Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls

by Danielle Wood

  ‘Western Australia. About an hour’s flight out of Perth. Loads of Poms there, apparently. And you?’

  ‘Other side. Eastern states, as they say in the West.’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘Why couldn’t they make it to the wedding?’

  ‘You won’t believe it.’

  ‘I might.’

  ‘Spider.’

  ‘Spider?’

  ‘Jeremy’s father was getting his old lawnmower out of the shed. Going to donate it to some trash and treasure thing in the neighbourhood, yeah? Got bitten by a white-tailed spider and had to have his finger amputated. The finger you, you know, give someone the finger with.’

  ‘He couldn’t come to your wedding without this particular finger?’

  ‘Well, he was supposed to have knee surgery, you see. And the finger amputation put his knee surgery back and they couldn’t afford Business Class and, well, you know what it’s like on long flights, even without a dicky knee. So, we said we’d do a little re-enactment when we got there.’

  We reached the place on the concourse where Angela and Jeremy had commandeered a pair of facing chaises. On one of them Jeremy was sleeping, wearing a T-shirt and a pair of shorts. On the other were Angela’s bags, which we moved, and an only slightly less than fresh bouquet of orchids and roses, which she placed tenderly in her lap.

  ‘What did Jeremy think?’ I asked quietly. ‘About you wearing the dress?’

  ‘Oh, he said I was mad.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ he said.

  ‘But don’t you think it would be nice for your mother to actually see me in the gown?’

  ‘Whatever you want, darling, it’s your day.’

  And, indeed, it was her day. It was a tour de force. The pews at the church were decorated with tea roses, the caskets of old violins, and plum-coloured ribbons. The bridesmaids in their voluptuous skirts of raw silk posed like Royal Doulton figurines for the photographer — who had once done a shoot for Vogue. At the reception there was the string quartet, and the Viennese waltz was executed faultlessly by the bride and groom, thanks to eight months of dance lessons. And there was the banquet that concluded triumphantly with a towering croquembouche.

  The newlyweds took a limo to the airport, and about two hours into the first leg of the journey, Angela cuddled up to her husband across the wide armrests of Business Class and cooed, ‘See, it’s not so bad, is it?’ She had been delightedly fielding the inevitable questions from airline staff and other passengers — ‘Yes, we’ve only been married seven hours’, ‘Australia’, ‘No, no, I haven’t met them yet’.

  She had brought nothing to read on the plane, and didn’t want to watch any of the movies since it would involve putting a headset over the top of her hair, thus ruining her do. She had already read the safety instruction card in the seat pocket twice, and thought about the tragedy of being forced to discard her wedding shoes in the event they had to evacuate the aircraft via inflatable slide. The shoes were silk. Like the manicured nail of her ring finger, they were monogrammed with her (new) initials. And they had cost more than she earned in two weeks. After the first meal had been served, a thoughtful flight attendant called Kyle brought her a stack of glossy magazines. She assessed his blond-tipped hair and immaculately filed fingernails. Probably gay, she thought. Shame.

  Angela knew that she should not even glance at the brand new edition of Bride To Be. Looking at a bridal magazine hours after you’d tied the knot was just torturing yourself. But look at the magazine she did, and punished she was. Because there in its pages was a wedding ring much nicer than the one that had just a few hours ago been slipped onto the ring finger of her left hand. The magazine ring was beautiful. Stunning. And very original. Rather than the traditional engagement ring and matching wedding ring set — for which Angela had opted — the bride in the magazine had cleverly chosen a single broad band in an opulent arrangement of diamonds and gold. Why hadn’t she thought of that?

  She had thought that she was really getting somewhere with her impulse buying problem, but here in Bride To Be was the proof that she had muffed it on something as important as her wedding jewellery. When, oh when, would she learn that it was always worth just popping into the boutique around the corner before you made up your mind?

  Still, she reasoned, all was not lost. All she really had to do was put up with her empress-cut diamond engagement ring and plain gold band for a year or two, and then she’d get a new set. She was sure Jeremy wouldn’t mind. A fashionable woman couldn’t be expected to wear the same jewellery forever.

  ‘Are you comfortable in all that?’ I asked her.

  ‘Oh, Christ no. My arms are all itchy under the lace and the bones in my corset are jabbing me in the tits.’

  She stood up and stretched, rotating her head on her long neck and causing another strand of dark blonde hair to fall from its place in an elaborate construction of loops and love knots. Her interest was caught, for just a moment, by a young man asleep on the marble floor, his girlfriend’s dark curls fanning out over his stomach, which she was using for a pillow.

  ‘You can tell he’s Australian, can’t you?’ Angela said, sitting down again. ‘Look at his legs, they’re like trees.’

  Jeremy, who had woken by now with ruffled hair, was sitting up reading a finance magazine. His legs, poking out of his navy blue shorts, were thin and darkly haired. He yawned and fiddled just inside one nostril with his finger. I watched a wave of mild disgust pass over Angela’s face before she turned to me.

  ‘Promise me something, Rosie,’ she said, in the passionate and sisterly manner that women sometimes affect towards another woman they have chosen as a temporary ally. ‘Promise me?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Promise first.’

  ‘Okay, I promise.’

  ‘Promise me that no matter what you’re trying to find, you will always look in the boutique just around the corner before you make up your mind.’

  It was not long after I accepted this pearl of wisdom from the bride that her flight was called. As she walked towards the departure gate, trailing a quarter-acre block of white satin, she half-turned back towards me, waving one last goodbye. And I knew, conclusively, that I would never see her again.

  And yet her unfinished drama nibbled at the corners of my imagination. Days later, as I strolled by a river in a city full of strange sounds and strange smells, I was still wondering how it had turned out for her. I doubted that she had foreseen she would have to give up her bouquet at customs. I could see her, batting her eyelids at the chaps in uniform, asking what on earth the signs about rotting fruit and sticky little fruit flies had to do with her lovely flowers? The customs guys would have been unmoved, I imagined, but would, out of kindness, have waited until Angela had crossed through the big, swinging doors before they tossed the white roses and pink orchids into a grubby airport bin.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she would ask Jeremy.

  ‘Never mind, baby, we’ll get you a fresh bunch.’

  ‘But it won’t be the same.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, babe.’

  ‘It matters to me! But clearly, you don’t care about that!’

  Yes, she would snap like that, and then immediately wish that she hadn’t. She would know that brides did not snap. Brides were poised, calm, happy.

  Pull yourself together, Angela! she would tell herself. This is your honeymoon.

  It was a word that had tasted so sweet in the Piccadilly travel agency. Hon-ey-moon. She had felt its syllables melt in her mouth as she dished it out to the mousy girl behind the counter, who no doubt wished that she were going to Australia on her honeymoon. Yes, thought Angela, she was in an enviable position, orchids or no orchids. And so she edited the bouquet from her vision and accentuated instead the princess-style wave.

  As the Cuthberts settled into their domestic airline seats for the final leg of the journey, Angela took her husband’s hand. She smiled like a film star as she saw a touch of
light spark off the gold band on her finger. Only an hour more. One single hour, a little circle of time the same size as the face of her Raymond Weil watch (which, of course, perfectly matched Jeremy’s). Once the seatbelt sign was switched off, a stewardess in a taut navy suit presented the newlyweds with a small bottle of champagne and two plastic goblets.

  ‘We would like to help you celebrate your special day,’ she said in broad Australian, smiling.

  It was a windy, bushfire kind of a day and the flight was bumpy. Unbalanced by a pocket of turbulence, the stewardess pitched into Angela’s white satin lap the full glass of red wine that was destined for the gentleman in the next row. Very, very deep down, Angela knew that it wasn’t the girl’s fault. But the knowledge was too deep to prevent her from shrieking, ‘You stupid cow! Look at my dress! Do you have any idea, any faint conception, how much this dress cost? No! Of course you don’t! And you’ve just wrecked it, you stupid, careless …slut!’

  The stewardess began fervently to apologise and mop at the spilled wine.

  ‘Don’t touch! Don’t touch it! Just don’t make it any worse than it already is, you ridiculous, brainless trolley dolly.’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry, she doesn’t mean it. It’s been a really long day,’ Jeremy intervened.

  ‘How dare you? How dare you take her side?’

  ‘Well, you are being a bit irrational.’

  And Angela saw, twiddling with the corners of her husband’s mouth, a tiny little smile.

  ‘Are you laughing at me?’

  ‘Well, you do …I’m sorry, love. You do look a bit funny.’

  And Angela flounced out of her seat and down the aisle to the tiny toilet cubicle, which she almost entirely filled with her froth of wine-stained skirts, and began to cry. When her tears subsided, she looked at herself in the mirror. Under the harsh cast of the fluorescent lights she was all blotchy and creased. Somewhere in their travels, they must have crossed some kind of dateline. Which meant it was all over. It was no longer her day.

  She was not so easily defeated, though. She wiped the mascara from beneath her eyes and breathed in deeply, a sense of determination filling her lungs. She returned to her seat and sat beside Jeremy in a restrained silence (not, you understand, a sulk) until the plane landed and taxied to a standstill.

  ‘Congratulations on your marriage. And I’m really sorry,’ said the clumsy stewardess, passing down Angela’s bags from the overhead locker.

  ‘I’m sure you didn’t mean it,’ Angela said. There was no sense holding a grudge on one’s wedding day. Brides were supposed to be happy. And gracious. And since no-one else, clearly, was going to make an effort to make her happy, then she would just have to be bigger than all of them and do it herself.

  At the door of the plane, she prepared herself. She would step out, smile, and wave. Step out. Smile. Wave. But when she stepped out, it was into the ferocious cross-current of a dusty wind that tore the tulle from her hair and carried it away over the tarmac into the neighbouring pine plantation.

  It was an extraordinary mime that Mr and Mrs Cuthbert Senior witnessed from behind the glass of Arrivals. In the blustery conditions, Angela’s wine-dappled skirts were a handicap, billowing out to one side as she struggled down the first few steps.

  It’s unlikely that silk wedding pumps, even those that cost more than two weeks’ salary, are ever designed with grip in mind. Which is why Angela, about halfway down the stairs, slipped and fell on her bottom, upon which she slid the rest of the way to the ground.

  ‘Ouch! Poor lass!’ Jeremy’s mother said, muffling a giggle with her handkerchief.

  As in a good silent movie, captions were largely superfluous to the interpretation of the scene that followed. The Cuthberts could see that although Jeremy rushed to rescue his damsel, he was having trouble stopping himself from laughing. They could see, too, that from Angela’s point of view, her mishap was entirely Jeremy’s fault. Her lips were forming all kinds of words that the seasoned watcher of test cricket telecasts could easily decipher. Jeremy submitted to the tirade for a time, then threw his arms in the air and turned to march towards the terminal building.

  ‘Not bad for a first domestic,’ said Mr Cuthbert Senior as Angela hurled one monogrammed silk pump, then the other, at Jeremy’s head.

  Jeremy threw one of the shoes back over his shoulder, in the general direction of Angela, but his high lob pass was intercepted by the ruck rover from the Sharks, the local Aussie Rules footie team on its way back from an end-of-season drinking marathon. It was a good mark, and his team-mates cheered and called for the handball. Angela chased after one of them, which only had the effect of egging the lads on in a game of keepings-off. A rogue gust blew her skirts up around her face, giving the footballers a good view of a set of high-cut knickers and suspenders.

  That’s where I left her: whirling in perpetuity, piggy white-frock in the middle, chasing after a monogrammed shoe. I admit that I am a coward and that I left her there because I could not bear to watch the next scene. I could bring her within metres of her in-laws, but no closer. I had reached a point in the story equivalent to the moment in a radio station prank call when I would always switch channels, or the moment in the movie when the joke-butt hero embarrassed himself one time too many, causing me to squirm right out of my seat and leave the cinema in the dark. And yet it is odd, isn’t it? That I should get squeamish, when I was the one who pushed her down the stairs in the first place.

  Slightly guilty, faintly remorseful, I returned to the point in the story where Angela stood at the top of the staircase, and stood there with her for a time, right there at the locus of her spectacular vision. And I thought that perhaps I should not have caused her to slip. Perhaps I should have had more compassion. Perhaps her silliness did not deserve quite so humiliating a punishment. But the longer I paused there, the clearer it became to me that her tumble down the staircase was, in fact, beyond my control. I realised that it was inevitable — written in the proverbs, even — that Angela Cuthbert (nee Wootton) would end up on her arse. For I doubted that anyone had ever more perfectly embodied the quintessence of bride before a fall.

  WORK

  Rosie Little’s Brilliant Career

  Once upon a time (and I use these words advisedly, in the fervent hope that the sisterhood has by now worked its magic, and things have changed) the demographics of the average newspaper office were enough to make a girl despair. While the vast majority of the reporters were bright and ambitious young women (for ambitious, read ‘desperate to get into television’), most of the subeditors were middle-aged blokes. Divorced, alcoholic blokes, I might add, through whose embittered kidneys the reporters’ prose was destined to pass. The rest of the subs were mothers: former twenty-something reporters who’d come back part time after their maternity leave, bringing with them leftovers in Tupperware containers and repertoires of alarming anecdotes about pelvic floor muscles and mastitis. And, of course, all those who made crucial decisions behind the frosted glass of private offices were men roughly the same age as my grandfather.

  Especially during the long, slow hours of nightshift, when I sat at the night reporter’s desk, edgy from too much caffeine and not enough food, I was prone to casting my eye around the office and wondering what was my destiny? It couldn’t be television: I didn’t have smooth hair. Did that mean I would have to get myself a nice wardrobe of pastel suits and bail out into PR? Or would that be me, sitting over there at the subs table wearing a tartan shirt with a Peter Pan collar, eating my microwaved dinner and telling people who weren’t listening how many stitches I’d had after my last episiotomy? Please no, I begged anyone in the cosmos who would listen, please don’t let that be me. But please, don’t let me be Lorna, either.

  Lorna was that anomalous creature, a woman who had survived in a newsroom to middle age and attained a position of seniority to boot. So long had she been sitting in the chief sub’s chair, shoulders rolled forward and chin stuck out, that her body had begun to loo
k as if it were sitting down even when, technically speaking, it was standing up. Either way, the fleshy fold of her lower stomach lay over the top of her thighs like a thick apron, then her upper stomach folded down, in turn, over the lower stomach, followed by the uppermost layer of a heavy and apparently unsupported bosom.

  Lorna was a very still person. She was quite still even when she was typing fast, and the way her fingers flicked and kicked on the end of motionless wrists put me in mind of an Irish dancer’s legs. Her stillness was not benign, however. She used it in much the same way as a crocodile does: lying there inert, lulling her intended prey into thinking it’s standing beside nothing more dangerous than a log of petrified wood. But, in fact, a crocodile can move as fast as a racehorse over a short distance, and when it does, you can easily find yourself with your jugular vein dangling down around your sternum. To the left-hand side of the chief sub’s chair, it was possible to discern a slight deviation in the walking track that had been worn into the carpet, and it only took new copy boys a day or two to discover why it was advisable to follow it.

  ‘Incompetence. Nothing I hate more than incompetence,’ Lorna would mutter, settling back into reptilian stillness while some fresh-faced graduate bled quietly from multiple cuts inflicted by the sharp edge of her tongue.

  Or else she’d repeat, through barely opened lips: ‘Six months. Six more months. Six months and I’m out of here.’

  It was a well-known fact that Lorna was leaving in six months’ time, since Lorna had been leaving in six months’ time for close to twenty-five years. It was even said that when she first accepted the job — back in the days when the newsroom rang with the cheerful TING! of typewriter return carriages and reporters were allowed to chain-smoke at their desks — Lorna shook the editor’s hand and said she was only staying for six months. But I never did believe that story, for the simple reason that it failed to account for Oscar. Bringing a pot plant to the office, I believe, is a sign of quite serious commitment.