Kitabı oku: «The Park Bench Test»

CHAPTER ONE

Somewhere there waiteth in this world of ours

For one lone soul another lonely soul,

Each choosing each through all the weary hours

And meeting strangely at one sudden goal.

‘Destiny’, Sir Edwin Arnold (1832-1904)

“Sorry, sorry,” I shout, running down Pretty Street where Emma and Katie are both waiting for me outside the shop.

I look at my watch. I’m 30 minutes late. Damn.

“Sorry,” I say again, trying to catch my breath. I really should work on my fitness.

I hug them both.

“The train was delayed leaving Leeds,” I explain. “And then we had to stop in Grantham to replenish the buffet car. I blame the fat git in coach D – every time I went past him to get to the loos he was scoffing another king size Mars Bar. And then I had to wait 20 minutes for a bloody tube. The underground was packed. Whose idea was it to go wedding dress shopping in London on the first day of the January sales?” I ask. “Oh yes – yours!” I say, grinning at Katie.

“Let’s have another look then. I’ve forgotten what it looks like already.”

She waves her left hand in my face and I throw my head back, pretending to be blinded by the sparkle.

“Gorgeous,” I say, and she beams – which is pretty much all she’s been doing for the last ten days, I suspect.

“Right then. Let’s get this show on the road,” I say, pushing open the door to Maid in Heaven.

“I’m sorry,” a lady with half-moon glasses perched on the end of her nose and a tape measure wrapped around her neck tells us when we explain we’ve come in search of a wedding dress for Katie – a little pointless really, given that we are stood in a shop full of the bloody things.

“We’re fully booked,” she says. “You really should have made an appointment.”

I don’t like the way she’s looking at us – like she would look at something sticky on the bottom of her shoe. Lips turned down, nose tilted slightly in the air. I’m tempted to pull that tape measure a little tighter…

“What about this afternoon?” Katie asks.

The woman shakes her head.

“Fully booked,” she repeats. “All day.”

She reaches for a big leather diary from a desk and flicks nonchalantly through the pages until she stops at the first one that isn’t completely obliterated with brides’ names, telephone numbers and dress sizes. She taps the page decisively.

“April the third,” she says, ever so slightly sarcastically. Anyone would think she’s trying to make a point. “I can fit you in on April the third.”

“APRIL THE THIRD?” Katie shrieks. “That’s…” – she counts on her fingers quickly – “…four months away. I want to get married on September the eighteenth. I can’t wait four months!”

“SEPTEMBER EIGHTEENTH?!” the woman shrieks, obviously now in competition with my friend as to who can inject the most alarm into three simple words. “September the eighteenth, this year? In that case you really should have made an appointment.”

Katie looks at Emma and me.

If I didn’t know better, I’d say she’s going to cry.

But of course I do know better. I’ve known Katie for nearly ten years. Katie would never let a nasty woman like this make her cry.

“I’m sorry,” she tells her, instead, “I’m used to shopping in Marks and Spencer and Next, where you don’t have to make an appointment to use a cubicle.” And then she glances over to the rails of dresses on display at the back of the shop, and grimaces.

“In any case,” she says, “I really don’t think you have what it is I’m looking for.”

Emma and I grimace too – just for good measure. And then the three of us leave the shop and leg it back up the road laughing.

The woman at the next shop is not quite so nasty. But she does laugh at us. How rude.

“Have you any idea how many men propose over Christmas and New Year?” she asks.

Katie looks crestfallen. I think she thought it was just Matt – that it was just the best day of his and hers lives – not every Tom, Dick and Harry’s.

“We filled three months of the diary in one week,” she explains.

“Okay. Thanks anyway,” Katie says.

And so we leave shop number two.

Katie looks at her list.

Old New Borrowed Blue is next. But it’s a tube ride away. I’m not sure I can face the underground again just yet. I’ve only just got over the ordeal of being pressed up against Worzel Gummidge all the way from Kings Cross to Knightsbridge. I don’t think I’ve ever held my breath for so long. I almost held the Metro paper between us as a makeshift barrier until I discovered someone had already used it to scrape a bit of chewing gum off the bottom of their shoe.

“Let’s go grab a coffee,” I suggest. I’m a tea drinker actually, but nobody says that do they? – ‘Let’s go grab a cup of tea’ – unless they’re over sixty five and planning on ordering a fruit scone to go with it.

“Good idea,” Emma and Katie both agree.

“So, Emma. Have you changed your mind yet?” Katie asks, before shovelling a huge forkful of chocolate fudge cake into her mouth. She’s as skinny as a rake too. There’s no justice.

“I can’t, Katie,” she says, offering her a piece of double chocolate chip cookie with extra chocolate – presumably in the hope that it will help soften the blow.

Emma is refusing to be a bridesmaid – on account of the fact that it will jeopardise her own chances of ever walking down the aisle.

What can I say? My friends are a little odd.

“Three times a bridesmaid, never a bride,” she told Katie the moment she blinded us for the first time with her newly acquired diamond ring on Boxing Day, when we met at my parents house in Sussex for leftover turkey and recycled Christmas cracker hats.

“You were only five when your godmother got married!” Katie had argued. “And Alison and Paul are already divorced, so that doesn’t count either.”

“Age is irrelevant. And the only way to reverse the curse is to be a bridesmaid another four times. And even if Becky does get off her arse and marry Alex,” Emma had said, looking pointedly at me, “that still leaves me three times short, and I don’t know anybody who’s even remotely close to getting that ring on their finger. Sorry Katie, I can’t do it.”

Personally I think she’s just trying to avoid the humiliation of wearing a peach dress in front of all of Katie and Matt’s friends and family. Not that Katie is planning on dressing us in peach. At least I hope she’s not. It’s every bridesmaid’s worst fear, isn’t it – being made to look like a giant helping of peach cobbler? Or worse still, being forced into some floral number that looks like it has come straight from your Auntie Mabel’s living room curtain pole.

Anyway – a battle ensued, involving a minor strop on both parts and an in-depth discussion on every possible superstition from the importance of good manners when coming face to face with a lone magpie, to the day-long good fortune to be had from seeing a penny and picking it up (frankly I’d be much happier to see a £20 note and slip that into my pocket – but maybe that’s just me).

Katie relented, eventually, and agreed that Emma could do a reading instead – on the proviso that she comes on every shopping trip that involves the wedding in any way, shape or form. Starting today.

She’s not quite given up trying to persuade her yet though.

“I can’t afford to risk it,” Emma explains, for the umpteenth time. “I have such shit luck with men.”

She’s right. She does.

She has no trouble meeting men. And getting them, for that matter. Emma is stunning – with legs up to her armpits, and perky boobs. And the blonde hair. And the blue eyes. And she’s a lovely person too. Makes you sick, doesn’t it?

Men, for Emma, are a bit like buses. Buses which turn up in the most unexpected places. In the baggage claim area at Gatwick Airport following a teachers’ conference in Glasgow, for example. Or the frozen vegetable section of her local Tesco Express. Or the back row of a karate class (the one and only class she ever made it to, I hasten to add, being too busy, as she inevitably was, loved up with the guy from the back row).

Yes – Emma can get the men.

It’s just the keeping them that she tends to have a problem with. Before long, either they lose interest – or she does.

Either she’s about to add her toothbrush to the pot on their bathroom sink and a spare pair of knickers to their bottom drawer when they give her the elbow or she decides she doesn’t want them anymore, in which case they tend to hang around like a bad smell.

Emma’s last four boyfriends, in no particular order, were:

Greg – who told her he loved her on their third date. He sent her 12 bunches of flowers, 37 voicemail messages and 52 text messages in six days. On the seventh day she dumped him. Good decision, I think.

Dean – who couldn’t get it up. But she really liked him and was prepared to help him through it – and would have done, had she not discovered that he had told all his mates she couldn’t keep her hands off him, that they were at it like rabbits and that they had virtually cleared the local branch of Boots of their entire supply of Fetherlite Durex. She dumped him after six weeks and promptly told his mates exactly why they weren’t at it like rabbits.

Barry – who most certainly could get it up – and did so on a regular basis. Just not exclusively for Emma, as she discovered when she let herself into his apartment to surprise him on his birthday after fibbing that she was busy – only to discover he had already put on his birthday suit for someone else.

And Peter – who dumped her after she discovered he was growing marijuana in his bathtub and suggested he might like to take up a more law-abiding hobby – like draughts or ping-pong.

Emma doesn’t believe in Mr Right. She just wants to meet someone she likes – or loves – enough to want to stick around. When she was seven her dad left her mum for his secretary and moved to the South of France. Maybe that’s why. I don’t think she’s ever got over it.

“So have you made any other plans yet?” I ask Katie, blowing on my tea.

She nods and waves her hand to signal she intends to give details. But her mouth is still full of chocolate fudge cake.

“You don’t have to eat it all in one go,” I tell her. “We’ve got all day, you know. My train doesn’t leave until eight.”

I normally stay the night with Katie and Matt. It’s a long way to come from Leeds just for the day – but I have to go home tonight as Alex and I have a christening to go to tomorrow.

“Well, we’ve set the date, obviously.”

They’re getting married on the anniversary of the day they met – six years ago. September the eighteenth. Nine months from now. She’s assures us that’s coincidental. I’m assuming she’s telling the truth. I’m guessing she wouldn’t choose to give birth whilst walking up the aisle.

“And we’ve booked the venue - a lovely little church in Beaulieu in the New Forest followed by a reception at the Montagu Arms Hotel.”

Matt took Katie to Beaulieu for the weekend when they had been together for a year. Katie fell in love with the place and told him when they got married that was where she’d like them to do it. Even back then she knew she’d met the one.

“You’ll love it,” she says, draining her coffee cup as we get ready to leave. “It’s so beautiful. I couldn’t believe it when they said it was available on the date we wanted. They’d had a cancellation, I think. Obviously someone decided not to get hitched after all,” she grins, pleased that someone else’s misfortune has turned into her own good luck.

It’s also due to a cancellation that we are finally able to make it all the way into a wedding dress shop without being laughed straight back out again. Old New Borrowed Blue has had a cancellation.

“You’re a lucky girl,” the owner tells Katie in a very teachery voice, as if she’s telling her off for colouring outside the lines.

“We’ve just this minute had a cancellation. The bride is sick, apparently.” From the tone of her voice I’d say she doesn’t believe the bride for one minute. I’d say she hears this excuse all the time. I’d say she thinks the bride has actually been dumped but doesn’t want to admit it.

“Great,” Katie says, before realising how that sounds.

“What I mean is, great that you’ve had a cancellation, not great that the bride is sick, obviously … ”

She takes our coats and shows us upstairs to a waiting area next to numerous racks of dresses. There are big comfy sofas, wedding photographs all over the walls, and piles and piles of wedding magazines stacked up on a large glass coffee table.

“Catriona will be with you shortly,” she says. “Feel free to browse.”

We are about to start rifling through the magazines when Catriona arrives.

She introduces herself, before asking: “Which one’s the bride?”

I quickly push Katie forward, before she gets any ideas that it might be me.

“I am,” Katie says, at the same time as Emma says “not me”. You can tell by her tone that what she really means is “not bloody me!”

“Wonderful,” Catriona says.

I like her. She isn’t nasty and she hasn’t laughed at us. Yet. She’s in her mid forties, I’d say. She’s small, and smartly dressed in a navy trouser suit and white top. She looks like she knows what she’s doing. And she’s smiling too. For now.

“When’s the big day?”

“September eighteenth,” Katie volunteers.

“Oh good. That gives us plenty of time then. That’s twelve, thirteen, fourteen … twenty one months,” she says, flicking through the months in her diary.

“No, September the eighteenth this year,” Katie says.

“SEPTEMBER THE EIGHTEENTH THIS YEAR?!” Catriona gasps. “But that’s nine months away!” she says, verging upon becoming hysterical.

“Yes?” Katie says, panic beginning to sound in her own voice, although she is not entirely sure why.

“Nine months?” Catriona repeats, this time as a question, presumably to check she has heard right.

“I’m not pregnant,” Katie says, defensively.

“I didn’t think for a moment that you were, dear. But nine months is really not very long at all to plan a wedding. A wedding is the best day of a girl’s life, after all.” She looks like she might actually be about to have a nervous breakdown. Anybody would think we’d just told her Katie was getting married tomorrow and needed a dress making from scratch.

“They want to get married on the anniversary of the day they met,” Emma explains, helpfully.

“So what about next year?” Catriona suggests, in a deadly serious tone. “I mean, for starters you won’t be able to have any of these dresses here, because we’d never get them in time,” she says, sweeping her arms dramatically across a rail of dresses. It’s no great pity, frankly – a good ninety per cent of them are hideous meringues and would therefore fall at Katie’s first test – ‘will they make me look remotely like Katie Price when she married Peter Andre?’

“Or here. Or here,” she continues, on a roll.

“What about these?” Emma asks, pointing out what appears to be the only rail that has not yet been waved at dramatically.

“Well, yes, those would be okay,” she says, almost begrudgingly. “But you’d have to order it pretty soon. We wouldn’t have much time to play with. Especially if you needed it altering at all. Which you probably will. What sort of thing are you looking for?” she asks Katie, who has already started rifling through the rail.

“I don’t want a meringue,” she says decisively. “I don’t like fussy things. No lace. No frills. No bows. No fuss. I want something white, but not too white. And I’d prefer it to be strapless.

“But I would happily try straps,” she adds hastily, registering the look on Catriona’s face, who appears to be mentally narrowing down the list of options by the second.

“I can spend whatever I need to,” Katie tells her, silently thanking her dad who is paying for the wedding, “but I’d rather not spend a fortune,” she continues, because she is not the sort to abuse her dad’s generosity.

At the mention of sort-of-unlimited cash Catriona’s mood perks up considerably and she takes over the rifling.

“You go in there and strip off while I get some dresses ready for you to try on,” she tells Katie, who obediently dumps her bag and coat on my lap and disappears behind a white linen curtain into a cubicle.

Moments later Catriona hangs three dresses on a rail outside the cubicle and pokes her head around the curtain.

“Take your bra off too, love,” she instructs Katie, inviting herself into the cubicle and pulling the curtain across behind her. I look at Emma and grin.

“How are you doing?” I call out several minutes later when they still haven’t reappeared.

It’s hard to tell but the loud guffaw from the other side of the curtain may well be a clue.

“Almost there,” Catriona shouts.

Emma and I flick through the magazines while we are waiting.

“Blimey! Guess how much this one is,” I say to Emma, holding up Bride Be Beautiful and pointing to the dress at the top of the page. I quickly cover the price with my finger.

“Dunno. Twenty pence,” she says, glancing up from White White Weddings.

“No, seriously, guess.”

“I want to say about eight hundred quid but judging by your reaction it’s probably more like five grand?”

“Twenty-five grand!” I tell her, bringing the magazine right up to my face. I must have misread it. “That’s ridiculous!” I say, having established there is nothing wrong with my eyesight and that, yes, this wedding dress really does cost almost as much as my annual salary.

“That’s a deposit on a house, for heaven’s sake.”

“If I ever get married, I’ll be doing it on a beach somewhere in my bikini,” Emma says. She would too.

“Why waste all that money on a dress that’s only going to be worn for a few hours – and on a day when all your new husband can think about is getting you out of it?”

Catriona pokes her head outside the curtain – to check we are still here probably – there’s a fabulous cake shop around the corner which I’m sure must be an incredible temptation when you are on the tenth or eleventh dress and the bride still hasn’t found one she likes.

“She’s ready girls,” she announces, before sweeping back the curtain and waiting for Katie to emerge.

“So. What do you think?”

“I don’t like it,” Emma says, screwing her nose up.

“You don’t get a say,” Katie tells her.

“What have you made me come for then?”

“Consider it your punishment.”

Emma says nothing – just rolls her eyes at me.

“What do you think Becky?” Katie asks me, not before giving Emma one more moody glance for good measure.

“Well, it’s okay … But there’s probably something out there that is more you,” I confirm, before she promptly disappears back behind the curtain.

“I am NEVER going to find a dress,” Katie says, despondently shoving a prawn cracker in her mouth.

We’ve come to China Palace for dinner before I head home. And we’ve ordered enough to feed an army, after Katie complained she had ‘not eaten a thing all day’. I did point out that this wasn’t strictly true – that she had in fact wolfed down an extra large helping of chocolate fudge cake as well as an entire king size bag of giant chocolate buttons between 2:12pm and 2:18pm. Single-handedly. The chocolate fudge cake she conceded, but the chocolate buttons didn’t count, apparently, since ‘chocolate buttons are an addiction, not a source of sustenance’.

Life is not fair. Katie can eat chocolate all day every day and never put on an ounce, whereas I only have to sniff the empty packet and I put on five pounds. And it’s not even as if I can just say ‘to hell with it’ and sod the five pounds. I have a bridesmaid dress to squeeze into. Or will do, anyway, if we ever get Katie sorted out first.

“You’ve tried on five dresses,” Emma laughs. “I don’t think you need to panic just yet, hun.”

“Yes, but I hated them all. Hated,” she repeats, slopping a spoon of sweet and sour chicken onto her plate. “And so did you two. God I hope it’s easier finding you a bridesmaid dress Becks. Unless you just want to get a wedding dress and have a double wedding?” she asks hopefully, eager for someone to share her frustration.