Getting Over Mr. Right (23 page)

Had I understood her properly? Enya had managed to spin out her grief over the end of an eleven-month relationship for a whole seven years! If I extrapolated from her experience and multiplied it by the length of time that Michael and I had been together, then I was looking at almost twenty-one years of this misery. Longer than the average criminal sentenced to “life” actually spent in jail.

“I don’t know what I did to deserve this.” Enya sighed. “I don’t know why I was chosen to bear this pain.”

“Me neither,” I said in what I hoped was a supportive way.

Enya thanked me for my “contribution.”

“But what happened to Robert?” the other newbie dared to ask.

The entire room turned toward her with disapproval in their
eyes. But Enya said it was okay. She would tell the new people the end of the story.

“He got married,” said Enya. “He has three children. He took out a restraining order against me late last year.”

When the session had ended, Enya came across the room and grabbed both my hands. Though she had been nursing her coffee cup for the entire session, her fingers were horribly cold. I felt like Ebenezer Scrooge being grabbed by one of his ghosts. Was Enya the ghost of my future?

“You were so brave today, telling your story so stoically. We’re all really proud of you,” she told me in a blast of halitosis. “Some of us go on to Starbucks after the session, to go over what we’ve learned. Perhaps you’d like to come along?”

I fought the urge to tell her that I wasn’t sure she had learned anything. Seven years grieving such a short relationship, while the guy who had left her had met someone else, married, and had a family? Enya was ridiculous. But was she really so much more ridiculous than me?

I imagined what Michael might think if he could have heard me describing the end of our affair to this room full of odd-bods, who all had very good reason to believe that they might
never
get laid again. I wasn’t like them, was I? I wasn’t wearing bicycle clips. I wasn’t wearing anything that looked as though it might have been made by a blind women’s collective in Ecuador. I didn’t smell of mothballs or llamas. I didn’t have breath that could kill a dog. Did I?

I had to get out of there. I felt as though another moment in the company of those people would only do me harm. That meeting had been what the Americans so charmingly call a “circle jerk.” I told Enya that I had to get home. My mother was expecting me for lunch.

“Okay,” she said, kissing me on both cheeks. “Here’s my
card. Anytime you want to talk, just call me. Anytime. I’m always happy to talk.”

I took the card, which said that she ran a shelter for homeless cats. I wasn’t in the least bit surprised.

The other newbie drew level with me as we exited the hall.

“What did you think?” I asked her.

Her eyes bugged out in horror. “I don’t know what to think,” she said. “But I know I am
never
going back in there. Never. I am going straight home to log on to Match.com and I am going to get laid by next weekend.”

She was out of that place like a bat out of hell.

As I headed back to Mum and Dad’s, it occurred to me that maybe the other newbie had the right idea. Voodoo hadn’t worked, and group therapy was not looking promising. Perhaps simply getting laid was the answer. I could continue to allow Michael the same space in my brain that he had always occupied, or I could get someone else in to edge him out. I needed to get back out there.

But who could I get back out there with? My social circle had been withering year after year as my friends succumbed to marriage and motherhood, even before I delivered the death blow by ruining Becky’s wedding. The last time I had been on a night out had been Becky’s hen night and that was hardly a raucous affair, with three of the girls not drinking because they were breast-feeding, three not drinking because they were pregnant, and one not drinking because she wanted to get pregnant before December to avoid the crushing pity of her mother-in-law over Christmas lunch.

Nevertheless, I did know of another hen night coming up that might be a little more fun.

My young cousin Karen was getting married in a couple of weeks’ time. I wasn’t going to go to the actual wedding. She was marrying a Kiwi guy she’d met in some backpackers’ club in Covent Garden and the marriage was going to take place on Fiji, with just the bride, the groom, and their best friends in attendance. (My aunt was absolutely livid.) Anyway, Karen may
not have invited any of her family members to her wedding, but she had invited me to her hen night, which was to take place on the August bank-holiday weekend. I had already turned the kind invitation down, thinking that nothing would send me into a terminal depression faster than a night out with a bunch of twenty-somethings mainlining Red Bull and vodka. But needs must. I had to go out or end up like Enya. I was not yet ready to sit in a bar all by myself, though. That would be way too sad. I had to go out with a gang, and Karen’s was the only gang available to me right now.

Karen was delighted to hear from me. “I thought you had another engagement.”

“My friend’s baby shower was canceled,” I lied.

“Aw,” said Karen. “That’s a shame. But I’m really happy you’re going to come to my hen night instead. We’re going to have an amazing time, Ash. We’re starting at Bolsheviks on the High Street. We’re going to walk north, having a drink in every single bar we come across, until we get to the nightclub. Assuming that any of us are still standing by then!”

“Sounds fantastic,” I said, wondering what on earth I was letting myself in for.

“Wonderful! I’ll see you next week!”

“Perhaps I should just stay in,” I said, as I had breakfast with my parents on the morning before Karen’s hen do. “I don’t know any of her friends. And they probably don’t want an old-timer like me tagging along with them anyway. I’m sure she only invited me to be polite.”

“Oh, go on,” said Mum. “Karen will be really excited to have you there. She’s always looked up to you. You’ll have a great evening. Besides, I don’t like to think of you sitting here all on your own while we’re away.”

That weekend, the last bank holiday of the summer, my father
was taking Mum to the hotel where they’d spent their honeymoon. They were supposed to go away for a whole week but the modest little bed-and-breakfast in Newquay had since become a ritzy boutique hotel and so they had cut back to two nights.

Mum had only agreed to go away that weekend because she knew that Lucas was planning to go away as well, to the Reading Festival, and that way she didn’t have to worry about him inviting his feckless mates around and getting cigarette burns on her new sofa. Five years previously she and Dad had left Lucas on his own for just one night and came back to find that particular year’s new sofa covered in new-age travelers drinking Special Brew from the best wedding-gift crystal and flicking ash from their spliffs into my deceased paternal grandmother’s prized Hermès teacups.

“At least they weren’t flicking the ash on the carpet,” Lucas had protested.

The pot smoking faded into insignificance when Mum went up to her bedroom and found one of Lucas’s school friends—a very sweet girl (or so we thought)—having a threesome with her boyfriend and one of my parents’ neighbors.

When Mum reminded my brother of that unfortunate party and the damage it had done to her trust in him, he pointed out to her that in actual fact I was the pyromaniac in the family.

“Thanks, Lucas.”

“It was an accident,” my mother chipped in on my behalf.

Despite my brother’s attempt at stirring things up, Mum was finally persuaded to get into the Saab and hit the road down to Cornwall. She waved tearfully until the car had rounded the corner and was out of sight. Anyone would think she had never left her children at home before, despite the fact that I had lived
independently for a good decade prior to setting fire to my own flat.

“The cat’s away …,” said Lucas as we went back into the house. He cranked up the stereo.

Thank goodness it wasn’t long before his friends came to collect him in an old VW camper van. Five of them were going to Reading that year. The van was piled high with rucksacks full of neatly ironed T-shirts (they all lived with their mums) and Tupperware containers of food, carefully packed into iceboxes to keep fresh (the mums again). Lucas added his own contribution to the stash: a hamper full of sandwiches lovingly prepared by Dad. They were less like the wild young rebels they thought they were than Five Go Camping without the dog. Speaking of which, Ben tried hard to sneak into the back of the van but was thwarted. He was staying with me.

“Don’t forget to walk him,” Lucas warned me. As if he ever remembered.

“Don’t die of a drug overdose, will you?” I said as I saw him and Richard, his best friend, off the premises.

“Watch out for chlamydia” was Richard’s charming reply.

“Fat chance,” said Lucas. “Ashleigh hasn’t had a shag in a year.”

“Five months,” I pointed out, pointlessly. “It’s been less than five months.” As far as Lucas and Richard were concerned, at thirty-two I was a shriveled old bag.

Once I had the house to myself, I turned the music
down
and settled at the kitchen table with a mug of tea and the latest copy of
Hello!
(which Mum had bought for the coverage of some hapless soap star’s funeral). It didn’t cheer me up.

The following afternoon I took Ben for a walk in the park. The weather wasn’t too bad, considering it was a bank holiday, and every spare patch of grass played host to a picnic. It was hard to walk from one side to the other without being hit
by balls, Frisbees, and Jack Russell terriers in pursuit of said neon plastic disks. Ben enjoyed himself, but that walk didn’t do much to improve my mood. Those people who weren’t playing Frisbee or trying to keep young children out of the pond were inevitably walking in twos. I remembered how Michael and I used to walk along like that, our arms around each other, synchronizing our steps so that we wouldn’t bump hips.

I had a stabbing vision of Michael wrapped around Miss Well-Sprung. I wondered what they were doing that bank holiday. Perhaps they were at the carnival in Notting Hill and she was making him do some exotic Brazilian dance. I drew small comfort from the fact that he would probably look like a twit. Michael couldn’t dance at all. But maybe, as I had been, Miss Well-Sprung was too much in love with him to care.

Turning for home, I retraced my steps to Mum and Dad’s. I was on the point of deciding that I was too miserable to go out that evening when my phone rang. It was Karen.

“Hiya,” she said. “Just checking you know where we’re meeting up tonight.”

“Er …,” I began. “I thought perhaps …”

“You’re not going to bail out, are you? You can’t pull out now. I’ve told all my friends that you’re coming. You’re the only member of my family I could ever talk to.”

How could I refuse after that?

At eight o’clock I found myself standing on the pavement outside the first venue. I hadn’t seen my cousin Karen for a couple of years. In fact, I hadn’t seen her in the flesh since she was doing her GCSE exams. But like so many families, we kept in touch via Facebook, so I had seen pictures of a variety of hairdos, boyfriends, and shots of her wearing traffic cones at the
end of a long night on the town. That said, I still wondered if I would recognize her. Would she recognize me? My hair, after all, was now the reddish brown of a scruffy city fox.

In the end, it was easy. I saw them as soon as I walked into Bolsheviks, a Russian-themed bar specializing in shots, which had been an Argentinian bar just a few weeks earlier. (The toilet doors were still adorned with silhouettes of tango dancers.) Unlike Becky’s snotty girlfriends, Karen’s friends were not planning to hold back on the traditional hen-night frippery. They were already in full regalia, wearing tutus instead of skirts and pink fur-covered horns on their heads. They each had a T-shirt with the name of a Bond girl emblazoned upon it. They looked crazy. They looked ridiculous. They looked like they were ready to have a good time.

Having embraced me enthusiastically, Karen held me at arm’s length and looked at my ensemble (a black dress and a pair of sensible heels I had borrowed from my mother) in dismay.

“Everything I had was ruined in the fire,” I said to excuse myself.

“Doesn’t matter. You need to change into this,” said Karen’s best friend and chief bridesmaid, Lola, handing me a plastic bag. I knew without looking what would be inside.

“We saved Miss Moneypenny for you,” Karen explained. “Since you are the oldest.”

Like I needed reminding.

I followed Karen into the tango toilets to change. Reluctantly, I folded Mum’s little black dress into my enormous handbag (also borrowed) and put on the outfit that Karen had provided for me instead. The stiff net ballet skirt barely covered my knickers.

“Are those cycling shorts?” Karen asked, pointing at the little black shorts that poked out from beneath the pink tulle.

“They’re Spanx,” I said grimly.

“What do you need those for?” Karen asked. “You’re not fat.”