Always the Bridesmaid

by Lindsey Kelk

  ‘It doesn’t matter now,’ she said, pushing a manila envelope across the table. ‘We’re letting you go because of the restructure.’

  I looked at the envelope but refused to touch it.

  ‘I’m serious, Matilda. Look at the pictures before the bloody margarita fountain burst into flames, which, by the way, was not my fault and could not possibly have been predicted. All the guests were told the party was no smoking and we put the fire out before anyone got hurt. What else could I have done? We should be suing the arse off that guest who was smoking.’

  I broke my cookie in half and scoffed it while I waited for her response.

  ‘It doesn’t matter now,’ she said with a resigned sigh. ‘You should have done a proper health and safety assessment on the margarita fountain, I expect. But Colton won’t be talked round on this. It’s way past formal warning stage. I think it goes without saying that the company can’t give you a reference, but if something comes up, you can use me as a personal one. Just don’t tell anyone, for God’s sake.’

  I nodded, taking a deep breath and slowly reaching out for the envelope. I couldn’t think of another time when I’d felt quite so much like shit. This was it. No friends, no boyfriend, and now no job. What was I going to tell people? And who were the people I was going to tell?

  ‘I really did do a good job,’ I said, sniffing. ‘I know I did.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ Matilda said.

  ‘Can you do me a favour?’ I asked, standing up slowly. ‘Can you make sure the Wheeler party goes to the new events person and not Shona?’

  ‘I’ll try,’ she said. She looked at me a bit more sympathetically. ‘Do you want to go out the back way?’

  ‘No,’ I said, in a terribly unconvinced tone. There was a silence. ‘I need to get some stuff from my desk anyway.’

  ‘Do you want me to come with you?’

  ‘If I were to punch Shona right in the fake tits, what would happen? Hypothetically speaking.’

  ‘Hypothetically speaking,’ she replied. ‘I imagine I’d carry you out on my shoulders.’

  ‘Just checking,’ I said, flexing my hands. ‘Hypothetically speaking.’

  It wasn’t as though the office was usually abuzz with excitement on a Monday morning, but when Matilda and I walked across to my desk, me with cardboard box in hand, everyone was especially quiet. All I could hear was the clicking of a hundred keyboards, all locked in IM conversations, and all of them about me.

  ‘In case you were wondering, the black eye isn’t from the party,’ I said loudly, resting the box on my desk. ‘But thanks for your concern.’

  ‘Maddie.’ Sharaline stood up at her desk. ‘This isn’t fair.’

  ‘Life’s not fair,’ I replied, trying to stay calm. ‘If I hadn’t applied for the promotion, I wouldn’t be leaving. If I hadn’t punched above my weight with Will, I wouldn’t have been punched in the face. Learn my lessons, Sharaline − do not overreach.’

  ‘But it wasn’t your fault,’ she protested, turning towards Matilda. ‘Maddie did everything right. I checked again when I refiled the paperwork for the new venue. Someone must have called them or sabotaged us.’

  ‘Someone?’ I asked.

  ‘If you checked someone’s emails −’ Sharaline stared at Matilda and cocked her head back towards the corner office − ‘you might find out.’

  ‘You read her emails?’ I was impressed. ‘That’s awesome. Why did I never think of that?’ Then I stopped. Shona would really go that far?

  ‘She saves her passwords in a keychain,’ she replied. ‘She’s an idiot. Anyway, it’s not Maddie’s fault.’

  Matilda was looking increasingly awkward. I wasn’t sure what the protocol was these days for wild allegations made by interns in an emotional situation, and I had a feeling that when it involved someone who was already sacked (and who had set fire to a fountain) there wouldn’t be an inquiry.

  ‘Sharaline, can you get in here, please?’ Shona shouted from her office. ‘Let HR deal with the situation. Don’t get involved.’

  Ten years working together and I was just a ‘situation’. Brilliant.

  ‘Are you just going to leave?’ she asked me, clutching her notepad to her chest as though it were armour. ‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’

  I looked over at Shona’s office. She and her ridiculous pineapple of a ponytail were staring hard at her computer screen, trying not to look over. It wasn’t like her not to be out here gloating all over someone else’s misfortune. What Sharaline was saying all made sense. I chose to think that maybe Shona was suffering the side effects of remorse. It was unlikely, but stranger things had happened. Like dyed pink rabbits running amok at a baby-naming ceremony in Greater London.

  There were a million things I wanted to say, a million things she needed to hear, but if I’d learned nothing else over the last few weeks, it was when to leave well alone. Shona wouldn’t learn her lesson; some people never did. If I went in there, all guns blazing, it would just set her off. Look what had happened the last time I gave her a rollocking. I knew I was in the right, and I knew karma would bite her on the arse eventually. This was the universe doing me a favour.

  On cue, Shona looked up, glancing over at my desk. With a perfectly straight face, I stretched out my hand and held up my middle finger, while mouthing the most unpleasant word I could possibly think of. Shona’s eyebrows shot up and she reached out for her blinds, dropping them as fast as humanly possible.

  ‘I think that covers it,’ I said to Sharaline, emptying my top drawer into the waiting cardboard box. ‘It would only make her feel better about herself, and the greatest thing to come out of this is that I won’t have to work for her any more.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Her shoulders sank as she realized I was actually going.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, resting my box on my hip, starting to find Shona’s refusal to meet my eye almost funny. ‘I’ve got quite a lot of telly to catch up on. I’ve been busy lately.’

  ‘I’m going to miss you,’ she said, her bottom lip quivering. Whether it was the thought of my departure or the thought of being left alone with Shona I wasn’t quite sure, but I was touched nonetheless.

  ‘Aww,’ I said, giving her a sideways hug before striding over to the lift with Matilda by my side. ‘I’m going to miss you too, Sharaline.’

  Another thing I never thought I’d say.

  Congratulations!

  Today is the big day.

  Everything that has happened since your bride asked you to join her on this journey has led to today.

  You are her bridesmaid. You are her friend, her sister, her support, her shoulder to cry on, the person she trusts with her most precious secrets and the protector of her heart.

  Enjoy your special day, bridesmaid, and treasure it forever.

  23

  Saturday August 1st

  Today I feel: All of the feels.

  Today I am thankful for: I don’t know − what have you got?

  By the time Saturday rolled around, I hadn’t left the house in a week.

  You’d think being unemployed, housebound and excommunicated by both your best friends would leave me some time to clean up, but no, I hadn’t done that either. Since the second I had walked in on Monday morning, the only person I had spoken to was the Domino’s delivery man, and our exchanges, though frequent, were not especially involved.

  When my phone lit up with Lauren’s name on Thursday afternoon I’d got a little bit overexcited, but it wasn’t my best friend ready to make amends, it was her mother, ready to disinvite me to the rehearsal dinner.

  I showered on Saturday morning, but only because I’d woken up when I rolled over in the night and smelled myself, and when I went to make a cup of tea I was completely out of milk. Finally I was going to be forced out of doors. Peering out of the window, I wondered if civilization still stood. The world could have been overwhelmed by zombies and I wouldn’t have noticed. I could probably have passed for
one myself; they wouldn’t have bothered me. Especially if they could smell me.

  My bridesmaid dress hung on the front of my wardrobe in its fancy grey garment bag, the lilac fabric giving me the finger through the little clear window on the front.

  ‘Piss off,’ I told it, rubbing my hair too roughly with my towel.

  We hadn’t spoken since the bridal shower, any of us. Well, for all I knew, Sarah, Lauren, Lauren’s mental mother and horrible sister spent the afternoon eating crappy cupcakes and dressing each other up in toilet-paper wedding dresses, all the while debating which of them I had wronged the most, but neither of them had been in touch with me.

  ‘I don’t care,’ I said to the dress. We’d become very friendly in the last week, but it didn’t give much back on the conversation front. ‘No job, no boyfriend, no friends. Fresh start.’

  Only there was no start in sight. I was stuck with nothing other than a painful, protracted ending.

  I sat on the bed, damp hair hanging down my back, wet towel in my hands.

  ‘If this were a romcom, Will would be banging my door down about now,’ I told the dress. ‘He’d have realized the error of his ways or found out she was shagging someone else, at least, and be battering the front door in last night’s suit with a dozen red roses in his hand.’

  The dress just hung there.

  ‘I don’t want him anyway. It would just be so I could tell him to fuck off.’

  Still nothing.

  ‘No?’ I asked, face falling. ‘You’re probably right. Maybe it wasn’t my romcom. Maybe it was hers. Maybe I was the obstacle.’

  I didn’t bother with the bit I sometimes thought about, where Tom turned up on my doorstep with a bottle of Hendrick’s and a packet of biscuits. And I didn’t tell him to fuck off, since I’d already done that.

  I stood up, letting the towel fall on the floor. Along with my pyjamas, my outfit from the baby shower, and the clothes I’d been wearing at work on Monday.

  ‘Feels more like a horror story anyway.’

  I mooched around my bedroom for a while, slathering on lotions and potions I never had time for, drying my hair carefully with the hairdryer instead of letting it poof up of its own accord, and finally, when there were no more things left in the bathroom to fanny about with, I went back, unzipped the garment carrier and pulled it off the most perfect bridesmaid dress that ever existed. It was one-shouldered, baby-soft lilac silk, fitted at the waist and then falling all the way to the floor with a slit from here to there. I had to hand it to Lauren − it took a brave bride to let her bridesmaids wear something as beautiful as this.

  ‘Do you want to go and get some milk with me?’ I asked.

  The dress was playing things cool, but it seemed like it was into it.

  Fifteen minutes later, I was sitting on the settee nursing a cup of tea, my computer on my lap, handbag by my side, wearing a £400 bridesmaid dress while I checked Facebook for the thousandth time that day. Neither Sarah nor Lauren had posted a single thing since Sunday, but there were a lot of well-wishers posting to Lauren’s page. Because she was getting married. Because it was her wedding day. And I was sitting on the settee wearing a bridesmaid dress, contemplating going out for milk.

  I clicked on my photos, scrolling back, back, back to the photos of Sarah’s wedding. Thankfully it was before the days of Facebook, so we weren’t captured and held up for judgement in real time, but Sarah had uploaded the photos afterwards. She had untagged herself in all of them, I noticed, but she hadn’t taken them down, not yet. I remembered untagging myself in my photos with Seb. I had breezed through my pics, knowing they were still there, that if I really needed them they were only a search away, but the photos he had posted were another matter altogether. The whole purpose of that evening was to move on, but I’d spent hours crying over happier times and staring at photos to commit them to memory, knowing I would never see them again as soon as I clicked my mouse.

  It took me a very long time to actually delete my photos. I wondered how long it would take Sarah to take down the wedding album.

  ‘Oh God,’ I moaned, pressing my hands against my face. ‘I can’t do this.’

  It was ridiculous. Here I was, in a bridesmaid dress without a bride to maid, staring at the Internet and going slowly insane.

  Picking up my handbag, I headed for the door. I couldn’t sit here on my own all day, refreshing feeds and waiting for someone to upload pictures of the wedding. Yes, we’d had an argument, yes, it was a big one, and yes, we all needed a slap round the chops, but letting it fester on Lauren’s wedding day felt all wrong.

  It was my romcom. I would make the grand romantic gesture, only the gesture would be to the real loves of my life.

  With a renewed sense of purpose and an elevated heartbeat for the first time in five days, I stuck my feet into my trainers and threw myself down the stairs, only to slam straight into someone outside the front door.

  ‘It’s you.’ I rubbed my bashed-in nose. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I kept calling your office and they kept saying you weren’t available,’ Tom said, rubbing his stomach as though my poor nose had hurt it in some way. It hadn’t. He was rock solid, I noted at the back of my brain. ‘So I found out your address.’

  ‘You stalked me?’ I said. ‘You found out my address and then hung about outside, not ringing the doorbell? How long have you been here?’

  ‘I saw you go out earlier,’ he said, shoving his hands deep into his pockets. ‘I thought I’d missed you. But then you came back so, I thought I’d give it another go.’

  I pointed back up the stairs. ‘I went out for milk.’

  Tom Wheeler was standing on my doorstep.

  He had actually stalked me, like in films and books.

  I felt so special, even if he hadn’t brought gin or biscuits.

  ‘Bit dressed up for milk,’ he said, nodding towards my frock, then frowning at my trainers. ‘Going anywhere nice?’

  The cardigan I’d thrown over my shoulders on the way out didn’t especially go with the dress, but what can you do?

  ‘Actually, I’m in a bit of a rush,’ I said, hoisting my handbag onto my shoulder. ‘Can we make this quick, I need to get a taxi.’

  ‘Let me give you a lift,’ he offered, pulling car keys out of his pocket and dangling them off his index finger. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘East,’ I said, snatching the keys from his hand. ‘Is it OK if I drive?’

  ‘No,’ he said, snatching them back. ‘It’s the Range Rover across the road and you’re not insured.’

  ‘All right, Dad,’ I muttered, following him across the street. ‘Of course you drive a wanker mobile.’

  ‘I’m so glad I decided to do this,’ he said to himself as the car beeped to declare itself unlocked. ‘Good move, Tom, great decision.’

  ‘Not that I want to risk my lift,’ I said, punching the address into Tom’s GPS, ‘but what are you doing here?’

  ‘Do we have to have this conversation while I’m driving?’ he asked, turning on the engine. ‘Why couldn’t I get hold of you at work all week? Why have they given my mother’s party to someone called Sharaline?’

  ‘Thank God it isn’t Shona,’ I sighed, relieved. ‘I got fired. On Monday.’

  ‘Oh fuck, really?’ He pulled a face. ‘Not because of the eye?’

  ‘No, because I was kind of responsible for setting fire to a fountain and, well, there were some rabbits and some storks involved, but it’s a very long story.’

  He stared at me for a moment and then pulled out into traffic.

  ‘Stop the car!’ I shouted, slamming my hands on the glove compartment. ‘Tom, Stop the car!’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Tom slammed on the brakes, a chain of traffic honking and swearing behind us. ‘Maddie, what is it?’

  ‘Over there,’ I said, unbuckling my seat belt and scrambling to climb out of the car. It was ridiculous − who needed such a huge car to pootle around London? ‘In the dress.’<
br />
  Outside my flat, a short, skinny blonde girl was pressing the buzzer and rummaging around in a lilac clutch bag that perfectly matched my frock.

  ‘Sarah,’ I screamed, hanging on to the car door.

  ‘Get out the road, you silly cow,’ a man in a white van yelled.

  Offering him a middle-finger salute, I hurled myself across the street, barrelling down my front path and rugby-tackling my best friend.

  ‘I was on my way to your house,’ I said as we squeezed each other tightly and jumped up and down. ‘I was coming to see you.’

  ‘I was sitting on the settee, and it was so miserable, and I hated myself,’ she said, breaking the hug to catch her tears before they could ruin her eyeliner. Which was, of course, perfect. ‘I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have told Lauren about the fire − I just couldn’t have her in the kitchen looking at me for another second. I thought I was going to—’

  Sarah broke off, her hands gripping an invisible neck in midair.

  ‘I’m sorry I said all that horrible stuff,’ I said, struggling to get the words out fast enough. ‘And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I was up for the job. They really did ask me to apply. I hadn’t even considered it until they suggested it.’

  ‘We were both a pair of fuckwits,’ she said. ‘Agreed?’

  I nodded readily. ‘Agreed.’

  ‘They offered me the job,’ Sarah said. ‘At Colton-Bryers.’

  They offered her the job. My job.

  ‘Of course they did,’ I said, trying a genuine smile on for size. ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘I didn’t take it, did I?’ Sarah said. She punched me hard in the arm. ‘How weird would that be?’

  ‘But you hate your job.’ I was secretly pleased but outwardly confused. ‘That was stupid.’

  ‘Well, no, I was thinking—’ she said as Tom’s car beeped twice across the road. ‘What if we went into business together?’

  I looked at my best friend. It was a startling thing when someone you thought you knew inside out could still shock you. And not just because I realized her hair was in a messy chignon instead of a topknot.