Original Cyn (30 page)

“God, so you’re like this hot-shit screenwriter?” Clementine said to Joe, completely ignoring Ken. “Have you any idea who might play me? Charlize Theron would be good. She was fabulous in
Monster
.”

Cyn was waiting for somebody to say that this wasn’t really the issue, but nobody did. Even Veronica was self-consciously twisting an end of hair round her finger as if the words
Dame, Judi
and
Dench
had all just come to mind at the same moment.

“You know,” Ken said, “Richard Chamberlain was wonderful as the priest in
The Thorn Birds
. Do you think he would be too old to play me?”

“Oprah could play me,” Sandra said. “I know she doesn’t do much acting anymore, plus she is black of course, but if we could persuade her to do it, I think she’d really be able to identify with my struggle over my weight.”

Joe was quick to make the point that he had come to therapy to do research and that none of the film would be based on people in the group. Cyn could see from the looks on their faces that they were all the tiniest bit disappointed.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Aren’t any of you angry?”

“I feel hurt and I do feel Joe betrayed us,” Sandra said, “but I think he’s been terribly brave to face us all like this and I would hate him to leave the group. Although if he stays I think it should be as one of us, not as an observer. “

“I agree,” Ken said. “After all, who amongst us is without sin? All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God. Romans three, verse twenty-three.”

Clementine felt the same. “Joe was under stress, he panicked and made a mistake. He’s said he was sorry. I think we should all move on.” She said that if Joe stayed on she promised not to hit on him anymore.

Joe was clearly overwhelmed and said he didn’t deserve their generosity. He agreed to think about staying on.

Sandra then suggested to Clementine that it was a bit hypocritical of her to forgive Joe while insisting Jenny was thrown out of the group. “I mean, Jenny confessed, too. It can’t have been easy. I think she’s been just as brave as Joe.”

Clementine was reluctant, but eventually, with a bit of persuading from Ken, she conceded the point. “Guess we’re both a couple of basket cases,” she said to Jenny, her expression distinctly conciliatory. “I’m sorry I bullied you.”

“And I’m sorry I dealt with it the way I did.”

Ken was looking at the two women and smiling a beatific smile. Cyn felt herself cringe again. Unless she said something, any moment now the man was going to do a
Golden Girls
and call for a group hug.

“I just want to say I’m leaving,” Cyn said. “This will be my last session.” She explained that although she wasn’t entirely proud of it, getting her own back on Chelsea had changed her. “That and pouring hair dye over Joe’s head,” she said, offering him a grin. He met her grin with one of his own and gave the top of his head a self-conscious rub.

“I think it is probably the right time for you to leave,” Veronica said to Cyn with something verging on affection. “You have come to the end of a very long journey. I think you are finally where you need to be.”

Cyn’s eyes found Joe’s. “Definitely,” she said.

When the session was over, everybody, including Veronica, hugged and kissed Cyn good-bye. They all said how much they would miss her and wished her well. Jenny said she would never forget the way she stood up for her. “I’ll always be grateful for that.”

Soon everybody had driven off and it was just Cyn and Joe left alone on the pavement. For a few seconds they just looked at each other. Then Joe cupped her face in his hands and kissed her.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you, too.”

A second or two passed. “You know,” he went on, “something really changed in me when I met you.”

“How do you mean?”

“From the beginning, you and I felt so right. The whole fear-of-commitment thing just seemed to fade away.” He shook his head as if he still couldn’t quite believe it. “The thought of you and me not being together actually fills me with dread. I don’t pretend to understand exactly what happened. Veronica would probably say that being with you somehow helped me resolve my trust issues. But a bit of me thinks it’s simply taken until now to meet the right woman. Whatever—all I know is that I want to be with you.”

“And I want to be with you, too,” she said, her face melting into a smile.

He didn’t say anything for a moment. “I’m sorry I hurt you.”

“You didn’t mean to. It was rotten of me to assume you were seeing Clementine. I should have given you a chance to explain. And for the record, I don’t really think you’re pond life.”

He smiled. “Actually, you said I was less than pond life. If my memory serves me correctly, you said I was the scum that lived on the top of ponds and I should crawl back to my—”

“OK, you don’t have to rub it in. I know what I said. But I was angry.”

“You had every right to be,” he said. “It didn’t look good. So, are we finally sorted?”

She nodded. “We are so sorted.”

“Cue credits and slushy music?”

“I think so, don’t you?”

He drew her gently toward him and kissed her again.

Postscript

Cyn and Joe had been premature deciding to let the credits roll. There were several more important scenes to go. For a start, there was the one a month later where they decided to move in together. It made sense since Joe was practically living at Cyn’s flat anyway.

After he officially moved in, Cyn decided to take a couple of weeks off work. She went to the gym in the mornings while Joe worked on his screenplay. In the afternoons they went for long walks on the Heath, followed by tea and cake at Louis’s Patisserie, or shopped for furniture, rugs and blinds for his flat. They would live there eventually, but had decided to hold off moving in until they’d made it comfortable.

After the way he’d lied to Veronica and the group, Joe had thought about abandoning the
Analyze Them
project, but Cyn convinced him there was no need as long as he kept his promise not to re-create the characters from the group in the film or steal their stories. His only problem was that he’d been with the group such a short time, he hadn’t done sufficient research to write the screenplay. Then one day, a few weeks before he moved in with Cyn, he happened to be calling Barney Weintraub and Brandy picked up.

They chatted for a few minutes and he ended up telling her about his predicament. It was the best thing he could have done. Apparently her therapist knew a therapist who had a friend in L.A. who ran Attention Seekers Anonymous. It turned out that a branch had just opened in London. When Joe phoned to say he was writing a screenplay about group therapy and could he come along to the group as an observer, they practically begged him to come. The group met twice a week, and after a month Joe had more material than he knew what to do with.

As far as his own therapy went, he had decided to leave Veronica’s group and make a fresh start with a new, male therapist who he hoped would help him sort out some of the issues still hanging over from his childhood.

If they didn’t go walking or shopping, they stayed in and made love until it got dark. Joe took to referring to those afternoons as “living in Cyn,” which made her laugh. Afterward they would open a bottle of wine and cook pasta. When they had finished eating they would snuggle up on the sofa and watch
Friends
and
Seinfeld
reruns. At some point Cyn would let out a soft, contented sigh. She’d come to realize that “feeling at home” wasn’t about four walls, it was about people—or in her case one particular person. With Joe, she knew she had come home.

A few days before Jonny and Flick’s wedding they decided they wanted to do something utterly daft and frivolous. Joe suggested a day trip to Euro Disney. Cyn had never been and thought it was a brilliant idea.

She hadn’t realized that the most important scene of all would be played out there. After they’d done the scary rides like Thunder Mountain and the Matterhorn, from which she had emerged each time with her stomach feeling like it was about to eject her entire Eurostar champagne breakfast, Cyn suggested they go on something a bit more gentle. “I know, what about It’s a Small World?”

“Cyn, how old are you? Thirty-two or two?”

She made a pouty kiddie face. “Please? Come on, we’ve spent the whole morning on the scary rides, and it looks so pretty.”

After much protest, Joe finally gave in, but she had to practically drag him onto the ride. They climbed into a carriage. About to get in behind them was a Scandinavian-looking couple with two blue-eyed children with white-blonde hair, aged about three and five. Suddenly the three-year-old boy peed on himself. Clearly humiliated by what he’d done, the poor little mite burst into tears. His parents did their best to soothe him and calm him down, but he wasn’t having any of it and started crying even louder.

“You know,” Joe said, turning to Cyn, “that could be us in a few years.”

“What, peeing on ourselves as we attempt to board the It’s a Small World ride?

“No,” he laughed. “I meant that could be us, trying to cope with small children.”

“Hang on—when you say us . . .”

“I mean you and me. As in a couple.”

As their eyes locked, she felt her heart rate crank up several notches. “Joseph Dillon, are you asking me to marry you?”

“Absolutely.” He moved in closer and began trailing his finger down her cheek. “So, what do you say?”

She didn’t have to think. “Yes, please,” she said.

Just then the ride started. They missed most of it because they were snogging, so afterward Cyn insisted they go round a second time.

Cyn didn’t want to steal Jonny and Flick’s wedding thunder, so she said nothing to her family about Joe’s proposal. She knew the moment Barbara found out there would be no holding her back. Before you could say
marquise diamond,
she would have placed an advertisement in the “Social and Personal” column of the
Jewish Chronicle
announcing her daughter was engaged to a famous, drop-dead gorgeous Hollywood screenwriter.

By now, though, they’d met Joe two or three times and everybody had said how much they liked him. Barbara was particularly smitten and not just because of who he was. “Watching the two of you together,” she told Cyn, “you just seem to be a perfect fit for each other. You know, I remember just before your dad and I got married, Grandma said the same thing about us. And look how we’ve lasted.”

Joe seemed to be completely at home with the Fishbein clan. He was happy to talk soccer with Jonny—they were both Arsenal fans—or listen to Mal while he spouted forth about the e-sniping software he’d just found that could put in a bid on eBay within a hundredth of a second of the end of an auction. He didn’t mind one bit when Flick demanded to hear about all the celebs he’d met or when Grandma Faye got him in a corner and started recounting long, complicated stories about the war and how her brother-in-law had been sentenced to eighteen months in Pentonville for selling black-market onions.

The final scene was Jonny and Flick’s wedding. Of course the ceremony, which took place in a tent in Barbara and Mal’s garden, wasn’t the actual wedding. Since Flick was Catholic and Jonny was Jewish, they did what they’d always planned and had a civil ceremony a couple of days before, followed by lunch for the immediate family at a swanky French restaurant on the river. Then, on Sunday, a rabbi and priest blessed the marriage, and Flick and Jonny—surrounded by what Barbara, for catering purposes, insisted on referring to as fifty couples—exchanged the vows they had written. As far as everybody was concerned, that was the real wedding.

It went like a dream. Well, almost. The spring sun shone, not just in a namby-pamby-occasionally-poking-out-from-behind-the-clouds kind of a way. It really shone and there was actual warmth in it. Mal, who everybody said looked ten years younger since he’d lost weight, gave Flick away. She looked exquisite in her pearl and diamond wedding dress and—as it should be—Jonny couldn’t take his eyes off her. The blessing took place under a white canopy garlanded with narcissi and blue hyacinths. Flick carried a bouquet of lilies of the valley.

Barbara and Mal stood next to the bride and groom, along with Grandma Faye and Flick’s rather gung-ho mother, Bunty. She had spent the morning knocking back the sherry, holding forth on the delights of hunting and three-day eventing and giving every impression that she hated getting dressed up and would have been infinitely more comfortable in a pair of old jodhpurs and a hacking jacket coated in Labrador hair. Cyn stood a few feet behind the others in her
Gone With the Wind
peach creation, looking like a giant version of one of those tacky toilet-paper-roll covers. But her appearance was the least of her worries. After all the effort she’d put in to ensure she would be the perfect bridesmaid, what had happened seemed so unfair.

The day before the wedding she’d had her eyebrows shaped and her underarms and legs waxed. She’d also had a deluxe manicure (Joe asked if it was deluxe because it came with fries). When she got back she put on a face pack and sat down and wrote a thoughtful and loving message in the wedding card she’d gotten for Jonny and Flick. She’d already given them their present: a Lazeee Nights Ultra Camper camp bed. Cyn had wanted to get them something more imaginative and stylish, but Flick had specifically requested the camp bed, on the grounds that their flat only had one bedroom and they were desperate for somewhere other than the sofa to put visitors.

Thinking she was being superorganized, Cyn draped everything, including her dress, over the passenger seat of the Smart Car, which she was still driving because her company VW Beetle hadn’t arrived yet. She wasn’t worried about the dress getting creased because there wasn’t a natural fiber in it.

She spent the night alone as Joe’s mother was over from Dublin and staying at his flat. He and Sheila had a long way to go, but they were gradually getting to know each other again. Joe had wanted Cyn to meet her, but they both agreed it was probably too early. “You’ve still got lots of talking to do,” Cyn said. “My being there will just complicate things. I’ll come the next time you get together.”

On Sunday Cyn woke up with that breathless birthday morning feeling she’d always had as a child. Cyn loved weddings. She loved the buildup: the last-minute panics that always seemed to involve a drink spillage and a famously capable aunt taking control and sprinkling liberal amounts of salt over the upholstery. She loved the way the top floor of the bride’s parents’ house became Bride Central—a girlie locker room full of antsy, hyped-up women charging around in their underwear trying to glue on false eyelashes and calm their nerves with Baileys. She loved seeing the bride walk down the aisle, filled with hope, optimism and anticipation. Most of all, though, she loved the smell: the heady collision of perfume, flowers and herring hors d’oeuvres.

The ceremony wasn’t until four. Barbara had said to come over about one o’clock because that’s when the hairdresser and makeup artist were arriving. Cyn stayed in bed all morning, exchanging sexy text messages with Joe, drinking coffee and reading the Sunday papers.

She got up at midday, had a shower and pulled on a pair of jeans. As she left the flat, quietly pom-pomming “The Wedding March,” she couldn’t help congratulating herself on how organized she’d been. She stepped into the street, filled her lungs with warm spring air and clicked the car lock. Even before she’d finished opening the door, she recoiled, hand clamped over her nose and mouth. The stench hit her like a slap or a sudden blast of heat. Some hooligan must have broken into her car overnight and filled it with decaying, putrid, rancid rubbish. But when she steeled herself to poke her head into the car, it was exactly as she’d left it. The dress, her carrier bag of bits and pieces, were detritus-free. It occurred to her—rather stupidly—that the smell was coming from outside the car. She looked round for a rubbish truck. Nothing.

She threw open the driver’s-side door and then went round and did the same on the passenger side. Desperate to find out what was causing the stink, she flung open the glove compartment and felt inside, desperately hoping her hand wasn’t about to come into contact with a maggot-ridden rat. There was nothing apart from an ancient, half-finished packet of Doritos and a couple of dusty tampons in their wrappers.

It was only when she opened rear door that she saw it. “Oh . . . my . . . God!” It was as much as she could do not to retch. The lid on Keith Geary’s jar of kimchee—the “rotting cabbage” delicacy he’d brought her from Korea—had blown. The tiny luggage space was covered in leaked, fetid ooze—which was now even more rotten than it had been to start with. When she looked closer she could see that the trail disappeared under the passenger seat. She rushed to the front of the car and picked up the dress. The hem was touching the floor. The outer layer of skirt—the bit everybody would see—looked perfect. It was only when she lifted it and looked at the petticoats that she saw the hems were damp with kimchee liquid.

There was no time to sponge the dress—not that mere soap would have had any impact on the smell. Nothing short of incineration could have gotten rid of it. She drove to her mother’s with the windows open and the air-conditioning on full.

Her parents’ bedroom contained not only the hairdresser and the makeup artist but Barbara, Flick, Grandma Faye and Flick’s mother, Bunty, all in various states of unease and undress. “Wow, it’s
My Big Fat Jewish-Catholic Wedding,
” Cyn said brightly.

Barbara’s hair had just come out of rollers and was being back combed. “Hello, darling,” she said from under her spiky, Phyllis Diller fuzz. “Hang your dress on the front of the wardrobe.” As Cyn hooked the hanger over the door, she missed seeing her mother’s nostrils start to twitch. “Good Lord. What on earth is that smell? It’s vile.”

“God, yeah, it’s disgusting,” Flick said, adjusting her bosom inside her bustier. “Cyn, did you bring something in on your shoes?”

“No, it’s not dog mess,” Faye said. “It’s definitely vegetable. Reminds me of the East End during the General Strike when the bins didn’t get emptied for weeks.”

“Have to say I can’t smell a thing myself,” Bunty piped up. She carried on drinking her tea and munching on a shortbread finger. Cyn put her olfactory immunity down to her having spent too many years mucking out horses.

Flick went over to the wardrobe and sniffed. “Uuurgh. Cyn, it’s your dress. What on earth happened?”

Cyn sat down on the bed and explained about the kimchee and how the petticoats had soaked up some of the putrid liquid.

“But you’re going to stink the place out,” Barbara said. “It’ll put everybody off their food. Why on earth didn’t you keep the dress in your flat?”

“Because I was trying to be superorganized and I wasn’t expecting a jar of kimchee to burst and leak all over my car.”

Flick immediately went into ultracalm nurse mode. “I know, why don’t we spray the dress with perfume?”

The upshot was that Cyn walked down the aisle behind Flick and Mal looking like an antebellum meringue and reeking of kimchee heavily laced with her mother’s Youth Dew. Cyn caught several people grimacing and waving their hands in front of their faces. Joe mouthed to her that she looked fantastic, which was sweet, bearing in mind what she looked like, but even he pulled a face as she got closer. Then, just as the ceremony was about to kick off, her cousin Ben, aged four, yelled out, “Phwoarrr, who’s farted?”