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she’d love him even more, no women to be in competition with and homosexuals are so cool now. I heard her say that once.
    Mum returned with a tray of lobster cocktails and after a shellfish episode at lunch in the Horgans’ home in Kinsale, which involved me, a tiger prawn and a fire brigade, she also carried a melon cocktail for me.
    I looked at my watch. Riley caught me.
    ‘Don’t leave us in any more suspense, Mum, what have you got to tell us?’ he said, in his perfect way that brought everyone back from their heads to the table. He had that ability, to bring people together.
    ‘I won’t have one, I don’t like lobster,’ Grandmother said, pushing the plate away in mid-air before it had even reached the table.
    Mum looked a little disheartened then remembered why we were all there and then looked at Father. Father kept reading his newspaper, unaware that his lobster had even been planted before him. Mum sat down, excited. ‘Okay, I’ll tell them,’ she said, as if that was ever under dispute. ‘Well, as you all know, it’s our thirty-fifth wedding anniversary this July.’ She gave us all a where has the time gone by look. ‘And as a way of celebrating, your father and I …’ she looked around us all, eyes twinkling, ‘have decided to renew our vows!’ Her excitement overtook her voice for the last three words and ended in a hysterical high-pitched shriek. Even Father lowered the paper to look at her, then noticed the lobster, folded away the paper and started eating it.
    ‘Wow,’ I said.
    Many of my friends had gotten married in the last two years. There seemed to be an epidemic sweeping – as soon as one married, a whole load were engaged and sauntering down the aisle like puffed-up peacocks. I had seen reasonable, modern women be reduced to obsessive maniacs hell bent on traditions and stereotypes they’d spent all their working lives trying to fight – I had been a part of many of these rituals in unflattering, cheap off-coloured dresses, but this was different. This was my mother and this meant it would be monumentally, cataclysmically worse.
    ‘Philip darling, Daddy would love it if you would be his best man.’ Philip’s face reddened and he seemed to grow a few feet in his chair. He bowed his head silently, the honour so great he couldn’t speak. ‘Riley darling, would you give me away?’
    Riley beamed. ‘I’ve been trying to get rid of you for years.’
    Everybody laughed including my grandmother who loved a joke at my mother’s expense. I swallowed, because I knew it was coming. I knew it. Then she looked at me and all I could see was a mouth, a big smiling mouth taking over her whole entire face as if her lips had eaten her eyes and her nose. ‘Sweetheart, would you be my bridesmaid? Maybe we could do that with your hair again, it’s so lovely.’
    ‘She’ll get a cold,’ my grandmother said.
    ‘But she didn’t get one last night.’
    ‘But do you want to run the risk of her having one?’
    ‘We could get nice handkerchiefs made up in the same fabric as her dress, just in case.’
    ‘Not if it’s anything like the fabric of your first wedding dress.’
    And there it was, the end of my life as I knew it.
    I looked at my watch.
    ‘It’s such a pity you have to go soon, we have so much to plan. Do you think you could come back tomorrow and we could go through everything?’ Mum asked, excited and desperate both at the same time.
    And here came the dilemma. Life or my family. Both were as bad as each other.
    ‘I can’t,’ I said, which was greeted by a long silence. Silchesters didn’t say no to invitations, it was considered rude. You moved around appointments and went to hell and back in order to attend every single thing that you were invited to, you hired lookalikes and embarked on time travel to uphold every single promise that had been made by you and even by somebody else without your knowledge.
    ‘Why not, dear?’ Mum’s eyes tried to look concerned, but