does she?”
“Why does she what, love?” he said, half listening, half reading his newspaper.
“Why does she love Ken? Why does she want to marry him?”
Of course, the answer was obvious – Barbie was marrying Ken so that Emma and I could get our hands on enough chocolate digestives and Love Heart sweets to make ourselves sick. But my dad chose to overlook this minor detail.
“What makes you ask that sweetheart?” he asked instead, buying himself a bit of time to come up with a plausible answer, no doubt, while simultaneously breathing a sigh of relief that he wasn’t going to have to explain where babies came from.
“I just wondered.”
“Well,” he ventured, both Emma and I now hanging off his every word.
“Well…he’s her Mr Right, I suppose.”
Hello?
We were only eight years old, dad.
“What’s a misterite?” Emma asked, trying to flick a bit of glitter off her finger.
My dad thought about it for a moment.
“Mr Right is the man a lady loves and wants to spend the rest of her life with. He’s the man she wants to marry. Because he makes her happy. Because they’re sort of meant to be together, sort of, I guess…”
You had to hand it to him – it was a damn good try.
“Does that mean you’re mummy’s misterite, then daddy?” I asked, still intrigued, while Emma, clearly less than impressed with this explanation, had returned to the task of making Ken a sparkly vest to go with his trousers.
“That’s right darling,” dad said, beaming – maybe because he was my mum’s Mr Right, maybe because he’d managed to answer the question without her help, probably a bit of both.
I may have only been eight years old, but I am pretty sure that was the very moment I decided I believed in Mr Right. And that one day I would find him.
I suspect it was also the moment that Emma decided it was absolute bollocks. That there was no such thing as Mr Right. And that the best she could ever hope for was to find someone who’d stick around longer than her dad did.
“But why?” I asked my dad for the third time, buttoning up Barbie’s wedding dress while Ken waited nervously in the marquee. “Why are you mummy’s misterite?”
My dad looked up from his newspaper and pondered the question for a second.
“Because, Rebs. Just because.”
Somewhere there waiteth in this world of ours
For one lone soul another lonely soul,
Each choosing each through all the weary hours
And meeting strangely at one sudden goal.
‘Destiny’, Sir Edwin Arnold (1832-1904)
“Sorry, sorry,” I shout, running down Pretty Street where Emma and Katie are both waiting for me outside the shop.
I look at my watch. I’m 30 minutes late. Damn.
“Sorry,” I say again, trying to catch my breath. I really should work on my fitness.
I hug them both.
“The train was delayed leaving Leeds,” I explain. “And then we had to stop in Grantham to replenish the buffet car. I blame the fat git in coach D – every time I went past him to get to the loos he was scoffing another king size Mars Bar. And then I had to wait 20 minutes for a bloody tube. The underground was packed. Whose idea was it to go wedding dress shopping in London on the first day of the January sales?” I ask. “Oh yes – yours!” I say, grinning at Katie.
“Let’s have another look then. I’ve forgotten what it looks like already.”
She waves her left hand in my face and I throw my head back, pretending to be blinded by the sparkle.
“Gorgeous,” I say, and she beams – which is pretty much all she’s been doing for the last ten days, I suspect.
“Right then. Let’s get this show on the road,” I say, pushing open the door to Maid in Heaven.
“I’m sorry,” a lady with half-moon glasses perched on the end of her nose and a tape measure wrapped around her neck tells us when we explain we’ve come in search of a wedding dress for Katie – a little pointless really, given that we are stood in a shop full of the bloody things.
“We’re fully booked,” she says. “You really should have made an appointment.”
I don’t like the way she’s looking at us – like she would look at something sticky on the bottom of her shoe. Lips turned down, nose tilted slightly in the air. I’m tempted to pull that tape measure a little tighter…
“What about this afternoon?” Katie asks.
The woman shakes her head.
“Fully booked,” she repeats. “All day.”
She reaches for a big leather diary from a desk and flicks nonchalantly through the pages until she stops at the first one that isn’t completely obliterated with brides’ names, telephone numbers and dress sizes. She taps the page decisively.
“April the third,” she says, ever so slightly sarcastically. Anyone would think she’s trying to make a point. “I can fit you in on April the third.”
“APRIL THE THIRD?” Katie shrieks. “That’s…” – she counts on her fingers quickly – “…four months away. I want to get married on September the eighteenth. I can’t wait four months!”
“SEPTEMBER EIGHTEENTH?!” the woman shrieks, obviously now in competition with my friend as to who can inject the most alarm into three simple words. “September the eighteenth, this year? In that case you really should have made an appointment.”
Katie looks at Emma and me.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say she’s going to cry.
But of course I do know better. I’ve known Katie for nearly ten years. Katie would never let a nasty woman like this make her cry.
“I’m sorry,” she tells her, instead, “I’m used to shopping in Marks and Spencer and Next, where you don’t have to make an appointment to use a cubicle.” And then she glances over to the rails of dresses on display at the back of the shop, and grimaces.
“In any case,” she says, “I really don’t think you have what it is I’m looking for.”
Emma and I grimace too – just for good measure. And then the three of us leave the shop and leg it back up the road laughing.
The woman at the next shop is not quite so nasty. But she does laugh at us. How rude.
“Have you any idea how many men propose over Christmas and New Year?” she asks.
Katie looks crestfallen. I think she thought it was just Matt – that it was just the best day of his and hers lives – not every Tom, Dick and Harry’s.
“We filled three months of the diary in one week,” she explains.
“Okay. Thanks anyway,” Katie says.
And so we leave shop number two.
Katie