I Heart London

  No one replied. Mum, myself and Louisa were too busy reading the menu, wanting a wee and wishing Jenny dead respectively. Whatever sisterly love had been generated by the perfect bridesmaids’ dresses was lost when we were turned away from the Ritz for not having a reservation. The Wolseley was hardly a poor runner-up, but Jenny hadn’t stopped whining about all the places she could have taken us. First she wanted to jump in a cab and head to the Sanctuary, then it was Harrods, and now we were back to her obsession with Soho House. And nothing was offending Lou more than the fact she insisted on putting a ‘the’ in front of it whenever she mentioned it. Which was often.

  We ordered the afternoon tea for all of us, everyone choosing a different tea, and then sat in silence. It wasn’t necessarily an awkward silence, but it wasn’t the most comfortable.

  ‘We’re ticking a bunch of stuff off the list today,’ Jenny said when the steaming silver teapots arrived. ‘Dresses, shoes, underwear. We’re, like, almost entirely sartorially sorted.’

  After sneaking out of the dress department, we’d done brisk business in shoes, choosing black chunky Jimmy Choo sandals that would set off and toughen up the black bow on their girly dresses. I’d opted to destroy my mother’s credit card with some crystal-studded Louboutin platforms that I already knew I’d need to trade for the matching leather sliders I’d convinced her to purchase at the same time. I was in shoe heaven. Added to that, I’d forced everyone into Stella McCartney lingerie, not that it was a terribly tough job.

  ‘I’m gonna have to go through our make-up tomorrow and see what else we need,’ she mused, adding to her to-do list. ‘I really should have done that before now.’

  ‘I did say I could probably get a make-up artist,’ Louisa said. ‘And a photographer. Have you got a photographer?’

  ‘Oh, like you could get us into the Ritz?’ Jenny asked with feigned innocence. ‘And yeah, I have a photographer.’

  I wanted to head-butt the table, but since I already had a lovely black eye coming through from my adventure over James’s shoulder the night before, I didn’t bother. Why was she being such a cow?

  ‘We really felt like the make-up artist made a big difference at my wedding.’ Louisa had clearly decided to fight this battle. ‘Also, I was going to talk to you about maybe having a play area for the babies?’

  ‘Multiple babies? Did you have another one when I wasn’t looking?’ I asked.

  ‘No, but other people will be bringing their kids, won’t they?’ Louisa looked to my mum for confirmation.

  ‘Your cousins have got children.’ Mum was clearly reluctant to get involved, either because she knew we were headed for a fight or because she was losing her game of iPhone Scrabble − I couldn’t be sure which. ‘But I don’t know if they’re bringing them.’

  ‘I’m just going to say it.’ Jenny prepared to make a declaration. ‘Kids make a wedding difficult. Sorry, but it’s true.’

  ‘At my wedding, we had loads of kids.’ Louisa flashed her wedding ring as though to prove a point. ‘And it was great.’

  ‘Alex texted me to say Craig and Graham have arrived.’ I changed the subject fast. God forbid that someone would ask me what I thought about who should be in attendance at my wedding. But actually, I didn’t know how I felt about having kids at the wedding. Mostly I was worried about sticky hands getting marks on my wedding dress. And that was just my sticky hands. ‘They’re going to play a show tonight or something. That’s their idea of a bachelor party.’

  Mum and Louisa looked up at me.

  ‘Stag do,’ I translated. ‘I think their friend’s band is playing a concert, so they’re going to tag on.’

  ‘Do you want to go?’ Louisa asked. ‘I’d like to see them play.’

  ‘Actually, yeah. That’s a really good idea.’ I brightened at the idea of seeing Alex on stage. It was a treat that I never got tired of. ‘I’ll ask him where it’s going to be.’

  ‘You can’t crash your fiancé’s bachelor party.’ Jenny pulled my phone out of my hands. ‘And you can’t spend your bachelorette night watching your fiancé play with his band. That totally defeats the object.’

  ‘It does?’ I said, deflated.

  ‘Of course it does.’ She turned off my phone and handed it back. Cow. ‘You’re supposed to wear something inappropriate, get wasted and dance up on some hot piece. You can’t do that in front of your man.’

  I didn’t bother to mention I’d already accidentally done that the night before. Instead I just shook my head and gave a rueful smile.

  ‘All good suggestions, but I think I’d rather go and see Alex play.’ I was trying very hard to keep things light. ‘Let’s see what he says.’

  ‘If you want to go and see Alex play, that’s what we’ll do.’ Louisa was speaking to me but looking at Jenny.

  ‘Whatever. We’re still going to karaoke,’ Jenny said, adding something to her notebook that I couldn’t see. ‘And to the Soho House.’

  ‘Will you stop fucking calling it the Soho House?’ Louisa screeched with a sudden vehemence that made me drop my teacup. ‘It’s just Soho House. There is no the.’

  Christ on a bike.

  ‘That’s what they call it in New York,’ I interjected before Jenny could retaliate. There was no need for blood to be spilled over afternoon tea. We’d already dropped an F-bomb. ‘They call it the Soho House. It’s like to-mah-to to-may-to.’

  ‘Tomahto tomayto bollocks.’ Louisa slammed both hands down on the table and stood up. ‘I’m sick of you defending her. She’s not a child − she doesn’t need babying.’

  ‘I know,’ I whispered, not really sure what to do. ‘I’m not defending her. I’m defending … American language usage?’

  Even I didn’t buy that.

  ‘You are defending her.’ Louisa started gathering her things and wiping away stray, angry tears. ‘You do whatever she tells you to. It’s pathetic. Yes, Jenny, no, Jenny, three bags fucking full, Jenny. Why don’t you just marry her and be done with it?’

  ‘Lou, calm down.’ I started to panic as people began whispering. ‘Sit down, please.’

  She stopped for a moment, arms half back in her cardigan, handbag in hand.

  ‘Hey, Louisa.’ Jenny cocked her head to one side and picked up her water glass. ‘Did you throw a tantrum at your wedding, too?’

  And that was that. Without another word, Louisa threw her bag onto her shoulder, knocking one of the teapots flying across the floor with a tremendous clattering racket, and stormed straight out of the door.

  ‘Well done,’ I said, turning to Jenny. Now I was furious. ‘Well bloody done.’

  ‘Me?’ Jenny opened her eyes wide. ‘What the fuck did I do?’

  ‘I think someone had better go after Louisa,’ Mum said quietly. ‘And someone probably needs to apologize to the manager.’

  ‘I think Jenny probably needs to apologize to everyone she’s ever met,’ I snapped, trying to wriggle out from behind the table. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

  I turned to point at Jenny with as much threat and rage as I could muster. ‘And don’t you dare eat my scones.’

  In the seventeen seconds it took me to get outside, Louisa had vanished. In the thirty seconds it took for me to turn my phone back on and dial her number, she’d either turned hers off or got on the tube. Either way, I was buggered. Back inside the Wolseley, Mum was trying to pacify Jenny. I could hear her bandying around phrases that included ‘fuck Louisa’, ‘fuck London’ and the all-encompassing classic, ‘fuck this shit’. If Louisa had dropped the F-bomb, Jenny was detonating an F-nuke. It was the Hiroshima of expletives. I had nothing to better it with. Instead, I stood beside the table with my hands on my hips, basking in the warm glow of every sodding nosy mare in the place staring at me.

  ‘What?’ Jenny shrugged.

  As befitting such a stiff-upper-lip establishment, our spilled tea had not only been cleaned up but had been replaced. In New York, we would have been dragged out onto the street by our hair or app
lauded, depending on the borough. Here, we’d been given cake. Lovely England.

  ‘What?’ I rammed a mini-scone into my mouth to stop it from saying something it might regret. Dear God, that was good. ‘You are unreal.’

  ‘I’m just trying to make sure your wedding isn’t some provincial, red-neck shit-show.’ Jenny’s face started to turn red. ‘It’s not my fault your best friend wants to turn your wedding into a pre-school tea party. Angela, she wanted to hire a clown. A. Clown. I didn’t tell you, but yeah − a clown.’

  I didn’t know what to deal with first. The way Jenny spat out the words ‘best friend’, the concept of my wedding being a provincial shit-show, or the clown. There would be no clowns. Luckily, Jenny gave me a more pressing concern to manage.

  ‘You know what.’ She stood up and knocked over the new teapot. Had she learned nothing from Louisa’s exit? ‘I’m through with this. Deal with it yourself. Book your own PA system. Find your own serving crew. If you can hire someone to organize outdoor fucking fairy lights with three days’ notice, then good luck to you. Screw all of this.’ With a final flourish, she stared straight at me, stuck out her chin and slapped one of the sterling-silver cake stands across the table before turning on her heel and tracing Louisa’s steps right out of the front door.

  ‘Oh, I say,’ Mum muttered, reflexively catching a flying egg and cress sandwich. ‘Maybe we should have gone to the spa.’

  ‘So they could drown each other?’ I suggested.

  ‘Oh yes. Maybe not.’ She raised her eyebrows and sipped her tea. ‘You’d better go after her. God knows what trouble she’ll get herself into wearing those jeans.’

  It reassured me somewhat that when Jenny had just trashed a two-hundred-pound afternoon tea, smashed a teapot, broken a cake stand and made more of a show of herself than my mother had ever considered possible in her worst nightmares, her main concern was that she was loose in London wearing low-riding jeans with her midriff showing. She gave me a tired smile, rubbed her forehead and waved her hand for me to go.

  ‘Before you lose her.’ She pulled her handbag onto her lap. ‘I’m getting used to this now.’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I dashed out into the street, looking in every direction for Jenny. Unlike Louisa’s Batman-esque exit, Jenny had gone for a less subtle approach. I followed a trail of destruction and scared-looking shoppers that Godzilla would have been proud of until I found her bellowing at a man handing out copies of the Evening Standard.

  ‘Jenny!’ I shouted, picking up my pace in case she decided to bolt. But my run wasn’t enough. As soon as she laid eyes on me, Jenny stepped into the street, right in front of a black cab. Of course he was too busy staring at her tight, toned belly to be upset, and when she hopped into the back seat and slammed the door shut, he just did as he was told.

  ‘Oh, bloody hell.’ I flagged down the next passing cab and threw myself in. ‘Can you please go after the cab in front?’ I asked as politely as I could.

  ‘Eh?’ He turned in his seat to give me the once-over. Whatever the first driver had seen in Jenny, I seemed to be sadly lacking.

  ‘Follow that taxi!’ I shrieked, hoping volume would make up for hotness. Apparently it did.

  ‘Yes, madam,’ he replied, gunning the engine into life and charging off down the street. ‘Although I feel like I should tell you these things never end well.’

  ‘They never really start that well either, do they?’ I reasoned, madly dialling Jenny’s mobile. ‘So it shouldn’t be such a shock to people.’

  ‘You’re right about that,’ he said, throwing me around the back seat as he took me towards the twisting, twirling streets of Soho. ‘Most people aren’t that clever though, are they?’

  ‘Too true,’ I agreed. ‘Too true.’

  The taxi driver kept on talking at me while I kept on calling Jenny. We whizzed down Piccadilly, almost killed someone crossing against the light outside Boots on Piccadilly Circus and kept on going. It was still daylight, but the billboards were all lit up like a teeny tiny Times Square. They made me want a Coke. We kept going, matching Jenny’s driver light for light, and I was simultaneously grateful and terrified for my cabbie’s lax attitude to the laws of the road.

  ‘Looks like your friend’s headed towards the river,’ the driver said as we span through Covent Garden. ‘And I don’t go south of the river.’

  ‘Really?’ I held tightly onto my seat belt. ‘I always thought that was a cliché.’

  ‘Well it is,’ he admitted with a big attractive snort. ‘But I’m not going over Waterloo Bridge. So that’s that.’

  There was no way I was getting out of the taxi until I had Jenny in my sights. This was my first and hopefully last dramatic car chase through the streets of London. Also, there was no way I’d pick up another cab at this time of day on the Strand. I tried to decide whether I should lead with desperate lady tears or angry lady shouting, but a couple of seconds later my decision was made for me.

  ‘Hang on, she’s getting out.’ The driver swerved to the side of the road without so much as the honk of a horn and pointed to the cab in front, where Jenny was indeed spilling out onto the pavement and shouting at her driver. ‘Problem solved. Twenty quid.’

  I threw some notes at him and jumped out, trying to grab Jenny before she ran. But she didn’t run, she turned and faced me with an epic pout on her face.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I pushed my hair out of my eyes. It was windy on the bridge. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I haven’t got any cash and asshat here doesn’t take credit cards.’ She flicked her head quickly and I could see she was trying not to cry.

  ‘Oh.’ I pulled another twenty out of my shrinking stash of cash and paid the driver, ignoring his obscenities and flipping him the middle finger as he drove off. ‘They don’t take cards here in taxis.’

  ‘Yeah, I got that.’ She wiped at her face and turned her eyes to the water. ‘It’s like being in the freaking past.’

  ‘This isn’t really the spot to dispute that,’ I said, resting my elbows on the railings and looking out at the Houses of Parliament in the fading afternoon light. I considered explaining about the Addison Lee app to her, but that just seemed a bit much. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘No, Angela.’ She joined me at the railings and kicked at them with my ballet pump. ‘I’m not OK.’

  ‘Just checking.’ I watched the water sparkle with sunshine, covering up all of its deep, dark, murky secrets.

  Neither of us said anything for the longest time. Jenny occasionally huffed, puffed and turned to gaze in the opposite direction, taking in the Tate Modern and Somerset House before turning back round. I just flipped once, smiling softly at St Paul’s. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been mid-makeover, his walls covered in scaffolding and soot. It had been a little bit sad. I’d always loved St Paul’s, but to see him so brought down and not living up to his full potential was tragic. Now he was all freshly scrubbed and shining brightly − the last two years had been good to him. We had a lot in common. Sort of.

  Jenny’s phone rang with an old school bell and she pulled it out of her Proenza Schouler and visibly shrank back. I leaned back to get a better view of the screen. In big, bold letters it said ‘Jeff’.

  ‘Oh, Jenny.’

  I watched a shadow fall across her face, her eyes sparkling with reactionary excitement before her expression collapsed in on itself and her lip began to tremble.

  ‘He’s been calling again?’

  She nodded, brown eyes locked on the phone’s screen until it faded back to black.

  ‘Have you been talking to him?’

  She nodded and waited for the screen to flash back into life. It did.

  ‘Oh, Jenny.’

  I wished I had something more insightful to say, something helpful and wise that would make her answer the call and tell that douchebag to go back to the bowels of hell whence he came and never darken her door or her phone again. When Jenny and I had first met and Mark had kept cal
ling me, I’d thrown my phone into the Atlantic Ocean. So I shouldn’t really have been surprised when Jenny pulled her arm back and tossed her phone into the Thames. It was becoming something of a habit.

  ‘Oh.’ I watched it sail through the air and then vanish into the water in silence. It really was a very expensive way of playing transatlantic pooh sticks. I couldn’t help but imagine our phones in Ariel’s cave of land-dwelling wonders, but I did manage to keep that image and accompanying song to myself. ‘Jenny.’

  ‘I’m sorry I was a bitch to Louisa,’ Jenny said, never taking her eyes off the horizon. ‘I don’t know why I said − well, I guess I don’t know why I said any of it.’

  ‘She’ll be all right,’ I replied, having no idea whether or not it was true. ‘Everybody says things—’

  ‘No, she’s right. Stop defending me.’ She cut me off with a bittersweet laugh. ‘You’re doing it right now. You’re like my mom. Except my mom wouldn’t stand up for me the way you do.’

  I didn’t have anything to say so I didn’t say anything. She was right. I’d been defending her when she was totally out of order.

  ‘I’m probably jealous of her,’ she said with forced breeziness. ‘Husband, baby, first dibs on you. Whatever.’

  I clicked the band of my engagement ring on the railing of the bridge, desperately biting my tongue. ‘You don’t need to be jealous of Louisa,’ I blurted out after a whole three seconds of keeping it in. ‘You’re successful, smart, funny, gorgeous. I can’t think of anyone on earth who wouldn’t be jealous of you.’

  ‘Wow.’ Jenny pulled all her hair back into a loosely tethered topknot. ‘Holy shit.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We have totally traded places,’ Jenny looked at me with an incredulous smile. ‘This. Us.’

  Dozens of people walked around us − tourists taking in the views, commuters on their way back to Waterloo making the most of the warm weather. None of them were concerned with me and Jenny and our roundabout lives.

  ‘You know, when we met, you were this lost little girl.’ She was smiling again. ‘I figured you’d last maybe two weeks? A month? And I was all “Oh, I’m going to have to babysit this broad and hold her hand until she runs off home to Mommy”, but man, I was wrong.’