Until Six
The groom arrived in a borrowed body and immediately ate a flower.
“It’s wax,” Tess said.
“I know that now.”
She held out her hand. He gave her the flower, bitten neatly through the stem, and she put it in the pocket of her wedding dress. The dress had pockets because she had made it, and because she had spent enough years crawling around under stages to know what happened when you dressed for an occasion instead of for the things that might happen during it.
The body was handsome in a tired, practical way. A little older than they had expected. There was a pale band where a ring had recently been, and someone had taken considerable trouble over the nails. Jun kept inspecting them. Then he would notice Tess noticing and look somewhere else. Looking somewhere else required moving his head, which still occasionally surprised him.
“Too much?” she asked.
“Your mother smells of hot bread.”
“She’s been baking.”
“Yes,” he said. “But I can tell.”
Her mother was at the far end of the hall, rescuing a tablecloth from an argument between two uncles. Tess put a hand against Jun’s chest. Under the hired waistcoat, a heart went about its work. She had known him for seven years. For most of that time he had reached her through an earpiece while she climbed ladders, fetched cable, or tried to locate the particular member of an amateur dramatic society who had decided to plug something into something. Once, during a production of The Tempest, they had spent forty minutes together inside a thunderclap that would not stop.
He covered her hand with his. “I’d like to keep this bit quiet,” he said.
At four seventeen, while Tess was pinning the buttonhole onto him, the owner called.
The little tenancy indicator below Jun’s collarbone turned amber. His mouth opened, shut, and opened again. “There’s a request.”
“Already?”
“He wants to speak to you.”
“Why me?”
Jun looked at her with an expression she disliked immediately. It was the expression of someone who had found the sensible person in a room.
She took out her phone. A man’s face appeared, evidently assembled in a hurry. The eyebrows were too high. Behind him was the standard blue background supplied to people who hadn’t paid for a room. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know what the booking says.”
“The booking says six.”
“Yes. I’m very sorry. My daughter’s outside.”
Tess looked toward the windows. Beyond the terrace, the old amusement park stood in a shallow bowl of September light. Half its rides had gone. The Ferris wheel turned on Saturdays when someone remembered to come and turn it on. Nobody stood outside the hall.
“Outside my flat,” the man said. “Her mother’s brought her back early. She’s got a key, but she’s eight. I can talk through the intercom. I’ve told her I’m coming.”
“Can you get someone?”
“I’ve been trying.”
There was a silence during which Tess could hear, very distinctly, her mother telling an uncle that if he put the trestle down on her foot she would break his other arm.
“We paid for four hours,” Tess said.
“I know.”
“We’ve done everything else cheaply.”
The man didn’t answer. His rendered face had begun to lose detail around the mouth. Tess knew what that meant. He was trying to keep the call going on the smallest possible allowance. She transferred enough to sharpen him again and resented him for making her do it, although he hadn’t asked.
Jun was touching the pale band on his finger. Tess wanted him to say something selfish. She wanted, with an intensity that made her ashamed, to hear him insist on one thing he had wanted.
“Ask where he lives,” he said.
They were married in a taxi at four thirty-nine. Tess’s sister held the witness connection steady between her knees. The celebrant, who had been expecting to appear on a large screen above the cake, occupied the driver’s navigation display and had to pause twice to let it announce a turn. When asked whether she accepted, Tess said yes with such ferocity that the driver glanced in the mirror.
Jun kissed her. He had been practicing this privately with borrowed mouths, which she had discovered the previous Thursday and teased him about until he asked her to stop. The practice helped. The driver missed the next turn.
At the flat, a child sat on a pink suitcase with a paper bag in her lap. She looked at Jun’s waistcoat, then at Tess’s dress. “You said work.”
“It was work,” said the voice from Tess’s phone.
The child stood up. “Why are you in there?”
The transfer took less than a second. Tess knew it had happened because the man’s hand went automatically to the back of his neck, where Jun had never put it. He looked at his daughter, and the daughter looked at him. Nobody said anything for several moments. Tess discovered that she was still holding his other hand.
“Sorry,” he said.
She let go. He knelt to unzip the child’s coat. She kept the paper bag clamped against her chest.
Jun spoke from Tess’s phone. “We’ve got cake.”
The girl looked at the screen. “What sort?”
Back at the hall, the musicians had given up waiting and were eating. The cake had been cut. Tess’s mother took in the stranger, his daughter, the waistcoat, and the phone in a single glance, then handed Tess a plate so heavily loaded that she had to support it underneath with her palm. Someone had opened all the doors. Warm air moved through the room, carrying the smell of cut grass from beneath the wheel.
Jun tried three speakers before finding one that wasn’t being used. “I had a whole first dance,” he told her.
“I know.”
“It was good.”
“I know.”
The child was showing Tess’s sister what she had brought in the paper bag: a chipped cup full of damp soil. Two narrow shoots rose from it. On the stage, one of the musicians had resumed playing without telling the others. A second musician joined him halfway through a phrase. Tess set down her plate.
There was an old flying harness in the equipment cupboard. Tess had inspected it in June, when the local school had put on Peter Pan. She brought it out and laid it on the stage. Her uncle, who had been drinking, stood up to help. She pointed him back into his chair and called her sister instead. Between them they checked the lines, cleared the tables nearest the stage, and brought the old winch awake.
“No,” Jun said, when he saw what she was doing.
“You haven’t heard the proposal.”
“I can see the proposal.”
“Then you can see I need you on the winch.”
The harness wouldn’t fit over the skirt. Tess tried twice, swore, and fetched the sewing scissors. Her mother made a noise. Tess cut from the hem to the waist, stepped out of the skirt, and stood in the bodice and the red work trousers she had put on underneath because the hall had no heating and she knew perfectly well how weddings ran late.
The first lift was awful. Her feet came up too quickly, she swung sideways, and the whole room shouted advice. Jun lowered her at once. Tess unclipped the left line, moved it, and told everyone who wasn’t holding something to shut up.
“Again.”
This time she rose slowly. Her sister walked beneath her until her shoes were above head height, then let go of the trailing line. Tess turned once in the air. The musician found the tune Jun had sent him weeks earlier. Across the room, the hired body’s owner lifted his daughter onto his shoulders to see.
“Left,” Tess said quietly.
Jun took her left. She bent one knee and tipped her weight forward; he caught the change too late and she swung out over the empty tables, laughing now, one hand stretched toward a beam she had painted herself twenty years before.
“Keep that,” she said.
He did. On the next pass she caught the beam, hung from it for a moment, and pushed away hard.
Her sister shouted something unprintable. The drummer came in.
Tess flew back toward the stage with both arms out, and Jun, who had spent the afternoon trying to inhabit a man, began to get the hang of her.