The Stag and Hen Weekend (21 page)

‘That’s good, that’s exactly the kind of thing she’ll need to hear.’

‘If it’s so good then why do I feel so bad? I know something happened between them. I can feel it right at the centre of my gut. And part of me wants to punish her and part of me wants to beg her to stay and I just don’t get what the right thing is to do here.’ He stopped and looked directly at Sanne. ‘I mean last night . . . I could have ruined everything.’

‘But you didn’t and that’s the important thing, if I’d thought, even for a moment that you didn’t really love her . . .’

Phil grinned. ‘You mean I could have been in with a shot with Sanne from Misty Mondays? How cool would that have been?’

Sanne threw her arms around him for what he was sure would be their final embrace. ‘I don’t get it,’ said Phil. ‘I’m not a singer, or a DJ or even an actor, I’m just an ordinary bloke from Nottingham who runs a hi-fi shop and you’re . . . well you’re you. How could I have ever stood a chance with you?’

‘What can I say?’ replied Sanne, with a grin, ‘I’m just a sucker for a man in a suit.’

Phil looked into her eyes. In a few moments he would never see her again and Sanne must have had the same thought because she tilted her head up and placed her lips firmly against Phil’s. It was all over in a matter of seconds, and although the line that Phil had fought so hard not to cross had been transgressed, this time he felt no guilt at all.

Sanne tapped Phil lightly on the chest with the palm of her hands. ‘You should go,’ she said quietly, ‘or you’ll miss the plane.’

He didn’t move.

THE HEN WEEKEND

For C.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Sue Fletcher, Swati Gamble, and all at Hodder, Phil Gayle, the Sunday Night Pub Club, Jackie Behan, the Board and above all, to C, for pretty much everything.

Friday

1.

It had been three hours since Phil had left for Amsterdam, an hour since she had dropped Samson off at the kennels and Helen Richards was now staring, in a bewildered fashion, down at her open weekend suitcase. In one hand she held a Braun hairdryer and in the other a brand new pair of GHD hair-straighteners. Her ability to get maximum enjoyment from the coming weekend was contingent on both items making the journey to Ashbourne with her, but as the case was already full of belongings deemed so essential that she had opted to pack them
before
her hairdryer and straighteners it was clear that the only options open to her were upgrading to a larger case (something which Yaz, who had agreed to drive half of the party to their weekend destination, had specifically forbidden) or to spend the last weekend of her unmarried existence in a state of abject frizzy-haired misery.

Paralysed by indecision, she was saved by the ringing of her mobile. She dropped the items in her hands on top of the case, picked up her phone from the bed and glanced at the screen, convinced it would be Phil calling to update her on his journey. It wasn’t Phil, however, it was Yaz.

Helen and the forthright Turkish-born, Cleethorpes-raised Yaz had been friends for many years. Starting out their careers in radio as broadcast assistants at the same local station in Nottingham, they had bonded over a shared sense of humour and love of red wine. Over the weeks that followed, their friendship continued to grow, and driven by a desperate need to find an affordable place to live so that they could stop sleeping on friends’ sofas, they had scoured the lower end of the accommodation food chain until they came across 111 Jevonbrook Road, a large, dilapidated terraced house without any form of central heating situated in the Lenton area of the city. Despite the cold, the mould and the guy no one seemed to know who took up residence in their kitchen, Helen loved those days, reminiscing fondly about how they would party until dawn, crawl into bed for a few hours, work a full day and then start the partying all over again. With Yaz even the dullest day ended up with them having a giggle or some weird encounter which would entertain them for months.

All these years later, having moved homes and changed jobs several times, they were both back in the city in which they had met. Yaz was now a full-time mum to two small children living the suburban dream in a modern four-bedroom semi as close as humanly possible to the best primary school in the area and Helen, following a bad break-up, had devoted herself to her career and was now the presenter of her own pre-drivetime afternoon show,
The Chat
with Helen Richards, on BBC Radio Sherwood.

‘All packed?’ enquired Yaz.

Helen looked down at the suitcase in front of her. ‘Nearly. A few last minute issues but nothing I can’t handle. How about you?’

‘Did it last night while the kids were asleep. I knew I’d never have the time today because mornings are always so mental around here. Plus I’m entertaining Simon’s mum as she’s babysitting for the weekend. I’m sure I’ll get to the hotel and find out that I’ve forgotten half the things I need but I can always buy what’s missing. After all, that’s why they invented shopping.’

‘You’ll be fine,’ said Helen. ‘How many times have we been away together and I’ve never once seen you forget a single thing? Who was it who pulled out a tube of superglue when Katie’s heel broke off while we were out for her birthday? You’re the living embodiment of “Be Prepared!” ‘

‘Was Simon on time to pick up Phil? I bet he wasn’t. I told him last night to fill up the car and go to the cash point and he was like “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” and then what’s the last thing he said to me this morning after sloping out of bed at half nine when I’d been up since six getting the kids ready for school, making their sandwiches, doing the school run
and
tidying up the spare bedroom for his Mum’s arrival? “Oh, I think I’m going to need to fill up the car and get some money out.” ‘ Yaz sighed. ‘They’d be lost without us wouldn’t they?’

‘Hopelessly so.’

‘Anyway, I was just calling to let you know that I got a text from Dee to say that she’s got this work thing she’s got to do and could we leave half an hour later than arranged. I was going to do a whole group text thing to let the rest of the girls know but I honestly couldn’t be bothered with all that typing.’

Even though they would be seeing each other in an hour Helen and Yaz continued chatting because that was the relationship they had. They were friends who spoke about anything and everything, often two or three times a day, with no excuse needed and although on the surface Yaz appeared to be the more dominant of the two, scratch below the façade and it became apparent that theirs was a relationship of equals.

They talked about the weekend and how much they were looking forward to it and Yaz confessed that she had even dreamt about it and was about to give Helen the full details when the conversation was cut short by the howling of a small boy, who had just banged his head on the table while playing armies with his older brother.

Helen tossed the phone on the bed and returned to her suitcase dilemma before recalling that she was now in possession of an extra half-hour which might be put to best use by the drinking of a cup of tea and the eating of a consolatory milk chocolate Hobnob.

As the kettle boiled and she hunted in the cupboard for her favourite mug she pondered the dirty jokes, filthy laughter, luminous cocktails and dancing on tables of past hen dos. How long since she had been on one? Years, surely. And there had been some good ones too. Yaz’s infamous weekend in Blackpool, Helen’s cousin Esme’s one in London that had ended with two girls being arrested for indecent exposure and not forgetting her first ever hen do when an old school friend had invited her to her last hurrah at the local Yates’s Wine Lodge in Doncaster when they were both nineteen. Good times each and every one. But perhaps unsurprisingly the one that she dwelt on longest was the worst one of her life: her own, some ten years earlier, for the wedding that never was.

Helen and her former fiancé Aiden Reid had met at work. Although she had been attracted to him from the very first moment she had spotted him in the canteen at BBC Radio Merseyside, Helen never considered, even for a fleeting second, that any relationship that might result from their dating might end in a marriage proposal, because while Aiden was undoubtedly driven, charming and utterly beguiling, one thing of which she and even the most deluded of women would agree upon was that he was not exactly marriage material. A fact to which he attested.

‘Last night was a laugh wasn’t it?’ he told her on the doorstep as he prepared to leave after their first night together. ‘But you know I’m not looking for anything serious, don’t you?’

Helen laughed. ‘Believe me Mr Deluded if I was in the market for something serious yours would be the last door that I would come knocking on.’

‘Because you don’t think I can do serious?’

‘No,’ said Helen, ‘because I know so.’

And so even as they graduated from casual fun-filled fling to a state of existence where Aiden spent more nights at her home than he did in his own, Helen remained resolutely indifferent to any talk of the future. What they had was fun and light-hearted, which proved a great relief from their stressful day-to-day jobs as overworked production assistants regularly putting in thirteen-hour days, often six days a week in order to prove themselves and climb a little further up the career ladder.

But, as is often the case in these situations, somewhere between Aiden’s increasingly playful daydreams (‘It’s such a shame you’re on the pill because you and me would make some right proper beautiful babies,’) and Helen’s emotional detachment (‘I don’t care if you’re here all the time I don’t want you leaving your stuff here,’) a compromise was struck, and the daydreams became less abstract, the emotions more engaged until finally they both realised that they had managed to somehow fall in love.

The proposal came a month after they had officially moved in together. Helen and Aiden had spent a rare free weekend at a music festival in the Midlands with mutual friends and had been travelling in the car back to Liverpool. Without any sort of build up (they had just finished talking about how much they both hated having to leave the festival so much earlier than their friends) Aiden said: ‘You know what, Richards? You make me really happy. I think we should get hitched.’

Without a single moment’s hesitation Helen surprised herself by saying: ‘You know what, Reid? I’ve been sort of thinking the same thing myself.’

The plans for the wedding took on a life of their own and it seemed like every spare moment was taken up with making decisions about the logistics of various wedding venues and caterers and above all how best to curb the number of invitees without causing huge swathes of distant family and long lost friends irreparable offence. For Helen at the end of a long day at work, all this planning was exhausting and exasperating but she did it because she knew it would be worth it in order to create the perfect happy ending.

The first sign that things weren’t quite going to plan came some six months after the proposal when Aiden came home from work one evening and informed her that he had been offered a job hosting an early evening music show for a BBC station in London.

‘How could you do this?’ yelled Helen who hadn’t even been aware that he had put together a showreel let alone that he had been actively auditioning for jobs outside of Liverpool. ‘We both agreed that we’d only ever look for jobs in the north-west.’

‘I know,’ replied Aiden. ‘Which is exactly the reason why I didn’t tell you. I never thought for a minute that I’d get the gig, but they loved me, Helen, they really loved me.’

Aiden explained his actions away in the same manner that he always explained everything away when people didn’t agree with his methods, utilising a heady mixture of charm and bombast that enticed the listener into believing that to stand in his way was in effect to stand in the way of progress. ‘It’ll be the best thing that’s ever happened to us,’ he assured her. ‘I’ve got a feeling, Helen, a really good feeling that this will be the making of both our careers.’

‘And what about the wedding?’ asked Helen. ‘Do you want to call it off?’

‘Of course I don’t,’ he replied. ‘It’s only a six-month contract. And I promise I’ll be home every weekend and we can do all the wedding stuff you like. But this is a chance of a lifetime! My own show! Who knows what it might lead to. It’s just too good to turn down.’

Although she wasn’t entirely sure what Aiden’s move would mean for them (after all her job, home and the majority of her close friends were in Liverpool), Helen knew that she couldn’t stand in his way and so, despite her reservations, gave her blessing reciting to all who questioned her judgement the very arguments Aiden had used to convince her.

For the first few months while Aiden was away Helen kept herself busy with work and the wedding, choosing to live only for the weekends when Aiden would return from London. But when his show began to take off and his initial six-month contract was extended indefinitely Helen found herself becoming less patient and more enraged until finally one evening during a telephone call he told her that he wouldn’t be able to make it up at the weekend because he was too tired.

‘Too tired?’ repeated Helen indignantly. ‘Have you any idea how tired I am? I work too! And I run this home and I’m planning this whole wedding by myself! How dare you tell me you’re too tired to see me!’

Following the argument that ensued they didn’t speak for two whole weeks but even through the worst of it Helen continued to work on the wedding plans convinced that all would be fine. And it was, inasmuch as, unable to cope without him, she travelled to London, apologised for the part she had played in the argument and promised to be more supportive of his career in the future. Everything returned to normal, which is to say that for Aiden at least not a single thing changed.