Our university friend Belle, who came with a guitar and a desire to go out dancing all weekend, moved into Farly’s room and life carried on as normal. The fridge still leaked. The downstairs loo carried on being broken. Gordon still barged his way into our house uninvited most Saturday mornings trying to dump hideous pieces of furniture on us as a ‘treat’ because he couldn’t be bothered to take them to the skip. We still did something called ‘ladies’ choice’ when one of us went to the shop, which means you get whatever chocolate bar they come back with. At first, I saw Farly more than I had done when we lived together, simply because she was hyper-aware of making me feel like ‘nothing’s changed’. But eventually I started seeing less of her. Everything changed.
Three months after they moved in together, I was sitting at my desk at work when I saw on my phone that I had been invited by Scott to join a WhatsApp group titled ‘Exciting News’.
I knew what it was so I didn’t open it. I had been waiting for this moment since the day Farly told me they were moving in together. I wasn’t ready to know, so I carried on working, as if it was all just a pending dream; an unsent message in the ether’s outbox. My phone sat on my desk for an hour, the notification staring at me.
Finally, I got a call from AJ – who had also been invited to the group – and she told me to open it. It said he was proposing. Valentine’s Day. Four years after their first date. He asked if we could get a group of her friends together and surprise her at a bar after he’d done it. I said I’d love to. I said I couldn’t wait. I said I was over the moon.
I cried, knowing I had lost whatever battle I was fighting with whoever I was trying to fight against.
Dilly walked past.
‘Dollbird,’ she said. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Nothing,’ I muttered.
‘Come on.’ She grabbed my hand and took me to the boardroom. ‘Tell me what’s going on.’ I told her about the proposal. She was up to speed with the saga, having already met Farly a few times and been fascinated by the Scott–Farly–Dolly love triangle for years, citing it as ‘the perfect structured reality plot’.
‘And I know it sounds like I’m being melodramatic,’ I said in between sobs. ‘I know people grow up and things change but Christ I never thought everything would change when we were only twenty-five.’ She looked at me and sighed, shaking her head solemnly.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘I always knew we should have rigged the place with cameras when you guys moved into that house,’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘I knew it – I said it to Dave at the time. I know you say you don’t want to be on camera, but this whole thing would have been such a nice series arc.’
I rounded up our friends and told them Scott’s plan. We organized a time and place where we would be waiting with a present. I bought them a framed print off Etsy with the lyrics of ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’, their favourite Smiths song. AJ said she’d buy me the ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’ one.
I had never wanted any of this. I never wanted her to spend every weekend with Scott’s friends and their wives at barbecues in bloody Balham. I didn’t want to see her for catch-up dinners. I didn’t want her to move out after a year. I didn’t want her to get married. And the worst thing was, it was all my fucking fault. If only I could’ve gone back in time and never set them up. Never dated Hector. Never gone back to Hector’s on that snowy night in Notting Hill. I wished I could go back and ignore him when he’d started talking to me on the train. I wished I’d never got on that fucking train in the first place.
The problem with having a Farly in your life is that their story feels like your story. She wasn’t living the life I had planned for us and I was in mourning for the future I now knew we’d never have. Up until Scott, we were on track with the plan: we went to the same university where we chose to be in the same halls, then lived in the same house for two years. When we graduated I thought we’d have ‘The London Years’ – not ‘The London Year’. I thought there would be many houses, not a house. I thought we’d have hundreds of nights out together that ended at sunrise. I thought there’d be gigs and double dates and trips to European cities and weeks spent stretched out, side by side, on the beach. I thought we had claim over each other’s twenties before we’d inevitably have to give the other one up. I felt like Scott had robbed me of our story. He’d taken ten years that were mine.
A month before Scott proposed, a group of us went out for drinks one Saturday night with Farly.
‘Scott said something weird to me this week,’ she announced. We secretly looked at each other – knowing we’d already chipped in for the Smiths print and had cleared Valentine’s Day – with blinking, bug-wide eyes.
‘Go on,’ I said sombrely.
‘He said he has a surprise for me for Valentine’s Day and it’s small but it’s also very big. And – I know this sounds crazy – but a part of me thought maybe it might be an engagement ring?’
‘I don’t think it’s that,’ Lacey said suddenly, sure to avoid all of our intense gazes – the nanosecond meeting of which would surely give the game away.
‘No, I know. You’re right, it won’t be,’ Farly said quickly, with a self-effacing laugh.
‘Yeah,’ AJ said. ‘I think you’re reading into it too much, dude.’
‘What could be small but big, though? I can’t work out what it is,’ Farly said.
‘Ooh, I don’t know,’ Lacey said. ‘Maybe plane tickets for a holiday or something?’
‘Maybe it’s a dog collar,’ I said flatly.
‘What?’ she asked.
‘That’s a small thing but very big. Maybe he’s decided to become a man of the cloth and he wants to tell you on your anniversary.’
‘Oh, stop it, Dolly,’ Farly sighed.
‘Or maybe … maybe,’ I said, my mouth catching up with the litre of white wine I had drunk. ‘Maybe he’s decided to get a Manchester United tattoo on his face. Seems small but actually it’s huge really, isn’t it? It might change the way you feel about him.’ AJ signalled at me to stop with a discreet throat-slitty motion. ‘Or maybe it’s the keys to a boat, maybe he’s bought a speedboat for the Thames. Quite a massive lifestyle change, particularly if he wants to take it out at the weekends. I imagine it’s quite expensive to maintain. Maybe that’s it. He’s a seafaring man but he’s never found the moment to tell you.’
‘I don’t want to guess what it is any more,’ Farly snapped.
I couldn’t sleep the night before the engagement, thinking about how Farly’s life was about to change and she had no idea. I sent Scott a text the next morning: ‘Good luck tonight. I know you’ll ace it. I hope she says yes. If not, it’s been nice knowing you x.’
‘Thanks for the vote of confidence, Dolls x,’ he replied.
A group of us sat in the bar, waiting for the text from Scott.
‘What if she says no?’ AJ asked. ‘Do we just go home?’
‘She’s not going to say no,’ I said. ‘But if she does I’ve already looked up what else is on and there’s a disco night at KOKO, so we just go there for a dance – it’s ten quid on the door.’
At ten, I got a text from Scott telling us they were engaged. He’d told her they were going to go for one final celebratory drink before they went home. We ordered a bottle of champagne, poured them two glasses and stared out of the window, waiting for their taxi to arrive. Finally, we saw them walk into the bar and AJ squeezed my sweaty palm twice, the silent universal Morse code.
‘CONGRATULATIONS!’ we all shouted as Farly walked through the door. She looked at us in utter shock, then at Scott. He smiled at her and she came running towards me for a hug.
‘Congratulations,’ I said, handing Scott his glass of champagne. ‘You’ve made my best friend very happy.’
‘I’m so glad you dated that idiot Hector,’ he said, laughing. ‘I love you, Dolly.’
His eyes filled with tears and he gave me a hug.
I wondered if he kn
ew how I was feeling. I wondered if he’d always known. Maybe that’s why he’d tried to include me on the night they got engaged; gave me my own project; somehow involved me.
Two hours later, Farly had asked me to be her maid of honour, I had drunk the lion’s share of their celebratory champagne and I was feeling vocal.
‘I wannamakea speech,’ I slurred at AJ and picked up a fork to tap against my glass.
‘No, darling,’ AJ said, taking the fork away from me and signalling at the other girls who swiftly removed all the cutlery from the table and gave it to the waiter. ‘No speeches.’
‘But I’m her fuckin’ maid of honour.’
‘I know, babe, but there will be plenty of time for speeches.’ When AJ went to the loo, I crawled under the table and found her car keys in her handbag. I clinked them to the glass with a ding ding ding.
‘When I first found out that Scott and Farly were engaged – yeah, sure, I was pissed off about it,’ I announced.
‘Oh God,’ Belle groaned.
‘Because I’ve known this little weirdo for over twennyfiveyears.’
‘Over twenty-five years?’ Lacey asked Hicks.
‘SHUDUP!’ I shouted, pointing at Lacey, my wine spilling on to the table.
‘THIS IS SHIT, YOU’RE NOT MAID OF HONOUR ANY MORE!’ Farly drunkenly heckled across the table.
‘But when I look around, I see that the world –’ I paused for dramatic effect – ‘is … juss as it should be. For my best friend has won the best man.’
‘Awww,’ everyone said, with a collective out-breath of relief.
‘To Scott and Farly,’ I bellowed through tears and sat down. Everyone gave a weak round of applause.
‘Beautiful,’ Belle whispered to me. ‘Even though I know you took that from Julia Roberts’s speech in My Best Friend’s Wedding.’
‘Oh, she won’t know,’ I hissed and flapped my hand dismissively.
The rest of that evening, I’ll be honest, is a bit of a blur to this day. I invited Dilly and her husband, who were in the area celebrating Valentine’s Day, along for the celebrations. I did the cancan in the dining area of the bar while singing ‘One’ from A Chorus Line and high-kicked a tray of plates clean out of a waiter’s hands, smashing them to pieces on the floor. I said goodbye to Scott and Farly, then went back to my flat in Camden and made everyone carry on drinking until six a.m. I woke up next to a semi-clothed Hicks who had happy valtine day written on her breasts in liquid eyeliner.
I spent the next day watching Farly’s ‘engagement weekend’ (I don’t want to seem too precious about this particular detail, but I had assumed one evening was sufficient) unfold on social media. There was a family barbecue, lunch at the Wolseley, Scott’s friends and their wives showering her with gifts like Smythson wedding planner notebooks and magnums of champagne, making my framed print look a bit measly. I began to feel like the fourth, forgotten Wise Man (who had brought a piece of tat off Etsy).
‘I think you found Friday night quite overwhelming,’ Farly said on the phone. ‘Are you OK?’
‘I’m fine! I don’t know what you mean, “overwhelming”. I mean, I’m not the one who got engaged. You’re the one who seemed overwhelmed. I saw on Facebook Michelle bought you that Smythson wedding planner book – that’s nice, isn’t it?’
‘Do you want to go to dinner next week, just us two?’
‘Sure.’
I emailed Hector – the first time in four years.
Remember me? Scott and Farly are getting married. Thank God you sent me down to your kitchen with no clothes on.
He replied. He’d said he’d seen the news on Facebook. He told me he’d quit the City for travel PR and he had an enormous expense account and asked if he could take me for a boozy lunch, to toast our skills as matchmakers. I thought we were the thin end of the wedge of ‘matchmakers’ but I said yes because I was feeling low. I searched my inbox for all his old dirty poems in a flush of forced nostalgia. I cancelled lunch the day before it happened.
‘Why do you think you emailed him?’ Farly asked in between bites of her burger at dinner a few days later.
‘I don’t know. I think I just want a boyfriend.’
‘Really?’ she asked, wiping her mouth with her napkin. ‘You always say you don’t want one.’
‘Yeah, but I’ve been feeling differently lately.’
‘What’s triggered it?’
What had triggered it? I was jealous. Not of Scott this time; I was jealous of Farly.
‘You getting engaged.’
‘Why?’ she asked.
‘Because I hate that your life is so different to mine now. I hate that we have always done stuff at the same time and now we don’t,’ I sighed. ‘I hate that our children could be so far apart in age. I hate that you’re about to buy a flat with a man and I had to beg my landlord to let me pay my rent three weeks late this month. I hate that you drive around in Scott’s Audi he got given from work and I still can’t drive. I hate that his friends are so different to me and I’m scared they’ll take you away because their lives resemble your new life and mine doesn’t. I know it sounds mad and it’s not about me and I’m ruining your special moment and I should just be happy for you. But I feel so far behind you and I’m worried you’ll run out of sight.’
‘If you had met your husband when you were twenty-two, I would have found it really, really hard,’ she said.
‘Really?’
‘Of course! I would have hated it.’
‘Because sometimes I feel like I’m going mad.’
‘You’re not going mad. I would have felt exactly the same. But I never chose to meet Scott when I was twenty-two. I wasn’t looking for a husband.’
‘Yeah,’ I said half-heartedly.
‘And I will be there to celebrate and experience all the milestones in your life, whether they’re next month or in twenty years.’
‘More like forty years,’ I mumbled. ‘I still don’t live in a flat with curtains.’
‘We’re not at school any more. Stuff will happen at different times. You’ll be doing some things ahead of me too.’
‘Like what? Meth?’
So, I finally made my peace with Scott. I realized he wasn’t going anywhere. I spent time with both of them and I reprised my familiar and well-received role as Official Third Wheel. It is an irritating typecasting, but one I do very well. Out of all my years on this earth, only a handful have been spent in a relationship. I am well-versed and rehearsed in third-wheeling; I am The Threewheelin’ Dolly Alderton.
My entire adolescence was spent hanging about with my friends and their boyfriends. Smiling along as they play-fought on the sofa or pretending to play snake on my phone while they snogged in a corner of the room. I smile and pretend with couples very well, it’s how I’ve spent most weekday evenings around a table in my twenties. I let them have fake arguments in front of me about whose turn it is to load or unload the dishwasher. I laugh along when they tell long stories about each other’s sleeping habits. I am silent as they discuss details of people’s lives I have never heard of in an overly animated way (‘No WAY?! Priya didn’t end up buying those tiles! I don’t BELIEVE it! After all that! Oh God, sorry, explain to Dolly who Priya is and the whole story of the loft conversion from start to finish’) to prove they have a wildly interesting life that doesn’t involve me. And all the while I pretend I don’t know why I am third wheel; why I am doing all the laughing and the listening. But of course I know I am merely an aphrodisiac in their game of Domestic Bliss – I know when I leave they’ll rip each other’s clothes off, having got all revved up on an extended joint discourse about their holiday in the Philippines, particularly when they both said the same island when I asked them what their favourite bit was. I am just a reluctant audience member.
But I sit and watch all these shows anyway because the alternative – losing my friends – is not an option.
And when Farly and Scott weren’t doing Their Bit on me, I discovered, to m
y utter shock, that Scott and I got on rather well. In fact, I resented that I hadn’t realized this sooner as I would have enjoyed his company when he was round when Farly and I lived together, instead of just grunting at him. He was funny and smart. He read the paper and had opinions on things. Scott turned out to be a pretty great guy and it seemed so obvious to me in retrospect that Farly would have chosen to marry someone cool. It was something I got very wrong.
When I wasn’t excitedly helping Farly plan her wedding, I also made more of an effort with his friends. Whenever I had met them in the past, I had made a huge, embarrassing performance of proving I was different to them. I got excessively drunk at a Sunday lunch at our house once and lectured them all on the ‘meat is murder’ doctrine as they ate their roast lamb. Once, in a pub, I had accused one of his friends of being a misogynist because he made a comment about my height. But after Farly and Scott got engaged, I tried my hardest to relax, be polite and get to know them. They were, after all, the people she was spending most of her time with now. They had to be half interesting.
And then suddenly, one Friday evening in August, we all stopped thinking about the wedding. Florence, Farly’s eighteen-year-old sister, was diagnosed with leukaemia. ‘Life is on hold’ was Farly’s dad’s refrain over the months that followed. Life was on hold. The wedding was put back a year. Florence was a bridesmaid and they wanted to make sure she was well enough by the time it came round. I had spent months obsessing over the wedding, and now I couldn’t care less about it.
The month after the diagnosis, it was Farly’s twenty-seventh birthday. We wanted to celebrate with her to take her mind off Florence’s illness, but she was drained of energy, having spent every hour she could in the hospital. She didn’t want to drink, she didn’t want to be in a big crowd, she didn’t want to have to talk to a load of people about how she was doing. Her family couldn’t come as they were camping out at the hospital. It was decided by Scott: AJ and I would go over to their new flat and he would cook the four of us dinner.
The first birthday I had celebrated with Farly was her twelfth. She had blown out more birthday candles with me than without me. I remember the first one like it was yesterday – when she was still just a friend who I sat next to in maths. She wore a pink Miss Selfridge dress and we danced the Macarena in Bushey church hall.
Everything I Know About Love Page 11