by Claire Peate
Before I knew it, I was automatically rooting around in my bag for my keys to the front door of the building. Home. It was nine o’clock on a Saturday night and it looked like another night with my two friends Mr Remote Control and Mrs Takeaway Menu. At least they were always there when I needed them and wouldn’t abandon me to go horse riding in Northern Spain.
Goddam it.
3
Apparently the first step in curing a problem is to realise that you have a problem in the first place. So with this in mind I decided to enter in my diary that the official start to my Dull Life Crisis was that evening in the bar with Marcia. I underlined it, just to be sure. My diary was one of those that tell you a supposedly interesting fact for each day, and on the start of my DLC it read, “Good King Wenceslas died in 929.”
Really? Had he really existed? Had he really looked out on the feast of Stephen and was there really a poor man gathering winter fu-uu-uel?
Oh my God. I was so boring I actually found it interesting.
I flicked on. A few weeks later an entry read, “In 1922 Charlie Osbourne started an attack of hiccups which lasted 68 years.”
Now that was interesting, surely? Even Marcia, if she’d had the time to read a diary, would have found it interesting. Wouldn’t she?
I closed the diary and threw it down on my pile of Tatlers. In truth there was no official start to my DLC – it had been coming on for a while now. For it to be so obvious that Marcia had picked up on it and used it against me, that implied it was pretty serious. I was projecting my crisis to those around me. I could no longer pretend I was happy doing what I was doing. Or rather not doing what I was not doing.
For a while I had been soul-searching, wondering how I was going to fill my life with something more fulfilling than getting up, going to work, coming home, eating and sleeping. The trouble was that anything more fulfilling seemed a lot of effort and the plain truth was that I wasn’t interested enough to join a sailing club, motivated enough to attend a reading group or bored enough to take up an evening class.
I just didn’t care enough about anything that would push me out of my smotheringly comfortable existence.
I’d fleetingly wondered whether my way out of feeling dull was to sex up my day job: that I should look at changing that and the lifestyle would follow. After all, being a project manager for a national network of lawyers was not the most exciting of jobs. But the pay was great and I loved my apartment, which had cost an arm and a leg. Could I really do some trendy sort of job in television and earn twenty quid a week? No. Besides, I actually enjoyed what I did and I was good at it.
But there was one glimmer of hope on the horizon. One thing I could look forward to. Pencilled in my diary at the end of next week, on the very same day that “The American novelist Ernest Hemingway shot himself in 1961” was “Louisa’s hen weekend – Brecon Beacons.”
That would be exciting.
Fun even.
At the very least I was probably going to have a better day than Ernest Hemingway had had in 1961.
Louisa was a good friend from university who I missed dearly as she’d never yet managed to get a weekend free to visit me in Wales since I’d moved, although she kept promising me she would. She had stayed in London and was busy flirting her way to the top of an independent estate agency. Louisa was good at flirting; a real professional, but all done with perfectly good humour and not at the expense of anyone else. She had flirted outrageously with our hideously ugly and foul-breathed lecturer and had (shock!) come top in our year of degrees. She had smiled and giggled and won over the interviewer for her first job and had taken off from there. Starting with representing bedsits and studios in Kilburn, she’d gone on to selling apartments in Marylebone and eventually houses in Fitzrovia, placing millionaire businessmen in millionaire properties. Good on her. She was using her good looks which she had in abundance, and why not? As she said herself it would be a shame to waste them, because one day they’d be gone and then where would she be? Plain and poor. And it didn’t bother her fiancé James either. He knew the flirting was all a show and there was never anything more to it than harmless fun. Besides, the two of them were deeply and madly in love and their wedding was going to be the event of the year.
But first we had the hen weekend.
According to the scarily efficient nine-page dossier that a girl called Laura, the Hen Weekend Organiser, had put together (not including additional two-page calculation of costs) we would be horse riding, hiking, spending a day in a luxury beauty spa and all this in the setting of the beautiful Brecon Beacons. By the end of the weekend I could happily see Marvellous Marcia again safe in the knowledge that she wouldn’t be able to count my failings on quite so many of her manicured fingers. Horse riding? Done that! Hiking? And that! Spa-ing? That too! Maybe I would take to one of these activities and realise that it was for me and hey presto, I would have something more exciting in my life than a fact-a-day diary.
I picked up the diary, opened it and drew another line under The Official Start of my DLC. This was where it ended.
4
The morning of the start of the Hen Weekend began bright and sunny and, unlike poor Ernest Hemingway, my spirits soared. I was desperately looking forward to the long weekend and the opportunity to see Louisa again. At last it came to five o’clock and I sprinted for my car. Pinned to my dashboard was a postcard that had arrived this morning and which would spur me on to make sure I got the most out of the weekend:
Hi Sweetie – Hope you’re feeling better after the other night at the Canteen. Marcia doesn’t know what happened and is feeling really bad that she might have upset you. Riding here is amazing! Plenty of breathtaking views and saddle-sore nights! Staying in Parador up in mountains for next four days. Three pools, spa centre and fancy food! Luxury! Marcia wants a word so bye bye from me. See you soon (Debbie’s party on the 18th?)
Ang xxxxx
Feeling terrible that you got so cross the other day : ( Let’s meet up and make up. M x.
Well sod Marcia.
And sod Angela too for being so insensitive.
Beside me on the passenger seat was a two-page set of directions from Laura the Hen Weekend Organiser – the same girl who had recently supplied me with the nine-page Hen Weekend Dossier. Back when I’d lived in London I’d met Laura once at a dinner party that Louisa had hosted. From what I remembered, Louisa had been right to put her in charge of organising the weekend. Not that it was “organisation” per se; it was more of a military operation. When I’d taken the phone call from Laura about the weekend, she didn’t tell me what was planned, she briefed me. She used frighteningly serious words like “precisely” and “sequentially” during the conversation, and gave times as o-eight-hundred-hours. It was no surprise. Although by day Laura was a primary school teacher to the future urban ruffians of Hackney, at weekends she was out with the Territorial Army, learning to jog ten miles with a rucksack filled with dumbbells and honing her ability to take the pin out of a grenade without breaking a fingernail. Very useful for the day job. She was a good laugh, though, and when drunk she came out with the most horrendous stories about the army, so I was very much looking forward to seeing her again and hearing more tales along the line of surviving on nothing but your own wee for two days in 40 degree heat.
I cast my eye down her directions – they were horrendously detailed and scary-sounding but in reality it was pretty simple. Point the car north, go west a bit at Abergavenny, and then I’d have to consult the directions a bit more. There were lots of “take a 90° right at High Barn farmhouse [OS459 567]” and “take steep track [1 in 4] up Coed y Bere lane [OS 456 577].” Maybe I should be a bit apprehensive if this was a sign of what was to come? Maybe the TA-trained Laura had gone all-out with the weekend plans and had some army-style horse riding planned for us all? Perhaps it wasn’t going to be as much about having fun and relaxing as I imagined, but more a regimented exercise in hen weekending? Would there be weapons involved
? Scary stuff, but then again potentially useful with the Marcia-situation: arrive at Bay Canteen, lay down M16 and see then whether she’s up for any more belittling and manipulation…
Well, it was too late to worry about my weekend now. I pointed my trusty VW Golf in the right direction, threw the postcard into the passenger foot-well, picked it up again, ripped it in half, threw it back in the foot-well and I was off!
The journey up in the late afternoon sunshine was pretty uneventful, although I was practically chewing the steering wheel in frustration at being caught on a single-lane road behind the slowest vehicle in Wales. The driver of “Barry Llewelyn’s DISCOMANIA!! - mobile disco and lightshow” was one of those motorists that sticks to 40mph on the open roads and a good 10mph below the speed limit elsewhere. Just in case one of his vinyls gets scratched. God knows what his performance at discos was like. Nevertheless I dutifully followed behind him, gnarling my teeth every time I had to slip down to second gear, which was often.
I finally lost it around Abergavenny when, on a 50mph stretch of road he slowed down to 17mph because there was a sign saying there was the possibility of sheep on the road. I slammed my fist down on the horn, which let out a pitiful “weeeeeep”. I expect Marcia had a car horn that would have cleared the road. Damn it.
I was in a hurry because Laura had made it absolutely clear on page five of the dossier (section 7.2) that bedrooms were to be allocated strictly on a first come first served basis, apart from Louisa the hen, of course, who would get the best room in the house. And when I spoke to her on the phone Laura had said something vague about all the bedrooms being great except … perhaps … one … and had left it there. So I was absolutely determined not to be the sucker who arrived last. Laura was not going to negotiate on which bedroom you deserved, given that it wasn’t your fault you arrived late.
Thankfully Barry the DiscoSnail turned off after Abergavenny and I sped away, shouting obscenities in his direction.
Finally at around seven I pulled up on the gravel driveway of the place that would be home for the next three days.
The Hen House – as Louisa had referred to it – was stunning. I’d never stayed in anything quite so grand in my life. It was surrounded by oak woodland on three sides and a field of sheep on the fourth, with a river just visible at the bottom of the field, sparkling away in the early evening sun. The place was like a miniature redbrick castle, three stories with odd shaped leaded windows irregularly punched into its old walls.
The minute I’d come to a halt the front door opened and I instantly recognised Laura as she strode out. She raised her hand at me in a serious sort of half-wave, half-salute before coming over to the car. She’d cut her hair even shorter than when I’d seen her last; now it was barely above a grade 2, short and spiky and not at all softening her features. It was obvious she didn’t spend much time flicking through the beauty section of Cosmopolitan searching out this season’s best lipgloss.
“Rachel!”
“Laura! Hi! Good to see you.” I climbed out of the car and shook the hand she’d extended to me. It was a firm and brisk handshake not unlike the ones my father always insists on giving me every time I see him.
“How’s the legal world?”
“Oh you know. Ticking over. How’s the youth of Hackney?”
“Bastards the lot of them. Anyway, got many bags?”
“Er, six…” I went over to the boot and opened it up, hoping to hide my sheepish expression and not appear too much the duffer.
“Six bags? Christ. Right, let’s divide them up and get you inside. I’ll give you a tour and show you to your room.” She hauled up four of the heaviest and turned to walk back to the house. “You’re the last to arrive, I’m afraid.”
I smiled a tight smile and grabbed the last couple of bags.
Damn that disco man.
The Hen House wasn’t posh exactly. To be posh it would need to be formal and impressive, and while it was definitely impressive it could never be described as formal. There was a sort of a shabby opulence to it that enveloped me the minute I stepped inside. It was the sort of place, in fact, that I imagined would have belonged to a very rich but very Bohemian family – people who had children called Tanzibar and Coco and were actors or writers or painters. People who walked around barefoot and dined on couscous and home-grown salads in the garden during the summer.
The artists or writers or whoever they were who had lived in the house had decorated the rooms in gorgeously striking limewashes of orange and scarlet and lime. The bright chalky walls were covered in old gilt mirrors that were barely able to show you back your reflection, while here and there ancient formal oil portraits hung next to quirky bold paintings of nudes. Everywhere was a riot of colour from the vibrant paintings to the multicoloured rugs and patchwork throws.
The furniture was a fantastic jumble of antiques, rough-cut dark wood pieces from India and eclectic junk shop finds. Enormous Venetian chandeliers hung from the exposed beams in the downstairs rooms and in some of the bedrooms.
But not in my bedroom.
How could the people who lived in this house have ever left it? It was amazing. If I owned it I would never have left it. Laura said, having flicked through the house’s information book, that the owners had relocated to Carcassonne in the south of France. I wondered what they did out there? If there was a Tanzibar and a Coco, what did they do now they had moved? Did Tanzibar break in wild horses, riding barechested across the southern French plains while Coco pursued her career in modelling and commuted to Paris? Who knows? What was certain was that I would never live the kind of life that someone who owned this place would live; it was totally alien to me with my project-manager job and Ikea-decorated apartment. But for one weekend only, this bohemian life and my very ordinary life would come wonderfully close, and I could pretend, for a few days, that I was the sort of carefree creative type that lived like this up here in a beautiful and remote Welsh valley. And I could escape the oppressive Dull Life Crisis that was starting to smother me.
When I’d had the tour and dumped my bags on my (small) bed in my (small) bedroom, I went to join the others in the sitting room.
“Rachel, darling!” Louisa jumped up from her sofa and embraced me in an enormous bear hug. “It’s been so long!”
“I know!” I hugged her back, my face covered in her long white-blonde hair. It was good to see her; I’d forgotten how much I missed her over the past couple of years. “I can’t believe you’re actually going to get married in a month. Are you nervous?”
“Me? Nervous?” Louisa laughed. “Come on, it’s James who is the nervous one! But look at you – you look so tired. Why did you move out of London? I mean – Wales, for fuck’s sake! How’s it going? Working hard?” She examined my face, looking at the bags under my eyes.
“Oh, you know, busy.”
“Mmm. I bet. Hey, I saw your ex the other day, he was shopping in Bayswater.”
“Oh!” I was momentarily taken aback. “How is he doing? Still as dull as ever?”
“Great, actually. He was really busy so he couldn’t chat for long. He’s changed so much I hardly recognised him. He was telling me how Natalie – did you know he’s got a new girlfriend? – anyway, how Natalie is the South West regional finalist in kite surfing and she’s got him into the sport in a big way. They’ve bought this really cool split-screen VW camper. He was off with Natalie to Newquay that evening. And he’s grown his hair long, surfer style. It suits him.”
Bugger.
“He was asking what you were up to these days. And he said ‘hi’.”
Bugger bugger bugger.
Why was everyone so bloody active and exciting? It was looking like Marcia was right in her assumption that it was me who was the freak with my dull old life. Perhaps Hemingway had a good point; today was a really good day to shoot yourself.
Louisa rushed off to the kitchen to rustle me up a cup of tea while I went to meet the other two hen-weekenders for the first time. Lou
isa had told me all about them, so I could pretty much work out for myself which one was the retiring Cathy and which was the boisterous Henna.
“I’m Cathy.” The timid-looking girl held out her hand and I shook it. She had mousy brown hair tied up in a tight ponytail and wore very sensible clothes. Suddenly I felt a bit more confident with my lot. I was more dynamic and active than Cathy. I must be. Surely she didn’t go kite surfing or scuba diving? “I’m a Doctor of Medieval English at Sheffield University.”
“Oh Gosh,” I managed. What on earth can you say to that? How interesting? No. How useful? No.
“So … er … you’re Louisa’s cousin, is that right?”
“Yes. On her mother’s side.” She gave a nervous laugh and sat back down.
“Henna,” the girl sitting next to Laura on the sofa jumped up and introduced herself. “Journalist.” She was a petite, slightly plump girl with neat black hair cut in a shiny bob. Just below her hairline was what looked like an enormous bruise starting to form, which every so often I saw her touch and wince.
“Henna writes for The Times,” said Louisa, obviously proud of her friend. “She makes stacks of cash for writing one half-page article a week. In fact, Henna, have you worked out how much you make per word?”
“God, I don’t know. Fifty pence or something, I think. Anyway, enough of that. Now we’re all here – Laura, you’re in charge, can we crack open the wine? Is that in keeping with your timetable for the weekend?”
