Читать книгу Surviving Hal - Penny Flanagan - Страница 14

8.

Three months after our meet-the-parents weekend, and I tell you this in confidence, I had an epiphany.

We were sitting in a restaurant overlooking the water and I looked at Andy and suddenly realised the thought of spending the rest of my life with him did not make me feel nauseous. (Admittedly, I had consumed half a bottle of chardonnay over lunch.) Quite the opposite, the thought of spending the rest of my life with Andy actually made me feel light and buzzy. I looked at him and saw that he was my future. It was unfortunate that I then opened my mouth and let my thoughts travel, unedited, to my tongue. Unfortunate because he has never let me forget it.

“Why don’t we get married.” I said out of the blue.

“What?” His eyes nearly popped out of his head.

“Nothing.” I had that feeling where I wished that words were on a string and you could just reel them back in.

“Did you just ask me to marry you?” he coughed with laughter.

I didn’t take that as a good sign.

“No,” I said. Then I pointed across the table at him, something I do when I want to show that I am deadly serious and that now annoys the hell out of him after ten years of being pointed at. “If you ever tell anyone,” I said, pointing gravely, “I will deny it wholeheartedly.”

“I’m telling everyone,” he laughed.

“Oh, go right ahead,” I said, sitting back so the waiter could set my dessert in front of me. Then I gave him a ‘consider the gauntlet thrown’ sort of a look.

He did tell everyone. He continues to tell everyone. And I continue to deny it. And because I’m considered the more reliable half of the whole, everyone believes me and he has been left looking the deluded fool on more than one occasion. But now you know.

About a month later he proposed by accident, (full of drink the night before he had planned to do it properly) took it back, then proposed properly over lunch the next day at the same restaurant. This time it was my turn to laugh.

“Are you serious?” I spluttered, even though I had been tipped off the night before by him saying, “I’m going to propose to you tomorrow. Oops, now I’ve gone and ruined the surprise.”

“Yes, I am,” he smiled. “What’s your answer?”

All I could do was laugh hysterically. Now that it was his idea and more of a reality, I was terrified. I didn’t know this person. What made me think I could spend the rest of my life with this person? The sun went behind a cloud and the sky went ominous grey. Then something shifted. Some intangible thing cracked my feelings into the right place.

“Yes,” I said.

He then produced a ring. I slipped it on and was admiring it from all angles, just about to shed a tear of joy when I heard the scrape back of his chair. He was standing up, glass in hand.

“No!” I pointed at him. “Please . . . no.”

“Everybody . . . ” he announced to the restaurant at large. “I have just asked this beautiful woman to marry me.”

“Shut up!” I hissed from my seat. “Just sit down and shut up, will you?” Everyone was looking at me. Andy was laughing, really enjoying himself.

“And she has said yes.”

He raised his glass to the ceiling and the whole room erupted into cheers. It was the first of many ways he has devised to embarrass me. It never ceases to amuse him.

Hal gave us seven years.

Meaning, he didn’t think we’d last longer than that. Meaning, the marriage would be in trouble and all over, bar the shouting, within that time frame. If I recall accurately, the reason he gave was because Andy, like his father, was ‘a humper’. Translation: he wouldn’t be able to keep it in his pants long enough to keep me. I was torn as to whether this was an insult or a compliment. Either I was a ball-busting, no-nonsense woman who wouldn’t stand for it, or I was not woman enough to keep him interested. Perhaps it was both with both meant as an insult.

He told this to Tom, who of course passed it onto Andy (a sibling’s loyalty after all is to his sibling) and then Andy passed it onto me, which was oddly unstrategic of him. Time has proven that it is better for everyone if Tom and Andy don’t tell me the things Hal has said. I get so angry. I want to take him on. My mother always encouraged outspokenness.

Go on, say something, her voice harangues me from inside my head.

Andy talks me down.

“Do not, under any circumstances, take him on,” he says. “You’ll be sorry.”

At first I didn’t understand. I thought it was a warning from him. “Hang on,” I said, needing clarification. “I’ll be sorry because you’ll make me sorry?”

“No, because he will hurt you,” Andy said, slowly and deliberately.

“How?”

“He’ll lash out at you.” He looked distant. “You’ll never recover.”

“So, what should I do?”

“Just try to get along with him.”

Getting married involves bringing two families together, physically and figuratively. In our case, it wasn’t so much the families Straw and Wylie as it was the fractured factions of the family Straw that posed the problem. Above all, it was the physical reality of Maude being in the same room as Hal for the first time since she’d absconded with her suitcase.

Putting Maude, Stan and Hal in a room together was the perfect recipe for some sort of ‘incident’.

Admittedly, the room would be a very large Golf Club reception room, the largest and grandest on Sydney’s northern beaches, with a balloon arch at the entry way, a parquetry dance floor in the centre, a Moby Disc turntable by the hall that lead to the toilets and a series of carefully planned tables around the edges. But a room, nonetheless, with Maude and Hal and all their combustible history contained therein.

Back then, the anticipation of an incident was near hysterical, right down to the wording on the invitation and how it might offend. In the end, in an attempt to keep things neutrally traditional, I managed to offend everyone. And we hadn’t even stepped inside the church.

My mother and I ineptly planned this big event, with our mutual lack of enthusiasm for anything resembling organisation. If I had my way again, I would have taken the very heavy hints Maude was dropping all over the place like giant flour bombs and handed the entire function over to her very capable and willing-to-plan-everything-right-down-to-the-ribbons-on-the-church-pews hands.

As it was, Mum and I left the flowers until the last minute (honestly, who cares?), picked alternate red meat and chicken mains because it was generically easier (vegetarians, get stuffed) and in a random show of enthusiasm went for the optional extra of the white balloon archway, through which Andy and I would make our entrance as Mr and Mrs Straw. (Or Mr Straw and Ms Wylie, to be more accurate.)

There were so many decisions to make that just didn’t interest me one way or the other: the bridal waltz, the entry music, the exit music, the wedding cake, the shape of the bridal table, the size and shape of the bridal cake, the size, shape, colour and vintage of the car that would take us there, the dessert or the cheese plate. Chair covers, ribbons on pews, flowers in church, flowers on tables, flowers in hair, flowers on lapels and who would remove the flowers from the church once the ceremony was over. Did we want them at the reception? If so, where? On the bridal table? At the entry? Would we need vases for that? Big or small? Freestanding or on a table? Hair up or down? White or off-white? Black tie or lounge suit? How to keep Maude and Hal on separate sides of the room all night.

For that last one, Andy worded up two of his brawniest mates to physically remove Hal from the premises at the first sign of trouble.

As it had turned out, it wasn’t Hal who needed to be handled but Stan. Heavy-headed with drink, Stan swivelled on the dance floor while doing his best Boogie Fever and found himself face to face with Hal. Stan blinked. Hal licked his lips. The music stopped for a millisecond between songs. Andy caught his brawny mate’s eye and the guys moved forward. Stan, drunk, stumbled back then righted himself. His right shoulder shifted ever so slightly as he prepared to take a swing. Then, instead of his arm moving forward through the air and cracking Hal Straw on the jaw as he had so often and so satisfyingly imagined, his arm was taken hold of gently and used to steer him back to his table.

Stan was moved off the dance floor just as Eye of the Tiger pulsed to life, as the silver disco ball spun into action twirling white spots of light across the dance floor. Hal found his nerve and uttered these parting words to Stan’s broad retreating back, just loud enough for those around him to hear, but not loud enough to have him escorted from the premises as prearranged, “Go on, you fat fuck.”

The crowd of jerking, gyrating wedding dancers folded around Hal and he shimmied in triumph, leering at my then-workmate Jessica, who was wearing a tight black minidress and was drunk enough to smile back and egg him on with a shoulder shaking, forward-bending, breast-jiggling dance move. Ever the opportunist, Hal made sure to put his hands out just in time to accidentally cup her ample assets as she shimmied toward him.

Meanwhile, Stan was sat back in his seat, furnished with a large glass of water and was heard to mumble something about wanting to kill Hal Straw.

After the panic leading up to the wedding, the hysterical expectation that Hal would cause trouble, it was strangely disappointing when he didn’t. We would have to wait another ten years before the prophecy was finally fulfilled.