It’s Sunday and I know that I should be out of bed, but I can hear Anna clattering about in the kitchen and I haven’t yet thought of anything to say to her about last night. To be honest, I’m surprised she hasn’t come strolling into my bedroom to ask me questions. I peel back the bed covers and grab my fluffy pink dressing gown from where it’s hanging over the door. I creep out of my room slowly, looking frantically around for any obvious threats. What if it isn’t really Anna I can hear in the kitchen? For all I know, she might not even have come home last night and we could be getting burgled!
I peer through the slightly-open kitchen door cautiously, cursing that all the best weapons like knifes and frying pans are contained inside with the possible burglar. There’s nobody moving around in there. I even swing the door open and jump into the room like a ninja (which obviously I wouldn’t do if I thought there was anything remotely scary in there). I can hear another noise though. It sounds like the telly’s on the living room. Bloody cheek of burglars these days, I think, as I push against the closed door and pray that it’s Anna sitting on our sofa.
She’s wearing a dressing gown like me, only it looks like she’s got nothing on underneath. Seriously nothing. Like no underwear nothing. She’s alone though. No dodgy bloke from last night and definitely no burglar.
“Made it home, did you?” she asks, sounding nothing like the stay-out-all-night Anna Lane I know.
“And you.” I fiddle with the belt of my dressing gown.
“Managed to find that silverware from Hong Kong?” The corners of her mouth are lifting, so I know that she’s not completely serious.
“It was the best I could do under the circumstances.” I laugh and join her on the sofa.
“You know, if he wasn’t into me, he really should have just said.”
I shrug loosely as though I have no idea why Damien chose to incorporate me into his plan to escape Anna’s advances. I don’t know exactly why he did. Maybe he just wanted to ask me about what Lela and co. had been saying. We hadn’t really spoken about much else.
“Unless,” Anna says, a wicked glint in her eyes, “he’s into you.”
I don’t want to sound conceited but the thought had crossed my mind. And I wouldn’t be considering him as my wedding date if I didn’t think it was possible, would I? The thought of what Anna might have planned scares me though so I insist that she’s wrong.
“Maybe you should go to all these stupid wedding events. I mean, most of time he’s going to be there, isn’t he?”
“Hang on a minute, yesterday you said I should back out of the wedding completely.”
“Yes, well I didn’t have all the facts then.” She sits up straight and shoves her feet into a pair of cartoon-characters slippers lying discarded on the floor.
I inspect the chips in my red nail polish without saying anything.
“So what’s the next wedding event?” Anna pushes.
I sigh. “Anna, I don’t even know if Lela will want me there after what I said to her.”
“After what you said? What about her rubbing her engagement in your face?”
“I don’t think that’s what she’s doing,” I whisper.
“Yes it is. But you’re not going to let her. You’re going to turn up to whatever she wants you to and you’re going to look hot.” Anna is already on her feet and dragging me towards the wardrobe in my bedroom.
“I don’t think I can take another makeover,” I protest, remembering the pre-wedding look Lela and I had argued about in the first place.
“It won’t be that bad.” Anna pulls the wardrobe doors open and clicks her tongue as she runs her hands through the garments.
I love Anna to pieces, but her idea of ‘looking hot’ appears to derive from Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. After she deems everything in my wardrobe unsuitable, I end up in a white top with cut-out sides and a zebra-print mini skirt. Since she is little bit more on the busty side than what I am, Anna also has to stuff my bra with tissue to fill out the gaping top.
“What do you think?” she asks, spinning me around in front of her full-length mirror.
“I look like Dolly Parton,” I say bluntly, seeing the effects of Anna’s curling tongs for the first time.
“Damien will love it!” Anna enthuses as though I’ve just told her I can’t wait to borrow her clothes again.
“I can’t turn up to Lela’s mother’s house dressed like this.”
“Oh,” Anna says, frowning. “What’s the occasion again?”
I grit my teeth. “It’s the engagement party.”
“The engagement party? Shouldn’t you have been invited to that ages ago? Like, when they actually got engaged.”
“Apparently they never had one.”
“Not like Lela to miss out on an opportunity to wear a nice dress and toast glasses of champagne to herself all night.” Anna rolls her eyes.
“She’s really not that bad, Anna. And her mum’s hosting it, so it’s really more likely to be her doing all the toasting to her wonderful daughter.”
“Aha!” says Anna dramatically. “So it’s Lela’s mum who’s the problem, is it? Even worse than her daughter?” She pulls a face at the thought.
I ignore her and lock myself in the bathroom so that she’s got no chance of stopping me from scraping the layers of makeup off my face. When I’m done dressing myself without Anna’s input, I think I actually look quite sensible. Boring compared to Anna’s standards but sensible enough to spend the evening with Mrs Henry.
***
Lela’s mother is always the woman I picture whenever I hear the phrase ‘ice-maiden’. She wears her long fair hair in a tight bun piled high on top of her head to make it less obvious that she’s about the height of a ten year old. Her style icon being the Queen, she answers the door wearing a deep blue tweed suit, complete with a matching fascinator in the shape of a miniature hat (because a full-sized hat would never fit on top of that hair do).
“Jade,” she says without any emotion, her thin lips pressing together in an imitation of a smile.
“Diane.” I nod stiffly in her direction and follow her through into the foyer (who calls their hallway a bloody foyer?).
Diane and I have never really formed a relationship beyond mutual tolerance of each other. She always wanted ‘the best’ for her daughter and apparently I’m not a part of that. She probably thinks it’s delightful news that Lela is marrying Ash. Maybe she had him lined up as a potential groom years ago and never thought that I was a worthy bride for him. It was probably her idea for Lela to contact him after she reached her twenty-third birthday with no ring on her finger.
Having married (the long since divorced) Mr Henry when she was eighteen, Diane thinks it should be every woman’s goal in life to get a man down the aisle as quickly as possible and that idea has been very firmly drummed into her daughter.
I step into Diane’s kitchen with the glass double doors open into the dining room. The table and just about every other surface have been adorned with tiny silver table decorations in the shape of engagement-themed things like diamond rings and champagne bottles. I gag and head through the doors with a glass of white wine attached to my hand. There’s a blown-up photo of the happy couple plastered to Diane’s swirly wallpaper above the fireplace. It’s romantically and artistically black and white, of course, and is only made worse by the real thing parading their love right in front of me.
I turn away awkwardly, scanning the room for someone I can talk to. Seeing Steph sitting on the ugly brown couch, I scramble into the seat beside her and strike up a polite conversation about how rubbish the weather’s been recently. She mumbles a response before Diane appears in front of us and hands Steph a pink concoction in a cocktail glass.
There’s nowhere I can escape to now so I sit still and quiet and pray that Diane won’t even notice I’m here.
“Surprised that you could make it tonight,” Diane says, her beady eyes focused only on me.
I take a long gulp of the wine and manage to ask why without slapping the smug look from her face.
“Oh, you know…Lela just mentioned something about you kicking off in the beauty salon.” She makes a tutting sound with her tongue and gives me a patronising smile as though I’m a five-year-old who threw a tantrum in the middle of the supermarket.
“Well Lela always was good at elaborating her stories.” I force myself to smile back at her. “Does she get that from you, Diane?”
“She must. Along with her taste in men.” Her gaze wanders to where Ash has his arm looped around Lela’s waist and they’re chatting to a group of people I’ve never seen before.
I scan the room, desperately looking for Damien but the only one of Ash’s friends I spot is Ste, looking drunk already as he chats up a repulsed Kerry.
“Aren’t you seeing someone?” Diane asks me, her head tilting to one side as she waits for an answer.
“Dating.” I nod enthusiastically.
“Well, you never know. Perhaps it will be you getting married by this time next year.”
I give her a meek smile in response and look for another way out. Lela is coming towards us. She looks flustered, her blonde hair sticking to her face.
“I didn’t think you’d come,” she greets me coldly.
“It’s your engagement party!” I say as though it’s the event of the century, aside from her wedding obviously.
Ash shuffles nervously behind her and doesn’t meet my gaze. She’s said something to him, but I don’t know what.
Lela tips her chin up so that she’s practically looking down her nose at me. “So you’re sorry, are you?”
I pause, seeing Diane’s eyes narrowing at me and Steph glancing my way with interest. Even Ash looks up from behind Lela’s shoulder to hear what I’m going to say. “Lela,” I say firmly, “can we talk in private for a minute?”
We end up back in Diane’s immaculate foyer where nobody can pry into our conversation.
“So,” Lela says, hands on her hips, “what is it that you want to say?”
“I’m sorry that I said what I did in front of Kerry and Steph. But I still feel the same. You should have told me that you were seeing Ash a long time before you asked me to be your bridesmaid.”
Lela shifts her weight awkwardly from one foot to the other. “Well, I didn’t know what you’d say. I thought you’d be mad at me and I thought…I thought you might not want to be my bridesmaid.”
“But I was always going to find out, Lela!” I say exasperatedly. “What were you going to do, make Ash walk down the aisle with a sack over his head?”
“No,” she whispers. “I just thought I could wait for the right time to tell you.”
I shrug my shoulders, having nothing else to say to her. The fact is, she didn’t find a right time. She just waited for me to meet Ash in the capacity of ‘best friend’s fiancé’ as though she hoped I would have forgotten who he was.
The jazzy doorbell sounds before Lela or I can say anything else. We both stare at the glass-panelled front door for a while before Lela swings it open, wearing her brightest hostess (or daughter of the hostess) smile.
Damien is standing on the doorstep, holding a bottle of rosé wine that I suddenly can’t wait to drink, huddled in his arms in a corner of Diane’s house somewhere where I can moan to him about all my problems like he really is an agony aunt. If there’s ever been a time for a Dear Damien moment, then this is definitely it.