6. MARMADUKE'S WEDDING

So my political dullard gets married...

Marmaduke and his bride Dragona arrived at the church together, which wasn’t exactly traditional. But Marmaduke wanted to make sure that this woman didn’t escape before the vows were exchanged and she was quite happy to be seen as a free spirit.

When he asked her about transport she’d said quite simply, “I’ll drive.”

He’d always had a query in his mind about women and driving, but let it lurk out of reach in the innermost recesses of his brain where the monsters that plagued him at night sometimes had their home. But that didn’t stop him from shuddering at the whole idea fo his future wife driving them to the church. Would they get there in time? Would she run out of petrol? Would she get a puncture because women have a fetish for driving over spiky things

“Are you sure?” he asked, “I mean, in a long dress and all?”

“It’ll not be that long,” she assured him, “when I last got married I wore a long white dress and it was horribly uncomfortable! I’m not doing that again! I mean to be comfortable, and not white!”

“Oh dear,” he sighed, wondering if he ought to book a taxi.

“So that’s settled then,” Dragona almost smiled, putting a lid on any future debate on the subject of transport.

So she drove them to church, in her Nissan Leaf, an electric vehicle which avoided any chance of her running out of petrol.

The wedding ceremony went well considered it was sandwiched between two funerals and the apparent fact that the Reverend Pike was old enough to have been in God’s waiting room for an age already. But experience had made wedding ceremonies into a sort of instinct for him and he only deviated to the funeral litany once when he started to give his opinions of the deceased, but swiftly realised his error and returned almost seamlessly to the wedding.

Dragona wasn’t normally given to smiling, but she made an exception when they exchanged rings because she finally had a man who would be more useful to her than her last husband had proved to be. And when she beamed the atmosphere in the church seemed to lighten as if there wasn’t due to be another funeral in ten minutes, and particular because the Reverend Pike was getting nervous as the next funeral was, to him, a biggy..

The I dos were said before the second and quite important coffin was due to be trundled in, and the happy couple were soon posing for the photographer. Well, Dragona was happy because she’d hooked an MP on her virtual fishing line, which meant she’d have access to as many important men and even some important women as she liked, and she was standing next to her beloved and being photographed to the backdrop of a nice oak coffin with a shiny brass plate screwed to it. And she didn’t mind because she knew who reclined inside that coffin even if Marmaduke had no idea. It was her own personal hero, a political spokesman for the people.

Marmaduke was less happy. Things hadn’t started well from his perspective. Dragona was dressed in scarlet rather than white, the colour meant to match her joy, she said, but it didn’t seem the most appropriate colour for a wedding dress.

Added to that was he had belatedly discovered that the second funeral was of the last mortal remains of a man so politically opposite to the dictums that he, Marmaduke espoused, and this is before he’d had a chance to have any kind of serious debate on important matters like political rights and wrongs with Dragona. But the deceased’s philosophy in life had been echoed by the particular colour of Marmaduke’s new bride’s wedding attire. Why, he thought, couldn’t she have chosen a tasty shade of blue?

What he particular hated was what he called commie nonsense, and the deceased had actually suggested that all men should be treated as having been born equal, and to Marmaduke the very thought that someone who said that kind of thing was equal to him was abhorrent and made anyone espousing that philosophy the worst possible commie. Furthermore, when alive the incumbent within the coffin had let it be known that profitable things like the utilities that everyone paid for should be in public ownership and not subject to the wayward swings of the market, and that sort of talk always made Marmaduke see red.

So, in life, Marmaduke had hated the corpse and had he known who the funeral was for he would have sought out another church or even have a Register office for his dream wedding. The deceased had been outspoken at many public meetings, and Marmaduke hated what he stood for and on top of that he hated the exuberantly polished coffin that the commie was being dispatched in.

But it wasn’t until the weeping mourners noticed him and who he was and became aware that he was being photographed that they decided that bags of soft and probably rotten fruit they had brought with them for use as missiles in a demonstration that they had planned for later that day in town might be better employed by being hurled at the awful Marmaduke Lauderdale and his wife because, to them, he was the worst possible Tory.

So the missile launching began, and to their credit the funeral mourners were good shots.

A soft peach narrowly missed Marmaduke and hit Dragona full in the face. Well, to be truthful the flesh part of the preach was soft and excessively juicy, but that juice was rancid, and to make matters worse the stone within it felt as hard as a bullet when it struck the bride, and despite a hardy nature she burst into tears, a reality which caused the mourners to jeer.

“Oh, Marmaduke,” she wept, “take me home!”

“But we’ve got the reception,” he protested, “there’s always going to be a bit of opposition in life. I’ve been on the receiving end of eggs and other missiles before, but it adds to the justice when my bank account continues to swell. You know where some of my money comes from, eh? Dividends from the profits made by the very utilities that dead b*****d wanted to nationalise! I mean, who ever heard of anything more absurd than that? Water belonging to the nation when it should belong to men who know how to market it! He was crackers and better off dead!”

“And you believe that?” she asked, scowling.

“Of course I do,” he replied, “all right-thinking people with brains that actually work think like I do, which is why they’re right-thinking! Ordinary people haven’t a clue about making a profit from, say, railways!”

“Why,” she asked between clenched teeth, “do you think I chose this wedding dress?”

“Because you like bright colours?” he asked, suddenly regretting that in the short time he’d known his new wife they’d never exchanged views on important things like profit and loss.

“Because, you twallop, I support the renationalisation of things that are important, things that shouldn’t be there just to make a handful of people stupidly rich while the rest of us are poor.”

“You can’t mean that, darling?” he said, using the darling word for the first time since his schooldays when he’d whispered it into Colin Fairfax’s ears one night when he found sleep wouldn’t come because another boy in the dormitory had a severe bout of snoring and he felt strangely moved by the shape of Colin’s backside even though it did have a quilt over it.

“Of course I do!” she snapped, peach juice still running in a small stream down her face and off her chin.

And it was at that moment, standing in front of a coffin that was being slowly manoeuvred into the church that he’d only a minute or two before exited from and subsequently was having his photograph taken that he knew he’d have to work out a way of getting a divorce, and quickly at that.

This woman, this Dragona, seemed to be a bit of a commie.

© Peter Rogerson 23.05.22

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