It's Got To Be Perfect

by Claire Allan

  Fionn nodded slowly and sadly. “And the thing is, I don’t know what to do about it. If I do nothing, I have a notion that Rebecca will worm her way back into Alex’s affections, but if I make a song and dance about it, I’m not sure Alex won’t jump to her defence. After all, she is the mother of his child.”

  “But that’s all she is,” I replied.

  “It’s a pretty big deal.”

  “You’re the woman he wants to marry. He never asked her, did he? In fact, they were never really, truly together – not properly. And, yes, they have a daughter together and fair play to him for being in her life so much but he does not love Rebecca.”

  “I’m starting to think that doesn’t matter. Emma is his priority. He has made that perfectly clear and I’m hardly in a position to tell him I’m more important than his own flesh and blood.”

  I could see where Fionn was coming from. And I didn’t have the answers. If I did, I would have willingly handed over my sage advice – but who was I to advise anyone on anything? I hadn’t exactly made a roaring success of my own personal affairs. I had a Life Plan in tatters, a wasted relationship with an egotistical chef and, it would seem, a new staring role as a fuck-buddy in a virtual stranger’s life.

  “I don’t know the answers,” I told Fionn, “But you will get through this. You and Alex were meant to be together. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a sickeningly perfect couple as the pair of you. Have faith, okay? We’ll work it out. I promise.”

  11

  There was no booty call that night. In fact, there wasn’t so much as a flirty text or a poke on Facebook. There was no word at all from Ant. I felt smug about that for all of about five minutes until I realised that I couldn’t really boast to Fionn about it. Sure there had been no booty call – initially, in my mind, blowing the theory out of the water that he was simply using for me for sex. But then, it dawned on me, there had been no call at all. Nothing. No lazy Sunday-evening blether on the phone.

  I wanted to send him a text but didn’t want to appear desperate. My phone remained silent apart from one message from Pearse saying he had a box of my things he wanted to drop round at my earliest convenience, or if I wished I could collect them from Manna.

  I thought about the latter suggestion for all of about three seconds before I dismissed it as a very bad idea indeed. I could deal with splitting with Pearse. I could deal with our life together being over. But I simply could not be coping with the notion of making the Walk of Shame across the floor of the restaurant with my toothbrush, an Abba CD and a selection of clean underwear in a cardboard box for anyone to see. Especially not after our last encounter. God knows what other humiliations he would have in store for me. People were always looking to see what Pearse was up to and that would be scandal in the extreme for the local gossip-mongers. It would look like he was packing me off, rather than the other way around, and I would have to fight the urge to tell everyone – in a loud voice – that it was me who broke up with him and that I had been having it away with an exceptionally virile Donegal man. On reflection, I realised that particular plan of attack might not paint me in the best light so I decided against the whole idea and sent a quick text message back saying I would check my diary and suggest a suitable evening for him to call over to my place. I had nothing more exciting planned than washing my hair but I couldn’t have him knowing that.

  So I washed my hair, and had a soak in the bath, with the phone in easy reach, and then I took to my bed like a lovelorn lady on the brink of death from self-pity and ate my Maltesers in record time.

  I should have put that in the Life Plan, I thought wryly: Breaking the World Record for the Fastest Consumption of a Family Bag of Maltesers. I would have achieved that for sure. I could see the entry now. Me, bloated, chocolate-stained, looking as if I might actually explode but with a smug smile on my face.

  Lifting my Life Plan out from its sad little resting place under my chest of drawers, I decided to read through it once more. It was a bit pointless really. I knew every page in great detail. I could recite the longer passages by heart if necessary.

  I remembered when I had made each entry – how during one particularly anally retentive phase I would get ridiculously excited if I saw something which would look good in the book, and rush home to get my glue-gun out.

  I remembered sitting and writing down my hopes and dreams – as if writing it all out would make it real. I was making my very own catalogue for life. My personal Argos book. Now, if only achieving what I wanted was as simple as writing a few digits down on a slip of paper with an eeny-teeny pen and handing it to a cashier . . .

  “White wedding, house in the country and three children?” the cashier would ask.

  “Yes, yes,” I would nod, adding a pack of batteries to my order at the last moment.

  “Will that be all?” she would enquire.

  “That’s all for now,” I’d smile, handing over my credit card, and then I’d wait for my order to arrive at my collection point.

  I didn’t know where Ant was going to slot into my perfectly planned life. I didn’t even know if he would. Surely it wasn’t a good sign that he hadn’t phoned that evening? We had spent the last two nights lost in each other – you’d have at least thought he would have phoned to see how I was.

  Does that make me sound stalkerish? Because I did start to think that I was perhaps obsessing about it a little too much. I had spent fifteen minutes earlier that evening Googling his name – but all I could find was a picture of him at some corporate do, which ironically enough had been held at Manna.

  I would have phoned Fionn just to discuss in intimate detail if I was indeed obsessing about it a little too much but I was aware she was dealing with Rebecca-gate at present and with bedtime approaching she would be busy enough discovering whether or not she was still on the proverbial Naughty Step. The last thing she really needed was me bending her ear once again.

  The only other option was that I phone my sister, Darcy (also named after a John Denver song) – but as I had yet to tell her about the big split with Pearse I didn’t think she would be particularly in the mood for listening to me wax lyrical about the new man in my life (who might, or might not, simply be using me for sex).

  Sighing, I slipped between the sheets, imagining my dream wedding dress, and went to sleep.

  Of course I didn’t sleep particularly well. I blame the sugar rush from the Maltesers. At 4 a.m. I was sitting at my dining table Googling self-help books for hopeless cases like me. After spending £40 at Amazon and a further £150 on the Monsoon website ordering an amazingly beautiful dress which I planned to use as motivation to help me avoid any future Malteser binges, I crept back into bed and stared at the ceiling till six thirty.

  I got up and battered off a quick email to Darcy. Just a short one, pretending nothing at all was wrong and attaching a J-peg of the dress. She would tell me whether it was a fashion pass or fail.

  I got back into bed and then I fell asleep. And woke, with a start and a sense of impending doom, at 9.10 a.m.

  It was then I achieved my second Guinness World Record by managing to get dressed, get in the car and get to work by nine thirty.

  I may have looked rough and I may have had to bring my entire hoard of make-up with me for emergency repair work as soon as Bob stopped firing me dirty looks, but I had made it all the same. Just thirty minutes late. Which, in fairness, wasn’t at all bad for me on a Monday morning.

  “Traffic was a nightmare,” I declared loudly, walking into the office. “I think there was an accident on the bridge or something. I’ve been in my car since eight thirty!”

  Someone snorted but I ignored that as I took my seat and switched on my computer. I may well have been running late but I had a busy day ahead of me – phone-calls to be made, client meetings to hold, Bob to avoid at all costs etc. I was just internally telling myself what a brilliant PR guru I was when my email pinged to life with a message from Fionn. Glancing across the office at her
before clicking open, I saw that she looked even more tired and worn out than she had the previous day. It didn’t take a genius to work out that perhaps Rebecca-gate was still very much ongoing.

  “He slept in the spare room last night and left me a message saying we have to talk. I have a very bad feeling about this,”her email read and if I’m honest I had a very bad feeling about it too. “We need to talk,” four weeks before a wedding, was never a good thing. Especially when there was a cow-bag of an ex waiting in the wings and the normally very nice fiancé seemed to have morphed into a complete tit who was putting the supposed love of his life on the Naughty Step.

  Fionn looked pathetic. Her eyes were red-rimmed – which I could spot even from my vantage point across the office. There was a kingsize bar of chocolate on her desk which meant this was a major emergency. Fionn didn’t do chocolate. Not much anyway. She really was of the belief that, apart from the odd glass of wine and our sausage baps on a Sunday morning, her body was a temple. She was disgustingly disciplined with food so the kingsize chocolate sounded real warning bells with me.

  I was starting to realise that I needed to take action – and soon.

  “It will be okay,” I fibbed in my response. Truth was, I didn’t know what else to say apart from offering to accompany her on an FSB at ten thirty, by which stage I hoped to have formulated some sort of plan to help my friend out of her truly horrible situation.

  My options were, however, a little limited. I could hunt Rebecca down in the hospital and dangle her by her ankles from the top of the multi-story car park until she agreed to back off. I could take Emma hostage until both Rebecca and Alex realised they were acting like children and sorted it out. Or I could do the unthinkable (not that enacting an act of violence or kidnapping a child was exactly thinkable) and go behind my friend’s back and have a word with Alex myself.

  Such actions were surely against the Friendship Code? I was sure if there had been an eleventh commandment it would have been “Thou shalt not meddle in thy friend’s relationship”. But surely God would have realised my motives were pure and with the best interest of said friend at heart?

  Alex and I got along quite well. We had shared many a foursome night out together with Pearse and they were always quite jovial affairs. I had only once made a complete eejit of myself in front of him and that was when they got engaged and I drank just a little bit too much champagne and decided to tell the entire room of well-wishers just how much I loved them.

  Pearse had gone rather puce as I babbled on and he had stepped up, taken the glass off me and finished the speech on my behalf while I cried with emotion in a corner. To give him his due, Pearse was the consummate performer and of course the assembled masses were only too delighted to have a local celeb do the talking and not a drunken advertising sales rep. Pearse had said all the right things – even down to offering to bake the wedding cake – which reminded me that I really should check whether or not he was still going to do that. I could imagine his generosity of spirit might have waned as soon as we split and his invitation to said big do became null and void. He would probably tell me to stick my cup-cake tower where the sun doesn’t shine, but nonetheless I would have to bite the bullet and ask him anyway.

  So that left me three things to be getting on with that day – speaking with Alex, speaking with Pearse and convincing Fionn during our FSB to share some of that chocolate with me.

  The whole thing was, at least, distracting me from worrying about Ant. I mean I had barely thought about him at all – well, at least not in the last ten minutes.

  Work, it would seem, would have to sit on the back burner for that day. Sure I’d make a few calls, and I should still be able to make my four thirty appointment but the rest could wait. I was pretty sure Bob wouldn’t really mind . . .

  The ten thirty FSB went okay. Fionn seemed relatively calm. She said she had resigned herself to a life without Alex and was planning on selling her wedding dress on eBay. She would be keeping the pink shoes.

  I told her, as kindly and subtly as I could, that she would do no such thing – apart from keeping the pink shoes which she absolutely had to do because she would be marrying Alex. And I would be wearing the most gorgeous dress in the world ever when I was their bridesmaid.

  “I don’t want to take away from what you are going through,” I said as I took a Marlborough Light from my prop packet and pretended to light up, “but you are meant to be together and as God is my witness you will be.”

  I thought that sounded suitably reassuring and Fionn didn’t laugh, or cry, at my comforting words as we headed back to the office.

  12

  Alex worked as the manager of a local sofa workshop – you know the kind, permanent sale, half-price sofas, three years interest-free credit. He was very good at his job and knew absolutely everything there was to know about Italian leather which was, sadly for Fionn, not half as kinky as it sounded.

  Like Pearse, he and his company were represented by NorthStar. In fact, that was how he and Fionn had met. She had been out cold-calling round local businesses for new projects and their eyes had met over a three-piece recliner. She said he dazzled her straight away with his confident sales-patter, nicely fitted suit and sparkly blue eyes. He could have sold her anything, she said, and he must have felt the same because that month Fionn added his business to her ever-growing portfolio.

  They had their first date at Manna, but of course, and I managed to swing it so that they got the best table in the place and an upgrade on a bottle of wine to a bottle of the restaurant’s finest fizz. I had never seen Fionn so alive. She had been, she said, a month away from buying a couple of cats and officially resigning herself to being on the shelf forever. I told her she was ridiculous. Thirty-five wasn’t a bit old but a horrible part of me was already thinking of names for said cats.

  Fionn just never seemed like the settling-down type – not until she met Alex anyway and then it felt as if she was always meant to settle down and be a step-mammy. She even started talking about when they would have kids of their own. They wouldn’t be wasting any time, she said, not with her being on the cusp of thirty-eight when they married. She was, it had to be said, ridiculously happy.

  There was no way I was going to allow this to go wrong and that is how I found myself outside Sofas To Go at eleven thirty on a Monday morning. I had my clipboard and briefcase with me. I looked every ounce the professional PR rep. I had even managed to make a half-decent attempt at my make-up before leaving the office.

  Fionn, of course, had no idea that I was where I was. She would have forbidden me from getting involved, but she needed help and I was just the person to offer that help.

  Alex, his curly dark hair flopping seductively over his eyes in a Colin Farrell style, was flicking through a sample book of leather and fabrics when I arrived. He smiled when he saw me but that look was quickly replaced by a look of confusion. It was unheard of that I would visit him. Understandably Fionn usually took care of all his needs – professional and personal.

  “Is everything okay?” he asked. “Fionn, is she all right? Is something wrong, Annie?”

  Bless him. He looked deeply concerned. He looked very much like a man in love and certainly not like a man planning to feck off with his ex. Then again he didn’t look like a man who had sent his thirty-seven-year-old fiancée to the metaphorical Naughty Step for the last three nights.

  I had to take a deep breath and remind myself that, floppy Colin Farrell hair and concern for Fionn aside, he had been acting like a feckwit the last few days and I was here on a mission.

  “Fionn’s okay. Well, when I say ‘okay’ I mean she is stressed to the eyeballs and wondering if her wedding is going ahead, but physically, yes, she is okay.”

  He looked mildly stunned. A cross between a guilty man and a rabbit (an admittedly very handsome rabbit) stuck in the headlights.

  The showroom was relatively quiet and one of Alex’s sales assistants looked at us with a look of vague
amusement on her face.

  “Maybe we should talk about this in my office,” he said.

  I nodded. “Yes, maybe we should.” I followed him to the cosy back office, where I knew for a fact he had bonked my best friend on at least three occasions.

  I tried not to think about it as I sat down opposite him at his desk. I tried not to imagine him taking her over the photocopier/fax machine but you know it was a little like when someone tells you not to think about pink elephants and then all you can think about are pink flipping elephants – and in this case the elephants were bonking.

  “Annie, I don’t know really why you’re here, apart from the fact you seem like you’re pissed off about something . . .”

  “I’m not pissed off as much as worried,” I replied haughtily. “Fionn is going through the wringer and I know that this is probably not any of my business but she is my best friend and I’m worried about her. She’s convincing herself that you are putting Emma and Rebecca above her and while she knows that Emma will always be your number-one priority she is feeling pushed out by Emma’s mammy. She thinks Rebecca is pulling your strings, if truth be told, and I happen to agree with her. You need to put Fionn first, or at least second, just now and believe her when she tells you that she loves Emma and she loves you and she wants this to work.”

  I felt quite proud of my speech, even if I was turning a slight shade of blue by the time I’d finished it. I felt I had made my point, clearly, concisely, breathlessly and without making too much of a tit of myself.