by Lucy Vine
Morning Delilah,
Nice to hear from you!
I’ll have to let you know later in the year whether I can do this. Put me down as a maybe.
Ta,
Fi
From: [email protected]
To: You
Cc: 30+
Hello again fellow bridesmaid, and hi everyone else!
I’m the groom’s little sister (emphasis on little, lol) (my brother’s a fat cheapskate) (just kidding, don’t tell him I said that) (he won’t lend me money) (Lauren’s too good for him lol!)
Anyway, I’m hoping I can make this, just need to find the money, still haven’t told Dad about the trust fund being gone. Do you want to use my new timeshare for the hen do???????
Simone x
From: [email protected]
To: You
Cc: 30+
Hey Lilah,
Katie Jacks here!!!! Nice to E-MEET YOU! Lol lol lol.
Thanks for the email, how exciting!!! I’d soooo love to come, just checking what dates you reckon the hen will be????
Thank you soooooooo much, can’t wait!!!!!
Katie xxxxxxxx
From: [email protected]
To: You
Cc: 30+
Hey Lilah,
Katie Jacks here!!!! Nice to E-MEET YOU! Lol lol lol.
Thanks for the email, how exciting!!! I’d soooo love to come, just checking what dates you reckon the hen will be????
Thank you soooooooo much, can’t wait!!!!!
Katie xxxxxxxx
From: [email protected]
To: You
Cc: 30+
I’m in!
Thanks x
From: [email protected]
To: You
Cc: 30+
Hey Lilah,
Katie Jacks here!!!! Nice to E-MEET YOU! Lol lol lol.
Thanks for the email, how exciting!!! I’d soooo love to come, just checking what dates you reckon the hen will be????
Thank you soooooooo much, can’t wait!!!!!
Katie xxxxxxxx
From: [email protected]
To: You
Cc: 30+
Hey Lilah!!
I keep trying to email you back but I don’t think it’s working!!!! Just wanted to check on the dates for the hen do??????
Katie xxxxxx
From: [email protected]
To: You
Cc: 30+
You have the wrong person. Can you take me off this group message.
From: [email protected]
To: You
Cc: 30+
Katie, stop sending the same email over and over. We heard you the first time, babe!! And the dates were in Lilah’s email anyway.
From: [email protected]
To: You
Cc: 30+
Hey everyone,
LOL, Lilah. I can’t believe Lauren’s got you on such a tight schedule. I’m going to tell her you waited a full day before obeying her!
But yeah, I’m in, obvs. Can’t wait.
Katie, STOP SENDING THE SAME EMAIL OVER AND OVER.
Joely x
From: [email protected]
To: You
Cc: 30+
Hey Delilah,
Thanks for this. How much do you think it’s going to cost, round about?
Also, can everyone stop cc’ing everyone else into their replies? My work email is getting overloaded.
Thanks guys,
Jess
From: [email protected]
To: You
Cc: 30+
Seriously, take me off this group message.
From: [email protected]
To: You
Cc: 30+
Hi there,
I’m out of the office this week. I’ll be back in on Monday 13 October 2008.
I’ll get back to you then.
Sofia
9
So it turns out a Jordan and Peter Andre style wedding is truly a thing to behold. There are hair extensions and tiaras everywhere I look, and everything from the dresses to the tablecloths are decorated using some variation of pink taffeta. IT IS AMAZING. Lauren is in her absolute element, hissing at every tiny detail and loudly stage whispering to me and Joely about it all being ‘disgusting’ and why it’s the exact opposite of what she’s planning for her big day. I keep trying to pretend I can’t hear her because we’re sitting on a table with all the bride’s aunts and uncles, who look a bit put out.
Joely’s having a much harder time of it. As the token single girl at every wedding we go to these days – and this is already number six this year alone – she’s barely been allowed to sit down because everyone has someone she ‘simply must meet’. She’s been dragged around and around the room over and over again to be presented to the very few single guys present. Literally ANY single man. She’s so far been pointedly introduced to a 62-year-old widower called Leonard, who wanted to talk to her about the Stephen King novel Gerald’s Game to see if ‘that kind of roleplay was her cup of tea’. She also met another man in his forties called Bernard, who is ‘still technically living with his wife’, but only because they ‘can’t afford to split up just at the minute’. Oh, and – my favourite – Catherine’s second cousin, Brett, who has just done ‘really well’ on his A-levels and is turning eighteen ‘any day now’. There was also a really awful few minutes where she was forced to dance alone in the middle of the room to Beyonce’s ‘Single Ladies’.
Bernard tried to dance with her at the end.
Joely’s trying to make the best of it, and keeps repeating the mantra: ‘Any attention is good attention’ and that everyone here – especially the awful men she’s met – are all potential followers and subscribers. But she’s really starting to look a bit dead behind the eyes, and has been in the loo quite a bit more than usual.
On the plus side, she reckons the teenager is quite fit, so she gave him her number. I think she’s going to his birthday party in a couple of weeks. She said she can shag him and then he’ll sell his story to the Sun and she can go on Loose Women to talk about age-gap romance.
I look around the room at all this love and goodwill, and think: seriously, fuck all of you.
No, just kidding. It’s nice, I guess.
The whole day – service and reception – has been held in a remote Scottish hotel, and you can tell the couple have been really involved with every aspect of the day. They’d written their own vows, which went on for sooo long. I had to stop Joely throwing something, and at one point she did this really exaggerated, loud yawn – which the groom totally saw. He still didn’t wrap shit up, though, and carried on talking for another twenty-five minutes or so. The speeches are up next, and they’re bound to be even longer, so we’re totally ditching. Joely has stolen two bottles of champagne and Will and I are trying to persuade Lauren to come hide in the catering tent with us. But she won’t – she says she needs to stay and take notes.
I feel a bit torn. I don’t want to abandon Lauren, but I’m so sick of talking to people from school who I hated and never wanted to see again. Many of whom called me Delly the Belly back then, and definitely not in an affectionate way.
Crap. In fact, here comes another girl from school, who I haven’t seen in ten years. She’s in a white dress, which seems like a brave choice at a wedding, and is flapping her hands in our direction, squealing.
‘Oh my GOD, hi, Lauren! I can’t believe you’re here! It’s been forever!’ she shouts at our whole table, before turning to Joely. ‘And Josie, right? I remember you – you used to come to our school discos and snog all the boys in our year! Ooh, remember what happened with Dea
n Clark? That was totes hilar. It’s so good to see you guys! How long has it been since we saw each other? Lauren, you never make it to the reunions, you naughty girl! We miss you! What’s been going on in the last ten years? Tell me everything about your life! Are you married? Have you found your special someone to complete you yet? I got married last year, so yeah, my life is truly amazing. He’s a lawyer, so . . .’ She stops and smiles smugly around the table, waiting for everyone to acknowledge her enormous accomplishment in bagging a rich human.
Her name is Petra Mooney and I don’t want to be mean, but she has this really whiny voice that hasn’t changed since Year Nine. There was a stray dog that used to hang around the school playground and, I swear to God, whenever Petra talked at lunchtime, that dog would start to howl and wouldn’t stop until she stopped speaking. It happened every single time, I’m really not even exaggerating.
Lauren smiles disinterestedly at Petra, while Joely barely nods an acknowledgement. Petra doesn’t seem to notice the lack of enthusiasm from the group and takes a seat beside Lauren – recently vacated by an uncle with bladder issues (that’s not a guess – he told us all about it over the main course).
Hopefully he leaked.
Petra pauses, scanning the uncomfortable middle-aged occupants of our table before landing on me and narrowing her eyes.
‘Delly?’ she says, unsure. ‘Delly Fox? Delly the Belly? Oh my God, is that you?’
I nod, smiling as genuinely as I can. ‘Hiya, Petra, how are you?’
Her jaw goes slack. ‘Oh-em-gee, Delly! You look so different. You’re so thin. What the hell. You’ve lost so much weight.’ She stops briefly, plasters a fake smile over her shock and adds, sugar sweetly, ‘Ooh, well done you, Delly! You look, like, sooo much better. I can’t believe how different you look from school. You were so fat back then, haha! Sooo fat, do you remember? Do you remember how we all called you Delly the Belly? Haha. And now you’re totally thin! I can’t believe it. You’ve dyed your hair red too, right? It looks sooo cute. I love how . . . bright it is. So, yeah, how much weight have you lost? Like, two stone? Three stone? Four stone? You’re so much better-looking now! Spill, gurl – what’s your secret?’
I half smile, then shrug uncomfortably. I really, really, really hate being told how much ‘better’ I look now I’ve lost weight. I hear it all the time. Every time I’m with someone who hasn’t seen me in a couple of years, I have to sit there while they tell me that I’m ‘acceptable’ to them now. Actually, that’s mostly why I’m finding seeing people here a bit uncomfortable. This is about the sixth encounter I’ve had just like this, with an acquaintance I haven’t seen for years loudly bringing up my body like it’s public property. I think it’s completely weird the way we act like weight loss is some kind of miracle and praise people without knowing anything about their situation. Because the thing is, none of us know what’s going on underneath the surface. You have no idea what’s happening in someone’s life. It could be an illness, it could be an eating disorder, or it could be that someone’s just had a really shitty breakup and is too sad to eat. That was my situation, by the way. The guy before Will, who dumped me brutally for a girl he met on Tinder. I was heartbroken and too miserable to eat and the weight fell off me. Yoga has mostly kept it off but it wasn’t some big, positive, happy thing. My eating was incredibly disordered and I lost three stone in three months. It wasn’t healthy on any level. My nails all broke, my hair fell out, my skin was terrible – and all I heard was how great I looked because I was emaciated. Personally, I’ve never known anyone to lose weight except through misery. Joely’s the happiest, most content person I know – which is why I don’t think she’ll ever be slim.
I also can’t stand this assumption that I must’ve hated myself back then. Like, I must be sooo relieved not to be that person anymore. Yes, sure, I hated the way people treated me when I was bigger, but I didn’t hate my body. I don’t understand how people like Petra think fat-shaming my previous self – the person I lived as for about twenty-six years – will make me feel good. It just makes me feel humiliated and sad to hear how much they didn’t like my previous body. How much more they prefer this version of me. It makes me look at my life before in a different way, like I was wrong and broken. And now that I’ve ‘rectified’ myself, I will be finally be allowed out into mixed society.
And I hate knowing that I’ll carry this knowledge with me if I put the weight back on. Which is, y’know, statistically pretty likely.
I don’t know what to say, so I half nod and glance over at Will beside me. I think I was hoping for support, or at least a distraction, but he’s staring down at his plate. He’s not having a good time and it looks like our escape window before the speeches has closed. He’s been in a tiny bit of a mood with me for a few days now. He says he isn’t, but I can tell he is. He’s doing that thing where he doesn’t properly look at me when we talk, and staring anywhere else. I keep trying to cheer him up today, hoping he’ll snap out of it, but it’s not working.
To be fair to him, I get it. I know he’s been feeling neglected lately. What with everything that’s been going on with Lauren, and all the hen do and wedding stuff, it’s taking up a lot of my time. I know it must seem to him like we can’t even get through an evening without some mini crises cropping up that Lauren needs my help with – and no, it can never wait until tomorrow. And now it’s not even just Lauren bothering me at all hours. Will and I haven’t had a single conversation lately without my phone beeping with yet another message from a confused hen who doesn’t know how to apply for a new passport and thinks I’m supposed to sort that kind of thing out for her since I’m the maid of honour. And what with work, Franny and Fuddy-Duddies United, I guess I’ve not really been home much lately at all. This is the most we’ve been together in weeks and all I’ve done today is talk to other guests. And then yet another wedding invitation arrived yesterday from one of his cousins, who’s marrying his boyfriend after eight years together. It’s so romantic, they’re getting hitched in a castle on New Year’s Eve! But when I went to RSVP yes online, I could tell Will really wanted to say something. I asked if he was OK and he looked a bit weird.
‘It’s fine,’ he said in a small voice. ‘It’s just . . . it’s just that I was hoping we could do something special on New Year’s Eve. Something just the two of us. I thought we could go away together maybe . . .’
And then he’d stopped as he spotted the panicked look on my face, thinking about the money something ‘special’ would entail. He immediately backtracked and said we should definitely go to the wedding, and then he laughed like he was being silly.
I feel really bad, and I know we’ve committed to an unbelievable number of weddings in the space of a year, but it’s not like we have a choice! It’s his family. And it’ll look homophobic if this is the one wedding we can’t make it to! We have to go. I can’t say no without a reason, can I?
Thankfully, across the table, Petra has already lost interest in my new look and is grilling Lauren about her wedding plans. They’re currently talking themes and Petra is boasting competitively about her own wedding, where they had a 1920s vibe with a Bugsy Malone-inspired first dance. Lauren is making approving noises but is pulling the face she pulled when we arrived at the hotel earlier today and saw all the pink taffeta. She shows Petra a venue on her phone that she made us all visit last weekend. She and Charlie were supposed to be absolutely decided on her father-in-law’s place for the wedding but this other place had a cancellation and Lauren said she ‘just wants options’. This venue specialises in ‘country’ weddings and has actual peacocks who attend your big day with you. The peacocks will – upon request – walk you down the aisle. It’s really cool. Or fucking ridiculous, I’m not sure which. Lauren’s dad is apparently in a huff about this part and says he can walk her down the aisle wearing ‘stupid feathers sticking out of his arse’ if that’s what she wants.
‘Do you know abo
ut the giant wedding fair in London next week?’ Petra suddenly says self-importantly, gripping Lauren by the shoulders. ‘It’s going to be massive and vital for any bride. You simply must go. All brides that really care about making their wedding day special should go. If only to be seen there, yars? All the top florists and designers and planners will be there. You must go.’
Joely and I exchange a panicked glance. We’ve already been to approximately 9,500 wedding fairs. We’ve surely seen everything weddings have to offer at this point. And if we have to go to this one, does that mean Petra’s coming too? We’ve already got enough cooks in this boiling-hot wedding kitchen and we definitely don’t need another voice on the bustling WhatsApp group.
‘Of course I’ve heard of it,’ Lauren says huffily, but she’s bluffing. ‘I’m on the list, obviously, but, er, I’m not sure I need it, to be honest. I have already spoken to all the, er, top wedding . . . people in the . . . country.’ She shoots us a look that says to keep quiet and that we might have to cancel any plans we had next week for a trip to London.
Oh God.
Petra nods approvingly. ‘Well, darling, let me know if you are and I’ll come along. Might be handy for when Richard and I renew our vows, right?’ she tinkers.
‘Would you really renew your vows?’ Lauren says, looking shocked. ‘But all that work and expense . . . Are people really renewing vows now?’