on your special day

The rain fell and from the peripheries of the gazebo's minimal coverage he cursed the world its ills. It had been short notice, shotgun, they’d have called it behind closed doors, and they hadn’t been able to arrange a marquee, left instead with six different gazeboes of disparate sizing erected around each other like weird zones. “The erogenous zones,” he had sneered as the two blokes erected them, cursing and sweating even in the rain, as though the very existence of such purported zones were of nought but pure fantasy at best, at worst the lies of the leisured classes peddled to belittle the best efforts of their weary underlings. "Fucking Twilight Zone more like it."

The day would be a certain failure. Gusts had soaked the still cling-filmed M&S buffet trays in rainwater and they looked sorry and pointless and sparse, and regardless of whether the food beneath was protected he knew, knew the truth of their futility in light of the elements. He opened a bottle of the champagne – waste of money, he said, Cava he said, pleaded even, did they listen? did they fuck – and glugged from the bottle until it fizzed in his nostrils and his eyes watered and he spluttered the drink from his lips and it gushed from the bottle neck in a great white plume and he heaved over it. He stuffed the open half-sunk sticky bottle back into the ice bucket and dried his hand on his suit trousers. The gazebo was sagging in four pits on each of the quadrants of its canvas roof structure where the sheer weight of rainwater had pooled without recourse in precise tarns. The blokes had advised caution given the relative seasonal fragility of the gazeboes, designed as they really were for summer usage and light showers at most, and not the torrential rain to which they were currently exposed, but he had paid them angrily and told them it would be fine, it would all be fine, in a way that their faces made clear was – and that he knew to be –unconvincing in an absolute sense.

They’d got the gazeboes up too late, it had already been raining for days, and the ground was churning up into soft almost liquid mud beneath his feet; when the rest of the hundred or so guests were trampling it the mess and the damage would be unimaginable. He thought about soiled dresses and the ruined carpets that were sure to follow them when the selfish bastards stomped through his hall on their way to the bathroom and spat harshly. Christ almighty, he wished he’d arranged a Portaloo. Let them queue three deep in the rain only to revel in the stench of their own stools! He reached up to the roof to disrupt the pools to the sides of the canvas but couldn’t reach high enough to get it over, so jumped some inches from the soft earth to achieve the same. The predictability of his fall would have been laughable if it hadn’t been so awful. He picked himself up, his suit trousers soaked through and caked in flattened soil. The pools remained.

He imagined with great pleasure the creaking of the gazebo’s frame, struggling beneath the weight of the weather, and grinned as he imagined the whole bloody thing coming down on top of them, his daughter’s face as the water soaked her dress and plastered her £100 hair to her face like a greasy slap, her bloated, simpleton, fiancé-soon-husband flailing his way absurdly in effort to inexplicably preservation of egg and watercress sandwiches, resting paper plates over the sodden bread parts as though he were performing some civic duty of the most significant order like he fucking paid for it, his own pissed wife done up like a dogs meaty supper, flirting her way to later apology, mud on her palms where she'd already slumped over trying to limbo to “Love Shack” - second dance for fuck's sake! - and mistook the laughter of the young to be appreciative and not the hateful derision he alone would know it to be, he saw it all as clearly as if it had happened already.

He looked around the food, the drink, the PA system – they’d plug an iPod into it later, not even a DJ! progress my penisroot, he thought, nauseous with hate – shrouded beneath tarp like Christ at Easter, the folded chairs, the piles of napkins, the table decorations, the damp tablecloths, the hope, whatever, all of it, he looked around it and felt the most debilitating sense of revulsion and of pity, not just for them but for he, too, indeed for all people, as though why, why, would we, they, anyone bother?, and what could possibly be the point of it, which is to say, anything at fucking all? He pushed the food tables over and stamped the sandwiches and sausage rolls and Indian snacks and chicken skewers and salad bowls and what have you into the mud and it sank in easily and rimmed his shoes in mayo and spreads and shaved meats, then strode past the house and up the side and into his car and he drove off quickly into the miserable afternoon. The limo'd be there for her soon.