Hating Valentine's Day Read online

  ‘How did the two weddings on Saturday go?’ I ask Sally when we’re safely on the freeway. I’d been extremely lucky to get a weekend off at this time of year. Poor Sally, meanwhile, had been booked out with couples who wanted Sally Bliss and only Sally Bliss and were prepared to pay a premium.

  ‘Boring.’ She yawns. ‘White. Roses. Sugared almonds. Beef or chicken. Chocolate mousse. Fruit cake that everyone picked the icing off. Need I say more?’

  ‘No.’ I’ve been there, done that, a million times over. ‘What about the date, then?’

  ‘Oh, that. We went out for “just drinks” on Friday.’

  ‘Of course.’ Sally always books them in for ‘just drinks’ on the first date, and if it works out she moves them straight on to dinner. If it doesn’t, she casually mentions she’s got plans and makes a run for it like a rat up a drainpipe.

  ‘And dinner, as it turns out. And lunch out on his yacht on Sunday. Hey, can I have a fag?’

  ‘Didn’t you just have one?’

  ‘Pretty please?’

  I wait, hoping she’ll give up.

  ‘Pretty please with a cherry on top?’

  ‘Oh, all right.’ I wait as she lights up and blows her first puff of smoke out of the window. ‘So?’

  ‘Well, I ditched him Sunday night…’

  ‘What?’ I look over and then, just as quickly, down at her lap.

  ‘Yes, I’m wearing undies. I’m going to a funeral!’

  ‘Just checking.’ I smile as I change lanes. When Sally is suddenly manless she often falls back on her old friend exhibitionism for entertainment. The no-undies-and-very-short-skirt-in-a-Ferrari trick is a great favourite of hers. Also of the workers at various toll booths around the city who she hands her change up to, even when it’s exact.) Her other piece of performance art is applying her cocoa butter body lotion in the well-lit, curtainless living room of her twenty-fourth floor apartment.

  ‘If we hadn’t been out on that damn boat I would have ditched him right after lunch.’

  ‘What happened?’ I glance at her briefly.

  ‘I saw him in direct sunlight.’

  ‘I don’t know what that means, but at least he isn’t a vampire.’

  ‘It would have been a more exciting option,’ Sally says, pausing to blow another lungful of smoke out of the window. ‘Anyway, the point is, my date had hair plugs. I’ll have to keep out of those dimly lit bars in future—I’d met him twice and hadn’t realised. From now on it’s daylight, or carrying one of those tiny torches in my handbag so I can do a quick spot-check. I can’t bear hair plugs. I can’t bear vanity in a man, full-stop.’ Sally wriggles around in her seat so her body’s facing me. ‘A piece of wisdom for you from your resident elder—never date a man who’s going to wrestle with you for mirror space, darling. It’ll only end in tears. Remember that.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ I say, trying not to laugh at the seriousness of her voice. As I change lanes again I think about Sally’s latest dumping and wonder at how alike Sally and Justine are, in that they can get over relationship hiccups and just keep going. And you have to admit that in Sally’s case three divorces are fairly significant hiccups—more like choking or suffocation or a quick smoker’s hack, really…But they do keep going. And with seeming effortlessness too. I wish I was like that. That I could treat my exes like speed bumps that are just obstacles to mount (in want of a better word) and speed off. But I can’t. My tissue consumption at my Tania sessions is still high. I’m Brontë-ish when it comes to break-ups, and am, unfortunately, the kind of girl you’d find on the moors yelling ‘Heathcliff!’ and getting the bottom of my dress double-dose-of-Napisan dirty…

  Pathetic, really.

  But that’s how it is. Still, when I hear Sally and Justine talk about their lives the way they do, sometimes I wish I didn’t play my life quite so like a game of chess—planning, looking ahead, thinking that somehow, if I concentrate and think about my moves before I make them, I’ll win in the end. It’s a method that obviously doesn’t work. Look at the whole Mike situation.

  ‘Oh, no,’ Sally says.

  ‘What?’ I glance over.

  ‘I know that look.’

  ‘What look?’

  ‘The Mike look.’

  Shit. ‘It’s that obvious?’

  Sally nods. ‘That time of year again, I guess.’

  Like I mentioned, Mike and I broke up on Valentine’s Day. And it wasn’t exactly mutual.

  ‘I was just thinking I wish I was more like you. I wish I could say “Yeah, it didn’t work out” and move on without glancing back.’ I look over at Sally to see what she’s going to say, but just as she’s about to start she pauses. ‘What?’

  ‘Sweetheart, you don’t want to be more like me. You really don’t.’

  I shrug. ‘Look, I know I’m pathetic. I know everyone thinks I’m a sad case because it’s taking me so long to get over him.’

  Sally shakes her head. ‘No one thinks that.’

  ‘Well, OK, maybe not in those exact terms, but they don’t understand why I’m not straining at the leash, dying to get “out there” again. They’re so damn cheerful about it all. It’s like living with a cheer squad. Gimme an L, gimme an I, gimme aV. What does it spell? Liv! And what do they want me to do? Date, Liv, date!’

  Sally laughs. ‘I can see your dad with pom-poms and a pleated skirt. Look, you know they mean well. They just don’t remember how much it can hurt. They haven’t been playing with fire recently, while you remember having your poor little marshmallow heart toasted all too well. You know what I think?’

  ‘What?’ I turn my head to look at her.

  ‘I think it’s all just a case of bumping into Mr Wonderful when the time’s right. You’ll be over Mike in a flash when that happens. Even Mr Only-Slightly-Wonderful would do. So long as he doesn’t have hair plugs.’

  ‘Believe me, Mr Wonderful doesn’t have hair plugs.’

  ‘Look, I’ll let you in on a secret,’ Sally says, lowering her voice. ‘The first one you really love is the hardest to get over.’

  I glance over at her again. ‘How long did it take you to get over Simon?’ Simon was Sally’s first husband and her longest marriage.

  ‘Geez, I don’t know…’ Sally thinks back, then meets my eyes with a glint in her own. ‘Six days at least!’

  I can’t help but laugh.

  Sally blows her last puff of smoke out of the window before stubbing her cigarette butt out on a tissue from her handbag. ‘Enough about me. What did you get up to over the weekend, chickadee? Any Valentine’s Day fun on the horizon?’

  Sally knows about Rachel, my dad and Justine’s annual efforts all too well. ‘There were some rumblings about a ball, but nothing concrete.’

  ‘No ticket? No dress? Nothing? Is your dad sick?’ Sally knows that by this time of year I’ll have generally been roped into something or other to ‘keep her mind off the day’, as I’m sure they say behind my back.

  ‘I know! I was pretty surprised too. They seem to have formed some kind of a pact to leave me alone this year. I’m not asking any questions. I need the break.’

  ‘Good for you. Don’t rock the boat. You’re right, anyway. It is a piece of crap day—I don’t know what the three of them see in it. All that chocolate.’ Sally pats her absolutely flat three-times-a-week personally trained stomach muscles. ‘I’m eating enough of the damn stuff as it is, giving up the smokes. And all I ever seem to get for Valentine’s Day is filthy lingerie and gigantic boxes of soft centres. I hate soft centres.’

  ‘You poor thing.’

  Sally gives me a look. ‘Oh, poo to you. You know, dearie, maybe if you dated even once in a while you’d understand—you’d get your filthy lingerie and boxes of soft centres too.’

  ‘I can buy myself filthy lingerie and boxes of soft centres—which, by the way, I don’t like either, thanks.’

  ‘Sure, sure. Hooray for Women’s Lib. Black crotchless undies and strawberry soft-centre cellulite here we come. I
just hope that’s what Mr Wonderful is looking for in a woman.’

  I snort. ‘I’ll ask him when I finally meet him.’

  After another fifteen minutes or so of solid freeway driving, I’m starting to wonder if this crematorium even exists. Plus, Sally’s proving to be a handful.

  ‘Hey, are you reading that street directory or is it just decorating your lap?’

  ‘I am too reading it.’ She looks up at the sign looming ahead, down at the street directory, and then back up again. ‘This one! This one!’ She points at the exit we’re passing. I screech off the freeway at the very last second.

  ‘Thanks for that.’

  ‘No worries. Now, first right, second left, and follow the smell of charred bodies.’

  ‘Sal!’ I give her a look.

  ‘Of course I’m going to behave!’ She closes the street directory with a flourish. ‘Oh, and we’ll fast-track it out of there after the funeral, if that’s OK. I’ve got a lot of work to do.’

  A few minutes later we pull into the crematorium parking lot and I park the car.

  ‘Look at that. Right on time.’ Sally glances at her watch.

  I check the dash clock before I turn the engine off and pull the keys out of the ignition. We are right on time. 9:55. We’ve arrived with five minutes to burn.

  Oops. Better not say that inside.

  Sally and I get out of the car and walk quickly across the car park up to the vaulted front door of the crematorium. There’s a board with the names of six different parties and directions to the respective chapels where the services are being held. The Batty-Smith service is in the Chapel of Tranquility. In other words, down the path and turn right at the toilets.

  How eloquent. Just where you’d want your final send-off.

  When we get to the chapel itself, another board tells us this is, indeed, the Batty-Smith service, starting at ten a.m. As there’s no one milling around, we both poke our heads around the still-open thick polished wooden doors to check whether they’ve already begun.

  They haven’t. Everyone’s sitting down, the coffin’s placed up at the front, but it’s obvious the service hasn’t started yet from the way there are several people standing in the aisle. Sally gives me a ‘phew, we made it’ look and we stand upright again.

  ‘Ready?’ she says, and I nod.

  We enter the chapel and find ourselves two seats halfway down the aisle—or, in this case, up at the back. There are only—I count them—twelve other people in here, and we could probably all fit into the front row if we squished. Everyone turns around to see the new arrivals.

  As Sally and I sit down, we acknowledge the people we know with a quick smile. Pip, Susan, Matt, Karen, Bill, Miranda, Sam 1 (female), Sam 2 (male), Trudy and Chris. All wedding photographers. All Mrs Batty-Smith’s employers.

  There are only two people in the chapel I don’t know. The two people in the front row. Relations, I guess. A woman around Mrs Batty-Smith’s age and a younger woman. Who they are, I have no idea.

  When the clock at the front of the chapel has clicked over to 10:05, and everyone’s sitting down, someone gets up and moves forward. It’s one of the two women from the front row—the younger one. Mrs Batty-Smith’s daughter, I’m guessing, by her age. I’d always vaguely known she had a daughter, Veronica, but I’d never even seen a photo of her, let alone met her, though I’d asked Mrs Batty-Smith about her a number of times. I look at her closely, interested. She looks—well, completely normal—probably about fifty, wearing a navy suit.

  The atmosphere in the chapel changes as everyone waits to hear what the woman is going to say. She coughs a little before she begins.

  ‘Hello. I’m Veronica Batty-Smith. Edna’s daughter. I’d like to thank you all for coming today, especially her employers. As we all know, my mother lived for her work and was very good at what she did. Now, if you could all turn to…’

  And that’s it. A hymn. Followed by a reading. And when the coffin is pulled inside on some kind of conveyer belt and the little red velvet curtains swish closed around it I am still none the wiser about Mrs Batty-Smith. Edna Batty-Smith.

  I sit, confused. I thought at these cremation things they usually have a photo up at the front and an order of service that says something about the person’s life and family. That it’s all supposed to be a bit more personal.

  I guess not.

  The red curtains remain fully closed and people start filing out of the chapel. I keep sitting, staring at where the coffin was, until Sally nudges me with one elbow.

  ‘Gawd. That was cheery. I don’t know about you, but I feel as if I should skip out singing a rousing rendition of “Ding-Dong the Witch is Dead”. I’m going to make a concerted effort to be nicer to people from now on. At least the ones who’ll be arranging my funeral.’ It isn’t until she’s stood up and smoothed her dress out that she looks at me. ‘Hey, I think we’re supposed to go outside now. You know—talk to people. Mingle.’

  ‘Oh, right. Sorry.’ I glance up at her blankly.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Sally leans down to inspect me a bit more closely. ‘You don’t look too good.’

  I shrug slightly. ‘It’s just that it’s a bit sad, isn’t it? We didn’t know anything about her, really. I didn’t even know what her daughter looked like until today.’

  Sally sits down again and pats me on the arm. ‘It’s not like we didn’t ask. Mrs Batty-Smith was a touch eccentric, that’s all. She didn’t want anyone to know. She was happier that way.’

  I know this is true. I asked Mrs Batty-Smith about her daughter numerous times. Asked about her friends, the rest of her family, what she’d done over Christmas, when her birthday was. But I only ever heard about her cats.

  ‘It is sad.’ Sally pats my arm one last time. ‘But it was obviously the only way she could cope with things. She didn’t want anyone’s friendship. I think she looked at it as pity, even though it wasn’t. Now, come on. We’ll go outside. Get some fresh air. You look like you could do with some.’

  And with that we head for the door—the last ones out of the chapel.

  Outside, Veronica is talking to people as they exit.

  ‘Hi, Sally Bliss and Liv Hetherington,’ Sally introduces us. ‘Your mother worked for us. We’re very sorry for your loss.’

  Veronica nods as if she recognises the names. ‘Thank you. It’s good of you to come.’

  There’s a long pause.

  ‘She spoke about you often,’ Sally lies.

  Veronica smiles at Sally’s line, which sounds like it’s been extracted from a specials bin box—101 Things to Say at Funerals. ‘I’m sure that’s not true, but it’s very nice of you to say so. I didn’t really see my mother all that often. In the end she’d alienated herself from just about everyone, you see. Even her twin—my aunt.’ With this she nods at the elderly woman who’d been sitting with her in the front row and who’s now outside chatting to people.

  ‘Oh,’ Sally says, at a loss for words. Something I don’t think I’ve ever seen before.

  ‘You said Bliss, didn’t you? As in Sally Bliss Photography?’

  Sally and I both nod.

  ‘She liked working with you two the best. No men there, you see. Not a great one for the menfolk, my mother, as I’m sure you noticed.’

  There’s another pause. And as neither of us knows quite what to make of this, but need to say something, I blurt out the first thing that comes into my mind (always trouble). ‘She spoke about her cats a lot.’

  ‘Now, that I can believe,’ Veronica says, raising her eyebrows. ‘Do you have a cat?’ She turns to Sally first, then me.

  ‘No,’ we say in unison, and I don’t know about Sally, but I’m thinking it’s pretty strange that she’s asking. Some kind of pop psychology thing, perhaps?

  ‘It’s just that Betsy and Shu-shu still don’t have a home. The other cats are a lot younger, so people took them first, but Betsy and Shu-shu are about twelve. They’re sisters. From the same litter. They’ve been desexed, of course.
’

  ‘Um,’ Sally says.

  Veronica takes a step forward, closer towards us, and moves in for the kill. ‘They’re very quiet. No health problems. They don’t even eat much. They just like to sit in the sun all day…’

  ‘Sorry.’ Sally butts in here. ‘But I’ve got a one-year-old German Shepherd. They probably wouldn’t be a great mix.’

  Liar! My mouth falls open as I know quite well Sally doesn’t have any kind of a dog, let alone a German Shepherd. But Veronica buys it—she visibly cringes, and I can almost see the mental picture she’s conjuring up of Sally being able to cut down on the Pal on her shopping list for a day or two if she takes both the cats. I look at the ground.

  Think of an excuse, Liv. Think of an excuse.

  ‘I don’t know what else to do,’ Veronica continues. ‘They’re old, and their coats are a bit tatty, and…’ The rest she leaves unsaid, but we all know what she means.

  Kitty death row.

  When I look up again, everyone’s staring at me. ‘Um, well, I…’ I can’t think up an excuse fast enough, so I tell the truth. ‘I don’t really want a cat, thanks.’

  ‘Right…well…’ Veronica looks around then at the people still outside, kind of desperately, and it becomes quite clear that no one wants Betsy and Shu-shu. All of a sudden, guilt stabs me square in the chest like a knife.

  ‘Right,’ Veronica says again. This time with a sigh.

  I look back inside, past the still open chapel doors to the red velvet curtains. The knife twists.

  I turn to Veronica and open my mouth slowly, knowing I’m going to regret this, ‘Look, if no one else wants them I’ll take one.’ And I know then that that’s it. My cat-free mini-break, with no hassles, no smelly kitty-litter to constantly empty, is over, but I figure it’s the least I can do for Mrs Batty-Smith.

  Veronica’s face lights up at this, and she grabs one of my arms. ‘You’re an angel. Now, what am I going to do about the other one?’

  Yep. Just when I’m feeling as if I’ve been let off the hook, the second knife of guilt is thrown straight at me. And this one’s poisoned. How can I take just one of the cats? God, they’ve just lost their owner. They’re sisters who’ve never been separated, for Christ’s sake. And, hell, at twelve years old they should both be receiving a letter from the Queen pretty soon, congratulating them on their old age. How many more years can they last?