Fireworks to Thailand

by J. R. Bonham

  They both agreed to go for the one that included a tour of Sri Lanka first. Then they would arrive at the hotel in Kosgoda a few days before 14th June in order to get married, six years to the day that they first met.

  Louise had a boy, Jake, the following January. Geoff rang John to tell him and John phoned Jan straight away to tell her. Jan sent Louise and Dean a suitable card to wish them many congratulations. She also put some money aside for Jake. Every subsequent birthday and Christmas she would add to the fund which she planned to give him when he was older. She had the idea that she would be able to surprise him on his 18th birthday. She obviously hoped that she would be able to see him before then. Hoped that they didn’t really mean what they said about her not being able to meet her own grandchildren.

  Louise opened her post, mostly cards, when she got home from the hospital with baby Jake. She showed Dean her mother’s card before making a point of putting it in the bin.

  “Don’t want to hear from her!” she stated. Then thought no more about it as she took Jake out of his carry cot to start to feed him. Dean was surprised by her reaction but said nothing.

  ‘Not worth the aggro,’ he thought. ‘I’ll just keep my head down or I shall be in trouble.’

  Dean was a very placid man who enjoyed the easy life. He found Louise rather temperamental and stubborn but he was good at dissipating any explosive situation in which he found himself with her. He found it was best to just let her ‘do her own thing’ and keep quiet.

  The decree absolutes arrived and Geoff wasted no time in asking Lynda to marry him, on the day it came through. They were married in the registry office by special licence three weeks later.

  At the same time Jan and Mike started preparing for their wedding in Sri Lanka in June.

  Jan rang Paula, her old friend from school with whom she had conversed all the years since Jan had left Bristol. She couldn’t wait to tell Paula all about her wedding plans and even to see if she would like to attend, like she did at Jan’s first wedding, to Geoff.

  “Would you be able to come?” Jan asked hopefully after giving Paula all the details.

  “I’d really love to but Stuart won’t hear of it, I know. He’s starting to become a right old grump these days. Getting like his father, old before his time.”

  “That’s a shame.” But Jan was not at all surprised. Paula had told her before that she wasn’t getting on very well with her husband. In the past, Paula and Jan had discussed everything and it was Paula who had brought up the subject of orgasms for women, a long time ago. Jan had been very pleased to tell her that it was not a problem since she met Mike.

  “Yes, it is. It’s our 30th wedding anniversary coming up soon. I really don’t know what to do. Should we celebrate it or forget about it?”

  “Is it really that bad? I didn’t realise.”

  “No, well, it’s not something you broadcast exactly, is it? Your failing marriage. I think you did the right thing by getting out when you did.”

  “I reckon you could be right there! Definitely,” Jan agreed.

  It wasn’t too long afterwards that Paula told Jan that instead of celebrating their 30th wedding anniversary they were getting divorced instead.

  Steven and Sheryl were excited about their forthcoming wedding in May. Sheryl’s parents insisted on doing all the arrangements. They had two daughters and so they would be treated equally. Sheryl’s younger sister, Joanna, had married the year before and so their mother knew exactly what to do. Steven made a list of his guests which consisted of his father with his new wife, Lynda, Louise, Dean and baby Jake, Granny Betty, John, Vera and their two, Danny and Natalie, Clare and Jamie with their two, Kara and Joss, plus three good friends and Steven’s best man, Ben.

  “Steven?” asked his future mother-in-law, puzzled. “There’s no invitation for your mother, only your father, is that right?”

  “Correct,” said Steven. And by way of explanation, he reiterated, “She won’t expect an invite. I thought eighteen was a nice round number, not including myself.” He wasn’t prepared to tell the truth by saying he had had little or no contact with his mother. He was slightly ashamed of that fact. When he thought about it, he thought he would have rather liked to have had his mother with him, sharing his big day. Louise would never forgive him if he had relented. He knew it was better to keep her sweet and do what she said than try to cross her. Or his grandmother. Heaven forbid he should ever step out of line.

  As Jan expected, she knew about her son’s wedding via her siblings but never received an invitation. She had her own wedding to prepare for very soon afterwards, in June. This took her mind off it.

  Jan and Mike packed for their two-week tour in Sri Lanka to include their wedding afterwards. Apart from the appropriate paperwork, the only things they needed were the right clothes. Jan had bought a lilac sundress and she made a veil for the occasion. Mike bought a new summer suit, together with a purple tie and a lilac shirt to match Jan’s dress.

  They arrived at Colombo Airport and were picked up by their guide, who was also their driver. There were two more couples on the tour who had both recently got married and they were there for their honeymoon. They were bemused to hear that Jan and Mike were effectively having their honeymoon first.

  They visited locations such as Sigiriya, Kandy and the Temple of the Tooth, the elephant orphanage at Pinnawela and nearby they were able to look after an elephant and even wash it. Afterwards, the elephant gave rides. Jan was amused as she remembered something Geoff used to say and she shared it with Mike.

  “Geoff’s favourite expression used to be ‘I bet he’s even washed an elephant,’ meaning that a person has done just about everything. I think he was quite jealous of people who had been able to achieve success where he failed. I shall have to tell him I’ve washed an elephant!”

  “Or maybe not!” he giggled.

  They looked at Buddhist art at Polonnaruwa and the Dambulla cave temple. They also went up into the hills to visit the tea plantations at Nuwara Eliya. At Galle in the south, they saw men sitting up on poles fishing in the sea. Jan and Mike were going on a safari after their wedding. This would be incorporated in their actual honeymoon when they would go from the hotel for a few days to see elephants in their natural habitat and stay in a safari hut.

  Sri Lanka was the most exotic place that Jan had ever visited. She was surprised at how under-developed the whole country was. There weren’t many cars on the roads, but everything else shared them – people, animals, lorries and buses. Both Jan and Mike were quite shocked and appalled at the bad driving they encountered but there was nothing they could do about it. It was no surprise that there were quite a few fatalities (animals and people) left on the side of the road for all to see. They seemed to be just swept onto the verge with not another thought.

  After the tour with the other two couples, Jan and Mike arrived at Kosgoda Beach Resort. They were assigned a duplex building, as an upgrade from a bungalow because they were getting married. The sitting room was downstairs with the bedroom upstairs. A huge bathroom was tacked onto the side of the building, partially with no roof, just a mosquito cover, over a little garden area. Jan was amused to look at the flowers and plants while she cleaned her teeth but she was somewhat alarmed when little animals crawled out from under the plants. One night as she came down the stairs in the dark she trod on a cockroach. It was still there in the morning, dead. It quite turned her stomach. She had never seen one before and this one seemed huge.

  They met the celebrant who was going to perform the service for them after the formalities were in order. It was the custom in Sri Lanka that people getting married had to be resident there for three days before the wedding could take place so they were able to just relax in that time.

  The day before the wedding, they met an Italian man, Alberto, who befriended them. They asked him if he would like to video their wedding with Mike’
s camera. He said he would be delighted and practised all evening with the buttons.

  The day of their wedding dawned. The hotel had made available a separate room where Mike could change into his wedding clothes. Drummers and dancers arrived at his door and escorted him to the site where the ceremony would take place. The ceremony wasn’t on the beach as they had expected because the weather wasn’t as good as it could have been. The manager had relocated the site to an island in the middle of the swimming pool where hotel staff had decorated the area with plaited banana leaves and colourful flowers including lots of orchids.

  Once Mike was in place, the dancers and drummers went to fetch Jan. She put on her veil at the last moment and emerged from their duplex and walked with them to where Mike and the celebrant were waiting.

  The ceremony took only fifteen minutes. They had to laugh at Alberto who captured everything on Mike’s video with a perfect commentary in a heavy Italian accent. He was in and out of the shallow pool and emerged from behind most of the trees on their way to the ceremony and during their vows.

  After the proceedings, they watched an elephant fully attired in an orange gown making its way over the grass. Mike and Jan looked at each other and both thought, ‘How on earth are we going to get up there?’ There was a simple answer to that: the hotel provided steps! Jan had a bit of trouble with her tight dress which she had to hitch up. The mahout put a big ‘Just Married’ sign around the elephant’s neck once Jan and Mike were astride it. The elephant with its cargo walked along the beach and back, to claps and shouts from the audience who were holidaymakers staying at the hotel. All caught brilliantly by Alberto on Mike’s video camera.

  Jan and Mike invited Alberto and his wife to the reception afterwards, with cake and champagne. They also invited another couple from the hotel whom they had met a few days earlier. They were joined by the hotel manager and the celebrant. Jan felt it would have been nice to have had someone they knew to see them get married, but it didn’t matter. They only had eyes for each other.

  Their ‘second’ honeymoon was spent at Yala National Park on safari. They were only there for three days and stayed in a superb five-star lodge in beautiful grounds. They had been told it was a hut but actually it turned out to be very superior to that.

  It was the perfect end to their wedding celebrations.

  Chapter 47

  In Bristol Ken visited Audrey in the care home most days. He would fetch anything that she wanted from the shops or home. He sometimes walked to the shops from their house. One day while he was out, he tripped over a tree stump. He didn’t know how it happened, but he said he felt dizzy. He went to the doctor soon afterwards and it was diagnosed that he had had a stroke. He went to the hospital and Jan took a day off work to visit him.

  She couldn’t believe how ill he looked. Her father had been a big strong man in his younger days; the man in the bed was much smaller and weaker than she remembered him.

  She then visited Audrey after that and gave her news of Ken. She also went to see Clare who was really worried about their father.

  Ken ended up in a nursing home himself, but not the same one as Audrey. He passed away a few months later. On 6th January 2000.

  “He wouldn’t have wanted to have gone on any longer and become like a vegetable,” Clare told Jan on the phone just after he died. “He told me he wanted to see in the millenium.”

  “Well, he did! Just!” exclaimed Jan. “It was like he knew what was coming. And if he could control it, he would have wanted to go like he did.”

  Jan went alone to the funeral. Geoff brought both Louise and Steven. Jan hoped that Louise would bring Jake so that she could meet her first grandchild. But no such luck. Just in case, she bought a present for him. It was a soft toy penguin with its baby. She hoped that Louise would take it and give it to Jake, but she was wary of how Louise had been towards her. She trod carefully and asked Louise to take the present and was pleased when she agreed. Apart from that neither Louise nor Steven spoke to her. Geoff, however, was pleasant towards Jan and told her how sorry he was for her loss.

  The funeral was a very small affair at the crematorium and afterwards at Ken’s local pub. Most of their friends had either died or become alienated because of Audrey’s illness.

  Jan met up with all her cousins on her father’s side. The ones she only used to see once a year, when they were children, at Christmas time, when the whole family used to gather at her grandparents’ house.

  “When we were younger we used to meet at weddings. Then christenings. Now we just meet at funerals!” Jan said to her cousins.

  “Matches, hatches and dispatches!” they all agreed.

  “It is nice to see you all, even if it is such a sad occasion. We are all getting older so that is just to be expected I suppose. Nothing we can do about it. Thank you for coming anyway.”

  Audrey asked Jan if she could meet with Mike, now that Ken was gone. She had hoped to meet him before then but had been too afraid that Ken would find out.

  They visited Audrey on weekends as that was the only time that Mike had available.

  “How lovely to meet you,” he said to Audrey, the first time he met her. He went down on bended knee and kissed her hand and she blushed.

  “Likewise. After all this time!” Audrey was enamoured straight away by Mike’s charm. “It’s been far too long, but you do understand why we couldn’t meet before?”

  “Of course, that’s fine,” he confirmed.

  He was pleased to meet Jan’s mother at last. They chatted for what seemed like hours, and Jan was pleased they got on so well. She had always visited her mother on her own in the past and was sometimes stuck for things to talk about after the initial pleasantries. Mike had always been known for being able to talk to anyone about anything. Jan was pleased to be able to ‘let him loose’ on her mother while she herself sat back and listened. She increasingly found that she had little in common with her mother.

  Jan was glad that Audrey was more settled and happy in her care home even though, naturally, she missed Ken and his visits. She knew she would never return to the home she shared with Ken and was resigned to that.

  This first visit to Audrey was also a good opportunity for Jan to introduce Mike to her friend, Paula. Jan had promised Paula that next time they both came to Bristol, Jan would make sure she brought Mike round. But that was some time ago.

  “I know it’s been a few years and Jan’s told me so much about you,” Mike said to Paula, shaking her hand. “It’s lovely to meet you at last.”

  “Yes, well, she did say that about five year’s ago,” said Paula, a little grumpily.

  Time hadn’t shown well on her and Jan was surprised how haggard she was looking. She was living on her own since Stuart left her the year before and she seemed to have gone into her shell. She felt very jealous of Jan with her new life, but tried desperately not to show it. Unfortunately it was not easy for her and somehow it did not work very well.

  “Mike’s only been to Bristol once before,” Jan started to explain. “Dad refused to see him so I had to visit them on my own after that. Today is the first time that my Mum’s been able to meet him too. She wanted to meet him before but was too afraid of Dad finding out. Now Dad’s gone and one of the first things she said to me was, ‘I want to meet Mike’. It was really great, they got on so well.”

  “Oh, yes I forgot to say, I’m really sorry to hear about your Dad. How old was he?”

  “He was 83. Not bad I suppose. Mum’s only 75 but she’s stuck in the care home. She can’t look after herself so I suppose she’ll stay there permanently now.”

  “And what about you?” Paula directed the question to Mike, completely ignoring Jan. “What are your prospects exactly?”

  “Oh, well, hmmm,” Mike spluttered at the directness of the question. “I don’t suppose I have any prospects apart from retiring from work and doing s
omething else.”

  “Like what?” Paula said rudely.

  “Well, we want to go travelling more. We will probably move out to the country.”

  “Oh,” Jan was surprised. “That’s the first I’ve heard. As long as it’s not to Devon! I don’t mind really as long as we’re together.”

  “That’s nice.” Paula bit her tongue. She was feeling uncomfortable amid this loved-up pair and couldn’t wait for them to go. Her life was so empty and had been for the last year. She didn’t feel she could tell anyone and she was frankly embarrassed that her husband had left her. She had no idea when the marriage went sour and her daughter tended to side with her husband.

  Mike was now feeling uncomfortable with the atmosphere.

  “I think we ought to go soon, we’ve got a long journey home,” he suggested to Jan.

  “Yes, you go.” Paula started to show them the door.

  “Well, you take care and keep in touch,” said Jan as a last resort as they walked down Paula’s path and she was closing the door behind them.

  “Well, that was awkward,” Mike intoned to Jan as they climbed into the car.

  “I’m so sorry, I don’t know what’s the matter with her. She had gone on and on about wanting to meet you but she was so rude. Don’t worry, I’ll sort it out. I’ll give her a ring in a few days.”

  This was the year that Mike wanted to retire. Hopefully on or near his 55th birthday in July. He dropped hints to his boss but he wasn’t sure if he was being heard.

  “I’ve officially been offered early retirement!” Mike told Jan one day after work. “I didn’t think they would want to let me go, but now they’ve agreed.”

  “Does that mean I can retire too?” Jan tried hopefully.

  “Yes, of course, if you want to. My pension will be good enough to support us,” Mike agreed.