‘Anna works the cute look, you do curvy and hot.’ Lizzie grinned despite herself. ‘And I’m the lanky one. I wish I had curves like yours.’
A lie, but a white one to make Lizzie feel better. Natalie’s stepmother, Bess, was a seamstress who made a lot of wedding dresses and Natalie had grown up hearing about bridal anxiety.
‘No you don’t,’ Lizzie replied, but she was smiling as she tried on her hen-night regalia.
As part of her preparations for the evening Natalie had dutifully bought pink fluffy horns, T-shirts emblazoned with Bride on Tour and had booked a booth in Laguna, a happening club where the karaoke machine got turned on at eleven and poles were put up on stage for anyone wanting to try pole dancing and willing to sign the insurance waiver first.
It was ten to eleven now. Lizzie knew there was a still long night ahead.
She was thrilled her friend was happy. Steve was such a nice guy: kind, polite, decent. But Natalie couldn’t help recalling how, when they were younger, the three of them had had such dreams about conquering the world. And now they were twenty-three and suddenly it seemed as if the world had shrunk. Anna was dating a guy who was perfect on paper but slightly dull in real life. Gavin worked in the bank, owned his own flat, played rugby with his old school friends at the weekend and wore rugby jerseys with the collars turned up. Give him another ten years and he’d have golf club membership and a rowing machine with clothes thrown over it in the bedroom. They used to laugh at guys like him, the safe guys, and now Anna was enraptured.
Lizzie was getting married in a week to the sweet and kind Steve–and she wouldn’t be wearing bright red, the way she’d always promised: ‘I’ll never go down the aisle in white: the roof of the church would fall in!!’
Instead, her dress was creamy lace with a bustier top to make the most of her assets; her dark curls would be covered by a demure veil, and the guest list included all the various horrors of relations that she’d sworn blind would never get invited.
‘You have to ask them,’ she’d said when Natalie dropped by and found her fretting over the seating plan. Great Aunt Mona couldn’t sit with Uncle Tom or they’d kill one another. They hadn’t met without rowing in fifty years and it was unlikely they were about to stop now.
‘Why do you have to ask them?’
‘Because, that’s why.’
‘You never see any of them, except at other people’s weddings and funerals. I thought this day was supposed to be about you and Steve, not the usual outdated cliché of a wedding with ninety awful second-cousins-once-removed.’
Lizzie grimaced at having her words quoted back at her.
‘My mother would die if we didn’t have a big wedding,’ she said. ‘You know what she’s like, Natalie. Anyway…’ Lizzie paused. ‘I know it sounds strange, but I like the idea of having them there. It makes it real when all the cousins and aunties show up. Like we wouldn’t be properly married if we did it on a beach somewhere without them all clucking over the waste of money spent on the flowers or giving out about the bones in the fish.’
Natalie laughed. ‘Point taken. But when they’re all squabbling because you’ve sat them too far from the top table, don’t say I didn’t warn you.’
‘Mum will sort them out,’ laughed Lizzie.
Once, thinking of Lizzie’s mum might have upset Natalie. When she was a child, she’d felt different because she didn’t have a mum. She wasn’t the only kid in her class to have an unusual family set-up. There were two kids whose dads lived elsewhere, and one boy who had two families: his mother and stepfather, and his dad and stepmother, plus assorted brothers and sisters. And there was Eileen, a quiet mouse of a girl with long strawberry blonde hair she wore like a curtain hiding her eyes. She lived on her own with her mother and went mute whenever any event came up that involved dads.
Eileen might not have had a dad, but she had a mother. Even when Natalie was seven and her mind was gently exploring such things, even when Eileen was by far the strangest kid in the class, even then Natalie knew that Eileen had something she didn’t: a real mother.
Dads sometimes got involved in other things or worked all hours, but mums didn’t. Mums were there. Except for Natalie Flynn’s. Her mum was dead. She had Bess instead, her stepmum, who was wonderful, and so kind, but still wasn’t her real mum. She’d said Natalie didn’t have to call her ‘Mum’, so Natalie hadn’t; and that simple thing, that name, had strangely made all the difference. Other kids had mums and dads: Natalie had Dad and Bess. And Bess, no matter how wonderful, wasn’t Mum.
Natalie forgot loads of things: the sheer pain of writing her thesis had burned off so many brain cells, but she’d never forget the first time she was asked:
‘What’s it like not to have a mum?’
Toby–now grown up and cute, and always friendly whenever she went to the garage he ran–had been a teacher’s nightmare at the age of seven: hyperactive and overfond of the word ‘why?’
Why does the sun go down at night?
Why are the people on the television so small?
Why do we have to go to school?
Why did your mum die? Are you still sad about her being dead?
Natalie could see her seven-year-old self: a skinny little thing, with those matchstick legs poking out of the grey-and-white school uniform and her dark hair tangled and coming out of its ponytail no matter how carefully Bess did it before she went to school.
‘I’m not sad,’ she’d said defiantly. Toby obviously wanted her to say she was sad, so it was important to say she wasn’t. Toby said girls couldn’t climb trees and she’d shown him he was wrong. She’d skinned her knees in the process, but she’d shown him.
‘I’m never sad.’
Had she stuck her tongue out at him then? That she couldn’t remember. Probably. Sticking out your tongue was a vital way of winning arguments when she was seven, akin to pulling wimpy girls’ hair and jumping on to any bit of wall to dance along it.
She’d gone home and told Dad and Bess what Toby had said, and they’d exchanged that look that grown-ups did when they didn’t want to answer the question.
She had no memory of what her father had said, although she could remember subsequent conversations: God takes people sometimes, we don’t know why.
God’s responsibility had shifted vastly when the ten-year-old Natalie had said: ‘I hate God.’
Bess hadn’t missed a beat. ‘We don’t always understand what God does. We just have to accept it.’
Natalie had never accepted it.
There were so many pluses in her life: a lovely family with Bess as the centrepoint, Dad being sweet and just a little bit not-of-this-planet, her half-brothers Ted and Joe, and good friends like Molly. She had so much, particularly when she looked at the disadvantaged kids whom Molly worked with. Compared to them, she was rich in every way. Yet Natalie felt as if there was a part of her missing.
Lizzie and Anna seemed to think that any missing bit could be fixed with the right man. Natalie felt it was more than that. But what exactly?
‘Hi, beautiful, can I buy you a drink?’ she heard the guy with the skull-and-crossbones earring ask Lizzie.
Natalie could see him reflected in the bar mirror. He was tall, and good-looking enough for one of Lizzie’s model cousins to be giving him a hard, appreciative stare. Natalie took in the tousled fair hair and the honed body. She also saw Lizzie’s lustful look.
‘No thanks,’ Natalie broke in as politely as she could. ‘It’s a hen night. No men allowed.’
‘Spoilsport,’ murmured Lizzie, leaning on Natalie and smiling up at the guy.
‘No, really,