Cleo’s face really, really hurt.
It was a combination of all the smiling and, of course, the balloons. How she had ended up responsible for the balloons, she didn’t know.
Daisy was literally of no help, chatting away brightly. ‘Right?’ she asked Cleo, waving a limp balloon around expressively as she did so as opposed to blowing it up.
Across the function room Sarah was opening the French doors through to the beer garden, sending the balloons that Cleo had already managed to get inflated and tied off rolling around in every direction. Immediately Harry and Eli abandoned their efforts to get the folding tables up and started enthusiastically kicking the balloons into the corner. Cleo – mouth otherwise occupied – eyed them furiously over the swell of the balloon she was currently seeing to, to no avail.
Bea was – as usual – nowhere to be found, and Cleo could only assume that the three missing groomsmen were causing more trouble than those in the room. This was Day One, nuptial Ground Zero; if a generously large wedding party of eight couldn’t efficiently set up an engagement party in the local pub, how the hell were they meant to assist pulling off a spectacular wedding for a hundred and twenty guests in just under a year’s time? Nora was going to flap, definitely. Cleo sighed, redoubling her balloon-related efforts.
‘Hey,’ Bea groaned, finally making an appearance from the back room, balancing three Marks and Spencer sandwich platters somewhat precariously and realising she had no tables to place them down on. ‘A little help here, guys?’ she snapped. A sheepish Harry and Eli returned to their task.
‘Bea, is Cole in the kitchen?’ Sarah called across from where she was rummaging in one of the bags near the doors.
Bea 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 under each arm, Barlow finally made an appearance, the final groomsman, completing the wedding party contingent.
‘I know, I know,’ he got in there before anyone else could point out his poor punctuality. ‘It’s mad up there. There’s a match on.’ He immediately busied himself plumbing in the barrels to the taps of the small bar area in the corner.
‘Meanwhile, we’ve been dying of thirst,’ Cole complained, impatiently moving across to claim the first of the clean pint glasses Cleo had already arrayed.
‘Hold on, big guy,’ Barlow said, as unruffled as usual. ‘This stuff is worth the wait. It’s from a brewery in South Wales, it’s the business.’
There were many benefits to having Barlow as a mate, not least of which were the free drinks and free function space. Harry’s best mate from university, he had dropped out a term into his final year, despite everyone thinking him an absolute idiot for doing so, and became assistant manager in the village pub where he’d spent his summers pot-washing since he was thirteen. Fast-forward ten years and he was the owner, proprietor and general manager of The Hand in Hand, one of the best gastro-pubs in Wimbledon.
Definitely one the busiest pubs in Wimbledon, Sarah thought to herself, still immensely grateful for The Hand in Hand and the impact it had had on her life. Five years ago a younger, stupider Sarah had followed a man following a job, all the way to London. That man had promptly started ‘following’ his blonde, size-zero PA (gah!) leaving Sarah heartbroken, with the entire rent on their ‘dream’ central-SW19 flat for good measure. Three months later, with her carefully arranged payment plan about to fall down around her ears, Sarah had ducked into the newly opened pub on her walk home from the office, ostensibly to get out of the rain, but she knew from the off that she was about to spend her carefully budgeted few quid for that night’s dinner on a large glass of something more emotionally substantial.
It had been relatively early and the place had been pretty quiet, so the nice guy behind the bar had chatted with her a bit, insisting that he didn’t want to leave a dribble in the already-open bottle, thus pouring her the largest glass of wine she’d ever seen. But it was more the offered ear that had got her talking – all her friends were back on the Welsh coast and she was embarrassingly lonely in those days – and way before the glass was even empty the poor guy had had to suffer through hearing in great detail all about the collapse of her relationship and the wince-worthy state of her finances.
‘I’m sorry,’ Sarah had sighed, as she drained the glass and fumbled awkwardly for her handbag. ‘I don’t mean to bang on and take up your entire night. You must be busy.’
The guy behind the bar had just grinned at her and scratched his chin through his beard – the neater side of hipster – and said the words that would change Sarah’s life.
‘It will start getting busy in here round about now, yeah. You know, I’ve been thinking. Sorry, what’s your name?’
‘Sarah.’
‘Sarah. I’m Barlow. Sarah, I don’t suppose you know how to pour a fair pint, do you?’
And that was that. Sarah started at The Hand in Hand straight away; she stayed to have her training that very evening: four nights a week after she had finished at the office, plus as many hours as she could physically hack each weekend. With the decent hourly wage, plus tips, she managed to clear the bulk of the rental arrears within a few months and Barlow even helped her source a flatmate. In the end she kept on the Saturday shift at The Hand in Hand just because she loved it, and because Barlow had become a friend. And then, one night, about eighteen months after she’d started working at the pub, Barlow had decided that the break in her heart had healed enough, and arranged that fateful double date.
Sarah studied her husband of about a year now. Cole was built like a swimmer – unfairly, as he did no swimming – cultivated a devil-may-care sort of artful stubble, and although his hairline had started to recede as he approached thirty, the dramatic widow’s peak actually quite worked for him. He’d been dark where her ex had been fair, generous where her ex had been stingy and so flirtatious Sarah worried the blush would be burned onto her face by the end of that first date. And like a woman who didn’t learn her lesson, Sarah had fallen in love, all at once and all too quickly.
‘Cole!’ The next party guest through the doors made an immediate beeline for him; Cole stooped to wrap the petite blonde in a bear hug. Sarah swallowed a sigh. Hers was a face in far too many of the pictures on the photo wall.
‘Hello, Clairey. You look gorgeous. What are you drinking?’ Cole gestured behind him to where the drinks were lined up waiting. It was a serve-yourself bottle bar – Barlow didn’t want to be stuck behind the taps all night at one of his best friend’s engagement party.
Claire dramatically nudged Cole with her shoulder and rolled her eyes. ‘White wine, obviously!’
‘Obviously,’ Cole grinned back, moving to open the first bottle of wine of the evening. ‘Sarah, come say hi to Claire,’ he called as he worked the corkscrew. Sarah smiled on cue, but even she felt how thin it was on her face. Claire didn’t even bother with that; her lips just pressed together like she was trying to stop herself from saying something she shouldn’t. Sarah wearily filled in the blanks herself: Randomer; Chav from the Valleys; Interloper. Blah, blah.
‘Of course,’ Sarah managed. ‘Hi, Claire, how have you been?’
Cleo read Claire from across the room and knew she should probably head over and rescue poor Sarah, but she was trapped – quite literally, cornered – by Eileen and one of the twins (even after over a decade of knowing the Dervan family, she still couldn’t quite tell the identical girls apart).
‘But she must have an idea,’ wailed the twin. ‘A shortlist?’
‘Well, I don’t know, I don’t know, but there are only a very few acceptable colours for a winter wedding,’ sniffed Eileen. ‘And she could never pick red. It would be ghastly. Just ghastly.’
‘Do you have the Pinterest app on your phone?’ The twin asked suddenly, setting a beady eye on Cleo’s clutch bag. ‘Can I just have a look at the sort of things she’s pinning?’
Cleo clutched said clutch bag a little tighter. ‘Sorry, it’s a secret board. You should ask your sister. She’s really not done much, er, pinning yet anyway. Honestly. We’ll all try on some bridesmaids’ dresses when we go into the shops for her wedding dress, apparently, and we’ll go from there.’
‘A nice sage green,’ Eileen continued, mostly to herself. ‘Or champagne. And definitely sleeves. Or those nice fringed pashminas, Alanna, you know the ones. They sell them down that market on the Kilburn High Road, I’ve seen them.’
Cleo, paling at the thought of wearing fringed-anything, desperately tried to change the subject. ‘Are your other children coming tonight?’
Eileen looked at her calmly, but a bit like she was simple. ‘Cillian will be along later, with that fancy piece he had at Christmas.’ Cleo could only make the assumption that Eileen was referring to her son’s new girlfriend, who she’d actually met and thought was thoroughly nice and acceptably un-fancy. ‘But no young child of mine will be setting foot in a public house. Finola has the babysitter in.’
Cleo supressed a sigh on behalf of the no-doubt frustrated fifteen-going-on-twenty-five-year-old Fin. It had been hard enough for the others, but Fin was Eileen’s baby – an identity she would probably never be able to shed.
‘Mrs Dervan,’ Barlow arrived to save the day. ‘Can I get you a drink? I’ve got that sherry in that you like.’
Eileen flushed prettily and even patted at her hairspray-armoured bob; she adored Barlow, mostly because he insisted on calling her Mrs Dervan, no matter how many times she insisted in turn that he call her Eileen. And because he always remembered to get that sherry in.
‘Oh, well, I think I will. It’s a celebration, isn’t it? But a small one, now, a small one,’ she smiled, knowing as well as Barlow did that this was their code that he should pour the sherries large and often until she went home. Cleo took the opportunity to slip away, feigning the need for an urgent conversation with Daisy.
Daisy, as usual, was being DJ. Although she was secretly horrified she was such a cliché – an American named after Gatsby’s Daisy Buchanan (well, either that or Daisy Duke, and she’d never had the thighs for hot pants) – she felt she might as well live up to the trope and always throw the best parties. She had a bewildering number of Spotify playlists, each one completely appropriate for its designated mood, venue or context. She’d been working on Nora’s engagement party playlist since approximately six seconds after being told Harry had popped the question – and it was a cheesy masterpiece. Currently Geri Halliwell was wailing about not being able to find her Chico Latino, and the designated dance area had already filled to capacity with gamely salsa-ing women of a certain age (a bit like a Zumba class in heels, Daisy thought, with great amusement).
Nora adored the sort of nineties and noughties crap that everyone secretly loves, but would never admit to and, for Daisy, it was all inextricably tied up with so many good memories, a sort of soundtrack to their friendship.
The group that Daisy had travelled out with that year after college had one by one gotten homesick or run out of money (not to mention the one who’d gotten pregnant – talk about your souvenir to take home) and so Daisy had been alone arriving in Croatia that spring. Embarking on the coach that was to be her home for the next ten hours as they travelled overnight from Zagreb to Dubrovnik, Daisy had made the snap decision that she’d rather sit next to the already-dozing brunette who looked around her age than the human sweat-patch that was sat next to the only other empty seat.
Ninety minutes into the journey, that brunette awoke with a start, ‘completely mortified’ that she’d been drooling on a stranger’s shoulder.
‘I’m completely mortified,’ the girl had apologised to Daisy.
‘Don’t worry about it!’ Daisy had laughed. ‘You gotta catch your Zs when you can, am I right?’ And that was all it had taken to strike up conversation. They covered the usual ground (‘You’re English, right?’/’Are you American or Canadian, or …?’) and as the night wore on and the coach fell hushed around them, Daisy’s new friend, Nora, had pulled out a battered iPod Classic and a pair of candy-pink earbuds and offered one to her. In the seven hours that remained, Daisy had had a whistle-stop tour through the delights of the cheesiest of Britpop: 5ive and the Sugababes and Busted and much, much more. And by the time the coach arrived at the coast Nora and Daisy were inseparable. They’d spent the next six months jaunting around Europe together, working for cash-in-hand pouring drinks in their bikinis or convincing fellow English-speaking tourists that they really want to go into this one particular nightclub in order to save up to pay their coach fares and their two-euros-a-night hostel bed bills.
Returning to real life had been a horrible wrench for Daisy, and part of that was having to say goodbye to Nora, who returned to London after a thoroughly gapped gap year to pack away her tiny bikinis and take up a graduate scheme position in finance, date a succession of tie-wearing, red-wine-drinking men and generally grow up.
When the opportunity had arrived three years later for Daisy to move across the pond to her own firm’s London branch, she had quite literally jumped at it (she blamed the fact that her great-grandparents on her father’s side were Scottish for the serious Europhile feelings she’d always had) and immediately sent Nora Dervan an excited Facebook message.
Nora had just broken up with one of the tie/wine city men and instantly invited Daisy to stay with her in her little flat in Hoxton while she got herself sorted. The ‘sorting’ had taken a long time. Daisy had actually ended up living with Nora for years, until Harry happened. And, whenever one of them had had a shit day at work, they’d come home and put on the playlist Daisy had lovingly entitled ‘Overnight to Dubrovnik’, whack up the volume and spin and scream along with Atomic Kitten, Blue or Steps. It had never failed them.
‘I just love the music,’ one of Harry’s colleagues called out to Daisy as she danced past, waving a glass of rosé wine around alarmingly in time with the pumping pop beats. ‘Sooooooo ironic.’
Daisy just laughed wryly. ‘If you like this, just wait for the wedding reception playlist.’
Darren, who had made his appearance about twenty minutes ago, grinned at her over the head of his cider and black. ‘It’s gonna be your magnum opus, babe.’
‘Hey.’ Cleo appeared, greeting Darren politely before turning to Daisy. ‘Where’s Nora? Everything okay?’
Daisy nodded over to where Nora and Bea were dancing in the centre of a small clutch of friends; Bea was already barefoot (Daisy didn’t even know why she bothered with the pretence of the heels when she went out). Nora had her tell-tale white-wine flush pinking her face and her collarbones. Daisy could hear her laughing even over the music.
‘All quiet on the Western Front, sir,’ she assured Cleo sarcastically. ‘Chill out. Have a drink. You’re really stressing me out.’
Cleo shook her head. ‘I need to stay on the ball in case I’m needed for something.’
‘Look, the only thing you’re going to be needed for is to do the Locomotion,’ Daisy informed her archly, lining the song up on the playlist as she said it.
Cleo groaned. ‘Maybe I will need that drink …’
‘It’s going to be a very long engagement if you and Sarah insist on being such bridesmaidzillas the entire time. Now fuck off and get yourself some wine. You’ve got about forty-five seconds.’
‘God, Daise, I hate it when you mince your words,’ Cleo stuck her tongue out even as she went to obey the order. ‘Why don’t you say what you really think?’
‘Thirty-seven seconds …’
Cleo made a swift exit (via the bar).