I’m at a wedding in the Languedoc. It’s the last weekend of September. I’m relieved the hot, cruel summer is almost over. There’s a woman on the table next to mine with bleached hair and a magenta mouth. She looks like an eighties rock star. I can’t take my eyes off her. She’s wearing gold hoops and a purple boob tube that’s so sheer it shows the contours of her uneven nipples. She took a call halfway through the vows, and now she’s heckling the groom.
“What’s her problem?” I say to the man beside me. He’s wearing a linen suit, a fedora and trainers. He’s an art director called Tim. Or Tom. I suspect we’re being fixed up. She stands on her chair and gestures like a footie fan: oggy, oggy oggy, oi oi oi. Other guests twitch and recoil, or try to outstare the remains of their cassoulet.
“Mattie? Oh, she’s been like that since the baby,” says Tim-Tom. When he talks, he views me from the corner of his eyes in shifty glimpses. There’s a smudge of butter in his auburn beard.
“Baby?” The air is warm and weighted, it presses on my head like kneading fists.
“She dropped it.”
“It?”
“A boy, I think.”
I think about my own child, as unplanned as the relationship I was in, and as yearned for, both barely formed before their pitiful endings.
“What happened?” I ask.
“Dropped him onto a coffee table.”
“A coffee table?”
Mattie sits down and leans back. She yells for champagne. Where the top’s shifted to show her tan line, her skin looks sore and neglected.
“It was an accident,” he says, as though my face suggests otherwise. “Wriggled out of her grasp and fell. Poor thing didn’t stand a chance.”
“Coffee table?” I’m a high-pitched echo.
“Yeah, one of those glass-top ones. It shattered, went everywhere.” He mimes a bomb going off. Not glass breaking, a bomb. Boom.
“Jesus Christ, that’s awful.”
Mattie stands up and staggers towards the bride. A crimson-clad bridesmaid intercepts, puts an arm around Mattie’s waist, and gently leads her away. Mattie’s laughter sounds like mating foxes. I reach for a half-empty bottle of wine.
“Her husband left her. Blamed the drinking.”
“Before or after?” I ask.
“Before or after what?”
I turn my head and use my fingertips to rub at the pain that’s forming in my skull. The waiter puts crème brûlées in front of us. Tim-Tom stretches his limbs and rubs his palms together; he has hairy arms but smooth, feminine hands that look like they don’t belong to him. He grabs a spoon and whacks the caramelised top; it cracks and splinters. Boom, he mimes again.
I push mine away. “You don’t want it?” he says, and takes mine.
I put my elbows on the table, rest my chin on my palms, and watch Mattie. She twirls and sways to Dancing Queen. Wary guests give her a wide berth. When “Copacabana” comes on, I drain my glass, scrape my chair back, and shimmy up to her. Mattie smiles and hugs me, though she doesn’t know who I am. She smells of cigarettes and almonds. We move around in a drunken clasp and when Tim-Tom joins us I those warm hands of hers in mine and lead her off the dance floor.