Despite it being a Thursday afternoon, today has big Monday morning energy. This week has felt like a week full of Mondays and today is dragging just the same.
I suppose I should get ready soon. I’m heading to my parents' house for dinner. They only live a short train journey outside Leeds so I see them and my brother quite often, but we make a point of having dinner as a family every other week.
The only thing that could make my day worse would be piling into a commuter train, standing for the entire twenty-minute journey, probably with my face pressed up against the dirty glass door, murky from a day’s worth of fingerprints.
I’ll hop in the shower, throw on some clothes and hurry for the train. Once I’m at my parents’ place I can sit in front of a fan, drink lemonade and just enjoy the peace and quiet that comes with living on the edge of the moors. The only thing that could potentially ruin the nice, quiet evening of my dreams is if the subject of my cousin’s wedding comes up – which it almost always does, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.
My phone vibrating on the desk in front of me snaps me from my thoughts. I have a notification telling me that I have a new match on Matcher. I open up the app and instinctively reject the first person it shows me with a swipe to the left. Almost everyone gets swiped away these days. I’m about to go and check my new match when I realise that it’s showing me a message that I haven’t seen before. I squint at it suspiciously until I realise what it says:
No more matches. Check back soon.
It turns out I have run out of people to match with in my area, meaning I have swiped my way through every vaguely eligible bachelor (plus a few married ones who, it always amazes me, are lurking on the app) in Leeds. It’s official: I have run out of men. Well, you know what? Good. Good riddance to bad rubbish. This app has been nothing but trouble. I guess I’ll just go back to playing Candy Crush when I’m bored, rather than swiping my way through men who just aren’t worth shaving my legs for.
I place my phone on charge to give it a boost before I leave and head into the bathroom to get ready.
This escape room isn’t going to plan itself but, right now, all I can think about is escaping my own room. Of course, once I’m in a room with my mum and dad, chatting about the wedding of the century, I’ll probably want to escape that one too.
3
It’s only now that I live in the city that I truly appreciate what a gorgeous place I grew up in. At the time, my family home just felt like a house, but it was all I’d ever known.
Growing up was like something out of The Railway Children – literally, my parents’ house was next to the steam train line where the movie was filmed. Their back garden actually backs onto the line, which meant that we would often be able to watch as the old steam engine passed the bottom of our garden.
No one uses it to travel from A to B; there are much faster, cheaper ways. It’s a tourist attraction, one that pulls in people from all over the globe. Living right next to it, we wouldn’t go on it all that often. Just once a year, as kids, when we would take a trip on the annual Santa Train at Christmas time. The man who played Santa actually looked a hell of a lot like Santa Claus, with his grey beard, his rounded belly and his jolly smile, so when he would take the train for fun on a fairly regular basis, if my brother and I were playing in the back garden when he passed, he would always give us a wave through the window. Of course, we were convinced that he was the real Santa Claus, which is probably why we were such well-behaved kids. Our parents really drummed into us that Santa Claus was always watching, which feels highly manipulative, but I have to admit it’s a stroke of genius.
My brother, Oliver, still lives with my parents in their three-bedroom detached house. It’s a conversion of a building that is believed to date back to the eighteenth century. It looks picture perfect. Aged, but not old. Traditional, but not old-fashioned. It has always been well kept, sitting in a garden full of various plants and flowers. It’s like something out of a romance movie. The kind of place you inherit (although in the movies they’re usually in need of a lot of work) before falling in love with the hunky next-door neighbour. The only person next door here is a retired doctor in his nineties, and I’m betting it’s been a long time since he made anyone say ‘ahh’.
Oliver is younger than me. I’m twenty-nine with thirty breathing down my neck. Oliver is twenty-three with the world at his feet. Well, that’s what my parents seem to think anyway.
Oliver is their most viable child, having breezed his way through his bachelor’s degree, his masters, and now he’s doing a fully funded PhD. I don’t think they are more proud of Oliver, or that they love him more than they love me or anything like that. I just feel as if it’s easier to be more conventionally proud of him, whereas I’m pushing thirty, with a kind of weird job, living my best spinster life. All of my old school friends are married with kids. You can’t blame people for measuring my success against the people I grew up with, even if it’s not really fair.
I decided, after my disastrous date last night, that a trip to see my family was what I needed. Real people who actually cared about me, with no ulterior motive, giving me the time of day. The four of us – me, Oliver and my parents – are currently sitting around the table in their spacious farmhouse kitchen, eating dinner. We’re having salmon in a sticky honey and lemon glaze, which is my absolute favourite. I know that Oliver isn’t a huge fan, so we don’t have it all that often on family dinner night.
‘Would you say you were in a good mindset today?’ my mum asks. I shift uncomfortably in my seat. That’s a strange question to ask, isn’t it?
‘Erm… Yes?’ I reply. ‘I suppose so.’
I mean, I'm not exactly in a great mood. Last night was pretty disturbing and today wasn’t a very productive day. I guess I’m fine though.
‘So, if I had some news that you might not be all that happy with… now might be a good time to tell you?’ she continues.
My fork slips from my fingers and clatters against my plate.
‘Mum, what kind of question is that?’ I ask.
‘The kind that makes sure you’re in the mindset for potentially upsetting news,’ she says.
‘OK, sure, but you’ve already tipped me off to the bad news,’ I point out. ‘So whether you’re telling me it or not, I know that there is bad news. It doesn’t matter what it is, my brain is filling in the blanks for me – with ideas potentially worse than the thing itself. My God.’
I puff air from my cheeks. I feel in a right flap now. I pick my fork back up and reacquaint myself with my dinner. It’s a shame I can’t get it to takeaway or I’d be off. I’m not in the mood for a Brooks family drama.
‘For God’s sake,’ my dad, Ted, says, clearly annoyed to be having his dinner interrupted with a woman either side of him low-key bickering across his plate. He turns to me. ‘Cara, Lloyd is coming to Flora’s wedding. There.’
‘Lloyd?’ I shriek. ‘Lloyd? My ex Lloyd?’
‘How many Lloyds do you know?’ Oliver asks with a chuckle.
I meaningfully stab a carrot and pop it in my mouth with all the angst of a stroppy teenager.
‘Don’t be mardy,’ my dad insists. ‘Your mum worked hard on dinner. It doesn’t deserve to be stabbed so violently.’
I roll my eyes. Isn’t it weird how being back in your family home can make you feel like a kid again?
Ted Brooks is your classic Yorkshire dad. Honestly, he’s straight off a postcard in a Yorkshire gift shop. Strong and silent – apart from when he’s straight-talking – and awkwardly frugal – unless he’s buying things like cuts of meat or beer. I’ve always found his generation of ultra proud ‘Yorkshire born, Yorkshire bred’ Yorkshire men to be a mess of contradictions. Simple creatures, but still somehow impossible to figure out. My dad is a fairly big bloke, but a gentle giant. My mum, especially when she’s standing next to him, is perfectly petite. Reaching in on her tiptoes at just over five foot tall, Annie Brooks looks quite funny next to her h
usband. Once, when we were all walking up Malham Cove for ‘fun’ one weekend (not really my idea of fun – walking is a bit too much like exercising for my liking), my dad started chatting with a man and his family. The man, who couldn’t see my mum’s face behind her scarf, asked my dad how old his daughters were.
My mum does look good for her age though; she has sleek, dark bobbed hair, and almost always has a good covering of make-up on. That must be where I got it from – feeling the need to wear make-up every day. I enjoy wearing it, though, and have a lot of fun applying it. One of these days I’ll take a proper class, rather than just messing around in my bedroom, usually for no one’s benefit but my own. Then again, I suppose that’s what my feminist brother would prefer me to say. Oliver has my mum’s dark colouring and skinny frame, but it’s stretched to a height to rival my dad’s. I really don’t know who I take after, to be honest. I’m 5’ 7”, which is taller than average for a woman, but unremarkably so. All it means is that I have size eight feet, which makes shoe shopping kind of inconvenient sometimes. My height puts me about halfway between my mum and my dad, and I suppose my chest-length dark blonde hair puts my colouring at that midpoint between my dark-haired mum and my fair-haired dad.
‘Sorry, Dad, I’m a little upset because you just told me that my cousin is inviting my ex-boyfriend to her wedding. I can’t believe her.’
‘It’s her wedding day,’ my mum reminds me, as though I could have forgotten that the wedding of the century is soon to take place.
My cousin Flora’s long-anticipated wedding is less than two months away now. Flora, twenty-eight, is the only child of my auntie Mary, my mum’s only sister. When Tommy popped the question a couple of years ago it wasn’t long before Flora asked me to be her bridesmaid. We’re cousins, but we’re not friends or anything, so I was surprised when she asked me. We don’t socialise and we’re definitely not what you would call close.
We never really got on much when we were kids because Flora had that only-child mentality some kids are just cursed with. She always had to have her own way and I, being a whole year older than her, usually had to give in to whatever demands she made. In some ways that hasn’t changed… well, not until a few months ago when I finally broke the cycle.
‘I feel like she’s punishing me,’ I point out between mouthfuls of new potatoes. ‘She’s just being petty.’
‘Well, we do all really like Lloyd,’ my mum says.
‘Yeah, but Flora doesn’t,’ I insist. ‘I mean, she didn’t when we were together, and even if she did, why is my ex-boyfriend still invited to her wedding?’
It’s nearly a year since I broke up with Lloyd, and he didn’t exactly take it all that well. It was a year before our break-up when Flora invited us to her wedding, but she only invited Lloyd because he was my boyfriend at the time, so why would that invitation stand after our break-up?
‘Flora and Tommy want to honour his invitation,’ my mum explains. ‘They think it would be rude not to.’
‘But it isn’t rude to invite my ex, who I am not on speaking terms with?’ I say. ‘Has he said he’s coming?’
‘Yes. But Flora said you can still have a plus one,’ my mum points out.
God, I’m going to need one now. I wasn’t really feeling the pressure too much before, but if I have to go to this thing alone then I’m going to wind up saddled with my ex all day – an ex that I specifically haven’t stayed friends with. Lloyd and I broke up on pretty bad terms. He was jealous, possessive and had no boundaries. The fact that he’s still saying he’ll come to Flora’s wedding – all the way from Somerset – just goes to show how little he’s changed. He’s a twenty-eight-year-old man, for crying out loud. This is like something a high school girl would do.
My appetite well and truly beat, I put my cutlery down before dropping my head into my hands. I massage my temples for a moment.
‘She’s punishing me,’ I say. ‘This is because I dropped out of being her bloody bridesmaid.’
I know that it sounds bad, to agree to be a bridesmaid for someone, before backtracking, but I had a really good reason, I swear.
‘Don’t forget how upset Auntie Mary is that you did it over WhatsApp,’ Oliver points out.
I roll my eyes. Auntie Mary is of the opinion that I added insult to injury by bowing out over WhatsApp. ‘Not even a text’, that’s all she keeps saying, being too out of touch to know that the two forms of communication aren’t really any different. The reason I sent Flora a message, instead of talking to her on the phone, is because I had already tried raising my concerns with her in person, but she kept shutting them down. I thought it best to write down exactly how I was feeling, in clear but very tactful terms – the last thing I wanted to do was upset her.
‘Maybe she was looking forward to you being her bridesmaid,’ my dad suggests. I can tell he’s had enough of this conversation, but he isn’t the only one.
‘I doubt it,’ I reply. ‘We’re not exactly close, are we? It felt like an empty gesture at best, otherwise I reckon it was just to keep the numbers up.’
I did have a good reason for not wanting to be Flora’s bridesmaid, honestly. Well, I thought it was a good reason, but Flora and Auntie Mary weren’t in agreement with me.
It all started when we went for our first dress fitting. The dresses were already there waiting for us and it turned out that Flora was planning on using the bridesmaid dresses from her mum’s wedding (that none of her mum’s bridesmaids wanted to keep, which isn’t a surprise to me having seen them – they haven’t aged well at all over the past thirty or so years). Somehow impossibly shiny, but still with the texture of crêpe paper, the dresses would be serving as Flora’s something old (oh-so old) and something borrowed (yes, her mum wanted them back after) – and as far as I was concerned, my dress was going to be her something blue too.
You see, it just so happened that Auntie Mary had four bridesmaids – two adults and two kids. The dress that I was told to try on was actually the dress my mum wore when she was Auntie Mary’s bridesmaid… but my mum was quite slim back then and I, today, am not. I wouldn’t say I’m overweight, but I’m not going to be walking any Victoria’s Secret catwalks any time soon. I’d say I’m kind of average size, just with a few extra curves, and it’s because of my curves up top that the old bridesmaid dress intended for me to wear just wouldn’t fit. I had a little trouble after stepping into it, getting it over my butt, but as soon as it came to fitting my chest into it, it just wasn’t going to happen. Hence the something blue – it would be practically pornographic if I were to walk down the aisle with my boobs out, and all because I can’t get some solid-as-a-rock, eighties floral antique-curtain-looking dress over them. Honestly, it was one of the ugliest dresses I have ever seen in my life, and obviously I didn’t want to wear it. But I would have worn it because it was what Flora wanted. Except Auntie Mary didn’t want her old dresses ‘hacking up’ to make alterations so that the dress would fit me as I am. What Auntie Mary suggested to me, instead of changing the dress, was that I changed myself – by losing weight. Obviously I wasn’t going to lose weight to fit into a bloody dress, and even if I did lose weight, I couldn’t exactly guarantee that my boobs would shrink, could I? No one would listen when I tried to explain that I wasn’t going to crash diet to fit into a bridesmaid dress, which was why I wound up having to send her a very sugar-coated version of my feelings in a WhatsApp message.
‘I’ll just need to find a date,’ I say. ‘Any date. I just need a man.’
‘I can’t believe, out of the two of us, I’m the better feminist,’ Oliver eventually pipes up again with a laugh.
‘Just because I need a man and won’t wear a bridesmaid dress that shows my bra, I’m a bad feminist?’ I say. ‘I wouldn’t lose weight for a dress, remember.’
‘Yeah, there is that,’ he agrees. ‘You know, in The Handmaid’s Tale…’
Oh, give me strength. My brother is writing his PhD on the male ego and female empowerment in contempora
ry US hip-hop, which apparently makes him the authority on feminism in this house. I am all for feminism but I don’t need a lecture on how women shouldn’t be calling other women bitches, because ‘the patriarchy wants to set women against other women’, every time I say someone is a bitch – especially not from my woke little brother.
‘I can’t believe he’s actually coming,’ I say. ‘The man lives in Somerset.’
Lloyd and I were together for three years. He lived in Leeds while he was at uni, but after he finished his master’s degree he temporarily moved back in with his parents – in Somerset. The plan was to figure out our next steps, but we never had the chance. The distance magnified all of the small insecurities I’d noted Lloyd having over the years. His paranoia tore us apart. Not only that though, the time apart also gave me the space to realise that we just weren’t that happy together. He wasn't the one. Trying to talk to him about this only brought out an anger in him; that was when we broke up, and that was the last time we spoke.
‘Is he actually going to travel all this way and stay in a hotel, just so he can attend Flora and Tommy’s wedding?’ I ask, although I suppose it makes sense, if he’s as clingy as he was before. He’ll think this is his way back in.
‘Well…’ My mum pauses for a moment. I watch as she shakes off the anguished look on her face, forcing it into something much softer and brighter. ‘You know how much we all loved Lloyd, how he felt like part of the family…’
Oh, God, no…
‘He’s staying here,’ my dad blurts. Ted clearly has no time for sugar-coating today.
The Plus One Pact Page 2
