Tales From a Hen Weekend (3 page)

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?

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 formula, 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.

Today’s the Saturday morning, the week before my hen weekend. Matt leaves for Prague this evening. He’s gone into town to buy himself a couple of new T-shirts. Why do men leave everything to the last minute? I’ve had all my clothes sorted out for the hen weekend, the wedding reception and the honeymoon for about two or three months. I’ve come round to Mum’s to get away from the flat for a couple of hours, because all I can see while I’m there is Matt’s half-packed suitcase, and it’s making me crosser and crosser the more I look at it. I didn’t expect the whole gang to be round here: Auntie Joyce, Lisa and the kids. My brother-in-law Richard’s here too, but he’s outside doing something to Mum’s car.

‘He’s a good lad,’ says Mum, although the ‘lad’ is thirty-eight if he’s a day. ‘I’m sure there’s something wrong with the handbrake, but I’m afraid to take it to the garage. It’s so difficult when you’re a woman on your own.’

This is another common theme of Mum’s. How she’s stayed alive for the twenty-five years since the divorce must be a miracle. To listen to her, you’d think there was a dangerous wild beast lurking on every corner of every street, with its talons drawn ready to attack any lone woman venturing out of the safety of her home without a man on her arm.

‘Matt doesn’t know anything about cars,’ I say with a shrug. ‘I have to sort mine out myself.’

‘Richard would always help, if you have a problem,’ says Lisa, glowing in the reflected glory of her
good lad
.

‘It’s OK. I did that car maintenance course, didn’t I.’

‘Funny, isn’t it, Joyce,’ says Mum. ‘Funny how the kids do these things nowadays – girls doing car maintenance, boys cooking the dinners.’

‘We’re not exactly kids.’

‘And anyway,’ says Joyce, ‘it’s a positive thing, Marge. You don’t want your girls to be tied to the kitchen. What would be the point of giving them such a good education?’

Auntie Joyce and Uncle Ron have never had any children. I’ve never liked to ask the reason, but this is why she’s always taken such a lot of interest in Lisa and me growing up. She was only nine when Lisa was born, so she’s actually closer in age to us than she is to Mum. When I was a stroppy teenager, there were a lot of times I stormed out of the house after a row with Mum, and went to stay the night at Joyce’s house. She never took my side against Mum – just made me hot chocolate and listened to me.

‘We had a good education too,’ Mum points out. ‘But I didn’t expect to have a career
and
a family.’

‘Who’s talking about having a family?’

‘Well,’ Lisa looks at me pointedly. ‘Isn’t that why you’re getting married?’

‘What? No, it isn’t!’

I stare around the room. No one looks convinced. They’re all kind-of smirking to themselves as if they know perfectly well that I’m secretly planning a baby at this very minute, working out my fertile period so that I can go home and get one started as soon as possible.

‘That’s why
we
got married,’ says Lisa smugly. ‘We were ready to have children, and we didn’t want them to have different surnames and be called…’

‘Hang on, hang on! For a start I’m
not
ready to have kids! And for another thing it’s not like that these days, Lisa! Nobody bothers about…’

‘Well,
I
do,’ she says, protectively putting her arms around Charlie and Molly, who’ve both just trotted in, to the accompaniment of the closing music of a kids’ cartoon show on the TV in the other room.

Charlie and Molly are lovely kids. If I wanted kids, I’d want them to be clones of these two. Lisa’s a great mum. Like she’s great at everything.

‘But I don’t want kids,’ I mutter, half to myself. Not yet? Or not ever?

‘You’re thirty-one,’ Mum reminds me with great solemnity.

‘Thanks. I know.’

‘In my day, you would have been considered an elderly primigravida.’