The first night in the pub led to other dates, not in restaurants, where she used to go with her friends from work, but at gigs, sweaty indie clubs, slow walks along the canal. That summer had been long and sweltering in Manchester, and every memory Katie had of that time brought back a physical tingle: talking into the early morning as the wail of sirens carried on the stifling curry-scented air, or feeling the delicious itch of too-hot sheets on naked skin, while they listened to music in the dark, their arms and legs entwined, happy to be silent together. Ross wasn’t her usual type, but she fell in love without reason or explanation, which only made it seem more right.
Back then, Ross hadn’t seen her career as something to get angry about. Although Katie might have taken to the suits and Starbucks lifestyle, she wasn’t a townie – she’d grown up near Tewkesbury – but she was on a fast-track graduate scheme that had meant she’d stayed in Manchester after her degree course. Her parents hadn’t exactly encouraged her to go back, emigrating to Spain almost as soon as she’d qualified, and Katie was nothing if not ambitious.
She’d always wanted to work in town planning, sorting out people’s homes and buses and lives, but it was tough, and she’d realised quickly that to get ahead, she had to work twice as hard as the male graduates. After she and Ross had been seeing each other for six months, out of the blue she was offered something better, more money, with more responsibility – but back in the countryside, not too far from where she’d grown up, in a middling-size market town, Longhampton.
It had been a dilemma: Katie had never really adjusted to Manchester, and its busy, chippy attitude made her feel provincial, no matter how slick she looked on the outside. She’d stuck it out for the sake of getting on – something her parents had drilled into her – but leaving Manchester wouldn’t be a problem, especially for a job as good as this one. For Ross, though, always busy with design jobs for media companies, dragging him to the middle of nowhere – that was different. That was a lot to ask.
And yet Ross had been decisive.
‘Take it,’ he’d said, almost before she’d finished explaining.
‘But what about . . . us?’ They were on the delicate point between spending four nights a week together, and Moving In. ‘You have so many media clients, you need to be in Manchester.’
‘Ever heard of the internet? Anyway, there are other clients. I’ll freelance,’ he’d said, and cupped his hands round her face. ‘Katie or job? Katie or job? Hmm. Katie.’ And he’d kissed her.
Suddenly their relationship was on the same fast track as Katie’s career. Within eighteen months they were married, and then Hannah came along, and it had seemed logical for Ross to stay at home for a year, because he could take time out and she couldn’t, then when she discovered she was pregnant with Jack, and although she hated leaving Hannah, things seemed to be working . . . Well, why not?
It happened so gradually, like a photo fading in strong daylight, as work, babies, the house, bills shuffled those memories of sticky Manchester nights further away. They pecked kisses at each other instead of lingering over them, they fell exhausted into bed each night, joking about how unsexy they felt, and somehow it was easier to be annoyed with each other about the state of the house than to arrange babysitting for a ‘date night’ neither of them really had the energy for. Ross and Katie, the beautiful energetic Manchester couple, turned into Hannah and Jack’s parents. Two tired people, who loved each other, but not as much as they loved an early night.
One morning Katie trudged to work as usual, handed over a tenner for someone’s wedding collection, then when she went to the loo to reapply her make-up at lunch, she found she couldn’t stop crying. Her shoulders felt weighted down with some invisible burden, because so many things weren’t quite right with the life that seemed ideal on paper.
And now they were here. With just five more sessions to put it right, or finish it off.
When they left, another couple were already waiting on the orange plastic chairs outside Peter’s room, their arms tightly folded, heads tensed, not speaking. Without making eye contact, Katie and Ross made their way down the dingy corridor of the community centre, only the sharp clicks of her work shoes breaking the silence between them.
It was hard, she thought, to hear Ross say some of things he’d said, things he obviously hadn’t been able to say to her without someone else there. How he knew she wasn’t trying. How taken for granted he felt. She thought she’d been covering up fairly well, but though he didn’t say much, there was a bottomless well of hurt behind his eyes. No one could suffer like Ross. That was, if she was being truthful, why she couldn’t look at him in the counselling session. She wondered if all-seeing Peter had noticed.
She stopped walking and watched him go ahead down the corridor, his shoulders slumped with dejection. He was tall, good looking, and his hair was as thick and dark as when she met him. So what was missing?
The answer was one she didn’t allow herself to think often, in case she found herself saying it out loud. It was sexist, selfish, and totally unfair. But it was true: Ross had lost his manliness, the thing that made her want him, the unexpected remark, the feeling of being protected. And it was all her fault.
I used to fancy him so much, Katie thought, as if she were remembering something someone had once told her. I used to stop breathing when he pulled off his T-shirt at night and I saw that prickle of hair on his stomach leading into his jeans. Now I feel like I’ve got two toddlers and a sulking teenage son, and I feel about as sexy as my mother, and according to the magazines I’m meant to be in the prime of my life.
Ross had come to a halt in front of the noticeboard. Katie noticed that his jeans had flecks of poster paint on them. It didn’t look arty any more. It just reminded her that he never sorted the laundry properly.
‘What about this?’ he said, pointing to a handwritten advert.
‘What?’ she asked, unable to summon up even pretend interest.
‘Singing.’ He flashed a brave, fake smile like he would to Hannah. ‘Join a choir, no karaoke experience needed!’
‘Singing? Seriously? No, thanks.’
‘Pottery, then?’
She pulled a face.
‘Do you have to be so negative?’ he complained. ‘The whole point is that we try something neither of us can do.’
‘Sorry.’ Katie shook herself. ‘How about . . .’ She scanned the jumble of kids’ gymnastic lessons and AA meetings. ‘Ballroom dancing? Starts tomorrow.’
Ross peered more closely at the ad; unlike the others, it had been created neatly, on a computer, and had silver glitter sparkling around the edges. The harsh strip lights gave it a pretty, animated look. ‘Ballroom dancing. Huh.’
‘Although you’ll have to listen to what the teacher says instead of drifting off and getting me to explain,’ she added, waspishly, before she could stop herself.
Ross covered his face with his long, pale hand. ‘God, Katie, why are you always trying to pick a fight these days?’ He removed the hand and looked at her seriously. ‘Listen, I know you think counselling is a huge waste of time, but I really want to try to make things better again. It’s just a rough patch. We’ve got to try. For the kids’ sake? Let’s do the ballroom dancing. On the proviso, mind,’ he added, raising his eyebrow, ‘that we only learn dances that don’t involve tight satin pants or those fancy fishnet shirts you see on the television. The world’s not ready for that.’
‘On you or me?’ she asked deadpan.
‘On either of us.’ He paused. ‘Although you know I’ve always had a thing for Olivia Newton-John in Grease. So if you want to wear the tight satin pants . . .’
It was a bit lame, but she appreciated his trying. She just wished the trying wasn’t so obvious.
‘OK,’ she said, capitulating. ‘Ballroom dancing, then.’
‘Great. How hard can that be?’ Ross jotted down the details and looked up from his notebook with a hopeful smile. ‘Come on. We don’t want Gemma to run into a
third hour, do we?’
They walked down the echoing corridor in silence, until Katie asked, ‘Was that as bad as you thought it would be? The session, I mean.’
‘It was what I expected,’ he said, stoically. ‘Not easy. But, you know . . . Nothing worthwhile is. I want to fix things,’ he said, stopping and taking her hand suddenly. ‘I really want us to get back to where we were.’
But I don’t know if I can, Katie thought. I don’t even know if I want to!
‘A lot’s changed,’ she managed.
‘But a lot’s stayed the same,’ Ross insisted, and they stared at each other for a long moment. ‘And we’ve gained so much. Think about all the things we have now that we only dreamed about when we met, Katie.’
Re-mortgages. Love handles. The ability to have sex without waking up. A growing sense of ‘is this it?’.
Something cold gripped Katie’s stomach, and she heard herself say, ‘When did we stop loving each other?’
Ross’s face registered painful shock. Then he said, ‘We’ve stopped?’
Katie looked at him, stricken.
‘I haven’t stopped,’ he said, stubbornly. ‘But thanks for the memo about how you feel.’
‘Ross!’ Katie grabbed for his arm, but he was already storming towards the car park.
2
Lauren Armstrong hadn’t played netball since she left school four years ago, but in her head, she was still, and always would be, Goal Defence.
‘Just stand there, Lauren,’ Mrs Hathaway used to yell from the sidelines. ‘Stand there, stick those gangly arms out, and don’t try anything fancy.’
Lauren didn’t need to do anything fancy, because since the age of fourteen she’d been five foot ten, at least three inches taller than everyone else, nine inches taller than her mother, one inch taller than Mr Huddart, the headmaster. And the reason Mrs Hathaway didn’t want her trying anything fancy was because whenever she did, something usually fell over. The goal post, the other team’s Goal Attack, sometimes Lauren herself. But because Lauren did her best, she blocked more goals than she knocked over other players, and was thus nearly always picked for the team, sealing her rather ambiguous self-image for life.
Lauren was now twenty-two, and the Reception Manager/Lead IT Administrator at Longhampton Park Surgery. In a belated moment of revelation, just after her sixteenth birthday, she’d realised that her lanky legs were something to be grateful for, especially coupled with long blonde hair, but sadly her clumsiness wasn’t just an adolescent phase. Things kept on getting knocked over. And that was why, now she was months away from being Mrs Christopher Alan Markham, she was determined to be the bride she’d always dreamed about, throughout those freezing-cold matches where she hopped from one long leg to another to keep warm, and everyone giggled about her beanpoles.
On her wedding day, Lauren ‘Big Bird’ Armstrong promised herself, she was going to be a Disney princess: gorgeous, elegant, graceful and totally, one hundred per cent non-gangly.
Not that it was working out quite as easily as she’d thought. Lauren was a cheerful organiser at work, and an enthusiastic wedding researcher at home, but she hadn’t reckoned on her co-planner being even more dead-set on fairy-tale romance than she was. Not her mother, Bridget, who was happy to let her do whatever she wanted, as usual, but the other mother in the picture: Irene ‘Call me Mum!’ Markham, her mother-in-law-to-be.
Or, as she referred to herself in the wedding notes, MIL2B. Lauren was B2B. Bridget was MOB. And so on.
Lauren was sitting at Irene’s marble-topped breakfast bar right now, with a mountain of magazines in front of her, through which Irene was flicking methodically, searching for the glass-slipper cake topper they’d been discussing.
She checked her watch discreetly. They were meant to be waiting for her mum, who was coming over after she’d finished at school, but it was almost impossible to stop Irene. It’s almost as if, Lauren thought, she’s picturing herself in those dresses, not me.
‘If you go for the Sleeping Beauty theme, then you’ve got your carriage, you’ve got your lovely big gown, plus you’ll get to waltz to “Once Upon a Dream” at the reception.’ Irene gave Lauren a meaningful nod. ‘Whereas, with Snow White, OK, it’s a more distinctive dress, what with the corset and the overskirt, like you say, but everyone’ll be wondering, where are the dwarfs?’
‘It is my wedding,’ said Lauren, in what she hoped sounded like a joking tone. You had to start where you meant to go on with mothers-in-law. And Irene went on and on and on. It took all of Lauren’s extensive nice reserves to keep nodding and smiling. ‘Mum’s Year One class can be my dwarfs!’
‘Yes, but do you really want your mother to dress up as the Wicked Stepmother?’
Lauren blinked. So that was it. ‘I wasn’t planning on making the guests dress up too. But if you think it would be a good idea . . .’
‘Ooh!’ Irene scrambled for her ‘lookbook’, already heavily Post-itted and clogged full of pages ripped out of bridal magazines. ‘Apples! I suppose if you go for Snow White you can have apple-themed desserts . . .’
‘And if I go for Cinderella, I can have one of those wedding cakes that turns pink, then blue, then pink again like in the film,’ said Lauren brightly. ‘Irene, can I make myself another cup of coffee, please? I think Mum must be running late.’
‘Let me!’ Irene leaped to her feet before Lauren could push back her chair. She remembered too late that the last time she’d tried to make coffee at Irene’s, she accidentally pulled the handle off some designer storage jar. ‘Latte or cappuccino?’
‘Whatever’s easiest,’ said Lauren, blushing at the memory. ‘Instant’s fine.’
‘Proper coffee’s perfectly easy when you’ve got the right machine.’ Irene ran her fingers over her latest bit of kitchenware, tapping her shell-pink nails proudly on the chrome. ‘Weren’t you going to start cutting back on the lattes, though? What about that detox plan we were talking about the other day?’
‘We aren’t getting married till June,’ Lauren pointed out. ‘It’s only just September.’
‘It’s never too early!’ said Irene as the machine hissed and gurgled. ‘You’ll be looking at those photographs for the rest of your married life, and you don’t want to be wishing then that you’d given up wheat and dairy for a few months.’
‘Well . . .’ Lauren’s stomach freaked out at the thought of no hangover McDonalds till she was a married woman, but she steeled herself. It’s not for ever, she thought. Cinderella would not have wheat bloat. ‘Did you say you’d got a diet sheet from one of the magazines?’
‘I’ll dig it out for you.’ Irene finished fiddling with the coffee, and set a clear glass cup down in front of Lauren, the cappuccino capped with thick white foam. It smelled delicious.
I’ll give up from next week, she thought. ‘Ooh, that’s lovely. Are you having one?’
‘I’m sticking to peppermint infusions,’ said Irene and gave her a reproachful smile.
The thing was, Lauren thought, Irene wasn’t a Wicked Mother-in-law. She meant well, and was quite stylish for someone in her fifties, and nothing was too much trouble when it came to her and Chris’s wedding. She just had far too much time on her hands. Since Chris’s dad died and the life insurance paid off the house, she hadn’t had to work, unless you counted her three mornings a week at the charity shop on the High Street, which Lauren didn’t.
‘So, have you spoken to Christopher about him learning to ride a horse?’ demanded Irene, picking up her pen again. ‘Because he’ll need to get started with that if you want him riding into the ceremony to wake you up.’
‘Um . . .’ Lauren hadn’t worked out how best to broach that with Chris. Chris still thought – hoped – they were having a simple church wedding and sit-down hotel meal. His idea of a big night out was the pub with his mates, followed by an all-you-can-eat at the Peking Tiger, followed by half an hour at Diamondz, the club at the far end of the High Street. But then it was all right for Chri
s: all his life he’d been the rugby-playing, in-crowd-leading, first-one-to-have-a-car, school-fit-lad type. It wasn’t a dream for him, like it was for her.
Irene’s pen paused, mid-note. ‘You haven’t told him about the horse, have you?’
‘Um, sort of . . .’ Lauren fumbled. She hadn’t actually told her own mother about the horse yet, but there had been such a gorgeous photo in one of the wedding magazines, of a bride about her height, mounted on a pearly-white pony, looking so elegant and magical . . .
‘Would you like me to have a word?’ suggested Irene with a sympathetic half-smile. ‘I am his mother, after all.’
The doorbell rang and saved Lauren from answering.
‘That’ll be Mum,’ she said, hastily getting up. ‘I’ll let her in. She’ll have a strong coffee, if there’s enough there – three sugars.’
Lauren didn’t miss the sotto voce tut that escaped from Irene when she thought she was out of earshot, but said nothing. After a long day wrangling with five-year-olds, her mum needed two cups of coffee in a row, three sugars in each, just to summon up the strength to get her shoes off.
Irene’s detached house was big enough to have a front porch, but not a single stray shoe or plastic bag escaped the wicker storage solutions lining the wall. Through the frosted glass, Lauren made out the small, round shape of her mother Bridget. As she opened the front door she caught her hurriedly stuffing the last chunk of a banana in her mouth while juggling a bulging Tesco’s bag and her battered leather tote.