The Stag and Hen Weekend

by Mike Gayle

  All these years later, having moved homes and changed jobs several times, they were both back in the city in which they had met. Yaz was now a full-time mum to two small children living the suburban dream in a modern four-bedroom semi as close as humanly possible to the best primary school in the area and Helen, following a bad break-up, had devoted herself to her career and was now the presenter of her own pre-drivetime afternoon show, The Chat with Helen Richards, on BBC Radio Sherwood.

  ‘All packed?’ enquired Yaz.

  Helen looked down at the suitcase in front of her. ‘Nearly. A few last minute issues but nothing I can’t handle. How about you?’

  ‘Did it last night while the kids were asleep. I knew I’d never have the time today because mornings are always so mental around here. Plus I’m entertaining Simon’s mum as she’s babysitting for the weekend. I’m sure I’ll get to the hotel and find out that I’ve forgotten half the things I need but I can always buy what’s missing. After all, that’s why they invented shopping.’

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ said Helen. ‘How many times have we been away together and I’ve never once seen you forget a single thing? Who was it who pulled out a tube of superglue when Katie’s heel broke off while we were out for her birthday? You’re the living embodiment of “Be Prepared!” ‘

  ‘Was Simon on time to pick up Phil? I bet he wasn’t. I told him last night to fill up the car and go to the cash point and he was like “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” and then what’s the last thing he said to me this morning after sloping out of bed at half nine when I’d been up since six getting the kids ready for school, making their sandwiches, doing the school run and tidying up the spare bedroom for his Mum’s arrival? “Oh, I think I’m going to need to fill up the car and get some money out.” ‘ Yaz sighed. ‘They’d be lost without us wouldn’t they?’

  ‘Hopelessly so.’

  ‘Anyway, I was just calling to let you know that I got a text from Dee to say that she’s got this work thing she’s got to do and could we leave half an hour later than arranged. I was going to do a whole group text thing to let the rest of the girls know but I honestly couldn’t be bothered with all that typing.’

  Even though they would be seeing each other in an hour Helen and Yaz continued chatting because that was the relationship they had. They were friends who spoke about anything and everything, often two or three times a day, with no excuse needed and although on the surface Yaz appeared to be the more dominant of the two, scratch below the façade and it became apparent that theirs was a relationship of equals.

  They talked about the weekend and how much they were looking forward to it and Yaz confessed that she had even dreamt about it and was about to give Helen the full details when the conversation was cut short by the howling of a small boy, who had just banged his head on the table while playing armies with his older brother.

  Helen tossed the phone on the bed and returned to her suitcase dilemma before recalling that she was now in possession of an extra half-hour which might be put to best use by the drinking of a cup of tea and the eating of a consolatory milk chocolate Hobnob.

  As the kettle boiled and she hunted in the cupboard for her favourite mug she pondered the dirty jokes, filthy laughter, luminous cocktails and dancing on tables of past hen dos. How long since she had been on one? Years, surely. And there had been some good ones too. Yaz’s infamous weekend in Blackpool, Helen’s cousin Esme’s one in London that had ended with two girls being arrested for indecent exposure and not forgetting her first ever hen do when an old school friend had invited her to her last hurrah at the local Yates’s Wine Lodge in Doncaster when they were both nineteen. Good times each and every one. But perhaps unsurprisingly the one that she dwelt on longest was the worst one of her life: her own, some ten years earlier, for the wedding that never was.

  Helen and her former fiancé Aiden Reid had met at work. Although she had been attracted to him from the very first moment she had spotted him in the canteen at BBC Radio Merseyside, Helen never considered, even for a fleeting second, that any relationship that might result from their dating might end in a marriage proposal, because while Aiden was undoubtedly driven, charming and utterly beguiling, one thing of which she and even the most deluded of women would agree upon was that he was not exactly marriage material. A fact to which he attested.

  ‘Last night was a laugh wasn’t it?’ he told her on the doorstep as he prepared to leave after their first night together. ‘But you know I’m not looking for anything serious, don’t you?’

  Helen laughed. ‘Believe me Mr Deluded if I was in the market for something serious yours would be the last door that I would come knocking on.’

  ‘Because you don’t think I can do serious?’

  ‘No,’ said Helen, ‘because I know so.’

  And so even as they graduated from casual fun-filled fling to a state of existence where Aiden spent more nights at her home than he did in his own, Helen remained resolutely indifferent to any talk of the future. What they had was fun and light-hearted, which proved a great relief from their stressful day-to-day jobs as overworked production assistants regularly putting in thirteen-hour days, often six days a week in order to prove themselves and climb a little further up the career ladder.

  But, as is often the case in these situations, somewhere between Aiden’s increasingly playful daydreams (‘It’s such a shame you’re on the pill because you and me would make some right proper beautiful babies,’) and Helen’s emotional detachment (‘I don’t care if you’re here all the time I don’t want you leaving your stuff here,’) a compromise was struck, and the daydreams became less abstract, the emotions more engaged until finally they both realised that they had managed to somehow fall in love.

  The proposal came a month after they had officially moved in together. Helen and Aiden had spent a rare free weekend at a music festival in the Midlands with mutual friends and had been travelling in the car back to Liverpool. Without any sort of build up (they had just finished talking about how much they both hated having to leave the festival so much earlier than their friends) Aiden said: ‘You know what, Richards? You make me really happy. I think we should get hitched.’

  Without a single moment’s hesitation Helen surprised herself by saying: ‘You know what, Reid? I’ve been sort of thinking the same thing myself.’

  The plans for the wedding took on a life of their own and it seemed like every spare moment was taken up with making decisions about the logistics of various wedding venues and caterers and above all how best to curb the number of invitees without causing huge swathes of distant family and long lost friends irreparable offence. For Helen at the end of a long day at work, all this planning was exhausting and exasperating but she did it because she knew it would be worth it in order to create the perfect happy ending.

  The first sign that things weren’t quite going to plan came some six months after the proposal when Aiden came home from work one evening and informed her that he had been offered a job hosting an early evening music show for a BBC station in London.

  ‘How could you do this?’ yelled Helen who hadn’t even been aware that he had put together a showreel let alone that he had been actively auditioning for jobs outside of Liverpool. ‘We both agreed that we’d only ever look for jobs in the north-west.’

  ‘I know,’ replied Aiden. ‘Which is exactly the reason why I didn’t tell you. I never thought for a minute that I’d get the gig, but they loved me, Helen, they really loved me.’

  Aiden explained his actions away in the same manner that he always explained everything away when people didn’t agree with his methods, utilising a heady mixture of charm and bombast that enticed the listener into believing that to stand in his way was in effect to stand in the way of progress. ‘It’ll be the best thing that’s ever happened to us,’ he assured her. ‘I’ve got a feeling, Helen, a really good feeling that this will be the making of both our careers.’

  ‘And what about the wedding?’ asked Helen. ‘Do
you want to call it off?’

  ‘Of course I don’t,’ he replied. ‘It’s only a six-month contract. And I promise I’ll be home every weekend and we can do all the wedding stuff you like. But this is a chance of a lifetime! My own show! Who knows what it might lead to. It’s just too good to turn down.’

  Although she wasn’t entirely sure what Aiden’s move would mean for them (after all her job, home and the majority of her close friends were in Liverpool), Helen knew that she couldn’t stand in his way and so, despite her reservations, gave her blessing reciting to all who questioned her judgement the very arguments Aiden had used to convince her.

  For the first few months while Aiden was away Helen kept herself busy with work and the wedding, choosing to live only for the weekends when Aiden would return from London. But when his show began to take off and his initial six-month contract was extended indefinitely Helen found herself becoming less patient and more enraged until finally one evening during a telephone call he told her that he wouldn’t be able to make it up at the weekend because he was too tired.

  ‘Too tired?’ repeated Helen indignantly. ‘Have you any idea how tired I am? I work too! And I run this home and I’m planning this whole wedding by myself! How dare you tell me you’re too tired to see me!’

  Following the argument that ensued they didn’t speak for two whole weeks but even through the worst of it Helen continued to work on the wedding plans convinced that all would be fine. And it was, inasmuch as, unable to cope without him, she travelled to London, apologised for the part she had played in the argument and promised to be more supportive of his career in the future. Everything returned to normal, which is to say that for Aiden at least not a single thing changed.

  A week before the wedding Helen gathered together a group of her oldest, closest friends that had of course included Yaz, who was then working in marketing for a media company in Manchester, to a bar in Liverpool where they sipped cocktails and exchanged horror stories from their dating pasts, before moving on to a trendy restaurant near the quayside where well presented food was consumed and more cocktails imbibed before heading off to a nearby nightclub to dance until the early hours.

  As daylight broke across Merseyside and Helen along with Yaz and a couple of other friends who were staying with her for the weekend returned to her apartment, Helen’s phone rang.

  ‘Is this Helen?’ It was a female voice, young, undeniably sexy even though currently laced with stress. Helen confirmed her identity. ‘I think you should know that Aiden’s been cheating on you.’ Helen couldn’t speak. The woman carried on regardless. ‘He’s a bastard, an absolute bastard and he doesn’t deserve to be happy.’

  Any doubts as to the veracity of this life-shattering statement evaporated when Aiden called her less than a minute later. He lied of course, claiming she was the deranged ex-girlfriend of a mate and was trying to get back at her ex by being a right royal pain in the arse to all around her, but Helen didn’t buy it for a second. It wasn’t the words so much as the guilt in Aiden’s voice, which he seemed unable to hide almost as if on some unconscious level he actually wanted her to know the truth that he was too cowardly to say to her face.

  Eventually forced to confess, Aiden blamed everything from the pressure of work to Helen’s desire to stay in Liverpool for leading him astray, While Helen only blamed herself. As she contemplated the misery and embarrassment that lay before her she made two promises to herself: that she would never let her career backslide again for the sake of a man, and that if she fell in love again (which she couldn’t imagine) she would never, absolutely never, agree to get married.

  Leaving the indignities involved in having to cancel the wedding a week before it was due to her mum and Yaz, Helen managed to talk the travel agents where she had booked her honeymoon into allowing her to exchange it for eight nights at a spa hotel in Paxos, where she embarked on a daily routine of beauty treatments, sunbathing, swimming and drinking bottle after bottle of local wine to the point of unconsciousness.

  Returning home she cleared out anything that reminded her of Aiden, gave up alcohol, took up running and buried herself in her job, thinking nothing of working weekends and double shifts. Helen soon attracted the attention of upper management and received a promotion to producer of the mid-morning current affairs show, a post which she’d had her eye on since joining the station. Although thrilled to have reached her goal within weeks of starting the job, she found it still wasn’t quite enough. She wanted a bigger, better challenge, something that could completely absorb her and which she could mould as her own. It was only when she made these comments to Yaz late one Saturday evening when her friend had come to visit for the weekend that she finally realised what she wanted to be. ‘I want to be on air,’ she told Yaz, ‘I want to be a presenter on my own show.’

  Determined to make a point to whomever might care to observe it Helen devoted all her spare time to putting together an amazing showreel that highlighted both her natural skills as a broadcaster and those she had picked up working with the brightest and best at the various stations across the nation. On a sunny spring morning a few weeks later she crossed her fingers and sent the CDs she had prepared out to the ten best radio stations in the country.

  Within six months every one of them had rejected her. Refusing to give up, she continued sending out showreels until she had exhausted every option bar one.

  Disheartened, she knocked on the office door of her own station manager and after a brief conversation outlining her desires had handed him the CD convinced that as well as marking the end of her dreams it would also result in the erosion of any credibility that she had. Management were suspicious of production people who wanted to become on-air talent: they felt it showed a lack of commitment while revealing the full extent of their bloated egos.

  The following afternoon Helen got a call from the station manager’s PA asking her to come and see him. Prepared for the worst Helen found herself nervously reviewing the job ads at the back of Broadcast as she waited to be called in to his office. When he told her that he had liked her showreel so much that he was offering her a try out covering Kit Emmerly’s weekend overnight show the following month Helen convinced herself it was all an elaborate joke. It was only when she found herself covering Matthew Hutcherson’s early-evening phone-in the month after, and Jane Edwards’ mid-morning talkback show the month after that, that she finally accepted her dream was coming true right before her eyes. The day that they told her she had finally landed her own show, Call-back, with Helen Richards, an overnight show covering Monday to Thursday, she was on such a high that she didn’t come down for days.

  It was around this time, with a new job and the worst of what had been a monstrously unhappy year behind her, that Yaz chose to announce that she and Simon were getting married. And it was at her friend’s hastily thrown together engagement party that Helen encountered Phil Hudson for the first time and came to realise that the second of her vows made after splitting up with Aiden, might not be quite so easy to keep as the first.

  2.

  Meeting a potential life partner hadn’t even been on Helen’s agenda as she entered Simon and Yaz’s crowded living room clutching a plastic cup of red wine. She hoped to chew over old times with a few good friends and at worst she thought she might drink too much, talk about work a little too loudly and around midnight end up dancing and singing to I’m Every Woman. It was, then, very much to her surprise, when after three glasses of wine and an hour of room circulating she found herself being introduced to Phil, one of Simon’s friends, and thinking as his hand touched hers: “Hmm, he’s nice.”

  Phil was tall but not too tall. He had short black hair, dark brown eyes that seemed to radiate warmth and peeking out from underneath his hairline by his right temple was a tiny scar. He was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved black t-shirt, which was so tight across the shoulders that Helen was tempted to reach out and give the outline of each deltoid a prod with her index finger.

>   ‘Are you okay?’

  Helen blinked, aware that she had been away in her own private daydream. ‘Yes, yes. Sorry about that. I was away with the fairies.’

  ‘No problem,’ said Phil. ‘I just wanted to make sure that you weren’t drifting off into a diabetic coma. That would have been terrible.’

  ‘For me or for you?’

  Phil was horrified. ‘You’re not actually diabetic are you?’

  Helen shook her head and Phil wiped imaginary sweat from his brow.

  ‘I thought I’d really put my foot in it there.’

  ‘Don’t worry, there’s still plenty of time.’

  They continued talking, mainly about Simon and Yaz. Phil thought Yaz was the best thing that had ever happened to Simon and liked the way that she seemed to have calmed down the excesses of his youth. He usually saw them two or three times a year but wished he could see them more because although he had friends where he lived, none were as good as Simon.

  Phil revealed that he was the owner of Sharper Sounds, a high end TV and hi-fi shop in Derby. Helen deliberately played down her job’s glamorous side and focused on the hard work that she had to put in every day but she couldn’t help feeling a flush of pride when he appeared genuinely impressed, even asking her to send him a CD of her show to listen to in the car on his way to work. She took his address and promised that she would send him the disc first thing Monday morning, but even as she kissed him on the cheek as they parted, she knew it wasn’t going to happen. Nice as he seemed she wasn’t anywhere near ready to start dating again.