Just Say It

JUST SAY IT

They were in ‘Wallis and Alexander Beautiful Wares’ shop. A tea cup glowed in citrus yellow beside cramped eclectic china. Its delicate bony handle saying ‘sip nicely please’.
‘I’m not sure we’ll handle the numbers’ Theresa Duncan was mentally cross-checking details. ‘Oh yes, I removed uncle Vincent’s invitation. Yes, that got rid of about five people with three children’.
Her only daughter’s wedding buffett to be held in their three-storey house was under control. Abby need not fear.
’Fraaaayser no more guests!
For Fraser, there could never be too many people at a wedding. And that went double for little kids who after all were a low-cost item able to be punch drunk on ice cream cones. It was about the light he saw in every person's eye. To which she’d say ‘you’ve got no filter’.
He nodded at her and wandered off towards a masculine looking wicker fishing basket.
‘oh look filter papers included’ she called out holding up a duck blue coffee pot… ‘looks vintage! Nineteen seventy!’
Fraser worried Theresa Duncan. His emotions, his flights of fancy. Thank God her capacity for logical thinking kept him sorted out. It ensured their life as a couple had structure. Nevertheless every now and then she made sure he was consulted otherwise it wouldn’t be fair.
‘Fraaazzz what do you think of this one with the orange stripe?’ She knew she would get what she wanted. On cue, he replied ‘ darling just get what you want’.
‘Orange plates are brilliant’. Straight away forty-six were ordered.
His foraging now took a profound turn in the form of an antique picnic basket with the name Gloria Jensen engraved on its silver label. It bulged with classy silver cutlery, red rose plates and a pink enamelled flask. That’s it!-- a picnic buffett. Lying on a blanket (away from their vogue magazine house), munching on a chicken wing. Eating a piece of lemon frosted wedding cake while gently swinging. He could suggest it. Why not? No invoices had been paid. Forty-six-year-old Abby loathed the idea of being a young bride with an at home wedding buffet.
Now, how to broach the topic with Theresa? ‘Darling I was reading in Tattler’s that Emma Watson is having a picnic wedding. Pretty swish don’t you think? Or ‘Theresa you know Sam the one I go to Bali with every year, well he has a child who insists on having a volley ball wedding. Sam’s twisting himself into a knot about it because his loaded ma believes all weddings should be in a church. What do you think he should do?’ That would at least test the waters.
Jesus, he just needed to say it. Just say it? the words were possessing him..He was nineteen. His world was his parents and his brain had not yet stopped developing. Theresa cried day and night—the only time in the last forty seven years.
‘It may be nineteen seventy son but a fuck before marriage is still wrong especially when you get my princess pregnant. Now you need to do the right thing by her mother and me and marry her next Sunday’
Theresa’s father will kill you if you pull out now.'
Go on 'just say it. You have to do it.
Christ I’m standing at the alter I need to just say it..‘All I have to do is say it. I don’t need to feel it or believe it’. ‘I…
‘Hey Theresa you know what?
‘What now!’
‘ I don’t like the idea of a wedding buffett at home. In fact, I don’t like the idea of being married period. Perhaps we should break all the china in this shop. Perhaps Abby should just live with Kelvin. Perhaps you and I should try NOT being married. . watch me I’m buying Gloria Jesen’s picnic basket right now and going for a picnic with the seagulls in Watson's bay.'