by Olivia Ryan
Today’s the Saturday morning, the week before my hen weekend. Matt leaves for Prague this evening. He’s gone into town to buy himself a couple of new T-shirts. Why do men leave everything to the last minute? I’ve had all my clothes sorted out for the hen weekend, the wedding reception and the honeymoon for about two or three months. I’ve come round to Mum’s to get away from the flat for a couple of hours, because all I can see while I’m there is Matt’s half-packed suitcase, and it’s making me crosser and crosser the more I look at it. I didn’t expect the whole gang to be round here: Auntie Joyce, Lisa and the kids. My brother-in-law Richard’s here too, but he’s outside doing something to Mum’s car.
‘He’s a good lad,’ says Mum, although the ‘lad’ is thirty-eight if he’s a day. ‘I’m sure there’s something wrong with the handbrake, but I’m afraid to take it to the garage. It’s so difficult when you’re a woman on your own.’
This is another common theme of Mum’s. How she’s stayed alive for the twenty-five years since the divorce must be a miracle. To listen to her, you’d think there was a dangerous wild beast lurking on every corner of every street, with its talons drawn ready to attack any lone woman venturing out of the safety of her home without a man on her arm.
‘Matt doesn’t know anything about cars,’ I say with a shrug. ‘I have to sort mine out myself.’
‘Richard would always help, if you have a problem,’ says Lisa, glowing in the reflected glory of her good lad.
‘It’s OK. I did that car maintenance course, didn’t I.’
‘Funny, isn’t it, Joyce,’ says Mum. ‘Funny how the kids do these things nowadays – girls doing car maintenance, boys cooking the dinners.’
‘We’re not exactly kids.’
‘And anyway,’ says Joyce, ‘it’s a positive thing, Marge. You don’t want your girls to be tied to the kitchen. What would be the point of giving them such a good education?’
Auntie Joyce and Uncle Ron have never had any children. I’ve never liked to ask the reason, but this is why she’s always taken such a lot of interest in Lisa and me growing up. She was only nine when Lisa was born, so she’s actually closer in age to us than she is to Mum. When I was a stroppy teenager, there were a lot of times I stormed out of the house after a row with Mum, and went to stay the night at Joyce’s house. She never took my side against Mum – just made me hot chocolate and listened to me.
‘We had a good education too,’ Mum points out. ‘But I didn’t expect to have a career and a family.’
‘Who’s talking about having a family?’
‘Well,’ Lisa looks at me pointedly. ‘Isn’t that why you’re getting married?’
‘What? No, it isn’t!’
I stare around the room. No one looks convinced. They’re all kind-of smirking to themselves as if they know perfectly well that I’m secretly planning a baby at this very minute, working out my fertile period so that I can go home and get one started as soon as possible.
‘That’s why we got married,’ says Lisa smugly. ‘We were ready to have children, and we didn’t want them to have different surnames and be called…’
‘Hang on, hang on! For a start I’m not ready to have kids! And for another thing it’s not like that these days, Lisa! Nobody bothers about…’
‘Well, I do,’ she says, protectively putting her arms around Charlie and Molly, who’ve both just trotted in, to the accompaniment of the closing music of a kids’ cartoon show on the TV in the other room.
Charlie and Molly are lovely kids. If I wanted kids, I’d want them to be clones of these two. Lisa’s a great mum. Like she’s great at everything.
‘But I don’t want kids,’ I mutter, half to myself. Not yet? Or not ever?
‘You’re thirty-one,’ Mum reminds me with great solemnity.
‘Thanks. I know.’
‘In my day, you would have been considered an elderly primigravida.’
‘Great. Thanks. I’m actually not any sort of gravida, elderly or otherwise. Matt and I haven’t even thought about having kids, OK?’
At this there’s a silence, broken only by Charlie asking for a drink and Molly going ‘Daddy gone? ’s Daddy gone? ’s Daddy gone?’ over and over.
‘I don’t mean we haven’t discussed it,’ I backtrack quickly. ‘Just that it hasn’t been high on the agenda… it hasn’t been an issue… it hasn’t been…’
Actually, we’ve barely spoken about it.
Any more than his bloody stag party.
‘So he’s off tonight, then, Katie?’ says Lisa as if I’ve spoken aloud.
‘Yes,’ I say, a bit curtly.
‘Ten days, eh? Blimey, you’re really letting him off the leash, aren’t you!’ she laughs.
There’s a trace of admiration in her voice. Am I a good girlfriend, then, for allowing my bloke to go off and bankrupt us just before the wedding? Like I had any choice in it?
‘In my day,’ says Mum, predictably, ‘the bridegroom just had a night out at his local pub. There wasn’t any money for jetting off on these separate holidays.’
Don’t worry about it. There isn’t now, either.
‘What about the bride?’ says Lisa. ‘Didn’t you have a hen night, Mum?’
‘Of course I did!’ She shrugs to herself and I wonder what exactly she’s remembering. How it felt to be happy, and in love with my dad, before it all started to go wrong?
‘We went down to Southend on the train,’ she says wistfully. ‘Four of us. We all worked together at the hospital. We got drunk and went on the Big Dipper. I was sick on the train home.’
‘Sounds lovely,’ I say.
‘It was,’ she retorts quite fiercely. ‘It was – because we didn’t expect too much.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘That’s the trouble, you see,’ she adds darkly as she picks up our mugs and takes them out to the kitchen. ‘That’s the trouble, nowadays.’
Lisa and I look at each other and smile.
But I don’t want to ask her what she thinks the trouble is. I don’t really want to dwell on trouble, this close to my wedding, thank you very much.
ABOUT HELEN
The flight takes off on time. I’m sitting in the middle seat of three, between Lisa and my friend Helen, and as we lift off the Stansted Airport tarmac a cheer goes up from the row behind us, where Emily’s sitting with our two other friends from Uni – Karen and Suze.
‘YEAH!! DUBLIN HERE WE COME!’ shouts Emily.
‘Watch out you Irish lads!’ adds Karen, and everyone starts laughing and cheering, even people further down the plane who don’t know us.
They might not know us, but they certainly know why we’re going to Dublin. Emily’s made sure of that. We’re all wearing bright pink T-shirts, with Katie’s Hen Party printed on the back. Mine also states in bold print (in case anyone had any doubt): BRIDE. Emily’s says CHIEF BRIDESMAID, Lisa’s says BRIDE’S SISTER and Mum’s says MOTHER OF THE BRIDE. Mum, sitting across the aisle from me with Auntie Joyce, has put her cardigan on over the top of her T-shirt so nobody can read it. Anyone would think she was ashamed of me!
‘You’re quiet,’ Helen says to me as the fasten seat belt signs are turned off and everyone bustles about, putting their seats back, their trays down, getting their magazines or books out and settling down for an hour before we start to descend again. ‘You OK?’
‘I’m fine.’ I flash her a grin. ‘Relaxing. Saving myself for tonight.’
‘Relax while you can, then,’ she says with a grimace. ‘Sounds like your mates have got a full programme of intoxication lined up for you.’
Helen’s a bit strange.
She’s the other fiction reviewer from Bookshelf. We split the fiction between us, right down the middle, the middle being a kind of cultural line. She takes the literary fiction, I take the chick lit. She deals with the crime, I deal with the romance. She reads serious, I read humorous. It works well. We don’t conflict with each other’s interests. And surprisingly we get on well tog
ether, too. Helen’s not like me at all. She’s forty, single, and determined to stay that way. She’s not gay, but she doesn’t like men either.
‘I don’t understand,’ she tells me sometimes, in tones of great exasperation, ‘why intelligent young women with university degrees, good careers and the world at their feet, should want to chuck everything out with the garbage as soon as some arrogant twat gets inside their knickers. It’s such a waste!’
‘But we can have both, can’t we? A career, a life of our own, and a man?’
‘Huh!’ she sniffs. The sniff speaks volumes. ‘Trust me, Kate, it just doesn’t happen. It doesn’t work out like that. You start living by your hormones, you sacrifice your own identity. Every time you fall in love, a few more brain cells die. Look at the heroines in the books you read. Do they strike you as being in full command of their senses?’
I laugh at her. She’s so intense, she’s funny.
‘Have you been in love?’ I ask her quietly as we speed across the Irish Sea. I can’t imagine her willingly shedding any of her own formidable brain cells. ‘Has there ever been anyone special?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she snorts dismissively. ‘I haven’t got the time, or the inclination. Men bring you down, Kate. Sooner or later – whatever you think, however perfect they seem at the beginning – they bring you down to their own level. “Would a lark tie itself to a snake?”’
It’s a quotation from a book she read last week. She told me at the time how impressed she was with it.
‘Not all men are snakes, surely,’ I smile.
‘“They slither in the dust,’ she continues. ‘They’d drag the poor lark along with them, breaking her wings. She’d never fly again.”’
‘Shit. Glad I’m not a lark,’ I say lightly, but she just shakes her head at me sadly. A lost cause.
Lisa’s looking out of the window, watching the clouds, listening to her MP3 player. She’s smiling to herself. I wonder if it’s her music making her smile, or her own thoughts. What’s she thinking about? Richard? Mr Wonderful? I have this private nickname for him – don’t laugh – I’d never tell her, of course – Rick the Perfect Prick. I can’t help it: he’s such a goody-goody, he irritates the shit out of me. She talks about him as if he was the last angel in heaven, delivered to her personally as a gift from the gods. They never argue. He washes up every evening, gets up to the children if they’re sick in the night, brings Lisa flowers for no reason at all, tells her he loves her even after six years of marriage. She says they’re ecstatically happy. Ecstatically! Says their sex life is fantastic, says she can’t wait for the kids to be in bed every night so they can get down to it. I should be pleased for her. Correction – I am pleased for her, of course – but I’m sorry; I just can’t see Perfect Prick in that light. It makes me cringe, to be honest. He might be very useful in terms of motor vehicle repairs, but I wouldn’t want him tinkering with my big end, not if he was the last man in the universe. Just as well we don’t all have the same taste in men, I suppose, or the human race would have died out almost overnight if Mrs Noah held fast to her underwear and said ‘Not tonight, Noah, and not ever again either, thank you very much, even if you are the only man on board.’
Helen’s reading a hardback called Solitaire. The cover’s black, with a single white rose in the very centre, beneath the title – the significance of which nobody could even begin to guess at, probably not even after they’ve read the entire book. Always presuming they could struggle through all of its six hundred and odd pages. Just looking at it makes me feel tired.
‘Good plot?’ I ask her, nevertheless. My own current paperback, the latest Ginny Ashcroft romp, is at the bottom of my suitcase. I don’t really know why I brought it. Get a life! said Lisa when she saw me sliding it into the case under my knickers and bras. This is your hen weekend! You are so NOT going to get time to read your bloody book!
‘The narrative is superb,’ says Helen, smiling, tearing her eyes away from it, closing the book with a brass paperclip-type bookmarker placed carefully over the edge of the page. ‘Durant manages to capture the taste of Paris café culture in the eighteen-sixties, the very essence of the move towards symbolism in literature as well as in art…’
Sometimes I think Helen and Greg would be perfectly suited, if only Helen didn’t hate all men. They could both put a slow reader off making the effort with literacy, for life, without even trying, despite the fact that they’re both passionate about books themselves. I can never quite work out how Helen manages to read a work of fiction as if it was a well-crafted instruction manual. Give her Bridget Jones’ Diary to read (not that she would, from choice), and she’d start taking it apart and talking about its social message and the author’s use of cliché and colloquialism and before you knew it, she’d have ruined the story for you. Sorry, but I had enough of the dissection of literature when I was in Uni. Now, I read books. I either like them or I don’t; I recommend them or I don’t. The Bookshelf customers know where they are with me. They read my reviews to help them decide which books to buy – and help them is what I do. I don’t bamboozle them with jargon.
‘A good yarn, then, yeah?’ I interrupt her, digging her in the ribs as she’s in full flow.
She’s used to this. She takes it in good part. It’s my little joke at both our expense – my admission of my intellectual inferiority; her admission of her tendency towards being anally retentive. She puts the book in the seat-back pocket and closes her eyes. I wonder if she’s taking a nap, but, with her eyes still closed, she says:
‘So this is it, then, Katie Halliday: your rite of passage.’
‘I guess so.’
‘Half a century ago we’d have been regaling you with old wives’ tales about your forthcoming nuptials. What to expect, how to bear it, what to think about while he’s claiming his marital rights.’
‘Yes. Jesus, must have been pretty scary for those virgin brides. If they really were…’
‘Good point. A lot of dishonesty’s gone out of the window, along with the mystique. May be a good thing after all.’
I look at her and wonder. For some reason I’ve never fathomed, I seem to be one of those girls other people tell all their problems to. I’ve often thought that if I was out of work I could get a job as an agony aunt. But not Helen – she’s never confided in me. She’s a closed book. Has she really never loved anyone? Never lived with anyone? Never had a relationship?
As if she can hear these questions going on inside my head, she opens her eyes and tells me as if it’s a topic of general interest like the weather in Dublin:
‘I’ve had quite a lot of sex, you know. Just not often with the same person too many times.’
There’s not a lot that can usefully be said in response to this, is there?
‘Oh. Right,’ seems to just about cover it.
The fasten seat belt sign has come on and I can feel the beginning of the descent from the pressure in my ears.
‘We’re there!’ calls Emily from behind me. ‘We’re coming into Dublin, girls!’
‘Yeah!’ chorus Karen and Suze, who sound like they’ve been hitting the white wine already.
‘Yeah, cool!’
‘ Hubblin’, bubblin’ Dublin!’
‘Bloody hell,’ says Lisa, packing her MP3 away in her bag and giving me a quick grin. ‘I feel excited already, and I’m not even the bride!’
‘Bringing back memories?’ I suggest. We went to Edinburgh for her hen weekend. To be honest I don’t remember much about it except for Lisa getting rat-arsed and going on, and on, and on, about how lucky she was to have found Perfect Prick, and how wonderful he was, and how much in love she was, and how wonderful their sex life was, and eventually throwing up at just about the same point that we all felt like it.
‘Your turn now, little sister!’ she says with an unusual gentleness.
My turn to see how pissed I can get in the shortest possible time?
My turn to throw up in the toilets in a city
nightclub, stagger home in the early hours wearing a torn, tatty veil, an ‘L’ plate and no shoes, and lie in bed the next day with the worst hangover of my life?
My turn to hang around the necks of my best mates, slop my drink down their clothes, cry and tell them I’ll always love them more than any man?
OK, then; bring it on.
‘Are you ready for this?’ Helen asks me quietly just before the wheels hit the tarmac of Dublin airport with a jolt that makes my backbone shudder.
‘Ouch!’ I wince afterwards. ‘No, I wasn’t!’
But we both know she wasn’t talking about landings.
ABOUT JUDE
We’re booked into a three-star hotel in Temple Bar. We arrive in two taxis, waving and calling out of the windows at any interested or interesting specimens of Irish manhood as we pass.
I’ve called Jude on her mobile, and she’s waiting for us in reception. She looks up as we swing in through the door, alerted by the shrieks and laughter. We catch sight of each other and immediately we’re both legging it across the foyer, grabbing hold of each other by the shoulders, hugging as if we haven’t seen each other for years. It’s only been a few weeks, actually, since she came over for the fitting of the lilac dress.
‘When did you get here? Did you have a good journey?’
‘I did, thanks. How was your flight? Kate, you’re looking well! Are you OK?’
‘I’m fine,’ I assure her. ‘I’ve been looking forward to seeing you.’
‘Me too. God, it’s desperate, I can’t believe you’re all really here!’
‘Christ, Jude – have you been on the booze already? Of course we’re all here!’ I’m laughing as I’m hugging her.
