Prior Engagements

by Sarah Goodwin

  I noticed as I was leaving that the businessman and the two elderly couples were also laying down tips. I went back to my room feeling cheered by this display of silent British camaraderie.

  Letting myself into the room, I went to the astonishingly twinkly bathroom (filled with white tile and chrome so spotless that I’d have gladly eaten off of it) and ran myself a bath, dumping all the bubble bath I could find into the steaming water.

  I brought my bag into the bathroom and took out that week’s paperback (a fairly shitty crime novel that had lied bold facedly about the groomsman being dead, probably because the writer knew people would correctly finger him as the culprit on page one). I climbed into the bath, relishing the hot, bubbly water after another fortnight of dribbly lukewarm showers (I might as well have hired a dachshund to drool on me for all the good my shower did).

  Just as I was running more hot water into the bath, having reached chapter twenty-one, (‘Oh my God! T’was the groomsman that did for Count Fortesque,’ cried the maid in horror, as Theodor Levy, the undead groomsman advanced on her from behind, clutching a rusted sickle in his meaty fist) my phone began to ring. Even more inconveniently, it was Will’s ringtone, Ke$ha’s TikTok in Spanish.

  I considered just not picking up, but then, I hadn’t spoken to Will since before he’d bought me the dress. It would have been downright rude, not to mention really nasty, to never thank him. I picked up the phone and answered the call.

  “How’s the café? Still standing?” I said as chirpily as I could.

  “Just.” Will sounded tired, and I instantly felt bad for leaving him in the lurch (and for leaving him, period. I was supposed to be there, making sure he took his Berocca’s and didn’t drink before noon).

  “What happened?”

  “Water spilt a five pint tub of custard over the toaster.”

  “Shit. Can you fix it?” I asked, knowing how much the Russell Hobbs eight slice toaster (with, as Will had put it, a real motherfucker of a bun tray) had set us back.

  “Not really. Water turned it on to dry it out, fused everything out, for the entire row of shops and then the toaster caught fire,” Will gave it one of his ‘C’est la vie’ sighs. “It’s not the toaster I’ll miss anyway.”

  This was quite a statement, coming from Will, who, when he had purchased the toaster, had made it very clear that its safety came well before mine (Seriously, when we’d run our employee fire drills, I was the one who had to practice unplugging the toaster and evacuating it at speed – my record was twelve seconds).

  I closed my eyes, and really wished that I was wearing clothes. “Let me guess, Yvonne told you.”

  “Yeah, she did. Why didn’t you?” Will sounded really angry, and I couldn’t blame him. “She came in with some rugby boy,” (all Yvonne’s conquests were ‘boys’ to Will) “and I asked her how you were. That’s when she told me you were moving to bloody New York.”

  “Dorian only asked me last night.”

  “But you were thinking about it before then, weren’t you?” Will demanded, “you were never going to come back to the café.”

  “I didn’t think it would be a very good idea...”

  “Annie, don’t freak out on me. We can still be friends, one kiss doesn’t change that. And it certainly doesn’t mean you have to move to the other side of the world to get away from me.”

  “Don’t I?” I found myself saying, “Will, I’m a married woman, that’s supposed to mean something, and it still didn’t stop me from nearly going at it with you on a worktop.”

  There was a pause.

  “You would have gone all the way with me, in the kitchen?”

  I blushed, desperately trying not to think about the fact that I was naked and up to my neck in rose scented froth. “Well, yes, I suppose,” I admitted.

  “That’s a food hygiene violation.”

  “Oh shut up. Anyway, I’m not that dirty.”

  “You were acting pretty dirty,” Will said, with his inbuilt flirtatiousness. I was pretty much scarlet from head to toe. At any moment the bath water would begin to boil around me.

  “Shut up!” I squeaked.

  “And you know how fragile those cabinets are. One of them cracked this morning, just because I put my tea down for a second. There’s no way we wouldn’t break them, even if we were just sitting on them...”

  “Will...”

  “...let alone we actually try to do it. I wasn’t exactly planning on taking it at a cabinet friendly pace.”

  We both realised exactly what we were doing at the same time. Will went abruptly silent, and I tried to ignore the prickling heat rising in my chest, which had nothing to do with the bathwater, and everything to do with Will, and the images he’d put into my head.

  “I keep forgetting that I’m not allowed to do that anymore,” Will said eventually.

  “Chat lewdly with me on the phone?” I said, aiming for humour and failing miserably.

  “It’s just, in my head, you’re not married. Shit, An, it was only a fortnight ago that you weren’t married. How am I supposed to change gear that quick?”

  “Were we ever in gear?”

  “My fault if we weren’t,” Will sighed.

  “Mine too...I wish I’d stopped thinking about Stephen ages ago. I’ve barely thought of him since...”

  I was about to say, ‘since I met Dorian’ and then I realised what a mistake that would be. Will appeared to understand where my huge, idiot mouth had been heading though.

  “I’m glad. The prick didn’t deserve you being hung up on him.”

  “I don’t deserve you being hung up on me,” I told him, “I mean, come on Will, you can get anyone. What about Fanny-Pony-Club who laughs at your shitty jokes?”

  (Fanny-Pony-Club came into the café in her greyhound-hair covered jodhpurs every Wednesday morning for a cup of earl grey and two rich tea biscuits. Her crush on Will was longstanding and had always rubbed me up the wrong way.)

  Will was having none of my attempts to lighten the mood.

  “Please don’t go to New York, An, I want us to be like we were. Why can’t you just come back to work, tell me I look like Ace Ventura’s colour-blind parrot, and take over the kitchen with one of your cake projects?”

  My brain was preoccupied with how bad I was feeling, and that’s the only reason I can think of to explain why the truth came out of my mouth.

  “Because I don’t think I can see you, and not want to kiss you.”

  My heart was in my throat (not just an outplayed metaphor, I swear I could taste ventricle) as I waited for his response to that little piece of information.

  “So why don’t you?”

  I hadn’t been expecting that.

  “I mean it Annie – this marriage, it’s not...I mean, you don’t even know him, not really. It was just an experiment, something you wanted to do – and why the hell shouldn’t you’ve? But now...Annie, I love you, and I want...”

  “I know. I know, OK? I do too, but, Dorian deserves better than two weeks of marriage. I thought we’d settled this, I won’t do it Will. You know I can’t do that to him.”

  “So you’re going to stay married to someone you don’t love? Isn’t that just as wrong?”

  I was getting annoyed now. What I wanted might not have made sense to anyone but me, but then, it didn’t have to. I wasn’t about to break Dorian’s heart for my own selfish reasons. That was that. And Will was hardly unbiased.

  “I care about him,” I said.

  “But you don’t love him,” Will paused for a moment, as if letting that little revelation sink in (maybe I didn’t love Dorian completely, not yet anyway. But I’d loved Stephen, look how far that had taken me).

  “Do you love me Annie?” Will asked suddenly.

  Again, my brain scrambled like a pan of curdling eggs. The truth leapt out before I could modulate it with sanity. “I thought I did, when we were at uni.”

  “And now?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even kno
w if I believe in it anymore, the whole ‘love’ thing. I’ve done it Will, and it did not end well.”

  And yet I’d told Dorian that I loved him, as easily as asking him to pass the butter. Why had I done that? What had I been thinking?

  When Will spoke again his voice was softer, and I slid further down into the hot water, I’d always liked it when he did that. “Annie, at the wedding...I never should have let you go home.”

  “You think you should have driven me straight off to therapy?”

  “I should have taken you back to mine,” Will said, deadly serious, “or off on your honeymoon, anything. I should have...” he sighed, “right from the start, the minute Stephen told me he was going to propose, I realised I’d just been waiting for you two to break up, so I could do what I should have done the first time we met.”

  I could feel it coming, the rest of this train wreck. Will would tell me he’d wanted to ask me out the moment we’d clapped eyes on each other (which was complete rubbish, he’d been incredibly high the first time we’d met, he’d thought I was Fanny Craddock) and I’d tell him that I had lusted after him for the entire first semester of uni (which was unfortunately true, even stoned off his face, Will was still a charmer). Then we’d get talking about love again, and before either of us knew it we’d be having it off (after he’d taken a short drive, and possibly faffed about with the reception desk at the hotel).

  But where would that leave us? After the chick-flick kiss, the gorgeous hotel sex and a couple of secret shags back at his place once the weekend was over, what would happen? Dorian would have his third attempt at marriage crumble around him, I’d feel incredibly guilty, and after a while...well, Will flirted with anything and everything female, and clearly neither of us were exactly emotionally mature. It was doomed to go down like the Titanic – romantic yes, but still sunk like half a brick in a septic tank.

  Dorian was the HMS Victory, regal, dependable and not about to send me crashing into the icy waters of despair.

  I knew I had to stop this right now, before we set off from Belfast (figuratively speaking), then there’d be no going back.

  “Thank you for the dress Will,” I said quietly, “I really wish I could come back to the café, but I can’t. I’m sure Yvonne wouldn’t mind filling in until you find someone new.”

  Will was quiet for a moment, and I knew what I’d just said was cold and sharp and pretty much the worst thing I’d ever done to him (including switching his stash of marijuana out for shag tobacco and oregano the week of our exams). But, then as now, it was for his own good.

  “I see,” he said, “and that’s what you want is it? For me to find someone else?”

  I caught hold of my tongue before it could say ‘No! No you idiot!’ and said, “Yes, I think that would be for the best,” instead.

  “Take care of yourself Annie. I hope New York works out for you,” he said, like I was an unusually chatty café punter, and not his oldest friend.

  “Take care...” I started, but he’d hung up.

  I closed my phone and looked at it before slinging it back into my bag. So that was it. The Titanic was sailing off without me. I’d lost my ticket to Leonardo DiCaprio in a card game at the last minute, and in a few days I’d be thanking God that I wasn’t going to go down with that particular ship.

  I dipped my head under the water. I really hoped that I would feel like I’d had a lucky escape, and soon, because right then I felt anything but lucky. My terrible paperback slipped off of the side of the bath and sank into the water, where it turned into a soggy wreck within moments.

  Typical.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Dorian called me from a taxi almost as soon as I’d finished drying my hair.

  “I’m on my way to the hotel,” he said, “are you feline-free?”

  I managed a smile, albeit a small one. “100% certified.”

  “I’m so sorry last night was a washout, we’ll have to make up the time somehow.”

  “Well, I’m going to quit my job as soon as I’m off the phone to you, so I’ll have today free.”

  “You mean you’re not committed to retail service for its own sake? You surprise me.”

  I laughed. “It’s true, sorry to say. Most shop-dollies are called by a higher power to serve their irritating fellow man – myself I was called by a man named Bruno kicking my door in for the sake of an ice sculpture repayment.” (I didn’t mention that Bruno had been the first of many dept collectors. He had also, incidentally, had the nicest manners).

  “There a great many good places to work in New York, I’m sure one of them will suit you.”

  “I hope so. It’d be good to find something better – like swabbing the NYC sewers with my tongue, or grooming the hobos.”

  “You’re completely serious about coming to live with me then? It wasn’t just a way of granting me my last earthly request?”

  “Of course I’m serious.” I’d just broken my best-friend’s heart hadn’t I? I was as serious as a snake bite on the scrotum.

  “Well, you can’t blame me for wanting to be sure – I have a history of misreading the level of commitment in women.”

  I huffed a laugh. “I married you, you silly man. I might as well try living with you.”

  “About that,” Dorian sounded slightly worried, “my apartment is...well, there are a few things I need to explain before you move in.”

  “OK, we’ll go through it nearer the time, yeah?” I said. I didn’t want to be snappy (especially after I’d nearly poisoned him with my cattiness already – budum chush!) but at the same time, talking about the move was just reminding me about Will. That was not something that I wanted.

  “Alright, I’m almost at the hotel anyway, just coming up on Churchill Bridge...bugger.”

  “What?”

  “Road works.”

  These were probably the same road works that had held my Dad’s car up when he was moving me into my university room. High-Vis jackets and cones were a permanent fixture of Bath, where nothing ever seemed to be finished, new development signs came and went as regularly as the busses didn’t, and water mains burst on Lower Bristol Road on any day ending in a ‘y’.

  “I’ll ring off, my battery’s dying anyway,” Dorian told me.

  “I’ll be dressed by the time you get here.”

  “Shame,” Dorian said, followed almost instantly by, “I’m not smooth enough to carry that off, am I?”

  “Smooth as Prince Phillip on rollerskates.”

  “So, not very?”

  “I didn’t want to say it.”

  Dorian chuckled. “Ten minutes.”

  “See you then.”

  I put down the phone and put my breakfast outfit back on, then picked my phone up and scrolled down to ‘Prick’ in my address book.

  Neil answered the phone straight away, like he’d been waiting to pounce all morning. He’d probably been champing at the H&M bit to drag me in for a disciplinary and maybe a bit of amateur water torture.

  Well, hard luck. I’d been fantasising about this day since my second day working at BHS, and all day, every day since then. Sometimes the fantasy varied. As I restocked shelves and dealt with customers, I’d dreamt of being wrongfully terminated, sexually harassed or injured by a falling mannequin (I’d have settled for being sexually harassed by a mannequin, back in the dark days of the January sales) – just so I could quit my job, guilt free and pay off my wedding debt with the generous settlement I’d be awarded. Sadly, I’d remained employed, unmolested and unharmed, despite feigning some very odd political loyalties, investing in a new bra, and liberally buttering one of the escalators just before closing (not something I’d recommend – very expensive to fix, and bound to attract at least one stray cat who will then refuse to be evicted from the lingerie department – a fairly hilarious location to see several senior team leaders crouching down and calling, ‘here pussy’).

  “Bea!” Neil thundered, (using my last name, clearly this was serious) “
Where the fuck are you? It’s three hours into your shift, you’re not here, Yvonne’s fucked off on sick pay for her ‘cramps’ and there’s a sale on in Homewares - I’m up to my ears in it, and head office just sent round a memo about possible store closures in our area. This is your job Annie, more importantly, it’s my job, and I’m not going to lose it just because you’re a flake with no sense of loyalty.”

  I decided to cut him off there, before he had a chance to draw breath and start over again (Neil never ended his bollockings, just stopped going round in circles and walked away).

  “Neil, uno momento. I just called to say – fuck you, fuck your job, and most importantly, fuck your attitude – you jumped up sliver of turd, for thinking that your wanky little management title gives you any right whatsoever to talk to me or anyone else the way you do. I hope you get tossed out on your fat arse, and end up stocking up at Iceland.”

  The line was completely silent, and I took a moment to collect my thoughts and reign in the ringing-throbbing in my ears. I’d wanted to shout at Neil since I’d met him, and I knew I might never get the chance to enjoy it so completely again. I wished I’d recorded it.

  “Also, your aftershave is toxic, it was me who nicked your phone and dropped it in that hole in the stockroom before the builders concreted over it, you overpaid me by fifty quid three weeks ago, that memo you got back in February about the Luau themed casual Friday was from me, and...” I paused, trying to remember all the things I’d done that I couldn’t bear not taking credit for any longer, “it was me who rearranged all the men’s department mannequins to make it look like they were gangbanging that plaster reindeer at Christmas.”

  OK, so Yvonne had helped (and drawn on their porno-staches) but she still had to work there.

  “What...the HELL ARE YOU-”

  “Catch you later fish-eyes,” I said, and snapped the phone closed.