The Armchair Bride Read Free Page B

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    I say nothing else, instead I will the headache/brain tumour to take a grip and finish me off. My eyes close and before long, I drift into a fitful sleep.
    I’m on a yacht, serving spaghetti hoops to laughing women in elegant frocks. For some reason, I’m naked and telling lame ‘ knock knock ’ jokes. Someone asks me to give them a song and someone else offers to accompany me on a silver baby grand, which appears from nowhere. I agree and launch into The Wind Beneath My Wings.
    When next I wake, it’s dark and Andy has gone, though he’s tidied up, tucked me in and placed a bucket on the floor next to the bed. The bongo player in my head sounds to be on a break and my alarm clock comes into focus. 5.05. I pull an old T-shirt and sweat pants from the linen basket to shuffle into the kitchen. Next to the kettle, there’s a note from Andy.
    It’ll be fine. Everyone was drunk.
    There’s nothing on TV apart from films I’ve seen a hundred times already. All my teatime quiz shows have been suspended in favour of movies about wizards, aliens and evil aunts who live in castles and torture small children. I channel hop and end up staring at a harrowing documentary about old people with hypothermia.
    When it gets too much, I mute the sound and grab my laptop. Andy’s left a second note on the keyboard.
    Four months to find Mr. Right. Don’t forget.
    I don’t need any mirror to tell me I look ancient. My two sisters bagged the good genes, sharing a peaches and cream complexion. I, on the other hand inherited the sort of colouring popular amongst corpses and actors who play heroin addicts. In the summer, if I so much as glance through a window at the sun, my face fills with freckles and turns lobster pink. In the cold light of a January evening, I’m translucent. My skin tone all the more noticeable thanks to hair that stops short of pillar-box red. Hours of effort with a hairdryer, straightening irons and every styling product known to man, woman or beast is wasted. Today, I know that I must look like a badly creased and very old Little Orphan Annie tribute act.
    I sink into my favourite armchair. It belonged to Dad. After he died unexpectedly of a heart attack at 64, Mam went into a frenzy of ripping out the old and filling her house with new things. A woman who lived to scorn IKEA, became their best customer. Bleached pine and white ash replaced the chocolate browns and floral patterns of my childhood.
    One weekend, shortly after Dad’s funeral, I took the train south to Birmingham to spend a weekend helping sort through his things. I arrived as my Uncle Brendan hauled Dad’s favourite chair into a skip. I’m normally so restrained, so terrified of making a fool of myself in public, but I started to sob, great gulping, howling gasps for air. I didn’t care who heard. Curtains twitched and Mam, who’d been counting on me for comfort, ended up sitting me down with a cup of hot sweet tea and promising that Brendan would fit the chair in the back of his Landrover and drive it back to Manchester.
    Dad’s chair is blue and battered. Andy and I live out our lives against a backdrop of oatmeal and magnolia, so it sticks out like a badly bruised thumb, but Andy knows I wouldn’t give it up for all the money in the world. It holds too many memories. In my darkest moments, I talk to Dad through this chair. I still see him sitting in it and placing my hand where his once lay makes everything better on those days when your period is late, your best friend doesn’t call or you feel like shutting the curtains and hiding from the world. Days like today.

    My laptop whirs and clunks into life and I absent-mindedly trawl through email and news sites before calling up PlaceTheirFace. A flashing message informs me in the last month, three of my former school friends have created new profiles. Do I want to read their stories and find out how they - like almost everyone else I once knew - have wonderful lives? It’s