Page 47 of Mad About You

Barmen poured and rattled cocktails, bottles of sake held high with a flourish, waitresses circled with platters of gyoza, and people holding full glasses drifted onto the decking outside to take in the view of city rooftops. The happy couple had their first date here, so it had sentimental significance, and Danny and Fergus had hired the whole place.

Their generosity and style were making things abundantly worse – the contrast between the glamour of it all and the horror of it for Harriet, as if she alone was being set up. There was no first dance but there were speeches, to be bathed in the early-evening glow as the sun went down.

The environment for the next two hours or so was an accidental hellscape of a blissful union, Harriet constantlytrying to calculate how many times she needed to pass by the knot of guests that contained Scott. Looking like she was avoiding him was untenable, seeming as if she had a special interest was intolerable.

Scott’s title of ‘best man’ was more than a little satirical. How few men had Danny met, if this was the best one he knew? However, Harriet was unsurprised that Scott was best manning someone he’d not known in their years together. Scott thrived on being a novelty, buzzed on being the latest greatest person you’d met. He poured his energies into winning new acquaintances over like a top salesman with his most potentially lucrative client. He’d have effectively been auditioning as a future best man from their first handshake, whether he got the gig or not. Scott, she had realised only with hindsight, liked to overwhelm people.

Every so often, when the crowd parted and Harriet was sure he’d not see, she allowed herself a moment’s scrutiny. Scott was chatting animatedly and winningly, in his slim-cut violet suit, and still with the expensively ruffled, mop-top hair. Harriet knew the maintenance that went into the unkempt lead guitarist look.

At his side was a petite girl with brilliant blonde hair in a blunt shag cut and sticky, raspberry-bright lips. The combination of her big blue eyes, framed with sooty eyelashes, and high forehead, gave her the look of Tweetie Pie fromLooney Tunes.

Her presence was a given, to Harriet: Scott wasn’t the type to be without a partner. He always had an eye for a pretty girl.

She was in a lilac dress – she and Scott had co-ordinated – with diaphanous lace panels that stretched tight across her hips, and Scott had a proprietorial arm draped around them. Her killer metallic heels were so high that Harriet would be weeping for the relief of removing them after five minutes, but she never saw her so much as shift from leg to leg, no sign of wincing or complaining whatsoever.

Scott was doing the talking, and as time went on, in Harriet’s covert snatched surveillance, it started to become a point of fascination: when would she say something? A polite ‘no thank you’ head shake to the tray of lollipop prawns was all Harriet could catch, as the blonde decorously sipped her Passionfruit Something Or Other.

It took a lot of deep breaths, and a quantity of valiant guts that Harriet didn’t quite know she possessed, to stride over at a natural juncture.

‘Could I get a quick group photo?’

Everyone acquiesced, Scott pulling his girlfriend (wife? Fiancée? Harriet hadn’t seen rings, but also not allowed her gaze to linger long enough at any one moment to be sure) sharply to his side, in unspoken taunt, or defiance, a mocking kind of lopsided grin on his face.

‘Fantastic, thank you,’ Harriet said, with a fake smile, moving on, feeling the sweaty heat under her clothes.

Eventually everyone was ushered inside for the sit-down meal, and Harriet had the scheduled hour’s grace to find something to eat herself.

She took the lift down several floors and emerged into the deserted Victoria Gate shopping centre. It was oddly atmosphericout of hours, the monochrome, zig-zagged tiled floor splattered with moody illumination from up-lit shop windows: like the holodeck of some spaceship vast enough to provide designer stores with undulating windows for its passengers.

She should find food, but she had no appetite. Harriet remembered the kindly nurse, when her grandfather died, telling her eating when not hungry – but traumatised – was nevertheless essential: ‘emotional and physical energy aren’t separate things’. KFC it was. She could absently gnaw on hot wings while imagining Scott falling over that balcony.

As she walked down the arcade, she heard the din of heels on a hard surface behind her and turned, to see Scott’s partner also exiting the lift. Shouldn’t she be busy with the wedding breakfast?

Blonde Girlfriend pulled the vertiginous shoes off, one after another, and rubbed her feet, grimacing. She stood barefoot as she rifled in her tiny bag for a cigarette, which she lit with unsteady hands. Harriet had once heard the term ‘restraint collapse’ to describe kids who are good as gold at school and naughty once home. Blonde Girlfriend seemed to be relaxing into her own restraint collapse – after several deep restorative drags on her Marlboro Light, head thrown back, she began scrolling her white iPhone with one hand, while massaging alternate feet with the other. Harriet was pretty sure that her left ring finger bore a showy sparkler that could only be an engagement ring. Her fag was gripped in her mouth like Betty Draper when firing the shotgun. The tableau felt like it featured a different woman to the one Harriet had seen upstairs.

She looked up and saw Harriet watching, at a small distance. Harriet didn’t know what to say, or what expression to make, to transform the interaction from spying on what Blonde Girlfriend thought was an unobserved moment, into something socially understood as mundane and acceptable. After a few seconds of blinking at each other, both transfixed and mute, Harriet turned and continued on, camera bag on shoulder.

She couldn’t stop mentally pulling apart, dissecting and analysing what she’d witnessed, as she picked at fries.

Afterwards, she wiped her hands on paper napkins and hurried back, not out of fear of being late, but because she didn’t want to lose the courage it took to walk back in.

Harriet fired off aggressively frequent frames of Scott giving his best man’s speech.Clack clack clack.Whirr, clack.In the quiet of the room, it sounded like the clatter of shutters you got in the sombre hush of press conferences.Too many!Pump your brakes, Hatley. She needed to calm down before she gave herself away, the same way people who gabbled too much thought they were hiding their nerves.

Scott had the audience in the palm of his hand. He was telling the story of how he and Danny bonded on the hilariously disastrous stag of a mutual friend in Cologne – half the stags fell out and flew home, Scott and Danny discovered a joint love of the divisive local speciality, Mettbrötchen, then the relationship had deepened further back home, when Scott helped Danny through the loss of his mum.

Danny broke down, and leapt up to hug Scott, Scottembracing him and rubbing his back, notecards for his speech gripped in his hand.

‘It’s alright, man. She’s here. She’s here,’ Scott said.

Several onlookers openly wept.

Harriet took more photographs, in lieu of feeling the right feelings. Yeah, that was Scott. Always great in your crisis. Always exploiting an opportunity.

Once again, Harriet found herself lost in the lonely chasm between who Scott Dyer was supposed to be, and who he actually was; the sole person burdened with the dissonance, doubting herself. She hated this wedding for forcing her back there, against her will. She hated everyone in this room.

The Ministry of Ideal Weddings could use the minutes that Scott was speaking as a textbook example of How To Give A Best Man’s Speech. It was flawless. He was witty, but also sincere: the tribute so well judged in its obligatory embarrassing disclosures and gentle mockery, but laden with much touching, genuine praise. There was the sad part, honouring Danny’s missing mother. When he had his audience sniffling, he brought it back to laughter and relief, riding in to the emotional rescue and providing catharsis. It was as if Scott was playing them like a musical instrument, knowing when to ramp up tension, then relax the pressure – a virtuoso performance.

Scott built towards his summing up, describing the great joy of seeing Danny find his equal match and balance in Fergus. How lucky everyone here today was to share in this occasion. How loved the marrying couple were. Having Harriet as spectator clearly didn’t bother Scott in the slightest,didn’t throw him even slightly off balance. Of course not: he’d have to care what she thought for that.

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