Actually, I’d meant it. I took a swig.
‘Just think – you’ll never have to make love to a man who slaps you on the rump and calls you a filly ever again!’
‘Neiighhhh!!!!’
‘Or date ANYBODY SHORT.’
Olly and Max were both very tall. These were our minimum requirements. We’d always reckoned that short men for girls were the equivalent of that horrible joke blokes tell – ‘What have fat girls and scooters got in common? They’re both fun to ride, but you wouldn’t want your mates seeing you with one.’
‘Or snog anyone for a dare.’
‘Or sympathy.’
‘Christ, yeah. Remember Norm?’
‘It was charity work,’ I replied indignantly. ‘Helping the less blessed in the world.’
Norm had been something of a mistake, something of a long time ago.
Norm had been a snuffling pig, outright winner in an ugly pig competition.
‘Anyway, why are you starting, Bridezilla? What about Pinocchio?’
Pinocchio told a lot of lies and had a very long narrow woody.
‘Pour me some more Baileys immediately,’ demanded Tashy.
‘I don’t want to give you a headache.’
‘Are you joking? We’ve booked singers from the local choral society to sing the hymns. No one’s getting out alive without a headache.’ She rolled over.
‘It’s turning out all right, though, isn’t it?’
‘We thought that at sixteen.’
‘Oh yeah, when we hadn’t gotten pregnant. God, we knew nothing.’
‘I think we thought that was it, didn’t we? That we’d cracked it.’
‘And at any moment, the knight in shining armour was just outside putting money in the meter …’
‘Can you believe both of our Prince Charmings are going bald?’ said Tash meditatively.
‘Yours fastest,’ I said defensively.
‘It’s all the testosterone building up from me being too tired to shag him after planning this damn wedding.’
‘Does not shagging them make them bald? We could have saved Prince Edward after all.’
‘No we couldn’t.’
The thing is, when your friends fall in love – seriously – it gets very difficult to discuss the boys with them any more. It’s fine to completely and totally dissect someone you’ve seen twice because they look a bit like Pierce Brosnan and can get gig tickets, but once it creeps into the full time – watch telly with, wash socks of, etc. – it becomes impossible. It’s like discussing somebody’s naked dad.
Max was just so sensible, so safe. He just … he just didn’t get it. And he didn’t seem to know the lovely Tashy I remembered, haring down the seafront at Brighton with her heels in her hands at four a.m., or marching us off through Barcelona because she thought she knew the way and was buying the sangria, or dancing all night on top of a bar, or taking her stuffed rabbit on holiday until she was twenty-six … I know people think this about all their friends, but Max … he was all right, but I didn’t really think he was good enough for my her. I wanted someone who could match her, dirty giggle for dirty giggle, not someone who could help her work out her SERPS contributions and had strong views on the education of children.
Of course I knew this was how it was going to work. We’d even devised the Buffy scale of life relationships: you start off wanting Xander, spend your twenties going out with Spike and settle down with Giles. Which seemed to mean Tashy had never had a chance at an Angel. And, I suppose, neither had I. I didn’t believe in angels, anyway. I didn’t believe in much.
We leafed through a celebrity wedding edition of OK! magazine for the last time together as single girls. For one of us at least (and me too, of course, I’m never having bloody gold-rimmed parasols), the chances of ever having an elephant attending our wedding, being carried in on the shoulders of gold-painted slaves, spending over $2,000,000 on flowers, marrying someone older than our dads because they were very, very rich indeed, insisting all the guests wore a certain colour and weren’t allowed to talk to you, the press or the special bought-in soap celebrities, were about to vanish for ever.
We sighed as we flicked over to some other minor star, who had designed her own dress (which showed, in that it looked exactly like the highly inflated numbers we used to draw in primary school, complete with more flounces than Elton John playing tennis), and had fifteen flower girls, including seven she barely knew but who happened to be in a similar television show – plus one girl who was so ugly she had to be close family, but had been zipped into skin-tight, bust-squeezing fuchsia anyway, next to the telly lollipop girls, looking like the unhappiest whale in captivity.
‘“I haven’t been able to sleep for months with the excitement,”’ I read the bride said. ‘Really? Do you think? Months?’
Tashy glanced at the gushing copy. ‘They’ve only been together for six months. It’ll all be over by Christmas. She’ll be able to give hundreds of interviews about her heartache. It’ll make her feel really famous. No wonder she’s excited.’
‘Huh,’ I said. ‘Plus, you know, celebrities: they have to fall in love ten times harder than the rest of us.’
‘I know,’ said Tashy. ‘It must get really boring for Jen and Brad. They’ve been married for ever and people keep asking them if they’re still as divinely in love as they were when they first met. Well, they aren’t. Nobody is,’ she said, addressing the magazine sternly.
‘Do you remember when we were bridesmaids for Heather?’ I asked suddenly. Heather is Tashy’s big sister. She’d had to ask me too because we were so inseparable. We had had an absolutely great time. It was the eighties, so our dresses were enormous. We were allowed to wear a huge amount of blue makeup, white tights, and dance with all the boys wearing shiny Jonathan Ross suits. As Heather pointed out later, in a rare wistful moment after the divorce, we’d had much, much more fun than she had. At the time, we wouldn’t have believed that to be possible. We thought she was the most beautiful and enviable living thing we’d ever seen.
‘Oh, yeah. Don’t. I asked her if she wanted to be my matron of honour, and she snorted and said, “Thanks, but if you want to get involved in all that garbage, please do it without me, Natasha,” and went back to doing yoga and eating muesli.’
‘It is a real shame he got the sense of humour in the divorce,’ I said, and Tashy nodded glumly.
Then she popped her head up from the magazine. ‘Um.’
‘What?’
She jumped up and got us another Baileys.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Well, you know when you were talking about us being stupid at sixteen?’
‘Mm?’
‘You’ll never guess who my mother ran into at the post office. Invited the whole family.’
I rather love Jean, Tashy’s mother. She is giggly and dresses too young for her age and drinks too many gin and tonics – all the reasons she embarrasses the bits out of Tashy. It’s amazing how, even though we’re both in our thirties, we still turn into sulky teenagers when confronted with our mothers. It had been worse recently, with all the wedding arrangements for Tash, and there had been at least two occasions when Tashy had slammed out of the house shouting – and she was ashamed to relate this, even after a couple of glasses of wine – ‘Stop trying to control my life!’ She had also decided that since she and Tashy’s dad (they were divorced, and got on a lot better than my parents) were paying for most of