by Brigid Coady
Edie looked. She didn’t remember this night. Not in this corner. Not with Tom wearing that dark suit that had been tailored to show his leanness, the lining a sedate navy. The light blue shirt made his eyes glow, or was that something else? And that was the tie she had bought for him the last Christmas. Well she hadn’t actually bought it. One of the secretaries had. But he'd loved it and that was what mattered, wasn't it?
There was a bottle of champagne chilling, unopened beside him. She saw the yellow label. They had always said they would only drink that brand for truly special occasions, she remembered. There was a little bunch of her favourite tulips in reds and oranges on the side plate of the place setting opposite him. But this had never happened. Was this some sort of fantasy? Her mind was conjuring up a scene where everything turned out right; it was taunting her with what could've been.
She watched as Tom craned his neck every time the door to the restaurant opened and someone new came in. She saw the way his eyes lit up as the door jangled and how they died a little when it wasn’t the person he expected.
For forty-five minutes she watched. And with each minute his shoulders slumped a little more. She sat at a table nearby, rubbing her chest, which ached more with each drop, with each bit of light that faded in his eyes.
“Would sir care to order?” a waiter would ask every five minutes.
“No, I’ll wait,” he assured him.
And as time went on the waiter’s attitude changed to one of pity.
Who the hell had the audacity to stand him up? Just look at him! She thought.
His phone rang and even the shock of seeing how phones had changed didn’t disturb her as much as the thought he’d been left alone.
“I hope he gives the silly cow what for,” she said, "I mean look at all the trouble he went to."
“Shug, where are you?” his face bright and eager.
Shug.
That was his name for her, short for ‘sugar’ because he said she was as sweet as it. It tugged at her heart and exploded in her brain.
She was the one he was waiting for.
“Not going to make it at all?” his face fell. No, it crumpled. His whole body seemed to curl in on itself. Like the air had been let out of him.
“No, no I understand. Your work is important and if Hilary needs you to stay, you have to. Yes, I know how much she’s done for you. I’ll see you at home. I lo…” he winced at the sound of a dropped phone, which even Edie could hear from where she sat.
“I love you.” He whispered to the dialling tone.
Edie’s vision blurred.
“Would sir like to order?” the pitiful gaze of the waiter was again on him.
“Yeah, I’ll have a double gin and tonic and take back the champagne. We won’t be needing it.”
As Tom stared dejectedly at the table his hand crept to his right hand pocket. Dipping in, he brought a small object up to the table.
A small, black velvet ring box.
No. Edie’s stomach flexed like it had taken a prize fighting punch.
He flipped the lid and there nestled on white satin was the most perfect ring she had ever seen. Small and discreet, not expensive or showy but it wouldn’t have mattered because it would’ve have come from Tom and that was enough.
“No,” she mouthed.
“What was so important that you forgot it was your anniversary of your first kiss? What was so urgent that you couldn't make time for him? What blinded you to your life that you didn’t know that Tom was going to propose?” The Ghost was implacable. Each question fell on Edie like physical blows.
“But we were busy, the Agnew divorce was complex and it was all hands to the pump. It was that work that got me the promotion. Hilary, Ms Satis, she told me I had to focus. That work would never let me down, that it wouldn’t cheat on you. And he knew I wanted to do well. Always be the best you can be, he knew that. But he never said. If he’d said…” she faded out.
“If he’d said that would you have come?” the Ghost asked.
Would she? Would she have wanted to be married so young? She wasn’t sure. Maybe a few years before she would have but then… then she was clawing her way up the ladder and getting married would have gotten in the way.
“We could have had a long engagement?” she said hopefully.
“Edie, you cheated on him. And you cheated on yourself. And you still are."
And with a twirl of flowers and pink glitter the Ghost, Tom, the perfect ring and Luigi’s restaurant vanished.
Edie was alone at last in her cold and empty bed.
Chapter 7
Sunlight streaked in the window and struck Edie in the eye. It had drawn its bow and unleashed it right on target.
She groaned. She felt like she’d drunk a crate of wine and then gone five rounds with Mike Tyson. What had happened?
The scent of jasmine, sweet pea and roses was still in the air.
The Ghost.
Edie sat bolt upright in bed.
A Ghost had visited her, just as Jessica had promised. This was actually happening. She started to shake. People like her didn’t get haunted. In much the same way people like her didn’t turn into vampires or go to séances. It just wasn’t done.
There was no logical reason she could come up with to explain it, though. Even if someone had managed to invent some sort of very high-end interactive experience it couldn’t explain what happened. There were things that were shown to her last night that no one else could have known.
She was going mad.
She stopped shaking.
Yes, she was going mad. That was much easier to deal with than hauntings. Obviously she was overworked and needed a good rest or something. Or some pills. Maybe an extended stay at a health farm. Odd that being mad made her feel better. As if she'd regained some control.
She swung her feet out of the bed.
They were grass stained and muddy.
She began to shake again. She looked closer; a pink heart-shaped piece of confetti was stuck to the little toe of her right foot.
Mad. Crazy. Certifiable. Chased by the little men in white coats loop de loo. If only that was the explanation.
“Oh my God!” she screamed catching sight of the alarm clock.
It couldn’t be ten o’clock?
She had to be at Mel’s in an hour and it was a good twenty minutes between here and there, even on a Saturday.
Confetti forgotten, the Ghost relegated to the back of her mind. Edie scrambled from her bed and ran into the bathroom.
An hour, later she pulled up outside Mel’s in Clapham South. She’d made it. She winced as she looked in the rear view mirror as she reversed into an available parking space. She had made it but her grooming hadn’t. Her dark hair, which had been damp and unstyled when she got in the car, was now windswept and curling into ringlets here and there. Her nose was shiny as she hadn’t had time to put on any make-up and she struggled to remember what she had stuffed, willy nilly, into the overnight bag for the weekend. She was sure she had forgotten something.
“Edie!” Mel screeched as she came to the door of the flat.
The terrace of houses, now mostly divided into two flats, was the same as pretty much everywhere in this part of South London. Built sometime in the late nineteenth century as family homes for commuters they now were family homes again, just cut up to a much smaller scale. Mel and Barry had the ground floor of a corner house, giving them a garden that came into its own in the summer.
“Edie! Come in! Come in!” Mel called, oblivious to her neighbours and their Saturday morning comfort.
Edie grimaced. Typically, Mel had demanded she was here on time and yet again she was running late herself.
Locking the Mini, Edie walked to the flat and wondered why she’d rushed. She could've at least taken the time to dry her hair.
“I’ll just be a few more minutes,” Mel promised as she ushered her in.
Edie followed her through the living room that the front door opene
d straight on to. The room was cluttered with fashion magazines and boy’s toys. Games consoles and mountain bikes.
Edie carried on down the narrow corridor and into the kitchen dining room at the back of the house. The summer sun streamed through the glass ceiling of the extension.
Mel disappeared into the bedroom while Edie settled herself on a stool at the breakfast counter and tried not to notice the sink full of dirty dishes. Edie itched to wash them and to stack the listing pile of magazines into a perfectly arranged tower. Instead she chewed on her thumbnail. The edge was ragged and she grimaced as she noticed the polish was almost completely gone.
“OK, Edie you have to promise that whatever happens I am NOT to snog anyone or do anything that I might regret tomorrow morning,” Mel called from the bedroom.
Regrets? Surely getting married would give Mel enough regrets. One more wouldn't break the bank.
“I’ll make sure!” Edie replied, because she knew that as a maid of honour she had certain responsibilities.
“Oh and I hope Mum will be OK. Aunty Celia has had to pull out so I’m not sure how she’ll feel being the only one of her generation at the weekend.”
“I’ll look after her,” Edie replied.
Thank God, she thought, another grown-up. Now there would be someone as uncomfortable with all the pink glitter and stupid games as she was. Maybe this way she wouldn’t miss Jessica’s acerbic asides so much.
Thirty minutes later Edie had persuaded, cajoled and threatened Mel into the car. As it was they would be cutting it fine to make it to Bath, or rather the house outside Bath that had been rented for the weekend, in time for lunch.
Edie roared out of Clapham and hoped that they would at least be in time for the manicurist and massage therapist some enterprising sort had booked to visit them that afternoon.
“OK, we have to be at the restaurant for seven thirty,” Jo, one of the other bridesmaids called over the high pitched and slightly hysterical voices of the hen party spread around the kitchen and living room of the Cotswold house.
“And as it said on the invite… LBDs, that is Little Black Dresses everyone! And I’ll be supplying the accessories.”
I’ll just bet you will, thought Edie.
She’d caught a glimpse of what looked like feather boas in a rainbow of colours in a bag that Jo had slipped upstairs. She had also overheard people talking about fairy wings and tiaras. Why didn’t they just tattoo ‘hen party’ on their foreheads and have done with it?
Edie went upstairs, her body more relaxed than it had been since the whole haunting thing had started. She might not enjoy the rest of the weekend but she had definitely enjoyed the wonderful massage. The therapist had set up his table and oils in the study cum library downstairs. The fact that the therapist was male and quite personable hadn’t passed any of the party by. And the manicure; she inspected her nails. Perfect. Now no one would know she was stressed.
The hen party included the other two bridesmaids, Jo, Mel’s best friend from uni and Sophie, Barry’s sister. Edie couldn’t work out why Mel thought she had to include her but maybe it was a love thing?
She shook her head; there was no point in worrying about it. They were stuck with Sophie. The rest consisted of Mel’s mum, Maggie, and a collection of uni and work friends.
In the master bedroom that she was sharing with Mel, Edie took her overnight bag and began to unpack. Her toiletries, nightdress and clothes for tomorrow were all there, but no little black dress.
“No,” she whispered.
She was sure she had packed it.
Edie thought back and suddenly she could see it in its dress bag still hanging on the back of her bedroom door. Put there so she wouldn’t forget it.
Yes, she was going mad.
“What’s up?” asked Mel as she came into the bedroom.
“I seem to have forgotten my dress,” Edie said quietly.
Mel’s mouth dropped open.
“You forgot something?” she came and sat on the bed, looking up at Edie concerned. “Are you OK, Edie? Is it work?” Edie noted that she didn’t ask if it were a man.
“No, I’m fine,” she said.
If you count seeing dead people as fine, she thought.
“Well, if you’re sure. You do seem a bit distracted…” Mel waited and looked at Edie expectantly. Edie wasn’t elaborating because if she did they would be on their way to the hospital rather than a nightclub.
Mel shrugged her shoulders and continued. “Good thing I bought a spare. Do you need shoes as well? Because someone else might have some,” Mel went to her bag and started pulling out a mess of black material.
“Actually I bought three dresses because I couldn’t decide and someone was rushing me!”
Edie blushed.
Untangling the three dresses Edie and Mel stared at them as they lay on the bed.
“Ah…” said Mel.
Ah indeed. The dresses were all on the ‘lacking in material’ side of fashion. And then of course there was the fact Edie was taller and curvier than her petite elfin friend.
“This one is stretchy,” Mel picked up a jersey dress which looked demure in front, which was unusual for anything of Mel’s. “Give it a go.”
Edie looked at it dubiously
“It looks like a tubey grip,” she said.
“It stretches. It’ll be fine” Mel said.
Five minutes, later having puffed and panted and wriggled into it, Edie stood red-faced looking at herself in the mirror.
“Obviously you’ll have to go commando,” commented Mel, “and you can’t wear a bra because of the back.”
“The back?”
Edie swivelled round and saw that what the dress had in coverage at the front was more than made up for with a lack of material at the back. The dress scooped down and fell in folds just above her bottom.
“But you’ll be fine, you’ve got the body for it,” Mel said as she straightened the seams.
“Body maybe, but not the mind,” Edie said.
Or lack of it she thought.
“I’ll wear what I came in,” Edie stated.
“What, you can’t!” wailed Mel. “The whole little black dress thing is a theme… Jo and I had it all planned. If you don’t wear it, it’ll throw everything out. We won’t all match.”
Why on earth was she the maid of honour? There was no way she could back out. She was supposed to be calming Mel down not winding her up. She was going to have to do this.
“I’ll do it but I’m not wearing heels!”
“They aren’t too high are they?” Mel asked later as Edie tottered out to the waiting taxis in the only pair of shoes that had fitted her in the whole house. She’d tried to force her feet into a pair of Jo’s ballet shoes but it turned out the only person with the same size feet was Sophie.
“I look like a hooker!” she hissed back.
“No you don’t. Admittedly you don’t look like you. But you scrub up very well.” Mel grinned and then swinging her pink feather boa, adjusting her large garish tiara and wiggling her fairy wings she went to join the other hens in the cars.
Edie’s nose tickled from the bright red feather boa that she had been presented with as she’d come downstairs and she hoped that the tiny silver tiara that she had managed to find wasn’t too obvious in her hair; the hair that ever since this morning’s fiasco refused to sit flat.
I look like I’m on the pull she thought grumpily as her Achilles tendons twinged from the vertiginous heels that she wore. They consisted of a few strips of leather attached to the Everest of heels. She now knew why Sophie had happily passed them over. She’d need a few drinks to just numb her toes that were already complaining about the funny angle.
“I’ve heard that the professional rugby players all go to the club we’re off to tonight,” crowed Sophie, flicking her mane of red hair over her shoulder. Edie shuddered; so they were going to be fighting off Neanderthals all night. She tried to get into the taxi without the nonexistent
skirt part of her dress riding up round her waist.
“Phwoar! I love rugby players…” giggled Mel.
Edie closed her eyes. OK, so she and Maggie would be the only ones not interested in the Neanderthals. And so it begins, she thought.
Three hours later, full of food and lubricated on enough alcohol to sink a small ship, the hen party stumbled into the club. The music was so loud and full of bass that Edie could feel it in her chest. The club was dark with flashing lights; and the decor featured too much chrome and black velvet. There was only one dance floor with a bar down one long wall. Mel was already on the dance floor, feather boa aloft shedding feathers as she shimmied unsteadily.
Edie winced as her shoes made themselves known over the alcohol yet again. She needed more drink and she needed it now. Maybe she'd black out and be carried home. She started to pick her way to the bar.
“Regroup!” hollered Jo. “We’ve got a table in the VIP section!”
Edie sighed and looked longingly at the bar, so near and yet so far.
She winced her way to the VIP section. It was in the corner of the club furthest from the bar and across the dance floor. Behind the roped off section crowded with full tables was one long empty table and champagne bottles in buckets of ice. The surrounding tables were full of men the size of mountains, with cauliflower ears and scars. But all were grinning at the approaching party. There weren’t just foxes in the hen house, there were wolves.
How many of these will I see sneaking out of the house tomorrow morning? she thought. There would be a fair few and most will have been with the married or attached hens. Something about hen parties made the paired up types worse.
“Someone drag Mel off the dance floor.” Jo crowed. “It’s time for ‘Truth or Dare!’”
Maybe if I drink enough I can numb my feet and my brain, Edie thought. She grabbed a seat at the far end of the table, furthest from the ringleaders and from the hungriest looking wolves. But nearest one of the champagne buckets. If she kept control of the bottle she would be fine.
She wanted to slip her shoes off and massage her feet but she wasn't sure she'd ever be able to get them on again.
Maggie, Mel’s mum, sat down next to her. She was leaning a bit after being persuaded in the restaurant that Mojitos were non-alcoholic.