The Plus One

by Sophia Money-Coutts

  Gavin, the IT worker from Norwich and part-time life model, was booked for the following morning. Hen activities are hellish too. The worst ones are the twee, Fifties housewife classes – macaroon-making, cocktail-making, fascinator-making. I hated macaroons. Silly dainty little almond pastries. Not a proper snack. They wouldn’t fill an anorexic mouse. So, if we had to do activities for Lex, I’d decided it would be a rude activity. Gavin was coming at 10 a.m. the following morning for two hours. A bit rude because it involved a penis, but also a bit cultural because we would be sitting drawing pictures with charcoal.

  I unpacked the Ocado bags while mulling this all over, and decided to go and pick my bed before everyone else arrived. There were four bedrooms, all doubles, and Cathy from the lettings agency had said she’d put up a camp bed to make nine. I absolutely was not going to end up in that camp bed, so I slung my bag on one side of a big double bed and looked out over the shoreline. It was gloomy outside. Grey clouds were squatting over the sea.

  I had another biscuit with a cup of tea downstairs and plotted. It was nearly six but I had ages because everyone else was getting the train from Liverpool Street and wouldn’t arrive for a couple of hours. I needed some fresh air, so decided to walk down to the shoreline and dip my toes in.

  It was a few hundred metres across the lawn and down a shingly bank covered in clumps of dried seaweed to the beach. Not a white sand, blue sea sort of beach. The sand was dark brown, the sea sludgy green. I took a photo anyway and sent it to Jasper. Brrrrrrrr, I wrote underneath the picture. I then threw my shoes up onto the shingle, rolled up my jeans, walked in up to my ankles and immediately lost all sensation in my feet. I’d never been one of those people who could jump into cold water. I took circa fifteen minutes to get into any swimming pool on holiday. First my feet, then my knees, then halfway up my thighs, then I’d put my hands in and wet my face, then I’d wade in until the water was around my bottom and my ovaries were leaping about inside me in horror at the cold, then to my belly button when, finally, I’d take a big breath and push the rest of myself underwater. Pathetic.

  I felt my phone buzz in my back pocket. Jasper. ‘Hello,’ I said, smiling into it.

  ‘You made it,’ he said.

  I looked out across the sea, my feet still stinging from the cold. ‘Yup, just about. Unloaded four million shopping bags. Got the wine in the fridge. Just tried to put my feet in the sea but it’s so cold I might have given myself frostbite.’

  ‘Don’t be a wimp. You wait until I push you into the lake at home.’

  ‘Urgh. Not a massive wild swimmer.’

  ‘Then we’ve found it.’

  ‘Found what?’

  ‘A reason I can’t possibly marry you.’

  ‘Ah. Sorry.’ I smiled into the phone again. ‘I don’t mind nice pools and nice seas. Nice, clear blue water where you can see your feet and nothing can attack you.’

  ‘Noted.’

  ‘Where are you anyway?’ I asked.

  ‘In the car. On my way home with Bovril sitting beside me. We’ll miss you this weekend.’

  ‘I’ll miss you too. I hope home’s OK.’

  ‘Oh, it’ll be fine. Bovril and I will amuse ourselves, won’t we, boy? Right, was just calling to check in, so you go and warm up and I’m going to put my foot down.’

  ‘OK. Drive safe. Love you.’

  ‘Love you back.’

  I hung up and slid my phone back in my pocket so I didn’t fumble and drop it in the sea. Then I looked out at the horizon again. I was still torn about whether or not to talk to Lex about Hamish. About the party. About the spanking. I hadn’t told anyone. Not even Joe. On the one hand, I was possibly the worst friend in the world if I didn’t mention it. On the other, how could I break it to her on her hen? But if not this weekend then when? It was getting closer and closer to the wedding.

  I went inside for a bath and an hour or so later was still thinking about the Hamish situation, but two glasses of wine down. I’d also called Mums, who was watching an old episode of Taggart with Sidney, spent half an hour trying to work out how to use the oven, kicked the oven, put the fish pies into the oven once I’d calmed down again and spoken to Sal, who said they were all in taxis from the station. I could hear them singing ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’ in the background.

  I was pouring a third glass of wine when headlights flashed through the kitchen window. The door banged open. Lex came through it first draped with a ‘bride-to-be’ sash and a pink tiara. She hugged me and hiccupped in my ear.

  ‘It’s worth getting married just for the hen.’ She hiccupped again as others appeared behind her.

  I knew Sal, obviously. I’d met two of Lex’s former work colleagues, Rachel and Laura. And I knew Lex’s lesbian cousin, Hattie. I’d first met Hattie when we were both seventeen and I’d been vaguely wondering if I was a lesbian too because I still hadn’t had sex with a boy, but then Hattie had explained what ‘scissoring’ was and I’d decided I definitely wasn’t.

  I’d met the others from time to time with Lex, they were mostly friends from her primary school. I’d been sending them increasingly threatening emails in the preceding weeks asking for their money. ‘Hi, guys.’ I lamely waved at them. One was called Alice, another was Beatrice. This left the one with pink hair, who I guessed was Lex’s pal from art college. Elisa.

  ‘Anyone want a glass of wine?’ I said.

  ‘Oh no, not for me, thanks,’ said the one I took to be Beatrice, patting her stomach. Oh yes, I remembered, Beatrice was pregnant. ‘Have you got any elderflower cordial?’

  ‘Ah, shit! No, sorry I don’t. But there’s Diet Coke?’

  Beatrice looked at me as if I’d just suggested eating her baby.

  ‘Oh no. No, thanks. I’ll just have water then.’

  ‘Okey-dokes,’ I replied cheerfully, ‘tap’s there. Go grab rooms, everyone, dinner’s nearly ready. Fish pie and peas.’

  ‘What kind of fish is in it?’ asked Beatrice. ‘I need to be careful about mercury poisoning.’

  Obviously, everyone was still in bed at ten o’clock the next morning when Gavin – the sometime IT worker, sometime life model – rang the doorbell. I pulled on a pair of tracksuit bottoms and ran downstairs.

  ‘You must be Gavin,’ I said, opening the door.

  Gavin was presumably a life model because he would never have made it as any other sort of model. He was small and thin, with a shaved head and thick glasses behind which he was squinting.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ I said. ‘Bit of a slow morning. Let me just go and hurry everyone up. Can I get you a coffee?’

  ‘Yeah, please. I’d love one. Black, two sugars. And where shall I go and get freshened up?’

  ‘Ah, ’course, go through the kitchen and the bathroom’s at the end.’

  I bolted upstairs and stuck my head into multiple bedrooms. ‘Get up, you lazy toads, the activity is kicking off. I’m making coffee.’

  Ten minutes later, everyone was more or less assembled on the sofas in the sitting room with coffee in one hand, croissants in the other. Apart from Alice, who had said she was so hungover she might die if she had to get out of bed. So I left a packet of Nurofen and another bottle of water on her bedside table.

  ‘Right then, ladies, where do you want me?’ Gavin appeared from the bathroom in a dressing gown. Coffee cups froze in mid-air. Sal sniggered.

  ‘Well, we thought in the middle might work,’ I said, gesturing at a chair in between the two sofas. I’d put a towel on the chair. I really couldn’t face any smearing on the upholstery.

  ‘Terrific,’ said Gavin, stepping carefully between the sofas, wafting a strong smell of Lynx as he went, which caught me right in the back of the throat and made Elisa cough.

  Chair reached, he undid his dressing gown cord. I glanced across the room at Beatrice, who was looking down determinedly and inspecting her nails. Lex and Sal were on the same sofa, but their eyes were focused on Gavin like lions at feeding time.

  Th
e dressing gown fell to the floor and another wave of Lynx drifted across the room. ‘Oh goodness,’ said Rachel, to my left, then, ‘Sorry. It’s just… quite early.’

  Gavin didn’t appear to notice because he was busy positioning himself. Quite odd to find yourself in a seaside cottage on a Saturday morning in June, eyeballing the freshly shaved scrotum of a stranger from Norwich.

  ‘Does this work for you, ladies?’ He was standing with one leg on the floor, one leg on the chair, arms suspended in the air as if he was pulling on a bow. He had a tattoo of an Alsatian on his left shoulder blade.

  ‘Mmm,’ murmured everyone vaguely. Lex and Sal were shaking with silent laughter.

  ‘Great, I’ll hold this for ten minutes and then I’ll do another one. Ready, steady, go.’

  Heads bowed down, everyone started sketching. I was crap at art at school. Mr Robertson, the art teacher, had once complimented me on my ‘excellent’ drawing of a rabbit.

  I’d looked at him coldly and replied: ‘It’s a horse.’

  Still, I thought, looking at the charcoal in my hand, how hard can a bottom be?

  ‘Time’s up,’ said Gavin ten minutes later, putting his leg down from the chair and stretching his arms into the air. ‘Show and tell. Everyone hold up their drawings so we can see.’

  ‘Here you go, Gavin,’ said Sal, holding her drawing in the air. It was a stick man with an enormous penis.

  ‘Very flattering,’ said Gavin. ‘I think you’ve captured me perfectly.’

  ‘Pols, what on earth is that?’ asked Sal.

  ‘Well,’ I said, peering over the top of my pad at the drawing, ‘I thought drawing a bottom would be relatively easy. Turns out it’s not.’ I’d seen finger-paintings stuck on fridges that were more accomplished than my study of Gavin’s bottom.

  After nearly two hours of drawing Gavin and several glasses of Buck’s Fizz, everyone had become friendly enough to take selfies with him. Then he put his clothes back on, wished Lex good luck and got back into his Corsa, tooting his horn as he drove back down the drive.

  ‘I thought he had quite a nice penis,’ said Rachel.

  ‘A bit squat,’ said Sal.

  ‘Blimey, Sal,’ I said. ‘If that’s squat then I’m terrified to know what your fiancé’s penis is like.’

  ‘I don’t like them shaved,’ announced Elisa.

  Alice appeared from upstairs.

  ‘Morning, babe. How you feeling?’ asked Lex.

  ‘Great,’ she said. ‘Completely fine. A few of those Nurofen and a couple of extra hours in bed and I’m mended.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Because we need to be in the pub for lunch in just under an hour.’

  The Cow and Fiddle was in the next-door village, a short but bracing walk along the beach. It was Jasper who’d told me to book it. His knowledge of country pubs was encyclopaedic. While everyone else murmured about showers and getting dressed, I texted him a photo of my best Gavin drawing, one where he’d been lying on the floor, head resting on his right hand, one knee bent in the air, his penis falling over his other thigh, dangling towards the carpet.

  ‘Not sure I’m ready for a walk,’ said Alice, peering through the windows just as it started raining.

  The Cow and Fiddle was the sort of pub that existed in Twenties Ireland. It was thatched on the outside and inside it smelled of old beer and stale cigarettes. Men who looked like they’d been alive since the Renaissance sat at the bar; a dog of indiscernible breed lay like a corpse underneath a stool beside it.

  Our table was in a corner, beside a window which looked out over the sea. ‘Everyone has to wear these,’ said Sal, handing out headbands which each had two small pink penises on springs attached to them. I put mine on and squinted at a cloudy Guinness mirror next to the window. The penises waggled when I moved my head.

  ‘No excuses, Bea, it’s like Christmas hats. Everyone has to wear them. And drink out of these.’ Sal reached back into her bag and pulled out a fistful of neon straws with a small plastic penis attached to the top, so you had to drink through a veiny plastic knob.

  ‘Happy hen, Lex,’ I said, waggling my head at her.

  ‘And, you have to put on this…’ Sal leant over the table and handed Lex an L-plate badge.

  ‘Can we start with three bottles of Prosecco?’ said Sal, to a waiter who’d appeared at the table.

  ‘And a big jug of tap water please,’ said Alice. ‘And some bread?’

  ‘Guys,’ said Lex, at the head of the table, ‘can I just say before we all get too pissed…’

  ‘Again,’ said Laura.

  ‘Yes, again,’ said Lex. ‘But I just want to say how happy it makes me that you’re all here. Honestly, if you’d said to me a year ago that we’d be sitting in a pub in Norfolk on my hen because I was getting married to Hamish I would have suggested you need sectioning. And yet here we are, doing exactly that. And I’m just so, so happy.’

  ‘You next, Pols,’ said Sal, digging an elbow into my side.

  ‘Yes, Polly Spencer,’ said Lex, loudly. ‘This time next year I want to be on your hen.’

  I rolled my eyes. ‘Guys.’

  ‘Or even earlier, to be honest,’ Lex ploughed on. ‘How long have you been going out now?’

  ‘Erm, about four months,’ I said, aware that everyone around the table was listening. ‘So I think we’re possibly getting a bit ahead of ourselves.’

  ‘A September wedding at Castle Montgomery would be amazing,’ said Lex.

  ‘Sure, no problem,’ I said, fumbling to check my phone in case it had somehow accidentally dialled Jasper in my bag and he was overhearing this.

  ‘Would you get married at Castle Montgomery then, not where you grew up?’ said Sal.

  ‘Guys, honestly, this is a bit mad. I don’t know. Where are our drinks?’

  ‘You’re going to marry Jasper and you’re going to be a duchess,’ said Lex. ‘Can I please come and stay when you live in a castle? For weekends?’

  ‘Sure, and we should get Gavin around,’ I said, waving at the waiter.

  ‘Well, all I’m saying is I’m keeping my fingers firmly crossed,’ said Lex, holding out an empty glass for the waiter. She smiled at me and made an excited squeal.

  We managed to drink seven bottles of Prosecco at the pub, which was when Lex started demanding Espresso Martinis.

  ‘Is that like a coffee? Like a white coffee?’ the waiter asked, looking confused, so we decided to get the bill and go back to the house before it was dark and someone drowned in the sea on the walk home.

  Not that the walk did much to sober anyone up. Sal and I walked into the kitchen singing ‘It’s Raining Men’ and immediately ransacked the cupboards, hunting for the crisps.

  ‘What time is it?’ I asked, squinting at the kitchen clock. ‘Five-thirty. And let’s say we want to sit for supper at eight-thirty. Which means putting the lasagne in at eight, which means starting Mr and Mrs at about seven-ish, right?’

  ‘Mmmm.’ Sal nodded her head through a mouthful of crisps.

  ‘Everyone back downstairs at seven for drinks and games,’ I bellowed through the house, reflecting, for the 392nd time, how exhausting hen weekends were. If I ever got married, I wanted it to be a piss-up in the Italian in Battersea.

  I checked my phone. No word from Jasper, which was fine, I told myself, because I wasn’t becoming that kind of girlfriend. I was on a hen, having a good time without him. No need for us to be in constant communication. Although I’d sent him a picture of my drawing earlier and he’d definitely seen it because the WhatsApp ticks had gone blue.

  Mr and Mrs has got high-tech in recent years. It is no longer acceptable to send the groom a few questions which he can reply to on email. Instead, one or more of the hens must find a mutually convenient time with the groom and film his answers on camera. Sometimes the groom will be forced to wear fancy dress for this ordeal. Sometimes he will be made to drink shots while he answers. No one seems to think it odd that a friend of the bride has met up wit
h her groom to ask him about the couple’s sexual preferences.

  Sal filmed Hamish in his office a couple of weeks before the hen. She’d then done some fancy editing so that, by the time everyone was on the sofas, Moscow Mules in hand, we were gazing at a TV screen which said: ‘Mr and Mrs Wellington’.

  ‘Ready?’ said Sal.

  Everyone cheered. Hamish appeared on the screen behind what I assumed was his desk. No fancy dress, he was wearing a suit. He waved nervously at the camera. ‘Hi, girls.’

  ‘Hi, Hamish,’ chorused everyone back.

  The first question appeared on the screen, underneath Hamish. ‘What did Lex wear on your first date?’ Sal paused the video.

  ‘Easy,’ said Lex. ‘Black Maje dress with my leather jacket and silver espadrilles. It was summer. We went to a pub by the river.’

  Sal pressed play again. ‘Oh God,’ said Hamish, frowning back at us. ‘I know it was at the Blue Anchor in Hammersmith.’ He sat back in his chair and looked stricken. ‘Christ… Was it… erm… I’m going to guess jeans and a pair of heels. And maybe some sort of top?’

  ‘Pathetic,’ said Lex, shaking her head.

  ‘First shot then, Lex,’ said Sal, pushing a small glass of vodka towards her.

  The second question appeared on the screen: ‘When did you and Lex first say you loved one another?’

  ‘Oh, that’s easy too,’ said Lex. ‘We went away after we’d been going out for about a month, to the New Forest.’

  Sal pressed play. ‘Erm. God. Erm.’ Hamish looked panicked again. ‘Erm.’ He scratched his chin. ‘I remember. It was a Sunday morning, and we were in bed at home and she brought me a coffee in bed. And I just thought, Yeah, I can do this.’ Sal pressed pause again.

  ‘Total crap,’ said Lex. ‘It was at The Pig. A hundred per cent. We were lying in bed there. He’s an idiot.’