CHAPTER 80
It was too easy to get lost. All I had to remember, really, was that if he was a big man, and its name didn’t start with a D, he was from Sarah’s entourage. Her husband included, they really were stupidly big, and I could see where Elaine got her looks from. She wasn’t fat, just square, and apart from the look around the eyes and mouth, Sarah was very different. I have to admit that I lost track of the names of the kids.

“Sar, what are you doing about bed space?”

“Ych, took a block booking at the Travelodgy place for the others, but Steve and Tony and the kids are campers. I have delegated the beefcake to doing the erections. Isn’t that what men are for?”

I must have taken some time to pull my jaw up, because next thing I knew I had a head peering over my shoulder and a hand squeezing my bum. Ginny was amused.

“Annie, I think I might like this woman, if I can wean her off solids.”

I turned my head as far as I could. “Ginny, not only are you married, but so is she, and she has a scary family, aye?”

She laughed. “Not as scary as my girly would be, yeah?”

I gave her that one on points. We were almost done with the domestic arrangements, as tents sprouted and sleeping bags occupied odd corners of the two houses. Sarah had changed from her leathers into a denim miniskirt and little spiky boots, a real rock chick look, and I looked at her legs and bum and could have killed her. There again…

Eric had insisted, and my slimmer-but-not-slim figure was getting there. I had finally taken the hint, and by the time everyone was settling into the houses and gardens I was settling into his gifts, some seriously debauched underwear beneath what would have been the perfect LBD if I had been at least two sizes smaller, and shoooooooz. Alice just about matched me, heels and stockings-wise, but I had a lesson to learn.

When having a ‘do’ in a marquee, high court shoes are fine in the house, and on the decking in the marquee, but not for walking across the grass between the two. Alice and Sarah showed me the flats they were carrying, after Alison had laughed herself silly over my attempts to cross a soft, damp lawn in heels. I went and found some trainers.

It sounds like a mad whirl, and it was, getting everything moving until people and the party could take on a life and movement of their own. At several points, Eric managed to catch up, and I got a hug, or a soft kiss, or just a touch to my arm or face. Dave’s wife was in the kitchen a lot, and I had the time to study her as we handed out cups and plastic pint glasses, and Naomi and Steph laid out the platters of finger food. Her dark eyes obviously caught me looking at her, and she smiled.

“I’m Joy, Dave’s missus”

“Oh, I know that, I was just curious”

“What about?”

“How does someone as normal as you seem to be end up with a nutter like him?”

Ice broken. I got the comments about the lovely dress, and the ring, and the sharp intake of breath when I said the words ‘joint account’, and it was nice, but I was starting to get overloaded with faces. I went looking for Darren, finding him in the Woods’ place with a huddle of other children

“You up for playing, kiddo?”

His eyes widened, and he was off his belly as if the floor were alight, leaving the others to continue the computer game they had been playing. He paused long enough to look me up and down.

“Annie….you look beautiful, Eric, he really lucky guy, yeah?”

That did it, and he got a hug, and a lipstick brand on his cheek, and we gathered together our instruments, and I sent him to find Steph and Jan as I carried out Eric’s guitar with Saburo. Into my trainers, over the grass, back into my pretty shoes, with the fleeting thought that I no longer needed to buy ones with an adjustable fit, and then we were setting up ready for some fun. Steph joined us with her fiddle case, Jan in tow. Both were in longer dresses than mine, and I felt a little out of place. Steph caught my hesitation.

“Looking gorgeous, Annie, but I think there’ll be no standing on one leg in that dress. I’ve given sis-in-law an idea of the big piece, but we’ll do a few standards to warm up first, if that’s OK”

Geoff and Bill settled into a couple of chairs at one side, with bouzouki and squeezebox, as Jan and Darren compared beaters and skins on the other side, and our visiting barman dished out bottled ale to a sound track of soft rock, which Eric killed. Guitar in hand, he made the announcement.

“Those of you who know these two ladies at all well will know they like their music, and so do we. Young Darren here has some tricks to show you as well, so if you want to dance feel free, if you want to stand and listen that’s fine, but if you prefer to bugger off down the Sun, make sure you bring me back some pork scratchings.

“Thank you all, though, for braving this time of year to help us celebrate my engagement to this wonderful woman. I’m happy, I think she is too, so if you aren’t, get some more ale down your neck and pretend. Now, without more ado, here are Hairy and the one-legged woman!”

We ran through the standards Steph suggested, and it was good, and it was tight, and people were doing that odd semi-traditional swinging on the marquee decking, and the empties were piling up. I was feeling really odd at first, the various ‘sexy’ items of underwear at first pulling in odd ways and the heels making me think about my ‘stage’ movements. Steph whispered in my ear during a pause.

“Suspenders, yeah? Feel odd, don’t they?”

I just nodded, resisting the urge to pull them about. “Time for the piece de resistance, aye?”

“Oh aye. Jan, can you follow Darren for the intro, and just set up some cross rhythms? Let him drive”

I gave Darren the nod, and he started in, setting a low beat with lots of right hand, making the tone of his drum rise and fall as he worked between flat hand and cupped edge to give a truly atmospheric sound that Jan started to echo, Eric then started a quiet and limited set of chords until Steph joined in with a slow, pulsing figure involving some quite sharp right hand work. Once the key was established, Geoff came in with more quiet chords, and Bill was there with odd bits of percussion.

I started the intricate, looping tune and began to lose myself in it, Saburo taking on his own life, me forgetting that I was under canvas, in stockings and heels and a little black dress, just wrapped in the sounds we made, and I was away, drifting, but Darren’s face was ecstatic, as the music stole his soul just like it had taken mine, and…and it had to come to an end, in a slowly fading pattern of soft beats from his drum as Steph and I held a steady note and the others sat silent behind us.

Oh. Oh god. That was what I was born for, and I think at that point he was having the same thought, and none of us moved for at least ten seconds, as the applause started sporadically and then swept around us, and Steph and I stood aside so his friends could see him, for he knew, now, that he had friends.

I looked at him as that thought clearly came into his heart. “I think you deserve a beer, Darren. Take it slowly, though”

“Na, I’ll have a coke, lahk. Don’t want to get pissed, this is too much fun, yeah?”

He got his coke, and we played some more of the standards as people recovered their dancing feet, and I watched my man as he grinned and played. How could we ever NOT play? People came and went past us, Kelly and Mark, Ginny and Kate, while others sat quietly and happily to one side. I was part way through one bit of woodwind-linked silliness, trying to decide if it would actually be possible to do an Anderson on one leg without showing everything I had, when I noticed a couple of people standing quietly by the doorway into the tent.

It was Polly and her man, and I waved the other end of the flute at them as I strutted and Steph shook, and Darren just drummed his heart out, and then I saw the blonde head.

They’d brought Chantelle.