Daphne and Colin were spending Friday evening as they spent most Friday evenings – in front of the telly with a microwaved dinner and a bottle of sweet German wine, watching their favourite programme; a camcorder compilation of matrimonial mishaps and wedding-day disasters called ‘The World’s Worst Weddings’.
Each programme treated its viewers to a parade of doomed brides tumbling down church steps, or skidding backwards and landing legs-in-the-air on dance floors. Beautifully crafted, four-tiered wedding cakes toppled slowly sideways like Pisan towers and then collapsed into rubbly heaps of icing. Horses bolted with their empty landaus from the church gates. The weather outside the churches was always turbulent, lifting the brides’ dresses up over their heads to reveal saucy bridal lingerie, or whipping the top hats off the heads of the men who chased them through churchyards like farmers after troupes of grey hens.
This anthology of crookedly shot, poorly focused visions of minor catastrophes had Daphne and Colin in stitches. They laughed until they hurt. They winced at painful bits (drunken sword-dancing, marquees bulging with stored rain), drew in their breath, gave each other mock-horrified looks, groaned, giggled, shook their heads pityingly and put their hands over their mouths.
By the end of the programme, as the credits rolled quickly over a reprise of the choicest clips, Colin and Daphne felt exhausted. Their jaws ached and their voices were hoarse. But at the same time they felt refreshed and reassured by the sense they had that other people’s lives were a train of small calamities, and that while their own lives might not be everything they’d wished for, at least they were ordered havens of static objects and common sense people. The World’s Worst Weddings renewed for them each week their sense of their own worth as people while fortifying them for the routine struggles of the week ahead.
Daphne was manager of the Erith branch of BurgerWorld where she supervised a crew of twenty surly teenagers and two shift managers. She could handle (though rarely needed to) one hundred and fifty customers an hour. She was a good branch manager. She had, in the words of Dale, her area executive, ‘ketchup in her blood’. She was blonde, wide, buxom and clever. She was forty-seven.
Colin her coeval, childhood sweetheart and husband of thirty years was a bus driver. He had power-steered red double-deckers from Trafalgar Square through the suburbs of South East London for almost as long as they’d been married. In the early days he had sat alone in the forward cab of a Routemaster, obeying the bells, buzzers and knocks of his conductor. Then, at the beginning of the Seventies, he was asked to merge two people into his one body and become both driver and conductor of the new pay-as-you-enter buses. It had been difficult at first, and he felt bad about the conductors who lost their jobs, but he managed the transition with some panache. He has twice been a finalist in the South East Bus Driver of the Year Awards. He genuinely cared about his human cargo. He took corners carefully. When he stopped he stopped gently and his passengers all nodded in unison. His sedentary life and fondness for the odd pint had given him a roly-poly figure and a thickening of fat around the neck. His hair was dark but thinning on top, combed back and out of the way behind his ears, half an inch short of unkempt. His teeth were sharp, symmetrical, stained with cigar tobacco.
He was stretched out on the couch, still in his bus drivers” uniform which, with its wine-coloured blazer and striped tie, made him look like a ridiculous schoolboy. This added to the shock Daphne felt when he turned his brick-red face, still damp with laughing, towards her and said, in a voice quiet with excitement,
“Love, I think I’m pregnant.”
