The new ankle boots were already a mistake, actually. They were pinching her toes and she could feel the beginnings of a blister on her left heel. She’d only bought them yesterday, along with a couple of dresses, in the clothing aisles of Sainsbury’s, for those posh evenings at The Retreat’s and that promised party at the lake house on Sunday night. If glam was required, glam could be rustled up.
Sal skidded round the corner and came to a stop with a grin. There they were, under the departures board: JoJo, immaculate and fresh in a smart, beige raincoat, shaking her blonde head and tapping her watch in mock consternation; Rose, in jeans, iridescent top and black court shoes, grinning like a loon and trying to re-attach something to the back of Wendy’s head; Wendy, all red curls and swathes of brightly coloured material, laughing as she let a scratchy-looking polyester veil get clamped to her hair. Behind them, Sal spotted a group of Chinese tourists trying to take sneaky photos: the Great British Hen Do was obviously quite a sight.
‘What time do you call this?’ hollered JoJo.
‘Come on, Sal!’ shouted Rose. ‘We’ve been waiting ages.’
‘We’ve only got a blooming train to catch!’ called Wendy. ‘Leg it, woman!’
So Sal did. She laughed and dashed towards them. Her friends. The friends she adored. She was so happy to see them. Forget the throbbing blister, the fear of pampering, Niall with the green eyes and the sexy tats, even forget the bloody pub, she thought. She was spending three nights with her old, beloved friends and this was going to be a fantastic weekend.
Chapter Four
Rose
The whistle blew, the train rumbled slowly out of Paddington and the four women made their unsteady way along carriage ‘D’. JoJo had reserved four seats either side of a table, but it was taking a while to get to them; the train was busy and those without reserved seats were clogging up the aisle looking for spaces. Rose had to squeeze past a loud American couple, with a bird in a cage, who were bellowing something about ‘Cirences-tire’ and trying to persuade a disgruntled-looking teenager in enormous headphones to move so they could sit together. It was hot on that train; all the windows were already open and Rose felt quite stuffy and constricted in her jeans and top.
‘Here we are!’ declared JoJo, checking the numbers on the tickets sticking out the top of the seats. ‘This is us.’
They all started wedging their bags in the overhead racks. Rose, being quite short, had to stand on tiptoes to do hers and on the final shove went careering into a gentleman in a turquoise cagoule who was sitting below her.
‘Sorry!’ she said.
‘No problem,’ said the man, rustling his newspaper in suppressed rage.
As Rose took her seat, blushing, the others were all laughing.
‘Short arse!’ said Sal.
‘Clumsy Clots!’ said Wendy.
Rose grinned.
‘The longer I know you, the more you never change!’ laughed JoJo, settling in her seat. ‘The first time I met you, you tripped over in the Students’ Union and had to be picked up by that Philosophy lecturer. Do you remember?’ Rose nodded, giggling. ‘None of us really change, do we?’ continued JoJo. ‘Rose is clumsy, Wendy is crazy and Sal is always late.’ She grinned, stood up, reached to the rack, rummaged for her BlackBerry and charger and placed them on the table, before plugging the charger in.
Rose looked at Sal, Sal looked at Wendy and the three of them looked pointedly at JoJo.
‘Ha, very good,’ said JoJo, laughing. ‘I’m not going to look at that, by the way. I’m just charging it, for . . . later.’
‘Yeah, right,’ said Sal. ‘And sorry I was a bit late,’ she added, not looking that sorry at all.
‘It’s fine,’ said JoJo, with a grin. ‘There’s nothing I like more than sprinting towards a departing train like a demented bat out of hell.’
‘Me too.’ Wendy smiled, getting comfy in her seat and attempting and failing to smooth down her mass of red hair. The veil had fallen off again and was now sitting on the table. ‘I really appreciated leaping onto a moving ton of metal like Bruce Willis in Die Hard, minus the bald head and the vest.’
Rose chuckled at the thought of Wendy without hair and in a white, old man’s vest; she’d probably still look good, though. ‘I actually enjoyed it,’ Rose said. ‘It was fun, but then again I don’t get out that much these days. I’ll take my excitement where I can find it!’
‘We’ll be making up for that this weekend,’ said Sal. ‘Your lack of excitement.’ She got up to pull some stuff out of her bag and starting chucking things on the table: the penis deely boppers, the handcuffs, the L-plates, plus four miniature bottles of rosé.
‘So much for no hen props,’ said JoJo, shaking her head in mock sorrow. ‘Rose, Sal, you’ve really let me down.’
‘I know,’ wailed Wendy. ‘How could you?’ She grinned. ‘Will The Retreat even let me in if I turn up in some of this stuff? I can’t see the penises being allowed over the threshold!’
‘Of course they’ll let penises in,’ said Sal decisively. ‘Now stop whinging and let’s get some of this wine down our necks.’
They opened their tiny bottles and started glugging the wine. The rows of terraced houses outside the window were starting to flash past them quite fast now and the sun was coming out and glancing off NASA-sized satellite dishes. JoJo shrugged off her raincoat; Rose slipped her feet out of her court shoes. It was so hot on here!
‘Lovely,’ said Rose. She seemed to have quite a thirst on her and had drunk almost half her bottle in one gulp.
‘You might have chilled them,’ said JoJo. ‘Joking. They’re great.’
‘My wine, at the pub, is always chilled,’ said Sal. ‘I got these from the mini-mart at Woking station.’
‘They’re perfect,’ said Wendy, settling back further into her seat. ‘Thank you, Sal. So, how is everyone? What have you all been up to recently? Any gossip?’
They all fell silent for a second. JoJo shrugged; she hardly ever had gossip, Rose knew, unless it was something salacious about a client. Sal looked . . . what? Guilty, a little bit cheeky? A smile was curling at the corner of her lips in a suspicious manner. And Rose was considering telling them about Jason, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to bring down the buoyant, excited mood just yet. She’d wait for a lull in proceedings, like maybe on the train home again.
‘All the exciting stuff is going on in your world, Wendy,’ Rose said. ‘The wedding . . . next Saturday! I can’t believe it! Are all the preparations done?’
‘All done!’ declared Wendy.
‘Is Frederick on his stag this weekend?’
‘Nope. Last weekend,’ Wendy said. ‘He and some of his old schoolmates went fishing for the weekend.’
‘Wild,’ pronounced Sal.
Wendy grinned. ‘It’s just something he likes to do. He always puts the fish back,’ she added.
‘Of course he does,’ said Rose, ‘Frederick’s a nice guy – lovely, in fact. You’re really lucky, Wendy. He’s a catch.’
‘Just like the fish,’ put in JoJo, to smiles all round.
‘Lucky is the word,’ said Wendy. ‘Bloody, bloody lucky I think you’ll find. Right, so you know all my news – how about yours? Somebody give me something! How are the girls, Rose?’
‘The Sisters of Sass? Oh, just the same, unfortunately!’
The Sisters of Sass. That’s what she and Jason called their daughters – they would never say it to their faces, it would make them more sassy than they already thought they were. As Rose had packed her bag, all three Sisters of Sass had lolled on her bed. One had her feet under Rose’s pillow; one had a smooth, fake-tanned leg dangling over the end of the bed; the third lay on her front and picked at her nails until glittery bits of polish sprinkled down onto Rose’s pale grey carpet. On principle, she shouldn’t even have allowed them in her bedroom – she wasn’t allowed in theirs, unless it was for essential de-scuzzing, or to bring food . . . They�
�d spreadeagled themselves – all legs and straightened hair and perfume and nail polish and powdery, foundationed cheeks – and had started criticising her fashion choices.
‘You’re not taking those, are you, Mum? Like, total cringe!’
‘Eew – those shoes are horrible, Mum!’
‘Mum! You’re, like, way too old for that top!’
So charming. Rose often wondered who these alien creatures were and where had they come from. They were so big. They were so loud. They had so much stuff – so many clothes, so much make-up, most of which they were wearing, all at once, layer upon layer of it. And they were so contemptuous. It was a good job she loved them so much, otherwise she might resent being a rather despised and worn part of the furniture – squishy and unkempt and thoroughly sat upon.
‘And how’s Jason?’ asked Sal.
As her daughters had lain on her bed and teased her on her sartorial choices, a great snort had come from the spare room and the girls had hung off each other’s shoulders in peals of sisterly laughter.
Jason was having a catch-up nap and a bloody good snore. He had a varied repertoire; never steady, rhythmic snoring that could be tolerated by a co-sleeping human, but the spluttering, intermittent kind – a frustrating orchestra of misleading lulls and great, trumpeting trumpets. It was snoring that had seen he and Rose resorting to separate rooms, which was not a great situation as, of course, they were already in separate rooms for most of the year anyway, but Rose got such a terrible night’s sleep if she and Jason slept in the same bed, and she needed to be alert, what with the girls and the house . . . and the girls . . . to deal with that it was the only solution. And he slept better without her prodding him or kneeing him in the back or making random clacking noises with her tongue, like she was giddying up a horse, which she’d heard could stop a bear of a man snoring in his tracks.
Disappointingly, she’d heard wrong. They never slept in the same bed because of the Philharmonic Snorechestra . . . Rose had coined that phrase and her daughters, for once, actually thought it quite funny.
‘He’s OK,’ replied Rose. ‘The same. He got back this morning. “Good cop” has returned.’
Jason had arrived home this morning after yet another work trip to Hong Kong – it had been five years of this now; that land reclamation project was taking a really long time. His plane had actually arrived late last night, but sensible Jason never did a Roy Orbison and ‘Drove All Night’ to get home to her, all dishevelled and five o’clock shadow . . . rather he would check into the Novotel at the airport, have a good night’s sleep and a hearty continental buffet breakfast and then cruise on home for a civilised 8 a.m. When he’d stepped into the hall with a weary ‘hello’, she didn’t bother leaving the washing up to come and greet him; he went straight upstairs to sort out his case. It was predictable, non-romantic fare for two pedestrian, rather careworn ships that passed in the night, or rather, the morning. Same old same old.
‘Meaning you’re always bad cop?’ enquired JoJo.
‘Yep!’ said Rose. ‘I’m there at the coal face, in the trenches, doing all the nagging and the telling off. He breezes in now and again, like Prince Charming, to save the day, and to do nice things. They adore him because of it and just tolerate me. I’m so boring compared to him!’
To their girls, Jason’s homecomings were always Prodigal. All three of them had ambushed him on the landing this morning, showering him with kisses and hugs and risking creasing their lovingly ironed (by Mum) cropped tops and leggings. OK, they stopped short of ‘Daddy, my Daddy’ but it was like the bloody Railway Children.
‘Thank God you’re home!’ Darcie had exclaimed. ‘Mum’s been driving us nuts!’
‘And she took my phone away for being cheeky!’
‘And she wouldn’t buy me that new top, for Alex’s party!’
It was the same thing every time. He was someone fresh and exciting, hardly ever seen; she was always there, good old Mum, bad old cop, just part of the furniture to be sat on and abused, day after day, because it didn’t really matter if she was there or not.
‘Does he feel that way too?’ asked Sal. A train sped past them in the other direction, with an elongated toot and a flash of people sleeping or raising plastic coffee cups to their mouths.
‘That I’m boring?’ asked Rose. ‘Probably.’ Jason, she was sure, saw her as part of the furniture too. Not a lover, just that terrible and damning ‘mate’. When had he started calling her that? Five years ago, ten years ago? After Katie was born? When he’d been down the ‘business end’ three times in total, for the birth of his daughters, and had seen quite enough? When he’d witnessed her mooching round in her dressing gown of a morning cooking sausages one too many times? Or because he was away for more than half the year, leaving her and the girls to it, and ‘mate’ was the best she could get, in the current circumstances? She daren’t admit it could be way more than that, not yet.
‘Where’s he been?’ asked Wendy. ‘Hong Kong again?’
‘Always Hong Kong.’
‘He’s a man in demand.’
‘He is. Shame me and the girls are at the back of the queue for supply.’ Rose sighed a big, huffy sigh, and not for the first time. She was sure a lot of people thought she was a single mum, and she wouldn’t blame them. That’s what she was, in effect. ‘Ugh. Enough about me and Jason,’ Rose said, wriggling in her seat and slipping a foot in and out of one shoe, under the table. ‘It’s dull. What’s going on with you, Sal? Are you still dating and dumping?’
‘I like to call it being discerning.’ Sal smiled, as the train clattered heavily down a portion of track and their near-empty rosé miniatures jiggled on the table, threatening to topple over.
Rose smiled. Sal was always meeting people then discarding them. Several men in the last three years had been kicked to the kerb. There was Mr Lovely, who Sal was over the moon to discover had a tragically misspelled tattoo, a tiny etching of ‘They think its all over’, with a devastating missing apostrophe; there was Mr Right with the Wrong Attitude, who made the catastrophic error of opening a door for her and steering her through it as ‘one of the fairer sex’; and other men and other non-negotiable traits – an overly dirty laugh, an inability to pluck nostril hairs, a penchant for Travel Scrabble or owning one horrid jumper too many. Sal looked for faults like a bloodhound and was thrilled to uncover them so she could dispatch the man off into the horizon.
‘The Guy Effect,’ said JoJo sagely. ‘Still rumbling on.’
They all nodded. Sal had been in a ten-year relationship with Guy. On a good day he had been charismatic and charming, on a bad, downright awful. He had a lot wrong with him but Sal loved the man and could never see it. She defended him, she made excuses for him. She said he was a ‘poet and a tortured soul’ (he really wasn’t; he was a merely a frustrated copy editor on a lawnmower magazine); Rose and the others just thought he was a grumpy, argumentative loser.
During one of their epic fights four years ago, Guy had died. There had been a petty argument in the car involving Sal’s map reading and Guy’s refusal to stop and ask a passer-by for directions. The argument had escalated; the car had accelerated, driven by an increasingly angry Guy. He’d failed to see a Give Way sign and had ploughed them into the base of an electricity pylon. Guy had died instantly; Sal miraculously emerged unscathed, physically, at least, and, although grief-stricken over his death, Sal suddenly saw the relationship and its terrible end for what it was. She had been blind to Guy’s faults and that blindness had caused years of pain and, ultimately, tragedy, which was why she looked for them relentlessly in men now. It was a protection: simply, she only dated people she could never fall in love with.
‘Actually,’ said Sal, hesitantly, ‘I’ve slept with someone.’ Her face broke into a broad grin. ‘Someone I really shouldn’t have slept with.’
‘Who?’ asked Rose.
‘When?’ asked JoJo.
‘Why shouldn’t you have slept
with him?’ asked Wendy. ‘Did he have the Wrong Shoes or call you a “lady” to your face?’
‘Er, no,’ said Sal, looking quite sheepish, for her. ‘He’s my chef, at the pub.’
‘Your chef!’ exclaimed Rose, delighted. ‘Oh, naughty, naughty.’
‘What’s he like?’ queried JoJo.
‘Have you got a photo of him?’ enquired Wendy.
‘No, of course not!’
‘A one-night stand?’ asked Rose.
‘Yes, of course a one-night stand.’ Sal jumped; a high-speed train coming in the opposite direction shot past them in dramatic fashion, making the windows rattle. Rose automatically breathed in. ‘You don’t think I’d make a habit of it, do you?’
‘Depends how good he was!’ laughed Wendy. Sal laughed too, but Rose knew she would do everything in her power not to make a habit of anyone. She was OK now, after what had happened to Guy, but she wasn’t ready to let anyone into her heart. Not again. Sal had said more than once that the pain simply wasn’t worth it.
The conductor came, punched their tickets; made unnecessary small talk. Rose willed him to hurry up and move on – they were trying to have an in-depth catch-up here! Finally, he shuffled down to the next seats.
‘Wow!’ said Wendy. ‘Your chef. Now that is gossip!’
‘Yup,’ said Sal. ‘And rather unsavoury, if you excuse the pun. I shouldn’t have gone there. Now,’ she said briskly, ‘let’s move on from my love life. JoJo, any men on the horizon for you?’
‘Nope.’ JoJo shrugged happily. ‘No men. Not interested, don’t have the time. I’m married to my work, as you know.’ A very apt choice of phrase, decided Rose, and so ironic: JoJo was so busy helping other women have perfect weddings she could never meet someone to provide her with her own. ‘I’ll keep my life plain and simple, thank you.’ She smiled serenely and picked her BlackBerry off the table to give it a composed glance.
Four Bridesmaids and a White Wedding: the laugh-out-loud romantic comedy of the year! Page 3