The Park Bench Test

CHAPTER SIX (#u1d9f1cbe-faa7-5737-bbf0-df3cb6fdfa4f)

“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.