swallow the wrong way and cough a little.
‘Yeah.’ I sip my water. ‘Well, they’re good kids. I had fun.’
‘Maybe you do have maternal instincts,’ my mum says warmly.
I glance around the table and see that everyone is smiling at me.
‘Maybe,’ I reply, knowing full well that I am about as maternal as a shoe. Still, if people are going to be nicer to me for showcasing these “normal” feelings then I’m all for it. Whatever makes my stay here more tolerable.
‘You did do a good job,’ a voice that sounds exactly like my auntie’s says, but it can’t be her, can it?
I look to my right to see my Auntie June smiling at me. Yes, smiling at me, and it’s not forced or smug, it’s genuine.
‘You’ve clearly done some growing up, Mia,’ she adds.
Belle, visibly annoyed that I am getting more attention than her, attempts to put me back in my place.
‘Mia, why aren’t you eating your dinner?’ she asks angrily.
‘The vegetables are delicious,’ I lie.
‘Well, it’s your show business diet, isn’t it,’ my mum chimes in. ‘It’s a tough business. Things like that matter.’
My eyes widen. First my dad compliments me, then my auntie is nice to me and now my mum is defending me – and everyone is still smiling. I must be dreaming.
Perhaps now everyone is seeing me in a better light, this wedding might not be so bad – I might even have fun.
‘So you’re refusing to eat my sausages?’ my sister persists.
‘I don’t really eat pork,’ I reason. My sister looks angry but everyone else in the room seems fine with me until…
‘I don’t eat pork,’ a voice echoes my own. Everyone looks towards the end of the table, where the kids’ table is. Josh is grinning widely.
‘Excuse me?’ my auntie says to her son.
‘I don’t eat pork,’ he continues as he eats, much to Max’s amusement.
When I let Josh and Max watch Pulp Fiction I knew that they wouldn’t tell their parents on me, but there’s one thing I didn’t anticipate happening – something that is inevitable when you watch a Tarantino flick – they caught the quoting bug.
I glance down the table at them, pleading at them with my eyes not to take this any further, but they’re not looking at me, they’re having too much fun.
‘Why not?’ my uncle asks his son curiously.
‘I don’t eat filthy animals,’ Josh replies.
Everyone in the room is still baffled, apart from Dan’s older brother Mike who is chuckling to himself – he’s clearly a fan of the movie. If this situation wasn’t all my fault I’d probably be amused too – and impressed, Josh is nailing the delivery of these lines, and he has remembered them perfectly. It’s true what they say, children have minds like sponges.
‘They root in shit,’ Josh elaborates, clearly on a roll. ‘That’s a filthy animal.’
On hearing her ten-year-old son say shit, my auntie snaps her head to the right at an impressive speed. The smile is immediately wiped from Josh’s face when he realises how angry his mum is, and just how much trouble he’s in.
‘Where did you hear that?’ his mum asks him.
‘I don’t know,’ he replies, fooling no one.
‘Max?’ my auntie asks her son’s partner in crime, but he’s frozen still and completely silent.
‘Josh, tell us where you heard that,’ my uncle demands, sounding angrier and angrier as he says each word.
Just keep your mouth shut, Josh. This will all blow over.
‘It’s Pulp Fiction,’ Mike says in an attempt to diffuse the situation. Little does he know, he has just sealed my fate.
‘Where have you seen…’ my auntie’s voice trails off as she turns to face me, this time her movements are slow and sinister. ‘You!’
My auntie points at me with her knife, and whether she just happens to have it in her hand or she’s actually planning to stab me, I decide not to take any chances and jump up from my seat. I move around the table as I try and explain.
‘You let my son watch a “fifteen” rated film,’ she shrieks as she tries to chase me around the table.
‘I think it’s an “eighteen”,’ Mike unhelpfully chimes in, which only makes my auntie angrier.
I’m too busy trying not to get stabbed to notice what everyone else in the room is making of this, but I know for sure that no one is doing anything to intervene.
‘It’s a classic,’ I reason.
‘A classic that’s full of swearing,’ my auntie yells.
‘It isn’t gratuitous swearing, it’s all in context,’ I insist.
‘Actually, I think it features over two hundred and sixty uses of the F word,’ Mike muses.
‘Piss off, Wikipedia,’ I snap, which provokes an unimpressed reaction from everyone in the room. Everyone but Belle, that is, who looks delighted that universal balance has been restored. Everyone hates me again.
‘I’m not saying you’re not likeable,’ my sister explains as she admires her underwear-clad body in my bedroom mirror. ‘Just that you need to try harder to make people like you.’
I lie back on my bed and exhale deeply. Dan’s back is still bad so he’s still stuck in bed. I assumed that was why Belle asked me if she could try on her bridal underwear in my bedroom, so he didn’t see it. In actual fact this is her not so subtle way of telling me that I need to try harder to “make people like me” – which, in my opinion, is as good as telling me that I am not likeable.
‘What do you think of the shoes?’ Belle asks. OK, so I’m here for a lecture and to watch my sister prance around in her underwear and a pair of white ballet pumps.
‘They’re nice,’ I reply. Personally I would have gone for something with a heel, but with my sister usually opting for ugly, clumsy, flat mules no matter what the weather, I’m lucky she isn’t forcing a pair on me to go with my bridesmaid dress. The wedding ceremony is taking place on the beach, so the outfits have been tweaked accordingly.
‘I can’t wait to see what my dress looks like with the shoes and the veil,’ she says to herself as she wiggles her hips in front of the mirror with a level of narcissism not unlike that of Patrick Bateman when he’s shagging those hookers in American Psycho. ‘The clothes should have been delivered by now.’
Right
