‘Maybe she was looking forward to you being her bridesmaid,’ my dad suggests. I can tell he’s had enough of this conversation, but he isn’t the only one.
‘I doubt it,’ I reply. ‘We’re not exactly close, are we? It felt like an empty gesture at best, otherwise I reckon it was just to keep the numbers up.’
I did have a good reason for not wanting to be Flora’s bridesmaid, honestly. Well, I thought it was a good reason, but Flora and Auntie Mary weren’t in agreement with me.
It all started when we went for our first dress fitting. The dresses were already there waiting for us and it turned out that Flora was planning on using the bridesmaid dresses from her mum’s wedding (that none of her mum’s bridesmaids wanted to keep, which isn’t a surprise to me having seen them – they haven’t aged well at all over the past thirty or so years). Somehow impossibly shiny, but still with the texture of crêpe paper, the dresses would be serving as Flora’s something old (oh-so old) and something borrowed (yes, her mum wanted them back after) – and as far as I was concerned, my dress was going to be her something blue too.
You see, it just so happened that Auntie Mary had four bridesmaids – two adults and two kids. The dress that I was told to try on was actually the dress my mum wore when she was Auntie Mary’s bridesmaid… but my mum was quite slim back then and I, today, am not. I wouldn’t say I’m overweight, but I’m not going to be walking any Victoria’s Secret catwalks any time soon. I’d say I’m kind of average size, just with a few extra curves, and it’s because of my curves up top that the old bridesmaid dress intended for me to wear just wouldn’t fit. I had a little trouble after stepping into it, getting it over my butt, but as soon as it came to fitting my chest into it, it just wasn’t going to happen. Hence the something blue – it would be practically pornographic if I were to walk down the aisle with my boobs out, and all because I can’t get some solid-as-a-rock, eighties floral antique-curtain-looking dress over them. Honestly, it was one of the ugliest dresses I have ever seen in my life, and obviously I didn’t want to wear it. But I would have worn it because it was what Flora wanted. Except Auntie Mary didn’t want her old dresses ‘hacking up’ to make alterations so that the dress would fit me as I am. What Auntie Mary suggested to me, instead of changing the dress, was that I changed myself – by losing weight. Obviously I wasn’t going to lose weight to fit into a bloody dress, and even if I did lose weight, I couldn’t exactly guarantee that my boobs would shrink, could I? No one would listen when I tried to explain that I wasn’t going to crash diet to fit into a bridesmaid dress, which was why I wound up having to send her a very sugar-coated version of my feelings in a WhatsApp message.
‘I’ll just need to find a date,’ I say. ‘Any date. I just need a man.’
‘I can’t believe, out of the two of us, I’m the better feminist,’ Oliver eventually pipes up again with a laugh.
‘Just because I need a man and won’t wear a bridesmaid dress that shows my bra, I’m a bad feminist?’ I say. ‘I wouldn’t lose weight for a dress, remember.’
‘Yeah, there is that,’ he agrees. ‘You know, in The Handmaid’s Tale…’
Oh, give me strength. My brother is writing his PhD on the male ego and female empowerment in contemporary US hip-hop, which apparently makes him the authority on feminism in this house. I am all for feminism but I don’t need a lecture on how women shouldn’t be calling other women bitches, because ‘the patriarchy wants to set women against other women’, every time I say someone is a bitch – especially not from my woke little brother.
‘I can’t believe he’s actually coming,’ I say. ‘The man lives in Somerset.’
Lloyd and I were together for three years. He lived in Leeds while he was at uni, but after he finished his master’s degree he temporarily moved back in with his parents – in Somerset. The plan was to figure out our next steps, but we never had the chance. The distance magnified all of the small insecurities I’d noted Lloyd having over the years. His paranoia tore us apart. Not only that though, the time apart also gave me the space to realise that we just weren’t that happy together. He wasn't the one. Trying to talk to him about this only brought out an anger in him; that was when we broke up, and that was the last time we spoke.
‘Is he actually going to travel all this way and stay in a hotel, just so he can attend Flora and Tommy’s wedding?’ I ask, although I suppose it makes sense, if he’s as clingy as he was before. He’ll think this is his way back in.
‘Well…’ My mum pauses for a moment. I watch as she shakes off the anguished look on her face, forcing it into something much softer and brighter. ‘You know how much we all loved Lloyd, how he felt like part of the family…’
Oh, God, no…
‘He’s staying here,’ my dad blurts. Ted clearly has no time for sugar-coating today.
‘What?’ I squeak. ‘Here? Here at your house?’
‘No, in the shed,’ Oliver says sarcastically.
‘Where is he going to sleep?’ I ask, but my brain figures that one out for me a split second after I answer the question. ‘You’re letting him sleep in my room, aren’t you?’
‘Well, you don’t actually sleep in it, do you?’ my mum reminds me. ‘You live in your own flat. I assumed you’d be sleeping there before the wedding. You’re only twenty minutes away on the train.’
‘It’s still my bedroom,’ I say. ‘My childhood bedroom. I don’t want him in there.’
And when I did want him in there, I wasn’t actually allowed to have him in there, even though we were in our twenties, my parents have always been old-fashioned like that. This has to be some kind of horrible prank.
My mum stands up and begins clearing the table.
‘It’s just for a few days,’ she says as she heads for the kitchen. ‘I’ll fetch the pudding.’
‘A few days?’ I reply. ‘He’s staying here for a few days?’
‘The lad fancied a break,’ my dad tells me. He leans in to speak quietly to me, while my mum is out of the room. ‘Come on, it’s a few days, you don’t live here, you know your mum really liked him – she’s just doing the lad a favour.’
I fold my arms and slump down into my chair. I can’t believe it. I really can’t believe it. This is classic Lloyd, muscling his way back into my life the first chance he gets. There is no way he just wants to watch Flora and Tommy get married – he never liked them and they never liked him. I get why my mum is saying that Lloyd can stay here, because she always had a huge soft spot for him, and obviously she was never privy to the reasons why we broke up. She just thought it was the distance. I didn’t have the heart to tell her how intense Lloyd turned out to be after he moved back to Somerset.
My mum is just being my usual lovely mum, but Flora is something else. Her inviting Lloyd is definitely some kind of payback for me refusing to slim into a dress for her. She has no reason to invite him otherwise.
I notice my phone vibrating on the table so I snatch it up, hoping it’s something that isn’t going to annoy me.