by Lindsey Kelk
‘This place is weird,’ Alex said.
‘It is,’ I agreed.
‘You love it, don’t you?’ he asked.
‘I do,’ I confirmed.
The Venetian was fake and flashy and wonderful. The uber-kitsch always floated my boat, and anything to do with Christmas made me want to do the Snoopy dance. We had found my spiritual home.
‘There’s no hope for you. You know that, right?’ Alex pulled me away from a group of opera singers and walked me further down the canal. ‘I should have known better than to let you into Vegas. You’re gonna be one of those old women serving at the Tropicana with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth telling everyone how the city stole your soul.’
‘Will I have a massive bouffant and too much blusher?’ I marvelled at the massive Madame Tussauds and let Alex lead the way, trusting him not to push me into the canal.
‘And you’ll tell anyone who’ll listen how you came for a weekend and never left.’ He draped his arm around my shoulders and sighed. ‘Because Vegas was the thing that had been missing all these years.’
‘It completes me.’
‘I am so offended.’
‘Really?’
‘No. It’s Vegas, baby.’ He kissed the top of my head, the argument seemingly forgotten. On his part. ‘So you said you had something you wanted to talk to me about?’
‘I did.’
Eeep. I was absolutely not ready for this conversation. I was more scared than the time I had to tell Jenny that I’d spilled red wine all down her new cashmere sweater. And also that I had borrowed her new cashmere sweater.
‘So, shoot.’
Panicking, I looked around. Surely there had to be some sort of distraction? I mean, there should at least be a man offering to get us a girl to our room in twenty minutes or less. If you couldn’t rely on a pimp in Vegas, what could you depend on in this world? Without hookers, I went for the next best option. Gondolas.
‘If I swear I won’t fall in, can we please go for a gondola ride?’ I gave Alex my best puppy-dog eyes. ‘When in Rome?’
‘We’re not in Rome,’ he said. ‘We’re not in Venice. We’re not even in Italy.’
I traded my puppy-dog eyes for the ‘just do as you’re told’ expression I usually saved for the times I needed him to go out to buy me tampons. I was pulling out the biggest weapons in my arsenal, but we were at defcon one here. And what was more romantic than a gondola ride in Venice?
After far too many seconds of deliberation, he kissed me on the forehead and waved towards the boats.
‘The things I do for you,’ he moaned.
This did not bode well, considering the next favour I was going to ask. But at least I was getting my boat trip. And hopefully not a wet bottom.
Climbing aboard the boat in the middle of faux St Mark’s Square, I considered the fact that I should have agreed not to start singing ‘Just One Cornetto’, but since the reference would have been lost on my American boy, I just made that promise to myself. Getting into a gondola in four-inch heels was tricky. Getting into a gondola in four-inch heels without flashing your knickers was impossible. With Alex guarding my modesty, I just about managed to clamber aboard while keeping both of my promises. I was as surprised as anyone.
‘Welcome to the Grand Canal of Venezia. My name, it is-a Guido,’ the gondolier had the worse fake accent I had ever heard. He made the cast of Jersey Shoresound like they’d been spending every summer in Tuscany since The Situation was nothing but A Slight Concern. ‘I will give-a you a guided tour around our beautiful-a water ways-a.’
‘If I give you ten bucks, can you not?’ Alex held out a ten-dollar bill. I held my breath. Guido pocketed it in a heartbeat.
‘ Grazie, signor.’
He actually looked quite relieved.
‘So when you’re not pole dancing and Jenny isn’t banging her ex, what have you guys been getting up to?’ Alex asked, sliding in beside me at the end of the gondola. It was not comfortable.
I considered his question for a moment and decided to ignore the Jenny comment for the time being. ‘It has mostly been pole dancing and illicit sex,’ I conceded, ‘but I have also flown around the Grand Canyon in a helicopter, fallen in the Bellagio fountains, been shopping and eaten myself blind at the breakfast buffet.’ It sounded quite exciting when I said it all out loud.
‘Sounds like a good time.’ He took hold of my arm and circled my wrist with his hands. ‘I should handcuff myself to you so I don’t have to go to another strip-club breakfast buffet.’
‘Please tell me you’re joking.’ I covered his hand with mine. ‘But it’s not a bad idea. Maybe you could handcuff me to you, then when they come to deport me, they’ll have to take you too.’
‘Kinky.’ He nuzzled my neck, momentarily knocking off my concentration. Damn him and his obscene cuteness. He did smell lovely.
‘Speaking of deportation,’ I started in my breeziest tone of voice, ‘I have had a bit of bad news.’
‘Oh?’ He pulled away from the nuzzle. Proximity equalled fuzziness. Fuzziness equalled less terror. Less terror equalled easier conversation. Shit.
‘Yeah.’ I took a deep breath in, raised my shoulders and rolled my eyes. Totally relaxed. ‘I haven’t had a lot of luck with those pitches I put out. To get the media visa.’
‘Just how much luck is not a lot?’
‘Ooh, none?’ Still breezy. Definitely breezy. More or less.
‘And what does that mean?’ Alex was not echoing my breezy. He was the opposite of breezy. His tone of voice was somewhere between an angry maths teacher and a youngish police officer.
‘Um, I’m sort of running out of options on the old visa front.’ I stared directly ahead, focusing on a teenage boy spitting off the bridge we were about to pass under. If he gobbed on this dress, so help me God, I’d give them a real reason to deport me. ‘In that I don’t really have any options.’
‘Jesus Christ.’ He leaned forward, resting his well-dressed elbows on his well-dressed knees. I noticed for the first time how shiny his shoes were. It was weird to see him out of trainers. I didn’t like it. ‘There must be something we can do? The whole neighbourhood is crawling with Brits.’
I gave the boy on the bridge my filthiest look. He stood up straight and shoved his hands in his pockets. Brilliant – I had wasted my powers of mind control on the wrong boy.
‘Well, either they know something I don’t or they are “extraordinary”,’ I replied, trying to remember to breathe. ‘Lawrence the Lawyer says I’m not.’
‘What does Lawrence the Lawyer know?’ Alex placed his hand over mine. It was meant to be a reassuring gesture, but all it did was make me incredibly aware of how sweaty my palms were. Sexy times. ‘We’ll work this out, I promise. Just let’s get Christmas out of the way, OK?’
There was so much I didn’t like about that sentence. Firstly, Christmas should never be ‘gotten out of the way’, it should be celebrated endlessly and dragged out until you get food poisoning from the leftover turkey, somewhere around mid-January. Secondly, Alex’s resumed breeziness was altogether too authentic. He was not panicking enough. He should have been wailing, thumping the bottom of the boat and screaming, ‘Why, Lord, why?’ at the sky. The pretty, blue, painted-on sky. He could at least tear off his tie in frustration. Or maybe punch Guido. He was totally listening in.
‘The thing is, there just isn’t that much time,’ I said hesitantly. ‘To keep waiting.’
And there wasn’t. The incredibly selfish people at the INS hadn’t included a Christmas card in their lovely letter, so I assumed there wasn’t a birth-of-baby-Jesus amnesty on deportation. Season of goodwill, my arse. ‘And I don’t want to ruin Christmas for everyone.’
‘Angela, no one is as excited about Christmas as you. You could not ruin it for anyone but yourself. The rest of us are just scared of accidentally revealing that Santa Claus doesn’t exist. I almost rented a Santa suit just to keep you happy.’
Sadly, I had to tel
l seven-year-old Angela (alive and well in my subconscious) that he was probably joking about the suit before I could carry on with the conversation. I could not be distracted. I had to make him take this seriously. Without scaring him.
‘Alex, I’m worried.’ I wiped my palms on what I hoped was an inconspicuous bit of my skirt and rested them on his knee. ‘Really worried that I might not be able to get a work visa.’
‘Don’t be.’ He turned towards me, his hair rebelling against his slick suit by falling into his face, brushing against those high cheekbones, his eyes sleepy and sparkling all at the same time. He actually looked pretty pleased with himself. Knob. ‘It’s all going to work out OK.’
Right. I was out of options. I looked to the faux heavens and cashed in all my good karma chips.
‘The lawyer did say there might be one other option.’ Hmm. Was it possible the high, singsong voice wasn’t the best way to go with this. ‘Maybe.’
We sat in silence, me sweating in a manner that would be unbecoming on Bernard Manning, and Alex’s happy-go-lucky expression melting away until he looked as tense as Robert Pattinson breaking down outside a Twilightconvention. And presumably just as scared. I wondered how long we would have to sit there in silence before he put two and two together and actually said something, but as it turned out I didn’t have the patience to wait.
‘Wecouldgetmarried.’ I blurted it out more or less as all one word – no pauses, no time for breathing, no margin for error.
Alex didn’t say anything. He sat beside me, his casual slouch replaced by a posture so rigid you’d have thought someone had left the coat hanger inside his suit jacket. Silence. I counted to ten. And then to twenty. And then the verbal diarrhoea kicked in.
‘It wouldn’t be a real married.’ When in doubt, I always thought it best to carry on waffling until someone stopped me. The fact that this tactic had never really worked terribly well for me before didn’t stop me now. ‘It would be visa married. Just paperwork really, just like, a favour. Not anything. Nothing would have to change. At all. It wouldn’t mean anything. Not that marriage means anything these days anyway, right?’
Sometimes the person who was supposed to stop me burst out laughing. Sometimes, when that person was Jenny, they gave me a slap. And sometimes, that person just sat in absolute silence, their mouth a grim line, the fear of God in their eyes. Like now.
‘And I wouldn’t hold you to it, obviously.’ I attempted a laugh. It was a failed attempt. ‘Seriously – me, you, city hall and a piece of paper, never to be spoken of again. Just like going down the post office.’
Of course it was nothing like going to the post office. Going to the post office was one of the most soul-destroying experiences in all of the universe. And probably much more complicated than getting married, really. Did there need to be five different ways to send my mum a birthday card? Thank Christ for Moonpig. While I continued my internal rant at the postal services of America, Alex was still frozen. I tore my eyes from the middle distance and forced myself to look at him. His face was ashen. No hilarious jokes about Father Christmas now, eh, Alex? This was not a good sign.
‘Really, I’ve thought of every other option and this is all there is.’ My voice dropped to a weak whisper. ‘This is the only way I can stay here.’
At this point, I just needed him to say something. And I assumed Guido was pretty invested as well, as the gondola crashed into the side of the canal.
‘My bad,’ he muttered in a distinctly un-Italian accent.
But the bump shook Alex’s tongue loose at last, and as Guido got us back on course, Alex cleared his throat to speak.
‘You want me to marry you for a visa?’ he asked in a voice I didn’t recognize.
‘Yes?’
Gone was the easy expression. Gone was the arm around the shoulders, the hand-holding and the sparkling eyes. This was bad. I’d never seen him look like this before. Not even when I shrank his vintage Rolling Stones T-shirt in the wash. Which, incidentally, was why I wasn’t allowed to do our laundry any more. For some reason it felt like I was failing a test. I wanted to jump up and down, hold his face, tell him I loved him, tell him this was the only way we could avoid a long-distance relationship that would fall apart over a tearful Skype call within a week because I would either be sent to prison for killing my mother or top myself because the UK was three weeks behind the US with True Blood. But instead, I took my turn at playing musical statues, too scared to breathe a word, to breathe at all.
After far too long, Alex coughed, loosened his tie and nodded.
‘OK then.’
I sat back, my entire body giving in, as though I’d been carrying something incredibly heavy for the longest time and finally let it go. For one second, I was relieved. And then I felt sick. And then I started to cry. The exact chain of emotions every blushing bride-to-be went through, I was sure. I took a deep breath, trying to fill myself up with air, and wiped away the tears before Alex could see them.
‘So we’ll get married.’ He was still nodding to himself, checking out his own shiny shoes. Admittedly they were very distracting, but I’d hoped the idea of us getting married might have been enough to put them in second place on the list of things he should be thinking about. ‘It’s just paperwork. Getting married doesn’t mean anything to you. It’s nothing.’
And there were the tears again. This time I had to look away as several renegade rivulets streamed down my cheeks before I could stop them.
‘What does marriage mean anyway, right?’ After such a long silence, Alex just couldn’t seem to stop talking. And the more he said, the more I really wished he would. ‘It’s not like anyone else we know is taking it seriously. Jeff sure isn’t worried.’
I didn’t know what I’d been expecting. In my head I’d gone through so many different scenarios. I was ready for him to say no, I was ready for him to say yes, I was ready for him to sweep me off my feet and whisk me away to Tiffany. I just wasn’t ready for him to say it meant nothing. Alex and I had talked about marriage before, in relation to our friends, as a vague, far-off thing that was sort of on the horizon but not something we really needed to think about any time soon, like a pension or a Blu-ray player, but I supposed, really, I’d been hoping he’d been thinking about it as much as I had. And not just because I needed a visa but because he wanted to marry me. But apparently, it didn’t mean anything.
‘We should just get it done while we’re here.’ He carried on talking in that strange voice. ‘Less hassle. Easier than in New York. Shit, we should just do it now, while I’m wearing a suit.’
‘I’m supposed to meet Jenny at ten-thirty,’ I said, not really sure why.
‘It’s the perfect Vegas vacation.’ Alex had become the human equivalent of a nodding dog. ‘Gamble a little, get married and still make dinner. Perfect.’
‘Alex.’ I hoped my voice didn’t sound as thick with tears as it felt. ‘We don’t have to.’
‘No other option, right?’ He threw his arms up in a shrug, throwing me off balance. ‘This is what you want.’
‘I don’t want to leave.’ I tried to pick my words carefully, something I probably should have done five minutes earlier. ‘But if you don’t want to do this, I get it. It’s not like the post office. That was a stupid thing to say.’
‘Not the first stupid thing you’ve said,’ he replied too quickly. Ouch. ‘Honestly, I’m flattered that you asked me and not one of Jenny’s gay mafia.’
‘OK, stop.’ Being engaged did not suit Alex Reid. ‘Forget I said it. Please.’
‘I can’t, can I?’ he turned to look at me for the first time since I had made my romantic proposal. His eyes were not shining with love. They weren’t anything. He looked … disappointed. ‘Because you did say it. You need to get married to someone or you have to leave.’
‘Not someone.’ I ran the hem of my dress through my thumb and forefinger, straightening out the pleats and folding them again. ‘This is all wrong, I didn’t mean—’
<
br /> ‘So we get married, we go home and we just go on with life like normal.’ Alex pulled the silky material out of my hands. ‘That’s the deal?’
I had no words left. I’d used them all up while I was babbling about how getting married was just a bit of paperwork that wouldn’t change anything. I was so incredibly stupid.
‘So congratulations?’ Guido broke the most excruciating silence in history as we drew to a halt. ‘ Si?’
‘ Si,’ Alex replied, jumping out of the gondola and letting Guido help me back onto solid ground.
‘Good luck,’ he said, dropping the Italiano. ‘You’re gonna need it.’
Face to face outside an authentic Italian Panda Express, I took Alex’s hands in mine, hoping to stop feeling like something he’d trodden in. Without words, he shook his head, looked behind him, looked over my head, looked anywhere that wasn’t at me before folding me up in his arms and pressing my face against his chest.
‘I love you.’ My voice was muffled but I used all the strength I had to make my words clear. ‘I don’t want to leave.’
‘I know,’ he replied right away, but I couldn’t help but hear a question in his voice. ‘It’s going to be fine.’ And after a beat, with an air of resignation. ‘I love you too.’
It was exactly what I wanted to hear, I thought, as he released me from his slightly too tight hug and took my hand in his. But I just didn’t believe him.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Everything that happened after leaving the Venetian was a blur. Alex dragged me along behind him as we marched through the casino, back out into the marble lobby, my heels clicking across the floor like a quickened clock. I just didn’t know what it was counting down towards. The evening was too cold to be outside in nothing but a little silk dress, but Alex didn’t want to wait for a cab. He’d either he’d gone mad, drunk fifteen Red Bulls when I wasn’t watching, or he really, really wanted to get married. There was of course another option – that he wanted to get it over with before he changed his mind – but I didn’t really feel like thinking about that one.