Epiphany

by Sarah Bayen

Part One. Wrath.

  

Limp laughed, that's what really got to me. Limp actually laughed at me. I was incandescent with rage in any case, but him coming up to my room, and laughing at me was the last straw. I suppose it wasn't just cross with him, I was cross about the whole thing. Why had my cousin Chrissie decided that I would make a lovely bridesmaid? Why had my mother agreed to the ghastly plan with such alacrity? So there I was, trying on this hideous dress in what I thought was the privacy of my bedroom, when Limp came in and laughed at me.

Limp lives next door. That isn't his real name, of course; his real name's William, but we all call him Limp. It's a bit of a joke really. He used to be called Wimp, well, because he is one; Wimpy William, that's what he was called until we were about twelve I suppose. Then we discovered sex, and Wimp Willy became Limp Willy for a moment in some school joke amongst us girls. Then he became Limp. I know it sounds a bit cruel, but there you go. Kids can be as cruel as adults, so they say.

You shouldn't get the impression that I was habitually cruel to Limp, not before he laughed at me in the dress anyway. We had lived next door to each other since birth, and I suppose we must have spent many hours playing with each other since before either of us could remember. He was always a bit of a fragile child, often ill, and not exactly full of zest or daring. His favourite activities were painting and reading, whereas mine were climbing trees, playing football, and getting into trouble.

It was a surprise, even to us, that we ever hung around together. Some of it was just proximity. He lived next door, like I said. Some of it was just habit; our Mums were friends, and it suited them for us to play together when we were little. On top of that though, we did sort of get on. I think he liked the way I didn't care about getting dirty, or doing what I was told. I often caught him staring at me in a sort of admiration when I'd done some prank or other. From my point of view he was useful. Nobody ever thought that darling William would do anything naughty, so it suited me to bathe in his reflected sainthood from time to time, as far as teachers and other adults were concerned.

Also both of us were sort of outcasts. The girls at school had all gotten themselves into make up and fashion, and boys. I had been popular when we were all younger, and these things weren't so important. Now I was the girl who'd forgotten to stop being a tomboy, and they tended to avoid me. So did the boys. Limp had never been popular. He was rubbish at sports, and hated fighting and stuff like that. The boys told him he was a girl, or a poof, and more or less ignored him. I suppose in a way, that's why he hung around with me so much.

People at school sometimes used to say that he was my boyfriend. Like YUK! Even at fourteen I wasn't a great fan of having boyfriends, and I certainly never thought of snogging Limp, not then anyway. He was more like a puppy. I could get him to follow me around whenever I wanted to, and, if I was bored with him, I could just send him home and forget about him. Boyfriend, no way!

So you can see that when he came into my bedroom, and looked at me in that stupid pink dress, with all it's hideous lace and frills, and had the audacity to laugh, I was bloody furious with him.

The whole thing had started a few months before, when my cousin Chrissie, who was twenty-two or something like that, came to visit us with some dork she was going out with. Apparently they were going to get married. They sat on the sofa, holding hands and giggling, to tell us, as if I was interested or something. Then came the worst bit. Hesitating, and stuttering, stupid Chrissie asked me if I would do her the honour of being one of her bridesmaids! I refused of course, point blank, but it was no good. Mum had been a bridesmaid at Aunt Carol's wedding a million years ago, so obviously that made it a family tradition. I sulked and fumed, and was taken out into the kitchen and given a severe talking to, and much to my disgust, I had to go back in and apologise, and say how pleased I would be to accept.

Mum has never really understood me. I'm an only child, but somehow I always get the impression that she thought having a girl would mean I'd be a nice little doll for her. She was always trying to get me to wear this or that, some stupid dress or frilly skirt or whatever. She always wanted me to have longer hair, and tie all sorts of stupid butterflies and hearts and stuff like that in it. God, I remember when I was twelve, about two years before the bridesmaid stuff, I sneaked out of the house one Saturday, and went down to the boy's barbers in town. I had got him to cut all my hair off, and paid for it with my own money. My Mum went ballistic, and even bought me a stupid wig to wear, to cover the shame, as she put it. Not that I wore it for very long though. Eventually she gave up on that, although she'd still occasionally come back from a shopping trip with a 'lovely dress I saw that I knew would suit you beautifully.' I'd have to try it on to show her, and then I'd put it in with the others in my wardrobe, and never touch it again. Unfortunately, the bridesmaids dress was another matter.

The day of the wedding was fast approaching. I'd managed to put off having a fitting at least three times by inventing football practices, karate tournaments and all sorts of things. But eventually, I was pinned down, and taken to a foul shop in town full of really grotty bridal stuff. Mum shoved me through the door, and I was taken into the back, and literally pinned into this bloody awful pink dress. The shopkeeper kept saying offensive things about how pretty I looked, and asking me how I was going to have my hair done. I hated it. When we got home, I knocked for Limp, and then, on a flimsy excuse, took out my frustrations by wrestling him to the ground.

He wasn't much fun to wrestle, because he didn't really fight back. He just looked sort of hurt, and nervous, and let me sit on him, and hold his hands behind his back, until I was bored with it, and let him go. Then, after carefully brushing any dirt off himself, he'd just carry on as if nothing had happened. I told him that I was going to be my cousin's bridesmaid, and the stupid idiot just said that that was nice. He had no idea.

Then, the day he came in and laughed, the dress had been delivered. It had arrived at about midday, and I managed to put off trying it on again for a good three hours. Eventually my Mum cornered me, and forced me into it. The dress wasn't the worst part though. You should have seen the underwear I was supposed to wear with it. There was something called a Satin Basque for Christ's sake! It was appalling; so uncomfortable and restricting. Mum said it would emphasise my bosom! That was the last thing on earth that I wanted to emphasise. I knew they were there, of course, and I knew men in particular had some sort of fetish about them. The only time I had gone out with a boy, John, he had spent most of the time trying to grab them and squeeze them. In the end I had to hit him, and tell him to bugger off. The whole school soon heard that I was a lesbian and a frigid cow. Well tough, if he was so obsessed about breast, he should ask his Mum to breastfeed him again. She'd had another five brats since him, I knew, so she should have plenty of practice, and milk.

So Mum wired me into this bloody Satin Basque by doing up about two hundred little hooks at the back, and then got me to attach a really stupid pair of stockings. I mean, all stockings are stupid, but these were really stupid. They were white, with ridiculous little silver pictures of bells and hearts all over them. My legs looked like some pathetic sausage shaped wedding present by the time they were on, and what with the suspenders hanging off the basque, I was about as uncomfortable as I had ever been in my life.

Then there were the lovely knickers as well, or so my Mum called them. Lovely? I thought they were bloody perverted! They were white to match the basque and the stockings, and the front was more or less see through, with the same bells and hearts in silver stuck all over it. They were bloody tight as well, and cut into my arse and my legs, which hardly made me feel any better about it.

Finally, the shoes. Well what can I say about them? Fortunately for me, I've always had quite big feet, which has meant my Mum has never really been able to get me into girly shoes. But somehow the wedding was an excuse to have a special pair made. Oh my God, I wish they hadn't bothered. They were white and flimsy, with an embroidered pink flower on the foot bit, and a strap like a ballet shoe going around my ankle. It didn't feel like wearing shoes at all, more like just strapping a pathetic piece of cardboard to your foot. You could never do anything in something as stupid as them, like climb, or run, or even stand still.

My Mum of course was delighted with the whole effect. She fussed and cooed about it, pulling the dress out at the bottom, and fluffing it up around my chest. She started talking about make up, and hair, which nearly made me feel sick. It was either that or the basque squashing my stomach so much. To my dismay, she remembered the bloody wig she had bought me when I'd had my head shaved, and decided that I just had to wear that for the wedding. I wished I had managed to ruin it or loose it in some way in the intervening two years, but I hadn't. It had just laid in the wardrobe with the other girly stuff she liked so much.

She told me to go and get it, which was why I was in my bedroom when Limp called that day. Helpful Mummy of course thought it would be nice if he went up and saw me in my humiliation, so, dutifully, he trudged up the stairs, and saw me in the pink dress, and laughed.

He didn't laugh for long, granted, and he apologised almost immediately. But the damage was done. Limp had laughed at me, the bastard! He said it was because he wasn't used to seeing me in a dress, which was probably true enough. I told him I wasn't used to seeing him in a dress either, which made him blush. Then he laughed again. I stamped my foot, and told him to get out and never come around again. He was about to do as he was told, when Mum came up the stairs to see what all the noise was.

Of course, she took his side. She said he was a gentleman for complimenting me, although I didn't quite see how laughing at me was a compliment, She said that if I was a real lady, I'd know how to take a compliment. I told her that I'd never said I was a real lady, and that if that's what they did, I didn't want to be one. She made Limp tell me I looked pretty, and I glared at him furiously as he did so. Then she let him go, and gave me another stern talking to.

I really hated him then. He was supposed to be my friend. Only the week before, I had stopped him getting beaten up by a gang of boys at school. They were scared of me, because I was a better fighter than them, and they didn't think they should hit girls. So they ran away, and forgot about beating Limp up. He said he was grateful at the time, but the way he decided to show his gratitude was to laugh at me, and tell me I was pretty. For a day or so, at least, I decided I would never talk to him again.

It would be nice, wouldn't it, to be able to say that the wedding was nowhere near as bad as I had feared. But that would be a lie; if anything, it was worse. Apart from the embarrassment and discomfort coming from my preposterous costume, I had to spend two hours in the morning with Chrissie and two of her stupid pals. They were all gushing and being pathetic about the wedding, and all the trimmings that went with it. They wanted to know all the details about the honeymoon, which as far as I could tell, sounded like a pretty boring affair; a seedy hotel in Brighton for a week, no doubt with a fag smoking landlady who looked like a boxer. They just loved Chrissie's stupid engagement ring, which was tiny, and had a diamond in it about the size of the head of a pin. They fussed over her hair, their own hair, and my bloody hair, even though it was a wig! It was truly awful.

Then came the ceremony itself. Talk about boring! It went on for what seemed six or seven hours, with prayers, hymns, vows, and finally, the happy pathetic couple shot off into a side room to sign some book. I sort of thought the worst was over then, but the torture had hardly begun. The next bit was the photographs! Jesus wept; you have no idea how many photographs a professional photographer can manage to invent from something as simple as a wedding. We had the happy couple; the bride and her bridesmaids; I hated that one particularly, we all had to stand in a semi circle, supposedly looking in admiration at her bloody ring! Then, basically, he seemed to go through every possible permutation of bride, groom, best man, bridesmaids, bride's family, groom's family, and probably passing strangers who happened to be wearing poncy suits. You name it, that bastard took a photograph of it, two or three in many cases. And all the time I was wearing that ridiculous outfit, with the basque making it impossible to breathe, the stockings clinging to my legs like damp flannels, and the knickers threatening to cut me in two. Add to that the fact that the pathetic shoes gave my feet no protections, so I had stubbed my toe, and you can see that I was in a pretty foul mood.

At last the photographer finished, and we headed off for the reception. I was looking forward to getting something to eat, but wondered if I could get anything into my stomach past the vice like grip of the sodding basque. Then things really took a turn for the worse. As soon as we got to the seedy church hall where the reception was, I bumped into my other cousins, Mike and Alan. I secretly liked Mike. He was tall, and dead good at sports, especially rugby. When we were younger, he was about the only person in the family who didn't go on about me being more ladylike. He seemed to like that fact that I could climb trees almost as well as him, and that I could help him beat up his little brother Alan, and not get into so much trouble as him. We'd had some fabulous family holidays, the three of us. In fact, I had sort of agreed with myself that if I ever had to marry someone, it would be Mike. It seemed reasonable to me, since we were so alike. I had never told him, of course, but I just knew that it was bound to happen one day.

My heart leapt when I saw him, and I looked forward to spending an evening messing around with him; chucking food at each other, and maybe playing leapfrog over the gravestones in the graveyard by the church. But he looked at me strangely, and then did a half sneer, and half smile, that made me blush with fury.

"Don't you look the little lady then?" he said. "I bet you'll have all the boys wanting to dance with you later."

I was struck like lightening. How could fate have arranged it that Mike, of all people, would see me in this preposterous dress, and think that boys would want to dance with me in it. The worst thing about it was that he was right. Once I'd managed to eat a miniscule amount of some buffet sort of rubbish that was served up on trays, I was subject to the humiliation of some sort of stupid relay game from all the boys under twenty there. One by one they'd come up to me and ask if I wanted to dance. Well for one thing, if I had wanted to dance, I would have been dancing anyway! And for another, there was no way I was going to even try and dance wearing that bloody basque around my chest. I could hardly breathe, let alone go in for some physical exercise, so I refused them all.

This amused my fellow bridesmaids no end, and they teased me by asking me whom I was saving myself for. Eventually I lost my rag, and told them to piss off and mind their own business. They didn't talk to me after that, which made me happy for a while. Then Mike came over, and smiled at me again. I wondered for a second if he wanted to dance, but he looked to one side of me, and asked one of the other bridesmaids, who, giggling to her friend, accepted. Later I saw them together on the dance floor, kissing and gazing into each other's eyes. Mike was such a bastard. When we were married, I was going to make him pay for this.

I don't know about you, but when I'm bored, it affects time. Like, normally an hour takes an hour doesn't it? But when I'm bored, and hour takes about three hours. On that basis, the evening lasted about three days, and I was nearly asleep when at last, my Mum came over to me, to tell me that it was about time for us to leave. Even the leaving took forever. It was apparently tradition that we should say goodbye to all the guests, kiss them, tell them what a wonderful wedding it had been, and stuff like that. Almost all of them took the opportunity to tell me how beautiful I looked, which I hated. Worst of all was saying goodbye to Mike and his new girlfriend. Mum actually had the gall to tell them that they made a lovely couple!

I sat in the back of the car and sulked all the way home. As soon as we arrived, I ran upstairs, and removed the hideous ensemble. The most embarrassing thing about it was that I couldn't get the basque off. I had to call for my Mum to help me out of the bloody thing. She took her time getting up to my room, but eventually did. She told me how proud she had been of me that evening, and how she hoped I'd look as ladylike as that more often now I'd had the chance to try it. Well sod her, I thought. I was never going to wear a dress again, and even less, a flaming Satin Basque. I was really wound up, what with the boredom of the wedding, the humiliation of the dress, and the betrayal by Mike. Someone was going to pay, and that someone would have to be Limp.

  

  

  

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