LABRATS


THE GAZEBO THING

This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen.

When I’d been lying on my bed aged fifteen or so, my future (and the posters on my wall) looked a bit like this:

(a) David Cassidy, or (b) Donny Osmond (either married to or Living in Sin with, didn’t much mind)…

With:
Gaggle of gorgeous offspring resembling part-above/part me, therefore probably with red-hued and wavy hair but extremely musical.

And:
Lovely big house in the country with pink roses winding round the front door and a place in the city for parties and stuff.

And I’d be baking a lot, singing a lot, dancing round the kitchen table doing both aforementioned a lot and everyone would love me. My hair would be glossy and bouncy and everything I touched would shine. Folk (for that is who I’d be living amongst) would call on me and turn to me and rely on me and I would save days and turn sad days to happy.

Oh God, I was Doris Day. All I had to learn was how to dance slowly enough during the musical section to allow everyone else in the street to catch on and join in. That's how it was supposed to work. Well, wasn't it?
Anyway.

So…

If someone had told me that by the age of thirty-five I’d have been married five years to a handsome and successful Latino lawyer, have a beautiful little daughter of four and be living in a white cottage (yeah, with a white fence too) I’d have been shamefully delighted.

The fact that I was now spending a week in August holed up in my parents poxy back garden in Netherstock enveloped by some elaborate excuse for a gazebo would have had me snorting into my Bacardi and Coke. Loudly. Messily probably.

Mind you, if someone had told me I wouldn’t be having my hair coiffed every six weeks; wouldn’t have the enthusiasm or energy to stare at every available mirror I passed and would be wearing minimal make-up with no sign of a (returning) waistline I’d have probably drowned in whatever I’d been drinking at the time – of shame.

You see it wasn’t so much the marriage, husband, daughter-thing that was the problem - I’d grown quite accustomed to the way things had turned out - very nicely to a point thank you - no, it was more the gazebo-thing that perplexed me so.

One of my reasons for getting married was so that I could begin a new family and loosen the chains of my original family bonds – show my parents how it was supposed to be. MY marriage was going to be better, more fun, more attuned, more, well … ‘Walton’esque – with everyone hugging a lot and cooking for an entire community and shoulders available to all at the drop of a bonnet.

And it kind of was for a while.

When we’d lived together it had been. We’d always had people round for Sunday lunch, evening suppers; any day was a good reason for having people round and entertaining - even my parents. We liked it and let’s face it; we were bloody good at it. Although after about eighteen months of never having been invited back to anyone else’s it sort of dwindled slightly. ‘We’ decided that ‘We’d’ had enough of being taken for granted.

Actually it wouldn’t have bothered me to be honest, I would have carried on cooking and entertaining for as long as guests had the capacity to be entertained and the money for the taxi ride home afterwards. No, it had been Roberto who’d sowed the seed of doubt in my mind and watered it generously.

I’d guessed that a suspicious mind was bound to stem from spending so much time in the company of – and representing in Court, no less - lying, deceitful little toe-rags down the Magistrates’ every day and I’d accepted the way he’d thought. Compromise. Give and Take – all chapters in the Big Book of Pre-Marital Stuff. He’d probably have to put up with a hell of a lot worse from me if my parents were to be believed.

‘I pity the poor bugger that ends up with you my lady’, my father had oft been heard informing me.

‘He’d have to have no brains in his head whatsoever to put up with some of the stupid ideas you come out with my girl’ was another. (I’d been asking if I could stay on at school and do A-levels when I received this one).

Who me? Emotionally damaged? Who knows?!


HERE’S THE THING

Everyone remembers what happened on their wedding night, don’t they? A bit like the Kennedy Assassination, Princess Diana’s death, the Twin Towers - depending on your age. Roberto had got so pissed he spent all night throwing up in the bridal suite’s ensuite and I’d been so disappointed and dismayed that it was the end of the whole wonderful day (and possibly so pained by all that smiling) that I’d cried myself to sleep still wearing my wedding dress. I still refused to take it off when breakfast had been brought to our room the following morning.

I think I’d have had it stuffed and mounted if it had been an option.

The Honeymoon was less enjoyable. Two days later we were in Funchal. Here we were to proudly display our His ‘n’ Hers H. Samuel wedding rings and skip gaily through the sunny streets holding hands and wishing for all the world that everyone could be as happy as we were.

A week in and we were bored and wanted to come home. The island was apparently holding some cycling mega-marathon and at the same time some huge political figures had decided to begin discussions in top-secret style round the corner from our Hotel. What with frogs mating underneath our balcony all night, helicopters whirring loudly overhead from dawn ‘til breakfast and then finding all the roads cordoned off for the bike race, we’d had enough. With another week booked, paid for but very unwanted, we concocted a tale of family bereavement and were flown home a week early to the derision of many friends who couldn’t believe how anyone could get bored whilst on a honeymoon, not less a foreign holiday that had been given as a wedding present. Well, we insisted, we had…. Got bored that is. We’d done all the usual sex & stuff on the balcony in full view of other balconies and walked through all the gardens and eaten all the local delicacies and just decided we wanted to be home instead. Hadn’t ‘We’?. Besides there’d been no beach to speak of, no pool at the hotel and Rob had begun to get very tired of my sexual ‘demands’.

Ho Hum.

Was this how it was supposed to happen?

Dangerously George & Mildred.

Not so much Mildred’s mouthy, brash insinuations that her beloved was a damp excuse for sexual fulfilment, no, I had more of the ‘Mildred-inside’. I couldn’t let her out, though because believe it or not I actually wasn’t sure how overt I could be with Mr Right - but never ‘right-now’!

Oh dear.