Three Angry Women and a Baby

by Kerrie Noor

  I was about to make a joke about cocktails, sport cars, and threesomes when the band began to warm up their guitars.

  “Ten minutes to the bride’s first dance,” mumbled one of the guitarists, glancing at the unattended drums.

  Edna, with an I’ve got something you’re not going to like look, pulled up a chair beside Helen and launched into a story of Henry that stopped Steven in his tracks and had Helen choking on her spumante.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  The Wedding

  Shit sex has nothing to do with coming.

  “You have no idea what an idiot he is,” said Edna.

  “Think we do,” I muttered.

  Edna threw Helen a look. “He’s going to do something . . . ballroom-y . . . strictly ballroom-y.”

  “Henry?” said Steven.

  “Latin ballroom-y . . .” said Edna.

  “Aye right,” said Steven. “He is as much into Latin as Sheryl’s mum’s into chanting.”

  “He listens to it in the car,” said Edna.

  “He does not,” said Helen.

  “He does too,” said Edna.

  “The only thing he listens to in the car is gear changes,” snapped Helen. “That man has as much time for music as he did me.”

  “He is completely addicted to it,” said Edna. “He says it ‘makes the grey wet days almost bearable.’”

  “I find that as believable as your Ted doing a lap dance,” said Steven.

  Edna blushed.

  The guitarist tapped the microphone. “Make that twenty minutes,” he said, glancing at the empty drums.

  Edna sipped her bubbly and talked of how she and Henry shared a love of music, dancing, and the heat of Latin America.

  “He just loves to drill to a tango . . . tinker to a salsa.” She sighed.

  We looked at her with disbelief.

  “Henry never tinkered,” muttered Helen. “Not even on our honeymoon.”

  Edna eyed Helen. “Apparently, it helped him cope with the split.”

  “Good for him.” Steven tilted his glass.

  “He wants his moment in front of an audience . . .” said Edna.

  “What are you, his best buddy?” said Helen.

  “I’m a dance teacher,” sniffed Edna.

  “Forgot about that,” muttered Helen.

  “And he’s gonna dance,” said Edna.

  Helen choked on her wine. “Dance! He can’t even shuffle—he is as musical as a bulldog. He wouldn’t know a two-step from a nosebleed.”

  Steven looked at his sister. “How much have you had to drink?”

  “I taught him,” said Edna, “and he sort of got carried away.”

  “For fuck’s sake,” said Helen.

  Edna shifted uncomfortably. “He just wanted to impress his daughter. He said he had a lot to make up for. He said he never thought he could dance, and I”—she gulped her wine—“stupidly told him anyone could learn, except of course that bozo husband of mine.”

  She sighed. “The men I have taught.”

  I watched her sipping her drink, lost in (I presume) distant memories of men, music, and Latin moves.

  She flashed a look at me. “Then your mother made it—big time.”

  “Big time?” I said.

  “And he was livid.”

  “He’s always livid,” Steven and Helen said together.

  “Thanks to your mum, he has spent a week digesting every stupid wedding dance on YouTube . . .”

  “Thanks to my mum?” I said.

  The two young guitarists looked at the unattended drum kit. One pulled out his phone.

  “Where the fuck are you?” he hissed.

  “He’s come up with a plan,” said Edna. “A stupid plan . . . a rock-of-all-ages montage dance plan . . .”

  “That’s original,” muttered Steven.

  “I told him, ‘Henry,’ I said, ‘ I don’t think your daughter’s wedding is your moment.’ But would he listen?”

  “He did mention sock rocking . . .” muttered Steven.

  “‘A smooth waltz is all that’s required,’ I said. And do you know what he said?”

  “‘Nothing but the best for my daughter,’” muttered Helen.

  Edna gestured us closer.

  “He’s brought a sporran the length of a cricket bat.”

  “Shit,” said Helen.

  “I can’t stop thinking about it—my poor Gary. The last thing he needs is that twat and his cricket-bat sporran ruining the day.”

  Henry looked at Helen and gave her another wink.

  “So that’s why he’s only on tonic water,” muttered Helen.

  The two guitarists minus a drummer played “Islands in the Stream” as Amy and Gary took to the floor for their first dance.

  “Baby when I met you there was peace unknown . . .”

  Amy and Gary gazed at each other like there was no one else in the room. They laughed; he kissed her head as she slid her arms around his neck . . .

  “Islands in the stream, that is what we are, no one in between . . .”

  Gary ushered the best men and the bridesmaids onto the floor; there were hugs, kisses, and overenthusiastic singing as all in the room swayed to the music.

  It almost makes me want to get married again.

  Henry took Edna and twirled like a professional, while Helen and Ted raced about like they wanted the dance to end.

  “We rely on each other, ah-ha . . .”

  Once the song was finished, Henry grabbed the microphone and talked of his daughter as a DJ as ancient as my mother’s kitchen appeared. When he moved on to the dad-and-daughter’s dance, Helen looked at me.

  “But we don’t do traditional here,” he said.

  “Shit,” muttered Steven.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  The Comm

  A good entrance is nothing without an audience.

  Mum had spent the night before claiming how glad she was that she wasn’t coming, as the last thing she wanted to do was “upstage the bride.”

  “Who needs an activist at a wedding, especially a vegan one,” she said more than once.

  Like an egg had never touched her lips.

  We should have guessed, taken more notice, when, after flicking the TV off, she spent the rest of the evening wheeling about her room organizing an outfit for the “pensioners shopping day” in Stirling. Like that was for real.

  Turns out there was no shopping trip, but there were several texts from Francis about George and what he was up to.

  He’d been seen at the Comm . . . along with Tunie, the man with the largest boat in the Ardrishaig Basin.

  Henry had arranged for his great pal Tunie to sail Amy to the church and both Amy and Gary from the church to the hotel along the canal. Tunie, often referred to as the “Moby Dick of the Canal” (from those who’d never read the book), had the sailing skills of an admiral and the patter of Para Handy and looked pretty good in a kilt. But he was strictly a one-pint-a-day man and, thanks to Henry, ended up with his head over a toilet, “spewing,” to quote the barman, “his ringer.”

  Henry took one look at a cross-eyed Tunie, who was shouting “It will be all right on the night” at a urinal, and called the only man he knew who could get Tunie home: George.

  “You need to look after him,” said Henry, “and make sure Amy gets to the church.”

  George, who by now had turned up at his sister’s house vowing never to set foot near “that Hound of the Bastilles Beatrice again,” at first said “no.”

  “I am still incognito,” he shouted down the phone.

  Like a half-cut Henry would understand . . .

  His sister told him not to be so stupid, reminded him what friendship was all about, and said that Tunie’s boat was a handy thing to have the use of, and when that didn’t work, she swore blind the last person to be at that wedding was Beatrice, who according to her was “also still incognito.”

  George appeared, dragged Tunie to his boat, and settled him in.


  “She’ll be all right on the night,” shouted Tunie several times before hurling his fish supper, along with several pickled eggs, into the canal.

  The next day, hungover, with flatulence that would spark a bonfire and an upset stomach that required spare underpants, Tunie asked George to step in.

  Sipping a weak sugary tea, he feebly lifted his head and looked at his pal.

  “Save the wedding,” he muttered.

  To quote George, “What choice did I have?”

  With no time to go home, he slipped into Tunie’s kilt and took the helm, sailing Amy up the canal while Tunie dozed below mumbling incoherently.

  “Never again a pickled egg . . .”

  Francis, whose son owned the hotel, was supposedly helping. She spotted George at the helm miles away and texted Mum, “Guess who’s here in a way-too-tight kilt?” shortly followed by a picture of George helping Amy out of the boat . . .

  None of us noticed George; we were too busy tucking into the vol-au-vents and bubbly to notice. We thought they were still having their photos taken.

  It was Francis, clutching a tray of empty glasses, who pointed it out. She pulled me aside . . .

  “Guess who’s here?” she said.

  “Who?” I said.

  “George,” she said.

  Steven choked on his orange squash. “George? I thought he’d fallen off the planet.”

  “Where?” I said.

  “He’s driving the boat,” said Francis.

  “Sail, darling,” said a passerby.

  “What boat?” said Steven.

  Francis, pointing with a limp beer mat, said, “That boat.”

  “For Chrissake, don’t tell Beatrice,” said Helen.

  “Oh . . .” Francis blushed and swiftly left to clear a table.

  Mum claimed she only kept in touch with Francis to see what everybody was wearing. The last thing she intended to do was, well . . . what she ended up doing.

  As she said later, “Seeing George in a kilt helping Amy out of Tunie’s boat was almost too much, but when Francis followed it up with pictures of George tucking into prawn vol-au-vent . . . it was like the angels up above spoke to me. ‘Grab your chance, Beatrice,’ they said, and I did. Thank God I was prepared . . .”

  Three phone calls and a bribe for God-knows-what later, Mum, thanks to a volunteer driver, was being wheeled into the ballroom, while Henry was supposedly “rocking the socks off” Lochgilphead.

  To give Mum her due, she did try to sneak in, but as Francis pointed out later, “A wheelchair whirling onto a dance floor is enough to capture anyone’s attention, but by Beatrice, ‘the talk o’ the steamie’ . . . even the splits couldn’t compete with that.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  The Pelvis and Elvis

  Get my lipstick, open the malt; we have a wedding to get to.

  Henry had a pelvis of epic flexibility—a pelvis that made Elvis Presley look like a stick insect—and as he ripped off his kilt in the middle of dance floor, the room fell silent.

  No one was prepared for what was underneath . . .

  Henry, a man way past his best with the slim legs of Mr Bean and looking nothing like John Travolta, pulled a Saturday Night Fever pose—minus the white suit.

  The band stopped and the crowd hushed as they stared at a Lycra kilt so tightly stretched across Henry’s hips that all underneath was visible.

  Henry had gone commando, his modesty precariously covered by a sporran suspended like a giant upside-down fox tail, and it swung too freely for my liking.

  Henry, a man old enough to have grandchildren, had chosen to “swing freely” in a room full of grannies (who’d seen it all and weren’t fussed about seeing it again) and children (who had no idea about such things as pubic hair)—and he had chosen to do it to Santana, a band nobody in Scotland under the age of sixty had heard of.

  “Got a black magic woman . . .”

  “Jesus,” muttered Steven, along with pretty much everyone in the room.

  “What the fuck?” slurred the young man at the next table.

  The DJ, doddery and (judging by the volume) deaf, fumbled behind his equipment.

  “Got a black magic woman . . .”

  Someone yelled, “Turn it down.”

  The DJ nodded an okay and turned it up, causing a few toddlers to cry and Amy’s granny to rip out her hearing aid in disgust.

  God knows what Henry had planned, but if it was anything like his music, it was a blessing that Mum turned up when she did. The music was as appropriate for Amy’s wedding as Henry’s sporran, not to mention the jump.

  Henry started with a twist, his swishing sporran giving away way too much of his manhood for my liking and, from the look on her face, Amy’s too. Then he bounced into a squat and struggled to get up.

  “Are we meant to be laughing?” muttered a passing waiter.

  Helen, whose emotions, to quote her, had been “on a roller coaster,” shook her head with a no idea . . . until she, along with the children, spied Mum entering.

  Tunie, who it seemed did know Santana, was merrily pushing Mum into the ballroom with no idea who was dancing . . .

  He had, according to him, come across Mum struggling to wheel herself up the steps into the hotel, and he did “what any decent fella would do”; pushed. And he kept pushing until he, inches from the dance floor, caught sight of his mate making the sort of moves any six-year-old would be ashamed of.

  “Got me so blind I can’t see . . .”

  Tunie skidded to a stop just shy of the dance floor.

  “Jesus,” he mouthed as the wheelchair slipped from his hands.

  Mum’s wheelchair, not quite resurrected to its former glory, continued to roll . . .

  The crowd gasped and the children pointed as Mum, done up like a Christmas cracker, appeared through the fog of the smoke machine, stopping under flashing disco lights.

  She looked stunned.

  “Very Ricky Gervais,” muttered a waiter.

  Mum had on her “I’m not going down without a fight” outfit that she wore to impress her sister (though nothing impressed her); she claimed it was “never in fashion, so it will never go out.” An outfit she bought from a dubious-looking Ann Summers lookalike shop that had her crashing into the vibrators with a gay abandonment that had me shrinking in my shoes. An outfit of orange leather, yellow lace ruffles, and a hat that Captain Jack Sparrow would be proud of.

  Steven called it her “Pirates of the Caribbean look.”

  “It’s the storyteller,” yelled a wee one.

  “What the hell has she got on?” muttered Amy’s gran.

  “I thought I’d never see that again,” muttered Steven.

  To be fair, there had been a lot of alcohol drunk.

  Henry did his best to carry on with grim determination as the crowd, finally recognizing Mum as “the vegan activist on YouTube,” began to cheer with a what’s going to happen next? expectancy.

  Santana’s guitars blasted into the air, and Henry, taking his cue from the riff, did what any decent narcissist would do . . .

  He went for the jump.

  Henry propelled himself into the air like a stuntman out of an explosion . . .

  The crowd hushed . . . as he collapsed into a half-hearted cartwheel.

  Mothers covered their children’s eyes as Henry’s family jewels briefly flashed under the pulsating lights, and before there was time to work out what size it was, he skidded into the splits.

  A few winced, including Henry, as the DJ, who I suspected needed glasses, turned up the volume yet again.

  Something got into Mum. Maybe it was George watching on the sidelines, the flashing disco lights bringing back memories, or her outrageous outfit, or maybe she just happened to like Santana—who knows. But Mum, rising like a phoenix from the ashes, took to the floor like a pro any disabled person would be proud of.

  She, with a jaunty tilting of her hat, swirled her wheelchair backwards, then forwards, then hung a wheelie.


  The crowd stared; the children shouted for more.

  Henry, still wincing on the floor, glared . . .

  George, clutching a whisky, appeared beside me as Mum continued to circle the floor to a crescendo of drums and guitars as foreign to the crowd as Henry’s get-up.

  George laughed. “Only she could get away with that and that get-up.”

  Mum’s timely moves had most of us forgetting our drinks. She hit each beat with a twist, a turn, a flick of her hat, until after one final wheelie, she tossed the hat into the crowd, pulled Henry onto her knee, and wheeled him off.

  “Thank fuck for that woman,” muttered Amy’s gran before dropping off to sleep.

  Francis, acting as receptionist, waitress, and general dogsbody, ushered Mum and Henry to a quiet corner behind the reception desk, dramatically clearing a couch of papers.

  I, along with Edna, Ted, and Tunie, watched Henry ease himself onto the couch like a war hero.

  “Bloody fool,” snapped Ted, checking for any broken bits.

  Henry dramatically winced in pain as he spread his legs out on the couch like a starfish, his Lycra hiding little.

  “I told him,” muttered Edna. “‘Jumping takes months of practice,’ I said, but would he listen? ‘I haven’t months,’ that’s what he said.”

  Henry let out a loud moan.

  Edna threw a look at him. “‘Months for what?’ I said.”

  “Whisky,” moaned Henry, “any whisky?”

  “I wanted to do something sweet,” she said. “Wainwright, the Temptations, perhaps some Stevie Wonder, finishing off with smooth James Taylor . . .”

  She gestured towards the apparition of Henry. “None of this jump-and-splits malarkey. ‘Tradition,’ I told him, ‘you can’t beat tradition.’ I mean, it’s traditional for a reason . . .”

  “Some pelvises are just not meant to be seen in public,” muttered Francis, tossing a blanket over Henry’s “bits.”

  Mum, puffed and looking happier than I’d seen her in years, laughed. “That was fantastic, right off the cuff. I had them in the palm of my hand.” She looked at me. “Didn’t I?”