“Let’s go grab a coffee,” I suggest. I’m a tea drinker actually, but nobody says that do they? – ‘Let’s go grab a cup of tea’ – unless they’re over sixty five and planning on ordering a fruit scone to go with it.
“Good idea,” Emma and Katie both agree.
“So, Emma. Have you changed your mind yet?” Katie asks, before shovelling a huge forkful of chocolate fudge cake into her mouth. She’s as skinny as a rake too. There’s no justice.
“I can’t, Katie,” she says, offering her a piece of double chocolate chip cookie with extra chocolate – presumably in the hope that it will help soften the blow.
Emma is refusing to be a bridesmaid – on account of the fact that it will jeopardise her own chances of ever walking down the aisle.
What can I say? My friends are a little odd.
“Three times a bridesmaid, never a bride,” she told Katie the moment she blinded us for the first time with her newly acquired diamond ring on Boxing Day, when we met at my parents house in Sussex for leftover turkey and recycled Christmas cracker hats.
“You were only five when your godmother got married!” Katie had argued. “And Alison and Paul are already divorced, so that doesn’t count either.”
“Age is irrelevant. And the only way to reverse the curse is to be a bridesmaid another four times. And even if Becky does get off her arse and marry Alex,” Emma had said, looking pointedly at me, “that still leaves me three times short, and I don’t know anybody who’s even remotely close to getting that ring on their finger. Sorry Katie, I can’t do it.”
Personally I think she’s just trying to avoid the humiliation of wearing a peach dress in front of all of Katie and Matt’s friends and family. Not that Katie is planning on dressing us in peach. At least I hope she’s not. It’s every bridesmaid’s worst fear, isn’t it – being made to look like a giant helping of peach cobbler? Or worse still, being forced into some floral number that looks like it has come straight from your Auntie Mabel’s living room curtain pole.
Anyway – a battle ensued, involving a minor strop on both parts and an in-depth discussion on every possible superstition from the importance of good manners when coming face to face with a lone magpie, to the day-long good fortune to be had from seeing a penny and picking it up (frankly I’d be much happier to see a £20 note and slip that into my pocket – but maybe that’s just me).
Katie relented, eventually, and agreed that Emma could do a reading instead – on the proviso that she comes on every shopping trip that involves the wedding in any way, shape or form. Starting today.
She’s not quite given up trying to persuade her yet though.
“I can’t afford to risk it,” Emma explains, for the umpteenth time. “I have such shit luck with men.”
She’s right. She does.
She has no trouble meeting men. And getting them, for that matter. Emma is stunning – with legs up to her armpits, and perky boobs. And the blonde hair. And the blue eyes. And she’s a lovely person too. Makes you sick, doesn’t it?
Men, for Emma, are a bit like buses. Buses which turn up in the most unexpected places. In the baggage claim area at Gatwick Airport following a teachers’ conference in Glasgow, for example. Or the frozen vegetable section of her local Tesco Express. Or the back row of a karate class (the one and only class she ever made it to, I hasten to add, being too busy, as she inevitably was, loved up with the guy from the back row).
Yes – Emma can get the men.
It’s just the keeping them that she tends to have a problem with. Before long, either they lose interest – or she does.
Either she’s about to add her toothbrush to the pot on their bathroom sink and a spare pair of knickers to their bottom drawer when they give her the elbow or she decides she doesn’t want them anymore, in which case they tend to hang around like a bad smell.
Emma’s last four boyfriends, in no particular order, were:
Greg – who told her he loved her on their third date. He sent her 12 bunches of flowers, 37 voicemail messages and 52 text messages in six days. On the seventh day she dumped him. Good decision, I think.
Dean – who couldn’t get it up. But she really liked him and was prepared to help him through it – and would have done, had she not discovered that he had told all his mates she couldn’t keep her hands off him, that they were at it like rabbits and that they had virtually cleared the local branch of Boots of their entire supply of Fetherlite Durex. She dumped him after six weeks and promptly told his mates exactly why they weren’t at it like rabbits.
Barry – who most certainly could get it up – and did so on a regular basis. Just not exclusively for Emma, as she discovered when she let herself into his apartment to surprise him on his birthday after fibbing that she was busy – only to discover he had already put on his birthday suit for someone else.
And Peter – who dumped her after she discovered he was growing marijuana in his bathtub and suggested he might like to take up a more law-abiding hobby – like draughts or ping-pong.
Emma doesn’t believe in Mr Right. She just wants to meet someone she likes – or loves – enough to want to stick around. When she was seven her dad left her mum for his secretary and moved to the South of France. Maybe that’s why. I don’t think she’s ever got over it.
“So have you made any other plans yet?” I ask Katie, blowing on my tea.
She nods and waves her hand to signal she intends to give details. But her mouth is still full of chocolate fudge cake.
“You don’t have to eat it all in one go,” I tell her. “We’ve got all day, you know. My train doesn’t leave until eight.”
I normally stay the night with Katie and Matt. It’s a long way to come from Leeds just for the day – but I have to go home tonight as Alex and I have a christening to go to tomorrow.
“Well, we’ve set the date, obviously.”
They’re getting married on the anniversary of the day they met – six years ago. September the eighteenth. Nine months from now. She’s assures us that’s coincidental. I’m assuming she’s telling the truth. I’m guessing she wouldn’t choose to give birth whilst walking up the aisle.
“And we’ve booked the venue - a lovely little church in Beaulieu in the New Forest followed by a reception at the Montagu Arms Hotel.”
Matt took Katie to Beaulieu for the weekend when they had been together for a year. Katie fell in love with the place and told him when they got married that was where she’d like them to do it. Even back then she knew she’d met the one.
“You’ll love it,” she says, draining her coffee cup as we get ready to leave. “It’s so beautiful. I couldn’t believe it when they said it was available on the date we wanted. They’d had a cancellation, I think. Obviously someone decided not to get hitched after all,” she grins, pleased that someone else’s misfortune has turned into her own good luck.
It’s also due to a cancellation that we are finally able to make it all the way into a wedding dress shop without being laughed straight back out again. Old New Borrowed Blue has had a cancellation.
“You’re a lucky girl,” the owner tells Katie in a very teachery voice, as if she’s telling her off for colouring outside the lines.
“We’ve just this minute had a cancellation. The bride is sick, apparently.” From the tone of her voice I’d say she doesn’t believe the bride for one minute. I’d say she hears this excuse