bridesmaid dress.’
‘Have you talked any more about setting a date?’ Louisa asked, fussing with the puddle train behind her. Was I supposed to be doing that?
‘Not really,’ I shook my head. ‘I mean, we talked about it all the time when you two finally set a date, but since Mark got promoted we’ve hardly had time to blink. You know how it is.’
Louisa waved the photographer away for a moment. ‘Mmm. I just mean, do you think you’ll definitely get married? To Mark, I mean?’
Click, flash – not a good one.
I had to hold my hands to my eyes to get a proper look at Louisa. The August sun lit her from behind, obscuring her face and highlighting a halo of wispy blonde curls.
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘We’re engaged aren’t we?’
She sighed and shook her head. ‘Yeah, I just worry about you sweetness. With the wedding and stuff I feel like we haven’t really talked about you and Mark in ages.’
‘There’s nothing new to tell you. You probably see him more than I do. At least you get your tennis time every single week.’
‘I tried to get you to take up doubles,’ she muttered, messing with her hem again. ‘I just want you to be as happy as I am right now. Oh, that’s so patronizing, sorry. You know what I mean babe, just, be happy.’
‘I am happy,’ I reassured her, taking her hand and closing in on the dress for a scaffolded hug. ‘I am really happy.’
Just after the speeches had finished but a little bit before the dancing began, I finally managed to escape to the loo.
The reception was being held in a converted barn, that only had two ladies’ cubicles, neither of which were big enough to turn around in, so I had escaped up to our room. I looked around at my scattered belongings. I carried my life in my massive, battered handbag – laptop, iPod, phone, a couple of knackered old books. Bits of make-up and scraps of clothes were strewn all over the room, contrasting with Mark’s carefully organized suitcase. A place for everything and everything in its place, even in a hotel.
I was happy, I thought to myself, flopping down on the bed and idly flicking the pages of one of my books with my toes. I had a fun job that was flexible, I had Louisa, the best friend in the world, and I’d lost twenty pounds for this wedding, which had put me comfortably in the size twelve bridesmaid dress. I could even convince myself (if no one else) that a ten might have been a better fit. I wasn’t horrible to look at, long, light brown hair, greeny-blue eyes and since I dropped the extra weight, I’d discovered a pair of fairly impressive cheekbones. And I had Mark. Who wouldn’t love a good-looking, up-and-coming banker boyfriend? He should think himself lucky, I tried to convince myself. Yes, he’s got all his own hair, no hereditary diseases, a city banker salary, car and a mortgage, but I’d been attending horribly humiliating weight loss classes for the last six months (it wasn’t the weigh-ins that broke you, they were fine, it was the team leader who moonlighted as a dog trainer), I could cook and I cleaned the bathroom every Sunday without being asked. So no, sainthood didn’t beckon, but I wasn’t an awful girlfriend and we’d been together for ever, since we were sixteen. Ten years. But Louisa’s words bothered me a little bit. Was I happy? Maybe more content than bouncing-off-the-sofa-like-Tom-Cruise-ecstatic, but that’s still happy isn’t it?
I looked at my engagement ring. Classic solitaire. Not huge or flashy trashy, but not magnifying glass necessitating tiny. Mark had bought it with his first pay cheque and presented it to me on a holiday to Seville, post-pony and trap ride and pre-lovely sex back at our hotel room. It had seemed horribly romantic at the time, but now it just seemed a horribly long time ago. Shouldn’t he be pushing me for a date? Just a little?
‘Don’t be silly,’ I said out loud to my confused reflection. Louisa was probably just getting in front of herself, she was married now after all, I just hadn’t expected her smug-married neuroses to kick in before she’d even got out of the church. There was nothing wrong with me and Mark. Ten years of nothing wrong, why would I worry? I tried to slip my beautiful, beautiful heels back on but my left foot seemed to have gained ten of my twenty lost pounds. After five fruitless minutes of searching the suite for my standby flats, I accepted that my shoe bag hadn’t made it out of the car. Which meant I would have to brave the drunken uncles, the dancing children high on wedding cake (I had seen balloons too – they were armed) and go to the car park.
CHAPTER TWO
Tiptoeing barefoot, Louboutins in hand, I searched for the car. Over in a dark corner, hidden beneath beautiful weeping willows was Mark’s Range Rover. When he had bought it six months before, Louisa had taken it as a direct sign that he was ready for kids. I saw it as a direct sign that he was not ever going to let me drive it on my own. So far, I’d been the one proven right. Scrambling around in my handbag for the spare keys, I noticed that the reading light was on in the back. I smiled to myself, knowing Mark would be so happy that I had come out and saved his battery. Pressing the button to turn off the alarm, instead of the reassuring double pip, I was greeted by a loud siren and flashing indicators. Which was when I realized someone was inside the car.
Shit, our car was being stolen and here I was, hobbling barefoot over gravel with a pair of £400 shoes in one hand and wearing a floor length gown. And I’d just set the alarm off. Brilliant. The car thieves were definitely going to kill me. If I was murdered at Louisa’s wedding, she would be furious. All her anniversaries would be ruined. Would she still go on her honeymoon? Maybe I could use my heels as a weapon. Well, maybe not, I didn’t want to stain them. But the soles were already red …
I was all ready to turn and hightail it out of the headlines when I remembered my shoes. They could take Mark’s car but, damn it, they weren’t taking my fallback flats. Two-year-old Topshop maybe but they were the comfiest damn shoes I’d ever owned. I pulled open the back door to confront the thief before I bottled it. And then, in a startling moment of clarity, I realized there wasn’t a man trying to steal the car or my shoes, but two people, very much having sex on the back seat.
And one of them was Mark.
‘Angela,’ he stuttered, his red sweaty face staring out at me, indentations from my Hello Kitty seatbelt protectors on his left cheek. He wouldn’t let me put them in the front. It took me another moment to register the naked woman underneath him. She looked at me, frozen underneath Mark, with smudged mascara and a red chin from Mark’s omnipresent five o’clock shadow. I didn’t recognize her at all, blonde, pretty, looked fairly skinny from what I could see of her bony shoulders, and she had a lovely tan. A peacock blue silk dress scrunched up on the parcel shelf suggested she had been at the wedding reception, and the beautiful pair of silver Gina sandals clamped around my boyfriend’s waist told me I really should have spotted her earlier. I did love a nicely turned shoe.
‘I came to get my flats,’ I said, numb, not moving.
I stumbled backwards as Mark pulled himself out of the car on his belly and dropped to the floor in front of me, his boxer shorts working themselves further back down his legs as his sweaty skin peeled away from the leather.
‘Angela,’ Mark stood up, he pulled his pants up high, and wriggled into his shirt. I looked past him into the car. The girl had managed to get her dress on and was rubbing under her eyes to try to get rid of the mascara. Good luck, I thought, if it’s as good a quality as your shoes you won’t get that off by rubbing. Shoes still looked great though. Bitch.
‘Angela,’ he tried again snapping me out of my shoe-induced
