by Kirsty Eyre
A cocktail of amaretto, Prosecco and piña colada sloshes around in my gut and all I want to do is throw up. The DJ has set up behind a mishmash of flashing lights and sits on a stool reading a paperback thriller whilst his amps do all the work blaring Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’.
‘Fancy a dance?’ Neve asks.
I couldn’t be less in the mood for a dance, but sobriety and sense have long departed, and I’ve got nothing better to do. That, and I’m determined to portray myself as a winning warrior woman with moral high ground. Everything swirls and sloshes as Neve swings me under a mirrored disco ball. The room becomes a blur. Dave morphs into Bev’s mothers, Kat into Bev, and Bev into Kat, the two hedgehog cakes becoming one. I should really stop drinking.
‘Shame they didn’t have a hen party, otherwise we could have got all this awkwardness out of the way earlier,’ Neve shouts over the music.
My head is pounding and I don’t have room to either agree or disagree.
‘It’s weird,’ she goes on, ‘that we knew each other so well and for so long.’
I try not to throw up on her dress.
‘I’m sorry for the way it ended,’ she shouts, filling my mind with images of her and Nic going at it on an IKEA futon. ‘But it was because you wouldn’t let me in. Not properly.’
‘How do you mean?’ I mumble.
‘You were too scared of letting me down, and then, in the end, I let you down.’ She puts her hands on my shoulders and I sway under her grip. ‘You OK, Billie?’
‘Ladies and gentlemen, please come upstairs to be seated for your banquet.’
We amble upstairs. It’s almost too late for food, having already hit the dance floor. Bev, Kat, Maria, Dave and I are ushered to the top table, the five of us seated in a row overlooking everyone else like Hello! magazine royals. For some reason, everyone is handing me glasses of water and asking if I’m OK.
‘What’s up with you, buddy?’ Bev says as I gulp down another glass.
‘Joely turned up at the flat,’ Maria explains, leaning around Kat.
‘What the fuck did she want?’ Kat says.
‘A new start.’ I reach for one of the waters I can see, knocking over the other. ‘She’s told her folks about me.’
‘Yeah, right!’ Kat says sarcastically.
‘She really has,’ I mumble as a plate of melon is placed in front of me.
Bev picks up her napkin. ‘Tempted?’
I could do with everything just staying still for a second.
‘She’s way too fit to pass up,’ Dave says. ‘If you want male perspective.’
‘I can’t hear you properly,’ Maria shouts from the end of the row. ‘But if we’re talking about Joely, she’s flaky as hell, Bilbo!’
Kat leans in closer. ‘What about Lorna?’
‘Lorna, who isn’t here?’ Dave says, tucking into the bread rolls.
‘Lorna, who would be here if she wasn’t doing an emergency C-section,’ Maria counters.
I fiddle with my cutlery.
‘This is the girl that dumped you, Bill!’ Kat says, just as a microphone is handed to her, the whole room now listening. ‘She dumped you and had her hands all over that beefcake!’
‘I know.’
‘She left you for dust and then decides she wants you back when she sees you all over the newspapers in a bikini?’ Kat rages, causing the room to gasp in horror. ‘How do you turn this fucking thing off?’
The room undulates. I run my fingers over a small silver spoon, its smoothness calming. ‘Maybe things have moved a bit fast with Lorna,’ I say.
‘Here.’ Bev takes the microphone and presses mute.
‘Too fast?’ Kat protests. ‘This has to be the slowest-burning romance of all time!’
‘Can we talk about this another time?’ I suggest. ‘It is, after all, your wedding.’
‘Hell, no!’ Kat grabs more Prosecco and fills her glass.
‘I can’t hear you from down here,’ Maria yells, bringing her chair round to sit opposite me, her back to the wedding guests.
I feel like I’m not really at the wedding, like I’m floating somewhere in orbit. Like none of this is really happening to me, but to another Billie Oliver on another planet. ‘I don’t think Lorna will ever move from her life in the countryside.’
‘Have you asked her?’ Kat says.
I feel very queasy. ‘No.’
Dave smirks. ‘Is she good in the sack?’
‘Are we talking about Lorna or Joely now?’ Bev says, innocently.
‘Either!’ Dave laughs.
‘Well, say what you want, but I’m rooting for Lorna,’ Maria says.
‘Me too,’ Kat says, sawing through a slice of cantaloupe with extraordinary force. ‘Bear?’
‘Sorry, Kitty Kat, but it is pretty bad form to bail on the actual day of a wedding. I know she took a long time, but she got there in the end, so I’m with Joely.’
Dave reddens. ‘I’ve always been with Joely.’
‘Billie, it has to be Lorna!’ Maria says, infuriated.
‘Joely is beautiful and has told her parents she’s in love with you,’ Bev says.
‘Joely’s a flake!’ Maria says. ‘Lorna would rescue you from a fire that Joely would have probably started.’
‘Harsh,’ Bev says.
‘But fair!’ Maria says.
‘Do you still have Joely’s number in your phone?’ Dave says.
‘Yes.’
‘Then you still have feelings for her,’ he says.
Maria wrinkles her face at him. ‘That’s bullshit. I’ve still got three ex’s numbers in my phone that I don’t give a bloody monkey’s about.’ She turns to me. ‘Do you know Joely’s phone number off by heart?’
I ponder the relevance of this question for a moment. ‘No.’
‘Then it’s not true love,’ she concludes smugly.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, please raise your glasses for the bride and bride.’
I fill myself with buttered bread rolls and water, and try to sober myself up for the reading.
‘And in breaking with tradition, before we have our main course, a poem from the bride to the bride.’
‘To be continued,’ Kat whispers as she turns on the microphone, retrieves a script from her bosom and clears her throat.
‘Love is like tea at the end of the day,
It takes time to brew and is much better GAY,
Everyone’s tea is to their own taste,
For love and tea are no copy and paste.’
Kat is good. Her poem is good. I am up next with my Captain Corelli volcano piece and am close to throwing up.
‘Bev ordered ice-cream, not tea when we met.
A large ninety-nine. How good does it get?
We both wore flipflops, we both wore a hat,
Two kindred spirits with a load of chat.’
It was all OK when it was merely the challenge of delivering it loud enough for Maria to hear over the vacuum cleaner, but now, in front of Neve and … my head spins. The door opposite swings open, sending a free-standing silver ice bucket clattering to the ground. Everyone’s eyes are drawn to the tall, slender latecomer who hovers in the doorway.
‘But it wasn’t your perfectly scripted rom-com,
for I was an ovary ticking bomb,
and I knew that Bev was my cup of tea.
She ran for the hills as quick as can be.’
It isn’t the way she swaggers to the empty seat next to Kat’s mum, fanning herself with a drinks menu. It isn’t the way the duck-egg-blue silk dress I bought for her birthday sits perfectly on her hips. It isn’t the way her chocolate-brown eyes flicker across the room until they single me out, but there is something disarming about Joely Chevalier.
‘Ten years on and we’ve found our own blend,
of stubbornness and compromise, for let’s not pretend,
it’s all rosy lee with a flowery feeling,
For neither of us are the perfect Darjeeling.’
; Joely whispers something to Kat’s mum, causing her to look at me and smile. I try to decide whether gate-crashing a wedding to reclaim an ex is an act of true love or the act of a psychopath. She throws her head back and flicks off her pashmina, exposing elegant shoulders and the suggestion of a cleavage. The dress fits her perfectly.
‘We’re practically married, we come as a pair,
I am your Kitty Kat, you are my Bear.
The last ten years have been a retainer,
now marrying Bev is a total no-brainer.’
I begin to feel toilet-searchingly sick. Patches of my face disappear, and my skin feels clammy. I can neither focus on Kat nor Joely as the room spins round, Neve appearing in flashes somewhere between the two of them.
‘I’m marrying Bev for her buzzard blogs,
for rescuing eagles and fostering frogs,
for making me laugh a lot in life.
Bev, I’m honoured to be your wife.’
Rapturous applause fills the room, the clapping and whooping continuing as Kat kisses Bev and sits back down.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome our maids of honour, Billie and Maria, for a reading from Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.’
I hold the wireless microphone under my chin and take the reading out of my bag, willing it to stop wavering in my hand.
‘Hi,’ I say, addressing the room but looking straight at Joely.
‘Hi,’ she mouths back, flicking her hair off her shoulder.
‘This is a piece written by Louis de B …’
The room rotates and consciousness slides away until I am a shell of a person, reading on autopilot. All eyes are on me, including Joely Chevalier’s, and as much as I want this to be over, I don’t know what I’m going to do when this reading ends.
CHAPTER TWENTY
GIRL VERSUS GIRL
The Angel’s basement bar is open to the public and consequently packed to the rafters with Christmas shoppers, hats, bags and coats. The dull beat of Pulp’s ‘Common People’ from the wedding party upstairs can be heard over the slow croon of ‘White Christmas’ from the jukebox.
Joely sits at a small table next to a window enveloped in condensation, her nose in a copy of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. She sees me and stands up, duck-egg-blue silk caressing her hips.
‘Thanks for agreeing to listen.’ She kisses my left cheek and something inside me ignites, my heart somewhere in my mouth.
The ten-minute time-out alone in the fresh air has sorted me out, and I feel a lot more alert. ‘I’ve got to get back to the wedding in ten minutes.’ I peer over my shoulder to check I’m not being followed.
Her eyes meet mine, and I’m reminded of our emails. The flirting, the thrill, the will she, won’t she?
‘You once said that every coming-out story deserves an audience,’ Joely says, picking up her champagne. ‘I wanted to tell you mine, but first I need alcohol.’
We make small talk about big things: Dad’s health, her parents, her promotion at KSG. Big things that are somehow reduced to a fraction of their worth. I can’t really explain about Dad because she didn’t know him, not like Lorna does, and so the whole thing gets tied up in some neat, little ‘benign-now-recovering’ package.
My head thumps.
She tops up her glass with more champagne. ‘OK, so my parents expected me to marry Christophe—’
‘Recently, or when you were seeing him before?’ I feel like I’ve been prodded with a hot iron.
‘We have not dated recently,’ she says matter-of-factly.
‘That’s not what it looked like in the photos!’
‘You can read anything into photos, Billie.’ She smiles at me. ‘They expected me to marry Christophe when I was younger, but I couldn’t. I knew I would sabotage a marriage with him. It would be too perfect, and I’d explode.’
‘Right.’ A simple no would have sufficed.
She plays with the menu. ‘I explained that life doesn’t work like that, and I’m actually in love with une petite Anglaise who has no money!’ I try to stifle my disappointment at the brutally accurate portrayal of my status. ‘At first my father said nothing and then he went crazy, saying I’ve disappointed him et patati et patata,’ she says, gesticulating wildly and knocking over her glass, which luckily bounces rather than smashes. She picks it up and refills it. ‘It was traumatic. I was crying, my mother was crying.’ She puts her hand on my thigh reassuringly, though nothing about it is reassuring.
I’m flooded with flashbacks. I rip off her clothes in my hallway. We writhe around naked in her bed. We kiss at Waterloo station. We kiss in the lab. Her hands over my thighs. We kiss. Her hands between my thighs. We kiss some more.
She takes another gulp of champagne.
‘Easy, Joels,’ I say, unsure as to whether I’m trying to slow down her drinking or the hand on my thigh.
‘And then my mother says she and my father are responsible, because they don’t present a great image of true love between a man and a woman, and then she starts to shout at my father for licking the mussel of the lady in the apartment next door.’
‘Licking the—’
‘It’s very vulgar.’
‘OK,’ I say, conscious that I should be back upstairs now.
‘And my father wants to know how long I’ve been interested in the female form and I explain that it’s not always the gender that counts. It’s the individual. And he says these are the words of poetry, not real life.’ She twizzles the stem of her glass. ‘And then my mother says she just wants me to be happy.’
‘I needed you when I was on the farm,’ I blurt, emotion gurgling at the back of my throat. Everything comes flooding back. The feeling of slowly sinking and crying out for help that never comes. The helplessness. The desperation. The loneliness. That overwhelming feeling of being let down whilst she’s in complete control of her life. I’m powerless and she’s powerful and the longer it goes on, the more pathetic I feel. ‘I needed the moral support.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, her doe eyes looking up at me. ‘I was a coward.’
And now here she is, all vulnerable and out of control. I’m drowning in emotions I don’t even understand. I know I’m in too deep, but she has this gravitational pull on me. ‘I need to go back to the wedding,’ I say.
She grabs my hand and squeezes it. ‘Can I come with you?’
I should say no but there’s a big part of me that wants to say yes. She’s mesmerizingly beautiful. ‘Sorry, Joels. I don’t think it’s a good—’
Her eyes sparkle. ‘Please.’
I become conscious of my heart beating loudly.
She circles her fingertip on the back of my hand. ‘I promise, it will be worth it.’
‘It’s too late.’ I get up, checking that I’ve still got the silver beaded purse I’m not used to carrying. ‘Things have changed. I’ve changed.’
‘Ma petite Anglaise.’ She stands up and places her hands on my hips. Her breath is hot and heavy, her perfume intoxicating. It’s all I can do not to kiss her.
‘Joels, I’ve met someone.’ I’m unsure as to whether she hasn’t heard or whether she’s just choosing to ignore it, but the words don’t seem to register. Instead, she leans in and kisses me, and this time there’s no way I can hold back. Her lips are soft and taste of strawberry lip balm. My stomach flips over and over as her tongue finds mine. ‘Joels?’ I pull away. ‘I can’t. I’ve met someone.’
She looks into my eyes. ‘We have something special, Billie.’
‘I can’t.’ I grab my bag and make to leave.
‘You remember this dress?’ She steps backwards dramatically just as an elderly couple try to squeeze past. ‘You bought it for me only a few months ago.’
‘Of course, I remember the dress.’
‘And now it means nothing?’
‘Joely, you’re the one that ended our relationship.’
‘And now I’m here, saying sorry. Telling you I’m totally committed.’ She wobbles, steadying he
rself on the back of her chair.
‘Sorry, may we just get past?’ The lady standing behind Joely smiles nervously.
I feel like I’m living in some art-house film where sense and reason are sidelined for raw emotion; instead of moving out of the way, Joely only serves to box in our spectators further by puffing out her arms and, to my horror, starts to unzip the back of her dress.
‘Joely!’ I hiss.
‘Here!’ She peels her shoulders out of the dress. ‘You can take your dress!’
‘Joely!’ I yank her dress back up as diners from the surrounding tables suspend conversation.
‘You bought it, so it is officially yours.’ She tries to wriggle out of it.
‘Good grief!’ the elderly man next to us mutters.
My eyes dart around the restaurant. ‘You’re making a scene!’
She pulls down the straps. ‘You don’t find me attractive any more?’
‘That’s very nice, dear but we’ve a tube to catch,’ the captive lady says, finger tapping her non-existent watch.
Joely sways from side to side. ‘We had plans, Billie.’
‘Which you reneged on!’ I say, trying to weave my way past her.
Joely lowers her dress another inch.
A small, neatly presented waiter hurries over from the bar. ‘Excuse me, madam!’ He clasps Joely’s lower arm with a tea towel. ‘You’re in Islington, not Benidorm!’
I manoeuvre myself out of the way and head for the exit, heads turning as I go. I should never have followed her down here.
Outside, the cold drizzle, exhaust fumes and inner-city grime feel cathartic against my face. What on earth was I thinking? I get out my phone, forgetting it’s dead, and contemplate getting a bus away from all this when a familiar figure in an unfamiliar soft cream coat and high-heeled ankle boots steps out of a cab and walks towards me: Lorna Parsons has arrived. Her hair is styled with a side-parting, her fresh face awash with freckles, her lips accentuated by red lipstick. Her grey eyes sparkle.
She grins at me. ‘Sorry I’m ridiculously late.’
‘Lorna!’ I wrap my arms around her.
‘What are you doing out here?’ She frowns. ‘You’re not a covert smoker, are you?’
‘I was just … it’s busy in there. I needed some air.’ I look over my shoulder, willing Joely not to make an appearance.