Looking for Andrew McCarthy. Jenny Colgan

darkened living room of her tiny darkened flat – she’d deliberately bought a small one-bedroom so that Ellie could never conceivably move in with her. She’d always liked the way it was furnished, although these days she was noticing just how much Ikea there actually was – and tried to think long and hard into the night, but she wasn’t really of a philosophical turn of mind. So after about fifteen minutes she’d phoned up the cavalry and after mass screaming, they’d marched around with Worcestershire sauce and celery sticks; even Siobhan was temporarily roused from her Medusa-like life-long evil plottings long enough to empathize. Which was pretty good of her, seeing as Julia suddenly had the exact opposite of her own problem. Arthur was excluded – he was going to be furious, as he’d always insisted he’d had just as many childhood wedding dress fantasies as they had, but this was a woman-thing deep down, no doubt about it.

      ‘I thought … if, or when it ever happened, it would be, like, just the most exciting moment of my life,’ moaned Julia, sucking loudly through a straw.

      ‘That’s because the people that made the whole thing up had never had sex,’ said Ellie. ‘It was a tossup between getting engaged or dying in the throes of having a bastard in a workhouse.’

      ‘Yes, thank you Catherine Cookson,’ said Siobhan. ‘Well, I say, if someone asks you, you should just say yes immediately. It’s going to fail anyway, and at least this way people buy you stuff and pay you lots of attention.’

      ‘Me and Loxy wouldn’t fail! We’d be fine! It’s just, I’d kind of hoped for amazing, not fine.’

      ‘When you first met Loxy you swore he was the most amazing thing that had ever happened to you.’

      ‘Yes, but that’s the same in every new relationship, isn’t it? It’s new person sex voodoo. I don’t think I wore pants for six months, and if I did wear them they were made out of polyurethane and feathers. But now … we’re just …’

      ‘Big pants,’ said Ellie suddenly.

      ‘What?’

      ‘You’re in the “big pants”, stage of your relationship. Okay, what pants are you wearing?’

      Julia shrugged.

      ‘I’m wearing La Perla,’ said Siobhan.

      ‘Exactly,’ said Ellie. ‘You’re suddenly single, and you never know whether or not you’ll bump into John Cusack on the way home. I’m wearing special Marks and Sparks green pants, because if I buy white, black, pink or red, Big Bastard steals them off the washing line. Jules?’

      Julia sighed. ‘Well, okay.’ She reluctantly tugged them over the waistband of her trousers.

      ‘Yeuch,’ said the other two simultaneously.

      ‘They are clean, thank you.’

      But it was true that the outwardly fastidious Julia had a pair of massive saggy washed out grey knickers with a hole in them.

      ‘You’re just too comfortable. Your relationship has become a takeaway,’ Ellie said.

      ‘What?’

      ‘You remember when you started going out together? You used to lay the table? Light candles? Cook for him so you could pretend to be his mum and play house together? And now it’s just, sod it, let’s get a takeaway and eat it watching the TV and not talking to each other …’