Chapter Nine
‘Gurl!’ A bellowing Belinda flicks out a finger click with a sharp jut of her hip.
‘You like, just gotta, like, ya know, like, have a pescetarian option on the wedding menu!’ She tosses her hair as she shrieks in her fabulous, broad Dublin accent.
A highly successful businesswoman, with three after-school facilities to her name and her business empire expanding by the day, I’m in awe of her.
‘Stop jerking! And what are you talking about?’ I’m on my knees looking up at her totally confused.
‘Our Kathleen! That’s what she says to me on the phone, the crazy LA head on her. Pescetarian, me arse, I says to her. It’s a roast beef dinner at my weddin’ reception and that’s it. You used to suck the bejaysus out of a pig’s foot our Uncle Peter would boil us when you were a baba!’
‘Please stop moving,’ I command in muffled tones with yellow-topped pins held in my mouth.
‘Can ya get over that, though, Grace? She makes me laugh with all that Hollywood health hoopla. Hanging out with the rich and famous has gone to her head. They’re all too brainwashed to understand we’re mortal!’ Belinda bangs her chest.
‘Oh, I hear you. Not on the pescetarian diet, but I had a vegan convert in my life. Nothing against vegans whatsoever, just this particular one.’ I shake Logan’s obsessive diet from my mind; it was impossible to enjoy a meal with him.
I concentrate on sewing a final sturdy chain stitch into the hemline.
‘Only eating fish. Is she on them edible gummy yokes, I wonder? I mean for years when we were growin’ up, all we had was a jumbo-size bag of pasta shells and tins of tomatoes to last the five of us a week!’
‘That must have been tough?’ I throw my eyes up to her in shock as I pull two pins free, but she’s smiling.
‘Ah, we made the best of it. Da was well gone by the time I hit fourteen. He wasn’t built for this century, by his own admission, he was a drifter .
. . wasn’t it well for him? Our ma’s battle with the drink came and went as often as the 46A bus.
I swear, only for Peter R. – our older brother – doing a paper round in the middle of the night, followed by a milk round, followed by delivering flyers and basically goin’ around the posh houses from Malahide to Foxrock with an old petrol lawnmower and cuttin’ their lawns without askin’ so they had to pay up, we’d have starved!
I mean, I did my bit as a novice beautician, but Peter R.
kept us alive. And she only eats fish now.
Feckin’ spanner!’ Belinda wobbles dangerously.
‘You have to stay still, Belinda!’ I splutter again now with a mouthful of thinner, green-topped pins clasped tightly between my lips.
Belinda, as always, is dressed in vibrant pops of pink.
She’s a woman who knows her worth. I crawl out on all fours from under her satin and lace dress and stand up slowly, my knees aching, having finished the hem stitches and pinned the bottom of the under lace.
‘No more footwear changes now, okay? I mean it. That’s it. Stay out of BTs!’ I stretch out my tight back. I’m wearing my loose-fitting, vintage, yellow daffodil print pinafore and my biblical sandals, my hair tied back in a white bandana.
‘Is that you putting your foot down? If ya pardon the pun!’
I glare at her jokingly as she nods, steps down off my dressmaker’s block, and saunters towards the brass floor-to-ceiling mirror. I’m still paying off a credit-union loan for the partitioned area off my bedroom.
‘Fuck a duck! It’s stunnin’, hun. Yer some kinda genius.’ Belinda twists and turns her admirable curves, holds her sleek red bob between her fingers.
‘It looks gorgeous, you really suit it.’ Admiring my own work, I head to the kitchen, pour myself a glass of fresh lemon water from the jug on my small countertop before I return to her.
I like to give my clients a moment on their own to take in their reflection – it’s very important that I don’t just tell them they look beautiful, they need to see it themselves.
‘How’d ya manage to hide me belly?’ She drops her hair when I return, turns to the side and pats her stomach.
‘We all have bellies, if we didn’t we’d be dead, Belinda!’
Embrace the body. It was the first thing I’d been told on day one of my disastrous, catastrophic internship at Ferguson Brophy Bridal Designs.
The placement I’d coveted for years. The place where I’d worked so hard to get my foot in the door.
Another Logan-inflicted painful incident that still cuts so deep.
I shake off the painful disappointment of that.
‘And I don’t necessarily hide it, I simply create a dress that complements your body.
The drawstring bodice stops just before your tummy, giving you that svelte, pinched-waist look.
Then I’ve added a lace panel that floats over and flatters your tummy area.
It’s all in the craft.’ I admire Belinda admiring her own reflection.
It’s one of the best things about being a wedding-dress designer: seeing the elated faces of women who constantly wonder if they look good – realising they DO look good!
‘Stevo is gonna think I’ve gone under the knife in Turkey when he sees me floating down the aisle in St Patrick’s Church lookin’ like this! Max’s straight friends might even throw a “MILF” at me!’ Holding out the train, she totters towards me in her latest shoes.
I check my watch. I’m meeting Donal in Elephant & Castle in Temple Bar in less than an hour.
‘I’m gonna have to get a move on. I’ve got a date,’ I tell Belinda, tidying up around me.
‘Ohhhh, nice one, hun.’ She gives me a thumbs-up with a frighteningly long acrylic pink nail.
‘No . . . it’s not quite like that. Well, I mean .
. . I’m not sure, we’ll see.’ I twist my finger in a motion that tells her to turn around.
I begin to zip her down and hold her hand as I carefully get her to step out of the gown.
Despite the drawstring corset, I’ve hidden a side zip.
Belinda wanted a ‘quick escape’ – her words – because she didn’t want to be ‘messin’ around with bastard strings’ when she wanted to fall into bed in the early hours, pissed as a newt on pints of Bulmers cider. That summed Belinda up.
‘What are ya not sure about?’ she quizzes me, completely unbashful, in her strapless bra and pink thong. A large tattoo of the Irish flag runs down her left thigh.
‘I’m not interested in him romantically . . . just need a someone to bring to a party.’ I say, struggling to shut my bulging, orange wicker basket of threads and pins. I press down harder.
‘I see . . .’ she says, cautiously.
‘Like he’s not the one, if you know what I mean,’ I grunt, finally clicking the clasps shut.
‘Ya know what, hun? I don’t really know what ya mean.
’ Belinda stands in front of me now, hands on her hips.
‘What is the one, anyway? D’ya know, I always think people look for too much nowadays.
It all has to be WOW! this –’ Belinda throws her hands up in the air ‘– and UNREAL! that.’ She slaps the table.
‘There’s no room for ordinary relationships like me and Stevo.
We don’t blow each other’s minds.’ But she laughs now.
‘Fireworks never shot out of Stevo’s arse.
Well, maybe after a vindaloo in Tenerife that time, but ya know what I mean? ’
I roar laughing. Belinda puts a hand on my arm her expression suddenly serious, her brow furrowed.
‘Ya know, we were told we’d never last when I decided to go through with the pregnancy and we had Max in our teens, but we did. “Unplanned, not unwanted,” Stevo always said. We respected one another. Worked at it. We just got on with it while we quietly loved and supported one another.’
I smile at her.
‘My friend left her husband last year because she was deeply unhappy,’ I say. ‘I think she made the right decision.’
I hand Belinda her neatly folded, wide-legged pale denims. Then I take her wedding dress to my adjustable mannequin, draping it over, settling it lovingly.
And I can’t help thinking that Logan Hunter did blow my mind.
‘Call me old-fashioned, but I think people want too much nowadays. What’s the somethin’ ya need to bring someone to anyway?’ she asks beside me, shoving one leg into her jeans, then the other. She hops up and down, buttons them up.
‘A party where my ex-fiancé will be. That’s the only reason I’m meeting this guy – I desperately don’t want to walk in on my own,’ I say, distracted, running my hand down the seams of the material.
‘Ex-fiancé? Oh, hun. Sorry for yer troubles.’ I watch Belinda now buttoning up her crisp coral-pink short-sleeved shirt.
‘I’m not exactly over my ex . . .’ I reply honestly before my brain engages. I do not know why I’ve just shared that unbelievably personal information with a client. I never normally do that. It’s totally unprofessional.
‘Oh. So ya still have a bit of a hankering for this ex of yours?’ She lengthens her neck to look up at me, in a halfway lift, bent over stuffing her feet into pink runners, without opening the laces.
‘Truthfully, I’ve never stopped loving him.’ Oh, what? What am I doing?! What am I saying?! Shut up, Grace!
Belinda, with one arm now in her black blazer, stops and stares at me. It’s intense.
‘Time spent lovin’ someone who doesn’t love ya back is a waste of a life. Believe me, I’ve seen it with my brother, first-hand.’ A sadness comes across her face for a split second and then she busies herself pushing the other arm into her blazer sleeve and draping her cross-body bag on.
‘Anyway, it’s the heat talking. On the plus side we’re nearly there.’ I move swiftly on, past the headless mannequin. ‘Just, no more impulse wedding-shoes purchases!’
‘Only one more fitting, then you’re all mine.’ Belinda gazes adoringly at her dress, then turns towards the stairs. ‘Have a great date, hun. Ya never know, he might surprise ya! Just stay away from the vindaloo, that’s not the kinda surprise you want, believe you me!’