Prior Engagements

by Sarah Goodwin

  “Because I’ve only known him since Saturday.”

  Will blinked. “...Two days ago Saturday?”

  “Yes,” I said, waiting for the inevitable backlash.

  “Are you CRAZY?”

  “Says the man with the nuclear hairdo.”

  “Annie, I mean it, you married a man you’ve only just met? Where, for Christ’s sake?”

  “I met him in BHS, but I married him in Vegas.”

  “You flew to VEGAS with him?!” Will’s eyes practically skewered me to the floor. I hadn’t really thought about it at the time (thank you wine) but in the harsh light of the Day-Glo café I realised just how badly the whole thing could have gone. People got abducted or murdered, sold into the sex trade or ground down into burger meat, strangers would stab you soon as look at you. I read about it in the Daily Mail.

  Like hell was I going to admit that to Will though.

  “You really are a worry wart,” I sighed. “I was fine. Dorian’s a gentleman.”

  “Dorian?” Will, his horror forgotten for a moment, scoffed.

  “Yes, Dorian,” I snapped.

  “What’s Prince Dorian’s last name?”

  I tried (like a foolish fool) to brazen it out. “Foffaney.”

  Will froze for a second, then collapsed into hysterics.

  “Yes, yes, fine. Haha. Very funny,” I sighed, feeling my face flare up.

  “You’re....” he gasped, “you’re Annie...Fo-Fanny...”

  I glared at him.

  “Annie Fo-Fanny,” he wheezed. “Oh God, oh...I wish I could have seen your face...when you found out...you were, Annie, Fo-Fanny.”

  I peeled the remains of my bagel open and stuck one half to his forehead, smearing cream cheese on him. He still didn’t stop laughing, so I went off to refill the ketchup bottles.

  The bell on the door chimed, and three gray-faced students, all dressed in knitted hats, fake pit-miner’s boots and primary colour skinnies came in. They’d clearly been drinking all weekend, and were in search of ‘the cure’.

  Will’s almost-but-not-quite-patented hangover cure was a sandwich of black pudding and smoked salmon, topped with Tabasco and honey; it was a meal eaten only by the truly desperate, and digested only by the truly lucky. I’d only eaten it once, and it had nearly killed me, like a powerful antibody that hated my stomach more than Batman hated crime, and parent’s evenings at school.

  While Will fried black pudding and whistled at such a high pitch that the glass in the door seemed to tremble, I took drink orders from the students. Flat whites all round. Figures.

  After I’d wrangled the coffee machine into producing the coffee, I went back to refilling ketchup bottles.

  Will served the oil-drooling sandwiches to the students, and then cornered me in the kitchen.

  “So, are we talking about Dorian-McFancypants...or not?” he asked.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Uhhh, where is he right now? At your flat, or in his castle?”

  I glared at him. “He’s in New York, he works there. He’s coming to see me in two weeks. And we’re going to take things from there.”

  Will looked at me, dropping his pissy attitude for a second. Only a second, but it was long enough for me to see the concern, worse, the pity, underneath.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” I snapped, snatching up a tray of full sauce bottles.

  “I wasn’t...”

  “Yes, you were. I’m not...some, crazy, desperate freak. I know what I’m doing.”

  “Really? Because it sounds almost like you married a total stranger.” Will looked at me pointedly. “I know Stephen was an arsehole but...”

  “We’re not talking about him.” I stepped out of the kitchen and started setting ketchup bottles on all the tables. Will followed me.

  “That’s just it, we’ve never talked about Stephen, and maybe we should have...to be honest I always thought you wanted to forget it. For good reason.”

  I ignored him, rather maturely, I thought.

  “He was my friend too, Annie. But I sided with you, remember? All I want is for you to be happy.”

  “Well I am.” I turned to face him, picking the empty tray up and holding it like a shield. “Job well done.”

  Will looked for a moment like he wanted to say something else, but at that point, one of the students started to retch. Will turned to look as two of the nauseated, nauseating

  hipsters stumbled to the door and threw up in the dented bin on the kerb.

  None of the early birds walking into town paid any attention, it happened every Monday morning. You could set your watch by it.

  I thought the matter was closed, but I should have known better. Will was like an emotionally intuitive shark, once he had the smell of angst in his nostrils he wouldn’t leave it alone.

  “Have you told your mum yet?”

  Ah, he had finally stopped titting about and gone right for the jugular.

  “No.”

  “Don’t you think she needs to know? I mean...it’s going to make for a pretty awkward conversation as is. You don’t want to leave it ‘till you’re gathered round a dry turkey and some lethal stuffing, and someone asks you ‘how’s ya love life?’ before you say ‘oh yes, by the way I’ve got a fucking husband’.”

  “Oh yes, alright,” I snapped, “I’ll...email her or something.”

  “With or without emoticons?” Will glowered.

  “Without.”

  “Annie, you have to tell her in person.”

  Easy for him to say, his parents were taxidermists from Brighton. Jim and Sandy, who I’d met once when they’d visited to see the café. They’d bought us both lunch and told a bloody funny story about seven dead parakeets and some missing car keys. Delightful.

  My mother, a veteran of BBC dramas, had expected me to go all Miss Haversham, only with a bottle of Chianti and a boxed set of LOST instead of a mansion. She’d convinced herself that I was ‘damaged’ and would never marry. I’d been proving her doom prophet words right for five years. She was really going to be disappointed, she’d been buying us matching spinster-wear that would now go unused. One is Fun cookbooks and natty cardigans in peach and avocado.

  I looked up to find Will regarding me curiously.

  “What? I’ll tell her, OK?”

  “Have you slept with him?” Will asked, and I felt like I was wearing eight-inch heels, one of which had just broken unexpectedly.

  “You have, haven’t you?” Will’s eyes were wide. “You...but you haven’t had any dick in...years.”

  The steel-haired old woman who’d just approached the counter blanched and headed for the door. Another respectable patron lost to the BHS café.

  “It had not been years,” I hissed, “It’s been...” OK, I was not going to win this argument with facts, “not that long.”

  “So, what was he like? Hot? Hairy? Kinky?...”

  “Stop it!”

  “Premature?”

  “That. Is. My. Husband. You arse,” I said, snapping at his legs with a towel.

  Will sobered. “Seriously though, you met him, and you married him, and you’ve slept with him? That’s a lot of big steps for you. You don’t even date.”

  “I date.”

  “When?”

  “There was that guy, the one I met online.”

  “OK, one. One date...in five years.”

  “I met quite a few guys on there actually...just...no one really worked out. Which is not my fault.”

  “Who did you meet?”

  “Tom.”

  “Titchy-Tom...that four-foot bloke that Facebook stalked you?”

  “We had a nice time before that.”

  Actually, we hadn’t. He’d been a little creepy, kind of possessive, and entirely too devoted to LARP-ing. If I never had to hear the words ‘paladin’ or ‘sceptre’ again it would be light-years too soon.

  “Who else?”

  “Kev.”

  Will’s brow creased in tho
ught. “The other short-arse, with the acne?”

  “That was Mark. Kev was the one who took me to the gym.”

  “For your first date. Why did you let such a prince escape?”

  “Ha ha,” I intoned.

  No, I had not let him ‘get away’. He’d been hospitalised for steroid abuse. Shame.

  “Anyway, you can’t criticise – when was the last time you had a date?”

  Will, since we’d met in our first year at uni, had had precisely one girlfriend, a green haired eco-warrior known either as ‘Stig’ or ‘Stick’ (yes, I have trouble remembering names, as Water could probably tell you – should he/she grow a tongue at some point).

  “I don’t date, because I am perfectly happy by myself.”

  I reached under the counter and thumped the ‘bullshit’ button that I’d bought him for Christmas. Its little recorded voice yelped “Bullshit. Bullshitter!”

  Will raised an eyebrow. “You are a child.”

  “You are a eunuch.”

  “I have standards.”

  I felt wounded. “And I don’t?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Will rolled his eyes, “I just meant that, I know what I want, and that’s what I’m waiting for.” He looked at me and someone with a Mohawk should not have been able to produce puppy eyes that manipulative. “What is it that you want?”

  “Aside from a boss who can leave my personal life alone?”

  “I mean it, what have you been waiting for? Since Stephen?”

  I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to answer.

  “My wedding,” I said snippily, then went to ice a cake.

  How dare he? I thought, slathering a palette knife in homemade chocolate butter cream. Will always knew how to find my sore spots, a master of sadistic reflexology, but he usually steered clear of Stephen, just like I avoided the stuff that really pissed him off (microbrews, organic carrots and bloody Thatcher).

  I attacked the cake with the gooey utensil, pasting the icing on like a bricklayer. All I’d wanted was a nice day at work to follow my perfect weekend. I loved working at Raspberry Bs, much as I complained about Will, Water and the students. It was a lot better than smiling myself into a daze over at BHS. Still, sometimes even though he was my friend, my oldest friend, Will could be a little too much to handle.

  I finished icing the cake and decorated it with dark chocolate truffles. Then I started on slicing more tomatoes and lettuce for the lunchtime sandwiches, sending ripe veggies through the mandolin with no small amount of satisfaction. After an hour of mind numbing slicing, Will poked his head around the door, and, satisfied that I wasn’t going to hurl cake mix at him, waltzed in.

  “OK, fine,” Will said, slamming a plastic bowl of washing-up onto the counter beside Water, who was washing with his/her earbuds in, oblivious.

  This was Will’s version of an apology. It probably had been since he was five.

  “I’m not desperate,” I told him, still feeling the sting of his barely concealed disapproval.

  “I never said...”

  I glared.

  “OK, you’re not desperate.”

  “Thanks.” I rolled my eyes.

  “C’mon, cup of tea, and let’s be friends again?” Will wheedled.

  “....yes,” I said, grudgingly.

  “I’d love one, thanks,” Will said cheerily, ducking out of the kitchen.

  I scowled at the door, but by that time I was also putting the kettle on and making tea with the regulation staff tea bags (I wish I was kidding, but no, Will really was that much of a nut about protocol, the only exception was my breakfast bagel). Will might be a pushy, holier than thou kind of friend, but he was still a friend, and quite a good one at that.

  For the next few days he even held off on mentioning Dorian altogether. I knew he hadn’t forgotten, that he was waiting to see what time and another week would bring. So was I. I couldn’t wait for Dorian to be back in the UK, ready to meet Will, and prove him wrong.

  Chapter Seven

  Once, in university, I arrived five minutes late to a seminar, because I was an hour late for the bus. This was in itself, pretty unusual, as usually I’m so nervous about being shouted at that I show up to everything half an hour early. Even hair appointments. A habit that Will has always held, makes me a likely serial killer.

  Anyway, I had to explain my lateness to my hawk-eyed dictator of a ceramics professor. The reason, I had explained, red faced, sweating and clutching my now overdue assignment, was because of my housemate.

  My then housemate, Nibs (Or ‘Nips’, I can’t remember) was a charmless art-bitch from the Isle of Man (ironic, as she was a militant feminist, who did not believe in plucking, waxing, washing or microwave chips). She had, the previous day, used every tampon that we possessed in an art project (a pretty shit one, I might add) leaving me, about to dash out the door, suddenly in need of one, and finding myself up the scarlet creek without a cotton mouse, as the old saying goes. I’d had to count out pennies to get one from the dingy public toilets down the road, and had missed two buses in the process.

  My professor had glared at me through his clay speckled glasses and ordered me to leave, immediately. According to Will, I’d actually missed a session on the sculpting of female effigies that day. Pretty ironic.

  Anyway, the old bugger gave me a first in the end.

  Nibs got a third, and a suggestion that she ‘broaden her horizons’.

  Not that I’m bragging.

  The point of telling you this is that, when I walked into BHS on Friday, and met my manager, it was actually about twenty times more embarrassing than the tampon story. (Or it would have been, if I hadn’t long ago decided that I hated my job, and everything concerned with it could just fuck right off.)

  My manager, Neil, was a master of the dramatic, or so he probably told himself. Every sale was a battle with our customers better instincts (‘pile any old tat by the till, when Christmas panic sets in, they’d buy shit in a paper bag’), every set of sales numbers was make or break (‘this is my job, your jobs, the future of the brand’). His favourite phrases were ‘possible store closure’ and ‘possible redundancies’. His motivational tools? ‘I’ll fire you if you don’t....’ and ‘Blah, is taking the piss, you know? You’d better all work harder than Blah.’

  Blah was frequently Yvonne.

  In short, he was the world’s worst manager, pushy, abrasive, unfair, and kind of a prick. He was on me like a bitter old store detective on a six year old stealing penny sweets the moment I walked in the door.

  “Where were you on Saturday?” he demanded, a scowl painted over his football hooligan face.

  Oh yes, did I mention, he looked like an escapee from a youth detention facility/boy band training camp? He lived on protein shakes, talked endlessly about teambuilding through rock climbing and had cherub tattoos on his ‘guns’.

  He meant arms, bless him (the dick).

  I chose to lie. Yes, I shouldn’t have left work, just like that, but there had been unique circumstances.

  “Here,” I said.

  “Doing?”

  “My job, as laid out in...” I’d forgotten the name of the sainted document,

  “...that booklet you keep giving me.”

  “You left your section, without clearing time off with me.”

  “I must have forgotten.”

  He looked at me like a high court judge regarding a criminal.

  I sighed, but maintained eye contact. I had actually quit the job before, by default, as in the middle of a bout of flu I’d answered his ‘If you leave now you’re fired’ with a simple ‘OK’. (We’d both agreed to walk away from that confrontation and contract amnesia.)

  “This is work, not a game.”

  “I know that,” I said, flatly, trying to look contrite, but also mutinous.

  “So, why did you leave?”

  “I had to go to a wedding,” I sighed, walking around him and towards the escalator to the top floor, where the entrance to
the staffroom was.

  “Whose?” He shouted after me.

  “Mine!” I yelled, already on the bottom of the escalator, travelling upwards.

  “Bullshit!”

  “Oh go fuck yourself,” I muttered under my breath. I mean, the guy was an arsehole, but I did need the job.

  You’re probably wondering how on earth I was still employed there, and OK, perhaps I had become too used to Will and his informal work environment, but it’s actually really hard to get fired nowadays. Anyway, Neil was a big fan of the ‘disciplinary’, meaning he liked to shut you in his office and berate you for twenty minutes before disdainfully sending you back to work. I suppose if he fired me, he’d miss getting to harangue me every minute of my working day.

  Besides, working in retail was kind of a punishment in and of itself.

  I got off the escalator on the top floor, waltzed through the empty bed linen and cookery sections towards the café. Will detested the BHS café, but actually I quite liked it. Especially before or after the lunch rush, when it was just full of old ladies and distinguished ex-professors doing their crosswords and knitting over mugs of tea and slices of Victoria sponge (those professors knit amazing tea cosies, you should stop by and check it out).

  On the furthest side of the café was the staffroom door, and I shoved it open, my handbag swinging from my arm. Behind that door was the Hallway of Doom, a phenomenon that occurs in all shops. You see, the main floor is all about seduction, it’s all ‘buy me, I’m gorgeous’ and friendly pink writing on big, happy, posters. Behind the ‘staff only’ door it’s like a dictators think-tank. Plain white sheets of paper with ‘the rules’ printed on them, fire code, staff rosters and ancient leaflets about hygiene in the work place. The carpet was balding, the furniture in the staffroom itself (three wonky chairs and a table) was uncomfortable, and the facilities (one unisex bathroom with no lock on the door) were leftover from ten years previously.

  Actually, BHS was pretty good, I’d once worked in a seasonal shop, one of those ‘Christmas Superstores’ while I was in university. The back of house fixtures had dated from the early 60s, and three months after I stopped working there the whole building had been closed off. Asbestos.