Prior Engagements

by Sarah Goodwin

  “Well, tell him I’m fine too.”

  “I will,” Mum said.

  And that’s when the police kicked my door down.

  Chapter Eleven

  The police were very nice about it afterwards, but, as the old saying goes, ‘apologies do not reaffix hinges to the bloody wall’.

  The two constables had been dispatched to check up on me, because apparently the police had misplaced the post-it on their switchboard that warned them not to follow up calls from Mum’s number. When I hadn’t responded to their knocking, they’d gotten antsy, and one of them had (after losing a quick game of rock-paper-scissors, as they told me over tea and biscuits) decided it would be best to kick my door down.

  I’d hung up on Mum, telling her that the police had just turned up, and that I had to explain to them that she was just a batty woman who watched far too many Panorama paranoia-fests. The policemen (one of whom looked about twelve but who was at least seven feet tall, and the other of whom had the longest, girliest eyelashes that I’d ever seen) were really very nice about the whole thing, and proceeded to drink three cups of tea each, and demolish my biscuit stash as a gesture of friendship.

  The only problem was that Mum had taken my garbled goodbye as some kind of danger sign, and had called the police again. This meant that another load of police (two PCSOs and a very short blond man with a prodigious handlebar moustache) arrived ten minutes later. I had to run to the Spa shop down the street to fetch more bourbons, and make several more cups of tea, before they decided that they’d had enough of a laugh at my expense, and were ready to take the story back to the station.

  Once they’d gone I sent a quick text to the landlord telling him what had happened (and that it most assuredly wasn’t my fault) and asking for another door, preferably pronto.

  After all that I was too tired to mope about, so I went to bed and read half a paperback in the safety of my nest of throws and blankets. The landlord turned up, grumbling and huffing with his tool kit. I listened to him installing the new door, before finally going to sleep. Just before I dropped into unconsciousness, I realised that I’d forgotten to do something, something important.

  But for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what it was.

  I remembered as soon as I opened my eyes the next morning, and looked up at the familiar cracks and whorls of plaster on my ceiling.

  My dress.

  I hadn’t bought a dress for the meeting with Dorian’s parents. The meeting that was now only one day away. I jumped out of bed, tripped over the trailing hem of my Eeyore pyjama bottoms, and launched myself at the wardrobe.

  I’d spent some of my time away from the café scraping most of my clothing back into the wardrobe, as, during many many cycles of use-wash-dry, most of it had ended up in stacks on the floor, or on my dressing table chair. My wardrobe was an ancient beast of a thing, it had originally come from IKEA, but had been mended and reinforced with so much MDF that it had probably doubled in weight. I’d also painted it, on a drunken whim, with Will at my side. One side was pink, the other brilliant purple, and both doors were patterned with yellow and white butterflies.

  I yanked open the door and glared at the rail of clothes. I had a habit of buying things and then forgetting that I owned them, a hazard of browsing charity shops on a regular basis. I was dearly hoping that I’d squirreled away an Yves Saint Laurent dress, but the chances seemed slim. I did however have lots and lots of plain shirts, fancy shirts, denim skirts, a few pairs of jeans, jumpers, a truly hideous pair of paisley shorts and my BHS dress. Nothing that would make me look like a suitable match for Dorian.

  I dug through the chest of drawers next to the door (sky blue with hot pink china handles and gold lilies painted up the side) but unearthed nothing except a stash of threadbare knickers and an ancient pair of curling tongs that Yvonne had left at my place when we’d last gone out together.

  There was nothing for it, I decided that I’d have to go shopping. I’d have time to trawl the shops for something suitable (and preferably on sale) before coming home and digging out my home spa kit (a birthday present from Yvonne) and shaping myself into something closely resembling a well groomed woman.

  Someone knocked on my front door, and, with yesterday’s police fiasco at the forefront of my mind, I darted out of my bedroom and into the living room to answer it. The door that my landlord had installed the previous evening was tricky to open, and looked like it had been made from an old crate by blind nursery school children. I made a mental note to pick up some paint for it. I finally got the door open by using a biro to jerk the catch on the lock to one side.

  The hallway was deserted.

  I looked up and down, but, from one end to the other, the grim concrete hall was empty. I couldn’t even hear anyone on the stairs above or below. In front of me however, was a dark pink carrier bag, one of the posh paper ones, with Phase Eight written on the side in pink ribbon writing.

  I froze.

  The bag just sat there, being a bag, while I stared at it, my brain working overtime in an attempt to work out what was happening. You see, surprise Vegas wedding aside, this kind of thing didn’t happen to me. I was not the girl who found expensive shopping on her doorstep at the very moment she needed a dress. I wasn’t even the girl who could get a cab when she needed one. I was the girl who never got the door held open for her, who was always twenty-pence short of a cup of tea, and whose fiancé hadn’t shown up for her wedding. In other words – I was average, and very much aware that real life was not like a chick-flick, (it wasn’t even like an indie film, there weren’t enough fairy lights, and I didn’t smoke charming little cigarettes and discuss my various addictions in cool bars).

  This didn’t help to explain why someone had left a fancy carrier bag on my doorstep.

  After about half a minute, I managed to convince myself that is was just a bag of rubbish that someone had been too lazy to carry all the way downstairs. I leant down and opened the bag.

  Resting on top of a folded bundle of pale green fabric, was a bright pink envelope with Annie, written on the front.

  I knew Will’s handwriting when I saw it, and my heart sank.

  I picked the bag up and took it into my flat, closing the door behind me. Inside the envelope was a card, just the normal greeting-less card that you can buy at any WHSmiths. On the front was a picture of a huge layer cake, on the top of which Will had drawn a tiny little café. Inside the card he’d written, Nipped out for a breather, saw you looking at this, don’t be angry. You’ll knock ‘em dead.

  I laid the card flat on the table and closed my eyes. Why was it that every time I made a move in one direction, the world was waiting to push me off of my chosen path? After a few minutes I lifted the dress (and it was the dress) out of the paper carrier and took it to my bedroom. I put it on a hanger and slid it to the back of my wardrobe.

  I couldn’t wear it. It was beautiful, and I still adored it, but it wouldn’t have been right to wear it to meet Dorian’s family. I’d have to find a way to return it and give Will the money back without him noticing, until then it could stay out of sight. And hopefully out of mind.

  I got dressed in a faded denim skirt, cowboy boots and a much loved black velvet jumper. Picking up my handbag I swept out of the flat and downstairs to the street. The city centre wasn’t too far away to walk it, and I couldn’t face spending money on a bus when I was going to have to splash out on a dress anyway.

  I ended up at the Mall on Cribbs Causeway, which, if you’ve never been, is a bit like a fallen Soviet Empire, only with more chavs and empty McDonalds bags on the ground. I started weaving my way through the happy shoppers and peeking fretfully into the windows of every shop I passed. Everything was so expensive, a pair of shoes for £45, a handbag for £60, the dresses would be extortionate. I went into French Connection and prowled the racks, looking for anything remotely affordable. The closest thing to an appropriate dress was a blue and white striped jersey dress with little white ca
p sleeves. It looked nice on the hanger, but with my boobs and hips in it, the graceful nautical ensemble was transformed into a clingy cover for two bulging life preservers.

  It was the same story at all the shops that I tried, the flattering clothes were out of my price range, and anything cheaper looked hideous. At last, disheartened and trailing my poverty around behind me like a strip of grimy toilet paper stuck to my shoe, I traipsed into Peacocks. As soon as I walked in, my ears were skewered by the sound of a baby shrieking bloody murder in the kid’s section. My options were pretty limited, most things had tacky beads sewn onto them, or some kind of tassel or tie in a silly place. After a bit of poking around I found a lemon yellow tea dress that I didn’t instantly dislike (It might sound like I was being too picky, but, upwards of a size fourteen, clothes shopping does become increasingly difficult. Tiny design faults seem to be magnified by each enlargement of the pattern, until a single misplaced button or cheap frill is too much of a blight to ignore).

  I tried the dress on and it fitted reasonably well, I’d have to wear a cardigan with it (sleeveless was not a look that suited me) but I had a white lacy crochet cardigan at home that’d go nicely with it. The dress was only £14, which made me feel at once happy and depressed. Happy, because I’d found a pretty good dress for very little money, and depressed because I had the perfect dress sitting in my wardrobe at home, where it would have to stay.

  I bought a pair of ballet flats to go with the dress, as all my old pairs were looking a bit shagged out. These ones were dark blue with a small cluster of yellow fabric covered buttons on the toes. The whole lot came to £22.50, and I left the shop feeling mildly happier than I had when I’d entered it.

  Once I’d plodded home and hung my dress up to shake the creases from it, I put the kettle on, and settled in for a bit of TV. Tomorrow, I decided I’d tackle the home spa kit.

  The next day, with a whole ten hours at BHS stretching on before me, I got up two hours early to tart myself up for the visit to Dorian’s parents’ house. I could only pray that the magic contained in the home spa box would endure the hours I would spend at work.

  Yvonne had actually gone all out with this particular gift. It was a large hat box, which she’d filled with bottles and jars of every kind of cosmetic goop you could imagine. Pre-hair wash goop, post-hair wash goop, serums, masks, leg paste, foot jelly, face cream, armpit icing, scrubs with sugar, scrubs with salt, soaks, foams, polishes and waxes. There were also funny little brushes and wooden rollers, that were meant to banish cellulite, and a whole host of make-up samplers and mini-perfume testers (Strangely enough, or perhaps not so strangely, given Yvonne’s long and varied CV full of firings and dishonourable discharges, this little bundle had been gifted to me the very same week she had been canned by Superdrug).

  With a cup of tea at my bedside and an episode of The Great British Bakeoff playing on my laptop, I unscrewed some jars, and looked at their contents with mistrust. One of them contained a glistening green paste, dotted with tiny emerald specks. Not exactly something I was wildly enthusiastic about smothering onto my hair.

  Oh well, I thought, here we go then.

  Thirty minutes later I thought, I should have bloody known, as I tried to chisel the worst of the green muck off of my hair. It had set like cooling wax all over the top of my head, giving me the look of an unfortunate paintbrush, mashed about by a toddler in PVA glue and poster paint. I re-read the instructions on the pot, but they didn’t say anything about the product suddenly going into rigour mortis. Clearly I was on my own.

  I opened another pot, this one containing a thick white cream, and smeared that on over the green stuff, hoping that, like two rival ant colonies, they would fight it out between them, leaving me to defeat the victor.

  I drank my tea and watched someone cry over a sagging sponge cake on the laptop. Once I felt enough time had passed for the chemicals to have cancelled each other out, I went into my squalid little bathroom, climbed into the shower, and hosed off my hair.

  Then I rinsed it through, three times.

  Eventually I gave up, I couldn’t get it to stop feeling sticky. I just had to hope that it was supposed to feel like that.

  With my hair all gooped up, I turned my attention to my skin. Slathering myself in Veet was not entirely pleasant, given that my bathroom had an ambient temperature like the inside of an industrial fridge, but I gave it my best. With my legs, underarms and bikini line covered in thick cream, there was very little I could do, and in the ten minutes it took to work I found myself bored out of my mind (they really should put short stories on the back of the box, something it would take you ten minutes to read, like a really concise Jackie Collins yarn). I also found that I had a craving for vanilla angel delight, which was cruelly ironic.

  I finally reached the end of the agonising wait for hairlessness, and washed the slimy gunge from my skin. You may wonder why I didn’t just shave, or have someone wax me quickly and precisely. Mainly, it’s because I couldn’t afford beauty therapy, and because, in my university digs, many cruel remarks were made about the buzzing of my electric razor, which could be heard through the wall (Which was really rather ridiculous, as my actual vibrator was whisper quiet).

  Still faintly scented with Veet, I exfoliated my entire body with the different grades of scrub, from coarse salt to fine brown sugar, feeling very much like a dresser being sanded down for painting. I also experimented with the rollers and brushes, which rather added to the feeling of featuring on a makeover show set in Homebase. I didn’t notice any real change to my legs or anywhere else for that matter, but I did discover a few ticklish spots that I hadn’t known about previously (the locations of which I was determined to take to my grave).

  Outside of the shower, I towelled off my reddened, goosebumpy skin and slid into my comfy dressing gown. Next up was moisturiser, and Yvonne had given me tons of the stuff, enough to grease up an entire freight train. I slathered my legs in vanilla custard scented coco butter, my torso in cherry pink body blancmange, and my arms and neck in almond sponge body butter. The effect was an overpowering scent of trifle, which, while not unpleasant, wasn’t exactly sexy. I rubbed some scentless cream onto my face, then, with the growing sense that I was making matters steadily worse for myself, I took a look at the make-up supplies.

  I knew how to use about one tenth of the things Yvonne had supplied me with, the mascara, lipsticks and nail varnish were familiar. The whole host of flesh toned, filmy, slippy creams were not. Highlighter, illuminator, primer, under-foundation...they were all things that I’d seen Yvonne use, but I had no idea in what way they differed from each other. In the end I tweezed my eyebrows, dotted concealer onto my face until I looked reasonably blemishless and symmetrical, added some highlighter to my cheeks and eye sockets, and carefully applied eyeliner. The final touch was a dab of strawberry lip balm to my mouth.

  I styled my hair with a handful of puffy, white mousse, coaxing waves into my sticky feeling locks, setting the whole lot with a blast of hairspray (Will had left a can of Megahold Disaster Proof Hair Varnish at my flat). I’d thankfully dyed my hair just after getting back from Vegas, and my mousy roots were now the same brown as the rest of my tatty haircut.

  I checked the finished result in my bedroom mirror.

  Overall...it was a bit of a mixed bag.

  My hair actually looked alright, sort of...shiny, in that it looked like a conker had been stretched into a wriggly, wavy hairstyle. It looked impermeable, I had titanium hair. But it wasn’t bad.

  My eyebrows were OK, and I’d done a good job with the concealer, but there were some worrying blotches appearing on my neck. Sort of, reddish purple marks, somewhere between bruises and burns. I picked up a flannel, ran it under cold water, and wiped at my neck. With the front of my dressing gown open a little, I could see that the marks were also on my shoulders and collar bone. Pretty much everywhere I’d used the almond moisturiser. Terrific. I was having some kind of allergic reaction.

&nb
sp; It wasn’t until my throat started to contract, and I felt a little wheezy that I thought, bloody hell, I really am having an allergic reaction. I’m not even allergic to anything!

  As I fell to the floor, I gasped for air, and at the back of my mind tried to make sense of it all. Just as prickly blackness made my eyes swim, I remembered that I was allergic to something.

  But that something was feline skin flakes.

  Even as I lost consciousness, I managed to shudder in disgust. Catty skin flakes in my moisturizer. I’d always known that was how I was going to die.

  Chapter Twelve

  If I’d met my untimely end at that moment, I’d like to think that I’d lived to the full. I’d gotten drunk a lot, sung loudly in the shower, eaten a lot of cake and had a pretty good time of it. OK, I hadn’t solved world hunger, or invented non-stick pleather, but I was doing alright as a human being.

  But I didn’t die, I lived to underachieve another day. Many more bottles of wine and boxes of organic chocolate truffles remained to be devoured. I had crime dramas to watch and mad DIY projects to undertake.

  I woke up with a shock on my bathroom floor, spared from asphyxiation by some miracle fluke. I rolled onto my stomach and wheezed onto the cracked and grimy tiles, noting that the bit of floor under the laundry hamper was covered in dust bunnies (dust capybaras more like). I felt like a beached manatee. Gradually I eased myself to my feet.

  I was going to kill Yvonne (providing I wasn’t having an out of body experience, in which case I would haunt her until she died, and then haunt her grave site, terrifying all the disappointed male students who came to mourn her). I was lucky to be alive.

  Once my legs stopped shaking, I went to the kitchen, found some barbecue tongs, and picked up the pot of moisturiser with them, then carried it carefully to the bin. I got myself a glass of water, and went to my room to get my work clothes.