And so I blew.
And blew.
And blew.
And blew.
But the lash clung on for dear life.
And so I blew some more.
Harder.
Maybe a bit too hard.
I winced, as I caught the glimmer of a tiny fleck of spittle tumbling through the air with a trajectory that put it on a collision course with his finger.
But no matter how hard…
Or how much…
That lash wasn’t going anywhere.
So much for my fucking wish.
“OH MY GOD, I can’t believe this!” I jumped up and flung my arms in the air.
“What?” Damian was clearly taken aback by my sudden and rather dramatic outburst.
“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry or scream or shoot myself.”
He looked puzzled, “What do you mean?”
“Nothing is going right and I keep making a complete idiot of myself, what with the slippers and the pyjamas and the throwing up on the plane and the almost getting arrested and the catching on fire -- fire for heaven's sake -- and now I can’t even blow an eyelash off a finger, and, and, and…”
Damian’s eyes followed me as I started to pace up and down the embankment waving my arms in the air like a ragdoll in a tumble dryer. “This has got to be some kind of elaborate plot against me!”
“Lilly…” His tone was soft and soothing, which made me want to slap him, "…that could’ve happened to anyone.”
“Name one person that it’s happened to? One person?”
Damian rubbed his forehead thoughtfully. “This girl at university once wore mismatching shoes to class,” he offered.
I swung around and looked him directly in the eye, “That’s hardly the same. Besides, did her fiancé leave her at the altar the day before…NO!”
I kicked some sand into the water, hoping it would serve as a good exclamation point for the end of that sentence. “You know what these last few days have felt like? They’ve felt like someone, or something, has been conspiring against me, turning my whole life into some kind of sick Cosmic-Karmic joke. I’m almost expecting Ashton -- whatever his name is -- to rise up out of the water disguised as a Merman and shout, 'Surprise. You’ve been Punked'." I kicked some more sand into the water trying to make the mother of all exclamation marks. It was all very dramatic. But I didn’t care, because that eyelash was the straw that broke this camel’s back. It wasn’t about the lash. This was about the fact that I felt victimised by the world. That I felt like somewhere, out there, was a cinema full of people with popcorn and Coke laughing at me.
“Hehehehe. Look, she’s gonna get sick, she’s gonna get sick.” *Hiding behind a tub of popcorn*
“Hahah, look she’s wearing pyjamas on the plane.” *Laughing so hard, Coke shoots out of nose*
“Wahahah, she’s on fire! She’s on fire!” *Slapping knee and spraying popcorn everywhere*
I was angry, and kicking the sand into the water wasn’t generating the kind of punctuation marks that could vaguely emphasise my current state of distress; in fact, my toe was just sore. I think I hit a shell, or knowing my luck, a giant, rusty metal anchor.
“I guess I’m just tired of crappy stuff happening to me,” I walked over to the table, sat down and hoped that we were close enough to the Bermuda Triangle for it to magically suck me in.
“Guess what my wish was?” I said.
“What?”
“That bad shit would stop happening to me.”
Damian walked over to the table and sat down. He looked genuinely concerned.
“I’ve been trying so hard not to think about it… but, do you know what it felt like when he didn’t show up, in front of 500 guests?"
“I’m sorry, Lilly.” Damian reached across the table, and for a moment I thought he was going to hold my hand, but at the last second he picked up the bottle of water and poured us both a glass.
I mentally sighed; my life was a complete disaster zone.
We sat there in silence, sipping our sparkling water and listening to the bubbles pop and fizz. For some reason I thought about my wedding invitations -- I’d put so much effort into them. I’d spent hours at the paper shop choosing just the right colour, texture and thickness. Hours spent with the designer finding the right layout and design elements to make it perfect. The invites were an off-white colour -- Romantic Eggshell Dream was the name of the paper. They were embossed in the corners with a delicate flower design and all hand written in calligraphy -- some old lady sat there for days doing them all -- and then folded in half and tied together with pale lavender ribbons. What a waste!
And then another thought hit me. This scandal was going to be spoken about by my family for the next millennium, at least. In fact, it would probably be passed down from generation to generation in the great oral tradition of story telling. Some great, great, great niece of mine living in the year 2104, where robots feed you breakfast and everyone lives in hydroponic bubble suits, would still be hearing the story of poor Aunt Lilly who was left at the altar in front of all her friends and family. My family couldn't help it, they loved to gossip, they simply couldn’t keep it in. So for the rest of my life, at every family function I would probably hear…
“Shame, shame poor Lilly. You must be heart broken.”
“Oh shame. You must be so embarrassed. I don’t know how you cope.”
“Poor, poor Lilly, maybe you should just go live out the rest of your sad, pathetic, lonely life under a rock in the middle of the desert with only lizards to keep you company.”
I was grateful when a loud voice suddenly broke through my self-flagellating thoughts.
“Your hamburgers,” said the man in the black suit who seemed to have appeared out of nowhere and was very suddenly moving things around the table to make space for our food. He glanced at me with a displeased look, as he bent down and picked up all the candles and flowers that had fallen over. I mentally kicked him in the groin and smiled politely.
I looked at my plate. My burger might as well have been hanging from the roof of the Sistine Chapel. It was a work of art and I almost felt bad for eating it… almost. But by this stage, I was starving. I grabbed the burger, took an enormous bite and started wolfing it down. It dawned on me that I didn’t care that I probably looked like a hungry scavenger, frantically pecking on the last remains of a carcass. Because the one good thing about having your life declared as a disaster zone, is that things that bothered you before, suddenly seem so insignificant.
Take eating in front of a guy for example. Why is it that when a waiter arrives, whilst in the company of a male we’re trying to impress, we suddenly morph into panic-stricken possums, and in meek little voices say, “I’ll have the salad please, no dressing, no croutons.” We have these strict woman rules about what to eat and what not to eat on a date -- no spinach or any other kind of leafy green that clings to your teeth, no ribs or spaghetti and definitely no soup. So we order a plate of leaves and spend the night moving a lonely piece of lettuce around our plate, as if eating something with the calorific equivalent of air would impress him. And you know the hotter the guy; the less you’re gonna eat!
But since I didn’t like Damian, and this was not a date and I definitely wasn’t attracted to him, I didn’t care if he looked at me like I was a Yeti that had just emerged from hibernation and was eating the arse end off a low flying cow. I continued to savage the burger, and got so lost in the process, that at some stage I caught myself making loud 'mmmmmmm’s'. I don’t think I looked up once either. I was just so focussed on the task of consuming as much fat as possible. I swallowed the last mouthful and finally looked up and straight into the face of a smiling Damian.
“What!” I snapped at him, a fleck of something flying onto the table.
“Have you ever considered a career as a professional eater?” He said, putting a chip into his mouth.
Although I’d just claimed not to care, I was terribly offended by this suggestion, and he could see that.
“I mean that in the nicest way possible.” He said, pointing to the corner of his mouth in a you’ve-got-something-on-your-face kind of gesture.
I grabbed my serviette and rubbed my mouth, then looked at him for confirmation that it was gone. He shook his head and pointed to the other side and I repeated the process again, looking up for confirmation once more. But Damian shook his head again, took out his iPhone and took a photo of me. He turned the phone around so I could see.
How I'd managed to get tomato sauce on my forehead is beyond me.
“Ooops,” was all I could manage, but before I could do anything about the splotches of wayward sauce, Damian had leant across the table and was wiping my face with his serviette. He had such a look of concentration on his face as he poured a little bit of water onto it and went to work on my forehead. Then my cheek, and then the corner of my mouth. My lips tingled as the cool fabric touched them. Suddenly all I could feel were my lips and all I could see was him.
I pulled away quickly and sat back in my chair.
“Thanks.”
“Pleasure.”
This whole situation was just so, so bizarre. Here I was, on my honeymoon, in the most romantic place in the world, with a stranger who had just been gently, and very familiarly, wiping my face clean with his serviette. Who the hell had seen this coming? Who would have guessed that right now Michael and I would NOT be married and NOT be on our honeymoon?
Not even my mother's psychic Esmeralda (real name Jane) had predicted this, not that I placed much confidence in her psychic abilities, but surely something this big would have come through somewhere, considering she ‘read me’ the day before my wedding! My mother had insisted on it. My mother didn’t do anything without consulting her; she barely went to the toilet without a phone call to find out whether her bowel did in fact want to move. I’d never held psychics in very high esteem, especially not this one, who my mother met in rehab.
When Michael and I had first gotten together, my mother had insisted that I get ‘our cards read’ to make sure we were compatible. Of course I’d said no, but then she pulled her now famous, dramatic, guilt trip on me;
“It’s fine, don’t go, it’s your choice. But what am I going to do now? I've already paid. Maybe I can get a refund? But it’s fine if it’s not for you, sweetie. Oh my God, but she cancelled that other appointment for you! But I'm sure she won't mind. Like I said, no worries.”
So half an hour later I’m sitting in Esmeralda’s 'reading room', a dark and grotty cottage at the back of her property. As I walked in, I was instantly deafened by the cacophony of wind chimes. Chimes made of shells, feathers, crystals and the skulls of little woodland creatures hung like bats from her roof. The next thing to assault my senses was the incense that practically choked me, followed by the near heart attack her pet Monitor lizard Sid gave me, as his scaly tail brushed past my ankle.
And there she was, in full chiffon-draped glory, the star, Esmeralda sitting at her little table covered in black velvet. And you know what it’s like, even if you don’t believe in the powers of the woman sitting across from you fingering a pack of dirty cards, you want to. My mother had obviously told her about Michael, and even though I knew that, I still soaked it all in.
“I see a man. A blonde man,” she had said in a very fake mystical sounding accent.
Of course, your heart does cartwheels at this point.
“Yes, I see him very clearly now,” she fanned her cards out and moved her fingers around in little circles, “I see your future with him. I see you walking down the aisle. I see he will be very rich one day and you will live in a big house.” I hung on her words like a child. “Yes, I see three children. I see blonde children with blue eyes and one is a boy and the other two are girls. And you will be very happy and in love forever.”
And of course you want to believe it all, and I did, right up until the second I held that note in my hand. I’d believed that Michael and I were meant to be and that we’d ‘live happily ever after’. Perhaps I’d wanted the fairy tale so badly that I’d missed something real?