The Vintage Summer Wedding (17 page)

On the first go Mary wrap-turned to the left instead of the right and ended up in completely the wrong direction, treading on Matt’s toes and leaving Billy smirking on the edge and Matt sighing with his hands in the air. ‘It’s not going to work,’ he said, immediately stepping back.

‘Give it another go.’ Anna tipped her head to the side. ‘You may as well, there’s no one else here. Otherwise it’s just a waste of the rehearsal.’

Matt sighed, Mary looked at the floor.

‘Mary, stand up straight. The most important thing is communicating with your partner. Look into his eyes. Look at each other’s expression. You have to assume the personality of each dance.’ And so they went again, and again, and gradually they looked at one another and Anna felt herself smiling inside at the pinking of Mary’s cheeks as she stopped turning the wrong way and instead stepped in time with Matt and the two of them started to really move as Billy whooped from where he had perched himself on the top of the piano. ‘Lovely. Love it. Enjoy yourself, Mary,’ Anna shouted, and Mary went even pinker.

When they stopped, Anna found herself doing a little clap. ‘See! Now that’s what I call a step!’ She laughed and Matt wiped the sweat off his face and deigned to allow a tiny smile while Mary looked back down at the floor and nodded.

A car horn beeped outside and Mary said, ‘I think that’ll be my dad.’

‘OK, let’s call it a day.’ Anna nodded as the three of them immediately darted off to grab their stuff. ‘By the way,’ she said, wondering if any of them were listening when they didn’t look up. She swallowed, not actually sure what she was going to say, and then blurted out quickly, ‘That was good. You were good.’

Matt, who was already near the door, just shrugged a shoulder.

‘Erm,’ she went on, ‘next rehearsal...Will the others come, do you think?’

Billy and Matt exchanged a look. ‘Depends what we tell ’em, Miss.’

She paused, then found herself asking, ‘What will you tell them?’ And as she said it, realising that all her muscles had tightened in expectation of the answer.

As Billy and Mary trooped past her, Billy turned to walk backwards, his rucksack strap looped over his forehead, ‘We’ll tell them to come, Miss.’ He grinned, a little dimple appearing in his cheek.

Anna breathed out, unable to believe quite how much that meant to her. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘Whatevs,’ Billy called, turning his back to her and holding his hand in the air in a wave as he jogged out the room.

Her bubble of pride was short-lived. It lasted as long as it took for her to get in her car, drive home and walk into the house. As she flopped down onto the sofa, Seb walked past her from the kitchen, a bowl of pasta with tomato sauce in his hands.

‘Hi.’ She said, tentatively.

‘Hi,’ he replied. ‘I just ‒ I had to come in because the gas stove wasn’t working.’

‘Oh right.’ She nodded, sitting forward on the couch. ‘That’s fine. Come in anytime.’

‘No, I’ll get it fixed,’ he said, his voice flat and unfriendly, then carried on towards the door.

She thought how ridiculous they must look, Seb taking his pasta out to the shed.

‘Bye,’ she said then.

‘Bye,’ he muttered, without turning round.

When he came in late that night to wash up his plate and use the bathroom, Anna stood on the upstairs landing in her nightie, listening to the sounds of the water running and lights turning on and off. She leant on the banister and peered over but he didn’t look up and she didn’t say anything.

Chapter Fourteen

Since the thunderstorm, the weather had become quite erratic. Cool in the mornings, scorching in the afternoons and then suddenly cloudy with bursts of rain. Even the forecast gave up on solid predictions ‒ the jet stream seemingly as volatile as events in Anna’s life.

By the time of the next Razzmatazz rehearsal, Anna found that she had been nervous her whole day in the shop, silently polishing and rearranging.

Since her moving of the furniture, Mrs Beedle had sold nearly half the cushions and the giant gilt mirror and Anna had watched as she’d almost flogged the chaise lounge but the guy had said he needed to think about it, which Mrs Beedle said was the kiss of death for a sale. As a result of this sudden flurry of interest, Anna had spent the last few days working her way around the front of the shop, re-hanging pictures and carefully arranging cupboards, vases, lamps and chests of drawers. But all the time she was aware of the big pile of chairs and junk that sat piled high in the far corner of the shop. If she stood with her back to the front door, the counter and the curtained stockroom on her left, to the right was a portion of the shop floor that resembled a post-modern antiques sculpture and made her feel a little queasy every time she saw it. Just visible through a mesh of mismatched chairs was an old shop sign, a moth-eaten theatre set of Old Manhattan, a fairground fortune-teller with a missing eye and some precariously stacked boxes.

When she asked Mrs Beedle what she was going to do about it, Mrs Beedle shrugged and sat down in her armchair next to the counter, her back to the rubbish heap saying, ‘That, my dear, is exactly why my chair faces this way.’

But for Anna it was like an itch that needed to be scratched, and while Mrs Beedle told her there were other, more important, things to be getting on with ‒ like clearing the stockroom, polishing the good stuff that was out the front already ‒ Anna would spend a surreptitious half hour each day while Mrs Beedle napped in her chair, tugging bits free from the complicated maze and either adding them to her sorting boxes out the back, or positioning them unobtrusively round the shop. The oil painting of a young girl with a white dog at her feet that was now hanging where the gilt mirror had been, for example, had been plucked from the heap and Mrs Beedle had paused next to it the day before, narrowing her eyes as if trying to decide where in the hell it had come from.

At the end of the day, Anna had just freed a box of glassware ‒ little jugs with cut-glass edges, a set of six champagne flutes etched with delicate gold stars and a vase of deep-purple and blue faux-marino glass that shone when she held it up to the day’s fickle sunshine ‒ when she saw a couple of Razzmatazz-ers troop past the shop on their way to the hall.

She checked the time and realised this was it, this was when she’d find out if they’d OK-ed her. The idea made her brow start to bead with sweat. The possibility of victory here made other victories possible ‒ perhaps next she’d be able to have a proper conversation with Seb.

Pushing the box of glass onto the welsh dresser, she went out the back and grabbed her bag and sweatshirt. Then as she stood at the door of Vintage Treasure and looked over at the hall, she felt her hands starting to shake. If none of them came, what would that mean? That, once again, she had failed?
Hold yourself tall, Anna. Poise. Never apologise, never explain. Never let them see your weakness, Anna. No one puts winning with weakness, Anna.

She realised then that, nowadays, she spent so long protecting herself from the possibility of failure, that she never put herself in a position that came with the possibility of winning.

But as she walked across the sun-dappled square, past the lazy sheepdog and the pecking sparrows, her mother’s voice was silenced by a louder one in her head, one that she hadn’t heard for a long time that said,
I do mind. I do care. It does matter if they are there or not. Please. I really want them to be there.

Her own voice.

Pushing open the big double doors and stepping into the darkness of the hall that smelt of glue, sandwiches and orange squash she paused before looking up. Breathed in through her nose before raising her head but, when she did finally glance up, she felt her whole body fizz like it was filled with bubbles. There, sitting along the edge of the stage like birds on a telephone wire, was the whole motley crew of them.

‘We’re all here, Miss,’ Billy shouted.

Anna glanced across the faces that she didn’t really recognise, the wary expressions, the hair pulled high on top of heads, the T-shirts with a faded Razzmatazz written across them, the trainers banging against the wood, the Twixes and packets of Hairbo, the acne, the fat fingers, the thin fingers, the greasy skin, the powdery foundation, the streaky fake tan, the faces engrossed in iPhones, the headphones, the tipped-over school bags, the mess, the scowls and the half-smiles. And she found her own mouth stretch into an involuntary grin.

‘Except Lucy.’ Mary added, quietly, ‘She doesn’t want to do it any more.’

‘Why not?’ Anna asked, realising then that she’d actually been searching for the Farah Fawcett fringe.

‘Because you gave Mary her part,’ Billy said, while curling himself over into a bridge from where he stood at the foot of the stage stairs then, as he kicked up into a handstand, got stuck halfway so Matt kicked him and he fell in a heap on the floor.

‘But I didn’t give Mary her part, she just stood in for her in that section.’

Matt jumped down off the stage and gave Billy a hand up, while muttering, ‘We think it’s better this way round.’

‘That’s because Lucy has a new boyfriend.’ Cut in a pale-faced, fat boy who was sitting at the end of the line.

‘Fuck off it is, Peter. It’s because it’s better.’ Matt glared at him and Peter snorted a laugh.

‘Ok, ok fine, look don’t worry about it.’ Anna waved her hands to settle them down. ‘We’ll talk about Lucy later, let’s just get warmed up.’

‘I’m pretty hot already, Miss,’ one of the guys called out and the others laughed.

‘I’m sure you are,’ Anna raised a brow in his direction and then turned to Billy. ‘Do you want to lead the warm-up?’

‘No way I’m following him,’ muttered Peter as the ten year old bounded to the front of the hall.

At the same time as he said it, Anna was distracted by a movement of the doors to the side of the room. ‘Well—’ she said, her attention caught by who she thought it was. ‘Go home then.’ She shrugged and felt Peter glare at her as she jogged towards the doorway. She might be trying to be a little nicer to them all, but that didn’t mean she had to put up with their every whim and sulk. ‘You need to all work together. It shouldn’t matter who leads the warm-up,’ she called as she went.

Just before pushing the doors open, she glanced back to see Peter slope into the middle of the group and start a shuffling, half-hearted attempt at the warm-up. She also saw Matt pause to take a sip of Evian before turning the tune up loud and that made her smile.

Out in the corridor, she glanced both ways and just caught the swish of a blonde ponytail ahead of her. The girl was walking fast, but perhaps not fast enough to want to go unnoticed.

‘Lucy?’ Anna called, and the girl paused but then carried on.

‘Lucy!’ she shouted again and started to jog after her. It crossed Anna’s mind that she could just leave her, that it would probably make her life easier if she let her go. But when she finally caught up with her, just in front of the fire exit that led out the back to the bins, and put her hand on her shoulder which Lucy, spinning round, shrugged off quick as a flash, it wasn’t the Farah Fawcett flick that Anna saw. Instead her mind seemed to see brown hair, centre-parted with a long fringe, a cropped New Kids on the Block T-shirt over a black leotard and leggings, eyes narrowed like a cat’s, perma-frown of aloofness and an almost rigid poise in her body. When the girl turned, Anna almost had to take a step back at the accusation, temper and annoyance on the pursed lips. She wasn’t face to face with Farah Fawcett Lucy but with mini-Anna.

Anna swallowed and said, ‘Do you want to come inside?’

‘No.’ Mini-Anna scowled and went to walk away.

‘Wait, hang on.’ Big Anna pressed her hand against the bar on the fire exit door to stop her from opening it. ‘Wait.’ Why was she suddenly finding it so hard to breathe? She’d only jogged down the corridor. ‘Wait. It’s OK. Come back,’ she said. ‘Please don’t throw this away, you enjoy it.’

‘How would you know?’

Anna frowned, ‘I just think you do. I think that’s why you’re here, watching. Because you enjoy it. Because you’re good at it.’ She paused, saw mini-Anna’s jaw lock, saw the fury on her face. ‘It doesn’t matter about being the lead part or anything like that, you do it for you.’ She tried to will her to listen to her. ‘It’s about you being good at something and letting your—’ When she saw the trembling of mini-Anna’s chin, she tried keep her own steady. ‘Letting your talent shine whatever position you’re in. About doing it for you,’ she said again, more quietly.

Anna kept her hand firm on the fire exit bar, unwilling to let this girl escape now that she had her, thinking of how much more she had to say, when suddenly mini-Anna fizzled away and Farah Fawcett Lucy’s voice snarled, ‘But you think I’m shit.’

Anna sighed, turning to rest both her hands on the doorframe behind her to steady herself. ‘I don’t think you’re shit at all,’ she said, trying to hide her disappointment, her bewilderment at seeing her former self so clearly. ‘To me, Lucy‒’ she coughed, buying herself some time to get her thoughts in some kind of order.

‘To you, what?’ Lucy muttered.

‘To me you were one of the leaders of this group,’ Anna said, drawing on her PR experience and trying to compensate for the rambling emotion she’d just succumbed to. ‘And, as a leader, that doesn’t mean you always go up front, Lucy. It can mean that you lead by showing others, all those who look up to you and think you’re good, can then see that it’s OK to be anywhere. You lead by being part of the group‒’ Anna paused, reminded suddenly of the talk her boss had had with her when she’d demanded a promotion and had a massive sulk when her annoying colleague Beatrix had got it instead. She hadn’t listened at the time, just fumed at the idea of being kept down. It was only as she was repeating it that it now seemed like reasonable advice. It sounded like something her dad might say... No, something that her granny would have said and her dad would have repeated, passing the wisdom off as his own. That thought made her laugh, completely inappropriately given the circumstances, so she stifled it into a sort of horse-like snort which made Lucy raise a brow, like Anna was gross and old and couldn’t manage her bodily noises.