Page 103 of Mad About You

Bahahaha. Somehow I think two people shuffling in dressed in joke-shop noses and moustaches are going to be conspicuous? Even wigs can be a bit ‘oh look, someone in a wig.’ The only hairdresser I know is going to be busy (not) getting married that day

Marianne

Actually, disguises are not a bad idea! Harriet, you have long hair you wear up in a braid? Nina, yours is mid-length? We know men are really bad at recognising people when they change anything. You could both do something completely different with your hair. Harriet, you could wear it loose, curl it? Nina, how about a hat? Tons of make-up. Boom. If you sashay in late and sit at the back among my salon friends and cousins, Scott won’t spot you. There’s like two hundred people there, and honest to God, he hasn’t bothered to get to know quite a lot of my friends and family. Shoulda been less of a moody bastard!

Nina

Well, I’m convinced. It’s our best bet! Plus I love hats. Might go for a kind of Annie Hall vibe

Harriet

OK and I’ll try for some uncharacteristic femininity! Also, my friend Lorna made a good point. We don’t want Scott to be able to rewrite this bit of history. We should record it. She’s volunteered to sneak in the back and film it on her phone for us. Her idea is to look scruffy and like she might work for the hotel. It’s an absolute age since Scott last saw her & she had different colour hair, so I think she’s safe. We can stick the clip online later if we want. Or is that too much?

Nina

No

Marianne

No

Harriet

Just checking

48

Courage calls to courage everywhere.

Harriet didn’t believe in any Cosmic Architect who directed events, an interventionist God. Given the loss of her parents, it’d be pretty strange if she did. Her jaw muscles tensed when any well-meaning person said: ‘Everything happens for a reason’, and reflected they’d obviously not had anything very bad happen to them.

Nevertheless, the night before the wedding felt like such a huge, psychic game of swing ball, where her refusal to face down and defy Scott and his legacy, her entrenched habit of conflict avoidance, was coming back to haunt her in the most preordained, scripted drama way.

Standing up and annihilating someone’swedding ceremony? Her ex? The Man Who Should Not Be Named, for so long? Describing, to hundreds of people, what he’d done to her? Publicly identifying herself with that experience?

It was like asking a nun to streak.

Harriet was contemplating a daredevil stunt, a parachute jump, some sort of towering feat of adrenaline junkiedom.Telling yourself to hurl yourself out into the thin air at a great altitude, when it went against every survival instinct you had.

It was mind over body, executive function at war with your lizard brain.

No matter how many times Harriet rehearsed:Marianne wanted this, Scott should be stopped, and Nina would grab her, mid-dive– it was a completely aberrant thing to do. She might be justly vilified. The nuclear blast might be so big that Leeds would forever be irradiated for her.

This, after a lifetime of going foetal around threat. Yet she finally swore at Jacqueline Barraclough, demanded explanations from Cal, and even steamed round to read Jon his Miranda rights. Maybe change was possible.

What else was she avoiding?

Harriet had been listening to Jazz FM, lying on her bed. She was suddenly galvanised, struck by something that until now, had never had such a clear and obvious sense of its timeliness. The second it occurred to her, she knew this was it. Hadn’t Cal said she’d know? She’d thought that was consoling mysticism, but he was right. She knew.

Or perhaps, she was dressing it up in a thunderbolt, but her reasons were incredibly prosaic – there was finally another fear on the horizon that made this fear seem manageable by comparison. Maybe she simply needed a monumental distraction.

Harriet sat up and unthreaded the necklace from around her neck with shaking hands, and put the key pendant in the lock on the jewellery box.

What if the letter had degraded to the point it was unreadable or something? She would have let her mother down? What if the letter contained such a shock that it rendered her unable to function, to go through with tomorrow’s promise?

Harriet knew that even so, this didn’t matter, as she was going to do it anyway.

She picked the delicate envelope open with great care and pulled out a single page of paper, wrapped around a photograph, an old-style colour floppy. The notelet was only a few paragraphs long.

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