of reckoning would arrive eventually, and arrive it did, at 11 a.m., after Spandau Ballet’s greatest hits had left him feeling destitute.
‘Guys, just confirming we’re still on for the big night out for the company’s fifth birthday. I’ll email the itinerary soon,’ Harris said to the room. He was in his ironic t-shirt that said BOB MARLEY under an image of Jimi Hendrix and a pair of tartan drainpipes. ‘We all good?’
James had turned the options over already. He could play for time and simply say yes, he and Eva were still coming.
But the deposit was £100. He’d need a reason for Eva’s no-show. Something gastric, or a family crisis. James would be telling the kind of fibs that tie you in knots, bind your legs together and trip you over, face down onto a hard surface.
So far, failing to tell them he and Eva had split up was a lie of omission, navigating little semantic slalom courses when someone asked what he’d been up to at the weekend.
This would require active untruths – doctor’s appointments and non-transferable flights to Stockholm and remembering who’d done what, and to whom he’d told it. And when the truth of her absence was finally revealed, they’d work backwards and work it out. He could picture Harris, in one of his Playdoh-bright tank-tops, holding a hand up and saying: ‘OMFG, dudes. That was why she didn’t come to the five bash? I always thought the cancerous nephew was a crock of plop.’
The pity would be all the greater, mixed with derision. It was bad enough they had to know; James couldn’t bear them knowing he minded them knowing.
‘Uh. Actually, change my plus one. Eva and I have split up.’
Harris goggled at him. Ramona’s jaw dropped almost as far as her Tatty Devine MONA plastic nameplate necklace. A hush fell over the room, a hush punctuated by the squeak of half a dozen people turning in their chairs at once. Lexie, the pretty new copywriter, audibly gasped. Charlie, the only other married member of staff, who still dressed like he’d wandered off a skate park, mumbled a sorry mate.
‘Seriously?’ Ramona said, always ready with the wrong word.
No, she danced off in clown shoes squirting a custard gun.
‘Seriously.’
‘Why …?’
James mustered every last scrap of nonchalance he didn’t possess.
‘Wasn’t working out. It’s pretty friendly, it’s fine.’
He sensed Ramona’s desperation to ask who-dumped-who, but even her level of crass shrank from it. For now.
‘OK … well, I’ll put you down for one place then?’ Harris said.
James wrestled with the stigma of divorcing loser. Wrestled with it for only seconds.
‘Actually I was going to bring someone else. If that’s OK?’
Ramona’s jaw clunked open again.
‘Someone …? There’s someone new already? Oh. Is that why …’
James felt totally, completely justified in having not told them the truth. This was agony.
‘It didn’t help,’ he said, in a brusque, heartbreaker manner.
James turned back to his screen and congratulated himself on a job done, if not a job well done. He’d take plenty of time getting his lunchtime sandwich so that the analysis would be done by the time he returned.
So all he needed now for the birthday party was a one-night-hire-only girlfriend. Sounded like the kind of thing Laurence could help with.
‘Welcome to Sleeping Beauty. I am Sue and I can make your fairytale dreams come true!’ the boutique owner chirruped, which Anna thought was a fairly mental claim. Wasn’t Sleeping Beauty in a persistent vegetative state for a century?
Sue looked like a backbench MP in a skirt suit and pearls and Anna guessed her sales techniques would be brisk, despite all the wispy pouffiness around them.
Aggy and their mother’s eyes shone at her words, and Anna knew she was a lone cynic in the realm of true believers. It was an enchanted grotto for those who wanted to walk down the aisle looking like a Best Actress Oscar nominee.
The salon
The air was heavy with a sweet freesia scent, like some kind of sedative love gas. Michael Bublé crooned from hidden speakers, no doubt using subliminal hypnosis techniques.
Promise me your heart, give me your hand … and the long number on the front … now the expiry date, yeah baby.
There were racks of giant gowns, stiff and sticky-outy with net and bustles and laced corsets and an ‘aristocrat before the French Revolution’ attitude to making a bit of a show of yourself.
Sleeping Beauty could have been called Go Big Or Go Home. It was one big Pavlovian memory-trigger to Disney fantasies, in a world where the magic wand tap was the swipe of the Visa card.
Brides-to-be disappeared into a changing room through a crystal beaded curtain, to reappear transformed. Anna tried to imagine uttering the words ‘something simple’ in here, and failed.
‘You must be my bride,’ Sue said to Aggy. ‘I can tell you’re going to suit everything. Some fresh-faced young women simply make natural brides. And a sample size ten; the world’s your oyster when it comes to choosing a style.’
Anna itched to say: ‘What happens to the old broiler chickens then? Do you not flog them stuff?’
Aggy near-gurgled at the flattery. Physically, Aggy was a more angular, shorter version of her sister, but what she lacked in height and width she made up for in noise.
Aggy worked in PR, specialising in event management, and she was superbly suited to the job. She’d been organising things to her liking since she was very small, and her wheedle power was second to none. You wouldn’t mistake Aggy for an academic: today she was in a puffa coat, high-heeled boots and carrying a Mulberry Alexa. She lived life in caps lock. GETTING MARRIED LOL!
There were two years between the sisters, and in some ways, a chasm of difference.
‘This must be the beautiful mother of the beautiful bride,’ Sue said, speaking to their mum as if she was serving her a soft-boiled egg in an assisted living facility. ‘And this is the gorgeous sister and chief bridesmaid.’
‘Judy’ and ‘Anna’, they said in turn, as Sue clasped their hands and gazed at them with expression set to ‘purest bliss’.
Aggy had booked an hour-long private appointment, and whilst Anna hated a stalking sales presence, Aggy revelled in the attention.
Anna shrugged her grey duffle
