I was once forced to participate in a game at a hen do where we had to carve penises out of cucumbers, using only our teeth. The cucumbers were then judged and the most realistic won a prize.
Olivia, Warwick
Two and a half hours out of London St Pancras, twelve women spilled out into Gare du Nord, already more than a little merry on cans of gin and tonic from the bar carriage, the late-morning autumn light soft but strong through the big windows. The group drew wearied looks from passers-by, obvious as they were with their pink matching tees and loud voices, giggling and bouncing their way through the station, Cleo faffing with the itinerary print out that told them which exit they needed.
The house boat idea had started off as a joke – it had begun to come up in sidebars as automated advertising after Bea had started searching accommodation in Paris. ‘Jesus, whose idea would it be to stay on a pokey boat?’ Bea and Nora had laughed. But after a few weeks they found they couldn’t quite picture anything else and so they’d made the booking.
The boats were virtually identical, moored head-to-toe parallel to the riverbank, one painted in British racing green and the other in a burgundy like Christmas port, both pleasingly shabby, with years’ worth of water lines criss-crossing the hulls and little tangles of green garden taking up one half of each of the decks.Bea didn’t know whether it was as standard or just for them, but each of the boats was strung with cheery Union Jack bunting, bottles of champagne sat waiting in fresh ice buckets and towers of cliché but delicious-looking croissants piled haphazardly onto cake plates.
‘Ooh la la!’ Nora squealed, grabbing the topmost pastry and throwing herself down on the galley-style seating in the living area. The green boat was home for the weekend for Nora, Claire and the four bridesmaids, the other six hens taking up residence on the burgundy one. Out through the portholes, couples walked hand-in-hand along the cream stone walls, friends sat drinking coffee underneath the periwinkle blue parasols of street cafés; it was just like a movie. ‘Ohmigod, I’m so excited!’
‘Sacre bleu!’ Daisy laughed, joining her friend and tearing off a corner of her croissant for herself.
‘Right, ladies, let’s get sorted. S’il vous plait.’ Cleo clapped her hands at them all, already in full teacher mode.
‘Hey guys!’ Claire was standing outside on the upper deck, in between the sun chairs, waving madly at the hens on the other boat.
‘We can fit in a few hours of sightseeing before we need to get back and dressed for dinner,’ Cleo continued, ignoring her, reaching for one of the bottles of champagne and fiddling with the twist key.
‘Oh, and my scavenger hunt!’ Claire bounced down the wooden steps that led to and from deck-level. ‘It starts from now, and you have until we get back to the station tomorrow night.’ She fished down the side of her Ted Baker weekend holdall and passed a folder full of print outs across to Nora, who brushed croissant flakes from her fingers and took it.
‘Oh, it’s like Bachelorette Bingo!’ Daisy realised, brightly, cocking her head so she could read some of the dares. ‘Okay, so she’s got to get a kiss from someone called Harry – Claire, hun, that might be a little difficult in France? Selfie with another bride-to-be, mmhmm.’
Nora turned over one of the print outs to keep reading on the reverse side, looking a little pained. ‘Wow, there’s a lot here, Claire.’
‘I know,’ Claire beamed.
‘I need to get a condom from a stranger’s wallet?’ Nora read, slightly alarmed. ‘How would I even go about that?’
‘You ask?’ Bea suggested, lining up plastic champagne flutes for Cleo to fill.
‘I ask?’ Nora echoed with a scoff of disbelief. ‘What the hell is French for ‘condom’ anyway?’
‘Le sac?’ Cleo giggled.
‘GCSE-level French, once again proving useless in actual life,’ Bea teased. ‘I can’t believe Madame Moreau didn’t adequately prepare us for talking about contraceptive sheaths with strangers!’
‘And check out the bonus round,’ Claire urged, gesturing to the bottom of the back page.
‘The Spice Boys Challenge,’ Nora read aloud. ‘I have to take a picture with five different guys – one sporty, one baby, one scary, one ginger and one posh. Oh my god!’ she laughed. ‘Cleo, you’d better pass me that champagne.’
* * *
The hens, having dumped their bags and changed out of their travel clothes, all congregated, crowded, in the green boat, the hems of their sundresses sticking to their sweaty legs, hair going limp and flat under the thematically-appropriate pink berets that everyone was being forced to wear.
‘Okay!’ Cleo called for order, pulling at her beret so that it was fashionably off-centre with one hand while she used the other to hold her drink aloft. ‘So, here we are, Nora’s HEN DO!’ The other eleven girls echoed back a cheer. Sarah snapped a picture of Cleo with her phone, and Cleo subconsciously fiddled with her beret again. ‘So before we get going and try and do most of Paris’ tourist sights in – ooh, six hours! – we’re going to go over some ground rules.’ She laughed at the resounding chorus of groans.
‘So, rule number one, the Golden Rule if you will: no texting boys. Particularly no texting boys who are currently on the stag do.’
‘Even if they are your husband,’ Bea said pointedly, looking at Sarah. Harry and his lads were currently stagging it up in Barcelona. Nora had been emphatic that she didn’t want to know a single thing about what was going on – as long as he came back with two eyebrows and zero tattoos, she’d be fine.
‘Rule number two. No pictures on Facebook without the express permission of everyone in it!’
This was a firm but fair rule. Some of the girls had gone to the hen do of a friend the year before, where selfies were being uploaded hard and fast to social media throughout the night. Unfortunately there had been a couple of shots where one of the bridesmaids was pulling a bouncer in the background. (She’d been married. She wasn’t any more…)
‘And finally, rule number three: make sure Nora always has a drink in her hand!’ Cleo shouted. ‘To Nora!’
‘TO NORA!’ the hens echoed en masse, glass flutes tinkling together as they cheersed.
Nora jumped to her feet and hugged her hens at random, eager and excited, looking as sweet as ice-cream in a pale mint sun dress with cream sandals and – of course – the requisite pink sash diagonally across her torso proclaiming her to be the BRIDE-2-B!
The girls all spilled out into Les Berges, craning their necks and shading their eyes to appreciate the iconic Tower, where it was just visible as the river started to bend, Cleo already consulting the print outs of Google Maps she’d prepared. They made a beeline to the Pont des Arts, the love lock bridge. Nora had always found that sort of thing stupidly romantic, and Bea knew that she and Harry had taken their first holiday alone in Florence, where they’d duly scrawled their names on a padlock, tossing the key down into the Arno River, locking themselves into love eternally, or some such bollocks.
The bridge wasn’t as romantic as Bea had anticipated. Most of it had been restored with glass panelling, rather than the traditional metal railings. The council had obviously just done a mass removal of the padlocks; the railings were patchy. They had to – the weight of all that scrap metal was buckling the old pedestrian bridge. But the lovers of Paris didn’t care. People leant out over the Seine, over the new glass panels, to reach the metal fittings behind them – clipping padlocks on to other padlocks if there was no other space. Even now, a street peddler was calling to them – his French even more broken than theirs – trying to hawk his cheap looking locks for ten euros each.
‘Wait,’ Cleo instructed, seeing that Nora was tempted, digging in her handbag and presenting her friend with a hefty padlock, already thoughtfully Sharpie’d with Nora and Harry’s names.Nora, laughing, posed for a photo as she bent to close the shackle of the padlock, finding a tiny bit of bare space on one of the tall cast-iron streetlights: another thoughtless tourist in love in the City of Love. Bea thought about the weight of Nora’s love; she wondered how the Earth didn’t just dip out of orbit with the heaviness of all the people and their padlocks of love on it.
They raced through the Louvre – Cleo cheerfully informing them that if they were to only spend three seconds gazing at each object it would take them three whole months to get through it. The weekend crowds were thick and intimidating, but they paused a while in order to get as close to the barriers around the Mona Lisa as possible, the famous portrait so much smaller and unassuming in real life than they’d expected that they might have missed it altogether if it wasn’t for the queue of tourists massed in front of it. They giggled and dithered, too embarrassed to take a blatant selfie with said Lisa, until finally – rolling her eyes at everyone’s Britishness – Daisy did the honours.
Back outside in the fug of the autumnal city, there was a brief pause for group photographs in front of the iconic Pyramide du Louvre, taken by a very obliging Frenchman, who in turn seemed quite taken with the be-sashed Nora.
‘It’s her hen party,’ Cleo attempted to communicate. ‘Er. Le fête de poule?’ she tried, flapping her arms at the elbow in a reasonable, yet inadvisable impression of a chicken. She wasn›t sure if it was that, or her clearly appalling French that left the man crying with laughter.
‘Do you think he›s ginger enough to be one of my Spice Boys?’ Nora tried.
‘No way!’ one of her sisters had protested.
‘He›s strawberry-blonde, at the very least!’ Nora had insisted. ‘Bridesmaids› adjudication?’ she requested.
‘Denied!’ declared Claire, not seeming remotely bothered that she wasn›t technically a bridesmaid.
They didn›t have time for another museum and its queues, but they made sure to wander back towards the Seine and past the Musee d›Orsay, where they found another very obliging Frenchman to take photographs of the group posting alongside the sculptures representing the continents, two girls to each (Daisy insisting on and receiving rights to the Americas statue, naturally). Happily for Nora, this time the bridesmaids› adjudication found this Frenchman to be appropriately sporty (well, he was wearing Nike shorts anyway) and allowed Nora to take a photograph with him as one-fifth of her Spice Boys challenge.
Next was a refuelling stop in a Montmarte patisserie, where they drank deeply from bowls of hot coffee and lined their stomachs for later by sharing huge loaves of brioche with dishes of dark yellow butter, honey and jams in every colour, having to sit leisurely chatting for almost an hour afterwards, purely to recover from the food coma they›d put themselves in to. Their friend Bec brought her beautician skills to the fore and gave each of the eleven hens a “tricolore” manicure while they rested.
‘Who was it that said ‘Paris is always a good idea’?’ Nora laughed happily, as she purchased a box of pastel macaroons on her way out of the patisserie. ‘Because they knew what they were talking about!’
They dragged their carb-heavy bodies up to the dome of the Sacré Cœur Basilica, the highest point in all Paris, where even the point of the Eiffel Tower hung far below them, looking like a toy. Then, finally, the afternoon already old, they got the metro back across the city to the Avenue des Champs Élysées and the L’Arc de Triomphe.
They sat on the side of one of the fountains in the Place de la Concorde to rest their aching feet, eavesdropping on an English-language tour group that had helpfully stopped near them, soaking up some of the square’s tumultuous revolutionary history: the site of the guillotine and where notables like Queen Marie Antoinette herself had lost her head.
‘Let them eat cake,’ Nora joked, offering her box of macaroons around amongst her hens. Cleo just about bit back the know-it-all urge to tell her friend that that was a complete myth; History teacher Gray had insisted on giving her a run through of important dates, facts and figures ever since finding out she was off to France’s belle capital.Cleo slipped her phone from her bag – Gray wasn’t at the stag do, of course, so this wasn’t strictly breaking her own rules.
Been here for five hours, she complained, and we’ve already had the let them eat cake joke…
Poor old Marie A., Gray shot back almost immediately, with an eye-rolling emoji for good measure. It must be so frustrating to be remembered for that shit!
We’re just in the square where she died, too, Cleo replied. Her ghost is clearly here, and pissed off.
I’d like to think her ghost is at the Palace at Versaille, Gray countered. That was another thing Cleo loved about him – he was thoughtful and considerate of even the most stupid topics of conversation. Or at least at the Petit Trianon? I don’t suppose you’re going to get enough free time before evening hen shenanigans to jump on a train to Versailles and go and find out??
Ha, unlikely, Cleo told him (but getting a little thrill at the thought that he believed her a woman capable of shenanigans). At this rate we’re going to have about ten minutes to change before the dinner booking. Have I mentioned how we are twelve girls with only two bathrooms?? I would have loved to have seen Versailles though. Next time!
You would totally love it there, Gray agreed. I’ve been twice – it’s one of my favourite places in the world. When you go back, please take me!!
Cleo dropped her phone back into the side pocket of her bag like it had burnt her hand. The jerk of the movement caught Bea’s attention; she frowned.
‘Not texting anyone you shouldn’t be, are you?’ she asked Cleo airily. Cleo just sent her a mute but withering look in response. There was literally no way that Bea would make it to the end of the day without texting Eli – she doubted there had been a day since mobile phones were bloody invented that Eli and Bea hadn’t text one another – and texting groomsman Eli most definitely violated Rule One.
When all the feet were rested, and all the macaroons finished off, the gaggle of hens finally started to make their way back to the river and the boats, walking between the legs of the Eiffel Tower, craning their necks again to fully appreciate the engineering – and the height – of the venerable iron lady. Actually climbing up there was due to be their Sunday morning activity – they’d have a fair bit of the day before the evening Eurostar home. And climbing was exactly what they were set to do – not having realised until it was too late that you needed to pre-book tickets for the lifts between the levels. Cleo had looked up how many steps they were talking about – 1,665 from the bottom to the top – and had decided to keep that particular piece of Parisian trivia to herself. She hoped the hangovers wouldn’t prove too debilitating when the time came…