marriage

This story is dedicated to my good friend Liz Moir.

The white wafer is too dry, too big and too rice cracker for his taste. He’s just never got used to them. Ralph is kneeling on the thinning red rug, having had his turn, and his belly sours and boils. Kathleen makes him come to mass, she says, for his penance, the penance that he should have done when he met her five years ago. His knees hurt. Why they make them all kneel for so long is beyond him. He isn’t even Catholic.

Kathleen told him not to mention this to anyone. She said what they don’t know can’t kill them. She also says the same whenever she’s doing something she shouldn’t. It’s Kathleen that should be doing penance. What with crushing their wee Tommy’s favourite plastic roll-a-dog deliberately under the rear car wheels when she reversed out of the garage, or sprinkling chilli powder in the neighbour’s cat food when she thinks he, Ralph, isn’t looking.

Of course Kathleen isn’t at mass this Sunday. It’s your job to keep up appearances, she says, tickling his chin with her manicured violet nails. Tell them I’m sick, she says, every Saturday evening. Migraine. Or make something up. Kathleen’s been sick every Sunday morning four and half years now going on five.

Ralph shouldn’t have married Kathleen. She is garish, bilious, has disgusting piles, and laughs like a horse.

But when there’s a gun to your head, literally, what else can you do? It was ordained, Billy her father said, when you stuck your prick in her you little shit.  Kathleen had leant back with her round belly and pouted and giggled and stubbed her cigarette out on Billy’s smoked glass nest of tables.

On reflection, Ralph doesn’t believe he’d had much choice in the matter. He’d merely been helping out a woman in distress. Coming back from the office late, still warm in the glow of a just above average performance appraisal, he’d seen her trip in the street. Fly off the kerb in her hefty platform soles and land spread-eagled face down in the loading bay outside Pizza Express. The early Tuesday evening drinking crowds had stared a bit and walked on past her. Assumed she was drunk. What was a civilised man to do? He’d helped her to her feet, picked up her bits and bobs that had strewn from her handbag, and offered to flag her down a taxi. Let me buy you a drink, she’d said. And he had. Remembers it so clearly. A whisky sour with a healthy handful of crushed ice. She had chosen it. Then put a hand between his thighs. And ordered him another.

The wedding had been fast, furious and full of men with shaved heads in sharp suits with bulges in their right hand pockets. The flowers had been sickly ivory and the food had been fried and guillotined and divined to play certain havoc with Ralph’s acid reflux.

There’d been a champagne fountain. A six tiered cake with a photo of Ralph and and Kathleen on the top and a photo of Billy and his third wife Irene on every other tier. A pyramid of presents, many suspiciously long and thin and heavy, greeted the guests in the great marble hall.

After Billy’s speech, which ran over by several chapters, Ralph had escaped out to the hall, and picked up one of the gifts, wrapped in red velvet with a luxurious navy satin ribbon bow. It was a large square box, heavy, and when rattled, it sounded like metal. Ralph had held it up to his nose. Tried to smell it. I wouldn’t do that, said one of Billy’s henchmen, wouldn’t want to blow your pretty lips off your face would you? The henchman had laughed and dragged some woman in a silver boob tube onto the dance floor. Ralph had put down the present, rushed to the gents to powder his nose, throw cold water on his face, and hide in a cubicle until he was flushed out by his brand new father in law Billy Menoza kicking the door in.

Ralph didn’t invite his own family to the wedding, he didn’t feel it was safe. It was just small, at the registry office, he lied, the day after he and Kathleen came round to make the announcement. Ralph’s mother had sighed, smiled at Kathleen, and turned the pages of her crochet book, looking, she said, for baby mittens. Apricot or peach she asked in a breathy voice. Ralph’s father poured them all a sherry, except Kathleen of course, and said we may as well toast the bride even if she’s pregnant. Kathleen had demanded a gin and tonic, she wasn’t missing out she said, and what they don’t know can’t kill them. Ralph, at thirty three years old and only now leaving his parents’ house for the first time to live in the penthouse apartment Billy was providing, could think of nothing to say in response.

So Ralph sits, the wafer refusing to melt in his mouth, staring at all the other pennants,  the other hapless victims of Billy’s bilious daughters and nieces, and hatches a plan. Ralph will escape. He can’t take Tommy, that’s for sure. If he takes Tommy, they’ll come after him. And at the very least, kill him, Ralph. No, the boy will have to stay behind. They’re good to the boy at least. Treat him like some sort of heir. He’ll get a private education too. Billy had already paid the school for the next five years. In cash.

Ralph seeks out the eyes of the priest. The priest is busy down the end of the line. The priest has rather lovely shoes. Ralph studies his clothing. The vestments look soft and comfy. And Ralph has never had a problem cleaning, his mother always says that. He’d have to get up early, that’s for sure, and the food’s bound to be a bit boring, and it’s probably freezing in the winter, but one thing’s for certain, Billy Mendoza would not dare enter a monastery and neither would Ralph’s monster wife Kathleen.

Father, he will say later to the priest at the door of the church, I’d like to have a talk with you if I may, and Ralph will pause, drop his eyes, and continue, I believe, he will say, I really believe I may have had the calling.