just about managed to keep her eye-roll internal; she wasn’t above referring to Sarah as ‘Cole’s late-arriving Siamese twin,’ when she was feeling her cattiest. ‘Not a minute ago anyway,’ she answered before dumping the platters on the hastily erected tables and beginning to rip away the plastic coverings, batting away Harry’s hand as it snuck in for a hoisin duck mini-wrap.
‘Hey,’ Harry protested, swiping one anyway. ‘I paid for them.’
‘I thought Dad did,’ Harry’s younger brother corrected, characteristically appearing from nowhere the minute the food was revealed and grabbing the biggest sausage roll bite before Bea could react. Harry retaliated by snatching up his own sausage roll and following Archie out into the sunshine of the beer garden to argue the point. Eli approached the table hopefully.
‘Don’t even think about it,’ Bea told him flatly, putting herself bodily between the man and the platter. ‘Go and be useful, help Sarah untangle those fairy lights or something,’ she instructed as she physically shooed him away.
Daisy paused in her recounting of general life, love and work since she saw Cleo last to check her phone for the time. ‘When is Nora getting here? It’s late.’
‘She’s had to go and pick up her mum,’ Cleo explained, slightly breathlessly between balloons. ‘Eileen didn’t trust herself driving with a cake in the passenger seat, apparently, so Nora’s got to go up to Kilburn to get them both. Her mum and the cake, that is.’
Daisy laughed, clicking onto Tinder while her phone was in her hand, so Cleo could only assume that poor Darren was indeed on his way out the door. ‘I wonder which one gets shotgun.’
Cole finally appeared, waving something above his head like it was the Holy Grail. ‘Blu-Tac,’ he announced, dramatically. ‘Can’t believe we forgot about Blu-Tac.’
Sarah abandoned Eli to the snarl of wires that purported to be fairy lights and swept to her husband’s side. ‘Have you not got the photo wall up yet?’ she asked, a bit redundantly, being as she could certainly see that the designated wall was still bare.
‘How could I without any Blu-Tac?’ Cole pointed out reasonably. ‘I’m on it now.’
‘It’s gone six,’ Sarah continued to fret, glancing at the pool of balloons filling the floor, also waiting for some Blu-Tac attention. ‘We’ve got to get a move on.’
‘Chill out, love, its fine.’ There was no getting around it; Sarah was all too aware that she was a bit of a political bridesmaid – the wife of the best man – and she was determined to overcome this by ensuring said bridesmaiding was completely beyond reproach, resulting in her being, quite possibly, more emotionally invested in this wedding-planning even than Nora.
Sarah had been surprised when Nora had asked her to be a bridesmaid. Nora was one of those girls who had always had friends coming out of her ears, and while she’d been lovely to Sarah since day one, Sarah had never felt like Nora would have considered her one of her best friends. Nora hadn’t even been one of Sarah’s bridesmaids – she and Cole had got married so quickly in the end, and kept it so small, she hadn’t had any.
‘Here, why don’t you help if you’re so worried?’ Cole continued, distracting Sarah from her chain of thought, handing her a ripped-off chunk of Blu-Tac. With a glance back over at Eli to check he was still working away at the bird’s nest of lights, Sarah grabbed up a handful of photographs, sticking precise little dots of the tack in each of the corners.
‘Oh, God, this holiday,’ her husband laughed after a minute, still holding the first picture he’d picked up. He passed it across to Sarah, who gave it a polite glance. The fresh faces of young Harry, Cole, Nora and Bea grinned out at her, eighteen or nineteen, something like that, but still with the rounded cheeks of their childhood, their complexions reddened by the sun, or perhaps by the cheap alcohol in the cocktail fishbowl they were drinking liberally from. ‘This was the one where Bea got that tattoo she had to have covered up last year. We started drinking when we came in off the beach for lunch, and …’
Sarah tuned out; she’d heard this story plenty of times before. She wondered if she would appear at all in this wall of memories she was oh so carefully sticking into place.
Daisy paused in her generous swiping-rights to reply to a message from Nora, now finally en route with her two precious passengers and wanting an update on how things were going from her bridesmaids’ group WhatsApp chat. Daisy glanced over to where Bea was ferrying rubbish back through to the staging area rooms, Sarah and Cole were industriously sticking photographs to the far wall, and in front of her, where Cleo was looking alarmingly red in the face. All dandy, she replied on behalf of the four of them, adding a smiley face and a be-veiled bride emoticon for good measure.
* * *
Nora and her mother swept in just as the last trio of balloons were being mercilessly Blu-Tac’d into a corner, the multiple strands of fairy lights were being switched on and Daisy finished syncing her phone to the Bluetooth speakers and started up the Spotify playlist she’d created especially for the event. Nora clapped her hands, her eyes shining, the hemline on her contextually appropriate lacy white dress flipping.
‘Oh, you guys! It looks great.’
Harry made an appearance, surreptitiously brushing sausage-roll flakes from his hands onto his chinos. ‘You look great,’ he corrected his fiancée, kissing her cheek. ‘Eileen, do you want me to take that?’
Nora’s mother was delicately clutching a large cake box like it was a new-born baby.
‘That’s okay, Henry,’ she assured him. ‘If you’ll just show me where the kitchen is.’ Harry dutifully led the way. Eileen was the only person who actually called Harry, Henry; even his own mother didn’t call him Henry.
Nora sidled up to Bea, sat at one of the round tables, exchanging her Toms for a party-perfect pair of pink stilettos. ‘How’s it going, Mel?’ she asked, leaning on the back of Bea’s chair.
Bea straightened and grinned up at her. ‘Going okay, Mel.’ They were always asked, but, no, they couldn’t remember when or why they’d started calling one another Mel. Like most things from their childhood, it was more than likely related to the Spice Girls. ‘Don’t you look pure?’
Nora winked. ‘As the driven snow. It’s virginal Catholic bride chic. I need to keep away from guests wielding red wine.’
‘And penises,’ Bea added solemnly.
‘Yes, those too.’ Nora agreed, laughing, giddy with celebratory spirit already, kissing her old friend’s head. ‘Come on, I’m getting a drink.’
Harry was permitted to carry the cake, now on its stand, out of the kitchen, to place it as the centrepiece of the food table, the diminutive Eileen hovering anxiously at his elbow.
‘You’ve outdone yourself, Eileen,’ Bea told the older woman, standing and moving across to take her by the elbow and kiss her on the cheek, deftly removing the possibility she might trip poor Harry and send both him and her confectionary masterpiece flying.
‘Beatrice, for the love of,’ Eileen flapped at her godchild good-naturedly. Ever fearful of blaspheming, Eileen Dervan never took the Lord’s name in vain, but that didn’t stop her saying the rest of the sentence. ‘Will you ever put some clothes on you? Sure, do you not feel the cold in here?’ Eileen bustled away to find something to pick at, wrapping her arms around herself against the apparent ‘cold’.
From the other side of the nearby table, Daisy raised an eyebrow at Bea. ‘To be sure, to be sure, will you ever put some clothes on, Be-a-trice?’ she whispered, in an exaggerated caricature of Eileen’s strong Cork accent.
Bea laughed, gesturing at her relatively modest black skinny jeans and beaded camisole top combination. ‘I can’t win, trust me Daise. She said it to me when I was wearing a Christmas jumper and jogging bottoms once, I swear.’
Fashionably late, carrying a small ale barrel