Love and Other Near-Death Experiences: A Novel

Book by Millington Mil

ONE
 
Hello. My name is Robert, and I haven’t been dead for sixty-three days now.
 
TWO
 
“Silver or gold?”
 
“Silver,” I replied. “Or gold.” I peered hard at the samples in the catalog again. “Or silver.”
 
“Which?” asked Jo.
 
“Which do you like?”
 
She sighed. “I want to know which lettering you like. I’m not sure.”
 
“Me neither.”
 
“Come on, Rob, I can’t do this all on my own.”
 
I peered even harder at the catalog of wedding stationery.
 
Why did we need to have place cards printed for the guests at all? Couldn’t we just use Post-its or something? Or even let people sit wherever they felt like. I understood that the heel of hundreds of years of finicky tradition was on our throats at the church (put an aunt in the wrong pew and the whole place might explode into a brutal chaos of arguments, jostling, and unfathomable hats), but the reception didn’t need to be so tightly policed, did it? We didn’t need to decide about every single detail of every single thing, surely?
 
“Couldn’t we just use . . .” I began. Jo’s eyebrows climbed higher and higher up her forehead as she waited for me to complete the sentence; finally, they reached an elevation that seemed to say, “If the next word out of your mouth is ‘Post-its,’ then you’ll die where you’re sitting.” I waggled my hands about a bit. “. . . ushers?”
 
“For God’s sake, Rob—be serious.”
 
I imagined my face looked pretty serious already but, for Jo’s sake, I took a shot at getting it to look more serious still.
 
“This is the biggest day of our lives, babe,” she went on. “Everything should be perfect—we won’t get a second chance if we get it wrong. Let’s get everything sorted in good time so there are no last-minute panics.”
 
“It’s only just October. We’ve got nearly another three months yet. I mean, we could panic six weeks from now and it’d still be okay, wouldn’t it? It wouldn’t be anywhere near the last minute, even then.”
 
“Silver or gold, Rob?”
 
“Ohhhh, I—”
 
“Just say which one you like best.”
 
“I don’t know.”
 
“You must know.”
 
“Why? Why must I know? You don’t.”
 
“I do. I know which one I like best. I simply want to see if you like that one best too.”
 
“I’m easy. Let’s just have the one you want.”
 
“But I want to have one we both like.”
 
“Well, which do you like?”
 
“I like them both.” She shrugged. “But I prefer the silver.”
 
“Phew.” I relaxed. “Me too.”
 
“Do you? The silver? God—why?”
 
“What? What do you mean, ‘why’? The same reason that you like it, I suppose.”
 
“I don’t like it. It’s awful. I like the gold.”
 
“But you just said you liked the silver.”
 
“I was testing you.”
 
“Testing me? Why would you test me? Why would anybody do that? Why would anybody test someone over the color of the lettering on a wedding reception place card?”
 
“Because I wanted to see if you liked the same thing, or if you were just going along with what I wanted.”
 
“What does it matter? What . . . hold on. Why did you say ‘silver,’ then? How did you know that to ‘test’ me, you’d need to pick silver?”
 
“Oh, it’s obvious. I know you, babe—I knew you’d prefer the silver.”
 
“Christ al-shitting-mighty! So you knew what you wanted, and you knew what I wanted too—and yet we’ve still been sitting here for the last thousand years having this discussion. Why are we having this discussion?”
 
“Because I want to discuss the wedding with you: it’s our wedding. When two people are getting married, they should both be sure about everything, shouldn’t they?”
 
“Jesus.” I closed my eyes and slapped myself on the forehead: astonished at how, despite my best efforts, I was unable to escape this conversation. A decision that I—that even I—hadn’t seen coming, now had me in its jaws and wouldn’t let go. “Jesus.”
 
When I opened my eyes again, Jo was looking down at the catalog far too intensely, even for her. She’d tilted her head so that curtains of gently layered mousy blond hair had fallen forward to cover her face: she was hiding in her bob. I let out a long sigh.
 
“I’m sorry. It’s just, you know . . . Jesus.”
 
“I . . . It’s not just about the lettering, Rob. I thought that doing it might help too.”
 
“Help?”
 
“You know, babe.” She looked up and laid her hand on my leg. “Help you.”
 
“What are you talking about?”
 
I knew what she was talking about.
 
“Just,” she said, “that . . . well, that it’d help you to work your way back up. Like lifting weights, or something. You begin with light things and it builds up your strength; then you can move on to the heavier stuff. And so on.”
 
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
 
I knew what she was talking about.
 
“I thought it might help if you . . . oh, I don’t know. If you ‘eased yourself in’ with some unimportant decisions.”
 
“There are no unimportant decisions. How many times do I have to explain this? That’s the whole bleeding point—there are no unimportant decisions.” Already I could feel myself getting angry.
 
“Right . . . So we’ll go with the gold, then,” Jo said, after sitting there for a few moments of watching me try to get my breathing under control. “The gold.” She grinned. “I don’t suppose you’d like to pick a font?”
 
“You sod.” I laughed, and it washed some of the tension from me.
 
Jo put down the stationery catalog and picked up a different catalog. Jo had an impossibly extensive collection of catalogs.
 
“Have you spoken to Pete?” she asked, glancing through the pages. (They turned slowly—regally—each heavy leaf causing a slight breeze. I didn’t need to look inside; just the sound of the pages moving told me that whatever was on them was damagingly expensive.)
 
“Yeah, you know I have. We went out for a beer last night.”
 
“Tch—I don’t mean have you spoken to him generally, you fool; I mean have you spoken to him about the hotel.”
 
“About . . . the . . . hotel . . .”
 
“About asking the hotel if they could fit another two tables in the reception room.”
 
“Oh, right, about that . . .”
 
“Have you?”
 
“No.”
 
“Rob.”
 
“I forgot, okay? We had other stuff to talk about; I got sidetracked.”
 
“What other stuff?” Jo prodded me with a pair of light blue eyes that she kept in her head for this purpose.
 
“Um . . . well, the beer was a bit suspect, for a start—I remember we had a long debate about whether the barrel needed changing.” Jo looked as if she didn’t quite grasp how this debate could be devilishly complex enough to occupy most of an evening. Jo didn’t spend nearly enough time in pubs. “Anyway, you could call the hotel and ask yourself.”
 
“I don’t want to step on Pete’s toes—dealing with paying the people at the reception venue is one of the best man’s jobs.” She nodded reverently towards the mantelpiece. On it was our copy of Arranging Your Wedding, lying where it could be referred to at any time, day or night. It contained a ruthlessly comprehensive list of what had to be done and who had to do it. To overlook or (unthinkably worse) ignore the edicts of Arranging Your Wedding was not simply careless, it was indecent—your own outraged guests would stone you to death, I had little doubt about that.
 
“Ha!” I replied. “Don’t worry about his toes. Pete would gladly offer up the whole of both of his feet for stamping on here. Trust me—you go ahead and call the hotel.”
 
Poor Pete. Asking someone to be your best man is rather like letting a mate know that you think he is admirably resilient by abruptly pushing him down some stairs. Yes, it signifies that you regard him as a good friend and also think he’s competent and reliable, but it does so by giving him an utterly miserable pile of work to do (the “Best Man’s Responsibilities” section in Arranging Your Wedding dwarfs most of the others). Worse still, you’re compelling him to give a best man’s speech: little can match the misery of knowing you have to give a best man’s speech. It’s a gold star by the male character that the tradition has been endured all this time. Imagine the fuss if a woman were told that, just because she happens to be the bride’s friend, she has to stand up in front of a room packed with people—at least half of whom are complete strangers—and give a speech in which she’s expected by everyone to be funny, and original, and risqué—but not so much as to cause offense—and to reveal something embarrassing about the bridegroom— but not too embarrassing; something just embarrassing enough—and then to end on a wonderfully touching note.
 
As it happens, taking the poisoned chalice of being my best man was an act of even greater than usual nobility where Pete was concerned, because Pete and Jo had been engaged at one point. Oh, it was quite a time ago now—they’d split up well before Jo and I became an item—and I’m not suggesting that Pete still carried a torch for her or anything like that. No, I’m not worried that he’ll break down in the middle of the speech sobbing, “It should have been me, Rob—it should have been me!” (In fact, when I first started seeing Jo, I rather sheepishly asked Pete if he was okay with it. I didn’t really want to ask, to be honest—I’d have preferred to avoid the embarrassment I knew we’d both feel because of my raising the subject—but Jo had insisted I do it, so that she wouldn’t feel uncomfortable. Anyway, he put my mind at rest by the traditional method of [a] saying, “What’s it got to do with me? We’re not together anymore. You are such a poncey twat, Garland”; [b] our both then getting so pissed that I woke up in a bus shelter, surrounded by Monday morning commuters and in a sexually compromising position with a set of temporary traffic lights; and [c] never mentioning it again.) I mean that he can’t help but be aware that, if things had gone a little differently, I’d have been the poor bastard doing the best man’s job for him.
 
Hmm . . . if things had gone a little differently. Now there’s a phrase.
 
Jo gave me one of her looks.
 
“Okay, okay,” I said. “I’ll give Pete a call.”
 
“When?”
 
“Later.”
 
“Why not now?”
 
“Okay, I’ll do it now.”
 
“Right.”
 
“Right . . . Mind you . . .”
 
“Erghhh.”
 
“No—listen—no, it’s teatime, isn’t it?” I said. “Pete’s probably only just got in from work, all tired and sweaty from brutalizing sickly English schoolchildren. It’s not really fair to dump another job on him when he’s barely got through the door, is it?”
 
“Okay. You’re probably right, there.”
 
“Am I? Or do you . . . ?”
 
“You’re right, there, Rob.”
 
“Okay. Sorry.”
 
“Call him later, babe . . . but call him tonight, yes?”
 
“Yes, I’ll call him tonight.”