delaying her—that she wanted to go to another customer. “That’s nothing,” I said. “Some friends were together for twenty years, and the guy left six weeks after their twins.”

“Oh,” she said. “Why would he do that?”

“He had the option? Honestly. I don’t know.”

I tested the nails’ dryness before I left. Outside, the air had a pre-storm mugginess. Through the window I saw the manicurist texting on her phone. All these people thought I was crazy. Leonard, Sadie, my mother too. Why had I not made Nick settle down, had my own wedding day? And yet I had known, as a girl, that I never did want to be married.

When I got home there was still some time to wait. I ate something, I don’t know what, it wasn’t important. Amber texted me, checking in. “Keeping busy,” I wrote back. She didn’t know about my deal. Amber would not have approved. She had pink hair and sleeve tattoos. Amber wanted me to be free of all this.

I checked my texts. Still nothing from Leonard. Whenever Leonard’s colleagues saw us together they always gave us inquisitive looks. They were sceptical when he volunteered I was his nephew’s girlfriend.

“Why are you making Nick leave his wedding day?” he had asked me at our last lunch. I found it amusing that Leonard was picking up on a point of principle, when as a corporate lawyer he’d told me he was vicious. “Let me drop off Paola on Saturday.”

“No,” I said. “Nick wouldn’t let you, anyway.” This was the closest I had come to acknowledging our closeness, and Leonard blushed. The dynamics had changed between us after Nick and I split, and now I couldn’t remember if there had always been this erotic charge.

He paid. The way he paid without asking me always made me feel cosy, like I was being taken care of. Outside the curved window there was still no-one around Broadgate Circle. I liked London like this—so empty.

“It will cause problems with him and Esther.”

“Then he should get another bridesmaid.”

I had this feeling that I was a grown woman who had ideas of where she wanted her life to go.

“Don’t be a bitch,” Leonard said. He had never spoken to me like this. “It will look very bad. People will talk.”

“Let them,” I said, enjoying the clarity of my voice. I held my neck a little higher. “I have stopped caring.”

Finally the doorbell went. As I buzzed them in I watched from the door. The communal light was broken, and for a moment I couldn’t see who was carrying Paola. Leonard? Nick? My heart skipped. I didn’t know what would happen with either of them. I watched them turn the corner of the stairs, and saw that it was Nick.

He said nothing as he kicked off his shoes and carried Paola to her bedroom. Rabbit dangled from her hand. I wondered what Paola had seen, what she would tell me tomorrow.

“Can I have a glass of water?” Nick said. “She’s heavier than I remembered.”

The water was tepid but I poured it straight into the glass. I realized I had not expected him; in my heart I thought he would break the promise.

“Thank you,” he said, taking the glass. Nick sat at the table, and I saw he was relieved to be away from the wedding, glad of the break. A smell of cooked food came off him, and there was a splash of red wine on his shirt. It was weird to be inside the flat again together after all this time.

“So, was it as awful as we imagined?”

“No.”

“I’m joking!” I said. “Congratulations.” I offered him a toast. “To the bride and groom.”

We were lit for a few seconds in the disco of a passing ambulance.

“Did the bride look marvellous?”

“Come on,” he said. His voice warned me off, but then he smiled. It was then I realized he was happy, and the pain of this felt acute, and precise. “What did you do all day?”

Amber would have told me to lie, but I couldn’t find anything to say. “I thought about your wedding.”

“What about?”

“I don’t know.”

He was waiting for more.

“I was glad for you. Also sad, at some points.”

“Well, there you go. Life, isn’t it.”

“That’s it.”

We sat there for a while. “How was Esther?”

“Pissed off.”

“You hadn’t told her?”

“No. I said Paola would freak out if it was anyone else.”

“Did Esther believe you?”

He looked at me, looked at my mouth. Nick reached over and took my hand. “You got your nails done?”

I felt a burning sensation around my jaw, then it spread to my chest. He looked beautiful. I could imagine his body under the tensed shirt. “Yes.” I thought of the salon, and remembered the clean sparkle of the pirouette. “The manicurist told me I was mad not to have married you.”

He was still holding onto my hand.

“And what did you say?”

“That we didn’t want to.”

He nodded. “That’s it,” he said, taking his hand away, “that’s right.”

I held onto my neck. I couldn’t look at him. I felt a pulse of dark energy and I wondered who I was—this woman, this type of woman. Nick was watching me. Perhaps he was remembering the last time we were here together. Even for us, that time had been marked by violence.

“Why did you make me come back here?”

“I don’t know,” I said again, though now, I felt, I knew the lie.

Nick scraped his chair back and walked through to the hall. I followed him there but didn’t switch on the light. It was a narrow space. He bent to tie his shoe, his face level with my hips, and I could see the tender fold of his neck where it had been shaved. I imagined the hands of his barber on his skin. He was making me crazy; I was so alive with desire.

When he stood he took hold of my wrist, quite hard. He was angry with me, I knew that. “I wish I never had to see you again,” he said, forcibly whispering into my ear. He put his hand between my legs and almost lifted me up. I heard him say something, but couldn’t work out the words.

He let me go, and left.

I stood in the doorway. From the little window I watched him walk through the alley, startling a fox, which ran from the bins. Something wet trickled from my nose. I caught it with my hand—a nose bleed, the blood dark in my palm. I found a tissue and knocked back my head.

I wondered if I had got what I had wanted, if I had finished the day as I had hoped—changed, for having seen it through. I stood there for a while, imagining Nick’s re-entrance, Esther’s pleasant waiting face, Leonard’s envy. As I held my nose there was a strong smell of the varnish on my fingers, and in my mouth I tasted blood, as if I had just made a kill.