Cork

Cork.

He stumbled through the door, staggered across the room with the bottle of champagne in his hand and fell onto the four-poster bed.

Some wedding night this was going to be, she thought. Theirs had been a whirlwind romance. They’d met over the Internet and had fallen in love.

When they saw each other in person she had been disappointed. She’d been hoping that he just wasn’t very photogenic, that in real life he might be a little bit more attractive than his photographs, he wasn’t. She gave herself a mental dressing down. What did it matter what he looked like? He was sweet and kind and gentle. She’d fallen in love with his wit, and with the fact that he said nice things to her. Nobody had ever told her that she was beautiful before.

She didn’t like the way he kissed her. He was wet, slobbery, He’d force his unpleasant tongue inside her mouth and often she’d have to swallow his saliva. Or sometimes it would dribble down her chin. His breath wasn’t very nice and he did sometimes smell of body odour. These things didn’t matter though. It was his personality that she’d fallen for.

They were in a crowded restaurant when he proposed. Maybe he figured that was the key to unlocking her inhibitions. She’d wanted to wait before they had sex. He’d been persistent, groping and slobbering but she couldn’t let him into her until she felt the rush of love that had engulfed her all those nights sitting at her keyboard talking to him. It just never seemed to happen, so she’d held him back...waiting.

The night he’d proposed the restaurant had been packed. He’d had too much to drink. He often seemed to drink a lot. She wasn’t a big drinker and had sipped the awful wine, which he’d insisted they have, slowly. She thought he’d dropped something when he suddenly fell to the floor, and then it briefly crossed her mind that he’d fallen off his chair and was on the point of passing out. That might actually have been preferable. When it dawned on her what was really happening as he groped the little blue box out of is pocket, she just wanted the ground to open up and swallow her. Two men from the band came over one with a guitar and one with a fiddle and screeched some awful serenade at her and he spoke loudly enough to entertain the entire restaurant.

“Will you do me the honour of becoming my wife?”

The silence seemed to go on forever. What could she do?

“Say yes,” he muttered under his breath. This wasn’t sweet or loving, it was growled at her, said with menace. The diners were all straining their ears waiting for her reply. The staff had stopped serving; everybody had turned in their seats looking at her. She must have nodded her head. She had no recollection of doing it. Later she was quite sure that she hadn’t. He was already putting the cheap forty quid ring onto her finger and maybe she’d just looked down to see what he was doing. He was beaming; everybody in the room was clapping and cheering. Some people even stood to applaud as though they were in a concert. One woman with a big boil on her face was dabbing at her eyes with a napkin.

And so they were engaged. The next thing she knew he was telling her mother, over Sunday lunch and then it was lists and dresses, cakes and flowers and here she was, on her wedding night. This was supposed to be the greatest day of her life but her husband was drunk.

“Unzip me will you, I need to get out of this bloody thing.” She’d been trying for two minutes to get out of the acres of white lace that had been restricting her breathing for the last ten hours.

“Un ship, you? Couldn’t if I tried. Fingersh not working, lesh have a little drinkie.”

He struggled to sit up, while she struggled to get out of the wedding dress. And then he was fighting with the bottle opener. “Open thish will you?” he whined when the cork refused to come out of the bottle.

She’d got the dress off and had hung it on the back of the door. She was standing in her white underwear, in a fifteen hundred pound a night bedroom. She’d starved herself for six weeks to drop a stone. He’d groped and mauled at her for three months while she’d kept him at arm’s length. Here she was now, in her gorgeous lingerie looking better than she’d looked in her life and all he was bothered about was getting a bloody cork out of a bottle. The horrible thing about it all was that she didn’t care. She didn’t mind not consummating her marriage on her wedding night.

She fought back the tears as she went into the bathroom to wash.

As she walked back into the bedroom there was a pop.

Oley, she thought, he’s popped his cork, which amused her and she grinned.

“Come to me my lovely wife,” he slurred and lesh have some champagne before I fuck your brains out.

Fuck my brains out. That phrase made her feel like a whore, not the woman that he’d just married in front of all their family and friends. Is this how a wedding night was supposed to be, she wondered?

“I don’t want a drink,” she said petulantly

He was off the bed in a second towering over her. Suddenly he didn’t seem like a drunken fool, he was angry and frightening. “Fifty pounds a bottle and you don’t want any?” he already had a glass in his hand; he’d started to pour some of the champagne into the flute. He flung it hard against the wall. She watched the glass shatter. He was shouting and yelling at her but she wasn’t listening.

She turned her back on him and pulled the cover back to crawl miserably into the bed when something hit her hard on the back of the head. She cried out in pain and surprise and bent to pick up the cork that was now lying by her feet. “You threw a cork at me,” she said turning towards him.

“Yeah, it’ll be my fist next time,” he yelled back swigging the champagne straight from the bottle.

She got into bed and faced the wall.

The following morning she was awake first. Her husband was snoring beside her. The room stank and it wasn’t until she got out of bed that she saw that he’d been sick all over the carpet.

He didn’t even wake up as she quietly packed her belongings.

She left him sleeping in his filth.

In the foyer she called a taxi to take her to her parent’s house. She’d stay with them for a while.

In the taxi she turned the cork over and over in her hand … a symbol of her one night of marriage.