“Remember that?”
“What, our wedding?”
“Your mam. Saying we’d be divorced again within the year.”
Stephen wrinkled his nose. “Jesus, yeah. She went mental.”
“Can’t blame her. Cream of the Black crop, eloping with some fat biology teacher.”
“Eloping?”
“We ran off to Lincoln!”
“We were living in the same flat,” Stephen said sceptically.
“Still counts.”
Stephen rolled his eyes, picking at a stray napkin on the table.
“Want to play the wedding game?”
A slow smirk spread across Stephen’s usually impassive features.
The wedding game was something Mike’s stepsister Vikki had invented, when a slew of fusty cousins had got married a few summers ago. Before attending, they’d pick an option for the newly-weds: the scenic route to Happyeverafterville, or on the express service to West Divorcingshire. At the end of the wedding, they revisited it and came to a joint conclusion. Whoever had picked the losing option bought dinner—because weddings inevitably had shit food, and not enough of it.
“Alright. Divorce.”
“Shit,” Mike said conversationally. “Right, got a coin? We’ll toss for it.”
Stephen rummaged and produced a penny from somewhere. Mike tossed it, and Stephen called heads.
And won. “Damn.”
“There’s a good curry house not far from here,” said Stephen smugly. “We can nip off at nine or so, once Mother’s too pissed to notice we’re gone.”
“If her drunkenness is all that’ll keep us, then I’ll get her rounds in myself.”
* * * *
Mike got to skip the family dinner. Turned out it was blood—or bloody—family only. So Stephen skulked off at six, alone and in his best suit, and Mike satisfied himself with the hotel room telly, frantic texts from his mam about her own upcoming wedding, and—when the evening programming began—finding a decent porn channel and having a quick wank.
He woke up in the dark some time later, when a warm body slid into bed next to him. Didn’t matter. He hugged it close, and drifted off again.
So the next thing Mike was really aware of was the alarm on Stephen’s phone ringing, and—judging by the sounds in the bathroom—the man himself having a shave.
“Traitor!” Mike sounded, who was a beard fan.
“It looked scruffy!”
“It’s supposed to look bloody scruffy!”
He hadn’t done too much damage, though, when Mike got up to get ready. The shadow remained. Mike rubbed his cheek against the raspy jaw, and licked his way into a spearmint-flavoured mouth for a kiss.
“Urgh, Jesus, what crawled into your gob and died?” Stephen complained, shoving him away.
“Couple of pints of fuck-knows-what,” Mike said. “Oi, I don’t think so, c’mere.”
Stephen was just in his underwear—and his sodding sexy underwear at that. Jersey briefs were God’s gift to bums. Mike had a cheeky grope, pun intended, then got smacked away so Stephen could finish getting ready. Mike still eyed him up when showering, though. Inspecting the merchandise and all that.
It was just as well neither of them had a thing for suits, given how many sodding weddings they were in store for this summer. Stephen had been raised by people in suits, so never saw the fuss. Mike thought Stephen always looked too cold and stiff dressed up. Still, he gave another quick grope on their way down to the car, just for mood-boosting purposes.
“Behave,” Stephen scolded.
“Yeah, yeah…”
Mike drove, under Stephen’s directions, but he didn’t really need them. The narrow dirt roads, the overgrown hedges, and the rugged wilderness around them said that life, here, was something evidenced by tracks in the mud and the occasional abandoned cigarette butt. But today, there were other cars, and all grumbling through the greenery in one direction. Even at a slow crawl, caught between a Mercedes that was going to be distinctly worse for wear after this trek through brambles and trees, and a Skoda that was aggressively in love with Mike’s bumper, it only took a matter of five or six minutes from the gravel driveway of the opulent manor to the convergence of three dirt roads.
In the middle of the junction stood a church. It was a tiny old thing, and nothing like what Mike had imagined for a lavish Black wedding. Crumbling rock, headstones lying down amongst long, dry grass, and a roofless dovecote. Magpies lined the roof, eyeing the wedding party with beady eyes. Mist swirled gently about them, the sun too weak to burn it away.
“This is it?”
“Obviously,” said Stephen.
Which was a fair point. The church was on the outskirts of a clutch of four old cottages and a farm track. Mike was surprised it existed at all. Yet the field entrances were crowded with cars, and chubby middle-aged women in too-tight velvet pantsuits milled about the entrance in garish hats. It looked, Mike reflected, like parents’ evening.
An old man stooped to pick up his wife’s fallen handbag, and his kilt rose uncomfortably. Mike amended the thought.
It looked like Scottish parents’ evening.
Mike had to tuck the car between a savage, brambly hedge, and a Toyota Yaris. Stephen had to climb out over the driver’s seat after him, then his posture stiffened and his expression cooled. His typical response to his family’s presence. Mike liked to think of it as Stephen Parry being swept away, and Stephen Black resurrected. Because Stephen was a grumpy sod and next-to-never smiled, yes, but this Stephen wasn’t Mike’s Stephen.
Mike snorted. Well, he wasn’t playing at being Mike Black all day either. Sod that for the ace of spades. He tucked an arm low around Stephen’s hips instead, the hand perfectly indecent, and steered him towards the drystone wall that surrounded the churchyard. Butterflies were rising gently out of the grass. He could smell summer.
“I take it they chose this little old place for a reason?”
“Family church,” Stephen said, still eyeing someone who was—going by the nose and the fact he could have been cast as Gandalf the Grey—a great-uncle. “Blacks have been here since the church was built.”
Mike twisted around to squint at it. “Shitting hell.”
“Sixteenth century. The first preacher was a Black.”
“Christ almighty,” Mike said. “You never said you were a god-botherer. I demand a divorce.”
“Nice try, smartarse.”
“So your lot have been marrying here ever since?”
“More or less.”
Mike felt a tiny twinge of guilt. “So that’s why your mam weren’t too happy about the registry office.”
“No, that was definitely you,” Stephen said, relaxing a little. Mike laughed. “It’s more about tradition than religion. This is where we’ve always been married. This is the way we do things.”
And he didn’t need to say, because Mike knew it perfectly well, that the way the Blacks did things was the way they were always supposed to do things. And Stephen had never been too good at toeing the line.
“Bugger the way you do things.”
“You like the way I bugger.”
Mike cackled. An elderly woman in a floral tribute to Kew Gardens gave him a sour look. Well, if Stephen was going to retain his sense of humour throughout this snoozefest, then maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, nobody came to talk to Stephen, and he seemed disinclined to move. The relationship between Stephen and the rest of the Blacks hadn’t been good by the time he’d gone to university, had collapsed with all but the immediate family shortly afterwards, and the marriage to Mike had been the last straw even for them. Mike had been surprised they’d been invited to this thing at all. Stephen had offered the explanation that it would be obvious if he didn’t attend, given it were Beth, and they wouldn’t want people to gossip about why.
“Anyway,” he’d said, that day the invitation had arrived in the post, “Mother might be hoping I meet someone suitab
le and she can finally get rid of you.”
Mike tightened his grip in a hug. Good luck with that one, mother-in-hell.
“What?”
“Just thinking.”
“Bloody dangerous, that.” Ushers were filing out of the church. “Come on. Let’s get a seat near the back, before Mother turns up.”
Or worse, Mike thought, his father. Mary Black was one thing. David Black was quite another.
The inside of the church was quaint and pretty. The stained glass windows were dark and brooding from the outside, but soaked the close interior in bright rainbow light. The pews were ancient and narrow. Mike grumbled as he squeezed himself into one, and complained he wasn’t kneeling for any prayers as he’d never fit.
“Half the family’s ancient and can’t kneel anyway,” Stephen said. “Ow!”
“You mind your tone,” creaked a crabby voice.
Stephen’s face lit up like the sun. “Aunt Alicia!”
A tiny little old lady shuffled into the seat beside him, a great fox fur flung about her bony shoulders and a cane gripped in one clawed hand. Her smile was a crack in a great, wizened walnut of a face. She must have been two hundred years old, but traces of the woman she’d been were still there. Laughter lines about the near-buried eyes. Diamond jewellery, but Primark shoes. The fact that, if one looked closely, an earring gleaming in only one ear, not both, and there was a suspicious gap, not dissimilar to Stephen’s, in her eyebrow.
She promptly smacked her cane into Stephen’s shin, demanded a kiss for his old auntie, and called him a useless little sod who didn’t write often enough.
“I’m not blind, boy! I can read a postcard!”
Mike’s shoulders were shaking with the effort not to laugh.
“I’m sorry, Aunt Alicia. We’ve been busy.”
“Busy with what, eh, busy with what?”
“I told you,” Stephen said patiently. “Busy with the hospital.”
“Hospital, pah! What do you need a hospital for? Him, he needs a hospital, walking bloody heart attack, but that’s what you get for marrying a southern nancy.”
Mike grinned. He’d never been called a southern nancy before.
“I told you—”
“That’s the trouble with you young things, think you run the world while you’re playing at life. You need to slow down, you’re too thin. You! Michael, wasn’t it? Why are you eating all the pies, eh, and my nephew’s resembling a garden rake!”
Mike choked, cackling, but she didn’t seem to really want an answer, banging her stick on the stone floor and peering around the church.
“Look at this lot,” she grumbled. “Lot of wheezing, useless old fools. And his family! Pah. I wouldn’t have let my daughter marry such a sot, if I’d had one.”
Even Stephen was starting to smirk.
“I don’t know why I bothered,” Aunt Alicia continued. “Thirty pounds for the taxi. Thirty pounds! Well, I wasn’t going to pay, I said to them, I said—”
She wittered on, the miserly old bat, and Mike fiercely loved her. She was an ancient and avowed lesbian, Stephen’s grandmother’s sister, who had refused to go away and be quiet like the family wanted. Stephen would be like that, in a thousand years, and Mike was firmly looking forward to it. Alicia MacLeod, the proof that sometimes apples did fall far from the family tree.
The only person who shared Stephen’s blood that Mike privately regarded as belonging to their family, their tiny Parry family, at all.
The church settled down and quieted, as though by some unseen signal. The groom was some insipid-looking man with features so lacking in depth, they belonged in a postmodernist art gallery, and he rose at the front. A kilted old gent with a set of bagpipes shuffled up to the front, and lifted the ungainly instrument, ready. A baby, as was the grand tradition of weddings the world over, began to cry.
The bagpipes squealed, the church doors opened, and they rose as one.
A clutch of tiny flower girls, in puffy dresses of pale pink, came first. They were followed by an enormously angry seven-year-old pageboy. Then a dress shoe squeaked on the threshold of the church, where carpet met stone, and Mike was flung quite abruptly into the past.
Looking at Beth Black was like going back in time nine years.
Oh, she wore a veil and Mike hadn’t seen her in about seven of those nine years, but he knew every inch of her features all the same. For they were all Stephen’s, too. The thick brown hair, so dark it was often mistaken for being as black as her name. The deep blue eyes, like a still sea on a clear day. The way her eyebrows crinkled in the middle before she frowned. The smooth texture of her skin that made her look so aloof and expressionless, no matter her mood. He knew the soft curls of her fingers about the bouquet, and the long, steady strides she took. He remembered how her feet would look in those shoes he’d never seen. He recalled the long column of her neck and the soft slopes of her shoulders as though he’d seen them only yesterday.
In a way, Mike supposed he had.
He shook off the stunned reverie, and dragged himself back into the present. That git of a father-in-law had her by the arm, and Beth was a bit of a cow, going by what Stephen said about her. And a bird Mike barely knew was walking into a church to marry a bloke he didn’t know. No need for the waxing poetic malarkey.
Still, it was an odd experience. After all, Stephen and Beth were twins. It was just a bit like…well, watching his husband marry someone else. A long time ago.
Mike leaned back in the pew, grateful for his extra padding, and slipped an arm around Stephen’s waist as Beth was handed from father to future husband at the front.
Nah. Their registry office do had been better.
* * * *
Dinner had been eight courses of something tiny and unpronounceable. No bacon, no haggis, definitely no fried Mars Bars. There wasn’t a funny speech in sight. Stephen’s old man had droned on for a thousand years about expectations and pride, and had thrown more than one dirty look their way. The entertainment appeared to be that bagpipe-playing geezer, and some traditional Scottish dancing.
“If they were going for traditionally Scottish,” Mike said to Stephen over the sixth course—a globe of paste on an insipid bit of fish—in a confidential whisper, “then why not the dwarf-tossing?”
“Caber tossing, you bellend.”
“I dunno, dwarf-tossing, we could chuck the father of the groom.”
Stephen snorted into his sleeve, but it was the first smile he’d cracked since the ceremony, and it smoothed away quickly.
He was very stiff and cold, and Mike hated it. Stephen could sulk for Scotland, no competition there, and it radiated outwards so that he didn’t sulk at a particular someone, he sulked at everyone. Mike’s instincts said he was in trouble, and ought to be putting in orders to the best curry house in town and cleaning the kitchen as penance, even as his brain pointed out he hadn’t done anything to pay penance for.
The free bar helped a little, after dinner. Mike volunteered to drive, and pressed a pint into Stephen’s hand firmly. “Get it down you,” he said. “You’ll feel better for it.” The pint, plus Aunt Alicia criticising everything from the chandelier to the croutons, brought a tiny ease to the set of those slim shoulders. They lounged together against the wall for some time, Mike’s fingers caught in the back of Stephen’s belt, and Aunt Alicia chirping brightly about the hideous nature of the doorknobs.
And as Mike cast an eye around the room, he realised nothing had really changed.
People were staring, but steering clear. A bridesmaid was whispering to a friend, glancing at them every few seconds. The bride had done a full circuit of all her friends and relations, then skipped over Stephen like he were a ghost. Even Jane, the one member of the family to send a card when they’d got married, simply nodded and drifted away again. They were unwelcome…but too close to not be invited.
This was what the Black family did, in Mike’s experience. He couldn’t say he’d ever heard his in-laws, with the ex
ception of Bastard Black, say anything outright vile to either of them. But they took passive-aggressive to a whole new level. Frosty silences. Postcards from extravagant locations, offering to pay for their air-fare ‘next time.’ Invitations to family functions pointedly made out to Stephen, and Stephen alone.
Hell, Mike technically hadn’t been invited to this wedding at all.
“Alicia, come and—oh. Stephen.”
And there she was. Right on time—and on the flimsiest of pretences, as Stephen would have been blocking Aunt Alicia from her eyeline. But there she was, all the same. Damn Black, in all her glory.
Dame Mary Black was a tall, thin woman with a face like a slapped arse. Or a horse. A slapped horse’s arse, perhaps. She had the same colouring as her progeny, but none of the attractiveness. Her skin was sagging and thin from years of excessive yo-yo dieting, and her nose too prim and perfect on her loose face, the surgery too obvious. She’d either had Botox, or a stroke, since Mike had last seen her. Her nails were claws on Stephen’s arm, and her smile could have been—and with the amount of makeup, almost was—painted on.
Mike’s hackles were rising, and she’d barely even spoken.
Stephen clearly felt the same. He almost clicked his heels like a soldier. “Mother.”
“You’re not wearing your kilt, dear.”
“No.”
A sharp pause. Alicia was watching with a pursed mouth and gleaming eyes.
“I’m glad you came.”
“Yes.”
Another silence.
The Damn turned to Mike with an even falser smile. “Michael.”
“Mike,” said Mike.
“Lovely to see you again. Not drinking? I see you’re still having weight issues.”
“Driving. I see you’re still having charm issues.”
“Now, now, dear, I didn’t mean—”
“Eh, think you did.” He sipped his lemonade leisurely.
“What do you want, Mother.” Stephen’s voice was so flat, it wasn’t really a question.
She pursed her lips. “To see how you are, dear.”
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