The Park Bench Test

CHAPTER FOUR

Alex is out when I get home. He plays five-a-side football on a Monday night with the boys from work.

I unlock the door and trample on a pile of mail on the doormat.

There is more than usual and for a brief moment I imagine that the contents of one of these envelopes is about to change my life. A letter telling me I have been picked at random to win a year off work, for instance, notification that I have won the competition I entered for an all-expenses-paid trip to Australia, or a letter saying that I’ve been headhunted by Hello magazine.

As if…

But as I open the envelopes and stare at the property details for seven different houses for sale, I realise that one of the envelopes really could be about to change my life.

Do you think I should be considering buying my first house with a man I’m not sure is Mr Right?

Me neither.

I look at the details just long enough to come out in a cold sweat before putting them down on the coffee table. Upside down. Underneath the newspaper. If I can’t see them, I can pretend they are not there, that they don’t exist, that I’m not about to have to make one of the biggest decisions of my life.

CHAPTER FIVE

When I get into the office the next morning I phone Katie.

“Hello, Books!, Katie Roberts speaking,” she answers.

Katie is a publicity manager for a big publishing company in London. She works in the entertainment section, which basically means she gets to swan about the country accompanying celebs on their book tours. Last year she met three film stars, two footballers and a well-known soap-star who has written her autobiography at the ripe old age of twenty four.

It’s her ideal job. Not just because she’s some maniac celebrity stalker, but because she loves books. When she and Matt started renovating their flat in London, Matt’s first job (he’s an architect) was to put in a wall-to-wall bookcase in their living room. It’s already half-full. It’s a wonder the floor hasn’t fallen into the flat below under the weight of it. And it’s going to get worse. Instead of the traditional wedding gift list of Egyptian cotton bath sheets and Jamie Oliver muffin moulds, they are asking their guests to buy them a copy of their own favourite books. Knowing Katie and Matt’s friends they’ll end up with eighty nine copies of the Karma Sutra and one copy of Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course Volumes 1-3 from Katie’s Great Auntie Rose.

“It’s me,” I say. “How’s things?”

“Good. You?”

“I’m bored.”

“I thought you might be. You don’t usually phone this early. Haven’t you got enough to do? I’ve got some press releases you can write if you like?”

“I’ve got plenty to do. I just can’t be bothered to do it!”

“I don’t know why you don’t just look for something else. You’ve hated that job for as long as I can remember.”

“Is it really that long? Hmm… Maybe I’ll just pack it in and move back home…”

“Really?” she asks, excited.

“No, not really,” I laugh, though I’m not entirely sure why.

The worst thing about staying up in Leeds with Alex is being away from my friends. Katie moved back to London as soon as we finished our finals and Emma has never been far from the south.

“Katie…”

“Yes?”

“If I ask you something, will you promise to forget all about it when everything’s okay again?”

“Yes.”

“What do you think about Alex? About him and me, I mean. Do you think Alex is right for me?”

She says nothing for a few seconds.

And then, “I don’t know.”

It’s not what I expected her to say. I mean, I didn’t expect her to say yes, or no even, but I guess I expected her to be a bit more surprised that I was asking – a bit more surprised that I am having doubts at all. I forget sometimes how well she knows me.

I take a slurp of lukewarm tea and wait for her to say something else. I know she will. Katie never finishes anything with ‘I don’t know’.

“Well, personally I think you are perfect for each other,” she says. “You have the same values. You find the same things funny. You are both incredibly gorgeous, obviously,” she laughs at this one. “You love each other. And you want the same things out of life.

“But whether you want those things with each other is a different matter altogether. And only you can answer that. Only you know if he’s the one for you, B.”

“Yeah, I know,” I sigh.

And I do. I know it’s up to me. I think I just want someone else to make the decision for me. But it doesn’t work like that, does it? I have to find that damn label myself.

“Let’s chat about it at the weekend,” Katie says. “Are you still coming? I’ve made an appointment for 12pm.”

“Yes. Alex is going to bring me to work in the morning and Fliss said she’ll drop me at the station.”

“Excellent. And Emma’s going to meet us at the shop. I’ve got a good feeling about this shop, B. I think it might be the one.”

CHAPTER SIX

“I think I might want to split up with Alex,” I tell Katie and Emma as we take a well-earned break from wedding fever on Saturday to get some lunch. We’ve found a lovely little Italian restaurant around the corner from All Things Bride And Beautiful, which is very handy as we’ll be going back there as soon as we’ve stuffed our faces. They have loads of dresses that Katie likes and she’s only tried on fifteen so far.

“What?” Emma says, as the spaghetti she has just spent the last five minutes twirling onto her fork falls back onto her plate in a heap.

“I think I might want to split up with Alex,” I say again.

“That’s what I thought you said. Why?”

Katie takes a bite of her pizza while I bring Emma up to date on my love life.

“I am happy,” I say. “I’m just not sure Alex is Mr Right.” This is the wrong thing to say to Emma, who rolls her eyes at me.

As I’ve said, Emma doesn’t believe in Mr Right. She thinks the whole idea is, and I quote, ‘codswallop.’ She thinks that the best you can hope for is to meet someone who loves you, who you love back, and who doesn’t drive you too far up the wall when they leave their dirty underwear on the bedroom floor, drink the last of the milk before putting the empty carton back in the fridge, or delete the final part of a three-part drama that you haven’t quite got around to watching yet.

“Right, shmite,” she says. “You love him, yes? And he loves you?”

I nod.

“Well, there you go then.”

“But what if there’s someone else out there I’m meant to be with?”

“And what if there isn’t? And you throw away what you have with Alex for nothing? You said you’re not sure he’s Mr Right. But you’re not sure he isn’t either, right? So what if he is?”

“I don’t think she’d be questioning it if he was, Em,” Katie says, my fellow follower of the Mr Right religion.

“Well I think you’re both bonkers,” Emma says, abandoning her spoon and chopping up her spaghetti with a knife and fork instead.

“I know you think it’s rubbish but I’ve always believed in Mr Right,” I tell Emma back at All Things Bride And Beautiful while we wait for Katie to emerge from the fitting room in dress number sixteen. “Ever since we held that wedding for Barbie and Ken and I asked my dad why Barbie wanted to marry Ken.”

“Oh god! Yeah!” she laughs. “When we made ourselves sick on Love Hearts! And made Ken those sparkly trousers out of one of your dad’s old hankies and some glitter!”

“Yeah. Well, I’m just not sure Alex is my Ken.”

Today we are being looked after by Pippa. And she is looking a little concerned. I guess this is not the sort of conversation you would normally hear in a wedding shop. More like gushings of eternal love and all things fabulous.

“Better I discover it now, before I get to the point where you’re getting me to strip off and try on wedding dresses,” I tell her as she scuttles away to fetch dress number seventeen.

“Maybe you’ll get it when you’ve met someone you’re crazy about,” I tell Emma.

“Who says I haven’t already?” she says, suddenly grinning like the Cheshire Cat.

“So things are still going well with Jim then?”

“Really well, actually. He’s cooking me dinner tomorrow night. He says there’s something he wants to talk to me about.”

“Ooh, what do you think it is?”

“I’m not sure. But I think maybe he’s going to ask me to move in with him.”

“Wow. That’s exciting, Em.”

“I know. I really like him, B.”

“What’s he up to this weekend?”

“He’s in London, actually. He was meant to be away for some work thing but it was cancelled.”

“Why don’t you phone him? Get him to meet us for a drink. Katie and I are dying to meet him. Aren’t we Katie?” I shout through the cubicle curtain.

She pokes her head out, looking a little flushed.

“What?”

“Emma’s Jim. He’s in London this weekend. I said she should call him so we can meet him.”

“Absolutely,” she says, disappearing back behind the curtain.

“I could, I guess. He’s pretty busy, I think, but I can ask.”

She takes her phone out of her bag and dials Jim’s number.

“It’s ringing,” she mouths. I hear him answer.

“Hello you,” she says. “I was just wondering if you fancy meeting up for a quick drink. I’m in a wedding dress shop with Becky and Katie,” she tells him. “They want to meet you. And I’ve probably kept you to myself for long enough!” She looks over at me and grins. I nod enthusiastically.

“No…Yes…Oh, that’s a shame. Oh well, never mind. Another time. Becky’s down here all the time at the moment, anyway. Are you still okay to pick me up from the station tomorrow night?

“Great…okay, see you tomorrow.”

She switches off her phone and tosses it back in her bag.

“He says he’s already made plans to meet up with a mate,” she says. She looks disappointed. I think she really likes this guy. I hope it lasts. She deserves a bit of luck on the love front.

Emma and I have been friends our whole lives. Well almost – since we were barely out of nappies. We grew up in the same street in a little village by the sea near Brighton. From the moment she and her family moved in next door, Emma and I were inseparable. She and her brother Sam sat on the curb watching my brother Johnny and I playing hide and seek with the rest of the kids in the street while their parents supervised the removal men. The first time she spoke to me was to tell me where Johnny was hiding when I was ‘it,’ which I was chuffed to bits about because he had won every single game so far and was being a smug little git about it.

We walked to school together every day with our matching My Little Pony lunchboxes and on weekends we’d spend hours playing with our Barbie dolls – usually at Emma’s house because she had the Barbie mansion. It was brilliant – it was four storeys high and had a pulley-operated lift on the side, a kitchen sink with taps that you could get real water to come out of and a four poster bed which though it was very swish was clearly designed without heed to Barbie’s enviably long legs.

Every summer my nana and granddad hired a beach hut near their home in Bognor Regis for the holidays and they would take the two of us there as much as we could pester them to. It was our summer treasure trove – filled with buckets and spades, inflatable dinghies and fishing nets that we used to scoop up crabs from the rock pools. My granddad had a greenhouse and we’d spend hours walking up and down the path behind the huts looking for ice-lolly sticks which he’d use to label his plants. We played mini-golf on the green across from the beach and went to the amusement arcades on the seafront and played on the two-pence machines until we’d spent all my granddad’s coppers.

I’ve known Emma so long I don’t really know a life without her as my friend. We’ve grown up together, really,

My friendship with Katie had a far less innocent beginning – evolving primarily from a mutual appreciation for red wine and a mutual aversion to studying. We met at university, where we were both studying English, both of us chronically overworked with our eight hours of lectures a week…

We met in our hall of residence and quickly became friends after it dawned on us that we were, in fact, the only two vaguely normal girls in our block – my immediate neighbours, just to illustrate, being:

To my right – Wendy, the maths student away from home for the first time, who not only still considered it cool to wear Converse trainers with fluorescent socks, but also considered it cool to wear a different coloured Converse trainer and a different coloured fluorescent sock on each foot.

To my left – Heather, the religious Medic who wore hand-knitted jumpers with pictures of elephants on them, and who liked to begin each and every day with a solo rendition of ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing.’

And directly opposite, Victoria, the token Goth. Enough said.

We spent the next three years together – two of them in halls, and one in a student house with our goldfish Bob (now sadly in goldfish heaven) – getting pissed, getting as many guys as possible to snog us at the hall balls, and, miraculously, making it to the odd lecture.

Emma and Katie met each other loads of times while I was at uni, but it was at my twenty first that they really hit it off.

It was an elaborate affair – much like Barbie’s wedding – with a big marquee in the garden decorated with embarrassing photographs of me, blown up to humiliating proportions and pinned to every available surface – me in a pram, me sitting on the potty, me on my first day of Brownies, me playing a Christmas tree in my primary school play, me and Emma as Perkin and Pootle from The Flumps for the school carnival (Emma was not pleased with my dad for digging out that one)…

We had a pond back then, which my dad had fenced off with some tent poles and a bit of fluorescent ribbon. Whether it was there to stop people falling, jumping in or throwing things in, I never did establish. But I do recall helping my dad drain the pond the following summer and discovering an item or two that had mysteriously gone missing – coincidentally around the night of that party. Namely, a garden gnome, my mum’s best whisk, and the remote control for the kitchen television. I don’t know where the garden gnome fits in but I do remember Emma and Katie giving the guests an impromptu Karaoke performance of Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, both of them hunting frantically for anything that could pass as a microphone.

I also recall, I’m sorry to say, how I went missing just as my dad was about to make a speech in my honour and was spotted through the kitchen window, by absolutely everyone at the party – gathered, as they were, for dad’s speech – sat on the kitchen worktop with my legs wrapped tightly around Alex, snogging the face off him.

I’m a much classier chick these days.

Anyway, despite my own mortification at the whole spectacle, Emma and Katie were united in their approval, shouting frankly unrepeatable encouragement through the fanlight window at us. In between stuffing whole profiteroles in their gobs, that is. And so, another great friendship began.

And the three of us have been best mates ever since.

We know it’s good from the way Pippa theatrically sweeps back the curtain and practically shoves Katie out of the cubicle at us.

“What do you think?” our friend asks. She’s beaming.

And for what must surely be the first time in history, Emma and I are both simultaneously speechless.

Well, almost.

“It’s beautiful,” I whisper, as if I’m afraid to say it out loud in case the spell is broken and she turns into a pumpkin or something.

“That’s the one, Katie,” Emma agrees. “You look stunning.”

“Turn around,” I instruct her. “Let’s see the back.”

It’s an empire line dress. Ivory. Strapless. With tiny little glass beads in the bodice which sparkle in the light. The buttons on the back are similar to the beads – only bigger – and they go virtually all the way to the ground. I make a mental note to allow plenty of time for button-fastening on the day.

“It’s fab, isn’t it?” Katie asks.

She doesn’t need us to tell her.

Standing unobtrusively behind her, Pippa beams too. What a lovely job – witnessing the moment a girl finds the dress that she’ll wear on the biggest day of her life.

She’s soon business as normal though, when Emma lunges forward to hug Katie.

“Don’t touch the fabric,” she urges. “It’s only a sample dress, but we do like to keep them in pristine condition.”

“Oooh,” Emma mumbles, jumping back. “Sorry! I’m just so excited!”

After completing the paperwork and putting a significant dent in Katie’s dad’s bank account, we spend the rest of the day celebrating at a trendy wine bar in Wimbledon called The Hedge. It was only meant to be a pit stop on the way home, but it’s one of those places with comfy sofas that once you have collapsed onto you just can’t seem to drag yourself off, no matter how hard you try. Which we don’t, obviously.

Between us we polish off a couple of bottles of red, two packets of pistachios and a bowl of olives. We then succeed in emptying an entire carriage on the tube – stop by stop – with our rendition of Billy Idol’s White Wedding. And when we finally reach Katie’s flat we all climb into bed with Matt, waking him up and telling him that when he sees Katie in her dress he will think he has died and gone to heaven.

He rubs his eyes, surveys the three of us cuddled up together next to him and calmly informs us: “I already do!”

CHAPTER SEVEN

It’s Monday. Again. Bollocks.

And I’m back at work. Again.

Thirty-eight new emails, twelve new accounts to open, nine credit limits to chase, countless arsey salesmen to get right up my arse. So to speak.

I got the train back from London on Sunday morning. I figured I ought to spend at least a few hours with my boyfriend this year.

We cooked – or should I say Alex cooked – roast chicken, and we watched ‘50 First Dates’ on DVD. I asked Alex if he loved me enough to ask me out on a first date every single day for the rest our lives. He said he did.