Sally, A Fiction: part 4

Sally Pooper was agasp. Never before had she been confronted with so many problems on one day! Bumping into Sylvia was the final straw.

“All this on my special anniversary day!” Sally sobbed. The skies opened up as if they knew, and it started to rain. Luckily she had an umbrella but it didn’t open and she stumbled into her top colour psychologist's surgery in a flap. Her receptionist, Annabelle, barely raised an eyebrow at this performance, and handed her her appointments for the day: she only had one.

She sat in her perfect office waiting for her patient, staring at a framed photograph of Dominic and Jenson holding up a salmon they had caught on a fishing trip in the country, only rather than using a rod Jenson used his BB gun so there was quite a lot of blood. She kept staring at her beautiful husband, and was transported back to when they first all those years ago, at a shitty members club in Soho called Wanker House.

She had been having some cocktails in the upstairs reading area all dressed up for Fran’s 24th birthday. She scoped him out at once, and he too had spied her across the room and offered to buy her a drink. Dominic was gorgeous, dark, tall(ish), his eyes were quite far apart but that wasn’t a problem. He was confident and smooth, not particularly intelligent, but as you’ve probably guessed by now, neither was Sally.

The two talked all night about their hopes and dreams, their fears for, and of, the future. Dominic was one of the few people who really understood the importance of cushions, after all they were the original sofas and in China people still used them as sofas. Within half an hour Sally knew this was the real thing, that this was love.

They went on a few dates, one thing led to another and suddenly they were off to Bermuda where Dominic proposed. They had been together for two months.

Of course Fran couldn’t help but cast doubt on the whole thing. She thought it was suspicious to get married so soon, but that was because she hadn’t met that cheating snake David yet. Fran could be so selfish sometimes.

Dominic’s favourite film was Braveheart so they were married in a little Scottish church in the highlands. Sally wore daisies in her hair and they rode away on a white horse!

A knock at the door pulled Sally back to the present. It was just Annabelle telling her her the client was going to be delayed. Sally got out her copy of Marie Claire and started flicking through the adverts, then she read Vogue and Grazia. The clock was ticking and still no sign of the mysterious Mr Miner.

Finally Sally marched into the reception and insisted that the receptionist phone this “Mr Miner” Sally said reading his name off the list. But when the receptionist put down the phone she didn’t look happy. “He told me to fuck off” she said, on the verge of tears.

Sally was shocked. In all her years of colour psychology she had never heard anyone be so rude. She comforted poor Annabelle and insisted that Mr Miner be blackballed from their books.

“What’s his first name?” Sally asked.

“Finnegan, Finnegan Miner.”

Sally’s jaw dropped. Unbelievable! First the dream about the Irish potato famine and now she was late for her book group! She was becoming increasingly convinced that the nightmare about Shirley, her pre-incarnation as an Irish peasant, had put a curse on her day. Things like embarrassment, lateness, suspicion of extra marital affairs and the like just didn’t happen to Sally Pooper. Her life was perfect, just like a film.