The Stag and Hen Weekend (22 page)

A week before the wedding Helen gathered together a group of her oldest, closest friends that had of course included Yaz, who was then working in marketing for a media company in Manchester, to a bar in Liverpool where they sipped cocktails and exchanged horror stories from their dating pasts, before moving on to a trendy restaurant near the quayside where well presented food was consumed and more cocktails imbibed before heading off to a nearby nightclub to dance until the early hours.

As daylight broke across Merseyside and Helen along with Yaz and a couple of other friends who were staying with her for the weekend returned to her apartment, Helen’s phone rang.

‘Is this Helen?’ It was a female voice, young, undeniably sexy even though currently laced with stress. Helen confirmed her identity. ‘I think you should know that Aiden’s been cheating on you.’ Helen couldn’t speak. The woman carried on regardless. ‘He’s a bastard, an absolute bastard and he doesn’t deserve to be happy.’

Any doubts as to the veracity of this life-shattering statement evaporated when Aiden called her less than a minute later. He lied of course, claiming she was the deranged ex-girlfriend of a mate and was trying to get back at her ex by being a right royal pain in the arse to all around her, but Helen didn’t buy it for a second. It wasn’t the words so much as the guilt in Aiden’s voice, which he seemed unable to hide almost as if on some unconscious level he actually wanted her to know the truth that he was too cowardly to say to her face.

Eventually forced to confess, Aiden blamed everything from the pressure of work to Helen’s desire to stay in Liverpool for leading him astray, While Helen only blamed herself. As she contemplated the misery and embarrassment that lay before her she made two promises to herself: that she would never let her career backslide again for the sake of a man, and that if she fell in love again (which she couldn’t imagine) she would never, absolutely never, agree to get married.

Leaving the indignities involved in having to cancel the wedding a week before it was due to her mum and Yaz, Helen managed to talk the travel agents where she had booked her honeymoon into allowing her to exchange it for eight nights at a spa hotel in Paxos, where she embarked on a daily routine of beauty treatments, sunbathing, swimming and drinking bottle after bottle of local wine to the point of unconsciousness.

Returning home she cleared out anything that reminded her of Aiden, gave up alcohol, took up running and buried herself in her job, thinking nothing of working weekends and double shifts. Helen soon attracted the attention of upper management and received a promotion to producer of the mid-morning current affairs show, a post which she’d had her eye on since joining the station. Although thrilled to have reached her goal within weeks of starting the job, she found it still wasn’t quite enough. She wanted a bigger, better challenge, something that could completely absorb her and which she could mould as her own. It was only when she made these comments to Yaz late one Saturday evening when her friend had come to visit for the weekend that she finally realised what she wanted to be. ‘I want to be on air,’ she told Yaz, ‘I want to be a presenter on my own show.’

Determined to make a point to whomever might care to observe it Helen devoted all her spare time to putting together an amazing showreel that highlighted both her natural skills as a broadcaster and those she had picked up working with the brightest and best at the various stations across the nation. On a sunny spring morning a few weeks later she crossed her fingers and sent the CDs she had prepared out to the ten best radio stations in the country.

Within six months every one of them had rejected her. Refusing to give up, she continued sending out showreels until she had exhausted every option bar one.

Disheartened, she knocked on the office door of her own station manager and after a brief conversation outlining her desires had handed him the CD convinced that as well as marking the end of her dreams it would also result in the erosion of any credibility that she had. Management were suspicious of production people who wanted to become on-air talent: they felt it showed a lack of commitment while revealing the full extent of their bloated egos.

The following afternoon Helen got a call from the station manager’s PA asking her to come and see him. Prepared for the worst Helen found herself nervously reviewing the job ads at the back of
Broadcast
as she waited to be called in to his office. When he told her that he had liked her showreel so much that he was offering her a try out covering Kit Emmerly’s weekend overnight show the following month Helen convinced herself it was all an elaborate joke. It was only when she found herself covering Matthew Hutcherson’s early-evening phone-in the month after, and Jane Edwards’ mid-morning talkback show the month after that, that she finally accepted her dream was coming true right before her eyes. The day that they told her she had finally landed her own show,
Call-back, with Helen Richards
, an overnight show covering Monday to Thursday, she was on such a high that she didn’t come down for days.

It was around this time, with a new job and the worst of what had been a monstrously unhappy year behind her, that Yaz chose to announce that she and Simon were getting married. And it was at her friend’s hastily thrown together engagement party that Helen encountered Phil Hudson for the first time and came to realise that the second of her vows made after splitting up with Aiden, might not be quite so easy to keep as the first.

2.

Meeting a potential life partner hadn’t even been on Helen’s agenda as she entered Simon and Yaz’s crowded living room clutching a plastic cup of red wine. She hoped to chew over old times with a few good friends and at worst she thought she might drink too much, talk about work a little too loudly and around midnight end up dancing and singing to
I’m Every Woman
. It was, then, very much to her surprise, when after three glasses of wine and an hour of room circulating she found herself being introduced to Phil, one of Simon’s friends, and thinking as his hand touched hers: “Hmm, he’s nice.”

Phil was tall but not too tall. He had short black hair, dark brown eyes that seemed to radiate warmth and peeking out from underneath his hairline by his right temple was a tiny scar. He was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved black t-shirt, which was so tight across the shoulders that Helen was tempted to reach out and give the outline of each deltoid a prod with her index finger.

‘Are you okay?’

Helen blinked, aware that she had been away in her own private daydream. ‘Yes, yes. Sorry about that. I was away with the fairies.’

‘No problem,’ said Phil. ‘I just wanted to make sure that you weren’t drifting off into a diabetic coma. That would have been terrible.’

‘For me or for you?’

Phil was horrified. ‘You’re not actually diabetic are you?’

Helen shook her head and Phil wiped imaginary sweat from his brow.

‘I thought I’d really put my foot in it there.’

‘Don’t worry, there’s still plenty of time.’

They continued talking, mainly about Simon and Yaz. Phil thought Yaz was the best thing that had ever happened to Simon and liked the way that she seemed to have calmed down the excesses of his youth. He usually saw them two or three times a year but wished he could see them more because although he had friends where he lived, none were as good as Simon.

Phil revealed that he was the owner of Sharper Sounds, a high end TV and hi-fi shop in Derby. Helen deliberately played down her job’s glamorous side and focused on the hard work that she had to put in every day but she couldn’t help feeling a flush of pride when he appeared genuinely impressed, even asking her to send him a CD of her show to listen to in the car on his way to work. She took his address and promised that she would send him the disc first thing Monday morning, but even as she kissed him on the cheek as they parted, she knew it wasn’t going to happen. Nice as he seemed she wasn’t anywhere near ready to start dating again.

The next time they met was the following New Year’s Eve when Simon and Yaz had a small get-together at their house. Phil and several of Simon’s other friends arrived just after seven and the first thing Phil did on seeing Helen was to ask her what happened to the recording she had promised to send. Helen had lied and blamed the post, but Phil said that it didn’t matter anyway as he had offered one of his regular mail-order customers a ten per cent discount if they sent him a recording of her show. He claimed to have listened to it so many times that he had inadvertently committed parts to memory and proceeded to recite a minute’s worth of on-air banter about women’s underwear that she had exchanged with Sandy, the weather girl following the three o’clock news. Phil’s teasing had Helen in stitches and for the rest of the evening all they did was talk and laugh.

‘Call me and we’ll meet up,’ she said as she hurriedly tapped her home number into his phone.

‘Promise?’

‘On my life.’

Two days later, as she sat on her sofa watching TV Phil did indeed call but she didn’t pick up. Instead she stood next to the machine while he left a long and rambling message in the style of Sandy, the weather girl. The message made her laugh out loud but it also had the effect of making her think about the past, and she shed more tears in a single evening than she had in the previous six months.

Finally, some six months later, they met for a third time, on Simon and Yaz’s wedding day, in their roles as best man and maid of honour. At the reception, as Simon and Yaz took to the floor for the first dance of the evening Phil turned to Helen and asked her what exactly she was afraid of and without missing a beat she said: ‘Getting hurt, again.’

He gave her words careful consideration then reached for her hand and squeezed it, as if he was confident that this small action was all the reassurance she could need. In any other man, Helen would have found this response remarkable in its inadequacy but from Phil it felt like a beautifully eloquent gesture. He made her feel safe, he made her feel cherished and right there and then she knew he was all that she wanted.

Nine years, two house moves, three job changes, a large mortgage and a red setter called Samson later and Helen felt exactly the same way. Phil made her feel safe and secure and they were happy, really happy, until one evening out in the centre of Nottingham enjoying a post-cinema visit to Nando’s, Phil went and spoilt it all.

‘Look what I’ve found,’ he said reaching down beneath their table. He held out his hand and showed Helen a bright pink plastic ring with a red plastic jewel in the middle.

‘Somewhere out there is an under-accessorised four-year-old who is ruining her poor mum’s evening because she’s lost her favourite ring,’ joked Helen. ‘You should hand it in to the staff, there might even be a reward.’

‘Or,’ mused Phil, ‘I could just give it to you.’

Helen stared at the ring, saying nothing.

She was obviously in need of greater encouragement. He rolled the ring between his thumb and forefinger. ‘So come on then. How about it?’

She pushed his hand away. ‘Very funny, Hudson, you’ve had your fun, that’s enough.’

Defiantly, Phil placed the ring on the table in front of his plate. ‘Plenty of men would be more than a little bit crushed by a comment like that.’

‘Well given that you’re not one of them the point is, as they say, moot. Now, eat up and tell me what you thought of the film. If you’re lucky I might even pass off a few of your more perceptive comments as my own in tomorrow’s show when Carol-the-film-critic comes in for her slot.’

Phil began sawing at the chicken leg in front of him in a petulant fashion while Helen breathed a sigh of relief. She took a bite of her chicken burger and looked at Phil expecting to see him chewing. His lips were set in a grim line.

Helen calmly set down her knife and fork.

‘What now?’

‘Is there any need to use that voice?’

‘What voice?’

‘Your annoyed voice.’

‘I am annoyed, Phil! I just wanted us to have a nice night out and now you’re being all weird and sulky for no reason.’

‘No reason?’ Phil snorted loudly. ‘Of course there’s a reason! I can’t believe that you still don’t get it!’

‘Get what?’

‘How insulting it is.’

‘How insulting what is? I have no idea what you’re talking about!’

Phil’s eyes widened in disbelief. ‘Are you kidding? I’ve just asked you to marry me!’

‘Using a kid’s toy ring that you found on the floor! Am I supposed to be flattered?’

‘You know that’s not the point! I’m always asking you to marry me, and you’re always saying the same thing. How many times do I have to ask before you say yes?’

Hearing the genuine hurt in his voice amongst the anger and indignation made Helen feel terrible. He was right, of course. She had lost count of the number of times he had proposed. There had been several formal proposals in their first three years (one in a Michelin-starred restaurant on their first anniversary, another, in Venice during a private gondola ride as they passed under the Rialto Bridge) followed by countless informal ones over the next seven years when he was bored, drunk, sober, amorous, sentimental and, on at least one occasion, angry. No matter the context or the manner in which the question was posed Helen’s response had always been the same.