A friend of mine went to an amazing hen party where she proceeded to get very drunk. She needed a cigarette, so she went outside to have one. Wanting to sober up a little, she decided to go for a little walk, but ended up getting lost and walking across a muddy field, then walked back to the house. Too drunk to wipe her feet at the door, she trailed mud up the stairs into the bathroom, where she promptly threw up in the toilet. Feeling a bit better, she decided to borrow a toothbrush and clean her teeth before returning to the party downstairs. It was only when she got back out onto the landing that she realised she couldn’t hear her friends, or any music… You guessed it, she’d walked into completely the wrong house. Needless to say, she legged it…
Nicole, Hemel Hempstead
As anticipated, they hadn’t left themselves quite enough time. Cleo went outside to stand on the deck of the boat while she called to push their dinner reservations back in her basic and stumbling French, while the five girls she was sharing the accommodation with squabbled below: someone had taken some else’s phone charger out of the European plug adaptor to use it for their hair straighteners.
‘We’ve got 45 minutes, tops,’ she informed her friends as she descended back into the belly of the boat, grabbing up a luminous pink bottle of setting spray and squirting it liberally on her curls. ‘This is so counter intuitive,’ she complained. ‘Normally before going on a night out I’m trying to flatten my hair, not make it wilder!’
Bea shot her an impatient look from where she was attempting to scrape her long shoulder-skimming bob into an unfashionably high ponytail. ‘Poor you. I’ve been doing 50 sit-ups a day for the last month. Crop tops are not designed for thirty-year-old bellies,’ she shuddered.
‘Hey, at least you guys don’t have to wear a wig!’ interjected Daisy, voice distorted as she attempted to draw on lip-liner at the same time as speaking. ‘I’m going to sweat like a pig.’
Sarah was the first ready, but then her costume was the easiest. Although her straight, dark hair was a little too long for her to truly pass as a nineties-Victoria Beckham lookalike, her willowy frame in a black bodycon dress was otherwise en pointe for Posh Spice.
Daisy was next, probably by virtue of her not having to worry about doing anything to her hair. The only one of them who’d had to resort to actual fancy dress rather than high street shops for her outfit, her Union Jack mini-dress definitely covered a lot more surface area than Geri Halliwell’s infamous original from the 1997 Brit Awards (however still left her ample assets very much on display).
Daisy flipped at her overly-red synthetic hair and practiced a cheeky pout while looking into her compact mirror. ‘I don’t get lip-liner,’ she complained. ‘I especially don’t get lip-liner that’s a completely different shade to the lip-stick?’
‘Hey, that’s just the nineties look!’ Sarah reassured her.
Daisy looked back at her reflection, dubious. ‘I look like a nutcase.’
‘No, you just look like someone in Ginger Spice fancy dress,’ Sarah pointed out. ‘Trust me, nobody’s going to think this is somebody’s genuine casual evening look, hun.’
Nora was next, having raced through her beauty preparations so she could have another glass of champagne without risking wobbly make-up application. There’d been some debate over if she should have been Ginger, with her hair dye bottle-enhanced auburn hair, particularly as the natural-blonde Daisy could then have been Baby Spice. They’d all decided, resignedly, that Nora just simply didn’t have the required physique (aka the required cleavage) and so it was Baby Spice for the Bride-to-Be.It worked out okay, because it meant that she could wear a white skater style dress and feel suitably bridal (even if the baby pink patent platform-heeled knee-high boots ruined the virginal look somewhat).
‘Has anyone seen my lollipop?’ she demanded, rifling through bags with one hand while she held her drink safely aloft with the other.
Fighting against her natural instinct to smooth her hair down against her scalp, Cleo joined the finished articles out in the boat’s long galley seating area, pouring herself a glass of room temperature sparkling wine and picking at a grown-stale croissant. Okay, so it wasn’t her usual look, but her grandmother’s Caribbean genes leant themselves quite well to the Scary Spice afro. The leopard print leggings and black satin bustier were much more out of her comfort zone however, so she chugged the lukewarm Prosecco for courage.
‘LOOK SCARY!’ bellowed Nora, as she angled her phone to take a posed snap of Scary Spice-Cleo.
‘LOOK SEXY!’ Daisy demanded in the same moment, leaving Cleo caught looking a bit like she needed the toilet in the final picture. It was a fun shot through – the leggings made her legs look super long, the top lifted her breasts scandalously, and her eyes shone dark and knowing; she looked like a woman full of the sort of secrets that men want to learn.
‘Hey, can you WhatsApp me that?’ Cleo asked Nora; maybe she’d decide a little later to forward it into her chat with Gray – see what he thought of the mild mannered Miss Adkins gone a little scary.
Bea exited her bedroom with only minutes to spare, looking thoroughly miserable, having waited until the last possible second to don her outfit. She was lucky that crop tops were unfathomably back in fashion (with prepubescent tweens, anyway) so she’d been able to find what she needed on the high street relatively easily for her Sporty Spice ensemble. The bottom of her costume was, appropriately, a pair of Adidas popper-style jogging bottoms that she’d had lurking at the bottom of a drawer since she was about nineteen. Bea had never been to Paris; she hadn’t anticipated that her big night out in the beautiful old city would be spent wearing joggers and Reeboks. But Nora had thought it would be hysterical for her and her four bridesmaids to rock Spice Girls fancy dress and nobody – least of all Bea – said no to Nora.
‘Hey, would you mind getting some quick group pictures?’ Nora begged Claire, even though they were already running late; mutely Claire took Nora’s phone and dutifully snapped away as the other five hens posed with high-kicks and Girl Power peace signs.
Claire, ostracised from the group fancy dress of course, as she wasn’t a bridesmaid, was dressed as a Teletubby. Bea had spat out her gin and tonic laughing when her friend had informed her that this was her plan. In reality however this meant she was wearing a wickedly tight red mini dress with a sheet of reflective silver card fastened across her stomach and a wonky homemade-looking ‘antenna’ on a red headband. Bea swore under her breath. Even someone dressed as a fecking Teletubby was showing her up. She pulled her ratty Adidas trousers a little lower, letting her hipbones jut out over the waistband – at least with a month’s worth of sit ups and a reasonably severe crash no-carb diet her stomach was looking suitably sporty in the heinous crop top.
Nora, laughing, twirled one of her pigtails around her forefinger while she posed for a photo. Bea smiled; take away the booze and the boobs, and this could be twenty years ago. Ten-year-old Nora had gone through a stage of attempting to dress like Baby Spice – well, she’d favoured a lot of pastel colours, wrangled her hair into lop-sided pigtails and worn a pair of wedge flip-flops made of foam she’d bought from Tammy Girl until they quite literally fell apart.
‘You’re bloody obsessed with those slappers!’ Bea’s mother Hannah had once snapped at them; in retrospect, she’d been right. In the days before the internet the two pre-teen girls had had no other choice but to glue themselves to the cable music channels – flicking impatiently between MTV and The Box – waiting for a Spice Girls video to be requested. If – thrillingly! – it was a new one, it was immediately recorded to a VHS Nora kept for that express purpose, so that they could examine it closely at their leisure; Nora painstakingly jotting down the lyrics for later memorising, whilst Bea beadily reviewed the required choreography.
They’d kept a scrapbook too – Bea had almost forgotten! – and passed it back and forth weekly in a ceremony of sorts almost as formal and revered as the Changing of the Guard. Whichever girl had the book that week was in charge of snipping out any newspaper articles or pictures of the Spice Girls and carefully pasting them in. Bea’s mum unfortunately never bothered with newspapers or magazines, so Bea’s week was always light for new additions. Eventually Eli had decided to help out (despite proclaiming that the Spice Girls were RUBBISH and that East 17 were AMAZING) and regularly produced carefully cut clippings for Bea, even after his father had smacked him round the head for ruining the Sunday papers before he’d gotten a chance to read them.
Simpler times, thought Bea, heeding the call to grab up your bag and get going, the other half of the hen do already bankside and hollering about how late they were. It might be a cliché, but – still – Bea wasn’t entirely sure where the first third of her life had gone. It seemed like one minute they’d all been stressing about feeding and cleaning up after her Tamagotchi, and suddenly life was all shit bosses, expensive shoebox-sized flats, unexplained infertility. Bea checked that there was no lipstick on her teeth one last time before alighting from the boat (she knew Nineties Mel C had never really worn all that make-up, but there really was a line) and girded herself for the night ahead, putting aside memories of the days of Panda Pops and cheap nail-varnishes from the corner shop that always stained her nails green, of ten year old Eli passing her envelopes of newspaper cuttings and smiling just because he’d made her smile.