The Last Anniversary

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Rose, we spoiled the child rotten!’ Connie hadn’t been at all sympathetic.

Margie dreams she is trying to kiss Rotund Ron in a gondola in Venice, while an extraordinarily good looking Italian gondolier in a red and white striped top makes the gondola rock back and forth so much that they can’t get their lips to meet. (The gondolier is doing this because he wants to kiss Margie himself!) They all three find this hilariously funny. Rotund Ron is doing his jolly fat-man laugh, even though, of course, he’s not a fat man any more, and Margie is giggling uncontrollably like a schoolgirl. She looks down and realises she’s wearing her red crochet bikini, and this is so funny she can barely breathe. Tears of mirth stream down her face. She points out her swimming costume to the two men and they gasp and laugh with her.

‘You just got a text message!’

Margie opens her eyes. ‘What did you say?’

Ron leans up on one elbow and looks down at her with a suspicious, sleep-creased face. ‘Your mobile phone just beeped. Someone sent you a text message. Do you want me to show you how to read it? Are you laughing? Why are you laughing?’

‘I was having a funny dream.’

‘Do you want me to check it for you?’

‘It’s OK. I know how to check my text messages.’ Margie wants to get back to her dream in Venice. ‘I’ll check it later.’

‘Well, who would be sending you a text? I didn’t even know you knew how to text.’

He sounds hurt and uncertain. He thinks she’s having an affair. Apparently Rotund Ron’s wife is suspicious too. Both Margie and Rotund Ron agree that they quite like these wrong-footed versions of their spouses. It’s a hoot! Margie compresses her lips to stop herself from giggling. She actually feels a touch tiddly, as if she’s been drinking champagne. It must be nerves about tonight, or that dream, that funny dream!

‘It’s probably one of the kids,’ she says. ‘They send me text messages all the time.’ This is an outright lie. The only person who sends her text messages is Rotund Ron, and this one will be something about the arrangements for tonight. It would never occur to Veronika or Thomas to text their mother. They would assume, like their father, that she wouldn’t know how to read one. This is the first fully fledged, blatant lie Margie has ever told in her life, and instead of feeling guilty she feels a rush of exhilaration.

‘Really?’ Ron lies back down, scratching the top of his head. ‘What do they text you about?’

‘Oh, just whatever,’ says Margie carelessly. She gets a bit reckless. ‘Sometimes Veronika sends me jokes.’

‘Veronika sends you jokes?’

Margie’s lips twitch. ‘Yes. Sometimes they’re quite funny too.’

There is silence while Ron digests this. Margie rolls over onto her side away from him and secretly runs her hands over her stomach under her nightie. She has ‘abs’ now. People know she’s lost weight but nobody knows about her ‘abdominals’. She flexes her legs and caresses her ‘quadriceps’. Her body belongs to her again now, like it did when she was a little girl, before she developed curves and hips and that inconvenient bust. She used to wear her bra to bed every night, done up on the tightest clasp, because Laura told her that if she didn’t she’d end up with br**sts so big they’d be dragging on the ground. She didn’t like her br**sts. They were arranged by someone else to please boys like Ron Gordon and then to feed her children; they weren’t anything to do with skinny, busy Margie McNabb who could turn cartwheels and climb trees with her dad.

And then, when she got fat, her body seemed to have even less to do with her; she was lost in a mountain of chicken-skin flesh. She shudders just thinking about it.

For some reason she hasn’t been out yet and bought a whole new wardrobe to reveal just how much her body has changed. She prefers to keep wearing her old clothes, hanging off her and gaping around the waist. She doesn’t want to share all the details of her weight loss around just yet, to hear Veronika take credit for it, to hear everyone discuss it and argue about it and make jokes about it.

The ordinary phone rings and Ron bounces upright as if to defend himself from a punch. Oooh, lovers calling from every direction, thinks Margie gleefully. ‘Ron Gordon!’ he growls, and Margie swallows a guffaw.

‘Oh, good morning, Enigma.’ Ron relaxes against the head-board. He gives an old-Ron-style smirk. ‘Happy Anniversary.’

Margie hears her mother’s plaintive voice spilling from the phone. ‘Well, my word, Ron, you know perfectly well it’s a very unhappy anniversary! Let me talk to Margie!’

Ron goes to hand over the phone but Margie silently, wickedly shakes her head.

‘She’s in the shower, Enigma. Can she call you back?’

‘Thank you,’ says Margie after he’s hung up. ‘She only wants to go on and on about tonight.’

‘That’s all right.’

It’s an oddly courteous exchange. Goodness me, thinks Margie. It’s all very strange in the Gordon household today. They lie next to each other in silence, as polite as strangers on a train. I’ve slept beside this man for over thirty years. I should be more relaxed with him than anybody else in the world, so why is it that I feel so much more like myself when I’m with Rotund Ron, who I’ve only known for such a short time? Relaxed enough to laugh so hard I do those embarrassing laugh-snorts. Relaxed enough to tell him whatever comes into my mind, without censoring it, without checking first if it’s going to make him sneer or sigh. Like the ladybird beetles. I’ve never told anybody about the ladybird beetles before.

Yesterday she’d told Rotund Ron that whenever a ladybird beetle landed on her hand she liked to think it was a message from her dad, telling her he loved her, and that it was amazing how often, whenever she was feeling especially low, that sure enough an exquisite red and gold beetle would appear from nowhere, tiny wings fluttering. It hasn’t even occurred to her to ever tell Ron this, even though he was really very fond of Dad and the two of them used to have long, serious chats together about their cars and mileage or something.

‘So–are you–disappointed about missing the Anniversary tonight?’ asks Ron.

Lordie me! The man is actually asking how she feels about something.

She answers noncommittally, briskly, just like he does when asked about anything too personal. ‘Not really.’