Chapter 14 The Week Before the Wedding
The Week Before the Wedding
Three nights before Tam’s big day, she and Anna went to Wagamama’s just outside Meadowhall for cherry syrup gin and noodles.
‘This has to be the most low-key hen night I’ve ever been to,’ said Anna, chinking her glass against Tam’s.
‘I didn’t want one,’ replied Tam. It was a lie, she really did, with a group of mates all wearing T-shirts with the bride’s face on them.
She wanted to dance on a table and do a conga around a nightclub and sing ‘Agadoo’ and push pineapples and shake trees with a posse of girls just like Anna, but there was no one.
She’d swerved having a hen-night dinner with Natasha, who had intended to swell the numbers with the three witches: the braggy one whose husband had made it big with solar panels, Politics Penny and the other who looked Tam up and down all the time as if she were a human barcode scanner.
Oh, and K?rèn with her umlaut and grave accent.
‘I still feel bad about—’
‘Tam, stop,’ said Anna, holding up her palm to stem the apology. ‘I’ll be there at the wedding, at the back so I don’t give your parents a coronary that a Lancastrian has dared to attend. But I do have a rather natty hat. In Battenberg colours, for a sort of subdued protest.’
Tam sniggered. ‘It is so good to have you back in my life.’
‘I feel the same.’ Anna squeezed her hand. ‘I confess, I was a bit worried when I first saw you. You looked so . . . changed, but you haven’t, not on the inside, and that’s the most important thing.’
‘I looked you up online a few times,’ Tam confessed. ‘I was frightened to contact you in case you’d changed too much for us to have anything in common any more.’
‘I got a bit lost for a while,’ said Anna, ‘and I’m figuring you did too.
’ Tam smiled benignly. She wished Anna had been able to meet Harris.
She’d seen pics and said he was very good-looking: tall, fair, even adding that he would have made a great Prince Charming in a panto.
He’d said he was too busy, though, and Tam tried to bat the suspicion away that he might be preordained to disapprove of her formidable friend.
‘It’s not too late to back out,’ Anna joked, as she sipped her drink.
‘Don’t be silly,’ Tam said with a laugh that was a little too bright, a little too forced. No, it was just wedding nerves. But sometimes she wondered why the closer the big day came, the more they were starting to feel too much like doubts.