‘OK, friends of the bride!’ shouts the photographer, and I see Lara beckoning us over, smile so wide she’s in danger of the top half of her head falling off like the Canadians from South Park. I stand behind the happy couple, with Ruby-and-Alex, Jay-and-Kay, Kerry-and-Mia and, yes, Georgina in there somewhere too.
As her name comes unhyphenated, it may appear that she’s single but, nope, she has a new boyfriend. They started dating after the invites had been arranged and there was no extra plus-one to accommodate him. Plus, I don’t think Lara likes him all that much. I don’t either, but if you say it out loud you look like the bitter ex who can’t move on.
Photos are taken, and we disperse as Steve’s friends get into position. Jay, Kay and I retreat to a bench next to the hotel’s back steps and look on. I can’t see Georgina any more. Jay produces cigarettes and we light up. The smoke curls up in the still air and disperses in a thin cloud across our faces.
Eventually, either there are no possible permutations of photographs left to take or the photographer is getting bored, and we traipse back inside for the wedding breakfast. If someone invites me for breakfast, I expect there to be bacon at the very least, but hopefully also mushrooms, hash browns and fried eggs. In the backwards world of weddings, breakfast here means melon balls, roast beef and crème brûlée. I mean, fine, but it’s no bacon sandwich.
I am the token single person on this table. I’m not left out of the conversation but every now and then the couples turn away to check in with one another and I’m left drinking too much wine to compensate. We’re the only table to so far have asked the waiters for another bottle, and I’m a substantial part of the reason.
‘Have you spoken to Georgina?’ says Ruby, next to me. The question comes from so far out of the blue it’s green.
‘No. Has she said anything to you?’ I’m trying to lower my voice even though Georgina is a good three tables away, but the fifth glass of wine has turned off the part of my brain that controls volume awareness.
‘She said hello, but that’s it,’ Ruby shakes her head. ‘Why don’t you try and get back with her?’ This is strange, as Ruby never much cared for Georgina. I think she feels embarrassment on my behalf for me being, as she assumes, lonely.
‘Have you forgotten how it ended?’ I chide, gesticulating with my glass. ‘She threw my Kindle in a pond and I set fire to her dress, although in fairness it was accidental on my part.’
‘Well, you could still say hello,’ says Ruby, sipping her water. I shrug and turn to talk to Kerry-and-Mia about their new puppy.
The plates are cleared away, the speeches are made (my dream does not come true) and we toast the happy couple, before moving off to the gardens again while the tables are cleared away and the room becomes a dance floor. In the interim, Lara and I talk about her and Steve’s upcoming honeymoon. She mentions the meteor showers in the news too, but neither of us knows much about them. The evening guests begin to arrive, including Iris and Annie (one half of Annie-and-Matt), both without partners due to Lara not really knowing either of them and guest space being at a premium.
We put our cigarettes out and are allowed back into the function room, which looks much bigger now it lacks tables. A few waiters are setting out a buffet, and while I don’t know how anyone can even consider eating, Steve, Alex and Jay simultaneously make a move for it. I’m not your average man – most of the ones I know seem to have bottomless stomachs and an overriding love of sport. Some of the many reasons I’ve always been more comfortable being friends with women.
Once Steve is dragged away from the chicken legs he’s gorging on, they cut the cake, have their first dance (Adele’s ‘Make You Feel My Love’) and the rest of us, buoyed with alcohol, swarm onto the dance floor like ants honing in on a dropped toffee apple.
The music is what one has come to expect from weddings – the Grease soundtrack, Abba, Jackson Five – followed by hits from ten years ago that make us scream with recognition and excitement as the first notes play and we are taken back to being sixteen and seventeen, partying every weekend at someone’s house, circulating around the town so that parents had time to replace everything that got broken before that house hosted another one.
I move on to gin and tonics and, soon enough, I find myself in a corner of the hotel’s gardens under a bush shaped like a jumping stag, with Georgina.
Through the alcoholic fug, it’s not clear who approached whom, but someone asked the other one for a light and we both stand there, the music thumping away back in the hotel – it sounds like ‘Dancing Queen’.
‘What a lovely evening,’ she says, dragging deeply on her menthol cigarette. Her hair is dyed an emerald green, which at sixteen would’ve been experimental and cool, but now looks like someone struggling with the reality of adulthood.
‘We should go back in,’ I say, thinking I’d rather have root canal surgery than a conversation with Georgina.
‘No, Dex, hang on a second, I want to say something,’ she says, reaching out and stopping short of grabbing my wrist, a gesture we both know would be inadvisable. We’ve not seen much of one another since we split up, and certainly haven’t been left alone. Any touch at all is by its nature intimate, and I think my boundaries are still more solidly guarded than hers. I decide to see what she wants to say.
‘I’m sorry,’ she doesn’t say.
‘We should get back together,’ she doesn’t add.
‘Do you think we could try again?’ she doesn’t query.
Instead, she says, ‘Why didn’t you fight for me?’
It’s typically selfish of her, a trait I allowed myself to notice in the last couple of weeks of our relationship. I let the words hang in the air with our smoke and hope that she sees how ridiculous they sound. She doesn’t, though, so I have to answer.
‘I didn’t fight for you because I didn’t want to be with you any more,’ I say. ‘You pissed off my friends, accused me of cheating on you, drowned my Kindle and were barely letting me have my own life. You were turning up every single night – I was so behind on my work because you couldn’t take a hint.’
‘Because I was in love with you and I wanted to see you! Besides, you set fire to my dress.’
‘I didn’t mean to,’ I say, my voice rising. We’re too far away for anyone else to hear. ‘The thing is Georgina, up until that point, I had been pretty into you. But you didn’t let it happen on its own; you were trying to force something that was never going to get any bigger.’
‘So you’d rather be alone than with me?’
‘Pretty much, yeah.’ It sounds horrible as an excuse to break up, but she had gone psycho on me and sometimes it’s better to back out than try and make something impossible work. Some would call it cowardice; I viewed it as bravery, pissing off a human firework.
She slaps me and I walk off but, after a couple more gin and tonics, a heated conversation on the hotel’s main staircase, discussions with Ruby and Annie about what I’m going to do about her (Ruby says fuck her, and Annie says fuck her, but they mean entirely different things) and a long, mostly sleepless night, Georgina and I wake up together in my hotel room, stark naked and shagged out from some of the most acrobatic, contortionistic manoeuvres ever seen outside a circus.
I get up and go into the bathroom. My hair is flat on one side and sticking up with clumped wax on the other. Red scratches cover my chest and back, alongside smears of Georgina’s plum lipstick. My eyes are bloodshot with dark rings circling them – I look like a panda that’s traded in bamboo for a different kind of grass. Any more vigorous and she might have actually broken my nose.
‘This has been a huge mistake,’ says my reflection.
‘Yeah, tell me something I don’t know,’ I growl back, my voice box coated in sharkskin sandpaper.
I pee, wrap one of the fluffy white towels around my waist and go back into the bedroom. She’s still asleep, green hair billowing out around her on the pillow. The thick duvet covers most of her, but is bunched up at
the end and one foot sticks out, an angry red mark and the beginning of a blister on the ankle. The sun is prising itself through a tiny gap in the curtains, so I pull the heavy fabric back and let it invade.
I find my boxers and put them back on, run a comb over my hair and rummage in my overnight bag for a clean shirt and chinos. My watch says nine-fifteen and I’m in desperate need of some genuine breakfast food. As I pull my shoes on, Georgina stirs and sits up, make-up smudged. She smiles the tired, lopsided smile of a romantic comedy heroine.
‘I’m going to get some breakfast,’ I say, throwing a grey striped shirt on, having to do up the buttons twice as my fingers are still drunk and falling over each other like D-list celebrities on the first week of Strictly Come Dancing.
‘OK, sweetie,’ she says and I raise a hand to stop her.
‘No, no, none of that,’ I say, a magma-tinged force in my voice that surprises her, as well as myself. ‘Last night was a one-off. Bonus night, call it. You’ve got a boyfriend, remember? We’re finished. If you want to be friends, we can begin working up to that again, but we’re not getting back together.’
‘Fine,’ she says. She pulls the duvet from around her and I can tell she wants to storm out like someone in a film, except she’s naked and first has to find and put on her knickers and bra (which don’t match), before wriggling back into her dress. She doesn’t ask me to do up the zip, just picks up her high heels and finally is able to go. I hold the door open for her and follow her out. She turns left and I turn right, down to the restaurant.
Jay-and-Kay are sitting at a table with Lara. They’re laughing but as soon as they see me, they stop and their faces take on a concerned appearance. They indicate for me to sit down, but I need food first, so I go to the breakfast buffet and get bread, butter, jam, a few rashers of bacon and a scoop of scrambled egg.
‘What happened to you?’ says Jay. He looks refreshed, although is still wearing his dark glasses so he might be hiding his hangover behind them.
‘Georgina,’ I sigh, shovelling eggs into my mouth. I turn to Lara, ‘Did we ruin your night?’ She’s got her long ginger hair up in a ponytail which swishes side to side as she shakes her head.
‘Nope, you didn’t do anything! We sort of guessed the two of you might have gone off together. Ruby saw you talking earlier in the night, then you had a row in the hotel lobby, and you both vanished at the same time. We did wonder if she’d called Marcus and gone home.’
‘You haven’t got back with her, have you?’ says Kay, spreading marmalade on half a slice of toast.
‘No, don’t worry,’ I say. ‘I mean, well… no. We slept together, but there wasn’t anything you could pick out as romantic about it.’ I pre-empt their next question. ‘Before you ask, I couldn’t tell you who initiated it, but there’s no way we’re getting back together.’ I ran briefly over what I remembered of our conversation the night before, and my three friends nod and keep their opinions to themselves.
‘Where’s hubby?’ I say to Lara, noticing Steve’s absence for the first time.
‘Still in bed,’ Lara huffs. ‘Sodding Jamie and him were downing shots by the bucket.’ I laugh but she looks serious. ‘No, I mean it, they found a bucket and filled it with champagne and all sorts of… god knows what. He needs to sober up; we need to be in Portsmouth by lunch time tomorrow.’
‘I still can’t believe you’re going on a cruise,’ I say with faux despair. ‘Are you looking forward to spending your first ten days as a married couple surrounded by the living dead?’
‘Look, if his grandparents want to give us a free holiday as a wedding present, I’m taking it,’ says Lara. ‘I’ll put up with a lot of old age pensioners talking about rationing and leg pain for ten days in the Mediterranean with bottomless booze and good weather. Besides, given what Jay was saying this morning, it’s a good job we didn’t decide to go to France.’
‘What do you mean?’ I ask. I’ve not bothered checking my phone this morning yet, as most of the people who might have messaged me are here.
‘It was on the news this morning that France has gone into technological shutdown,’ says Jay. ‘You know, like when Egypt did during the Arab Spring riots? The news said they can’t even get on Twitter. I didn’t even know there was a political situation brewing there. The newsreaders were implying terrorism, as they do.’
‘This is what I was saying yesterday,’ says Lara, ‘There was a huge meteor shower there this week. I saw something about shooting stars.’
‘Yeah, loads of European places reported that,’ says Kay. ‘Nothing had been predicted so it kind of came out of nowhere. Maybe something landed last night and crushed the President or something.’
My mind has tuned to a channel playing nothing but white noise – I’m too tired and hungover for political discussion – and I focus instead on my breakfast.
We don’t see Georgina come down for breakfast, but her room is definitely empty by the time Jay drives us home.
Four
Lara-and-Steve
As I think back on the events of the last week, they feel like they’re a half-remembered history lesson. Something that happened to someone else, many years before. It seems unreal that just a week ago (I’m guessing at a week – how long I’ve been trapped in this cell is impossible to estimate) I was watching Lara-and-Steve say their vows.
I never did get to properly say goodbye, so instead I focus on the hello.
*
Lara Greedy – well, Hutchinson now, I suppose – appears to have come into my life to be the sole reason for my varied vices. She is the person who formally introduced me to cigarettes, alcohol and sex. Granted, I couldn’t exactly be labelled an innocent in any of these subjects before her arrival at sixteen, but she definitely led to them being given a bigger place in my life than they had done before.
I hadn’t known her before sixth form, at which point we shared English Literature classes and found ourselves seated next to one another. Our friendship developed naturally, the way two people bond when sitting at the same table three or four times a week for several months. By March, we had become close enough that she invited me to a party she was hosting that weekend. I was given directions and told to bring some friends before she departed with a battered copy of Titus Andronicus under her arm, lighting a cigarette before she’d even got out of the English department and into the school car park.
I rustled up Priti, Peregrina and Shell, as well as Shell’s man of the moment Ashley, and we arrived at Lara’s fashionably late with bottles of cider bought from the newsagents that didn’t ask for ID. The door was open, teenagers pouring out into the front garden, so we went in and set ourselves up in an unoccupied nook in the dining room.
Lara eventually stumbled – the perfect word – upon us with a grin that would’ve freaked out the Joker, genuinely happy to see me, or at least drunk enough to suggest it. Her thick ginger hair was up in a complicated-looking bun and she was wearing a tight blue dress that showed off every last one of her curves. Her sea-green eyes shone with excitement and I was aware that this was the first time I had seen her in a situation that wasn’t school based. She looked hot. Cigarettes were thrust into our hands; she snatched up a bottle opener from a nearby emo kid and cracked open our ciders.
I tried to speak to her, thank her for inviting us, but she was drunk and only nodded, her white-toothed grin getting bigger.
‘Oh my god, I love this song!’ she squawked, although I could have sworn that the song had already been playing a couple of minutes without any reaction from her. She danced off, leaving us feeling like potted ferns. We recognised a lot of the people at the party, but we didn’t know any of them well enough to throw ourselves into a conversation. These people were too ‘cool’, a word so devoid of meaning that it’s a wonder we still use it.
The evening was warm and the dining room full, so we moved out into the back garden to cool down where we all (except Peregrina) lit up cigarettes and began sussing out the other guest
s. We were probably the soberest people there, but once we’d drunk our ciders and taken swigs from the bottle of absinthe that had been passed around everybody as a dare – thinking on it, I dread to think how many people had backwashed into that – we had definitely caught up.
Shell and Ashley had retired upstairs for reasons that should be obvious, Peregrina had bumped into someone she knew from school that we didn’t and was chatting to her about some concert or other, and Priti was swaying alone in the corner of the living room to the music, half a cigarette hanging from her mouth, ash perilously close to falling onto the carpet but somehow defying gravity.
Lara found me again but was once more useless for conversation. Realising that I was alone, however, she grabbed a nearby girl with raven hair and dragged her in front of me.
‘This is my cousin, ––––––,’ she screamed over the music. The gap is because I couldn’t hear the name of this cousin. She shared Lara’s pale complexion and was pretty, but her nose was red like she was recovering from a cold and she still wore braces.
We half-shouted a conversation but it was fruitless and eventually I suggested we go somewhere a bit quieter. I asked her name again, but still couldn’t hear it. –––––– and I made our way upstairs to the spare bedroom, finding it occupied by Shell and Ashley. The master bedroom was currently in use by another couple, so we settled on Lara’s bedroom, a lilac and cream paradise, wall to wall with chick lit novels, romantic comedies and stuffed toys, most of them elephants.
It was there, on Lara’s bed under the watchful glare of over thirty fabric pachyderms that I lost my virginity to ––––––. She was by no means the first girl I’d fooled around with, but to this day I don’t know the name of the first girl I had sex with. I could never ask Lara as she mentioned a week later that her cousin (‘Who you met at the party, remember?’) had that week got engaged to her boyfriend of three years, and was moving to Seattle the following month with him for his work. Turns out that –––––– was twenty-two. I never heard Lara mention her again, and I never discussed what happened at that party, although I did always feel a bit weird whenever I had cause to be in Lara’s bedroom after that point.
The Third Wheel Page 3