Always the Bridesmaid

by Lindsey Kelk

  ‘I wanted to come,’ she said, sniffling, her eyes fixed on the wedding dress still tossed over the back of a chair. Her wedding dress. ‘Honestly, I did. I was sitting at home last night thinking how much fun it was when I bought my wedding dress.’

  Well, that just proved she had gone completely cocking mad. Shopping for Sarah’s wedding dress was two straight days of her mother calling her fat and refusing to spend more than a grand on a dress unless she lost a stone, followed by tears and recriminations and secret bingeing on bags of Mini Eggs in the changing rooms.

  In the end, she lost two stone and her mother had to pay a fortune to alter the dress, but yeah, Sarah, so much fun.

  ‘I don’t want to mess this up for Lauren,’ she whispered. ‘But I wasn’t expecting that.’

  ‘Don’t worry about Lauren,’ I told her, pulling a dubious-looking tissue out of my pocket and dabbing at her eyeliner. ‘I’ll do that. You worry about you.’

  She gave me a half smile and nodded.

  ‘Stephen’s at the house now.’ She wiped her face with the sleeve of her jumper and tried to smile. ‘He’s getting the rest of his stuff. Didn’t want to do it while I was there.’

  ‘Sounds wise to me,’ I said, remembering Seb’s and my last encounter in the flat. He was so polite and jovial, like someone I’d met once at a work do and then bumped into on the street. I hadn’t even cried − I was just empty. Apart from the moment when he’d told me he was leaving − that was the worst part. That was when he stopped being my Seb and became my ex.

  ‘Seriously, though, thank God for iTunes,’ she said. ‘If we’d had to sit and separate all the CDs I would have killed myself.’

  ‘No, you would have killed him,’ I corrected her, shaking off my own break-up memories. ‘You’re not slashing your own wrists over who bought the Coldplay CD.’

  ‘That would be him,’ she sniffed. ‘Wanker.’

  I nodded thoughtfully for a moment. Sarah’s shoulders heaved with the effort of trying not to cry. As a friend, it was heartbreaking, and as a wedding planner who had called in fifteen favours to get this appointment, I was very anxious about having someone wearing that much black eyeliner so close to so many white dresses.

  Do you know what I realized yesterday?’ she asked, her eyes and nose all red and blotchy. ‘He must have been planning it for ages. All that time I was thinking it was just a bit of a rocky patch, he was getting ready to go.’

  ‘Don’t make yourself feel worse,’ I said, squatting down beside her and hoping my bum wasn’t hanging out of the back of my jeans. It usually was. Damn you, Topshop. ‘How could you have known if he didn’t tell you?’

  ‘Because he wasn’t telling me anything?’ she replied. ‘We used to talk for hours, about everything. When we first got together, we would lie awake in bed at night and talk about everything. I knew everything about him, I told him everything about me, and then, out of nowhere, I couldn’t even tell that my husband was planning to leave me. How sad is that?’

  I flashed back to the last night in bed with Will before chasing the thoughts away. We’d get to the bit where you share stories of childhood trauma at three a.m., once we’d got past the rampant shagging and eating pizza in bed part.

  ‘It’s all the stupid little things that are killing me,’ she said. ‘You know what’s really pathetic? I went out and bought new toothbrushes to put in the holder next to mine, just so I wouldn’t have to see my sad one on its own first thing in a morning and last thing at night.’

  ‘That isn’t pathetic,’ I said. ‘It’s totally understandable. I remember when Seb left he took the toothpaste. I think I cried about it for a week.’

  ‘It’s bloody pathetic,’ Sarah corrected. ‘I wish I could go back in time and work out what I did wrong.’

  ‘You know you haven’t done anything wrong,’ I said, trying to remember all the things she’d said to me two years ago. ‘You never cheated on him, you were never cruel to him, you always put him first. What’s happening now is horrible, but … God, I don’t want to say it because it sounds like such a cliché, but—’

  ‘It’s for the best?’ Sarah finished for me. ‘It is what it is? You can’t change the past? All you need is time? I know, Mads − I’ve heard all of them. I just wish I could wake up and wipe it all out. Isn’t there a pill for that yet?’

  ‘Yes, but it only wipes out about twelve hours and it’s usually administered by very, very bad men,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to let you get roofied every night for the next six months. Drunk, yes, drugged, no.’

  ‘I can’t do any more hangovers,’ she said, screwing up her face. ‘And it’s only been two weeks.’

  ‘You say that now,’ I said, stroking her hair. ‘Let’s not make any bold claims we might regret later.’

  ‘What am I going to do?’ She lay back on the carpet, closing her eyes as I waved a confused-looking sales assistant on before she could get involved. ‘I’m thirty-one. I’m going to be thirty-one and divorced. I’m never going to meet anyone else, I’m never going to have kids. He’s going to meet someone else next week or something, if he hasn’t already.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ I lied. As far as I could tell, she was entirely correct. In the last two years, Seb had got engaged, married and babied up and it had taken me that long just to find a nice man who would have sex with me on the regular. The evidence was not in our favour. ‘You’re going to be fine and you’re a hot piece who looks about twenty-three.’

  ‘But I’m not twenty-three,’ she said. ‘None of us are twenty-three. We’re going to die alone.’

  ‘Thanks for the reminder,’ I said, lying down next to her. It was actually quite reassuring. ‘We’re not going to die alone.’

  She sniffed a big, dirty, sloppy sniff. ‘Oh yeah − you’re in love now. You’re sorted.’

  I let out an attractive choking sound. ‘I wouldn’t say I was in love.’

  Only I would. I would totally say it. I would stand on the roof of my house and shout it to the passersby if it wouldn’t get me arrested and locked away in the loony bin. I was completely and utterly in love. But this wasn’t the time to have that conversation.

  ‘I should probably go back in and check on madam,’ I said, bouncing my hand up and down on her topknot. ‘Would you do me a massive favour and get me a Diet Coke from somewhere? I’m dying.’

  ‘Course.’ Sarah blinked the last of her tears away and smiled, seeing right through my ruse. Obviously I was giving her an out but at the same time, I really was parched. ‘How’s my make-up?’

  Her make-up was a terrible, terrible mess.

  ‘You look fine,’ I said, taking the tissue to the worst of the eyeliner smudges. ‘Just a bit smudged here … OK. Yep, now you’re fine. Go and find me some pop. I’ll tell Lauren I sent you to fuel my caffeine addiction.’

  ‘I’ll go and find you some pop,’ she said with a grateful smile. ‘Thanks, Mads.’

  ‘Whatever,’ I said, grabbing a random blush-coloured one-shouldered gown from the rack beside me. ‘Go on, you daft mare.’

  ‘I pulled this – oh my God, what’s wrong?’

  I wasn’t sure if I’d walked back into Lauren’s changing room or some terrifying time-loop worm hole. The bride-to-be was sitting hunched up in a little ball in the corner of the room, wearing nothing but her undies and a pair of four-inch glitter heels, mascara streaks that made Sarah’s look like a subtle nod to goth. She looked like the saddest stripper ever, and if you’ve ever seen a stripper, you’ll know that’s quite an achievement.

  ‘I hate all the dresses,’ she replied in a tiny voice. ‘I hate them.’

  ‘Then you don’t have to buy any of these dresses,’ I said, hanging the new gown on the hook in the wall and resuming my position beside a sobbing friend. Seriously, couldn’t we keep it to one life in crisis at a time? ‘No one is going to force you to wear something you don’t like. We’ll find another dress.’

  ‘It’s not the dress,’ she said, wiping a
hand across her face and smearing her mascara as she went. I stuck my hand in my pocket, but Sarah had made off with my nasty tissue. ‘It’s everything.’

  ‘Everything?’

  ‘It’s all happening so quickly − I don’t know what I’m doing,’ she said, her bottom lip trembling while she talked. ‘I know his grandmother is ill, but I’m freaking out, Maddie.’

  ‘But you want to marry him, don’t you?’ I asked. ‘That’s all that matters.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she laughed. Lauren dropped her head to my knees and groaned. ‘I’m being stupid, aren’t I? Tell me I’m being stupid. Tell me to get my shit together and that it will all be fine.’

  I shuffled closer to her, ignoring the stabbing pain in my knees, and took her hand in mine. ‘You have to do whatever you want to do,’ I told her. ‘This is not the fifties − you do not have to marry someone if you don’t want to, just because you said you would. If you’re not one hundred per cent, it’s going to be much easier to postpone things now than it will be afterwards. Or on the day.’

  At work, we never said ‘cancel’, always ‘postpone’. ‘Cancel’ made women panic. ‘Cancel’ made them feel like they were letting people down, costing people money and ultimately doing something bad. ‘Postpone’ was just putting it off for a little bit until they had thought of a better way of explaining there was no way in hell they were going through with the wedding.

  ‘I love him,’ Lauren repeated once more. ‘I only wish I had a little more time to figure it all out. Why is this so hard?’

  ‘It only gets harder as we get older,’ I said, pulling a fresh tissue out of the box on the side table. ‘Everyone thinks women over thirty are desperate to get married, but to me, anyway, it’s harder now to compromise and settle. When I was younger, I put up with a lot more shit than I would put up with now.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she sighed. ‘You’re right, I guess.’

  ‘And more importantly, you know how you feel.’ I squeezed her hand, stood up – with some difficulty – and picked up the wedding dress that lay on the floor beside her. ‘In this room, right now, it only matters what you want. If you ask me to take this away and never, ever speak the “w” word again, I’ll do it. I’ll deal with everything. You wouldn’t even have to think about it.’

  ‘What would I do without you?’ Lauren asked, another smile breaking through a shit-storm of runny mascara. ‘You’re amazing.’

  ‘I know,’ I said modestly. ‘Now you get dressed while I go and tell Carol we’re done for the day.’

  She nodded, fumbling with the buckle on her shoe as I slipped out of the changing room and collapsed on the chair outside.

  ‘Everything OK, Maddie?’ Carol asked, appearing out of nowhere.

  ‘No, Carol,’ I replied, exhausted. I pressed my hand against my forehead and shook my head. ‘No, it most definitely is not.’

  13

  Sunday June 14th

  Today I feel: Confused.

  Today I am thankful for: My brother. Hence the confusion.

  ‘Hello, madam, I wasn’t expecting to see you here.’

  As if spending half of Sunday ploughing through the Internet looking for a company that could make a hundred pairs of personalized flip-flops by the first Saturday in August wasn’t enough of a treat, I looked up from my desk to see Shona standing in the middle of the empty office.

  ‘What are you doing, working on a weekend?’ she asked, as though it wasn’t something I did all the bloody time.

  ‘Just taking care of some bits and pieces,’ I said, running a hand through my messy Sunday hair and wondering if she actually woke up looking like a Barbie doll. I knew her boobs always looked like that because I’d covered for her the week she’d had off to have them done. ‘I’m leaving soon.’

  ‘Don’t go on my account,’ she said, sipping from a Starbucks cup the size of her head. ‘Great that you’re showing some ambition. And look at you working on a Sunday without me begging you first!’

  I smiled tightly, swallowing down a scream so loud anyone would have thought there was a One Direction concert happening in the office.

  ‘How is your thing going?’ Instead of going into her own office, Shona sat down at Sharaline’s desk, directly opposite me. ‘The baby-naming party?’

  ‘OK,’ I said, shuffling two Coke cans and three empty packets of Wotsits into my bin. I hadn’t expected to be in the office quite so long, but that was what happened when you got distracted by make-up tutorials on YouTube and gifs of Daniel Craig taking his top off. ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘You can talk to me about it, you know,’ she said, sipping her coffee, eyes on me all the time. ‘I’m not the enemy.’

  HA.

  ‘Do you remember just after you started here, we did that first-birthday party?’ She put the coffee down to pull off her jumper, and then smoothed out her hair, smiling. ‘God, that one was mental. The one with the carousels? Do you remember?’

  ‘I do,’ I said. It was a hard one to forget. ‘The Fergusons?’

  ‘Yes! The Fergusons! I don’t know how you remember all the details.’ Shona laughed and leaned back in Sharaline’s chair. ‘They were mental. One hundred per cent completely and utterly mental.’

  ‘Just because grown men and women want to dress as babies doesn’t mean they’re mental,’ I replied, wincing at the memory. ‘A bit messed-up, maybe, but we mustn’t judge.’

  ‘Faking a first birthday party so you can have a sex party dressed in nappies and babygros is where I draw the line between messed-up and mental,’ she said. ‘How long was it until they let us use that venue again?’

  We’ve never used it again, Shona,’ I reminded her. ‘Even if they would let us, I couldn’t. The things I saw …’

  ‘Fair.’ A big, sticky-looking stain began to spread around the bottom of her coffee cup, seeping into Sharaline’s notes. ‘I’ll never forget walking in on that woman changing her husband’s nappy.’

  ‘And nor should you,’ I said, raising a can of Coke in a toast. ‘I wonder if they’re still together.’

  ‘Oh, couples like that never break up,’ Shona said. ‘No, the weirder your fetish, the more likely you are to stay together forever. It’s like lesbians.’

  I winced − something Shona couldn’t do due to her Botox treatments. ‘I don’t think lesbianism counts as a fetish.’

  ‘Oh yeah, your sister’s a lezzer, isn’t she?’ she replied. ‘Sorry, didn’t mean it like that. Just meant how lesbians couple up forever.’

  ‘Eleanor says that’s a stereotype,’ I said, trying not to remember any of the other things Eleanor might have said recently. ‘She says that’s not actually true.’

  ‘Didn’t she get married when she was sixteen?’

  ‘Twenty-two,’ I replied.

  ‘First girlfriend?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, without a leg to stand on. ‘But Eleanor isn’t all lesbians.’

  ‘Must be weird, having your little sister married off already.’ Shona rifled around in Sharaline’s pencil pot and produced an emery board. ‘Is your brother still with that make-up artist?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, my shoulders stiffening. ‘Rachel.’

  The relationships you forge at work are always strange. It doesn’t matter how you feel about someone: when you spend upwards of sixty hours a week with them, it’s inevitable that you’ll become involved in each other’s lives somehow. But, given my feelings towards Shona, it made me very uncomfortable when she talked about my real life. She had a memory like a steel trap when it suited her, and it was unnerving to hear the names of my friends and family coming out of her mouth.

  ‘Rachel, that’s it,’ she repeated slowly as though committing it to memory. ‘Do you still see Seb? Are you still friends?’

  ‘We’re Facebook friends,’ I said, tapping my fingers on the cold Coke can. ‘Why?’

  ‘Just wondered.’ She clicked the emery board against the desk. ‘It’s hard being single when everyone else isn’t.’
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  I sat back in my chair and nodded.

  I wanted to tell her I wasn’t single. I wanted to tell her I had met a wonderful man who made me feel amazing and always replied to my text messages and was very handsome and had a job and all his own hair and no apparent physical or mental defects, but I just didn’t trust her.

  ‘It’s one thing to meet them, but it’s another one to find one worth keeping, isn’t it?’ She ran the emery board back and forth over her nails, and I noticed they weren’t painted for the first time in forever. ‘And all this online stuff has only made it harder. Easier to get a shag, but impossible to meet a decent man.’ I nodded again, afraid to contribute to the conversation.

  ‘Organizing all these weddings and christenings and anniversary parties −’ she kept her eyes trained on her nails as she spoke − ‘and then it’s either home to an empty house or going on another pointless date with another pointless wanker.’

  ‘That is difficult,’ I agreed. It wasn’t like Shona didn’t had boyfriends but they never lasted that long, and not just because she was one of the seven worst people alive today. She always ended things. Somehow, every single man she met ultimately managed to bore her or disappoint her or fail to meet some unspecified criteria she refused to share with anyone.

  ‘All my friends are married now,’ she said, finally meeting my eyes. ‘Apart from you, I mean.’

  ‘That’s hard,’ I said, wondering if she really did think of me as a friend or if she was just being polite. I hoped it was the latter because if I was a friend, God help her enemies. ‘Lauren is getting married.’

  ‘Your American friend Lauren?’ she asked. ‘Are you helping her plan it?’

  ‘Eh.’ I shrugged. No more personal details than necessary. ‘When I can.’

  ‘Friends can be so selfish,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘They forget it’s your actual job. Like you want to go home and start working again for free. You should tell her no.’

  ‘I can’t, though, can I?’ I said, dazzled by the very idea. ‘She’s my friend.’