The Plus One: escape with the hottest, laugh-out-loud debut of summer 2018!

Bill appeared back in the kitchen in his jeans and a t-shirt that said ‘I am a computer whisperer’ on it. In the years since I’d met him, he’d discovered contact lenses but developed a questionable line of t-shirts. ‘I’ll have one of those please. Actually, no I won’t. I’ll have a beer first. So, how’s tricks?’ he asked, opening a bottle. ‘How was Christmas? How was your birthday and so on? I’ve got you a card actually.’ He picked up an envelope from his kitchen table and gave it to me. ‘Here you go.’

‘Being single at 30 isn’t as bad as it used to be,’ the front of the card read. I smiled, ‘Thanks, dude. Really helpful.’ I put the card down on the side and had a sip of wine. ‘And Christmas was lovely, thanks. Quiet, but kind of perfect. I ate, I slept. You know, the usual.’ I’d been worrying about Mum and her scan all week, but I didn’t want to mention it to anyone else yet. If I didn’t talk about it, I could keep a lid on the panic I felt when I woke in the middle of the night and lay in bed thinking about the appointment. I had decided to wait for the results of the scan and then we could go from there. ‘Anyway, how was yours?’

‘Terrible,’ Bill replied. ‘I was working for most of it, trying to sort out some investors.’ He took a swig of beer and leant on the kitchen counter. ‘So, I haven’t left the office before midnight this week and I’m doing no exercise apart from walking from my desk to have a pee four times a day. But that’s how start-up life is,’ he sighed and had another slug of his beer.

‘Love life?’ I asked.

‘I’m still seeing that girl, Willow. I told you about her before Christmas, right?’

I nodded. ‘The Tinder one? Who works in… ?’ I couldn’t actually remember much about her. I was always, selfishly, slightly peeved when Bill was dating someone because it meant he was less available for cinema trips and pizza.

‘Interior design, yeah. She’s cool. But everything’s so busy at the moment that I keep having to cancel on any plans we make in favour of a “chicken chow mein for one” at my desk.’

‘Have you invited her tonight?’

‘Yeah. But she couldn’t make it.’

‘OK. So, who’s coming?’

Normally, Lex would be here too, and she and I would spend the night drinking wine while discussing our New Year’s resolutions. But Lex had gone away to Italy with her boyfriend, Hamish, this year. So, I was slightly nervous about who Bill had invited. Or not nervous exactly. Just apprehensive about having to talk to strangers all night.

‘Er, there’s Robin and Sal, who you know. Then a couple I don’t think you’ve met who are friends from home who’ve just got engaged – Jonny and Olivia. Two friends from business school you haven’t met either. Lou, who’s in town for a bit from America, who you’ll love, she’s amazing. And a guy called Callum I haven’t seen for years but who knows Lou, too.’ He looked at his phone as it buzzed. ‘Oh, that’s her now,’ he said.

‘Lou, hi,’ he said, answering it. ‘No, no, don’t worry, just a bottle of something would be great… number fifty-three, yep? Blue door, just ring the bell. See you in a tick.’

By 11 p.m., everyone was still sitting around Bill’s kitchen table, their wine glasses smeary from sticky fingers. I’d drunk a lot of red wine and was sitting at one end of the table, holed up like a hostage, while Sal and Olivia, sitting either side of me, discussed their weddings. How was it physically possible for two fully grown women to care so much about what font their wedding invitations should be written in? I thought about the countless weddings I’d been to in the past couple of years. Lace dress after lace dress (since these days everyone wanted to look as demure as Kate Middleton on her wedding day), fistfuls of confetti outside the church, a race back to the reception for ninety-four glasses of champagne and three canapés. Dinner was usually a bit of a blur if I was honest. Some sort of dry chicken, probably. Then thirty-eight cocktails after dinner, which I typically spilled all over myself and the dance floor. Bed shortly after midnight with a blistered foot from the inappropriate heels I’d worn. I couldn’t recall what font any of the invitations were written in.

‘Polly,’ they said simply at the top. Just ‘Polly’ on its own. Never ‘Polly and so-and-so’ since I never had a boyfriend. Sometimes an invitation said ‘Polly and plus one’. But that was similarly hopeless since I never had one of those either. I reached for the wine bottle, telling myself to stop being so morose.

‘Who’s for coffee?’ asked Bill, standing up.

‘I’m OK on red.’

‘You’re not on your bike tonight?’ asked Bill.

‘Nope, I’ll Uber. But touched by your concern.’

‘Just checking. Right, everyone next door. I’m going to put the kettle on.’

There were murmurs of approval and everyone stood and started to gather up plates and paper napkins from the floor. ‘Don’t do any of that,’ said Bill. ‘I’ll do it later.’

I picked up the wine bottle and my glass and walked through the doors into the sitting room, collapsing onto a sofa and yawning. Definitely a bit pissed.

Sal and Olivia followed after me and sat on the opposite sofa, still quacking on about weddings. ‘We’re having a photo booth but not a cheese table because I don’t think it ever gets eaten. What do you think?’ I heard Sal say.

As if she’d been asked her opinion on Palestine, Olivia solemnly replied, ‘It’s so hard, isn’t it? We’re not having a photo booth but we are going to have a videographer there all day, so…’

I yawned again. I’d been at uni with Sal. She once stripped naked and ran across a football pitch to protest against tuition fees. But here, discussing cheese tables and photo booths, she seemed a different person. An alien from Planet Wedding.

‘So, you’re a fellow cyclist?’ said Bill’s friend from business school, sitting down beside me on the sofa.

‘Yup. Most of the time. Just not when I’ve drunk ten bottles of wine.’

‘Very sensible. Sorry, I’m Callum by the way.’ He stuck his hand out for me to shake.

Stuck, as I had been, between two wedding fetishists, I hadn’t noticed Callum much. He had a shaved head and was wearing a light grey t-shirt, which showed off a pair of muscly upper arms, and excellent trainers. Navy blue Nike Airs. I always looked at men’s shoes. Pointy black lace-ups: bad. The correct pair of trainers: aphrodisiac. Lex always criticized me for being too picky about men’s shoes. But what if you started dating someone who wore pointy black lace-ups, or, worse, shiny brown shoes with square ends, and then fell in love with them? You’d be looking at spending the rest of your life with someone who wore bad shoes.

‘I’m Polly,’ I replied, looking up from Callum’s trainers.

‘So you’re an old mate of Bill’s?’

‘Yep, for years. Since we were teenagers.’

He nodded.

‘And you met him at business school?’

He nodded again. ‘Yeah, at LBS.’

‘So what do you do now?’ I asked.

‘Deeply boring. I work in insurance, although I’m trying to move into K&R.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Kidnap and ransom. So more the security world really.’ He leant back against the sofa and propped one of his muscly arms on it.

‘How very James Bond.’

He laughed. ‘We’ll see.’

‘Do you travel a lot?’

‘A bit. I’d like to do more. To see more. What about you?’

‘I work for a magazine. It’s called Posh!’ I said, as if it was a question, wondering if he’d heard of it.

He laughed again and nodded. ‘I know. Sort of… society stuff?’

‘Exactly. Castles. Labradors. That sort of thing.’

He grinned at me. ‘I like Labradors. Fun?’

‘Yup. Mad, but fun.’

‘Do you get to travel much?’

‘Sometimes. To cold, draughty piles in Scotland if I’m very lucky.’