I LOVE YOU, WE SAID
Chapter 1: Over and Over, Forever
A serialised novel
Introducing my novel, I Love You, We Said. Get it on Amazon or read it on Medium.
We’d known each other just six months, Jessica and I, so the trouble between us only really hit its stride on the morning of our wedding day.
It was going to be a filthy summer’s day, that first of June Year of Our Lord 2002; the Queen’s Golden Jubilee weekend celebrations helpfully providing the public attention vacuum we needed to prise open a last-minute gap in the Ealing Broadway Registry Office schedule. My bride looking comelier than ever — flashing eyes, flashing smile, damp patches sexily rounding the under-arms of her sleeveless gown, our baby forming in her belly…
My one job (besides showing up): to bring her beloved Bee Gees Their Greatest Hits Double CD Compilation along to the ceremony, so we could exchange our vows to the fervent entreaties and crass insinuations of “How Deep is your Love”.
The Registrar pressing “Play” and “Stop” on the portable stereo, if you’ll permit me the sad and distressing visual.
You see how it is.
How was I meant to get and stay married to someone who liked the Bee Gees? Who understood the problem with it, presumably, and unmoved, pressed on? It boded the very worst kind of ill.
But if I’m being honest, I knew exactly what to do. What any man in my position would, provided he knew what was good for him. I had to lose the damn thing.
And a man, a real man, a man of the world, would see the point of it, and know that it was beautiful. Wouldn’t think twice. All he’d know was that the fucking Bee Gees wouldn’t be singing at his wedding.
But I knew, as I opened the car door for her outside the Registry office, that I wasn’t going to do that. I couldn’t let it go, see, because it didn’t really solve anything. What would really change with such a shallow stunt?
And that, long story short, is how it came that I brought the accursed thing along, burning (truly) to have a discussion about it, one that would convince her of the crime of music like it being played on a day when life-long memories are made.
The issue I couldn’t get past was this: In no more than two hours I was to be tied forever to a girl who liked beautiful, vulgar music, whose idea of love, life and art was shrouded in a kind of soft-focus potpourri-and-chocolate-box aesthetic.
The kind of thing that, ideally, should have been dealt with long ago by any normal couple.
But to be fair to us, better late than never. In matters of such visceral report as music or art or politics or crime or the recreational value of drugs, say, or capital punishment or the division of wealth or gender-based advancement — in all these things, disagreement shied away from is merely filed away, until it is summoned forth foul and festering one day. And personally I dreaded the wait more than the showdown.
But what difference could a conversation make at this late juncture — or ever? To any casual observer, hauling it out into the open this late in the game would seem breathtakingly trivial and reckless.
Which was absolutely, terrifyingly, undeniably true.
Time to breathe. I had a job to do and I had to do it soon, but I was staring down the twin barrels of an impossible predicament: face the music now, or make it go away and face it later. Over and over, forever.
‘You OK, babe?’ she asked. The endearments, too, needed work. I felt my head move slowly from side to side in a way I couldn’t control and hoped was passably imperceptible. In no scenario did this end right.
Then another solution presented itself, less tenuous than an argument about taste, equally pathetic, much likelier to succeed.
I would casually drop a hint about what balls it was, a man having to listen to a band of keening peacocks with low muscle mass in beige suits and brown shirts on his wedding day. A hint so dark and toxic there’d be no mistaking its seriousness, predicating a fight so overblown, it would live forever in infamy.
And a man, a dark man, a man of destiny, could have done that too without too much thought, because it really neither befits a discerning music lover nor a truly cool customer to stoop to argue the merits of the Bee Gees. Raise a fatuous stink about how uncool they were, on the other hand, and you might just find yourself some resonance.
It’d be her turn to be cool about it. ‘Why didn’t you just say?’ she’d have to ask, eyes flashing stonily. And that silent promise of payback would be a bridge I’d cross when I came to it. Besides, I found I liked her just a tiny bit cross. Drew her out just a tad closer to the surface behind those relentlessly matter-of-fact eyes. Made the heart skip a beat and what all.
But I realised I wasn’t going to do that either.
What man would straight up ridicule his bride’s taste in music on her big day? I was capable of many things, but I couldn’t humiliate Jessica under some false and insulting pretext.
No, I was going to have to do it the hard way; I would have to win her over to my way of thinking.
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