Eve sat back on her heels a little unsteadily. Of all the sights she was expecting to see, that was not one of them.
Eve had completely lost her bearings, and now she was still a little drunk, disorientated and absolutely desperate for a pee. There was nothing else for it. Once she was sure that she was the only person awake in the field, she headed for the edge of it where it backed onto woodland. She walked less than a metre into it, ducked behind a tree and squatted down. The relief was unreal, until she lost her balance a little, a bit of wee went on her foot, which startled her and made her fall backwards into a bush of nettles. Jumping up, her back on fire with fresh stings, she danced around, arms flaying desperately trying to scratch areas she couldn’t reach. Eve couldn’t help the fat tears from falling down her face, and she took big gulps of air, trying to calm herself down. There was no point looking for dock leaves to help soothe the itching, it was too dark and with sod’s law being well and truly against Eve, she might end up with her hand in a rat trap.
Ben would probably tell her to bathe herself with the blood of a bat or something equally disgusting. The thought of Ben made her tears fall faster. Knowing that he still carried Kate’s locket around within him cemented the fact for Eve that she would always be in second place. Tanya was right, she was a complete doormat. A weak-willed doormat, whose complete self-worth had become dependent on finding and keeping a man.
Eve knew she couldn’t stay in the woods all night, as much as she wanted to just hide there away from the world until it was time to go home, back to her bedroom, which she had already decided she wasn’t leaving ever again.
A noise to Eve’s right startled her. This wasn’t the playful giggle she’d heard between Faye and Juan – this was animalistic, frantic love-making, with huffing and deep breathing providing the nighttime chorus. Eve felt an immediate sigh of relief that it wasn’t coming from her mum’s tent again, that may have just finished her off. But to her horror it seemed to be coming from a little green tent with a distinctive white handkerchief fluttering in the breeze on the top of it.
Chapter 33
That huffing and puffing didn’t sound like Ben. But then the last time Eve had heard him make anything like those noises was four and a half years ago, and he must have evolved his technique since then. Edging closer to his tent, Eve was in two minds. She desperately didn’t want to know who he was with, and what he was doing for the shrieks to be so plentiful and loud. But then, she couldn’t go back to her own tent, slip into her sleeping bag alongside a snoring Bruno and never know.
‘What in God’s name is all that noise? Is someone ill?’
Eve swivelled round. Ben was walking up behind her, her small overnight bag in his hand.
‘Ben!’ Eve whispered, her body flooding with relief.
‘Jesus, is that what I think it is? Where’s it coming from?’ Ben held out the battered holdall to Eve. ‘Here’s your bag, I went and got it from the farmhouse, I thought you might need it.’
The kindness of his gesture threw Eve. She thanked him, then said, ‘The noise seems to be coming from your tent.’
‘Mine?’
‘I thought it was you making that noise.’
‘Chance’d be a fine thing. It must be Tanya,’ he said striding towards the tent.
‘Tanya?’ Eve replied, hurrying after him.
‘She came to my tent when she heard me and your French boyfriend arguing,’ he said over his shoulder.
‘Bruno? Why were you arguing with Bruno?’ Eve replied, hurrying to keep up with him.
‘He came to my tent and accused me of sleeping with you, and told me to keep my hands to myself. I put him right, and then Tanya butted in and I’d just had enough. I told them both to go back to their own tents and I went to the farmhouse.’
They’d reached the tent and Ben yanked the zip up before Eve could tell him not to. Bruno’s naked bottom was rising up and down in the semi-darkness and Tanya’s recognisable Home Counties voice haughtily shrieked under him for ‘whoever that is to bugger off.’
‘I think it’s you two that need to bugger off actually.’ Ben said, opening the tent door wider. ‘Off you go. And you can take my sleeping bag with you, you owe me a new one.’
Bruno and Tanya scrambled out of Ben’s tent, clutching their clothes to their chests, Bruno wrapping the sleeping bag around his waist, while running off into the darkness.
‘Sorry about your boyfriend,’ Ben whispered finally, once silence had once again descended on the field.
‘Don’t be. Turns out he was a bit of an arse. And believe it or not, it’s actually not the worst thing to happen to me today.’ Exhaustion pricked at Eve’s eyes again and she needed to be alone. ‘I’m going back to mine now. Thanks for, you know.’
Ben shrugged. ‘Don’t be daft, it was nothing. See you tomorrow.’
He wouldn’t, Eve thought. She was planning to get up before everyone else and go back to London before small talk had to happen and she had to pretend to be upbeat and cheerful. She raised her hand as a farewell, even speaking out loud was alluding her.
Eve spotted the orange flag that she’d tied on the top of her tent easily, and was only a few steps away from the door of her tent when she felt a squelch underfoot and gasped in horror to see brown sludge oozing between her toes. She laughed. Big silent belly laughs that turned into big silent sobs.
She reached into the tent and upended her bottle of water all over her foot, washing the manure and her own urine off as best she could, then plonked Bruno’s suitcase violently outside the tent, keeping his bottle of champagne for herself. Popping the cork open, Eve looked around for a receptacle she could use to drink from, and realising there was none, brought the bottle to her lips and took a long, satisfying swig.
What a God-awful day.
Eve then did the only thing she knew would make her feel better. She got her laptop out of her bag and started writing.
I’m not one to complain, but … the stench of dung is overwhelming; my back is covered in itchy red bumps from nettle stings and I have a festering sore on my head from a vicious insect bite. My legs are covered in a crisscross pattern of scratches from the hay bales we were forced to sit on all day, and if the incessant itching is anything to go by, there’s a good chance I may have fleas. I smell of my own bodily fluids and animal excrement. I’m dishevelled, bedraggled, desolate. You’d be forgiven for assuming I’m on a reality show in the jungle, or perhaps the sole survivor of a tragic air accident that resulted in me wandering for days in a tropical rainforest. The reality is much more depressing. I’ve been at a wedding in the countryside.
It’s not the bride’s fault for thinking that a jolly village fete would make a good theme for her nuptials. It would. In theory. I love a nice toffee apple stand as much as the next person, and don’t get me started on gingham bunting, it’s beautiful. You know who else likes toffee apples? Wasps. Bloody hundreds of them. And you know the cute bunting fluttering in the breeze? Once the sugar from the toffee apples has kicked in, the kids will try to strangle each other with it. What about a jovial, well-mannered game of cricket? Those are always jolly good fun, aren’t they? Well, turns out they’re not. Not when some bright spark suggests pitting the bride’s side against the groom’s and introducing some strong scrumpy to the proceedings. And you don’t need chairs when you’re in a field do you? Hay bales, that’s the answer to a countryside seating dilemma. Hay bales are all the rage, particularly with the Straw Itch Mite, or the Pyemotes Ventricosus if you will, a tiny predator that loves nothing more than chomping down on human flesh.
It’s the casual air of country weddings that makes them so unique, don’t you think? There’s nothing like old friends getting together, bringing their guitars and harmonicas, and bonding over a shared love of playing songs that bear little or no resemblance to the original. There’s putting your own stamp on a song and then there’s stamping all over a song. Tonight’s rendition of Mustang Sally even had the Pyemotes Ventri
cosus jumping out of their hay bales and running for the silence of Stinging Nettle Wood.
Do you know where’s good for a wedding? A hotel. Do you know why? My bedroom normally has a lock on it. And a bed. And a toilet. And walls. Oh, how I miss walls as I sit here in my tiny excuse for a tent that I picked up at Tesco for twenty quid. I feel I’ve taken walls for granted up until now, not thinking beyond their structural abilities to hold up roofs. But there’s so much more to them than that, I feel like I owe them an apology. I don’t know what it is about camping, maybe it brings out the instinctive mammal in us, where we’re reduced to fulfilling our basic needs. Maybe we’re more like our animal counterparts than we like to think. Once you have a field full of tents and there’s only fabric between our naked bodies, primal urges to reproduce take over. Walls stop you sniffing out a potential partner, canvas doesn’t. Walking around this field after dark, once the bar had been drunk dry and all the families had left for their expensive guest houses, was like a nature documentary. The only thing lacking from the noises of pre-, during, and post-coital fun and games, was the dulcet tones of Sir David Attenborough telling us about the mating habits of the lesser known homo sapiens.
So there we have it. A wedding like no other. A wedding to remember. A wedding it’s going to take a lot of time, calamine lotion and gin to get over. Oh good. It’s started to rain.
The champagne bottle was empty, signalling that it was time for Eve to turn in for the night. It was now almost four, and the non-existent lining on this cheap-as-chips tent meant that as the sun woke up, Eve probably would too, although she was pretty drunk so she was hoping she might sleep through the dawn chorus.
Grabbing her phone to switch on the alarm, Eve saw that she had a few emails marked urgent. Sighing as she opened her inbox her heart sank when she read an angry message from Belinda at Venus, saying that her last column was well overdue and that they would be terminating her contract with them unless she provided them the copy by 9 a.m. the following day. And save the pussy-footing niceties for your day job.
Eve couldn’t lose this gig, she just couldn’t. It wasn’t just supplementing her income, it was tripling it, there was no way that she could keep up the credit card repayments without it. And she couldn’t go back to just writing about hearts and flowers and happy endings, she’d go mad. But to craft a pithy, cynical column out of thin air now would be nigh on impossible. She was drunk, exhausted, and completely spent. Eve doubted she was capable of writing a good text message at that point in time, let alone a 700-word opinion piece.
The solution was staring Eve in the face. Literally staring her in the face from the screen of her laptop. Without thinking, Eve copied and pasted her latest diary entry into the body of an email, wrote Hi Belinda, Sorry it’s late, here’s my latest column, hope you like it, Eve at the top of it and pressed send.
She then opened up a new email and typed in Fiona’s address.
Hey Fiona,
It’s Eve. Well, you know that because it’s come from my email. Sorry, I’m a bit drunk. Which should in no way dilute what I’m about to say because I’m thinking very clearly. Well, not very clearly, but on this particular topic, I’m very clear. Crystal, in fact. The thing is, I hate weddings. Like REALLY hate weddings. I hate everything about them, the fact the industry is worth about two billion pounds, I’ve just made that up, but it’s something like that, two billion pounds that could have been spent on schools or hospitals or something better than weddings that in all likelihood will end in divorce, then there’s the fake nails, fake eyelashes, fake friends. Orchids flown in from the Far East that are adding to the carbon footprint, that makes me very sad. If I could add a crying emoji here I would, but I can’t because it’s an email. Dresses that are only bits of fabric sewn together but the fact they’re white they cost ten times what they would if they were purple. The fact that no one really wears purple wedding dresses. I hate gift registers, kitten-heel shoes, tiaras (no one should wear tiaras except princesses or prom queens, and I hate prom queens, so just princesses. They’re fine.) Anyway, you get the picture. Which is why I’m resigning. I feel a fraud for writing about true love when I really don’t believe that it exists.
Yours, Eve
It sent. Then she slept.
***
‘I brought you this,’ Becca stuck a thermos of tea through the opening in the tent.
Eve murmured back a reply that was noncommittal. Even the thought of reaching for the flask was too much effort.
‘Everyone’s up and the bacon butty van has arrived.’ That was another one of Eve’s flashes of inspiration – what would hungover campers like more than anything the morning after? A greasy bacon bap served on their doorstep. Except the thought of it now made her want to throw up.
Becca climbed inside the tent, and sat cross-legged on the end of Eve’s sleeping bag. ‘I just ran into Ben. He told me about your shitty Frenchman.’
‘He’s not mine,’ Eve muttered, her head still resolutely refusing to peek out of the top of the bag.
‘I’m sorry if you didn’t enjoy the wedding,’ Becca said sadly.
Eve poked her head up. ‘I did enjoy it, Becs. I could have done without seeing my kind of boyfriend’s bare bum for the very first time in the way that I did, but that’s not your fault.’
‘I don’t know if having it in a field was necessarily a good idea now,’ Becca admitted a little sadly. ‘You’d be surprised the amount of people that have come out in little bites from the hay bales, apparently there’s a type of insect that live inside them.’
Eve shook her head. ‘Wow. Who knew?’ Last night’s keyboard tirade suddenly came flooding back to Eve, and she felt the colour drain from her face.
‘Are you ok?’ Becca said. ‘You look really pale. Are you going to be sick?’
‘No, I’m ok. What time is it?’ Eve was hoping beyond hope that it was before 9 a.m. and that she could fix this mess before it became a massive mine that exploded everything she held dear into millions of pieces.
‘Eleven.’
Fuck.
‘Look, you go ahead, I’ll just pull on some clothes and I’ll be right behind you.’ As soon as Becca left Eve grabbed her phone and called Belinda’s mobile. It rang once and went to voicemail. ‘Belinda, it’s Eve, look, I sent the wrong column last night, it’s not meant for Venus, I’m sorry, please ignore it, I’ll send over another one in an hour, please just delete the last one, it’s all a load of rubbish anyway. Can you call me when you’ve got this.? It’s really important. Thanks, cheers, bye.’
Eve then threw her head out of the open zip and vomited all over Bruno’s bag that was still outside the door of the tent.
***
Eve left countless voice messages, texts and emails tearfully begging Belinda to delete her column, but none of them were answered. She needed to get back to London as fast as she could, to try to implore to Belinda’s good nature in person. This could all still be salvaged if the post didn’t go live. Then Becca would never know how close Eve had come to ruining everything. Eve rammed her holdall full of her things and ran from the tent back towards the car park. She had to pass through the party field where the fry-up van was still being mobbed by hungry campers, but Eve kept her head down and stuck to the edge of the field so she wouldn’t be seen.
There wasn’t a traffic light or roundabout that Eve remembered from the journey back to Clapham, the last two hours passed by in a foggy blur. How she didn’t crash was a miracle as her sight was clouded by tears the whole way from Devon to London, and her hands shook as they gripped the steering wheel. She felt sick with guilt. Physically nauseous. Letting herself into the flat, remnants of her last girly night with Becca littered every surface. The last bottle of wine they’d shared lay at the top of the recycling bucket; their trainers lined up next to each other just inside the front door; Becca and Eve’s clothes scattered like confetti over the living room as Becca had packed her suitcase for her honeymoon, cherry-picking the best t
hings from both their wardrobes. A photo montage of the two of them punched her in the face when she went to the kitchen. Their young arms wrapped around each other in one photo from when they were freshers at university, others were taken on holidays abroad, one of them both leaning against a yellow New York taxi when Becca had visited, another of them jubilantly holding up matching keys to their flat when she had first moved in. It seemed like a catalogue of happy memories that now didn’t deserve to be in a nice frame. The glass should be smashed into pieces, just like their friendship was about to be.
Chapter 34
Eve went through the motions of filling the kettle up from the tap, flicking the switch on at the side, retrieving a mug from the cupboard – all part of the same routine she had done thousands of times, but never before with such a feeling of dread and foreboding. How could she have turned into the type of monster that would throw her best friend under the bus for some cheap laughs and a fat fee, was she really that person? Eve sank down onto the kitchen floor, her back against the units, her legs bent up to her chest. She used to be a nice person, she knew she did, but how did she turn into someone so blinkered and self-obsessed? The catastrophic hunt for B, the sarcasm she spouted in the Venus columns, this wasn’t her, and if it was, this wasn’t who she wanted to be.
Eve heard her phone buzzing from her bag in the hallway where she’d dumped it on the way in. Praying it was Belinda, Eve scrambled to her feet to answer it.
It was Faye. Eve held the vibrating phone in her hand and didn’t know whether to answer it or not. The drama that had happened after seeing Juan climb out of Faye’s tent last night meant that Eve hadn’t had any time to process how she felt about her mum and her personal trainer getting it on. Her instinctive reaction was to be disgusted, but this was quickly replaced with a feeling that people should enjoy happiness where they could find it. Eve didn’t really want to think too long or hard about the ins and outs of their burgeoning relationship if she could help it, but it wasn’t a union she was going to be against.
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