‘Would you say you were in a good mindset today?’ my mum asks. I shift uncomfortably in my seat. That’s a strange question to ask, isn’t it?
‘Erm… Yes?’ I reply. ‘I suppose so.’
I mean, I'm not exactly in a great mood. Last night was pretty disturbing and today wasn’t a very productive day. I guess I’m fine though.
‘So, if I had some news that you might not be all that happy with… now might be a good time to tell you?’ she continues.
My fork slips from my fingers and clatters against my plate.
‘Mum, what kind of question is that?’ I ask.
‘The kind that makes sure you’re in the mindset for potentially upsetting news,’ she says.
‘OK, sure, but you’ve already tipped me off to the bad news,’ I point out. ‘So whether you’re telling me it or not, I know that there is bad news. It doesn’t matter what it is, my brain is filling in the blanks for me – with ideas potentially worse than the thing itself. My God.’
I puff air from my cheeks. I feel in a right flap now. I pick my fork back up and reacquaint myself with my dinner. It’s a shame I can’t get it to takeaway or I’d be off. I’m not in the mood for a Brooks family drama.
‘For God’s sake,’ my dad, Ted, says, clearly annoyed to be having his dinner interrupted with a woman either side of him low-key bickering across his plate. He turns to me. ‘Cara, Lloyd is coming to Flora’s wedding. There.’
‘Lloyd?’ I shriek. ‘Lloyd? My ex Lloyd?’
‘How many Lloyds do you know?’ Oliver asks with a chuckle.
I meaningfully stab a carrot and pop it in my mouth with all the angst of a stroppy teenager.
‘Don’t be mardy,’ my dad insists. ‘Your mum worked hard on dinner. It doesn’t deserve to be stabbed so violently.’
I roll my eyes. Isn’t it weird how being back in your family home can make you feel like a kid again?
Ted Brooks is your classic Yorkshire dad. Honestly, he’s straight off a postcard in a Yorkshire gift shop. Strong and silent – apart from when he’s straight-talking – and awkwardly frugal – unless he’s buying things like cuts of meat or beer. I’ve always found his generation of ultra proud ‘Yorkshire born, Yorkshire bred’ Yorkshire men to be a mess of contradictions. Simple creatures, but still somehow impossible to figure out. My dad is a fairly big bloke, but a gentle giant. My mum, especially when she’s standing next to him, is perfectly petite. Reaching in on her tiptoes at just over five foot tall, Annie Brooks looks quite funny next to her husband. Once, when we were all walking up Malham Cove for ‘fun’ one weekend (not really my idea of fun – walking is a bit too much like exercising for my liking), my dad started chatting with a man and his family. The man, who couldn’t see my mum’s face behind her scarf, asked my dad how old his daughters were.
My mum does look good for her age though; she has sleek, dark bobbed hair, and almost always has a good covering of make-up on. That must be where I got it from – feeling the need to wear make-up every day. I enjoy wearing it, though, and have a lot of fun applying it. One of these days I’ll take a proper class, rather than just messing around in my bedroom, usually for no one’s benefit but my own. Then again, I suppose that’s what my feminist brother would prefer me to say. Oliver has my mum’s dark colouring and skinny frame, but it’s stretched to a height to rival my dad’s. I really don’t know who I take after, to be honest. I’m 5’ 7”, which is taller than average for a woman, but unremarkably so. All it means is that I have size eight feet, which makes shoe shopping kind of inconvenient sometimes. My height puts me about halfway between my mum and my dad, and I suppose my chest-length dark blonde hair puts my colouring at that midpoint between my dark-haired mum and my fair-haired dad.
‘Sorry, Dad, I’m a little upset because you just told me that my cousin is inviting my ex-boyfriend to her wedding. I can’t believe her.’
‘It’s her wedding day,’ my mum reminds me, as though I could have forgotten that the wedding of the century is soon to take place.
My cousin Flora’s long-anticipated wedding is less than two months away now. Flora, twenty-eight, is the only child of my auntie Mary, my mum’s only sister. When Tommy popped the question a couple of years ago it wasn’t long before Flora asked me to be her bridesmaid. We’re cousins, but we’re not friends or anything, so I was surprised when she asked me. We don’t socialise and we’re definitely not what you would call close.
We never really got on much when we were kids because Flora had that only-child mentality some kids are just cursed with. She always had to have her own way and I, being a whole year older than her, usually had to give in to whatever demands she made. In some ways that hasn’t changed… well, not until a few months ago when I finally broke the cycle.
‘I feel like she’s punishing me,’ I point out between mouthfuls of new potatoes. ‘She’s just being petty.’
‘Well, we do all really like Lloyd,’ my mum says.
‘Yeah, but Flora doesn’t,’ I insist. ‘I mean, she didn’t when we were together, and even if she did, why is my ex-boyfriend still invited to her wedding?’
It’s nearly a year since I broke up with Lloyd, and he didn’t exactly take it all that well. It was a year before our break-up when Flora invited us to her wedding, but she only invited Lloyd because he was my boyfriend at the time, so why would that invitation stand after our break-up?
‘Flora and Tommy want to honour his invitation,’ my mum explains. ‘They think it would be rude not to.’
‘But it isn’t rude to invite my ex, who I am not on speaking terms with?’ I say. ‘Has he said he’s coming?’
‘Yes. But Flora said you can still have a plus one,’ my mum points out.
God, I’m going to need one now. I wasn’t really feeling the pressure too much before, but if I have to go to this thing alone then I’m going to wind up saddled with my ex all day – an ex that I specifically haven’t stayed friends with. Lloyd and I broke up on pretty bad terms. He was jealous, possessive and had no boundaries. The fact that he’s still saying he’ll come to Flora’s wedding – all the way from Somerset – just goes to show how little he’s changed. He’s a twenty-eight-year-old man, for crying out loud. This is like something a high school girl would do.
My appetite well and truly beat, I put my cutlery down before dropping my head into my hands. I massage my temples for a moment.
‘She’s punishing me,’ I say. ‘This is because I dropped out of being her bloody bridesmaid.’
I know that it sounds bad, to agree to be a bridesmaid for someone, before backtracking, but I had a really good reason, I swear.
‘Don’t forget how upset Auntie Mary is that you did it over WhatsApp,’ Oliver points out.
I roll my eyes. Auntie Mary is of the opinion that I added insult to injury by bowing out over WhatsApp. ‘Not even a text’, that’s all she keeps saying, being too out of touch to know that the two forms of communication aren’t really any different. The reason I sent Flora a message, instead of talking to her on the phone, is because I had already tried raising my concerns with her in person, but she kept shutting them down. I thought it best to write down exactly how I was feeling, in clear but very tactful terms – the last thing I wanted to do was upset her.