‘Is it?’
‘Of course it is. Do you like him?’
I nod.
‘Do you like like him?’
‘This is just like uni.’
‘I know, it’s kind of nice,’ he says. ‘But, honestly, you deserve to be happy. Take a chance.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ I reply, before changing the subject. ‘How are the kids doing?’
‘The kids are doing great. They’re a lot of work but Stella is amazing with them.’
‘I can’t imagine having four kids,’ I tell him. ‘I can’t imagine having one, to be honest. I still feel like a kid myself.’
‘They completely change your life,’ he tells me. ‘They take all your time and your money and your energy. And, you know what, they’re not even grateful.’
‘I mean, they’re probably not old enough to be grateful, right?’ I reply.
‘Nah, 25 years old, I think, is when gratitude kicks in.’
‘Yeah, 25 at the earliest,’ I agree.
‘Do you know what you want from life?’ he asks me.
‘I’m scared of life.’
‘Well, remember, it’s just as scared of you as you are of it.’
I’m not sure if he’s joking or just too drunk to make sense.
‘I’m just so proud of you. You’ve always known what you wanted, and you’ve done whatever you’ve needed to do to get it. And here you are, you’ve got your dream job, your wife, your kids …’
Ed takes me by the hand and squeezes it tightly.
‘Luca, don’t think I don’t still think about how I owe this all to you.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ I tell him.
‘I’m serious,’ he says, staring straight into my eyes. The fact that he isn’t blinking is making me feel tense, rather than appreciated. ‘I owe so much to you, after everything you did for me. Zach too.’
‘What about me?’ Zach asks, hearing his name.
‘We were just talking about how we’re all maturing,’ I say. ‘Ed especially.’
‘Well, Ed’s always been mature,’ Fi replies.
Clarky returns and sets a tray of shots down on the table in front of us.
‘Shots,’ Ed bellows.
‘What were you saying about him being mature?’ I ask Fi with a chuckle.
‘Do you think it’s all men, who are crap or just ours?’ she asks me.
The three boys argue over which two of them get the extra shots. As Ed makes his case, Zach knocks back his shot, followed by both of the extra ones.
‘Maybe it’s just our men,’ I reply light-heartedly. ‘But we’re stuck with them, right?’
‘You speak for yourself,’ she says under her breath.
Chapter 23
New Year’s Eve 2008, 8.25 p.m.
The flashing lights are the first thing I notice. The rhythmic blinking of the hazard lights in the dark, cold night air.
‘Oh my God,’ I say as we pull up behind the car.
‘It’s going to be OK,’ Zach reassures me. ‘Don’t look, OK? I’ll go see what’s happened.’
I nod. I’m so grateful he’s going first because after what I heard on the phone, my imagination is thinking up all sorts.
I watch as Zach approaches the front of the car. As he looks down at the ground, I watch him run a hand through his hair and exhale deeply. I can see the anguish on his face from here. He looks terrified.
I can see that he’s talking to someone, but I can’t tell what he’s saying. As he approaches my car door, I take a deep breath and brace myself for what he’s about to say. This can’t be good news …
Chapter 24
Now
Today has felt like the longest day of my life so far, and it’s only 3 p.m.
Wait, no, it can’t be. I tap my Apple watch, but nothing happens. It’s a smart watch – smart watches aren’t supposed to stop, are they? I suppose, technically, it’s frozen, which I can’t help but find amusing, because it definitely feels like time has stopped moving today.
Perhaps it’s because it’s summer, and it doesn’t get dark until quite late, which is making it feel like the day isn’t ending, or maybe it’s my circumstances. I can’t help but feel I’ve been thrown back into my old life, and now I’m trapped here, in some sort of purgatory for millennials.
I just want this day to be over, I just want my life to finally get going … but both are as frozen as my watch.
I leave the cool breeze of the gardens to pop my head inside the warm bar where there’s a large clock on the wall. You’re in no danger of losing track of time in here, every minute passing you by is always in your peripheral vision.
So, it’s actually 6 p.m., not 3 p.m., which may be three hours along the line, but it’s still a long way away from midnight, when the invitation said the wedding would end. I know there’s no law that says you have to stick around until the end, but when you’re staying in the hotel where the wedding is, with nowhere else to go, it’s hard to come up with a good excuse to scarper.
I find my friends, still at ‘our’ table outside, and plonk myself down in the chair next to Fi. I open my mouth to speak, only to be interrupted by Kat.
‘Luca, there you are,’ she says.
‘Yep, here I am,’ I reply.
Why is it, as soon as I try to relax, someone comes along to stop me?
‘I have another job for you,’ she says.
Of course she does. God, I really hope she doesn’t need the toilet again.
As I stand up from the table I notice the number of empty shot glasses has significantly increased. The boys seem merrier too – and Ed has popped another shirt button open. That’s two buttons open now. To a regular person, that’s the equivalent of doing two lines of coke – it really must be party time.
‘No rest for the wicked,’ Fi says as I head towards my master’s voice.
‘What’s up?’ I ask.
‘Tom is looking for you,’ she tells me. ‘Wedding business – I’m not allowed to know, apparently.’
‘Right. Do you know where he is?’
‘He’s over there,’ she says as she points across the garden, to a gang of groomsmen standing around, looking shifty.
‘Great,’ I reply.
As I approach them, I notice they’re crowded around a bag for life, all peering in, discusses the contents.
Given what I know about the other groomsmen and the stag party, it’s probably a bag of sex aids.
I join their circle and peer down into the bag.
Oh.
I was totally joking about the sex aids, making a little dig to myself about their stag do antics, but that is exactly what is in the bag.
‘Luca and I have it covered,’ Tom tells them. ‘Don’t worry.’
The shifty group disperse.
‘Thanks for helping with this,’ Tom says, holding the bag up. ‘Come with me.’
‘Where?’’ I ask.
‘Upstairs,’ he replies.
‘Erm … are you not even going to buy me dinner first?’ I joke cautiously. Cracking jokes is my number one coping mechanism for awkward situations, but I am low-key concerned about where we’re going and what we’re going to do when we get there.
Tom laughs.
‘Are they party favours?’ I persist. ‘Those beads you’ve got there don’t look like the kind the mother of the bride would be interested in.’
Then again, she did seem to have a major hot flash while she was lying on Alan’s back, when he was doing press-ups for the crowd earlier.
Again, Tom just laughs at my joke.
We step into the lift together – I’ve never seen anything like it.
‘Oh, wow,’ I blurt.
‘Oh, you won’t have seen this if you’re staying in the cottages, will you?’ Tom replies. ‘It’s cute, isn’t it?’
‘It’s … something,’ I reply.
I suppose it’s kind of cute, but it makes me feel uneasy. I’m used to metal lifts, with polished doors, mirrored w
alls, and an eloquent and calming female voice telling me whether I’m going up or down. The lift here is older than I am. It has a wooden door – just a regular door, with a small window at the top – and inside, the walls are covered with carpet. Tom presses a button, to take us up, and as we travel from floor to floor, I realise we’ve left the door behind us. Instead of doors that are part of the lift, that move with the lift, we are passing each floor and door as we go up – we could even reach out and touch them.
‘Maybe we’ll take the stairs back down,’ I say as we step out.
‘Perhaps,’ he replies. ‘I did notice a sign in reception saying what to do if you got stuck in it.’
‘Yeah, that doesn’t fill me with confidence. So, are you going to tell me what we’re doing now?’
‘I have been tasked with the very important job of decorating the bridal suite,’ he tells me as I follow him along a corridor that wouldn’t be out of place in The Shining. ‘You’re the only person I trust to help me.’
‘So …’
‘So the boys have put together this bag of tricks,’ he says. ‘The idea is, we leave these sex toys all over the room, leave the sexy underwear hanging in the wardrobes – there’s some tools in here, to loosen the bed, so that it collapses when they get on it …’
‘I’m the only person you trust to help with that?’ I ask.
‘Yeah,’ he replies. ‘Well—’
‘You think I’m the person to dismantle a bed and dot dildos around?’ I interrupt him, unable to hide my disbelief. ‘That will absolutely ruin their night.’
‘Yeah, it will,’ Tom says. ‘So—’
‘So, no way am I helping you,’ I tell him. ‘In fact, I’ve got every mind to warn them.’
‘Luca.’ Tom rolls his eyes and laughs. ‘Just listen to me, OK? The guys got all this stuff together and they came up with the plan. I insisted on implementing it – with your help – because you’re right, it’s not funny. It would definitely ruin their night.’
‘So …’
‘So I brought some other stuff with me,’ he says, nodding towards a different bag on the floor outside the bridal suite. ‘I snuck it up here earlier.’
‘So you said we’d do it, so you can put nice stuff in their room,’ I say, finally catching on.
‘Exactly,’ he replies. ‘You’re so quick to think the worst of me.’
‘I am. Second nature, I guess.’
Tom hovers with his key in the door.
‘So, are we doing this?’ he asks.
‘Let’s do it.’
As Tom smiles at me, I watch the wrinkles around his eyes pull together. He doesn’t look old, he looks like he’s spent a lifetime smiling, laughing, being happy. When I look at his face, it’s like finding a picture that used to hang on your wall, that you put into storage and forgot about. You forget how much you used to admire it, how much it used to make your day when you looked at it.
‘OK then,’ he says, opening the door.
I step in the room and I’m taken aback.
‘This is gorgeous,’ I say. I feel a little crackle in my voice but I can’t pinpoint the origin of it.
It’s a large room, with tall windows and an even higher ceiling. Rather than modernise this one, they’ve kept it classic. Unlike other parts of the hotel, it looks like it’s filled with antiques, rather than old tat. The walls are simple, with a plain cream paper. The colours come from the peach of the carpet and the curtains, which ordinarily I would hate, but in here it looks just right. Like something out of a fairy tale. The pièce de résistance is the king size, four-poster bed in the heart of the room. It’s so grand, with its dark wooden frame and delicate white curtains and sheets.
‘It is,’ Tom agrees. ‘I personally think the dildos would’ve ruined it.’
I laugh. ‘I agree.’
We decorate the room with candles (ready to be lit when it’s time for the happy couple to come up) and scatter rose petals around. Tom even has a rose petal air freshener in his bag of tricks.
‘I thought this might be a nice touch,’ he says proudly as he places a small speaker on the chest of drawers. Upon closer inspection there’s a small MP3 player plugged into the back of it. ‘A romantic Eighties playlist, for a man who has shaped his love life around Eighties music.’
‘Matt was always more Mötley Crüe than Michael Bolton,’ I joke.
Tom presses play and starts playfully grooving to the song that is playing. I giggle as he bops towards me, inching closer to me until our bodies are touching.
‘Can I give you some advice?’ I say, looking up at him.
‘Go for it,’ he replies casually.
‘You might want to take “I’ll Never Fall In Love Again” off the playlist.’
Tom pauses for a second, taking in the lyrics of the Deacon Blue song currently playing.
‘Oh,’ he replies with an embarrassed chuckle.
He skips the track. Foreigner’s ‘Waiting For a Girl Like You’ plays.
‘Much more like it,’ I reply.
‘Would this seduce you?’ he asks.
‘You’re getting warm,’ I tell him, but then I catch myself for flirting with him.
‘What about if we wrap these fairy lights around the bed frame?’ he suggests with a wiggle of his eyebrows.
We both kick off our shoes and climb onto the bed. Tom carefully wraps the lights around the wooden frame as I feed him the wire to make sure he’s doing it evenly.
‘It’s really is so nice of you to do this,’ I tell him.
‘It’s the least I can do,’ Tom replies. ‘He’s my best mate, he deserves it. Plus, I know he’ll do the same for me.’
I smile to myself. It must be nice to have a best mate. My friends these days feel like little more than acquaintances. It’s not that there is anything wrong with me, it’s just so hard to make friends in your thirties. A few of the women at work are quite close, but it’s mostly the ones with kids. They’ve got this yummy mummy group that, obviously, I can’t be a part of. Most of the other people I work with are either young and hip, or older and married. I just seem to fall between the cracks. It’s sad because with a few taps of my phone, I have access to countless dating apps that will bag me anything from a quick hook up, to a long term relationship, to a financial arrangement that we’re all only a few bad decisions away from contemplating, even if there’s no way we’d have the bottle to go through with it. I can pretty much order a man like an item from a catalogue (although, in a similar way, you can’t tell if it’s good quality or not until you see it in person) but there’s no equivalent for making friends.
‘Are you getting married anytime soon?’ I ask him.
‘No,’ he laughs. ‘You?’
‘Not today.’
‘My dad keeps telling me I need to settle down,’ he says.
‘My mum is of a similar opinion,’ I tell him. ‘She’s always reminding me that she’d had me and my sister before she was my age.’
‘It was one of the last things my mum said to me.’
You know when you hear something and it confuses you because it doesn’t make sense with your version of the facts? Then it hits me.
‘Your mum passed away?’
‘She did,’ he replies. ‘Sorry, when I said my dad remarried, I didn’t think to tell you why he wasn’t with my mum anymore …’
‘Don’t apologise,’ I insist. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘She … she, erm …’
Tom’s voice crackles, just a little. I don’t think about it, I just wrap my arms around him and squeeze him tightly. The problem is that, because we’re standing on such a soft mattress, we fall down. I hit the bed first with Tom landing on top of me a split second later. Realising that we’re both OK, we burst out laughing.
‘Did you just attack me?’ he asks.
‘I think I might’ve,’ I reply. ‘But I was only trying to hug you.’
‘Are you hurt?’
‘Only my pride,’ I tell him. ‘
I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t apologise to me, apologise to Matt and Kat. They won’t be happy with us trying out their bed before them.’
‘No, I suppose not.’
I don’t move though. Neither does Tom. He rests on one hand as he brings the other one up to my face to remove a piece of hair from my eyes, gently tucking it behind my ear.
It’s such a cliché, when people say they get lost in someone else’s eyes. I don’t feel lost in Tom’s eyes, I feel home.
Is his face moving closer to mine or am I imagining it? And is the bed moving?
‘Wait, is that my phone?’ I ask, noticing the faint sound of it vibrating in my bag.
I feel around on the bed for my clutch and take out my phone to see that I have a missed call and a text from Fi.
‘Oh, we’re going to miss the first dance,’ I tell him. ‘We’d better hurry.’
‘I’d better get off you then,’ he says. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he sounded a little disappointed.
We finish putting up the lights in awkward semi-silence before making our way back downstairs – via the stairs this time. Because there’s only one thing more dangerous than this hotel lift and that would be lying on that bed with Tom on top of me for a second longer.
Chapter 25
It’s a real sign of the times (or perhaps it’s more a sign of my fitness levels) that rushing down the stairs is tiring me out. I thought weddings were supposed to be fun but, honestly, this has been nothing but hard work since I got here.
‘What do you think their first dance will be to?’ Tom asks me.
Tom doesn’t seem to be having too much trouble tackling the stairs. He’s a couple of steps ahead of me, and not at all out of breath. It did occur to me to blame it on my heels, but then I remembered that I’m not wearing them anymore.
‘If Matt has his way, it will be something classically Eighties,’ I reply. ‘If Kat picks, it will be something modern. Probably something naff.’
‘Because the Eighties were so cool,’ he laughs.
‘Erm, they were,’ I correct him. ‘But you know Kat … as far as I can tell, she’s very poppy and mainstream, right? She loves Ed Sheeran and Little Mix.’
The Time of Our Lives Page 14