A Beautiful Day for a Wedding Read online

  ‘I think we can be very proud of ourselves,’ Eve said, folding her arms and rubbing them. ‘I’m sure there’s a market for this type of service, party planning for when your party fails.’

  ‘We could call it Plan B Parties and show up in a car that instead of having a siren on top has a disco ball,’ Andrew added.

  Eve laughed. ‘I like that.’

  ‘I’ve had a good time though.’

  Eve had to agree; despite running around putting out fires, it had been a really fun day. Fun and utterly exhausting.

  ‘Do you want my jacket? You’re shivering.’

  She shook her head. There was something a bit too high-school prom about accepting a man’s suit jacket after a dance. ‘I’m fine, honestly, it’s nice to get some air.’

  ‘The party doesn’t need to end if you don’t want it to,’ Andrew said. ‘Bobby and I were just saying that we’d both be up for staying awake a while longer, if you were to keep us company. Come on, let’s have a party of our own.’

  ‘It’s very tempting, but the only party I’m going to be having is in my bed.’

  As she walked away, leaving Andrew standing there, Eve replayed her last sentence and gave a shudder. That sounded far too rude. Thankfully Andrew didn’t seem to notice.

  The doors to Eve’s lift had barely shut before Andrew came bounding into the nearly empty bar and shouted, ‘Bobby, we’re game on!’

  Ben was also one of the last stragglers in the bar and looked up from the brandy he was nursing at the interruption. He downed the remnants of his drink and headed for the lift at exactly the same time as Andrew, who was carrying an ice bucket filled with expensive champagne, and Bobby, who held three glasses.

  ‘After you,’ Ben said, holding the lift doors open for the duo.

  The doors closed and Bobby leaned into Andrew. ‘I can’t believe Eve’s up for it, what a way to end a wedding, is this your first threesome?’

  Ben’s ears pricked up.

  ‘No, third. You?’

  ‘First for me, mate. Can we keep the lights on though so we don’t touch each other by mistake?’

  ‘Yeah, definitely.’

  Ben’s head stayed bowed, eyes firmly on his feet during this whole exchange. They must be talking about another Eve, there’s no way that his Eve would do something like this.

  ‘She’ll be my first redhead as well.’ Bobby said. ‘I wonder if it’s natural?’

  ‘Well, we’re about to find out.’

  The lift shuddered to a stop and the doors noisily opened. The three men got out, two of them walking quicker and jauntier than the third. Ben’s room was next to the lift. He resignedly put his key into the lock as he silently watched the pair stroll confidently down the corridor, and Ben felt his shoulders drop.

  Chapter 19

  It was one of the first weddings Eve had been to where she was sober enough to remove her eye make up before going to bed. Dragging the wet cotton pad slowly across her eyes she realised that it wasn’t just an excuse when she told Andrew she needed her bed. Exhaustion had suddenly crept up on her and every part of her brain and body ached with over-use. Padding back into the bedroom Eve lay on the bed in the hotel’s white bathrobe, her long red curls spilling over her pillow as she looked up at the ceiling. Having lived above a live music venue for two years, Eve was normally adept at getting to sleep with the soft thump of bass from the floor below, but tonight the incessant beat was a constant reminder that only floorboards lay between her, her past and her future.

  She was trying to understand why she’d instinctively turned Andrew’s invitation for another drink down when she was single, he was single, and it would have been a fun end to a fun day. He and Bobby were good-looking, funny, interesting, and one of them could even be a potential boyfriend. Yet here she was, in a posh hotel room, by herself. And actually, that was just the way she liked it. She opened her laptop and began writing.

  I’ve never been to a school reunion, and I never want to. All those faces, familiar yet unfamiliar, all assessing the success you’ve had in life by what you’re wearing, whether you’ve turned up with a partner and the amount of dog-hair/baby-sick/unidentifiable food stains on your clothes. No one goes to a school reunion to see their friends. If they were your friends you’d see them all the time anyway. You certainly wouldn’t choose your next night out to be in the draughty assembly hall of your old school. No, you go to show off and be nosy. Let’s call it like it is. But weddings on the other hand, they’re the tombola of reunions. Unless you’re in the bride’s inner circle where you have access to the guest list, knowing who else is going to turn up at the church is a lottery. Chances are, your friend, the bride, has also stayed in touch with Esther, the mean girl from the year above, possibly Harriet, the siren who stole your first love with her flicky hair and ability to steal spirits from her dad’s drinks cabinet. You may even bump into your first love himself, now hopefully fat, bald, and sporting a facial tattoo or two, but my point is, at a school reunion you expect this, and can avoid it. At a wedding, where everyone in the couple’s past and present are crammed together in a room for ten hours or more, you have no choice about who you’re going to be stood next to at the mojito station. No choice at all.

  A soft knock on her door surprised her. Eve pulled her robe tighter around her, and opened the door. A silver ice bucket with a bottle of Moët in it was thrust into her face held by a smiling Andrew, while Bobby, just behind him, held up three glasses. They looked excited, expectant.

  ‘So, we brought the party to you, just like you asked.’

  ‘Um,’ Eve was confused. ‘I’m actually going to sleep, it’s really late.’

  ‘Which is why we should all go to bed,’ Andrew added, his left eyebrow suggestively curling up.

  ‘It’s nearly three.’

  ‘You say three, we say threesome.’

  Eve’s eyes widened in horror. Flustered, she shoved the ice bucket back at Andrew, with a firm ‘Good night!’ and slammed the door in their faces. Leaning against the back of the door with all her weight as though she expected them to shoulder-barge it open, Eve tilted her head back and looked up at the ceiling and laughed. What a day, what a ridiculous day, start to finish.

  Someone softly knocked on the door, jolting Eve into action. Those two were incredibly persistent.

  ‘What now?’ Eve hissed through the door. ‘No means no. Bugger off.’

  ‘It’s us, Ayesha and Becca,’ came the whispered reply.

  Eve opened the door, to find her two best friends there. Ayesha had taken her veil off, and her short black bob was a little dishevelled showing signs of being swished back and forth on the dance floor for hours. ‘We were just going up and thought we’d say goodnight. Is this yours?’ Ayesha was pointing at the unopened bottle of champagne and trio of flutes that were propped up on the carpet outside Eve’s door.

  ‘A present from the ushers for me.’ Eve said. ‘You don’t want to know why.’

  ‘Well, it’d be rude to let it go to waste. What with today being my wedding day and everything.’

  ‘Speaking of which,’ Eve said, holding open the door for them, ‘shouldn’t you be with your groom?’

  ‘The cocktail of drugs he’s on, mixed with the brandy he insisted on buying everyone has rendered him good for nothing apart from sleeping. Thank goodness I hadn’t saved myself for my wedding night, I’d be well disappointed!’

  ‘Poor Amit,’ Becca added, giving a wry smile.

  ‘Poor Amit, my foot. What a div, thinking he can still do the caterpillar. I have no sympathy for him whatsoever.’

  ‘Careful Ayesha, you sound a bit like Tanya,’ Eve warned.

  Ayesha gave a theatrical shudder. ‘Why are we friends with her again?’

  ‘It’s called nostalgia,’ Eve said.

  ‘It’s called masochism,’ disagreed Ayesha. ‘She told me that having a rainbow balloon arch made it look like a gay pride parade.’

  ‘It’s good to be inclusive
,’ Eve retorted, handing each of her friends a full champagne flute.

  ‘And she said that she was very surprised not to see dead fake legs with stripy tights poking out of tables, but that might be a step too far even for me. What does that mean, even for me?’

  ‘She’s just jealous that she didn’t have the imagination or personality to pull something like this off,’ Becca said.

  ‘Do you think so?’ Ayesha cocked her head on the side. ‘I have pulled it off, haven’t I? It wasn’t too weird and out there?’

  Eve shook her head. ‘It was unique. That’s very different to out there.’

  ‘I couldn’t have done it without you two though, nor would I have wanted to.’

  ‘It was honestly the best wedding I’ve been to in a long time,’ Eve said. ‘Becca’s going to have to pull out some serious stops to compete with today.’

  ‘Oi,’ Becca said, pointing her glass at Eve. ‘I’ll have you know, there are some elements to my wedding even you don’t know about.’

  ‘Don’t forget to give Eve a plus one, or two, judging from today.’ Ayesha winked.

  ‘How are the dastardly duo? Which one’s inching ahead?’ Becca asked Eve, who sighed in response.

  ‘Neither.’ Eve hesitated before saying. ‘The champagne you’re drinking was bought to be poured all over my body and ceremoniously licked off by both of them.’ Laughing at her friends’ horrified expressions, Eve added, ‘But don’t worry, I got rid of them before that could happen.’

  ‘Is it so wrong that I’m a bit jealous?’ Ayesha whined. ‘Here I am, a married woman, and never again will I get propositioned by two men in the same night.’

  ‘Me neither,’ Becca chimed in.

  ‘You make it sound like it happened all the time before today!’ Eve laughed.

  ‘Well,’ Ayesha smiled. ‘Not all the time.’

  ‘Well it’s a first for me, having two blokes vying for my attention.’

  ‘Three.’ Ayesha said. ‘Ben asked Amit if you were married now.’

  Eve rolled her eyes while simultaneously feeling her belly flop.

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said the truth, that you were single.’

  ‘Why did he ask?’

  ‘I don’t know, you know what blokes are like. Amit would hardly have asked him his feelings behind the question. Why? Would you be looking to rekindle anything?’

  ‘Of course not! That was eons ago, another lifetime. I can categorically say that I have no feelings towards him of any kind, apart from mild irritation at all these jokes he keeps playing on me.’

  ‘Phew,’ Becca said. ‘Because I kind of found myself inviting him to my wedding. We were chatting about old times, and he was asking if I was still in touch with different people and then I said yes, and that a lot of our uni friends were coming to my wedding, and then I heard myself invite him. Sorry Eve, are you sure it’s ok?’

  ‘It couldn’t be more ok, it’s fine, I’m totally over him.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Ayesha said. ‘Because that man has more baggage than a footballer’s wife travelling to the world cup. Top up?’

  Eve couldn’t ask her what she meant without it sounding like she cared, and she was doing a sterling performance of pretending that she didn’t. The three of them finished the bottle while recounting funny stories about the day, who said what, who danced with whom, but all the while Eve’s mind was a million miles and a few years away.

  Chapter 20

  Later that same day, after getting the train back to their flat, Becca and Eve lay in their living room listening to the Sunday afternoon jazz session from downstairs winding its melodic way up to them. The set list included some Nina Simone classics that had kept the two friends tapping their toes and humming along from their respective sofas. Eve had set Becca the task of going through all her RSVPs to her wedding and writing a definitive list of everyone that was coming. Becca had started the challenge so well, but now, less than six minutes into it, she’d fallen asleep. Eve carefully removed the pen from her friend’s fingers, and replaced the lid, before lying back down on her own sofa and opening up her laptop to write the week’s Misadventures of a bad bridesmaid column.

  Despite being a professional writer for ten years, Eve was finding it really hard to find a replacement noun for fibreglass flamingoes. There was so much comedy to be had recounting the trials and tribulations of Ayesha’s wedding verbatim, from the outlandish theme, to the broken nose, it was comedy gold for Eve’s new column – but she just couldn’t do it to her friend. So Eve was trying to disguise every detail of the wedding by using alternative descriptions. The flamingoes had become swans, the broken bone was no longer on the face, but on the foot and the lonesome DJ was called Larry. As she wrote, Eve couldn’t help laughing out loud at the lunacy of the day. Even if she’d tried to concoct a completely fictional account of a drama-studded wedding, she wouldn’t have been able to come up with anything as funny as the original.

  ‘Why are you grinning?’ Becca asked yawning. ‘And how long was I asleep for?’

  ‘Only twenty minutes or so, and it’s nothing, just work stuff.’ Eve shut her laptop.

  ‘I never had your job down as being particularly funny. Heartwarming, yes, but laugh-out-loud funny, not so much.’

  ‘Well you know, it has its moments. How are the RSVPs looking?’

  ‘Not great. We sent out about sixty I think, but I’ve had two hundred and eighty-two back, which is a bit strange.’

  ‘When you say, you sent out about sixty you think, what does that actually mean? Where’s your list?’

  ‘I didn’t make one. I just kept writing them, whenever I thought of a new person I’d like to invite.’

  ‘Well how many invitations did you order in the first place?’

  ‘That’s the thing, don’t you remember, my cousin Janine did the design of it? So whenever I thought of more people I just printed some more off. I didn’t really keep track of who or how many.’

  ‘Right.’

  Becca sat up. ‘Right what? What does that mean?’

  ‘It means, right, well, we’ve got to make a list now of everyone that you remember sending an invite to and then tally that up against the RSVPs you’ve got, and then chase the ones that haven’t replied.’

  Becca groaned and leant her head back against the sofa. ‘But that’s the thing. I can’t remember, I keep inviting people I meet, like I did with Ben, and I gave Jack, my mum and sisters a few to hand out to their friends—’

  ‘And you invited randoms like my mum.’ Eve interrupted.

  ‘Your mum isn’t a random, she’s your mum, but I sort of did an open invite at work as well, tacking one of the invites up on the notice board in the staff room.’

  ‘We’re not talking about flyers for a car boot sale Becca! This is your wedding, you have to stop asking everyone you come across!’

  ‘I know. I just got a bit carried away.’

  ‘Ok, give me the list of everyone you have invited, and their email addresses and I’ll get in touch with them all to confirm. Worst case scenario, how many people do you think might come?’ Eve asked.

  ‘Is the worst case the biggest number or smallest?’

  ‘Depends on your outlook. For me, the worst case would be six hundred people rocking up expecting free food and drink.’

  ‘That’s also a lot of hay bales,’ Becca said.

  Eve didn’t reply, she was too busy counting to ten in her head. Becca took the silence to mean that the conversation was over and everything was resolved, so she closed her eyes again and drifted off into a dreamless nap.

  Later that afternoon the two friends were standing amiably next to each other preparing the salad for their early dinner. Just as Eve reached over Becca for the punnet of cherry tomatoes both their phones that were charging next to each other on the counter lit up with life and buzzed simultaneously.

  The videographer just sent the video of our wedding! It premieres tomorrow night at ours
– come at 7.30, screening at 8, dress up!

  ‘I’m guessing yours was from Tanya too?’ Eve said.

  ‘Yep. Summoning us to her premiere.’

  The two women looked at each other and exchanged the same thought, what a dick.

  ‘Shall we go?’ Becca asked, scrunching up her nose to signal how distasteful she found the text message.

  ‘There are many other things that I’d like to do instead,’ Eve admitted. ‘But I haven’t got anything on tomorrow.’

  ‘So shall we say yes?’

  ‘Yes, but I’m going to tell her that I’m coming straight from my training session as the park is pretty much opposite their house, so she can take me in my tracksuit bottoms or not at all.’

  ‘In that case, I’ll say the same so you’re not the only one in sweatpants while everyone else is in black tie.’

  ‘She can’t seriously expect everyone to come in evening dresses?’

  ‘Tanya can do whatever she wants.’

  ‘Ain’t that the truth,’ Eve said. ‘Well look, if you’re going to be wearing the gear anyway, why don’t you meet me after work and join the training? Juan won’t mind, I think he’s getting a bit bored of my chat.’

  ‘Could do. I guess I should do at least one exercise class before I get married, isn’t that what brides are supposed to do?’

  Eve didn’t want to tell her that most of the brides she’d ever come across would have been having inch-loss slimming wraps twice a week for the last six months, and purely existing on ice cubes.

  ***

  Juan had one muscly lycra-clad leg up on the railings at a right angle, creating a perfect square with the ground.

  ‘Is that him?’ Becca whispered as they approached the part of the park where he’d already set up little cones and a variety of torture instruments masquerading as skipping ropes and barbells.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me he was that good looking.’

  ‘Is he?’

  ‘Eve, even you can’t be totally immune.’