SEVENTEEN
While I was chasing my veil around outside, Cherie had checked in to the hotel and taken possession of her own room. Presumably she had left her door ajar so I could find her on my return. She was holding a grey velvet cloche hat in one hand and brushing it briskly with a clothes brush. Her mother-ofthe-bride outfit, a silver chiffon gown, was spread out on the bed.
‘Cherie, what did you put in the orange blossom glaze?’
My mother had a chipper smile on her face but she stopped smiling when she saw my expression. Her mouth presented an O-shape but she didn’t speak.
‘Gulls stole my veil, Cherie. Gulls ripped it off my head and tore it to shreds.’
‘Oh, don’t scare me like that today, love.’
She didn’t believe me.
I walked to the window to see if it was possible to point out the tree to her. ‘A big brute’s got the cap. He’s in that fir tree over there pecking at the blossoms. See?’
Cherie regarded me with a mixture of suspicion and exasperation. She came over to the window and scrunched up her eyes. She could hardly see anything from this distance.
‘What did you put in the orange blossom glaze?’ I repeated, implying fault.
My mother realised I wasn’t joking. ‘Toffee varnish. And orange scent. That’s all.’
She had boiled up sugar and water to make the varnish?
‘It must have been all the ice-cream on the ground that brought the gulls over,’ Cherie surmised. ‘Beth, you really are hopeless.’
She went into her ensuite and closed the door. Despite her criticism, her tone had remained mild. Cherie rarely lost it. She couldn’t afford to do so in the classroom, and this enforced restraint carried over into the rest of her life. Several minutes later she emerged with a flickering, perturbed look on her face. She sought out her handbag and checked the money in her purse.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Into Sorrento to find you a new veil. I can assemble one in an hour if need be.’
‘But Mum, there are no hat shops in Sorrento.’
‘Some of the dress shops sell hats. And there’s Curtains Galore. Leave it to me.’
Who knew what Cherie would bring back as a replacement? I should tell her not to bother. That gull’s attack was so bizarre it had to be an omen. My wedding was simply not meant to be.
‘Can I come too?’
I’d be able to articulate my position while Cherie was concentrating on the road. Mum, Jordan and I are calling it quits.
If I put my decision to her in these incontrovertible terms, she might very well astonish me with her supreme adaptability– also acquired in the primary school classroom.
Oh, Beth, what a lucky escape. Who do you have your heart set on next?
Cherie could be the most hard-bitten person around when it came to tossing boyfriends, hers or mine. ‘Sooner him than me’ was her motto, as she ditched another mate before she gave him a proper look-in.
Cherie had not been in favour of us marrying in haste. She had taken an instant liking to Jordan, as most people did, but she couldn’t see what the rush was about. ‘Can’t you wait another year or two, darling?’
Now she was searching in her handbag for something. ‘Oh, you’ve got them, Beth.’
I handed back her car keys. What a wimp I was. Telling Judy was a cinch compared to this.
Cherie refused my offer of company. ‘How’s that wedding checklist going?’ she prompted as I followed her down the stairs. ‘Go check the dining tables, if you haven’t already. Go outside and inspect the fairy lights and the maypole dais – have they attached the ribbons yet? Call in on the kitchen and make friends with the chef. Your cake should have arrived by now. Make sure it has three tiers. You’ve paid for three. And the decorations need to go on top. Get a rustle on, Beth! This is no time to be having one of your stoppages. Give yourself a shake, because tomorrow it will be too late if something’s been overlooked.’
Cherie’s brusque manner left me feeling cornered and denied. This woman wasn’t going to bend to my whim and allow me to change my mind at the last minute. If I agreed to go to a party or attend a function, then I was obliged to do so unless I was infectious or bedridden: those were Cherie’s rules.
I began to wonder what happened to the certain percentage of brides who came down with gastro at the very hour their nuptials were to be declared. I couldn’t fake illness, but maybe my body would go into a self-preserving spasm and I’d start throwing up on the dot of five o’clock. Providentially, the vomiting would last until the bug was transferred to Jordan and he began throwing up too. Growing weary of waiting for our chucking fits to cease, the guests might choof off home of their own accord.
Oh yes! If only.
In spite of all the soul-searching I’d done on the beach, in spite of my educative encounter with Tracy, I’d resolved very little. I’d merely come back inside and entered my old reality. Once again I was stuck in the wedding hotel, bereft of support, waiting interminably for Jordan to appear so I could (theoretically) break things off with him.
But no. I definitely wasn’t the same betwixt-and-between person who’d arrived here at a quarter past ten this morning. In fact, my morning hours could only be referred to as ‘my old reality’ because my time on the beach had created a divide between my former grieving self and my cauterised new self.
I felt almost as though I’d never read that stupid letter. I’d ceased to feel its presence as a spear inside my satchel, threatening at any moment to pierce my side. Neither did I particularly want to know the name of the person who wrote it. At the very least I wasn’t still reeling from what I had learned. I had recovered somewhat from the shock and humiliation. I was tougher and meaner and ready to snap back at anyone who put me down. ‘To marry or not to marry?’ had been replaced by a new chant that croaked in my ear like a saucy cockatoo: ‘Knock him off his perch – why don’t you go ahead and knock him off his perch?’
Slipping on my sunglasses to protect my identity from roaming guests, I approached the lobby desk and muttered in Vanessa’s ear: ‘Has my fiancé come in yet?’
Vanessa jumped. ‘Oh, it’s you!’ I’d given her a fright, coming up behind her. ‘No, I don’t think so. But Beth, the dining tables are ready for your inspection.’
Oh well, I conceded, I might as well go and have a look to make Vanessa happy.
Normally you can walk straight into the dining room to eat your meals but today there was a gilded sign on an easel that read: Private function. NO ENTRY. I pushed open the frosted glass doors. A swathe of white linen greeted me. All was in readiness for tonight’s banquet. The chairs were draped with white slip-on covers to match the tablecloths. Each chair had a voile sash tied around it, with a bow at the back. All the bows had been tied up precisely. Such care had been taken with the decorations that I was really touched. To the left of the tables the patterned carpet gave way to a square of polished parquetry. It was quite a small dance area but the hotel manager had said it would suffice for the bridal waltz. We were supposed to be having a practice this afternoon, Jordan and I. We had never danced in a formal way before. That wasn’t our thing.
The room smelt sweetly and metallically cosy. On close inspection I realised the aproned woman at the long bridal table was ironing a tablecloth. And she was ironing the cloth while it was on the table. All the decorations had been pushed to one end, out of the way. Maybe this woman was the perfectionist housemaid the hotel manager had boasted about to us on the phone. No doubt she, or the manager, wanted the tablecloth to sit smoothly for the paying guests. For the bridal party, including me, in four hours’ time.
‘Don’t mind me, Beth.’ The housemaid smiled. ‘See anything that needs fixing, just give a hoy.’
Beth again! Maybe a photo of me had been circulated before I arrived. Be especially nice to the young lady who looks like this. I walked from table to table as I was expected to do, admiring the spruce settings and shiny cutlery. Gold bridal candles sat plumb in the middle of the patterned runners. Next to them were the Kodak Instamatic cameras for guests to take photos of each other so we could forever remember those who had shared this day with us. There were mosquito-repellent candles for when the doors to the beer garden were flung open. And each guest had been presented with some delectable Italian sweets hidden in a small white bonbonnière box.
Oh my goodness, a brand-spanking-new wedding reception was sitting here waiting for Jordan and I to walk right into it. I’d almost forgotten we had prepared these tables in such painstaking detail (with the hotel manager’s help). How could it hurt to indulge in tonight’s pageant as if it were still ours to have? Quite simply, all I had to do was put on my beautiful dress, hang tight to the arm of my former lover as though he was a stair rail, whisper the formulaic lines on the dais with the help of the celebrant’s prompt, and be seduced by the flutter of a hundred dove-shaped serviettes unfolding at the same moment in the flickering candlelight.
Come on, Beth. Chin up. Put your best foot forward. This might be your one and only chance. And a little voice whispered: You got Mr Sneaky because that’s what you deserved.
To my surprise I found myself wanting Jordan to walk into the dining room and hold me tight. I was in the mood for a trial spin with him on the dance floor. The perfectionist housemaid looked agreeable, so maybe she could hum a tune for us. If Jordan would step in here now, we could marry. A farce, it would be a farce! The housemaid could act as the celebrant, untying her blue apron and blessing our sweet souls with her upturned iron. A bit of spray, a bit of steam. Go on, Beth. Don’t be a spoilsport. Don’t.
Someone did push open the frosted doors at that moment and my heart leapt in anticipation. Supposing it Jordan, I dared not look. But the housemaid continued stroking the tablecloth with her hoof of iron.
The bartender I’d nicknamed The Cocktail Shaker was standing in the doorway. He was a disappointment. He broke the spell. And he bore a scrap of paper in his hand.
‘Excuse me – Beth?’
Here it comes. Jordan says he won’t be able to make it after all. Those who live by the sword …
‘Your mother rang.’ He was having trouble reading the note. ‘She says she found a veil and … um … she’s at … Mrs G’s place fixing it up. Would that make sense?’
I nodded. Yes, I understood. Mrs G had been our nextdoor neighbour in Sorrento.
The bartender hesitated long enough for me to express a growing need. ‘Could you by any chance bring me a glass of shiraz?’
He promptly returned with a bottle in one hand and an empty glass in the other. He poured the red wine for me and I took a sip. Yes, an excellent drop – I approved. Then the bartender left me in peace. He left me the whole bottle too. Now I was set.
I looked at my watch. It was twenty to three. I really should go outside and wait for Jordan. But I stayed in the dining room, quaffing wine and staring out through the glass doors at the beer garden. Up the slope, beyond the tables, our wedding dais rested like a circular bandstand. I could see the maypole ribbons tussling with the breeze. Several ribbons had fluttered loose, as though the retainer had been careless, or someone had spitefully untied the pegs. A cluster of leggy women bobbed up from behind the dunes. They sauntered across the far lawn and paused in front of the dais. A bit of chitchat between them before they each seized a loose ribbon and began prancing around the maypole. What cheek, but good on ’em, I thought. Why not make the day your own?
The four show ponies increased their speed. Now they slowed and twirled and ran in the opposite direction. Two spins right, then two spins left. The ribbons twisted and tangled, then slickly unwound themselves. The girls were dancing rather than running, but I’d know those particular styles anywhere. The baton-change girls were back together. Tracy was the fluid runner with the broad stride who kept a measured pace. Mish – now a South Yarra hairdresser – had a halo of Cyndi Lauper two-tone hair and shapely calves. Penny was the dark, tall, graceful one in white shorts. She moved deceptively slowly, as if she were skimming along the surface of water. Bin was the shorter girl with mousy-brown hair. Her real name was Belinda. She hadn’t shot up during puberty like the others. At fourteen she began starving herself to keep her weight down. Judy had christened her Skinny Binny back then, though Judy wouldn’t be casting scorn on Belinda for that reason today. Judy’s new nickname for the baton-change girl was: “not-so-skinny Binny”.
Tracy was the maypole ringleader. She was telling the others when to turn and unwind. The ribbon dance may indeed have been performed in honour of their schoolboy hero, Jordan Sinclair. After all, two of them had been Jordan’s girls. And the other two were pencilled in his address book, possibly for pending action. With Jordan you could never be sure.
The girls suddenly quit their ribbon dance. Mish flopped down on the dais and lay sprawled on her back. The others sat down and neatly crossed their legs. Tracy might have begun telling her pals about the fraudulent letter. Hence the serious expressions forming around her as she spoke. Would Tracy find the rat in her pack? I had no idea how firm the friendships were these days. Tracy seemed to dislike Binny, though. She’d implied as much on the beach. Yet Jordan’s interest in Binny had never been of the romantic sort. That was my gut feeling. Binny was a desperate perfectionist who was still trying to get into law at some new university that offered places to older students. She was another person Jordan felt sorry for.
After a while Pen and Trace stood up and considerately repegged the loose ribbons. Binny took herself back over the hairy dunes to the beach. Mish remained indolent on the dais, under the shade of the canopy. Shucks, when Jordan steps onto that dais at half-past five this afternoon, how many of us Mornington girls will he be thinking about? When he slides the ring on my finger, will he be speculating? ‘I marry you and you and you, and there are plenty more to come.’ Oh Jordan. He really wasn’t up to the solemn commitment of marriage.
My thoughts switched back to that warm spring day when Jordan started his foolish wedding prattle. To my surprise he claimed he had never seen my most beautiful place in the world.
‘You’ve not been to Portsea back beach? Tracy never took you there?’
Quite plainly he was lying. Of course he’d been there. Everyone who lives on the peninsula has been there.
Exactly a week after that abysmal October Sunday when I had put my old school uniform on, Jordan and I took the road I travelled earlier today. We passed the Portsea Hotel and turned left towards the surf beach. As we wound our way up the coastal bluff we tailed a trio of juvenile cyclists clutching their surfboards under their wings and wobbling all over the road.
‘Watch out for their dog, Jordan!’
My driver gave me a scathing glare. ‘The dog is the least of my worries. He’s keeping to the left.’
Reaching the summit and the huge empty car park, Jordan parked near the viewing platform. The wind was so strong the seagulls were being buffeted about. They were even losing feathers.
‘I’m not going on the beach,’ Jordan protested, catching a grey and white feather as it fell from the sky and sticking it behind my ear. I shrugged off his embrace and headed for the long, steep ramp down the side of the cliff. Companionable Jordan could only follow. Behind us came the cyclists lugging their bikes and boards. The young teens must have decided it was too rough out there, because they and their dog disappeared into the Surf Life-Saving Clubhouse and didn’t emerge while Jordan and I were on the beach.
Sand was piled high in a series of deep paddocky embankments on the massive ocean beach, and one needed to navigate these slopes to reach the waves. The roiling surf – which had drowned a fair few swimmers, including one prime minister – was brutal yet compelling. Rows of unfolding breakers shattered like walls of glass.
‘This makes last night’s heavy metal band sound piss-weak,’ Jordan yelled in my ear to make himself heard.
‘Yeah,’ I shouted back, heaving my short-legged wetsuit on. Jordan helped me do the back zip up.
I ran straight in and the freezing water burnt my legs, but I acclimatised and began cautiously treading a course parallel to the shore, vigilant for any sign of a rip. Today no seaweed clogged the water; it was translucent, the colour of lace and green tea.
I was not expecting Jordan to come in after me. Indeed, I would have preferred him to remain safely on the beach. I shouted for him to go back out, but for whatever reason he stayed in my vicinity, either through pride or male chivalry. He was holding his arms tightly around his pale torso and shivering.
The waves kept thundering in like avalanches. The undertow lifted us up and plonked us rudely down. Jordan clutched hold of me each time this happened, which had me worried for him. Then a giant glassy roller approached.
‘Ride this one in!’ I shouted, flinging myself forwards at the appropriate moment. The wave consumed us with unexpected force. It grasped us like flotsam and jetsam and brutally slammed us down onto the sand under the wave. My hands and knees bore the full brunt of the impact.
Jordan was physically stronger than I was. He was up to it. All he had to do was hold his breath until the tumult subsided. He was never out of his depth.
We surfaced at the same time. Jordan signalled to me that he was heading in. When I arrived at his side he was stemming a profusely bleeding chin with his towel. He must have landed on his face. He blinked at me in disbelief, as a child might look at a crazy mother who’d made him do something reckless.
‘You okay?’
‘Not really.’ He was sulking. ‘I could have broken my neck.’
Wrapped in towels we lay on the beach for a while, nursing our respective injuries.
Later Jordan unfurled my towel and pressed it against my grazed knees and palms. He told me I was really beautiful, though ‘beautiful’ would have been quite adequate.
‘Your neck still hurting?’ I asked.
He nodded morosely and rested his head on my chest. His chin was dribbling blood. It looked as if someone had scraped sandpaper across his jaw.
It was no fun on the beach and we left soon afterwards, clambering up the hundreds of steps through the whipping wind to the car park. Jordan’s ears were ringing and he was a bit dazed, so I got behind the wheel and drove us back to the township. On the way there Jordan wrapped his towel around his head and chin. He sat beside me in the car, unusually quiet, looking very strange and sombre.
I suggested we fortify ourselves with a drink at the hotel. Jordan unwrapped the towel from his head, and on the footpath he pulled his jeans on over his wet bathers. To save time I copied him. Then we went inside. But it wasn’t a beer Jordan was after. Did he have an ulterior motive? Did he enter the Portsea Hotel wanting sex, and come out unexpectedly engaged?
‘Let’s get married here.’ It was a statement, not a request.
I chose not to take this spiel seriously. Gaily I replied that I was waiting for someone more perfect to come along, as if Jordan wasn’t the most perfect man I could have ever dreamt of.
We sat on the couch in our wet clothes and the hotel receptionist put a giant photo album on the coffee table in front of us. After looking at the wedding photographs with more disdain than enthusiasm, I coaxed Jordan into the safer waters of the bay beach, saying, ‘The salt will be great for our wounds.’
Mercifully, the sea here was several degrees warmer than the ocean surf.
‘That was quite a dunking,’ Jordan said with gladiatorial conceit.
‘You want to go back to the ocean beach?’
He began tickling me. ‘Not on your life.’
In water up to my armpits, I held on to Jordan tightly. I stood on tiptoe and pretended to be a ballerina.
‘What say we give it a test drive tonight, Beths?’ asked Jordan, cradling me, weightless, in his arms.
‘Ahh …’ I still assumed he was thinking about sex, his flirty, depraved proposal tantamount to foreplay.
I had my own agenda. ‘What say I give you a quick swimming lesson, eh?’
After the restorative bathe we climbed the dunes to the hotel, requisitioned room number 31 and hopped in the shower together.
Jordan was still scheming. He had already marked a day in his diary. ‘The first Saturday in December might work?’ he suggested, eyebrows raised.
Oh my God, was he kidding? At the very least my boyfriend was guilty of premeditation.
When I folded back the bedsheets a spider crawled out towards the pillow. Jordan collected the creature in his shoe and disposed of it over the balcony railing. I pulled off all the covers to check for more of them. Then I lay down on the firm, steady mattress and sighed. A good night’s sleep was coming my way. No more bobbing up and down on the week-old waterbed. Cherie had suggested I return the bed to the store, but I assumed beds were like underwear with no returns or exchanges allowed.
‘One night in Portsea is like a year in any other place.’ Jordan sang bits of that 10cc song, ‘Une Nuit A Paris’, in a deep throaty voice for a laugh. He’d forgotten about his ravaged chin and jarred neck by then.
In the dark and unfamiliar bedroom I became another person. I couldn’t see Jordan but I could feel him, and the tactile intimacy worked to our advantage. It would be true to say that our lovemaking peaked that night. We had survived a drubbing on the floor of the sea. Prior to that we had endured a lonely week apart. When we decided the next morning to bond our lives together, it felt like a recovery operation.
The following weekend we had a puzzling conversation. It came back to me now as I fingered the face of my watch in the hotel dining room and realised, to my consternation, that another fifteen minutes had passed. Jordan was still missing.
‘You could never love a guy who was a weakling or a hard-luck story, could you, Beth?’ Jordan didn’t say this in a patronising way. He implied my inclination for strong partners was perfectly understandable.
And no. I wouldn’t want to go out with a weakling. He was dead right. ‘What are you getting at?’
He smiled. ‘You know how excited you got when you put that old school dress on …’
‘Sort of.’ I was cringing.
‘It was something you didn’t like about yourself, but you wanted to let me know about it anyway.’
‘Maybe,’ I said apprehensively.
‘Well, I’ve got something similar to share. Something that’ll make you think twice about me.’
‘Don’t say it then. Don’t tell me,’ I said and covered my ears.
‘But you need to know if we’re getting married.’ Jordan spoke loudly enough for me to hear him. ‘Besides, you’ve probably already noticed that I can only get hard for girls who are afflicted in some way.’
He wasn’t joking. He was earnestly admitting this defect as part of his nature. I recoiled emotionally.
‘So in what way am I afflicted?’
‘I’d say you don’t have any confidence in yourself.’
I hated him for saying that, but it didn’t turn me off him then and there.
‘I wouldn’t be so sure about that,’ I said.
‘I’m essentially kinder than you,’ he said – not arrogant, just stating a plain fact.
It was true, but I still objected. Why was he being so cruel and so unlike himself?
I took some time to collect my thoughts, then I replied.
‘How do you explain getting the hots for Tracy? And Vera? There was nothing afflicted about those girls.’
‘They were afflicted for certs.’ Jordan smiled, weary-eyed and superior.
I shook my head dismissively. Tracy was the most welladjusted girl I had ever met.
He paused and reloaded. ‘They were lovesick. Both of them. Suffering like anything. Cure in a kiss. Easy-peasy.’
Now he was crowing about his disturbing predilection.
‘Hmm. Once they’re cured, how come you still go for them?’
The inconsistencies in his dumb theory were glaringly obvious to me.
‘Never did go for Vera. She was a cocky one. Tracy’s more afflicted than you realise. I could always go for her,’ Jordan said.
‘So she doesn’t feel she’s a good enough runner?’ I scoffed.
‘Not exactly.’
‘What, then?’
Jordan gave me a faint contemptuous smile. Don’t you know anything?
‘It’s to do with her dad. He wanted her to be the next Raelene Boyle. You probably didn’t see it, but she was under so much pressure to make it. And her dad didn’t think she ever achieved her potential. He wanted her to focus on the 100-metre sprint, but Tracy only really enjoyed running in the relay with her friends.’
I was still trying to knock his vain theory on the head.
‘That doesn’t explain why you went for Vera when she smashed Tracy in that race. You should have wanted Tracy all
the more after she lost.’
‘That silly race again? Oh Beths, can’t you let the past lie?’
A few days after this conversation there was a knock at my front door. Jordan stood outside clutching a bunch of dark pink carnations. A peace offering?
I accepted the flowers but I was still fuming. What he’d said to me was so demeaning.
Jordan held up his hands in self-protection. ‘You don’t know how a marriage proposal can put a guy on the back foot,’ he pleaded.
You don’t know how a marriage proposal can put a guy on the back foot. Which marriage proposal had Jordan actually been referring to? The one to me in the hotel, or the one he’d made to Tracy a few days before that? Both proposals had been a mistake. He probably regretted both of them.
And so I went on to pardon the unpardonable. I let Jordan wheedle his way back into having a more serious relationship with me than he deserved.
What had made him reach out to Tracy again? Was it simply that he’d heard she was engaged to Rich? Or did he back-pedal when he realised that I was more than just afflicted? When he was given first-hand evidence of the shell of a girl I really am, living off the blood and sinews of others – the vampiric Beth, who wouldn’t let the past and all its emotions die with the passing of childhood?
Funnily enough, I don’t think I would have resorted to dropping Jordan if he’d been honest about his residual feelings for Tracy. In any case, it wouldn’t have surprised me that he still had the hots for her. I’d have said, ‘Let’s wait and see how it pans out.’ Then he wouldn’t have needed to traffic in weddingday deals to obliterate his wounded pride.
‘De-snagging’. A term used to describe the removal of wooden debris from rivers, it was also Judy’s code word for getting over someone. For Judy de-snagging was therapeutic. She regarded it as necessary to the separation process. For Judy de-snagging meant sleeping with her ex-boyfriend’s best mate as payback. For Judy de-snagging meant not returning her ex-boyfriend’s Dire Straits LPs until they were scratched and forever unusable again.
So this was what our wedding day amounted to: a sophisticated and morally suspect enterprise in de-snagging.