by Lilly Miles
We tried not to talk about the redundancies, and after a while I realized no one had mentioned Twatface, or being divorced, or even said congrats and given me a peck on the cheek; they were making polite small talk, which in journalists is just odd. So as I topped up their glasses I made a jokey reference to Twatface’s booze, which got nothing but a, ‘Mmm, it’s nice,’ from Fifi.
And then, five minutes later, in a quiet moment, I sighed and said, ‘Well, that was a long eight months,’ to which Porter responded that he had seen The Editor with a new squeeze in some bar in Covent Garden.
By the time the meal and wine were finished, and everyone declared it was time to go – ‘Thank you for having us,’ and, ‘Well done, you,’ kiss, hug, squeeze – several hours had passed at a divorce party which had in no way been a party, and where no one had mentioned divorce. Closing the door behind the last of them, I realized it was all a bit of an anticlimax, for them as much as me. It’s impossible to celebrate a negative, and no one sensible thinks the end of a marriage – even an unhappy one – is fun. They had come because they were my friends, and didn’t want me to be on my own. But this was the big moment I’d been waiting for, and it hadn’t been what I had expected: it had been disappointing.
I had hoped for a sense of dawn breaking after a long, dark night. All I had was the sensation of losing the comforting hatred which had been wrapped around me and kept me nourished for so long. I felt like a baby unwillingly evicted from its warm womb. It was cold and bright and lonely out there, and I was scared as well. I knew I could not, in all consciousness or with regard to my mental well-being, continue to brood on Twatface and our failings any more. Nevertheless, he is going to inform and affect, in my head at least, everything I do from here on in. How do I grow up big and strong, and stop myself listening to what he has to say?
Lying awake in my newly unmarried and unmade bed, I stared at the ceiling and wondered what the hell to do. All the metaphors and problems churned around in my brain as I tossed and turned. I flumped over on to my back, and lay looking at the chest of drawers, where the box which held my engagement ring – and now both our wedding rings – was still at the back of the sock drawer. I sighed and burrowed back through the duvet the other way, and saw the wardrobe, where my wedding dress still hangs in its clear plastic bag, having never been worn since that one and only time. ‘Gaaah!’ I shouted at the ceiling. ‘I’m surrounded!’
And that’s the problem. It’s everywhere I go – not just the bits and bobs and detritus of married life, but everything I carry in my head. If I’m a newborn, I reasoned, there must be a way to cut the umbilical cord, eat the placenta, bury it under a tree or something. There must be something I could do to turn what had happened to me into compost to promote growth.
Then it occurred to me that I’d considered this before, months ago when it had felt like my marriage was a mouldering corpse laid out in the front room. My rings had cost hundreds, but I’d tried to pawn them and the £50 I was offered hadn’t been worth the effort of walking to the shop. I couldn’t give my wedding dress to charity, either, for fear of passing the curse on to some other poor cow, and nor could I give the whole lot a decent burial in the garden, because the essence of Twatface with which they were impregnated would probably make my tomato plants turn their toes up and die.
There was only one way to destroy that toxin – the cleansing power of flame. It worked for the Vikings, so why not me?
Next morning I got up, grabbed the dress, ferreted through my socks for the rings, and took them into the kitchen. I decided not to touch the box of wedding mementoes in the attic – I hoped they would bring back happy memories, one day. Scrabbling around in the kitchen bin I managed to locate two plastic takeaway boxes with lids from the night before, an empty tube of Pringles (well, it wasn’t empty, but I finished the last stale handful), and a plastic milk bottle, and in the log pile I found a square of plywood and some twigs. Wrapping the cartons up in sticky brown parcel tape to keep them watertight, I lashed the plastic bits together with string to make a raft, the wooden bit tied on top like a platform. Then I stopped and scratched my head, and realized nothing was going to burn without paper under it.
I hunted around the house, but for once had no newspapers to use. Walking into the living room, the first thing that caught my eye on the bookshelf in front of me was my wedding folder, the A4 file in which for a year I’d kept every invoice, email, fax, and detail of our marital plans, from the suit hire to the honeymoon and everything in-between. The vows and readings, the receipt for flowers – and the £200 bouquet I’d refused to throw afterwards, on the basis that it had cost me £200. A receipt for ninety-nine euros for the dress: an ivory silk Chinese frock with hand embroidery I’d found in a shop in the Latin Quarter in Paris on a holiday.
Flicking through the folder I ripped out page after page, screwing each one up into a ball until I came across a section that stopped me in my tracks. I had kept everyone’s copy of their speech as a memento, and now here they were, the words coming alive under my eyes as I read them and remembered how much everyone had laughed at Barney the best man’s jokes, how Dad had made me cry, and the way everyone had been so surprised when I’d stood up and given a speech, too.
Then there was Twatface’s speech, the one which he’d put off and not written until the day before, and then only when I’d told him he’d look a tit if he said something off-the-cuff. He’d dictated while I’d written it down for him, occasionally reminding him that he ought to mention the bridesmaids, and that all he had to do was be sincere. So there it was, sitting there in my writing with my words scattered throughout, and I remembered how, because he hadn’t done it sooner or practised at all, he’d mumbled and stumbled his way through the whole thing and had made easily the worst speech of the day.
And everyone’s words were strangely prescient. Barney telling how Twatface just caused mayhem for everyone around him, and Dad saying he was now a part of our family. I sat on the floor and read, Dad’s voice in my head saying: ‘My girl gives 110 per cent to everything she undertakes, so I know she will put this and more into her marriage.’ Ha, yes, Dad, you were right. I do believe Twatface had more of me than actually existed, which is why I feel so empty now. Then Twatface turned to me and said it was the happiest day of his life.
‘And, oh God, here are the vows we wrote,’ I thought, eyes filling with tears as my lips silently mouthed the words again. ‘I give you this ring as a token of our marriage and symbol of my love for you; through all the adventures we will share I promise to be your friend, your helper and your protector, whether we are rich or poor, sick or healthy, happy or sad. You are the one I choose to spend the rest of my life with . . .’
I cried when I said those words the first time, and I’m crying now because I never thought that one day I’d be writing them here, when it was all over and gone. It was a promise I meant with every fibre of my being and one that I’m proud to say I kept. I stuck to my word when things got rough and even when they were appalling; I was his friend even after Fatty rolled up, and if he came to me for help today, I think I’d give it. I’d have a shout and a bitch, but I would still do what I could for him – although now I’d go only so far as didn’t cause me any pain. By contrast he said the same words, and I don’t think there was ever a time he helped or protected me from anything. He stopped being my friend pretty early on, and then our fate was sealed. The rest of our lives were never going to go the route we expected, and all that was within our control was the speed at which we travelled to the inevitable destination.
To add to the suddenly obvious predictability of how the marriage had panned out, there at the back of the bookshelf was a pair of miniature silk boxing gloves, one marked ‘Bride’, the other ‘Groom’, and joined together with ribbon, which Mum had thought was really funny to tie to the handle of our hotel room on the wedding night. Twatface was unimpressed, I recall, but I’d kept them anyway. If anything should be thrown into the cleansin
g fire, it was that symbol of two people at war, and of how terrified he’d made me, those times I should have left, but instead had stayed. They and the rings could be my funeral offerings, just like the Norsemen used to make to show how much a warrior had been worth in life. And I suppose that Twatface and I, after all that, were worth little more than three cheap rings and a bad-taste joke about domestic abuse. I grabbed the gloves, along with some of the balls of paper, and went back to my raft in the kitchen.
The paper I tucked under the string which was holding everything together, and then I piled the twigs, in increasing sizes, on top. I took my dress, gazed at it one last time and noted the beer stain and the torn side seam from when Twatface’s dad had picked me up and swung me round while I squealed. The hand embroidery was still beautiful, though. I folded it up and tied it on top of the pyre, took the rings out of their box and looped them together with another piece of string and tied them on to the bundle, and attached the boxing gloves, too. I looked at my fire-in-waiting, then out of the window where the cold wind was whipping the snow about. What if it didn’t light, or went out? Hunting through the cupboards for an accelerant, I came across a can of WD-40; purchasing it had been the furthest that Twatface’s DIY skills had extended. ‘Good enough,’ I thought, bundling it into my bag along with a box of matches and hoping I didn’t get stopped by a policeman. One look and he’d think I was going equipped, no matter what I told him about ex-husbands – and besides, my police caution was still running.
Throwing on a coat and some fingerless gloves, I picked up my rickety raft and walked for a few minutes until I reached the river, praying the tide would be out, so I could get down the steps to the stony beach. The tide was, of course, in. Stood outside the Cutty Sark pub in the freezing cold, I peeked over the railings on the embankment to the waves below and considered setting light to the whole thing and tossing it over. It would be dramatic, if nothing else. But alongside me, amid the expired party poppers and damp silly string from New Year’s Eve, were half a dozen tourists taking pictures of Canary Wharf on the other side of the river, and I felt I needed a little more privacy.
The tide was on the turn, but I wasn’t inclined to shiver for hours waiting for it to go out properly. My gaze wandered along the railings until it lit on a gate maybe forty feet away from the pub, leading to a set of seaweedy steps being lapped by the tide. Looking nonchalant, I opened this gate and shut it behind me, walking down the steps to a flat bit just above the water where no one could see me.
Hunkering down, I put my raft – pyre, coffin, longship, however you like to think of it – on the step, and sprayed the whole thing with WD-40. Then I sprayed it again, in case it had all soaked in, and then a third time, just to delay the inevitable. Getting out a match and putting it against the side of the box, I tried to think of some words to say. Words had been said over us at the start, but as I searched my head for something meaningful it came up empty. It was the end of an era, one in which I’d fallen in love, got married, been broken and divorced, and there simply were no words to sum all that up. All I really wanted was for it to be done with. Fingers shaking in the cold, I said quietly: ‘Goodbye.’ Then I struck the match and set it to the paper.
It had so much WD-40 on it that it went up like a bomb. PHWOOOOMP, it went, nearly taking off my eyebrows as I fell backwards off my haunches in an effort to escape the heat. Jerkily I managed to get my hand on to the Pringles tube and lift it off the step, leaning backwards to stop the flames licking up my coat. I threw it out into the air, six feet above the water, and as I watched it spiral down to the waves I worried for a moment that the splash might extinguish my blaze.
The fire sizzled for a second, but then recovered, spitting out flames as the raft bobbed on its takeaway cartons and righted itself. The dress – finally proven to be 100 per cent silk with no nylony bits in it, and I must admit I’d always wondered – didn’t curl or melt but burned rapidly to white ash, fluttering away on the breeze, taking with it all the hours of embroidery someone had put into the design. The whole craft rocked as the tide turned and was carried away from the steps, past the pub and downriver, and watching it I thought to myself, ‘Well, my girl, if nothing else you know how to build a sturdy ship.’ I climbed back up the steps and through the gate to lean on the railings and watch the tide take my life away, sniffling a little as I saw it turn into a soggy, blackened mess. The stink of burning hung in the air, and a grey plume of smoke trailed up to the tourists, who took out their cameras and started snapping, pointing and chattering.
Within a few minutes the dress, papers and twigs were nothing more than a pile of blackness, with little bits I could see cracking off and dropping into the river. It was too far away to be certain, but the flames had surely burned through the string holding the rings – the amethyst he got for our engagement, my thin white-gold wedding ring and his bigger, thicker, silver band he’d got cheap from the market because he wasn’t sure he wanted to wear one – dropping them all into the lap of Old Father Thames, for him to keep or spit up miles away as his mood took him.
It was now down to just a few plastic containers bobbing in the river, and I was uncomfortably aware I was guilty of both littering and pollution. Beating a hasty retreat before the river police could turn up and start asking questions, I turned my back on my raft and rang the only sister-in-arms who would understand what I’d just done – Nancy, mother of two and sadly still stuck in the throes of her divorce.
‘Hey,’ she said. ‘What are you up to?’
I laughed unsteadily. ‘I’ve just burned my wedding dress. It’s in flames in the middle of the Thames, on its way to Valhalla,’ I told her.
‘Jesus Christ,’ she said. ‘You madwoman! Why?’
Walking back to the house I told her how I couldn’t have given away or sold any of those things, and how it had seemed fitting to put them to the torch just as the Vikings had, so that the dead would find peace in the afterlife. ‘God knows when I’ll be able to do the same,’ she said glumly, recounting a tale of festive child-sharing with her ex, involving fights over money.
Then she announced: ‘Oh, there’s some news on the redundancies too.’
My heart stopped for a moment. The background rumble of joblessness has been too worrying to think about during the divorce, but there was still one hack to be sacked and my work this year probably hasn’t been what it should have. My ex-husband threatened to sue the paper, after all, and Elliot has more reason than ever to despise me since I saw his sex tape. Getting binned would put the tin lid on my shitty year.
‘I’ve volunteered to go,’ said Nancy, and I felt a guilty surge of relief that my job was safe. I closed my eyes for a second and then remembered to be a friend, and asked her what she was going to do.
She laughed, slightly hysterical. ‘I’ve no idea,’ she said. ‘I’m in the middle of getting divorced from Knobhead who doesn’t pay any maintenance, I’m a single mum, I’m having to sell the house and move somewhere smaller with two young babies. But they’re offering me six months’ money and d’you know what, it’s better than staying in newspapers right now.’
‘Really?’ I said, slightly hurt on behalf of the trade.
‘God yes,’ she replied. ‘I’ve loved every minute, but there are days when it’s unbearable. The people who sit in corridors have decided newspapers are fucked and are just managing decline. No one’s trying to do anything new, to make the internet pay or put some investment into things. Added to which, I’ve been doing this longer than you and I’m tired of being a journalist. It’s stopped being fun, and I’m a mum now – I need to be at home sometimes.’
After she hung up I walked home sadly. I was going to miss having my mate in the office. Val had gone too, and with less staff and more work the newsroom had been quieter and more stressed. I had got used to having my chums around me, imagining they’d always be there just like the paper would always come out in the morning. Except one day it won’t, and other people have their own l
ives to lead.
After I’d got back home I put the kettle on and huffed on my chilled fingers as I gazed out of the back door at the garden, which was covered in a crisp white blanket with not a single footprint in it. It was the best kind of snow; it made me want to pull on my boots and stamp all over it.
At one time it had seemed that my future was all darkness, and I had to feel my way with neither light nor warmth to guide me. But now I realized it was just like the virgin snow, which glinted in that special, weak winter light and makes you squint, and which you know will, in time, strengthen enough to melt the cold away, make the sap pump and draw new life pushing through.
This thought gave me a strange kind of peace. I was free, unencumbered, but stronger for my trials. I had my home, my job, and the paper was probably still coming out tomorrow. My life after divorce was laid out before me, just waiting to be lived, a blank page waiting for me to write a good story on it.
My phone beeped, and I picked it up to read the text. ‘Hey, Journo Girl,’ said Cricket Boy. ‘Fancy a drink this weekend?’
I laughed, then pulled on my boots and went out to make angels in the snow.
GLOSSARY OF TERMS FOR FOREIGNERS AND CIVILIANS
A good line – when working on a major story being covered by all other journalists, exclusives are possible but unlikely. Instead you aim for a good top line to make your yarn stand out from the rest of the pack. Makes for a dramatic headline, but rarely lasts past the top six pars of the story.
Buy-up – a contracted deal between a newspaper and subject of a story for an interview and photographs. Usually involves guaranteed payment for the subject, in return for a promise to provide the legal proof needed and not to speak to other media for a defined period. If either party breaks the contract they can sue the other.