sides, but still beautiful in her happiness. All of Tony’s meagre party stopped and stared at this marital vision as they tripped down the white marble stairs, built no doubt for a duchess hundreds of years ago. The photographer at the bottom was waiting for them, moving them around to look their best. Give her a kiss, mate, he was shouting and the crowd surged, excitement on their lips, bubbling over everything. Tony realised he’d forgotten to buy a camera, even though that had been on his list of things to do. He looked at his tiny, impersonal party and saw that even the witnesses were leaning over the balcony, wanting to be part of these strangers’ happiness for as long as they could.
Tony suggested a drink because it seemed too tragic for them to go straight home. All his money from his new job at the call centre had to be saved for the baby and Alice hadn’t even mentioned a honeymoon. She was amazing like that – unlike any woman he’d ever met – in her lack of desire for anything material. Clarice politely declined the offer of a drink and hailed a taxi, wishing them goodnight. So he sat with Alice in the garden of a wine bar with a bottle of champagne they couldn’t afford as the sun set over their wedding day. Tony wondered what they must look like to the other people in there, a group he had been part of but now felt so separated from. He looked at the men in their shiny suits and the women with their big shoulders and permed hair, he saw their mouths moving in conversation, saw them laughing and wondered how many of them would be going home together that night. He knew the mind-cleansing pleasure of a warm body you could forget in the morning and a great longing welled up in him that felt like a sadness, but he pushed it down and stared at his new wife, who was easily the prettiest person there.
They were home by eleven and in bed, across the hallway from Clarice. Alice rolled into him and he knew it would be wrong for them not to have sex on their wedding night. But it took an act of concentration on his part, not because he didn’t find Alice attractive – you’d have to be blind for that to be true – but because he felt so strange it was as if he was removed from himself. Their love-making was silent as he supposed it would have to be until they had enough money to move out, which in his estimation would be in at least five years. Afterwards Alice cried and said she had never been happier and Tony put his hand on her stomach and imagined the part of him already in there, swimming in its own dreams. The thought was magical and surprising and made him smile like a fool in the dark.
6 … Consumption
Mavis didn’t know how Dot had managed to persuade her to go shopping for a dress she didn’t want to wear to a party she wished she didn’t have to go to. But maybe it would be a good opportunity to say sorry for how she’d been behaving, perhaps even to explain. She longed for her friend’s advice in a way she’d never felt before and yet she’d never felt further away from asking for it.
They met at the bus stop, aiming to catch the 11.06 into Cartertown. Dot was late and Mavis stood in the cold, stamping her feet and slapping her arms around herself. She looked at the timetable for something to do and thought how only a town planner who drove a four-by-four and talked too loudly on his BlackBerry would devise a route which turned the bus the wrong way down the Cartertown Road in order to take in three other villages before heading towards the mecca of the town.
Mavis sometimes wondered what people a hundred years ago would think of their cities. Had they stood on the cusp of the modern world and thrown their minds forward into a future of shiny chrome and marble and structures which reached into a sparkling sky? She wondered why, despite all the evidence, they now in turn imagined their own future filled with alien domes and cars that whizzed through the air. In reality nothing changed
Tony suggested a drink because it seemed too tragic for them to go straight home. All his money from his new job at the call centre had to be saved for the baby and Alice hadn’t even mentioned a honeymoon. She was amazing like that – unlike any woman he’d ever met – in her lack of desire for anything material. Clarice politely declined the offer of a drink and hailed a taxi, wishing them goodnight. So he sat with Alice in the garden of a wine bar with a bottle of champagne they couldn’t afford as the sun set over their wedding day. Tony wondered what they must look like to the other people in there, a group he had been part of but now felt so separated from. He looked at the men in their shiny suits and the women with their big shoulders and permed hair, he saw their mouths moving in conversation, saw them laughing and wondered how many of them would be going home together that night. He knew the mind-cleansing pleasure of a warm body you could forget in the morning and a great longing welled up in him that felt like a sadness, but he pushed it down and stared at his new wife, who was easily the prettiest person there.
They were home by eleven and in bed, across the hallway from Clarice. Alice rolled into him and he knew it would be wrong for them not to have sex on their wedding night. But it took an act of concentration on his part, not because he didn’t find Alice attractive – you’d have to be blind for that to be true – but because he felt so strange it was as if he was removed from himself. Their love-making was silent as he supposed it would have to be until they had enough money to move out, which in his estimation would be in at least five years. Afterwards Alice cried and said she had never been happier and Tony put his hand on her stomach and imagined the part of him already in there, swimming in its own dreams. The thought was magical and surprising and made him smile like a fool in the dark.
6 … Consumption
Mavis didn’t know how Dot had managed to persuade her to go shopping for a dress she didn’t want to wear to a party she wished she didn’t have to go to. But maybe it would be a good opportunity to say sorry for how she’d been behaving, perhaps even to explain. She longed for her friend’s advice in a way she’d never felt before and yet she’d never felt further away from asking for it.
They met at the bus stop, aiming to catch the 11.06 into Cartertown. Dot was late and Mavis stood in the cold, stamping her feet and slapping her arms around herself. She looked at the timetable for something to do and thought how only a town planner who drove a four-by-four and talked too loudly on his BlackBerry would devise a route which turned the bus the wrong way down the Cartertown Road in order to take in three other villages before heading towards the mecca of the town.
Mavis sometimes wondered what people a hundred years ago would think of their cities. Had they stood on the cusp of the modern world and thrown their minds forward into a future of shiny chrome and marble and structures which reached into a sparkling sky? She wondered why, despite all the evidence, they now in turn imagined their own future filled with alien domes and cars that whizzed through the air. In reality nothing changed
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