Tales From a Hen Weekend (2 page)

‘Let’s run away,’ she said.

‘Where to?’

‘I don’t know. Somewhere in Ireland. It’s a big place. They’d never find us.’

‘Why Ireland? That’s not fair. Just because your family are going…’

‘All right, then. Where?’

‘London. Everyone goes to London to run away.’

‘Bor
ing
. Twenty minutes on the train. That’s not running away, it’s commuting.’

‘But we can disappear there. And eat in the soup kitchens.’

‘What type of soup? I can’t eat tomato, it brings up my mouth ulcers.’

‘Jude, we’re talking life or death here, and all you can worry about is your mouth ulcers.’

‘I don’t want to disappear in London. I want us to stay together, but…’

‘But what? How can we? I’ve begged and
begged
my mum to let me come and live with you in Ireland, but she’s just completely cruel.’

‘Mine too. How do you think
I
feel, being taken away from St Peter’s, and everyone? At least you’ll still have all the
others
.’

We brooded in silence, staring out of the windows, both probably thinking the same thoughts about who would want to be my friend after Jude had gone. And who would be
her
friend in some strange school in her new, strange country.

‘I suppose we’d better not, then,’ I said at length, with a sigh. ‘If we run away, they’ll just get the police after us.’

‘My mum and dad say you can come and stay as soon as we’re settled.’

‘Yeah. Mum says you can come back and stay with me whenever you want, too.’

I can’t remember whether we hugged each other at that point, or whether we cried. Probably not. A load of the other fifteen-year olds from St Peter’s were on the same bus and we wouldn’t have wanted to look uncool. But I remember The Pledge as clearly as if it was yesterday.

‘When I get married,’ said Jude, still staring out of the window as the bus trundled along the suburban roads back to our estate, ‘You can come over to Ireland to be my bridesmaid.’

‘What if I get married first?’ I pointed out.

‘Then I’ll be
your
bridesmaid, of course!’ She turned and flashed me a grin. ‘You’ll probably be first, anyway. Loads of boys always fancy you. They never look at me.’

‘Don’t be stupid…’

‘Anyway,’ she cut me short. ‘Let’s make it a pledge. We’ll be each other’s bridesmaids, yeah? No matter what? Even if you get a new best friend?’

‘Definitely! And I won’t!
You’re
my best friend,’ I said, stoutly. ‘And you always will be.’

So you see – Jude has to be a bridesmaid too. There’s no way I can renege on The Pledge. Without me even trying, this wedding looks like it could go from a small, quiet, private do, to being the social event of the century.

The three lilac bridesmaid dresses have been finished for months and hanging up in Lisa’s wardrobe. Jude sent over her measurements, and when the dress was at the tacked-together stage, she came over for a weekend and had a fitting. Since then Lisa’s been on at me about fifteen times a week:

‘Tell Jude she’d better not put on any weight! Not even an
ounce
, tell her! When she comes over for the wedding there won’t be time to let out any seams!’

‘Jude’s as skinny as a twig,’ I tell her wearily. ‘She’s not like me. She doesn’t have to go on a diet every time she nibbles a biscuit.’

‘Yes, well, she’d better stay skinny, otherwise it’s going to be a
complete
disaster.’

‘She’ll have to wear her jeans,’ I say, grinning. Lisa’s just too easy to wind up.

She closes her eyes and shakes her head.

‘Don’t even
joke
about it, Kate. I can’t bear it.’

See what I mean about weddings? They make people lose all sense of proportion. Someone getting too fat for their bridesmaid’s dress is
not
an international incident. At the minute I think it might actually lighten things up a little.

‘You’re not putting on any weight, are you?’ I ask Jude on the phone. Again.

‘Jesus, God, can you ever give it a rest about me putting on weight?’ Over the years, along with the Irish accent, Jude’s developed this weird habit of blasphemy that sometimes even extends to the theatrical
Jesus, Mary and Joseph
! To my English ears it sounds so fake, I’m never quite sure whether she’s kind of taking the piss out of herself. ‘I’d be thrilled with meself if I even put on so much as an ounce, but it just never happens, no matter what I eat.’

‘Well,
don’t
. Not even an ounce. Lisa’s doing my head in about letting out seams at the eleventh hour.’

‘Not a chance, Kate. Tell your sister she can sleep easy in her bed. She’s no need to worry on that score - I’m as bony as ever. I wish I
could
put on a little weight in some areas. Like me boobs for instance. It’d be nice to be recognised as a woman from one angle at least.’

‘After the wedding you can have a boob job. Just don’t go sprouting any till after the twenty-first of May.’

‘Katie, I’ve gone all through puberty, my teens and twenties without sprouting any, as you put it, so why in the name of God you think I’m suddenly going to become Madonna herself just to ruin your wedding…’

‘It’s not me. It’s Lisa, going on and on about the dress.’

‘And I
don’t
want a boob job, thank you very much for the thought, even if I could ever afford one in a million years!’

‘So think yourself lucky, then, you lucky skinny thing!’ I’m a size 14 on a good day (don’t even ask about the bad days) and when I talk to people like Jude I become so conscious of my size I can practically feel my bum, stomach and legs flopping and flabbing about like giant jellies. ‘And big boobs are overrated. They get in the way. I can’t buy nice pretty little bras with delicate shoestring straps, you know. I have to go for industrial harnesses.’

‘Overrated? Not to men, they’re not!’

‘Come on, Jude – we’re not going out with fifteen-year-old schoolboys now! Men do grow out of the breast-fixation stage. Fergus loves you the way you are, doesn’t he.’

‘Yeah. I suppose.’

There’s a silence I can’t quite work out. Is she upset? Have I offended her? It’s so hard not seeing someone’s face. It’s hard being best friends, oldest friends, but only getting together a couple of times a year.

‘I can’t wait to see you, Judy.’

‘Me too. Only a couple of weeks now!’

‘Yeah. God, I’m looking forward to the hen weekend so much! I think I’m looking forward to it more than the bloody wedding at the moment!’

She laughs.

‘I don’t think Matt would be too flattered to hear that!’

‘No.’ Suddenly this topic isn’t funny any more. ‘No, he wouldn’t.’

‘But he’d know you were only joking, Katie, so he would.’

Maybe. But I’m not so sure.

The hen weekend is a bit of a sore point, actually. Rather, the stag weekend is. Or to be more accurate, the stag
week and a half
. You know I told you about how compatible we are? Well, the hen and the stag are the first things we’ve really disagreed about. I’m trying to keep off the subject, to be quite honest. But how do you keep off the subject of something that’s going to happen in only two weeks’ time?

Yes, let me tell you a little bit about Matt.

I met him in the corniest way you can imagine. We were both with other people, having lunch in a pub. I was with a guy called James who I’d only been out with twice (and never did again), and Matt was with Sara – his soon-to-be ex. He walked past our table on the way to the bar and accidentally nudged my arm so that I dropped a sausage I’d been about to cut into. It hit the floor rolling and he trod on it. He stopped, looked at the squashed mess under his shoe, looked at me, and we both burst out laughing. I fancied him instantly. He scraped up the remains of the sausage and offered to buy me another one, which just made me laugh all the more. James was looking less than thrilled. I’d already decided he was boring and I wasn’t going to see him again, so the sausage episode brightened up the day. After Matt went back to his table (and back to Sara) I sneaked a couple of glances at him and caught him looking at me. But he was with Sara, so I didn’t think about it too much afterwards.

A few weeks later I was in the same pub one evening with Emily and some other girlfriends, and there was Matt, with another guy, leaning up at the bar. It was one of those heart-jerk moments; I fancied him even more.

‘That’s him!’ I whispered to Emily. ‘The sausage guy!’

‘Ooh – he’s
nice
. Where’s his girlfriend?’

‘Don’t know. At home, maybe.’

‘He’s coming over!’ said Emily, nudging me. ‘Introduce us, Kate! I quite fancy his friend!’

‘Hi!’ he said, with a smile that made my toes tingle. ‘Can I buy you a drink? Make up for the sausage?’

‘No need!’ I laughed. ‘It probably saved me about two hundred calories. Sausage and chips is a ridiculous thing to have for lunch when you’re trying to lose weight.’

‘You don’t need to lose weight,’ he responded instantly, looking me up and down and returning his gaze to my eyes.

He’s flirting with me
, I thought, with a shiver.

‘Hello!’ said Emily loudly, nudging me again. ‘Are you going to introduce me, or is this a private party?’

‘Sorry – this is my friend Emily,’ I said.

‘Nice to meet you, Emily. I’m Matt. Are you going to introduce me to
your
friend?’

‘Oh! Sorry – I’m Katie!’ I giggled before she could open her mouth.

‘So now I know your name, what you like for lunch, and what you drink,’ he said, nodding at the glass in my hand. ‘But what I really need to know is – are you having a night off from your boyfriend or is he going to walk in any minute and beat the hell out of me for chatting you up?’

Chatting me up
? I shivered again. He fancied me. I could see it in his eyes.

‘He wasn’t my boyfriend. Just a date. A one-off,’ I lied only slightly.

‘Never to be repeated? Then it’s OK if I say he looked like a boring prat?’

‘Absolutely OK. He was. He talked about politics all through lunch.’

‘God. No wonder you threw your sausage on the floor.’

‘You nudged me!’ I laughed. A delicious thought came to me. Did he do it on purpose? ‘And anyway,’ I added, hardly daring to ask, ‘what about your girlfriend? She not with you tonight?’

‘No. And she’s not my girlfriend any more.’

He told me later that they’d have broken up anyway – they were arguing all the time, it hadn’t been good for ages – but that meeting me had been the pivotal point for him.

‘I was suddenly forced to accept something I’d been trying to ignore,’ he said.

‘Which was what? You were clumsy in pubs? You enjoyed stamping on sausages?’

‘Apart from that! I didn’t fancy Sara any more. And I’d seen someone I did.’

Do you know one of those girls – I think everyone does – who doesn’t seem to be able to settle down, even though she’s edging into her thirties and all her friends are either married or sorted out with a serious relationship? The girl who has plenty of boyfriends, but never seems to find one she wants to stay with? Who’s got her own flat, her own life, and her own space, and nobody to share them with because she’s still
waiting for Mr Right
? Yep – I was that girl. But I’d finally met my Mr Right.

We fell in love frighteningly quickly. Almost overnight, we became one of those couples who used to irritate the shit out of me before I met Matt: phoning each other constantly, e-mailing each other several times a day from work, going everywhere together, neglecting the rest of the world. He moved in with me after only two months. Mum said it was much too soon and that we were still in the honeymoon period.

‘Isn’t that exactly the right time to want to live together?’ I said.

The truth was that I was absolutely mad about him and nothing else would do – we had to wake up together and spend every possible moment in each other’s company.

We’ve settled down a bit by now, of course. We’ve got a bit less intense. Emily says she thinks it’s healthier.

‘To be honest,’ she says, ‘you two were an embarrassment to be around, the first year you were together. Everyone was frightened you were going to rip each other’s clothes off any minute.’

‘Oh, please! We were
not
like that!’

‘Katie, the way you looked at each other, the way your
passion
was so obvious to everyone – sorry, but it unnerved people. You want to know the truth? I think when other people see couples so
aggressively
in love, it makes them feel inadequate. They measure their own relationships against yours, and think theirs are a weak and watered down version of the real thing.’

‘But surely everyone’s like that at the beginning, aren’t they?’

‘Sean and I weren’t. It was much more of a gradual thing. We were friends first, we liked each other, we got on well together, then we started to fancy each other. We’d been together for about six months before it kind of dawned on us that we were in love with each other. It was a
gentle
experience for us. Yours was headlong – violent – I watched it happening and it scared the shit out of me.’

‘Me too,’ I admit sadly. I’m sad, because that stage is over now. I don’t care what anyone says: you can’t recreate it. No amount of wearing black lingerie, having candlelit dinners or sex in unusual places is going to catapult you back into those fiery first few months of insatiable desire. ‘But we’re still in love!’ I add quickly, to reassure myself almost as much as Emily.

‘I know you are, you daft thing.’

We’re at my flat, in the bedroom. Matt’s in the lounge watching TV. Em’s come round in response to an emergency phone call. Well, when you’re getting married in a couple of months and your boyfriend calls you a moaning miserable cow, you kind of need your best friend. Badly.

‘What was the row about?’ says Emily.

‘Same thing again. Prague.’