Another Sad Story For Emily

Part One:

“Requests,” she cried, “I’m open to requests.”

“Tell us about your Father,” came the reply from the front left corner of the audience- a man’s voice, forty-something, flat and particularly Northern.

She lowered her notes to peer into the smoggy darkness and, having ruled out two elderly women and a young chap, inappropriately clad in a fireman’s coat, finally placed the voice inside the mouth of a bearded gentleman occupying the furthest seat in the second row.

“Which Father?” she replied, staring unblinkingly into the black hole of the second row, “I’m currently on my seventh.”

The quip was enough to raise a small, incestuous snigger from the right corner of the stage; the area normally occupied by her current lovers, the close associates of current lovers, several sniffling ex-lovers and those determined, and therefore lately estranged, associates of former lovers now decamped to her entourage.

(She held no illusions about these formally close associates of ex-lovers, understanding that their loyalty lay not with her, nor even the content of her nightly performances, but rather, in the feverish pursuit of her fame and the furious afterglory which had lately fashioned itself to her heels. She tolerated the formally close associates of ex-lovers, taking note of their failures on napkins and business cards; mean, little incidents to be turn-tailed at the first sign of flight.)

The snigger folded into itself and slid down the back of the piano. A funereal silence resumed.

“Any Father is fine,” the bearded man said. She could hear the squeak of stackable chairs shuffling as the audience repositioned their collective backsides in anticipation of a story. Reaching under the lectern she found, to her annoyance, not the specifically requested 500 ml bottle of chilled Evian, but rather a tumbler of lukewarm tap water, ineffectively protected by a paper doiley. A sodden blue bottle was making half-hearted attempts at the backstroke, circling spastically across the surface of the water. She replaced the tumbler untouched, cleared her throat and launched into her five hundred and seventy first sad story of the year.

“When I was seven years old,” she began, rising up on the toes of her sneakers to address the back row of the audience, “We lost my father. I was very sad. The year was 1983. It had not been a good year for the Andersons. This was the third father of the year and it was only April. The first had been a tax consultant and the second a hairdresser, specializing in natural looking highlights for both ladies and gentlemen. Each had been a perfectly adequate father figure, attending the requisite PTA meetings, reading the odd bedtime story and on one notable occasion taking the entire family on a mini-break to Edinburgh. (This incident, I seem to recall, should be attributed to the tax consultant.) However, we Anderson children, though sad to lose two such adequately equipped fathers, were far from inconsolable. Experience had taught us that the world was full of great fathers, the knack was to advance up, rather than down, the father ladder, trading in an adequate model for a good model, followed by a great model and thus, if God should choose to fall on our side, potentially a really wonderful father might be acquired before we reached our teenage years.”

“The third father of 1983 was extremely good, verging, in fact, on the possibly of great. We were determined to keep him for six months at least and, as a security measure, took to tying him to the dining room chairs. Utilizing everything we’d learnt in our combined thirteen years of scouting and guiding, we sewed him to his chair, stitched him in with fishing wire, braided him like a Barbie doll, taped him, tied him, knitted him down like a three point sermon, until we were absolutely, one hundred percent certain we would not lose another father.”

“On the morning of the third week, we came down for breakfast to find the Rice Crispies packet in sole occupation of the breakfast table. Our, “extremely good, verging on the possibility of great,” father was gone, leaving behind him nothing but a trail of fishing line and French knitting, unravelling in the direction of the train station. “It’s not your fault children,” our Mother said, lining us up in steps and stairs, “If anyone’s to blame, it’s me; that man had knives for fingers. God himself, couldn’t have kept him tied to the one place.” She was right. The next week but one we got a new father. Though no one mentioned the decline we all knew he was not quite as wonderful as our previous father.”

To signify the end of the story, she shuffled her notes purposefully and slid them under the lectern, raising and lowering the water tumbler to act as a paperweight.

The entire middle section of the audience were already sniffling into their programs, fishing in blazer pockets and handbags for unused tissues. In the back, by the fire exit sign, a woman was weeping uncontrollably, rocking backwards and forwards in her stackable seat. The chair legs, lifting up and down in time with her grief, beat a metronome on the wooden floor, lending a symphonic air to the room’s collective sorrow.

Carefully, very carefully, for fear of outshining the sadness, she slipped one half step back from the microphone, hung her head in perfect semblance of a dead tulip and apologized.

“Sorry,” she said, with all the calculated gravity of a trainee undertaker. (It was a lie, large as the Atlantic Ocean and similarly swelling, for she could barely recall the last time she’d enjoyed a moment of genuine sorrow.)

She had, however, come to pride herself on these final five seconds of a performance.

She said a good sorry; the best in the business one reviewer had claimed. And, though the apologetics were all part of the act- a gracious nod to the longstanding tradition of sad story telling- they served as a barrier between entertainment and the tragic portrait of six dozen full-grown adults paying twelve pounds fifty for the privilege of being faintly disheartened, or in one case, thoroughly undone. By delivering a convincing benediction, she allowed her audience to end the evening moist-eyed and fashioned with a scapegoat- a sad story, twice removed- upon which to blame those larger sadnesses which could not be fixed with time or money.

The people of the British Isles required an outlet for their accumulating sadness and she was able to offer them just such an outlet- neatly packaged, discrete and conveniently located- for twelve pounds fifty a pop or fifteen pounds at weekends.

The people of the British Isles were grateful to her, and to all those who had come before her, bearing the nation’s sadness like a broken record. They paid good money, three times a year, five or six times in the case of the truly heart-cut, to cry, long and hard, over someone else’s misfortune, avoiding at all costs the acknowledgement of their own soul-sick state.

And thus the tradition of sad story telling had passed from one able-voiced individual to the next, finally finding itself smirking up at her sneaker-clad feet. In recent years the responsibility for the nation’s collective sadness, though officially shared amongst some twenty five capable individuals, had rested heaviest upon her cold shoulders. For this honor, and the press coverage which came with it, she feigned martyrdom and thanked the Lord nightly with spirit-soaked gratitude.

Sorries said and stories told she began to edge towards the stage door. She was keen to leave on the popular side of early. It was only 8:30 and there were three perfectly good drinking hours left in the day, four if she took the liberty of rounding down.

Several members of the audience were already on their feet, fumbling with coat buttons and handbags, mislaid in the dark. A general murmur of contentment bobbled backwards and forwards, doughy-eyed with the crush which comes in the wake of a truly good cry.

At the back of the hall the custodian, also anxious to escape before 9, raised the house lights. The room suddenly shrugged and bled a bright, Damascan white. The second row, now exposed, revealed a bearded man standing upon a stackable chair, waving his hand wildly in the general direction of the stage.

It was impossible to ignore him, positioned as he was, in full view of the strip lighting.

“Excuse me, Miss Anderson, I have a question?” The second row shouted, continuing to make his presence felt, right arm like a flagpole, left hand rising in anticipation of a meeting.

“Fire ahead, “ she replied and her own voice, burrowing its way from the bottom of her heels seemed to take an eternity to emerge, like steam rumbling arthritically through the pipes and bellows of some ancient bathroom radiator.”

“Well, it’s not so much a question, as an observation,” he continued, stepping from his stackable chair and approaching the stage, where he found himself at eye-level with her stocking-clad knees.

“Please continue.”

“You didn’t make me cry,” he said, “Not even a little bit. I’ve seen Meg Ryan movies sadder than your stories.”

He wasn’t lying.

She could tell.

She knew lies and she knew the cut of sadness. She looked briefly into his eyes, which were brown and black and occasionally gray, and could not find the slightest stroke of sorriness, only a little something similar to a snigger. Panning back she caught the impending approach of her own comeuppance, hesitating in each of his seventy odd eyelashes.

The desire to shed her performance shoes, to run away rather quickly and never return another phone call was crouching seductively in the heel of her left stiletto. She screwed it firmly into the floorboards, reached for his hand and upon finding it, shook long and hard to her own downfall.

“Emily Ames Anderson,” she said.

“I know,” he replied. It would be several weeks before he offered so much as a surname in return.

For the first time in nineteen years Emily Ames Anderson felt inclined to proper tears.

Part Two:

Emily Ames Anderson had been three years old when she wrote her first sad story. Fashioned from alphabetty spaghetti on a plastic dinner plate, this story ran to some, twenty six characters and recorded, succinctly and with Joycian flair, the unfortunate fate of two guinea pigs and a much-loved hamster; unwitting victims of the Winter’s first freeze.

By the age of six she had been banned from reading aloud, having driven the entire Primary Two class, teacher included, to casual hysterics with her “What I did this Summer essay;” a work, it should be noted, of Shakespearean tragedy which plumbed, from the pre-school perspective, the oceanic depths of human suffering and vacationing in Eastbourne.

At thirteen, two elderly ladies had fallen out of their chairs and later died of sadness whilst listening to her, ad-libbed Virgin Mary, in the Sunday School nativity. “What a tragedy,” the Vicar’s wife was overheard muttering through intermittent sobs, “To give birth to Jesus Christ in a stable. Have you ever heard anything as sad in your whole, entire life?”

Buckling under the weight of responsibility Emily Ames Anderson had simply stopped speaking, holding her tongue all the way through middle school and grammar until the advent of her eighteenth birthday and imminent departure for university, had forced her to break silence.

“Sweetheart,” her father had said, reaching across the Sunday papers to embrace his silent daughter’s wrist, “You’ll starve at university if you don’t speak up for yourself.”

“Perhaps,” Emily Ames Anderson replied, uttering her first words of the new millennium, “The world would be a happier place if I did starve.”

These twelve words formed the saddest sentence ever uttered in Mr. Anderson’s presence. Moved to tiny tears, (and later sobs,) the upset had been big enough to put him off both his Sunday morning fry and the complimentary perusal of the sports section.

Emily Ames Anderson, fully aware of the devastation lurking behind her teeth, had continued to measure her words carefully throughout the Spring and Summer of her eighteenth year. Friendless, for the most part, she took a part-time job in the local bookstore, stacking books, filling orders and stocktaking in companionable silence. During her lunch breaks, and the ten minute time outs scheduled for long-term smokers of cigarettes and drinkers of coffee, she had climbed the fire escape stairs and hidden beneath a large golf umbrella, (for this was, after all, British Summer Time,) she had devoured every sad story in the building.

Starting with the Russians she had made her way backwards through the Bible. Paddling for three straight weeks in the shallower ends of Shakespeare and Greece, she had finally arrived, unrepentant at the feet of Hemingway, whom she’d pronounced to no one but her own quiet head, “simply not sad enough.”

An entire Summer of morbid reading had driven Emily Ames Anderson to conversion point. By the beginning of September, just three weeks shy of enrollment at the local polytechnic, she had been forced to admit that the world, in particular the provincial corner of Great Britain, in which she’d currently found herself located, required the telling, and subsequent retelling of terribly sad stories.

“There’s a little slice of all of us,” she’d finally admitted to herself, “Which wants to fall apart.”

Moved by this realization Emily Ames Anderson had given up on the notion of further education and formed a convincing, and subsequently successful argument in favor of full time employment at the bookstore. Impressed by her commitment to literature in general, and their literature in particular, the owners soon began to allow Emily Ames Anderson freedom above and beyond her eighteen years. And Emily Ames Anderson, for the first time in eighteen years, purposefully employed, had taken those two yards of freedom offered and stretched them into two square miles. By Christmas of her first year she had hijacked three bookshelves, previously occupied by the local interest section, and was enjoying a surprisingly steady trade in sad stories. Business had boomed and by Easter of the following year, an entire corner of the bookstore had been set aside for sad stories and the malignant buyers of sad stories.

When the canon of existing literary sadness had been exhausted Emily Ames Anderson simply moved into the realms of adaptation. Under her careful hand War and Peace became simply, War. Cold Comfort Farm lost its comforting edge and Great Expectations found itself significantly reduced to the much less palatable Lowered Expectations.

Within a year she’d been promoted to assistant manager. Under her partial management the bookstore had developed into one of those specialized bookstores, catering to the needs of a very particular demographic; in this case, people who liked to cry.

When asked, as she often had been, “Who the bloody Hell is reading all these sad stories?” Emily Ames Anderson simply smiled and gave her usual answer, “Very ordinary people. People just like yourself actually. Ugly people, people who can’t bring themselves to fall in love, people who fall in love too easily, people without friends, people who don’t like the friends they’ve got; people who hate their jobs but don’t know how to do anything else. Everyone needs to feel sad about something.”

This observation in and of itself was often enough to get the listener fumbling for a tissue.

As the weeks had tripped into months and she began to anticipate the advent of her third year in the bookstore Emily Ames Anderson started to gain attention, notoriety even, nationally and shortly thereafter, internationally. From time to time an actual customer would still slouch through the front door muttering something along the lines of, “My wife just left me. I feel like shit. Do you have anything really, really sad I could read.” Or, occasionally, “My dog just died. I really loved that damn dog. I just want to be miserable for a while. What can you recommend?”

More often than not, however, these actual, physical customers, had given precedence to the shady, half-persons who populated her inbox; emailing at ungodly, pain-drenched hours, demanding tear-jerkers, unhappy endings and “something similar to Lord of the Rings but much, much sadder.”

Emily Ames Anderson had yet to fail a customer.

Her knowledge of tragic stories began with Shakespeare and encompassed the full canon of English literature, lately flirting with those Latin American and Eastern European authors who’d soldiered bravely into the miry depths of untold sorrow.

Where an appropriate tale did not yet exist, Emily Ames Anderson had simply picked up her pen and written another sad story, specifically catering towards the needs of each individual customer. Over the years she found herself celebrating the entire spectrum of human suffering, offering a literary antidote to lost partners, pets, jobs and, on several occasions, limbs and movable appendages.

It had not taken long for the full-grown Emily to realize that she was just as capable, if not more keenly trained in tragedy, than the sorry-mouthed little girl she had once been. Though it had taken some ten years to take hold, Emily Ames Anderson found herself fully convinced that the ability to orchestrate hysterics was not the burden it had once been, but rather a blessing from God himself, comparable to wings or running really fast.

And so, when the man from the Institute had arrived in the bookstore, clutching a copy of her latest sad story, Emily Ames Anderson was more than ready for the next chapter.

“Excuse me miss,” the man had said, baring down on the countertop like a wet weekend, “Did you write this?”

He’d pressed a copy of her latest book into the table top, sliding it dully towards her.

“Yes,” she’d replied. It was impossible to deny, for a Polaroid likeness of the author was taped to the back cover.

“I need your help,” he continued, and because he’d been wearing a thin-striped shirt, creased like a brown paper bag, she’d made the obvious assumption of a wife recently left home, more likely than not, in the company of an immoral brother-in-law or business partner.

“Can I point you in the direction of our sad story department? We have some excellent books about abandoned husbands. I’m sure you’ll find something appropriate.”

“No, thank you. I’m not interested in purchasing a book. It’s you I need.”

“I’m sorry. I’m afraid I’m not for sale.”

“Let me explain myself. My name is Greene. I work for the Institute of Sad Stories. We’re based in Birmingham. I’m sure you’ve heard of us.”

She had.

“We’re very much interested in your work Miss Anderson. We’d like to offer you a job. “

“I have a job,” she’d replied.

“This job would be better. Two hundred dates a year, reading your stories in front of a live audience.”

“I have a job.”

“I’m sure you’d like this job better. The people of Great Britain need you Miss Anderson. Everyone wants to fall apart once in a while and there are very few people as naturally blessed in the necessary mechanics as you appear to be. Please consider joining the institute. Think what an honor it would be; using your gift to serve your country.”

“I have a job.”

“Perhaps, you might be convinced to reconsider,” Mr Greene had said, raising the book to reveal a check made out to Emily Ames Anderson.

Emily Ames Anderson had, without flinching, counted five fat zeros and a pound sign, before slipping the check, unmentioned, into her breast pocket.

Within a fortnight she had resigned from the bookstore and signed up for a twelve week tour of the British Isles, performing nightly shows in a series of increasingly packed Scout halls, Working Men’s Clubs and Primary School auditoriums.

Though ill-acquainted with the deeper realms of happiness, Emily Ames Anderson was no longer quite as sad as her stories suggested.


Part Three:

By the next evening the bearded man had progressed to the front row.

He began to make his presence known within the opening seconds of her show, hacking willfully into a paper tissue every time she paused for breath. In the back burn of the stage lights she could pick out two dry eyes and a massive grin, burrowing out of his bearded face.

By the interval Emily Ames Anderson could no longer concentrate on the sadness. The man in the front row was the loudest thing in the entire room.

During the thirty minutes break between first and second halves, she considered, from the solace of her dressing room, the possibility of having him removed from both this building and all future buildings she might choose to enter. However, having not yet had opportunity, (or need,) to test the outer limits of her celebrity she was unsure if such widescale partisanship was possible, let alone justifiable.

After twenty five minutes of utter silence, purposefully accompanied by two large gin and tonics, Emily Ames Anderson returned to the stage slightly inebriated and freshly convinced of her own God-given ability to sadden the masses.

But the bearded man was insidious. During the opening sections of the second half she found herself fighting the urge to smile. All the while both corners of her mouth worked against her, dragging ever upwards to meet her eyebrows. By the middle part of the routine, she had fabricated a wild, alcoholic hiccup, in an ungainly attempt to halt, or at the very least alter, the chuckle progressing up her throat. The final few paragraphs of the evening were delivered from behind an open hand, offering both a brief respite from the unrelenting glare of the audience, and the opportunity, sinful as it was, to recount the fictional death of her grandfather, with a broad grin plastered across her face.

Emily Ames Anderson’s eyebrows, it should be noted, had always worked against her; they rose playfully like two arched smiles and thus the gathered masses found it virtually impossible to enter into the onstage masquerade. For the first time in five years Emily Ames Anderson found herself unable to make an audience cry.

That night, driven by the desire to be elsewhere- absolutely anywhere outside the four wooden walls of the East Latimer Village Hall- she cut her set short, (purposefully excising the morbid account of her second husband’s untimely demise,) slipped out the fire exit and drove all the way up the M1 at one hundred and ten miles an hour, gin bottle lodged firmly between her thighs.

The next night the man returned, slipping in late, just as the house lights died. The following night he was early; sole occupant of the entire middle section for a good ten pre-performance minutes. The fourth and fifth nights he refused to sit and therefore spent the greater part of three hours, languishing menacingly against the back wall of the room.

On the sixth night- a Sunday, no less- she approached him in the interval. Not counting the homeless man who lived on her apartment steps, it had been almost a week since Emily Ames Anderson last made someone cry. The worry of it had driven her to five straight nights of insomnia. As a result her left eye now trailed two beats shy of the right. She wore sunglasses to mask the problem. Even inside.

“What the Hell do you think you’re doing?” she asked, lowering herself into the chair next to the bearded man. “I can’t concentrate with you staring at me every night. Are you some kind of stalker or what?”

The man said nothing. He checked the time on his wristwatch, uncrossed his legs and stretched them straight beneath the chair in front, revealing several inches of white sports sock cupping the gap between trouser leg and shoe.

Emily Ames Anderson could feel the itch of him, gathering menacingly just below her fingernails. It was all she could do to keep from scratching.

“I’d like you to leave now,” she said, measuring her words in perfect one syllable shots.

“No,” he replied, “I’m staying put. You need me.”

Emily Ames Anderson had not been expecting this. She choked on her own tongue, spluttering all over the man’s beard. The taste of gin rose to meet her.

“Excuse me, what did you just say?”

“You need me.”

“I don’t need you.”

“Oh, you may not think you need me but you’ll soon realize that you do.”

“I don’t need anyone, least of all you.”

“It’s started already hasn’t it? You’ve found yourself smiling in the most inappropriate places; out and out laughing in the middle of a story and you simply can’t stop it. You’re not as sad as you used to be. You’ve noticed. Your audiences will soon start to notice. Let me assure you Miss Anderson, you need me more than you’ll ever admit.”

“I don’t understand,” she started to say but the house lights were already lowering, signaling the start of the second half. She shuffled towards the stage and trundled through an all too cheery performance of what had previously been her very best material. When the house lights came up they revealed the empty space front centre, previously occupied by the bearded man and, at the back of the hall, an elderly couple angrily demanding their money back.

The following night was Monday and Mondays had always been her evenings off. She spent the evening and early hours of the next morning with a former lover. The former lover, though hesitant to point out the obvious, was well aware of abnormalities in Emily Ames Anderson’s behavior.

“Do you enjoy kissing me?” he asked, reaching across the bed to pinch her arm.

“Yes,” she replied. It was the truth.

“You’ve never enjoyed kissing me before have you?”

“No,” she replied. It was also the truth. She ran a cautious tongue across her lips and wondered what was happening to her. For the first time in absolutely forever she considered the possibility of lovers, former or otherwise, who would last longer than the pre-ordained three weeks.

“Can I stay tomorrow night too?” she asked and the words sad oddly in her mouth, like an extra set of teeth.

“Of course you can,” the former lover replied and smiled a painfully honest smile all the way into her armpit.

Emily Ames Anderson had never before made anyone smile. Her insides felt adrift.

The following night the bearded man was nowhere to be seen. She insisted upon reading with the full beams on, constantly scanning the room over the shuffled edge of her notes. Tuesdays were not by nature popular nights on the entertainment circuit but this one seemed ridiculously tight. Just eight people had shown up to watch her perform. Two were former lovers and of the remaining six, Emily Ames Anderson recognized three as members of her soon to be floundering fan club. The caretaker and what could only be the caretaker’s wife accounted for a further two audience members leading Emily Ames Anderson to admit that her appeal had somewhat diminished over the course of a single week. This evening she made no pretence of sadness, reading through her notes at a righteous clip and, on several sobering occasions, giving into the spate of giggles twinkling at the base of her tongue.

No one cried. One of the former lovers, recipient of a guest list pass, made a successful demand to be reimbursed. Emily Ames Anderson for all her troubles made exactly twelve pounds fifty for an entire evening’s work. She left quickly via the bathroom window and cursed the bearded man seven shades of sorry all the way back to her former lover’s front door.

“Back again?” the former lover asked as he opened the door. He was wearing a football shirt under his bathrobe.

“I guess so,” she replied.

“Well, if this is going to be a habit we’ll have to look into cutting you a front door key.”

The talk of front door keys had previously terrified Emily Ames Anderson. Tonight it didn’t.

Two days later she received a front door key. Three days later Greene from the institute called her on the telephone. Emily Ames Anderson ignored the first and second messages, answered the third only to find Greene had already hung up, and on the fourth attempt finally felt brave enough to risk conversation.

The former lover, summonsed urgently from the kitchen sink held her hand comfortingly throughout. In his other hand he held a potato peeler, recently used. The former lover could not keep from grinning inanely, and Emily Ames Anderson, though well aware of the solemn situation waiting on the other end of the receiver, had a hard time staying sad herself.

“Yes?” she said, purposefully slinging a question mark on to the end of the syllable.

“Young lady,” replied Greene, “We are not amused.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know full well what I mean.”

The former lover, having found the flip side of Emily Ames Anderson’s ear was making it extremely difficult to concentrate on the conversation.

“I’m sure I don’t Mr. Greene.”

“Now, don’t play coy with me Miss Anderson. You have one week to get sad again. One week or you’re fired. We can’t be having you gallivanting round the United Kingdom making people happy while you’re employed by the Institute. One week and you’re out on your ear, no excuses. Do you hear me?”

“Yes Sir,” she began to reply but Greene had already hung up, his voice fading irretrievably into the dialing tone.

“Gosh,” she said, passing the handset to her former lover, “I have one week to get sad or I’ll lose my job.”

(It was not the loss of job which particularly bothered Emily Ames Anderson so much as the magazine articles, the floor-length dresses, former lovers and chat show appearances which kept her ticking from one mediocre moment to the next.)

“Oh dear,” replied the former lover, “It looks like you’re stuck being happy with me. Maybe we should get married and make it official.”

Though the former lover wasn’t taking things seriously Emily Ames Anderson agreed.

(The former lover was a hot shot banker, simultaneously based in five different European cities. The former lover had three houses and a downtown apartment. The former lover could open a beer bottle with his own teeth. The former lover had arrived at the somewhat elderly age of thirty eight years with all original hair attached. Emily Ames Anderson made a quick list of pro’s and con’s and without the slightest intention of ever being actually wed said yes. It was, after all, essential to have a back up plan if the sadness did not come back.)

“Let’s do it quickly,” Emily Ames Anderson whispered in the former lover’s ear, “One week today seems as good a time as any.”

“Done,” he replied and engaged her with the ring pull from a Seven Up can, which for all his anxious forcing, refused to budge further than half an inch down her marriage finger.

That night, while dreaming a bitter pickle of happy ever after dreams, Emily Ames Anderson unknowingly sliced her own cheek open with the angry side of her engagement ring.

The next morning, the bearded man was waiting for her on the doorstep.


Part Four:

“What happened to your face?” the bearded man asked, rising to run a finger tenderly across her cheek.

Emily Ames Anderson winced and stepped away from his hand, tripping, as she did, over the welcome mat.

“I got engaged,” she replied. It was hardly conclusive but the bearded man seemed quite content to fill in the gaps. She tried to smile like a believable newly wed and finding exuberant joy undoable, made a half-hearted attempt at general mirth. What emerged was something akin to an early-morning grimace. (Smiling, she noted, was something of a stretch, when caught between a bearded inquisitor and a former lover’s front door.)

“Nice ring,” he said indicating the Seven Up pull, which had jammed itself between her knuckles, “Tiffany’s I presume.”

Incapable of an appropriate, (or even righteously inappropriate,) response, Emily Ames Anderson simply slid past the bearded man’s shoulder and began marching purposefully in the direction of her car.

Of course he followed, easily keeping pace with her heavily-heeled strides.

“Still happy?” he asked.

“Leave me alone,” she shouted.

“I can help. You just have to ask.”

“Leave me alone. I have a rape alarm and I will use it.”

“You’re only going to get happier and happier.”

“Maybe I want to be happy.”

“I don’t believe you for a minute, Emily.”

“Maybe I’m tired of being sad all the time.”

She stopped walking and turned to face him head on. His shirt, she noted, hadn’t changed in any of their half dozen meetings.

“That may well be the case but there’s a world of difference between wanting to be happy and not wanting to be sad,” he continued, “I know your sort. You’re not the kind of girl predisposed to eternal happiness. You like your magazine covers too much to throw it all away.”

Emily Ames Anderson was listening now, offering the bearded man her full, undivided attention. The Seven Up pull on her left hand began to throb slightly.

“I’m listening.” She said, and she really was. She hooked one heel into the gap between pavement and curb, and hung there, waiting heavily on his next few words.

“Not much to tell,” the bearded man replied, “Just give me the word and I guarantee you’ll be good and miserable by this time next week.”

“Done,” she said, though she didn’t quite believe him. “Now if we shake on it, will you piss off once and for all?”

Emily Ames Anderson stretched her right hand across the silence, ready to make it official.

“I don’t do handshakes,” he replied and left. It would be one full week before she saw him again.

The week trundled on; terrible shows, ever-decreasing audiences and evenings wasted, wedding planning from the bottom of her former lover’s bed. Caught up in the crunch of guest lists and bridesmaids’ dresses, Emily Ames Anderson had little time left for worrying about the bearded man.

Banished from the waking hours, he began to find increasingly inventive ways to wheedle his way into her thoughts. On Sunday evening he snuck menacingly into her dreams, coming after her with a stringless tennis racket. On Monday night he was back, drinking tea from a milk jug. On Tuesday evening Emily Ames Anderson, much to the former lover’s amusement, fell asleep with a pair of cotton earbuds lodged in each ear, guarding against the possibility of any unwanted visitors. She slept long and hard dreaming herself Jesus Christ in a sheepskin coat.

Waking the next morning she found it difficult to explain the association.

She had not been the obvious kind of Jesus.

The Jesus dreams continued for the remainder of the week, keeping the bearded man at gunpoint, somewhere on the other side of consciousness. The Jesus dreams remained difficult to explain and so Emily Ames Anderson kept them to herself, tucking them tightly under her pillow, lest the former lover over-react and call the whole thing off.

She was not Jesus in the obvious sense.

At no point did she attempt to raise the dead, to preach the Gospel or heal the sick. She had yet to be crucified, even unsuccessfully. She had performed no miraculous deed, literal or metaphorical. In fact most all of the dreams were of a mundane nature: face-washing, walking from one end of a field to the other, sleeping, or in one incidence, preparing and eating a sandwich, (cheese and pickle on sourdough bread.) And yet, hours after waking, Emily Ames Anderson remained adamantly convinced that she had, even in the most insignificant acts, been Jesus Christ.

Dull as the Jesus dreams were, they soon found their way into the festive muddle of becoming married.

At first the she simply felt stiller and less inclined to cry over those things which could be fixed with time or money. Later in the week she felt still enough to cry openly over the things which could not be fixed with time or money. It was a different sort of sorry, never before tasted by Emily Ames Anderson. It was a kind of movable sorry- frisky round the edges- and more than capable of getting things done.

The being of Jesus, she realized, was an ever-expanding thing; like a fungus.

Greene from the Institute, called twice: once on Tuesday evening, once on Thursday evening, his voice rising to radio pitch on the second call.

“Relax,” she replied, already lowering the receiver, “I’ve still got twenty four hours. Call me tomorrow. I’ll be miserable as sin, I’m sure.”

It was a lie. Emily Ames Anderson, having wasted a quarter decade in the pursuit of permanent misery, had no intention of being anything but blissful for the rest of her living years. That evening, just sixteen hours short of her impending marriage, she turned to the former lover, instant coffee in hand, and made the sentiment concrete.

“I’m not getting sad again,” she said.

“Never?” he said.

“Never, ever. I think I might have lost my sadness.”

“I don’t believe you. No one’s one hundred percent content.”

(Emily Ames Anderson drunk deep from her coffee mug, resisting the urge to open her mouth and blurt out the terrible truth, “I think I might be. I dream that I’m Jesus Christ every night. I’ve forgotten how to be anything other than still and happy and terribly, custardly dull.”)

“Would you still love me?” she asked chewing on the corner of her lip, “If I was one hundred per cent content every single second for the rest of my life.”

“Of course,” the former lover replied, reaching to twist the Seven Up pull round her marriage finger. It pinched ferociously. “But you’re not going to be one hundred per cent content for the rest of your life. I love you- we all love you- because you’re a little bit mean. I’m happy that you’re happy sweetheart, but when you get mean and melancholy again, I’ll be happy with that too: it keeps things sharp.”

“What if I don’t get sad again?”

“That’s ridiculous Emily, you’re the saddest person I know.”

“But I can’t tell sad stories any more.”

“Of course you can, you’re just not trying hard enough. You’re on a temporary high from sleeping in my bed every night.”

And with this, the former lover attempted to humor her, crawling across the bed to find the underside of her ear.

“Tell me another sad story Emily,” he whispered, “I want to cry so much that the bed grows flippers and floats out the bedroom window. I want to cry until my eyelids shrivel up like cranberry raisins. I want to cry a swimming pool for the back yard so we have somewhere to swim if it ever gets hot.”

“Oh, shut up,” she said. The former lover was being ridiculous.

She closed her eyes, lowered her head unto the pillow and tried to concentrate.

“In 1965,” she began, “When my father was thirteen years old and fast in love with an older lady, the city of London was plagued by a terrible rain storm.

The rainclouds, making their way softly from South to North, had been instructed to float high over the surface of the Thames. Upon reaching the Thames, however, each cloud turned curious tourist, floating closer and lower for a better view of the Houses of Parliament, of Hyde Park and the pin-striped commuters making their way backwards and forwards across the Thames, until finally the first cloud found himself caught upon the pinnacle of Tower Bridge. Too late he thought to warn the others, and thus, all but one of the rainclouds became firmly lodged upon the higher fixtures and fittings of London town, quickly tearing open to release torrents of unforgiving rain. Mercilessly engorged, the Thames swole solidly for a week becoming, in the process, a seething sludge of piss and mud and watery sin which engulfed, without discretion, anything shorter than ten foot six. London drowned and my thirteen year old father, imprisoned in Liverpool Street could do nothing but dream of his older lady, imprisoned on the far side of Covent Gardens.

On the fifteenth day of the flood, my father, driven by desperation and an unfortunate predisposition to “good ideas,” decided to paddle his way to Covent Gardens on a block of butcher’s ice.

For two straight days my father battled the swell of the Thames on an ever-shrinking iceberg. His feet, swathed in a pair of pea green Wellington boots, fused solid to the surface of the ice as it shrunk from king-size bed to sofa, armchair and finally a square, roughly the shape and size of a tabloid newspaper. For direction he used two hockey sticks, bound by elastic bands to his elbows and wrists. By Piccadilly it had become glaringly obvious that my father was willfully ill-equipped for the adventure at hand. For two days and two nights, he drifted at the mercy of the swollen Thames, the only notion keeping him afloat an over-played future memory of the older lady, charmed and delighted to peer from her bedroom window only to find him floating heroically in the river below. “It will all be worth it,” my father told himself, “When she realizes I have come to rescue her, and finally, for the first time in the six months of our casual acquaintance, sees past my thirteen small years, to the giant within.” This thought alone was enough to warm my father for forty eight hours. Even when he found himself pounced upon by starving swans, harassed by the river police and finally, driven to balancing one-footed on a bucket-sized block of ice, this very thought kept him afloat.

Finally, on the morning of the third day, when the ice block was barely large enough to support a pigeon, my father spotted the upper two floors of the older lady’s apartment block. His heart lifted, his teeth thawed and the ice block, having become one with its teenage passenger, rose two inches to meet his impertinence.

“Rosie,” my father cried, cupping both hands to form a megaphone, “I have come to rescue you.”

And Rosie, twenty two years senior and aging by the second, peered down from her rooftop garden and the friends of Rosie, elegantly attired in Macintosh coats and shiny galoshes peered expectantly down from her rooftop garden and the elderly lover of Rosie- twenty five years her senior and aging by the second- peered down from her rooftop garden, tipped his champagne glass towards my father, and exclaimed in a clipped Oxbridge accent, “I say, Rosie, there’s a small boy down there, drowning with two hockey sticks.”

My thirteen year old father promptly sunk and had to be fished out of the river with an ironing board.”

Having finished her sad story, Emily Ames Anderson opened her eyes and glanced over at the former lover. He had fallen asleep on the far edge of the bed, one hand cupped around her knee cap. He was smiling in his sleep. She checked his cheeks. They were perfectly dry.

Emily Ames Anderson turned the bedside lamp out, fell asleep and dreamed she was Jesus Christ reading the Sunday papers on the back patio.


Part Five:

At nine am the seven bridesmaids arrived; individually at first, followed by a pair of sisterly twos.

Emily Ames Anderson ushered each of them over the threshold with a mug of instant coffee and, once congregated, admired each individual dress in turn.

This was a work of supreme, exhausting fiction, time limitations having necessitated that each bridesmaid choose her own, “lovely” dress. Though not specifically suggested by the Bride, all but one, of these “lovely” dresses had manifest in the pastel, meringue persuasion; (the seventh dress, being roughly modeled on an outfit once worn by Cher in the movie, Mermaids.)

Grouped together the bridesmaids were a bad romantic comedy.

Emily Ames Anderson looked long and hard at her nearest and dearest, tugged twice on the Seven-Up pull and reminded herself, dresses aside, just how lucky she was to be happy and dull and marrying the former lover. She backed her pert, little backside- already enhanced by a matronly pair of suck and shove underwear- carefully on to the sofa arm and allowed herself the luxury of a little matrimonial enthusiasm.

“Can you believe I’m getting married this afternoon?” she gushed, “Can you believe it; this time tomorrow I’ll be a married woman?”

Judging from the lack-lustre expressions on the bridesmaids’ faces, the miracle was all but wasted on them.

“Do you have any vodka?” the eldest bridesmaid asked, rifling ineffectively through the former lover’s writing desk, “I think we need some vodka.”

The vodka was duly located and administered in eggcups, the shot glasses having mysteriously disappeared during the early hours of the New Year.

“To Emily and what’s-his-name,” the eldest bridesmaid toasted. All seven bridesmaids, “here, hered,” downed their vodka and instantly agreed to a second, third and fourth shot. (There were only seven eggcups so Emily Ames Anderson drank her shots neat from the upturned end of an old bowling trophy. She tasted dust and metal as she drank. This only served to remind her of those former things so recently passed.)

“It’s strange,” she said, “One week ago everything was different. It’s kind of an odd story how all this happened. Do you ladies, want to hear how we ended up getting married?”

“Maybe another time,” the eldest bridesmaid said, “I don’t think we can be bothered today.”

The youngest bridesmaid- barely twenty three years old with a sweeping side pony- yawned deeply, beginning with her diamond dropped earlobes and working outwards to engulf her entire face.

Emily Ames Anderson, unused to anything aside from over-reaction, pinched herself hard to keep from cursing and followed her bridesmaids up the hall stairs.

They congregated in the upstairs bathroom; lolling against the towel rack, lying spread-eagled across the linoleum floor and perching on the lip of the tub to admire their pastel painted talons. The smallest of the seven clambered into the bathtub and curled up under a large pink towel. Within a matter of minutes she appeared to be asleep. Encouraged by the rise and fall of two fat lungs the towel slipped from her shoulders to expose the last blush of a week-old hickey.

Emily Ames Anderson, anticipating a good two hours of primping, of fluffing and fluster clucking, positioned herself upon a wooden stool and waited to be made beautiful. The better part of her was ballooning like a pair of parachutes, caught up in the bitter thrill of plummeting into the previously unknown. “It will be good to be dull and married,” she thought, “To know exactly which side I sleep on. To smile occasionally. To dream of Jesus every night for the next fifty five years. It will be good and dull to be married.”

“Right,” she said, “Shall we start with hair, or make up?”

None of the six remaining bridesmaids- the smallest having fully succumbed now to the lure of the bathtub- ventured a response, so she lifted a hairbrush from the rack beside the washbasin and waved it purposefully under the nose of the largest bridesmaid.

“Maybe,” replied the largest bridesmaid, speaking into the hairbrush as if it were a microphone, “We should have a little rest before we get started.”

“A rest,” echoed the five remaining bridesmaids, “A rest sounds like a good idea,” and promptly unhooked towels, bathrobes and washcloths from their various spots before folding them into makeshift pillows and cushions. Then, with what appeared to be pre-rehearsed perfection, they uttered a communal six part yawn, and fell fastly and convincingly asleep, bridesmaids’ dresses expanding and contracting like a room full of breeze-licked tissue paper.

After twenty five wasted minutes, Emily Ames Anderson quit poking, prodding and trodding upon the sleeping forms of her pastel bridesmaids, fixed her own hair in a front to back plait and walked the two miles to church.

Her Mother was already waiting in the vestibule, clutching a bunch of shrink-wrapped carnations and making Spanish eyes at the young vicar who had been hired to oversee the marriage rites.

“You’re late,” her Mother said, thrusting the carnations into her daughter’s hands and hastily adding a somewhat unconvincing, “You look nice,” more- Emily Ames Anderson suspected- for the young vicar’s benefit than anyone else’s.

Emily Ames Anderson felt far from nice.

Her front to back plait had come askew at the side and was spiking furiously over her left ear. One heel had come somewhat undone outside the library, so every other step found her lurching drunkenly to the right. Her lipstick was peeling, her mascara swimming and a small reservoir of sweat had formed in the armpits of her bridal frock. She looked down at her hands and noted that the shrink wrapped carnations, still swathed in their plastic sheath, had been purchased from the Esso station next to the church. An orange price sticker, hastily removed, still bore witness to the fact that her wedding bouquet had been purchased on sale, for the bargainous price of one pound fifty.

(However all these lesser details, even the cut price flowers, were forgettable, laughable even at a later date- on the third evening of their honeymoon perhaps, over a second margarita in a Mexican resort- if it were not for the stomach pit realization of her own dullness. For, upon tentatively peeking through the gap in the chapel doors, Emily Ames Anderson had quickly counted the backs of seventy odd gathered heads and shoulders, and realized that she had not one single thing to say to any of them.)

“It’s too late now,” she admitted to herself, “I’m getting married with half a haircut and a head full of elderly thoughts.”

“Right,” she said, turning to face her Mother, “It’s now or never. Let’s do this thing.”

But her Mother had already fallen asleep against the radiator, head resting upon the young vicar’s shoulder. Emily Ames Anderson watched in eager disbelief as the young vicar’s leather-backed Bible, slipped from his sleeping fingers and made its way, fluttering down the length of her Mother’s thigh, until it came to rest against her stocking clad ankle, pages peeled back to reveal the book of Revelation in all its apocalyptic glory.

In the corner by the hymnbooks, both ushers were dozing quietly; ankles crossed, arms akimbo, the larger of the two quietly humming the Star Wars theme in his sleep.

Pushing back the chapel doors, Emily Ames Anderson caught a glimpse of her soon-to-be Mother-in-law elegantly installed upon the communion table, chest rising and falling in time to the piped organ music. The remainder of the congregation had wilted; heads lolloping over the sides of pews, wedding hats fallen askew, older men dozing in the laps of the young. All but one of her wedding guests, moved to boredom by the theatrics, had fallen fastly and dully asleep in their seats.

Emily Ames Anderson lingered in the doorway- one foot on the chapel carpet, one foot tapping on the tiled floor of the vestibule- and felt the old sadness clawing its way back into her bones. Beginning in her nails- both fingers and toes- she traced it backwards all the way up her shins, through her elbows and spinal chord, across each of her sixteen ribs until finally, she felt the source throbbing relentlessly in her ring pull finger.

She twisted the ring pull free, drawing blood in the process, and swallowed it down in one gulp. This slight gesture, similar to uncorking a wine bottle, would mark the infinite end of Emily Ames Anderson’s Jesus dreams, past, present and future.

She drew both feet into the chapel and squared up to the bearded man, not yet sleeping in the back pew.

“I suppose you think this is funny,” she said, “Or ironic. I bet you think this is really ironic. I bet this was part of your stupid plan all along.”

The bearded man said nothing.

“You win,” she said, “I’m sad as cancer again. I’m sad as a friggin’ stick. I’m sad and lonely and full to the brim with enough sad stories to keep the nation crying well into the next millennium.”

The bearded man said nothing.

“Fix it please,” she said. She was not beyond begging. “I’ll be dull and happy for the rest of my life. I’ll never do another magazine. I’ll pay you one year’s wages for the privilege. Just fix it.”

“I can’t,” the bearded man replied.

“You bloody well can,” Emily Ames Anderson shot back, dripping snot and tears and the faintest trace of hairspray down her bridal frock, “Fix it now.”

“I had nothing to do with this. You were just born sad.”

And with the sentiment still lingering in the air, the bearded man pulled his knees to his chin, closed his eyes and fell fastly asleep, forehead leaning against the pew in front.

Emily Ames Anderson could feel the Seven-Up ring pull, progressing viciously through her small intestines, keeping time with the rising sadness. She removed her shoes- first left then right- and reached up to loose the remnants of her front to back plait. She bent down to remove an unused Kleenex from the hands of a sleeping aunt and, fully prepared for the apocalypse, made her way up the aisle to meet the rest of her life.

Emily Ames Anderson, though fully aware that the former lover was fast asleep, dozing amidst a pile of upturned hymnbooks, had never been the kind of girl to accept her sadness second-hand.