‘You’ve got to have a stripper, though,’ my best friend Barry said, shoving another handful of chips in his gob.
‘I don’t think I have to, though, do I? I mean, what if Emma finds out?’ I asked, making him pause before he was able to shovel yet another mouthful of Terry’s finest in.
‘Don’t you think she’ll be having some big muscly guy taking his kit off in front of her and waving his schlong in her face on her hen night, then?’ he said, dangling his jumbo sausage in front of his own face as a prop, before taking a bite of it then shuddering when he realised what he’d made himself look like.
‘It’d be a bit pointless, mate. She wouldn’t see it, would she? She’s blind, remember?’ I told him.
‘How could I forget? I helped you fool her into thinking you were, too,’ he told me.
‘So did I,’ Terry shouted out from over the counter. I knew it was a bad idea to eat our food ‘in’. Terry’s always getting involved in other people’s business, he’s never changed.
Barry and I moved our heads closer together and carried on the conversation.
‘Do you think it’ll be a more touchy feely affair, then?’ Barry asked, dropping his sausage and grabbing the air in front of him with both hands.
‘Oh, that’s funny, isn’t it. I suppose you’ll be going on stage next, making the masses laugh? Anyway, you were miming breast-groping then; she’s not having any stripper, and even if she did, it wouldn’t be a female one.’
‘Oh, I know that,’ he confirmed, picking up his sausage again.
‘You know what, Barry ...’
‘Oh, will you stop your moaning, it was a joke. All I’m trying to say is that it’s 2014. Everyone has strippers for their stag or hen nights, it’s the done thing. No one cares these days,’ Barry reasoned.
‘I don’t think Emma would like me having one, that’s what I’m saying. Plus, I wouldn’t want to think about her being given a touchy feely dance by some six foot rugby player in the nude.’
‘Gotta be better than having one off you, I reckon she’d thank her lucky stars she’s blind if you started breaking out your moves. I remember how you used to move on the dance floor. It was like a cross between jogging on the spot and someone having some kind of arthritic flare up.’
‘I’ll have you know, I looked good,’ I said. ‘And anyway, you were no better, I remember you getting dragged out that club in Coventry after trying to impress the locals with your caterpillar.’
‘They were impressed, it was them fascist bouncers that didn’t like it. I was showing them up for the robots they were, that’s why they dragged me out before I could even get up and apologise for kicking that woman in the face. I was too passionate, that was my problem.’
‘You were too pissed, that was your problem.’
‘What were we talking about?’ Barry said, having found himself back in the room after a mental trip to Coventry.
‘My stag night – you’re supposed to be organising it,’ I reminded him.
‘Oh, yeah, I have. We’ll be going paintballing with Terry, then fish and chips, then off out into town for a good old fashioned knees up, with a stripper thrown in somewhere along the way for a treat.’
‘I keep telling you, I don’t want a stripper,’ I reminded Barry.
‘Oh. OK, we won’t have a stripper,’ Barry said, doing one of his over-acted winks.
‘No, seriously, I don’t want one!’
‘OK, no stripper,’ he said, doing another wink. It was pointless trying to talk to him. I decided that I’d send him a text later, from home, explaining that it wasn’t fair on Emma for me to be enjoying a stripper when she couldn’t and that I wouldn’t be paying for it out of the stag fund that I’d agreed to let Barry control.
I still don’t think I was out of line in vetoing the stripper. It had only been a year since I’d come clean to Emma and told her I’d been lying and pretending I was blind. Sure, we knew each other pretty well these days, but in the face of everything I’d been through in order to find someone that was willing to marry me, I didn’t think it was worth taking even the slightest chance of messing things up.
Before we left Terry alone to harass his normal customers for the evening, we needed to forget the banter and get on with the planning. Barry shared the list of people he’d thought of inviting along.
‘So, we’ve got: me, you, Terry, Boris and Jerry. That’s about it on the list of your friends. Shall I add my own friends or are you happy with the low numbers?’ he said.
I laughed this off, but regardless of however brutal Barry was being, he had a point. Did I want that few on my stag night or did I want something altogether more extravagant? After all, I had my mother’s money and it wouldn’t be a problem if I did choose to have a bigger affair.
I thought about it and decided that I was more than happy to only have close friends there. I didn’t need to fill my life with any more of Barry’s weird manga cartoon friends. They were just too weird.
‘So, just the small party, then. That’s OK, more stripper for all of us,' Barry concluded, then had a thought. ‘Hang on, what about Jerry? He’s not going to be interested in a female stripper, is he? I’m not ordering a bloke in just for him, I refuse,’ he told me, throwing his pen on the table and crossing his arms like he thought I might force him to actually hire a male stripper on my own stag night, just to keep the one gay bloke there happy. Although I did keep the idea in mind for later, should I feel the need to really upset him.
‘I should think seeing as we’re not having any kind of stripper it won’t matter anyway,’ I told Barry, reminding him what I’d been telling him for the last few weeks.
‘Can I have Jerry’s number?’ Barry asked immediately. I knew his plan, he was the only one thick enough to think that I didn’t.
‘What for?’
‘I need to check his size for the T-shirts, we’re all going to be wearing them. Here, look, this is the picture I’ve had made for the back,’ he said, getting out his iPhone and thrusting it in front of me.
‘Jesus Christ, where did you get that? It’s horrendous.’
‘It’s from when we went on that holiday to Greece in 1999, remember?’ Barry said, looking at the picture like I should.
‘I remember the holiday, I don’t remember that picture, but why would I? I was passed out. I remember scrubbing off the beard you’d drawn on me, though.’
‘Just be pleased I didn’t remove your eyebrows,’ he said, giving me a nod.
I remembered the holiday well. I still can’t stand the feel of wire wool on my skin. It was our first lads' holiday, although I think ‘lads’ normally means more than two; nevertheless, two of us there were and we did have a good time. Barry still claims he had some other friends with him when he drew the beard on me. He didn’t see them afterwards on any of the other nights out we had, though, and his story was patchy to say the least. He’d probably just got bored, as that particular night was the night of my nineteenth birthday and all the bars and pubs that we went to insisted on giving me free shots, and no matter how much they were watered down, the sheer number of them and the willingness of the reps to force them down my throat was too much for me. The last thing I remember is being involved in a ‘drink a yard of ale’ competition, standing behind the bar, wearing an apron with a fake pair of tits on it. I did manage to get it down me, but it all came straight up again. I’d have won if it hadn’t been for the projectile vomiting.
‘I am pleased, but I’m not sure they’d make this photo any worse than it is. You could have taken it when I had some clothes on,’ I said, bringing myself back to the here and now.
‘I could have put this one on there,’ Barry said, pulling out a photocopy of an old Polaroid of me when I was four, standing up in the bath and weeing onto the floor. I remembered it well, it was taken by my father before he left us to it. Barry must have been going through my things at Mother's when we were cleaning up.
‘I’m not sure I can pick out the worst of the two, th
ey’re both pretty bad. Do we really need T-shirts?’ I asked.
‘Of course, how else will people know you’re the groom? Well, apart from the hat, but that just complements the T-shirt. They’re going to be proper Fruit of the Loom shirts, nice ones, so don’t worry,’ he assured me.
‘I know, I’m paying for them,’ I reminded Barry.
‘Well, your mum is.’
This was a point of Barry’s, he liked to call my inheritance 'Mum’s money'. Since she’d died and he’d helped get the carer that’d pushed her down the stairs sued, along with the company who employed someone with no qualifications, Barry had been much more content with himself. He used to see my mother as his own mother, or at least the closest to it that he’d ever had.
We were both in the position of being thirty with enough money to live on for the rest of our lives. Barry’s came from Social Services, through an abuse case that we weren’t allowed to talk about, and mine came from inheritance, with more on the way from the care company. I don’t think Barry meant any harm by calling it 'Mum’s money', it was just his way of placing where he would be getting the money from. I’ve never been good with money, so with the old house sold and the rest of the estate in cash, I’d opted for a trust fund which Barry controlled and out of which he gave me enough to live on.
When the time was right, I’d move out of my house and in with Emma. We'd decided that I’d only move in permanently once we were married, although it didn’t stop us staying with each other a lot of the time.
Terry came over and started cleaning away the plastic trays. He was excited that he was getting to take us paintballing. He even had a little pistol paintball gun underneath his white apron. I’m not sure how safe it was for a chip shop proprietor to be carrying live paint rounds when dealing with food, but once he’d passed the tray over the counter to the assistant he was employing that week (they all seem to bore quickly of his stories and leave within a week or two) he pulled it out and showed us. It was a funny shape, thin at the trigger end and getting wider at the end the balls came out of.
‘It looks like a cock,’ Barry observed, turning Terry’s smile upside down.
‘It’s not a cock, it’s a gun,’ Terry confirmed, looking to regain his self-respect in the eyes of Barry. It was a non-starter, I don’t know why he even continued the conversation.
‘I know. But it looks like one,’ Barry said, not giving up.
‘You should be nicer to me, I’m the one sorting this all out; if it wasn’t for me you’d still be staring at the noticeboard looking for something for us all to do,’ Terry said, stopping short of putting his bottom lip out.
‘There’s only two things on your noticeboard. One is paintballing and the other is the failed campaign you tried to start last year to stop the bus stop being planted right outside your shop, and it’s still only got your signature on,’ Barry argued back.
Terry and Barry can argue. This is what it’s like when you bring your friends together. If I’ve learnt one thing over the last year, it’s that just because you like someone, it doesn’t mean your friends will feel the same way. It’s funny, me and Barry have known each other for most of our lives and I’ve known Terry for as long as I’ve been old enough to carry enough cash to buy a portion of cod and chips. I'd never really liked Terry that much before, I’d always found him to be a bit of a pain in the arse, but when he gave my other friend, Boris, a job after he lost his job as a taxi driver, I saw that he wasn’t too bad after all. Barry wasn’t of the same thinking, though. Terry was the local sad act in Barry's eyes and there wasn’t much that would convince him otherwise.
Terry and Boris also bickered, although in theory they should have got on perfectly. Unfortunately Boris had a different opinion on health and safety to the rest of the world and thought nothing of drinking vodka while in control of all amounts of hot things. To be fair to Terry, he couldn’t keep him on past the incident of a can of coke being thrown in the deep fat fryer ‘to see if it popped’. That was the line that Boris crossed. Terry said he’d actually found the pickled eggs and pies that Boris had dipped in batter and chucked in fairly funny, but the coke exploded and covered the shop in some weird sticky oil/coke mixture. It was a good job it was before they opened one lunchtime or customers could have been treated to a face full of the delights of Boris’s cooking. Boris was an idiot, he’d lost himself a lifetime of free food for the sake of a silly little experiment. Still ,he was still a regular in the shop and Terry didn’t mind, as Boris had the uncanny ability to be able to listen to Terry’s stories without getting bored. I suspect he is able to zone out easier than most.
However, I digress. I’d got two or three close friends and the dynamics of the group wasn’t good. In fact, I was dreading spending the weekend with them.
‘So, I sorted out the paintballing and you should be grateful. If it wasn’t for me you’d all be going on one of those kids' days that the guys dressed in camouflage sell in the shopping centre. Just the fact they’re wearing army fatigues in a mainly white building should tell you all you need to know about their knowledge on the subject. The one we’re going on is excellent. I’ve tested it for you,’ Terry told us, diverting the conversation away from his substandard noticeboard.
‘I’m still not sure a day is enough,’ Barry said, disregarding Terry’s comment completely. ‘I think we should go for a proper weekend, like every other normal male in the country does. I really can’t see what your problem is with a weekend. It’ll be great. At least we’d have time to relax and have a couple of drinks in between activities.’
‘Just because,’ I told him, not wanting to be drawn any further into the argument. I’d made my mind up and that was that, I didn’t want to be on a God-awful weekend away with people that didn’t like each other.
‘Just because, you’re a bender.’
‘Oh, very mature. Very mature indeed. Well done, you’ve convinced me now. Calling me childish names has decided it. We’ll go for the weekend.’
‘Nice one, I’ll book it up then,’ Barry said, standing up. ‘Terry, slight change of plan. I’ll be in during the week to let you know if we’re still going to your field for the paintballing or if it’s at another one. And you’ll need cover for the shop,’ he shouted, as he almost ran out of the chippy. He was just being an arse, though, as he raised his voice higher than mine so Terry couldn’t hear me complaining.
It wasn’t until the next day when I got a text from him saying he’d booked us a minibus for the same weekend as Emma’s hen do that I realised that he’d actually been enough of a dick to actually go and book somewhere. He, of course, used the stag fund. If there’s one thing he knew for sure it's that I wouldn’t want to lose the deposit money for four people.
I decided the only thing that it was in my power to do was give him the silent treatment, so I did that for a couple of hours before breaking and texting back to ask him where it was he’d booked it for.
‘It’s a surprise, trust your best man, he has your BEST interests at heart’ was the only response I could get out of him. I warned him that Emma wouldn’t be happy with him, but he called my bluff and lay down the ace card by informing me that he’d already run it by Emma via Jerry.
It was my night off from seeing Emma that night, so Boris came round after work. As I say, Boris had recently lost his job as a taxi driver, before losing it as a chip fryer. He’s pretty much an alcoholic, but as he sees it, he’s Russian and allowed to be. Lately he’d been working in a kitchen, just doing some washing up and trying to keep out the way of his wife as much as possible. Since the time he stole the family dog to lend to me, during ‘the period of dishonesty’ as Emma and I have come to call it, things had been pretty terrible for Boris at home. His wife, Yurtka, was stronger than any man I’ve ever had the pleasure of being punched in the face by, and nasty with it. I knew why Boris flinched whenever you walked past him or reached up to move your hair from your eyes, he was a nervous wreck. Said he couldn’t leave her,
though, due to having children with her. I suspect it was more about being scared she’d give him one more final beating if she ever caught up with him again.
‘A weekend away sounds perfect to Boris,’ he slurred. Oh, yeah, Boris had started talking about himself in the third person.
‘I know it does to you, but you’ll be luckily if you remember more than a few hours of the whole weekend. I’ll have it imprinted on my brain, unable to cleanse it away, for years to come.’
‘It sound to Boris that you don’t want to go,’ he told me, underlining my point about his short memory.
'I’ve been telling you for weeks that I didn’t want to go for a weekend, we even agreed you could tell Yurtka that you were away for the weekend so you could stay here, instead. Can’t you remember any of those conversations?’
‘About what?’ he asked, swigging the final dregs of wine from the bottle he’d brought with him. It was no good talking to Boris while he was this drunk. He just needed to get home and get some sleep. The new kitchen job was good for him, but I suspected they didn’t stocktake the cooking wine very often. I let him nod off in the chair. He’s never asleep long and it’s amazing what a little bit of sleep does for a bumbling idiot – he’s almost coherent when he wakes up.
When he woke up asking for a pint, I decided that I wouldn’t mind one either. Having learnt the hard way, I knew better than to take Boris to the pub, so I just gave him twenty quid and told him to get a few cans from the shop. He returned twenty minutes later with a half bottle of vodka, four cans of Special Brew and a couple of cans of Stella, which he handed to me. Sometimes I still wonder what I was thinking giving him the money … mind you, what else did I expect? At least he’d got me something I actually liked.
We talked over Barry’s plans for the stag night. It seemed I was the only one that didn’t want a whole weekend away, or a stripper. Boris was extremely clear on his position on the stripper. He made sure that I understood he most definitely wanted one and, if possible, a nice Russian one with ‘knockers her president would be proud of’.
I knew I needed to talk to Emma about the whole thing. I'd always had a tendency to keep things to myself (the fact I could see during the early stages of out relationship being a biggie). I just bottle it up and it’s never good for me. Talking about stuff just wasn’t something I was very good at.
That particular evening ended with Boris staggering about in the car park for an hour after he left my house and before he gave up and decided that he probably lived in the house that he had just come out of, and knocked back on the door. Before he passed out properly for the night, he underlined his need to have a weekend away from his wife and to see a stripper. Although his last words were:
‘Boris needs sleep, hmm, boobs.’
The Diary of an Expectant Father
Read an extract from the book:
~Introduction~
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