Chapter 4: There's Nothing Special About Me

Miss Smallbone looked out of the window, haloed by the bright sun. I stared at her, unblinking, and the halo appeared brighter and brighter until Miss Smallbone seemed almost to disappear into the light. Still I refused to blink. My eyes started to water, and eventually she vanished completely. It was very comforting until my mind’s eye replaced the glare by replaying, for the millionth time, the hideous vision of my husband shagging Cathy Colloway.

So that was it. Of course David Tennant had not come to visit me, and probably I had invented the now invisible Miss Smallbone as well. I was having a delayed mental spasm. I know people who are very proud of their sanity, like my pontificating neighbour in Chambers, but my mother always told me that those are the ones you’ve got to watch.

The hideous vision in my mind’s eye was in super high definition, as if in close up on a television so expensive that even I, a reasonably successful young barrister, could not afford unless I got married to another reasonably successful young barrister, like Gavin, who I had got married to, but who I wasn’t married to any more, not in any significant sense like him buying me big televisions on which to watch visions of him have sex with someone else. The picture in my mind’s eye, which I believe some brain scientists might call a ‘memory,’ is the one I saw when I got off the lift on the wrong floor in my hotel, still in my wedding dress (halter-neck cream sheath, rose-buds, short oval train spreading in satiny, semi-circular ripples) and decided to climb the stairs instead of waiting for another. Standing with his back to me in corner of the stairwell was Gavin, the trousers of his morning suit (hired, though I had begged him to buy one) around his ankles, pasty buttocks juddering. He has quite good legs, albeit covered in ginger fuzz. There are always spots on his bottom, which, please don’t hate me, I liked squeezing. There was a ripe one low on his left buttock. Cathy Calloway had spent the day looking beautiful in the kind of floaty English summer dress that only rock stars and aristocrats can get away with, because it only looks amazing if it looks like you’ve just thrown it on. Her silver slippers hooked together in the shelf above Gavin’s heaving bum, and however hard I examine the super-high-definition picture, I can find no flaw in her rocking, bored-seeming legs.

She saw me when she stretched her arms (perfect, one platinum bangle) behind Gavin’s head to check her watch. She registered my shock, saw that the die was cast, started moaning and grinding like someone in a film, and bit Gavin’s earlobe. All this time, her eyes never left mine, and she never stopped smiling. Finally, I regained control over my body, or lost it completely, and I was sick. Gavin didn’t notice, because he was coming. Cathy grinned wider, and whispered in Gavin’s ear, loud enough for me to hear, ‘Look behind you, big boy.’

The reason I froze when I saw them locked together was that the picture of them together was so unreal. Not just shocking, but unreal. I don’t think I am being vain, but… Okay. Here it is. One of the things that shocked me was that, in my head, Gavin was lucky to have got me, and here he was, on our wedding day, when he should have been grateful, shagging someone so far out of his league that she might as well have been playing a different game.

This is a really embarrassing admission for me. It’s bad to look at people and judge them like that, not so very far away from saying one type of person is ‘better’ than another type, which I’m sensitive to, like any mixed race girl who went to an almost-all-white English public school. But, hidden in my crappy soul, I clearly believed that I was a better catch than Gavin. I know I’m not hideous – there have always been boys who are interested – and my friends say I’m funny, though they’re my friends, so who can trust them? And anyway, Gavin’s not bad. He’s a bit boring, but he’s got great prospects, which we girls are supposed to value. And he was never actually an arse until the day of the wedding, when he seemed to have a personality transplant.

Okay. In the interests of strict honesty, one of the reasons I thought I was out of his league was that three of my best friends told me, quite separately, early on in the relationship, that I could do better. And late on, they asked if I was sure. I pretended to be offended, but the reason I was irritated was that deep down I thought they might be right, but it was easy for them to say, because they all had long-term boyfriends and husbands. If I’d been properly angry, I wouldn’t have invited them to the wedding.

But in spite of wrongly thinking I was out of Gavin’s league, it’s not as if I think I’m amazing. I do know some amazing people. My pontificating neighbour, for instance, played international rugby until he mangled his knee, and then, instead of getting depressed about it, he became a barrister and set up a huge Charitable Foundation simply by asking a load of city boys asking them to put a quarter of a single year’s bonus into it. That’s amazing, and I’m just not. It was a sad day for me when I realised that I would never be Lord Chief Justice or marry a prince, but it was also not a sad day, because if you live your life dreaming of things like that, you will always be disappointed.

So here I was, having a mental spasm. I had imagined David Tennant in my office, and I had imagined him saying I was ‘the Chosen One.’ My brain wanted me to be special, and after what had happened with Gavin, who could blame it? I blinked a few times. Miss Smallbone was still there. I didn’t know how she fitted into the spasm. Was I so far gone that Chambers had sent for help? ‘Are you a psychiatrist?’ I asked. ‘Am I going crazy?’

‘Snap out of it, Mary Sue,’ she replied. We don’t have time for this. I want you to be thinking clearly, so that you are receptive to a real shock, which is when your mind will open to what we have to tell you.’

‘I can’t believe you don’t think I’m shocked! I’m totally in shock. I imagined you came in here with David Tennant!’

‘I’m sorry about this,’ she said, and looked back out of the window. ‘Gavin’s back from Mauritius.’

‘How do you know?’ She said nothing, her gaze fixed on the courtyard. I heard a shout and rushed to join her just in time to see David Tennant cut off my husband’s head with a glittering sword.