The One with the Hen Weekend
ERIN LAWLESS

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HarperCollinsPublishers

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First published in Great Britain by HarperImpulse 2016

Copyright © Erin Lawless 2016

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Cover design by Alex Allden

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is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Ebook Edition © November 2016 ISBN: 9780008181758

Version 2016-10-18

PRAISE FOR ERIN LAWLESS

‘Funny and Addictive… If this is Erin Lawless’ first book, I can’t wait to read her next one’

Fabulous Magazine (the Sun)

‘A lovely, warm read to snuggle up on the sofa with’

Novelicious

‘Devastatingly brilliant…an absolute triumph’

Books with Bunny

‘First there was Bridget and Mark; then there was Em and Dex and now there is Nadia and Alex…it is a rare thing to be able to make the love between two fictional characters become so real that you actually champion their love from your very roots’

Lisa Talks About…

‘Friendships, trust, lies, deceit, love and so much more – a real page-turner for me’

Cosmochicklitan

‘A superb debut about complicated ties, betrayal and lies, and one of my favourite books of the year’

ChickLit Club

‘Mind-blowingly good and everyone should read it’

ChickLitReviews

‘This book was so incredibly amazingly awesome that I want to shout it from the hilltops and make ALL my friends buy it this instant’

The Chiq Blog

For Jacqui, Joanne, Ksenia and Nicola – my beautiful, brilliant bridesmaids,

and for all of my Lawless Hens:

I’ll never forget the amazing weekend when we all met The Juan.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for Erin Lawless

Dedication

Author Note

Character List

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Coming Soon From Erin Lawless

Also by Erin Lawless

Erin Lawless

About HarperImpulse

About the Publisher

Author Note

As I arrived in my mid-twenties, something very strange started to happen – my friends started to get engaged. Seriously? – I thought, staring at the fat, glossy invitations appearing through the post – I swear it was only this time last year you were snogging strangers in clubs, and now I’m Saving the Date? And I should put how much aside for your Hen Do!?

Ever since then, my weekends – particularly in the summer – have been a veritable nuptial string of engagement parties in pubs, dress fittings in boutiques, hen dos in spas and clubs and, of course, the weddings themselves (I gave as good as I got, of course, when I got married myself in 2014). The narrative of being a wedding guest (or knowing a bridezilla) has been so woven into the lives of my friends and I for so many years (and for so many more years to come, no doubt) that I really wanted to capture some of that in a story.

So here we have: one bride, and four bridesmaids, from proposal to altar.

Interspersed through the books, I’ve collated some real life anecdotes about perfect proposals, disastrous dance floors, suspicious strippers, bad bridesmaids and gorgeous groomsmen. Get in touch on social media and share your stories!

Character List

Please Save the Date

for the wedding of

NORA EILEEN DERVAN

and

HENRY ROBERT CLARKE

New Year’s Eve

Nora Dervan, the bride

Harry Clarke, the groom

Bea Milton, a bridesmaid – Nora’s godsister and best friend since birth

Cleo Adkins, a bridesmaid – Nora’s best friend from university

Daisy Frankel, a bridesmaid – an American girl Nora befriended while travelling in their early 20s

Sarah Norris, a bridesmaid – the wife of the Best Man

Cole Norris, the Best Man – friends with Harry, Nora and Bea since primary school

Eli Hale, a groomsman – friends with Harry, Nora and Bea since primary school

Barlow Osbourne, a groomsman – Harry’s best friend from university

Archie Clarke, a groomsman – Harry’s younger brother

Eileen Dervan, Nora’s mother and Bea’s godmother

Cillian, Aoife, Alannah and Finola Dervan – Nora’s younger brother and sisters

Hannah Milton, Bea’s mother and Nora’s godmother

Gray Somers, a colleague of Cleo’s teaching at the Oakland Academy

Claire, a friend of Nora and Bea’s since secondary school

Darren, Daisy’s current boyfriend

Kirsty, Bea’s flatmate

Bec, Abbey, Nish and Jayne, assorted friends and the rest of Nora’s hen party

Chapter Twenty-One

Cleo tapped her thumb and her forefinger together, giving the fetching impression that she was doing an impersonation of a crab. She winced at the flare of pain, immediate and sharp along the underside of her arm.

‘I think its Repetitive Strain Injury,’ she moaned at her colleague, Gray, who grinned into his mug of coffee.

‘Wait, isn’t that what teenaged boys get once they discover internet porn?’ he smirked. ‘Busy weekend, love?’

‘You’re not far off the mark, with “teenaged”,’ Cleo admitted, smiling as Gray spluttered on his drink. ‘I’ve been helping to hole-punch heart shapes out of old Smash Hits! magazines from the nineties.’

‘Right. Okay… Well, everyone’s gotta have a hobby I suppose!’

‘It’s for the wedding,’ Cleo clarified, laughing. ‘It’s quite sweet really. It’s going to be used as the confetti.’

‘Because it’s not matrimony unless you have little heart shaped pictures of East 17 and Billie Piper thrown over the bride and groom?’

‘Exactly.’ Cleo helped herself to a second chocolate chip cookie from the packet that Gray had produced when they first sat down. (She’d be good closer to the big day…)

‘Okay, you know you really do need to explain…’ Gray prompted.

Cleo swallowed her mouthful of cookie. ‘Well, you see, when she was a kid, Nora LOVED Smash Hits! magazine…’

‘Who didn’t?’ Gray allowed.

‘But her mum was quite strict and didn’t like her being in to all that.’

‘All that?’ Gray echoed, amused. ‘What, pop music?’

‘Apparently. So, anyway, Nora used to scrimp and save up her lunch money so she could buy it every fortnight. But she couldn’t bring it home, or her mum would find it, so she gave it to her friend and he kept all of her issues for her. For years. That friend being Harry.’

‘Ah.’ Understanding dawned on Gray’s face.

‘And, years later – when they fell in love and moved in together and blah, blah, happy ever after – he turns up with three huge cardboard boxes stuffed full of old issues of Smash Hits!And they’ve been a right ballache to store, but they didn’t just want to throw them away… so this seemed like a really good idea.’

‘I’m not sure your wrist agrees.’ Gray said, taking that wrist in his hand, almost like a doctor checking for a pulse, the broad pad of his thumb pressing gently against those fragile, birdlike bones, against the swell of her blood. Cleo scrambled back aboard her train of thought, plucking her hand back from his and using it to pick up her mug of cooling coffee.

‘Well, you know how it is,’ she shrugged. ‘Bridesmaids are the dogsbodies of every big wedding!’

‘Well, to be honest, I’ve never really been to a big wedding,’ Gray shrugged, moving his own hands back to his drink, an easy mirroring of Cleo’s own movements. ‘Maybe a few family ones, but all my mates who’ve gotten hitched have done it pretty small-scale, registry offices and pubs, you know? Certainly no custom confetti hole-punched by the fair hands of beautiful maidens.’ Cleo ignored the easy flirt, ignored the traitorous heartbeat shouting in her chest, pinched it down, right down. (She did not, could not and would not fancy this man, period. It was just a question of discipline.)

‘What time are you getting there on Saturday?’ she asked lightly, focusing on how Gray’s fingertips were paler where he held his mug.

‘I… I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to make it, actually,’ Gray answered after a moment’s pause. ‘I was going to see if I could, er, move some things around, because it was really nice of your friend Claire to invite me, but, yeah.’

‘Oh,’ Cleo replied, tonelessly, her mind slow to decide how she wanted to react to this news. She’d been part mortified, part thrilled when Claire had informed them all that she’d invited Gray along to her 30th birthday dinner.

‘Well, why not?’ Claire had demanded, when the news had been met with an awkward silence. ‘He got along really well with people at the engagement party, and at your birthday Cleo.’

‘He got on really well with you, you mean,’ Nora had teased gamely, but she’d still shot a worried glance over at Cleo. Nora was still utterly persuaded that Cleo and Gray were meant to be. (She’d even developed a celebrity-style nickname for their rhetorical relationship, which – unfortunately – was the rather unromantic ‘Clay’.) The more Cleo railed against it, the more adamant Nora became.

‘Well, if you’ve got something else on, I’m sure Claire will understand.’ It felt like Gray was waiting for her to ask what his other plans were, but Cleo refused. (Because she didn’t care. Honest.) ‘But, you know, maybe you can just come for the dinner part, or meet us for drinks later in the night?’ Cleo found herself saying. Gray regarded her, his expression smudgy, unreadable.

‘Yeah, maybe,’ he allowed, finally, with a half-smile. ‘I’ll drop you a text, yeah?’

‘Yeah, sure. Or, you know, Claire.’

‘Sure.’ Gray unfolded slowly to his feet, gathering up the packet of cookies and folding over the packaging to keep them fresh for the next break. ‘Guess I’m on washing up duty. Considering your wrist injury and all.’ And with that he collected up their mugs and headed to the grotty old staff room sink, leaving Cleo with a full five minutes left of their morning break and her discipline bruised, but mercifully intact.

Chapter Twenty-Two

I went away for my cousin’s hen weekend – I didn’t know anyone but the bride, and as the other hens were quite cliquey and serious it was a fair bit awkward when we arrived to do our life drawing class. It was even more awkward when the male model got a huge boner half an hour in…

Lucy, Peterborough

‘So I wanted to show you first,’ Claire chirped. ‘Just to check, you know; get the ‘bridesmaid seal of approval and all that’. Claire was getting used to the idea of not being a bridesmaid, Bea thought, but there was still just the barest nip of real bitterness in her tone.‘But I think Nora’s really gonna love these!’

To Bea, an invitation to Nora’s hen do was probably going to be in the form of an email and/or text, once Nora had provided the finalised list of lucky gals. When she’d mentioned this to Claire last week however the girl had almost choked on her gin-and-slim and begged to take over the sourcing of “proper” invitations. Already a little overwhelmed at the thought of marshalling twelve women into booking travel, accommodation and activities, Bea had readily handed over the invitation reins.

Now she was sincerely regretting it.

After a full minute’s silence, she realised she’d better say something.

‘Wow,’ she just about managed.

‘Great, aren’t they?’ beamed Claire. ‘Do you want me to explain a little?’

Phew. ‘Yes please!’

The invitations were much more of a… “pamphlet”… than Bea had anticipated. The front cover was largely taken up by a close-up selfie of Nora, snagged from her Facebook page no doubt. Her mouth had been partially obscured by a bright pink lipstick print. Letters in a matching pink floating above her head proclaimed Nora to be KISSING THE SINGLE LIFE GOODBYE!!!

‘That’s actually my lip print!’ Claire trilled.‘I did it on the back of the receipt at the copy place and got them to digitise it; it’s amazing what they can do with computers these days, isn’t it?’

‘No kidding?’ Bea flipped over to the inserts with a slight frisson of trepidation. Claire’s skill at Facebook stalking was no longer in any doubt – each of the twelve hens were represented by a square-framed photograph snagged from their social media and washed over with a liberally applied pink filter. Nora was first and most prominent, as was natural, followed by Bea, Cleo, Claire, Daisy and Sarah (Bea decided not to comment on the fact that Claire had interjected herself in the centre of the row of bridesmaids). Then came Alannah and Aoife, Nora’s twin younger sisters (or maybe it was Aoife then Alannah..?) and four other friends made up the chosen dozen. ONE LAST FLING BEFORE THE RING!!! shouted the bright pink letters on this page. (Bea hated that. What, was Nora supposed to stop having fun once she became Mrs Clarke? Grr.)

At least Claire hadn’t been able to do much damage with the main page; Bea had been very clear with her instructions that the information was just to be copied and pasted, and not embellished upon in any way, shape or form. Claire had still managed to jazz it up though, by using a silhouette shot of what appeared to be a gigantic woman pole-dancing up against the Eiffel Tower as the page’s background and entitling the page OOH LA LA!!! (Did this woman ever use less than three exclamation marks for anything? Bea couldn’t be sure.)

Bea and Daisy’s carefully drafted information was intact, however offensively-fonted, so Bea guessed she had to be grateful for small mercies. The hens were duly instructed to assemble at St Pancras International for a weekend in gay Paris, where Bea had booked them accommodation on a pair of twin houseboats on the Seine, as close to the Eiffel Tower as possible. The Saturday night’s requisite fancy dress was 90s-themed (naturally), and the four bridesmaids ‘Backstreet Bea’, ‘Cleo-patra, Coming Atcha’, ‘Princess Daisy from Super Mario’ and ‘Clueless Cher-ah Horowitz’ hoped that everyone would join them in heartily embracing it. At least Claire hadn’t added herself to the bridesmaid sign-off…

The final page had a breakdown of upfront costs, with Bea’s banking details provided in a pink cloud shape for ease of reference and instructions to send RSVPs or questions to norasgettinghitched@geemail.com.

‘Oh, the password for that email account is nora1986,’ Claire added, off-hand, before returning to chattering on about the many artistic decisions that had been taken in the invitations’ journey. Bea flipped through the little booklet again. Okay, so it was totally not Nora and generally pretty cringe, but they definitely had their own certain charm, and Nora would probably be amused rather than horrified, which was the main thing.

‘So, am I good to post them out?’ Claire queried.

‘Yeah sure, not long to go now and I need some money in ASAP as I’ve already paid off all the deposits,’ Bea confirmed, wincing a little at the thought of her deflated bank balance.

‘Great!’ Claire fished under the table and pulled out a canvas tote shopper bag emblazoned with the logo of the estate agency where she worked; it was already stuffed with stamped and neatly-addressed envelopes. ‘I’ll post these now then!’

Chapter Twenty-Three

London was full of babies. Miniature chaps in chino shorts, pint-size princesses in sundresses: their fat little legs poking out, kicking merrily. Pregnant women in maxi dresses glided past her on the pavements, red-faced but serene, the globes of their fruitful bellies proudly leading the way. Every direction Sarah looked in, there they were.

The summer had burst like an over-ripe fruit and the days were starting to cool as they headed toward autumn; ironically, it was harvest time. Two more women had announced their pregnancies in the office, moaning light-heartedly about their ‘bad luck’ in having ‘inconvenient’ due dates around the Christmas holidays. Cole’s younger sister and her boyfriend of only six months’ standing had just yesterday afternoon publicised their own unexpected happy news by way of a grainy scan picture texted around the family before being uploaded straight to Facebook (‘Oh, it was a bit of a shock! I was on the pill! But we’re soooo happy!’). When she’d opened that text Sarah had felt like she’d just been eviscerated with her mobile phone. Numbly she allowed Cole to fold her against his chest, searching for comfort, squeezing her eyes shut, pressing down against the spiked ball of pain lodged somewhere deep below her collarbones.

‘Well,’ Cole had said, after a minute’s silence, ‘I guess at least this proves that my family is super fertile.’

Last night, Sarah had run the hottest bath she could stand, a favourite indulgence she’d long been avoiding since reading on the internet somewhere that the heat was detrimental to good ovum quality, and poured herself five generous fingers of whatever expensive whiskey Cole kept in his antique decanter. While she was waiting for the bath to fill she tidied the bathroom. The hideously complicated Clearblue Digital Ovulation Monitor she’d spent the better part of £200 on was quietly packed back into its box and away into the drawer unit under the sink. The His-and-Hers pre-natal vitamins that she kept next to their toothbrushes – so that they never forgot to take them of a morning – followed suit. The small plastic cup next to the toilet that she had dipped what felt now like a million home pregnancy tests into over the past two years she tossed into the bin.

Two years.

Raina, her heavily pregnant colleague, had inadvertently highlighted the length of time Sarah’s womb had remained obstinately barren just that morning.

‘Your wedding anniversary is coming up, isn’t it?’ she’d asked, after she’d finished complaining about how hard it was to be pregnant in the warm weather, and affirming just how much she was looking forward to September (and her maternity leave) arriving. ‘How many years now; is it two?’

‘Yes, two,’ Sarah had confirmed politely, firmly persisting in typing out her email, in the hope that Raina would take the hint and not continue to try to engage her in conversation.

‘Time to start thinking about kiddies soon, surely!’ Raina had chirped, leaning back in her desk chair and placing a protective palm atop her bump, as if her sentence somehow needed further illustration. ‘Most married couples get cracking after the first year!’

Sarah recalled how she’d woken up that morning and not stuck a thermometer straight up between her legs to chart her basal body temperature for the first time in over a year. She’d expected to feel freed. Instead she’d just felt horribly, horribly empty.

‘We’re not quite settled enough yet,’ she told Raina tonelessly; the standard line. ‘We’ve got a lot of stuff going on.’

‘Hmm, well, perhaps you need to re-evaluate your priorities,’ Raina sniffed. ‘You know fertility begins seriously declining after thirty. In fact, you will have already lost up to 90% of the eggs that you were born with!’

‘I’m sure I’ll be just fine,’ Sarah had snapped, standing abruptly and walking off towards the tea point, mug in hand – not wanting the drink, just wanting to get away from smug Raina and her effective fucking ovaries.

Sarah wandered through the aisles of the library. Was there going to be a set of shelves somewhere in this building labelled Infertility? Surely not. Health, then. Sarah ran her forefinger lightly over the laminated spines of the books as she searched for what she needed, past countless books about what to expect when you’re expecting (many of which – shamefully, painfully – she had pre-emptively already read).

She refused to make eye contact with the library assistant who stamped the checkout card of ‘Get A Life: A Comprehensive Guide to IVF and Assisted Conception’.

***

Daisy and Darren looked at one another. There wasn’t much more to say.

Months and months of being in each other’s lives, each other’s flats, each other’s bodies and here they were: an awkward silence and a Tesco carrier bag partially filled with odds-and-sods at Darren’s feet. Perhaps the fact that their relationship had boiled down to a toothbrush, a rusted-up razor, a couple of pairs of underwear and some borrowed DVDs was a sign that Daisy was making the right decision.

Darren cleared his throat. ‘So, shall I bring over your stuff from my flat sometime next week then?’

‘I don’t think I’ve got much in your flat Darren, so don’t worry about it,’ Daisy answered carefully. She, of course, had known this break-up was coming so she’d been able to subtly clear out her belongings over her past few visits.

‘You’ve got shampoo and stuff in my shower,’ Darren corrected her, mulishly.

‘It’s fine, you can toss it all.’ That Bumble and Bumble shampoo and conditioner may be expensive, and still half-full, but not having to have another awkward meeting with Darren would be worth the sacrifice.

She’d given the usual spiel: it’s not you, it’s me, and all that. And it was actually pretty true. There was nothing particularly wrong with Darren, for all his oddities and irritating habits; Cleo was right – if Daisy loved him, really loved him, they’d be charming, not irksome. But there was no casual way of informing the man you were dumping that he was being chucked because you still dreamed of one day having someone who made your whole body feel like it was smiling.

‘Okay then.’ Despite his words, Darren looked in no rush to leave. He started towards Daisy, holding his hand forward almost as if he was going to touch her, but thought better of it at the last minute. ‘I’d like us to stay friends, Daisy, if that’s okay?’

‘Sure thing,’ Daisy lied. She’d give it a few months and then she’d subtly delete him from her Facebook friends’ list. The key was to add him to a limited list for a little while beforehand, so he got used to not really seeing her updates on his feed. Sadly she’d had to do this many times before … ‘But, in the circumstances, I don’t really think it’s appropriate for you to come to Nora and Harry’s wedding in December. You understand.’

Darren’s face crumpled a little further, but he rallied like a man: Daisy appreciated that about him. ‘Sure. I understand. Yeah.’

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