My best friend insisted she wanted a “traditional” hen party, so I searched high and low for the buffest male stripper around to come to the cottage we were staying in – to serve us drinks with his bum out, that sort of thing. I obviously misjudged just how seriously he took his job; the minute he arrived the clothes came off, the baby oil came out, and my poor friend was pinned to a chair while he performed a reasonably aggressive lap dance for her. About halfway through though, his energetic dancing managed to flick baby oil in her eye (we’re still not sure what part of the anatomy it came from) and we had to spend the next hour and a half washing it out with bottled water in a shot glass.
Rachel, Milton Keynes
Daisy felt faintly embarrassed as the dozen hens formed an orderly English queue in front of the bouncer. Spice Girls and Teletubbies aside, there was a Baby-One-More-Time era Britney Spears, a Marge Simpson, a Sexy Beanie Baby (props to Bec for coming up with that beauty) and more. She was sure the bouncer must have seen it all before – and worse – but still, it felt a little odd, stood outside that venerable establishment; Daisy surreptitiously attempted to pull her dress both up and down simultaneously.She was getting old. In fact, if she was honest, she was already ready for bed. She stifled a yawn and hoped very much that the bouncer wasn’t going to demand to see ID, as she wasn’t bearing a terrible amount of resemblance to her passport picture at that moment in time, and she really couldn’t be bothered to take her wig off after all the efforts to stuff her real hair in neatly underneath.
The bouncer took a disinterested glance at the booking confirmation print-out Cleo had presented him with and waved them past.
‘Ladies and, ladies!’ Bea cheered, turning around to face them and walk backwards through into the entrance lobby, her pale skin rosed over with the wash from the red lights. ‘Welcome to the Moulin Rouge!’
They were a good fifteen minutes late, even after the time that Cleo had called and put the table reservation back to, and the hostess sat them with a polite impatience before heading off to collect their pre-ordered, pre-chilled drinks.
The entry, three-course meal, drinks and seats to the cabaret act at the Moulin Rouge had not been particularly cheap – especially as each hen was paying one-eleventh of Nora’s share – but they’d all agreed quite quickly that it just had to be done. Fifteen year old Nora had been faintly obsessed with the Baz Lurhmann film when it had first released and had quite convinced herself that in a past life she had been a dazzling courtesan in turn-of-the-century Paris, coughing prettily into handkerchiefs, dying stylishly of consumption.
To Daisy’s relief their table was quite private, more of a booth with a high back, and she felt less like an A grade dickhead as she wiggled into place along the leather seating, keeping the hem of her Union Jack mini-dress at an acceptable mast. Nora, of course, was sat in the very centre of the curve; Daisy hoped she didn’t need to go to the bathroom too often during the course of their evening.
‘Okay, presents or a game first?’ Bea asked the Bride-To-Be, as the hostess finished ferrying over their carafes of fruit purees and juices to mix with the three litre bottle of vodka they’d pre-ordered and the hens impatiently began pouring themselves cocktails.
‘Presents!’ Nora echoed in a squeal. ‘What presents?’
‘You’ve got a few small things,’ Sarah informed her, with a smile.
Nora looked around at her grinning hens. ‘Oh, guys, no. It’s too much! Presents as well!?’
‘Don’t thank us yet hun,’ Daisy warned, fishing under the table for the tote shopper she’d been carrying that had most of the gifts inside.
For all that she’d immediately said she couldn’t possibly accept any presents, Nora tore into the first with gusto. It took her a few turns of the see-through plastic envelope of rubber to work out exactly what it was; when she did she burst out laughing.
‘My date for the evening?’ she asked, as she freed the currently flattened blow up man from his packaging. ‘Hardly Ewan McGregor though, is he?’
‘I reckon he could give Ewan a run for his money though,’ Bea laughed dirtily, reaching over to highlight the doll’s impressive manly appendage (which would no doubt be even more impressive once, erm, inflated).
Nora’s eyebrows almost disappeared into her hair. ‘So I see!’
‘Is that what you’re going to call him then?’ grinned Claire. ‘Ewan?’
‘I think he should be called Dickie!’ shrieked one of Nora’s sisters, already half-a-glass of cocktail down and still going strong.
‘Horny Harry?’ suggested Bec, in a nod to the absent groom.
‘Roger!’
‘Randy!’
Nora spluttered laughter into her drink. ‘Okay, Randy it is!’ The girls all cheered, giddy and silly, clinking their drink against that of the friends closest to them. At home they might be teachers, or mothers, or line managers, and there might be a full in tray at work, or a full laundry basket in the house, but right here, right now they were in Paris, with the ceiling of the Moulin Rouge soaring above them, and what felt very much like bottomless vodka to make their way through.
‘Okay, next one!’ Claire passed across a rectangular shaped box, grinning wickedly.
Nora was briefly stunned into silence once she’d unwrapped it – ‘it’ being a bright blue vibrator with more moving parts than seemed feasible (or necessary).
‘Wow guys, this is so funny!’ Nora joked, deadpan. ‘Because, just the other day I was saying that I had always wondered what it would be like to be shagged by a Smurf!’ The hens howled with laughter.
‘Okay, last one,’ Cleo promised, handing the third gift over. ‘You, er, might sense a bit of a running theme.’
‘The running theme being “cock”!’ Daisy crowed, frankly.
‘Wow guys, this is almost beautiful!’ Nora laughed, as she unwrapped a delicate glass dildo shaped like the Eiffel Tower.
‘Well, just don’t put it on your mantelpiece,’ one of Nora’s sisters warned. ‘You don’t want to give poor Mammy a heart attack!’
‘Like she’d have a clue what it was!’ guffawed the other Dervan twin.
‘Well, thanks so much for those, guys. Although, of course, now I’m wondering if I really need Harry at all!’ Nora teased.
‘Yeah, you do sweetie,’ insisted an already more-than-tipsy Sarah. ‘Because these things can’t cut the grass. Trust me!’ she burst into peals of laughter.
‘Okay, a game, a game!’ cheered Cleo; Bea noticed that at some point during the distraction of the present-opening, Cleo had been checking her mobile phone – it was sat quietly next to her drink.
‘Okay, how about Truth or Dare?’ Bea suggested; they’d already played Mr and Mrs and Never Have I Ever on the Eurostar over. Truth or Dare had been another big Nora obsession around the last few years of primary school and first few years of secondary. She’d insisted Bea, Claire and her other girl friends play it with her ad nauseum; they’d mainly only done dares because at eleven they didn’t really have any decent secrets.
Bea didn’t much care for the game – considering she’d grown up to be rather a creature of secrets – but this was Nora’s weekend after all.
‘Okay, who first?’
Daisy solved the conundrum by grabbing up one of the plastic cocktail stirrers and spinning it in the middle of the table; the rounded end landed on Bec.
‘Oh, I can never think of anything good!’ Bec whined. ‘Nora, truth or dare?’
‘Dare!’ yelled Nora without hesitation.
‘Oooh,’ Bec, wiggled in place, thinking hard. ‘Stand up and shout I’M ON MY HEN DO!’
A giggling Nora acquiesced, awkwardly slipping off her platform shoes so she could safely stand on the leather of the seating.
‘Oh, Christ,’ Cleo murmured, hand over her face but still laughing, ‘I hope we don’t get kicked out.’
‘I’M ON MY HEN DO!’ Nora bellowed obediently, arms spread wide, to a chorus of polite applause from the rest of the tourists in the hall (thankfully the staff seemed supremely unfazed) while her hens snapped away below, taking pictures on their phones.
‘Right!’ Nora announced as she returned to a sitting position. ‘Claire. Truth or dare?’
‘Truth?’ Claire answered, like she wasn’t quite sure.
‘Where is the weirdest place you’ve ever had sex?’
Claire’s face pinked. ‘You know where,’ she protested.
‘Tell the group!’ Nora insisted, drunk and merciless. Bea, who knew too, added a little more of the vodka to her glass.
‘Umm ner mm cow,’ Claire murmured.
‘So we can hear!’ Daisy insisted, laughing.
Claire rolled her eyes and steeled her hand on her drink. ‘I said under a cow.’
‘Wait, wait,’ Sarah protested, over the tide of screams and laughter from the hens. ‘How does that even happen? Under a cow? What do you even mean!?’
Claire sighed. ‘I was on a team building weekend, back when I worked for that really poncey Estate Agents in Chelsea? They sent us to a working farm. It was disgusting. Anyway, they told me and one of the Lettings Negotiators to go and muck out the stalls where the cows were. And when we were done with that, we…’
‘Got a little mucky yourselves!’ Daisy crowed with undisguised delight. ‘Good on you, girl.’ The rest of the hens agreed, gifting Claire with a smattering of impressed applause. Slightly mollified, Claire sipped at her drink and deliberated who was next in the firing line.
‘Cleo,’ she announced. ‘Truth or dare?’
‘Truth,’ Cleo requested immediately. Claire tilted her head, like she was considering how best to phrase the question that was rolling on her tongue.
‘What’s really going on between you and Gray?’
Cleo’s eyes flashed on her phone, just once, and Bea knew she’d been right to assume the girl had been texting her colleague.
Cleo felt all the champagne and the vodka sitting heavily somewhere under that black satin bustier and all the bravado she could usually muster.
‘There’s nothing ‘really going on’ between me and Gray,’ she insisted.
‘Oh, come on, the name of the game is TRUTH or Dare,’ Bea immediately – and loudly – complained. Nora shot her friend a censorious look, but sent another one Cleo’s way straight after.
‘What do you want me to say?’ Cleo didn’t know if it was her laughing, or the champagne. ‘Tell you that I fancy him? That I’m like an obsessed teenager? That I’m so fantastically over-the-top in love with him I’m considering looking for another job and I pretty much want to drown myself in my morning coffee every time he tells me all about the date he went on the night before? Is that what you want to hear?’
There was an awkward silence, and Cleo belatedly realised that halfway through her jokey-outburst, she’d stopped laughing; Nora looked at her with soft eyes.
‘Something like that,’ Bea joked weakly, in an attempt to break the tightness of the moment.Thankful, Cleo took a deep drink and began thinking about what good truths or dares she could come up with for the next round in order to distract the hens (and herself) from her and her embarrassing eruption of love.
But Claire wasn’t letting it go. ‘You told me you didn’t fancy him, that you were just friends.You know, he talks about you all the time. All the time. But I didn’t think anything of it, because you said you were just friends,’ she repeated. Cleo looked at her, mutely apologetic. ‘Obviously I won’t try anything with him though if you’re in love with him? If you’d rather I didn’t?’ Claire finished, looking faintly mutinous but resigned.
Cleo cleared her throat. ‘Would you mind awfully?’ she asked, polite to a fault.
All at once Claire seemed a little deflated; even her little Teletubby antenna headband seemed to hang a little lower. ‘No problem,’ she managed, with an attempt at cheer, mixing herself another drink, a little stronger than the one before.
‘Right Bea,’ Cleo announced hurriedly, wanting to move along as quickly as possible. ‘Truth or dare?’
‘In the interests of us not getting kicked out, I’ll go with truth.’
‘How many men have you slept with?’ Cleo asked; not the most imaginative of questions, but all she wanted at that moment was distance between the group and the Gray awkwardness.
Bea seemed to agree, because she answered immediately. ‘Twelve. Okay, Alannah—’
‘Twelve?’ echoed Nora, before Bea could get the question out to her sister. ‘Twelve?’ Her forehead creased in a light frown. ‘Have you slept with anyone new recently?’
Bea rolled her eyes. ‘Chance would be a fine thing, trust me.’
‘Well then you must be eleven,’ Nora argued. ‘I remember when you got to ten and you were all, double figures, oooh. And there’s been that one guy since then. Eleven.’
All at once Bea went decidedly pale and fidgeted with a set of midi-rings on her index finger.
‘Yes. You’re right. Eleven. Haha. I’m glad one of us is paying attention!’ Her joke was as weak as her fake laughter. Nora eyed her oldest friend doubtfully. ‘Anyway,’ Bea continued, doggedly, ‘Alannah, truth or dare?’
Nora thought she saw a strange look pass between Bea and Claire, but she must have imagined it. No way would Claire know something about her oldest friend that she didn’t.
Alannah was saved from having to answer – and Bea from any further suspicion – by the timely arrival of the round of starters.
* * *
The desserts arrived just as the heavy curtain raised to reveal the dancers readied on stage for the 11pm cabaret show, an acceptably sumptuous riot of feathers, rhinestones and barely-concealed nipples.
‘I expected there to be nudity on my hen do, just not other women’s!’ joked Nora. ‘Ou et la penis dans le Paris?’
‘I think you’ve got quite enough Parisian penis there,’ pointed out Daisy, nodding towards the tote bag holding a still deflated Randy, the Smurf-coloured vibrator and the Eiffel Tower dildo.
‘I’m glad you didn’t decide to go for Moulin Rouge fancy dress,’ Cleo told her friend with feeling.
‘Maybe next time,’ Nora winked.
The show was spectacular, the entire room was entranced – but Cleo found she couldn’t ignore the blinking LED at the top of her phone that signalled she had a message notification. It was probably nobody. It was probably her mum. It was probably o2 telling her that she’d already gone way, way over her agreed data package. (She shouldn’t have sent all those pictures to Gray.)
Up on stage a ventriloquist was jabbering on – impressive, but not as interesting as the impossibly beautiful women who’d been dancing around with snakes, and a lot of it was lost in translation – and that little green light was blink-blink-blinking her to distraction. Cleo knew she should put the phone away in her bag – or give it to Bea and beg her to keep her away from it – but she didn’t do either.
Gray had sent her the emoji of the screaming face with its hands up. Cleo blinked.
Look at you!! The text followed. Thank god you don’t dress like that for work!
Stung, Cleo immediately forgot her promise to check but not reply.
I think the kids at the Academy are a little too young to even know who Scary Spice is, to be fair. Surely I don’t look that mad??
Mad? You look amazing! Gray shot back, before Cleo even had the chance to put her phone down, and kept going. Cleo stared at the little Gray is typing… line at the top of the chat box and felt her mouth go a little dry; she resisted the urge to take a deep swallow of her vodka – she didn’t need any more embarrassing outbursts.
If you wore that to work, little learning would get done. Or teaching, for that matter.
Well, there’s no fear of me turning up in this on Monday morning, don’t worry… Cleo tapped out. This is much more of a ‘Saturday night’ sort out get-up.
Well, we need to get a Saturday night in the diary ASAP, was Gray’s immediate response.
Cleo was holding her phone so gingerly that it almost jumped clear out of her hands when Daisy elbowed her in the ribs.
‘No texting boys!’ her friend reminded her, shouting over the roar and crash of the music as the cabaret show built towards its climax.
Guiltily, Cleo immediately slipped her mobile into her handbag, before snatching it back out the minute Daisy’s attention was back on the stage.
If you can fit me into your busy schedule. Hey, G, out of interest, do you flirt this much with everyone or am I meant to think I’m special?
This time Cleo did put her phone away in her handbag – switched off for good measure.