Tales From A Hen Weekend Read online

  ‘Overrated? Not to men, they’re not!’

  ‘Come on, Jude – we’re not going out with fifteen-year-old schoolboys now! Men do grow out of the breast-fixation stage. Fergus loves you the way you are, doesn’t he.’

  ‘Yeah. I suppose.’

  There’s a silence I can’t quite work out. Is she upset? Have I offended her? It’s so hard not seeing someone’s face. It’s hard being best friends, oldest friends, but only getting together a couple of times a year.

  ‘I can’t wait to see you, Judy.’

  ‘Me too. Only a couple of weeks now!’

  ‘Yeah. God, I’m looking forward to the hen weekend so much! I think I’m looking forward to it more than the bloody wedding at the moment!’

  She laughs.

  ‘I don’t think Matt would be too flattered to hear that!’

  ‘No.’ Suddenly this topic isn’t funny any more. ‘No, he wouldn’t.’

  ‘But he’d know you were only joking, Katie, so he would.’

  Maybe. But I’m not so sure.

  The hen weekend is a bit of a sore point, actually. Rather, the stag weekend is. Or to be more accurate, the stag week and a half. You know I told you about how compatible we are? Well, the hen and the stag are the first things we’ve really disagreed about. I’m trying to keep off the subject, to be quite honest. But how do you keep off the subject of something that’s going to happen in only two weeks’ time?

  ABOUT MATT

  Yes, let me tell you a little bit about Matt.

  I met him in the corniest way you can imagine. We were both with other people, having lunch in a pub. I was with a guy called James who I’d only been out with twice (and never did again), and Matt was with Sara – his soon-to-be ex. He walked past our table on the way to the bar and accidentally nudged my arm so that I dropped a sausage I’d been about to cut into. It hit the floor rolling and he trod on it. He stopped, looked at the squashed mess under his shoe, looked at me, and we both burst out laughing. I fancied him instantly. He scraped up the remains of the sausage and offered to buy me another one, which just made me laugh all the more. James was looking less than thrilled. I’d already decided he was boring and I wasn’t going to see him again, so the sausage episode brightened up the day. After Matt went back to his table (and back to Sara) I sneaked a couple of glances at him and caught him looking at me. But he was with Sara, so I didn’t think about it too much afterwards.

  A few weeks later I was in the same pub one evening with Emily and some other girlfriends, and there was Matt, with another guy, leaning up at the bar. It was one of those heart-jerk moments; I fancied him even more.

  ‘That’s him!’ I whispered to Emily. ‘The sausage guy!’

  ‘Ooh – he’s nice. Where’s his girlfriend?’

  ‘Don’t know. At home, maybe.’

  ‘He’s coming over!’ said Emily, nudging me. ‘Introduce us, Kate! I quite fancy his friend!’

  ‘Hi!’ he said, with a smile that made my toes tingle. ‘Can I buy you a drink? Make up for the sausage?’

  ‘No need!’ I laughed. ‘It probably saved me about two hundred calories. Sausage and chips is a ridiculous thing to have for lunch when you’re trying to lose weight.’

  ‘You don’t need to lose weight,’ he responded instantly, looking me up and down and returning his gaze to my eyes.

  He’s flirting with me, I thought, with a shiver.

  ‘Hello!’ said Emily loudly, nudging me again. ‘Are you going to introduce me, or is this a private party?’

  ‘Sorry – this is my friend Emily,’ I said.

  ‘Nice to meet you, Emily. I’m Matt. Are you going to introduce me to your friend?’

  ‘Oh! Sorry – I’m Katie!’ I giggled before she could open her mouth.

  ‘So now I know your name, what you like for lunch, and what you drink,’ he said, nodding at the glass in my hand. ‘But what I really need to know is – are you having a night off from your boyfriend or is he going to walk in any minute and beat the hell out of me for chatting you up?’

  Chatting me up? I shivered again. He fancied me. I could see it in his eyes.

  ‘He wasn’t my boyfriend. Just a date. A one-off,’ I lied only slightly.

  ‘Never to be repeated? Then it’s OK if I say he looked like a boring prat?’

  ‘Absolutely OK. He was. He talked about politics all through lunch.’

  ‘God. No wonder you threw your sausage on the floor.’

  ‘You nudged me!’ I laughed. A delicious thought came to me. Did he do it on purpose? ‘And anyway,’ I added, hardly daring to ask, ‘what about your girlfriend? She not with you tonight?’

  ‘No. And she’s not my girlfriend any more.’

  He told me later that they’d have broken up anyway – they were arguing all the time, it hadn’t been good for ages – but that meeting me had been the pivotal point for him.

  ‘I was suddenly forced to accept something I’d been trying to ignore,’ he said.

  ‘Which was what? You were clumsy in pubs? You enjoyed stamping on sausages?’

  ‘Apart from that! I didn’t fancy Sara any more. And I’d seen someone I did.’

  Do you know one of those girls – I think everyone does – who doesn’t seem to be able to settle down, even though she’s edging into her thirties and all her friends are either married or sorted out with a serious relationship? The girl who has plenty of boyfriends, but never seems to find one she wants to stay with? Who’s got her own flat, her own life, and her own space, and nobody to share them with because she’s still waiting for Mr Right? Yep – I was that girl. But I’d finally met my Mr Right.

  We fell in love frighteningly quickly. Almost overnight, we became one of those couples who used to irritate the shit out of me before I met Matt: phoning each other constantly, e-mailing each other several times a day from work, going everywhere together, neglecting the rest of the world. He moved in with me after only two months. Mum said it was much too soon and that we were still in the honeymoon period.

  ‘Isn’t that exactly the right time to want to live together?’ I said.

  The truth was that I was absolutely mad about him and nothing else would do – we had to wake up together and spend every possible moment in each other’s company.

  We’ve settled down a bit by now, of course. We’ve got a bit less intense. Emily says she thinks it’s healthier.

  ‘To be honest,’ she says, ‘you two were an embarrassment to be around, the first year you were together. Everyone was frightened you were going to rip each other’s clothes off any minute.’

  ‘Oh, please! We were not like that!’

  ‘Katie, the way you looked at each other, the way your passion was so obvious to everyone – sorry, but it unnerved people. You want to know the truth? I think when other people see couples so aggressively in love, it makes them feel inadequate. They measure their own relationships against yours, and think theirs are a weak and watered down version of the real thing.’

  ‘But surely everyone’s like that at the beginning, aren’t they?’

  ‘Sean and I weren’t. It was much more of a gradual thing. We were friends first, we liked each other, we got on well together, then we started to fancy each other. We’d been together for about six months before it kind of dawned on us that we were in love with each other. It was a gentle experience for us. Yours was headlong – violent – I watched it happening and it scared the shit out of me.’

  ‘Me too,’ I admit sadly. I’m sad, because that stage is over now. I don’t care what anyone says: you can’t recreate it. No amount of wearing black lingerie, having candlelit dinners or sex in unusual places is going to catapult you back into those fiery first few months of insatiable desire. ‘But we’re still in love!’ I add quickly, to reassure myself almost as much as Emily.

  ‘I know you are, you daft thing.’

  We’re at my flat, in the bedroom. Matt’s in the lounge watching TV. Em’s come round in response to an emergen
cy phone call. Well, when you’re getting married in a couple of months and your boyfriend calls you a moaning miserable cow, you kind of need your best friend. Badly.

  ‘What was the row about?’ says Emily.

  ‘Same thing again. Prague.’

  OK: this is what it’s all about. For my hen party, I’m having a long weekend in Dublin with Jude, Emily, my mum and sister and a couple of other friends. I think that’s quite reasonable, don’t you? And Matt, for his stag, is having ten days in Prague, with about twenty of his mates. When he first told me about it, I flipped – and I’ve been annoyed about it ever since.

  ‘How the hell are you getting so much time off work?’ I asked him. ‘You have booked the two weeks off for the honeymoon, haven’t you?’

  It’d be just like a man to forget.

  ‘Of course I have! I’m taking some extra leave, unpaid.’

  Unpaid!

  Last time I’d checked, we weren’t Lottery winners. We hadn’t suddenly come into serious money or robbed a bank.

  ‘What are you thinking about? It’s just so irresponsible! How much will this cost, with all the alcohol you’re going to consume out there? We can’t afford it! Not with what we’re spending on the honeymoon!’

  ‘It’s really cheap flights, Kate, and a dead cheap hotel. They had a special offer: book a week and get three extra days free. Sean’s organised it all, and it was such a good deal, I wasn’t about to scotch his plans.’

  ‘You didn’t think it was worth discussing it with me, then?’

  ‘Sorry? No, I didn’t, to be honest! I didn’t think it was anything to do with you.’

  Well, how nice is that? For nearly four years, we’ve shared every moment of our lives. We’ve hardly farted or hiccupped without the other one knowing about it. And suddenly, just before we commit ourselves to loving each other forever, he’s doing something that’s nothing to do with me.

  ‘I didn’t expect you to consult me about your hen weekend!’ he added.

  ‘You knew we were going to go to Dublin! I always promised Jude we’d have the hen weekend in Ireland!’

  ‘So you’re doing what you want, and I’m doing what I want! What’s the problem?’

  ‘The problem is,’ I said, spitting the words out through my teeth, ‘that you’re spending a jolly ten days not earning anything, while I’m at work bloody paying for it!’

  And the problem is that I’m still furious about it. I’m so furious, it’s eating away at me, and whenever he talks about Prague I feel like chucking something at him.

  Really auspicious start to a lifetime of happiness, eh?

  I know, I know – we shouldn’t really have spent so much money on the honeymoon. We let the travel agent talk us into it. We went into the shop with the idea of a week in Spain or the Canaries, and came out with a booking for two weeks in the Caribbean. Well, it was the pictures of the white sand, the palm trees, the clear blue sea… it looked perfect. At the time, we were much more entranced with the idea of jetting off together as husband and wife on our perfect honeymoon than we were about the wedding itself. We’d had this naïve idea that perhaps we could just book our local church on a quiet day when the vicar could fit us in, turn up with our immediate family and half a dozen friends, do the business, retire to the pub for a bar meal and a few rounds of drinks, and it’d be a done deal.

  And now look at us: not much more than a handful of loose change and two steadily growing credit card bills between us, a two-week luxury honeymoon booked in the Dominican Republic, a ten-day stag holiday in Prague for the bridegroom which probably won’t be worth the money because all those going will be pissed every night and hung over every morning, and a long weekend in Dublin for the bride, which I might be too miserable to enjoy.

  ‘To be honest,’ says Emily, ‘the break from each other will probably do you both good.’

  ‘Do you think so? Matt and I have never thought in terms of having a break from each other. We’ve always thought it was bad enough being apart every day when we’re at work.’

  ‘Yuck!’ laughs Emily. ‘Your problem, Katie Halliday, is you’re just too bloody romantic by half!’

  Well, I’m sorry, but it’s my job, you see.

  I haven’t told you about my job, have I? I read, and sell, romantic novels for a living. Nice one, eh?

  I’ve got a pretty good idea what a relationship is supposed to be like. It’s supposed to be all about long, lingering looks, and kissing in the moonlight, and making love on rugs in front of crackling log fires. We’ve done a bit of all those. We like romance. But nowhere, in these books I read every day, is there any mention of the guy booking a ten-day piss-up in Prague and telling the girl it’s none of her business. There’s never anything about the girl calling him a selfish inconsiderate pig, or the bloke saying she’s getting more like his mother every day.

  I just wanted it to be like it is in the books. That’s not so very terrible, is it?

  ABOUT MARGIE

  I’m at Mum’s today, and she’s driving me round the bend. My mum married my dad in 1972 and divorced him in 1980. Considering how few years it lasted, it’s strange how she’s now holding her marriage up as a shining example of how things ought to be done.

  ‘People didn’t used to live together before they got married,’ she announces as she hands me a mug of tea. ‘Our parents would never have allowed it.’

  ‘That’s not strictly true, Marge,’ pipes up Auntie Joyce, who’s been sitting quietly in the corner reading the paper. ‘I moved in with Ron before the wedding.’

  I’ve got a lot of time for Auntie Joyce. She often does this – very quietly, without any fuss, puts Mum right and knocks her off her high horse.

  ‘Yes, well,’ huffs Mum, ‘it was all very well for you.’

  This, too, is a well-worn theme. Joyce is twelve years younger than Mum, and inevitably, I think, my grandparents held the reins a lot more loosely in her upbringing.

  ‘Society had probably moved on a bit by the time you and Uncle Ron were going out together,’ I say, trying to keep the peace.

  ‘Moving on isn’t always for the better,’ mutters Mum. ‘In my day, weddings were for a purpose. They marked the beginning of your life together, as a couple.’

  ‘So you don’t see the point of all this? You don’t know why we’re bothering?’

  ‘I didn’t say that!’ she shakes her head impatiently. ‘Of course I’m glad you’re getting married. Happiest day of a mother’s life, isn’t it!’

  ‘Happier than the day I was born?’

  ‘Don’t be facetious.’ But she’s laughing now. ‘All I’m saying is that it seemed more of a significant event, when the bride was moving out of her parents’ house into her new home with her husband.’

  ‘Not sure about that.’ Lisa looks slowly from Mum to me with her head on one side as if she’s considering the differences between us. ‘In some ways, it’s more significant nowadays, if a couple have been living together, been through all the ups and downs of getting used to each other, and then make a public commitment to each other. There’s no social pressure on them to do it, but they still want to.’

  ‘Yes. It’s more romantic…’ I begin, but as I should have expected, everyone else laughs me down.

  ‘What are you reading at the moment? Love and Marriage? Happiest Bride in the World?’ teases Lisa.

  ‘Actually it’s called Betrayal and it’s a really powerful story about a polio victim whose fiancé gets killed in the First World War and then falls in love with an alcoholic …’

  ‘Sounds like a jolly read!’ says Mum dismissively.

  Not all romantic fiction is light and fluffy. Some of the books I read make me cry. If true love always ran smooth, in fiction or I guess in real life, there’d be no story to tell.

  I’m used to my family teasing me about my work.

  ‘You sound like Greg,’ I tell them with a shrug. ‘He thinks a good story is the life history of a man who discovered a scientific formu
la, or a mathematical equation. He doesn’t like reading fiction.’

  Which, of course, is how I got my job, so I’m not complaining.

  ‘I’m surprised you two don’t end up throwing your books at each other,’ says Lisa. ‘How do you stand it? I can’t think of anything worse than sitting in that man’s office all day, working on his computer, listening to him going on and on about his boring old books.’

  ‘I like my job,’ I say, defensively. I get to spend half my days at home, catching up on my reading. ‘And Greg’s not that bad.’

  Lisa’s only met him once, although to be fair it wasn’t a very good first impression. I invited her to a very boring literary event, introduced her to my boss and left them to chat while I went to talk to a couple of authors. When I came back over half an hour later, her glass was empty and her eyes had glazed over, and Greg was subjecting her to an animated but incomprehensible monologue about the book he was reading: The Technology of Tunnels.

  ‘He’s boring!’ insists Lisa.

  I can’t argue with that. But if you really want to know boring, try working as an admin assistant in the editorial offices of a major publishing house for four years – opening the post, doing the photocopying, sending out the standard rejection letters – waiting for your promotion, your big break that never comes despite your first-class English degree, because everyone else in the office is over-qualified too and no-one ever leaves. Try giving up on that and working as a temp for another two years – drifting from job to mind-numbing job and never even staying long enough to make friends or get a desk of your own. And then imagine seeing an advert that could change your life. A guy who’d set up his own on-line bookshop and review service – bookshelf.co.uk – who’d been running it on his own for eighteen months and now needed help because he was snowed under and wanted someone to help him develop the website and review the fiction. With his background as a commissioning editor for a scientific publishing company, it wasn’t really his forte. Within another year, he’d become so successful he needed a second fiction specialist – allowing me to concentrate on the romantic fiction. As I say, I love my job. I’m not about to complain if Greg occasionally bores the knickers off me.