The Wedding Diaries (2 page)

Me: [snatching up a pair of kitchen tongs and brandishing them in her face]
Susie
…

Susie: No. We probably don’t. Sorry!

Me: Is Pete around to do an alcohol run?

Susie: Since it’s neither Christmas nor the Twins’ birthday, I think it’s safe to assume he’s not.

Also, Susie: not so good with
possessing
the wonderful drinks she offers. But the few times she has, combined with the frequency of her offers means she is somehow still seen as a glorious homemaker. I blame Lily and Edward. Their charm and beauty distract from the true horrors of their mother’s hostess talents. And since Susie’s husband Pete is almost never at home to ease her household burden, frequently away with his glamorous travel agent job, the fact that her children still have their full complement of fingers/legs/heads ought really to be enough for us.

We chatted for a minute or two, until I reminded her of my weekend away with Thom. I knew she wasn’t really paying attention when she asked for details since she was so busy rolling out scores of pastry cases for some school event; I repaid her with a mind-numbing parody of our mother’s anecdotes, in the style of a particularly dry shopping list.

Me: … And then we looked at the baths, so that was five o’clock, then we went back to the hotel, then we changed and went to dinner, at seven … no, eight … no … was it? … No. Eight o’clock. Then we were at the restaurant. Oh. And then he proposed.

Susie: [stunned] Is that a joke?

And they say we Carlows are unromantic. Besides our inability with languages (Susie and I once took a trip to Italy in our teens and when our passports were stolen, discovered that the only Italian we’d picked up was seventeen different kinds of pasta) it seems we also face romantic situations with the same facial expression and tone of voice of someone asked to kick a piglet.

When she realised that I wasn’t joking, she lifted a floury hand to her throat, then clasped my hands between hers. As she warmly expressed her joy and excitement with little giggles and happy sighs, and clutched my arms, I suddenly twigged what she was up to, and looked down to find myself covered in flour up to the elbows. She started backing away, chuckling, but I held up my hands – Peace – and promised that I only wanted to wipe the mess off her neck. When she gave me that fatal moment of trust, I grabbed as much flour as I could from the counter and ground it into her hair.

Thom came in with the children moments later to find me bent over the worktop as Susie held my ponytail and rubbed my face in the flour, both of us weak with laughter. Susie called the Twins over.

Susie: [sternly] I don’t ever want to see you doing this to another child, do you understand?

Twins: Yes, Mummy.

Edward: [thoughtful] But can we do it to adults?

Susie: No.

Lily: But we can do it to Aunt Kiki?

Thom and Susie:
Yes
.

TO DO:

Dress

Venue

Food

Honeymoon

Find out if I absolutely
have
to invite own sister

August 18th

My colleagues at Polka Dot Books were exactly as supportive as I’d expected: Alice was excited, Carol suspicious (‘And how long will you be expecting to take for Honeymoon?’ Me, to self: Why is she making that sound like a disgusting illness?) and Norman apathetic. Carol’s our Commissioning Editor at Polka Dot and one of the grumpiest people I’ve met, but she speaks with such a beautiful tone, like a cross Joanna Lumley, that I never really mind her irritable pronouncements, while Norman, Head of Accounts and taciturn to the point of muteness mostly, would be newsworthy if something caused him to react at all. Alice is my closest friend there, and a member of the Hamilton family, of Hamilton Industry fame, the tooth-achingly rich owners of 60% of the world’s chalk mines. I still can’t tell if Alice works here for a dare, or if she’s trying to prove something to her parents. She got the job through connections, of course, her father being the godson of our boss’s mother (this is what Alice’s whole life is like), so I was tempted to tip her off the fire escape when she joined the company. She’s always immaculately dressed in DVF or modern Chanel with a few choice pieces of Whistles and Topshop thrown in, and I’ve never, ever seen her with egg on her blouse or a large bump of hair sticking out the top of her ponytail. Her handbags alone would be enough to make a grown woman weep, but combine that with the face of an angel and the wallet of a Trump and Alice completely terrifies most of our authors (while others are completely in love with her – one a little bit of both), so she turned out to be a great guard dog for the office. It also gradually became clear that like many of those lusciously maned ex-Edinburgh Uni girls, she was great at publicity, pulling on her spiderweb to get our authors into great magazines and media slots, so we all had a meeting behind her back and decided we’d let her live. She’s incredibly posh but undercuts it all with a deadpan humour that took me three months to get but now is my favourite thing about going to work each day. She can say anything – literally,
anything
– to our authors and to Tony, the boss, and they might blink for a second but will never, ever disbelieve her or question quite how filthy/offensive/untrue what it is she’s saying.

But it was a surprise for my boss to be so gleeful. He doesn’t really approve of personal lives.

Tony: What’s all this fuss about?

Me: [nervous] Oh … It looks like I’ll be getting married next year.

Tony: Fine. [suddenly paying attention] Really? That’s brilliant! Brilliant! What great news!

Me: Ummm … yes?

Tony: No, that’s great! Have you got much planned?

Me: Well, it’s still pretty early, so—

Tony: Brilliant stuff. Good. Well, this couldn’t have come at a better time. I’ve got a new book for you!

New book was selling it somewhat short. Through some hideous Machiavellian scheming that I definitely don’t want to know about, Polka Dot Books have somehow landed model/soapstar/popstar Jacki Jones’s book – and it turns out that since she too is getting married next year, it’s going to be a wedding book.

I’m a humble editorial assistant at Polka Dot Books, a smallish publisher of very commercial titles (the books you’d see at the supermarket mostly) which was opened in the eighties by Tony’s parents. They kept their small family firm under the radar by publishing nothing arthouse, nothing controversial, nothing groundbreaking, just making cheap populist paperbacks available to a hungry public. Tony’s father died when he was young, but his mother, Pamela, is still around, and Tony lives in awe and terror of her. She, in her turn, has rewritten the importance of Polka Dot into something comparable to the Gutenberg press, defending the honour of her publishing house by criticising most of what we publish. She also holds the family purse strings, and is the majority stockholder here (rumour has it she gave Tony 10% of the company on his 21st birthday, certain – and correct in her certainty – that those shares would keep him attached to the Polka Dot where mere maternal threats might fail). He’s worked harder than his 10% would warrant, some might argue, doing a fairly good job (although the office hasn’t been repainted in almost a decade, at least it’s still open) with little from her but an occasional visit to snoop at the books ‘she’s’ publishing.

Since arriving here four years ago my duties have officially been limited to office diary management and author care (patting the authors on the head, making sure they know how to get in and out of a taxi, taking them to the BBC and showing them where the door is for them to walk through, giving them a snack and carton of squash when they get fractious) with a little bit of editing on the side, although actually I’ve done so much ‘editing on the side’ that Tony’s been promising me my own titles for almost a year now. So I should be excited that I’ve finally got one, and such an exciting one at that. But the fact that Tony’s given me a book to work on at all (and such an exciting one, etc.) has rather set alarm bells ringing. What’s so wrong with this author or this book that Tony is happy – and I mean
happy
– to hand it over to his assistant? The thought that this is finally a charitable move on his part is quite literally incredible, so I shall have to wait and see why
Jacki Jones’s Perfect Wedding
is so monstrous that Tony Cooper, big fish in this small Polka Dot pond, has washed his hands of it. At least I might be able to pinch something from the photo shoots, I suppose.

When I came out of Tony’s office, Alice was smiling wistfully.

Alice: I was engaged once.

Me: [shocked] Were you?! When? How?

Alice: Thank you for your incredulity, Kiki. I was engaged when I was seventeen, to the first man I ever slept with. Mummy and Daddy didn’t really like him, and it didn’t last long. After we broke up, he kidnapped a girl who looked exactly like me but he got off on an insanity plea.

Her tale was so awful, but Alice’s straight-faced delivery and shrug – what? Doesn’t that happen to everyone? – meant that I couldn’t stop laughing for fifteen minutes. She came out as gay in her early twenties, to everyone except her parents. She now lives with a man she describes as ‘so dim it hurts to talk to him’, sharing a two-bed flat and moving into one room when her parents visit. Soon after I met her, I asked her why she was with him. She said, ‘I’m not
with him
, with him. Anyway, he’s really kind, he has an amazing collection of obscure science-fiction novels and my mother loves him. It keeps them off my back.’

It’s not a large company – Tony, Editorial Director; Carol, Commissioning Editor; Norman, Accounts; an Art team of three, Dan, Mark and Nayla; a part-time Sales team of five; Alice and two others, one freelance and one part-time, make up Marketing and Publicity; a marvellous Production duo; whichever intern we’ve signed up for the month (currently Judy the Intern, who, now I think about it, seems to have been here for
ever
); various other freelancers; and me. In the early glory days of Polka Dot Books there was talk of moving to a building with a reception desk where guests would be warmly greeted and actually assisted, rather than bumbling up the stairs until someone recognises them, but one thing after another meant we’re still in this sad office block off Baker Street – a lovely location, but a structure that is surely only standing because the developers haven’t decided what to build on top of its shattered wreckage. The office itself is some odd hybrid of Dickensian lair and supermarket warehouse: books are piled on every surface, blocking windows and propping open doors, but each book usually has either glitter or a sexy-looking weapon on the front and back (each with a heavily airbrushed author photo). These are not Booker winners. But they keep people reading, and they pay for a roof over my head. I’m a fan.

TO DO:

Venue – location?

Dress – book Suse to come

Investigate how cross Mum will be if I don’t ask her to come dress shopping too

Honeymoon – New York? Berlin?

Buy bridal magazines

August 20th

Tony’s very kindly ordered a pile of wedding books For Reference Purposes before I get to work on Jacki’s book. I am indeed referring to them, not least to work out the things I need to get done over the next few months. Some more for the list:

TO DO:

Announce our engagement – email? Newspaper? Rooftops?

Engagement party – usual gang? usual place? Friday night?

Sort wedding date – August? (nice weather)

Choose a colour scheme – blues? Nautical but Nice? Pinks? Like a big bruise? Or … all green. The Wedding of Oz. Ask Suse about colour schemes

Dress – decide what shape I want (fishtail, strapless, A-line, column, empire, spherical, whatever)

Find magazine images of veils, accessories I like (who has
veil
preferences?)

Music for reception – see if Thom would be happy for Jim to find local band?

August 23rd

Here, for the record, is how we met.

One day, seven years ago exactly, I’d come to stay with Susie and Pete during a university holiday, and was working at a terrible data-entry job, typing in the details of vacuum cleaner warrantees for seven hours a day. Susie – young, carefree, albeit recently married – had called me up and said, ‘Stop moping over your horrible lists. No one should have to care about vacuum cleaner purchase histories. If you haven’t met your quota, you can hang yourself later. You’re coming dancing with us tonight.’

There was a big gang of them going out, a group from Susie’s radio station, all impossibly cool to someone still not quite officially in the big wide world, even though most of them were only a couple of years older than me. One of them had a birthday so they were all heading east to some super-chic bar, and Susie was insisting I join them. It was either that or an evening in with Pete (he was exhausted from his new job at a travel company) so I bolted back to the flat, threw on Susie’s favourite dress, pinned up my hair, and was out the door before Pete could regale me with a hilarious double-booking anecdote. When I got to Bar Electric – a bar so cool they simply put their records on shelves along the walls, so their hipster crowd could help themselves – Susie’s original gang had swelled to include other friends of friends, so I was tucked into the booth next to someone Susie didn’t know, so couldn’t introduce me to, while she went to get drinks. I had no eyes for the company though, because I couldn’t take my eyes off a guy I’d spotted the second I walked in. He had to be the best-looking human being I’d ever seen in my life. Piercing blue eyes, a half-smiling mouth, thick, perfectly-not-styled hair, and (from what I could see) a killer body: this was the full cliché. He was amazing. I couldn’t believe that not only had he not had me thrown out for looking at him, but he’d actually been looking back at me, talking to his friend, looking at me, turning back to the friend but constantly seeing if I was still looking at him. He was
amazing
. Susie arrived with my drink shortly after, which I necked in my nervousness.