“Okay,” she said, kissing me on both cheeks. “Here’s my card. Anytime you want to talk, just call me. Anytime. I’m always happy to talk.”
I took the card, which said that she ran a shelter for homeless cats. I wasn’t in the least bit surprised.
The other newbie drew level with me as we exited the hall.
“What did you think?” I asked her.
Her eyes bugged out in horror. “I don’t know what to think,” she said. “But I know I am never going back in there. Never. I am going straight home to log on to Match.com and I am going to get laid by next weekend.”
She was out of that place like a bat out of hell.
As I headed back to Mum and Dad’s, it occurred to me that maybe the other newbie had the right idea. Voodoo hadn’t worked, and group therapy was not looking promising. Perhaps simply getting laid was the answer. I could continue to allow Michael the same space in my brain that he had always occupied, or I could get someone else in to edge him out. I needed to get back out there.
But who could I get back out there with? My social circle had been withering year after year as my friends succumbed to marriage and motherhood, even before I delivered the death blow by ruining Becky’s wedding. The last time I had been on a night out had been Becky’s hen night and that was hardly a raucous affair, with three of the girls not drinking because they were breast-feeding, three not drinking because they were pregnant, and one not drinking because she wanted to get pregnant before December to avoid the crushing pity of her mother-in-law over Christmas lunch.
Nevertheless, I did know of another hen night coming up that might be a little more fun.
My young cousin Karen was getting married in a couple of weeks’ time. I wasn’t going to go to the actual wedding. She was marrying a Kiwi guy she’d met in some backpackers’ club in Covent Garden and the marriage was going to take place on Fiji, with just the bride, the groom, and their best friends in attendance. (My aunt was absolutely livid.) Anyway, Karen may not have invited any of her family members to her wedding, but she had invited me to her hen night, which was to take place on the August bank-holiday weekend. I had already turned the kind invitation down, thinking that nothing would send me into a terminal depression faster than a night out with a bunch of twenty-somethings mainlining Red Bull and vodka. But needs must. I had to go out or end up like Enya. I was not yet ready to sit in a bar all by myself, though. That would be way too sad. I had to go out with a gang, and Karen’s was the only gang available to me right now.
Karen was delighted to hear from me. “I thought you had another engagement.”
“My friend’s baby shower was canceled,” I lied.
“Aw,” said Karen. “That’s a shame. But I’m really happy you’re going to come to my hen night instead. We’re going to have an amazing time, Ash. We’re starting at Bolsheviks on the High Street. We’re going to walk north, having a drink in every single bar we come across, until we get to the nightclub. Assuming that any of us are still standing by then!”
“Sounds fantastic,” I said, wondering what on earth I was letting myself in for.
“Wonderful! I’ll see you next week!”
“Perhaps I should just stay in,” I said, as I had breakfast with my parents on the morning before Karen’s hen do. “I don’t know any of her friends. And they probably don’t want an old-timer like me tagging along with them anyway. I’m sure she only invited me to be polite.”
“Oh, go on,” said Mum. “Karen will be really excited to have you there. She’s always looked up to you. You’ll have a great evening. Besides, I don’t like to think of you sitting here all on your own while we’re away.”
That weekend, the last bank holiday of the summer, my father was taking Mum to the hotel where they’d spent their honeymoon. They were supposed to go away for a whole week but the modest little bed-and-breakfast in Newquay had since become a ritzy boutique hotel and so they had cut back to two nights.
Mum had only agreed to go away that weekend because she knew that Lucas was planning to go away as well, to the Reading Festival, and that way she didn’t have to worry about him inviting his feckless mates around and getting cigarette burns on her new sofa. Five years previously she and Dad had left Lucas on his own for just one night and came back to find that particular year’s new sofa covered in new-age travelers drinking Special Brew from the best wedding-gift crystal and flicking ash from their spliffs into my deceased paternal grandmother’s prized Hermès teacups.
“At least they weren’t flicking the ash on the carpet,” Lucas had protested.
The pot smoking faded into insignificance when Mum went up to her bedroom and found one of Lucas’s school friends—a very sweet girl (or so we thought)—having a threesome with her boyfriend and one of my parents’ neighbors.
When Mum reminded my brother of that unfortunate party and the damage it had done to her trust in him, he pointed out to her that in actual fact I was the pyromaniac in the family.
“Thanks, Lucas.”
“It was an accident,” my mother chipped in on my behalf.
Despite my brother’s attempt at stirring things up, Mum was finally persuaded to get into the Saab and hit the road down to Cornwall. She waved tearfully until the car had rounded the corner and was out of sight. Anyone would think she had never left her children at home before, despite the fact that I had lived independently for a good decade prior to setting fire to my own flat.
“The cat’s away …,” said Lucas as we went back into the house. He cranked up the stereo.
Thank goodness it wasn’t long before his friends came to collect him in an old VW camper van. Five of them were going to Reading that year. The van was piled high with rucksacks full of neatly ironed T-shirts (they all lived with their mums) and Tupperware containers of food, carefully packed into iceboxes to keep fresh (the mums again). Lucas added his own contribution to the stash: a hamper full of sandwiches lovingly prepared by Dad. They were less like the wild young rebels they thought they were than Five Go Camping without the dog. Speaking of which, Ben tried hard to sneak into the back of the van but was thwarted. He was staying with me.
“Don’t forget to walk him,” Lucas warned me. As if he ever remembered.
“Don’t die of a drug overdose, will you?” I said as I saw him and Richard, his best friend, off the premises.
“Watch out for chlamydia” was Richard’s charming reply.
“Fat chance,” said Lucas. “Ashleigh hasn’t had a shag in a year.”
“Five months,” I pointed out, pointlessly. “It’s been less than five months.” As far as Lucas and Richard were concerned, at thirty-two I was a shriveled old bag.
Once I had the house to myself, I turned the music down and settled at the kitchen table with a mug of tea and the latest copy of Hello! (which Mum had bought for the coverage of some hapless soap star’s funeral). It didn’t cheer me up.
The following afternoon I took Ben for a walk in the park. The weather wasn’t too bad, considering it was a bank holiday, and every spare patch of grass played host to a picnic. It was hard to walk from one side to the other without being hit by balls, Frisbees, and Jack Russell terriers in pursuit of said neon plastic disks. Ben enjoyed himself, but that walk didn’t do much to improve my mood. Those people who weren’t playing Frisbee or trying to keep young children out of the pond were inevitably walking in twos. I remembered how Michael and I used to walk along like that, our arms around each other, synchronizing our steps so that we wouldn’t bump hips.
I had a stabbing vision of Michael wrapped around Miss Well-Sprung. I wondered what they were doing that bank holiday. Perhaps they were at the carnival in Notting Hill and she was making him do some exotic Brazilian dance. I drew small comfort from the fact that he would probably look like a twit. Michael couldn’t dance at all. But maybe, as I had been, Miss Well-Sprung was too much in love with him to care.
Turning for home, I retraced my steps to Mum and Dad’s. I was on th
e point of deciding that I was too miserable to go out that evening when my phone rang. It was Karen.
“Hiya,” she said. “Just checking you know where we’re meeting up tonight.”
“Er …,” I began. “I thought perhaps …”
“You’re not going to bail out, are you? You can’t pull out now. I’ve told all my friends that you’re coming. You’re the only member of my family I could ever talk to.”
How could I refuse after that?
At eight o’clock I found myself standing on the pavement outside the first venue. I hadn’t seen my cousin Karen for a couple of years. In fact, I hadn’t seen her in the flesh since she was doing her GCSE exams. But like so many families, we kept in touch via Facebook, so I had seen pictures of a variety of hairdos, boyfriends, and shots of her wearing traffic cones at the end of a long night on the town. That said, I still wondered if I would recognize her. Would she recognize me? My hair, after all, was now the reddish brown of a scruffy city fox.
In the end, it was easy. I saw them as soon as I walked into Bolsheviks, a Russian-themed bar specializing in shots, which had been an Argentinian bar just a few weeks earlier. (The toilet doors were still adorned with silhouettes of tango dancers.) Unlike Becky’s snotty girlfriends, Karen’s friends were not planning to hold back on the traditional hen-night frippery. They were already in full regalia, wearing tutus instead of skirts and pink fur-covered horns on their heads. They each had a T-shirt with the name of a Bond girl emblazoned upon it. They looked crazy. They looked ridiculous. They looked like they were ready to have a good time.
Having embraced me enthusiastically, Karen held me at arm’s length and looked at my ensemble (a black dress and a pair of sensible heels I had borrowed from my mother) in dismay.
“Everything I had was ruined in the fire,” I said to excuse myself.
“Doesn’t matter. You need to change into this,” said Karen’s best friend and chief bridesmaid, Lola, handing me a plastic bag. I knew without looking what would be inside.
“We saved Miss Moneypenny for you,” Karen explained. “Since you are the oldest.”
Like I needed reminding.
I followed Karen into the tango toilets to change. Reluctantly, I folded Mum’s little black dress into my enormous handbag (also borrowed) and put on the outfit that Karen had provided for me instead. The stiff net ballet skirt barely covered my knickers.
“Are those cycling shorts?” Karen asked, pointing at the little black shorts that poked out from beneath the pink tulle.
“They’re Spanx,” I said grimly.
“What do you need those for?” Karen asked. “You’re not fat.”
“That’s what you think. Because I’m always holding my wobbly bits in.”
“Oh.”
“You’ll understand when you’re older,” I said.
“I’m never going to wear support underwear,” said Karen.
“I think I said that once, too.”
She handed me the T-shirt. I didn’t need to put it on to know that it was going to be a disaster. I held it up to my chest.
“Karen, this is a child’s T-shirt,” I said. “I won’t even be able to get this over my head.”
“You totally will,” she said, taking it from my hands and starting to tug it over my head for me. “It’s full of Lycra. See? It’s, like, really stretchy.”
True. It did stretch. And I did get it on. Though when I looked in the mirror, I was not in any way comforted by what I saw. Imagine stuffing a pair of slightly misshapen melons into an elastic bandage.
“This T-shirt is way too small,” I said to Karen. “In fact, I’d have to say it’s borderline obscene.”
Lola had joined us. “Oh my God,” she said. “You have a magnificent rack! Have you had your tits done?”
“I have not had my tits done,” I said.
“Well, it looks like you have. In a good way. You are going to stop traffic.” She jiggled my breasts à la the dreaded Trinny in the early days of What Not to Wear.
“I’m putting my dress back on.”
Karen pouted. “Come on, Ash. It’s my hen night. I’m only going to do this once. You’ve got to enter into the spirit of things. We’re all dressed up so people can see we’re together. We’re a team.”
“Yeah,” said Lola. “Team Karen. Come on, Ash. Have a laugh while you still can.”
“While I still can?” I winced.
She took a pair of nail scissors out of her handbag.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I’ll wear the T-shirt. There’s no need to threaten me.”
“Hold still,” she said, getting dangerously close to my neck with the pointed blades. “This T-shirt needs customization.” Lola was training to be a fashion stylist.
She snipped a channel from the round neckline of the T-shirt down to the top of my cleavage. Instantly, the little cut spread into a rough-and-ready V-neck, of the kind that Pamela Anderson or some other glamour model might wear to flaunt her expensive and not entirely successful surgery.
“Oh. My. God.” I could only stare at my reflection in horror. I looked as though I was going to spend the evening working as a superannuated promotional “model” handing out shots of vodka with a free serving of innuendo.
“Fantastic,” said Karen. Her friend agreed. “Now you’re ready. Hello, boys!”
I wrapped my arms across my chest. “I cannot leave the ladies’ looking like such a … such a slut!”
“Oh, come on!”
Karen and her friends were not taking no for an answer. We had been joined by two more of the girls. Daisy, whose Bond name was Solitaire, and Jools, who for that night only was Vesper Lynd.
“We’re missing happy hour!” said Vesper.
I was bodily dragged back out into the bar, where one of our crew—code name Plenty O’Toole—had lined up twelve shot glasses. Behind the bar, a lad who didn’t look legally old enough to be working as a barman was performing some pretty impressive juggling with two bottles. In a seamless move, he stopped juggling and began to pour liquor into our empty glasses. A layer of peach schnapps was followed by a layer of Baileys and a few drops of grenadine as a garnish. The Baileys started to curdle.
“That looks vile,” I said.
“It’s a brain hemorrhage,” said the barman proudly. “If you can drink five of these without throwing up, you get the sixth for free.”
“I can do that,” said Daisy/Solitaire. She quickly dispatched four of the twelve glasses lined up along the bar. Then she covered her mouth with both her hands. She couldn’t do it after all. But she did manage to keep the four she had already drunk down, which was a good thing in the circumstances.
“Ready, ladies?” Lola handed out the remaining glasses. “Let’s toast the blushing bride! Up your bum, Karen!”
I did my best to look game as I sipped at my own brain hemorrhage. Really, who comes up with these things? The combination of peach schnapps and Baileys Irish Cream was quite the most vile thing imaginable. The Baileys and schnapps wouldn’t mix in the glass, resulting in a blobby emulsion that looked unspeakable and tasted worse. It was so sweet I felt sure I heard my teeth squeak. Having forced the evil stuff down, I slammed the glass back on the bar with a shudder and hoped that was the end of it. I needed a proper drink to wash the taste away.
“Another round,” someone shouted.
“Can’t we have a bottle of wine?” I asked.
“Nah,” said Karen. “It’ll take us ages to get pissed drinking wine. Plus, if you do shots, you spend less time running back and forth to the toilet.” The logic of youth …
A fresh round of hemorrhages had already been prepared.
“Come on, Ashleigh! Down in one this time,” yelled Lola.
I suppose I could have refused. I could have wished Karen the very best with married life, given her the “Congratulations, you’re getting married” card that I had in my handbag, and hightailed it out of there. But there was something infectious about the enthusiasm
these girls had for life. They were out for a good time and, heaven knows, I needed a good time. So I stayed. Maybe if I just let go and got bladdered … I downed my second hemorrhage. By the time I’d had three brain hemorrhages, I was definitely starting to “chillax,” as my young cousin would have said.
The bar in which we found ourselves at around ten o’clock that long night seemed to be full of hen and stag parties. A DJ took requests for all those who were about to give up their freedom. Karen asked him to play “Hit Me, Baby, One More Time,” which is the first song she ever got into. She was just ten when the song was released and asked for the DVD for Christmas. I remembered the family party when she and her little sister dressed like hookers and performed the Britney dance for our horrified grandparents. I dread to think what Granny Polly would have thought if she’d seen Karen dancing to Britney on her hen night, lifting her overly tight Pussy Galore T-shirt to reveal a Day-Glo pink bra.
Karen’s performance was so energetic that she was soon invited to dance on a pedestal in front of the DJ’s decks. Her bachelorettes whooped with delight as Karen did a bit more bump and grind and was rewarded with a bottle of cava. “Better than champagne,” the DJ assured her.
Karen had dispatched half the bottle by the time she made it back to our table. She offered me a swig and I took it. The cava was as warm and sweet as if it had been left on a sunny windowsill for a week and a half. Ordinarily I would have turned up my nose, but four brain hemorrhages into the evening, I was no oenophile. I had quickly reached the stage where I agreed with Daisy and Lola that I was happy to drink anything as long as it was alcoholic.
“My round,” I said. “Barman, line ’em up.”
Four shots later, we found ourselves in a nightclub called Histeria. I wondered if the misspelling was deliberate and gave the word a double meaning that I simply couldn’t see. A double meaning wasn’t the only thing I was having trouble seeing by this point. Gazing up at the blackboard behind the bar in search of a new and more interesting cocktail, I found myself unable to focus on the equally creatively spelled cocktail list. Either I was going shortsighted or I had been poisoned by Baileys. Never mind.
Getting Over Mr. Right Page 16