Chapter 17
17
AILISH
Ailish prayed that there wasn’t a hidden camera in the salon recording them, because the parents of her pupils definitely did not need to hear that once upon a time, her twenty-one-year-old self had consumed so many Slippery Nipples before 6p.m. on New Year’s Eve 1991, that she’d fallen into a bush singing ‘I Wanna Sex You Up’ by Color Me Badd. The spelling alone was atrocious.
Beside her in the chair, Rhonda squealed with laughter. ‘Oh lordy, I remember that. You’d come into the salon I was working in because there was a rumour that my last appointment of the day was going to be Marti Pellow from Wet Wet Wet. We sneaked you in, but he never showed up. Some of the stylists who’d already finished for the day decided to drown their sorrows by making cocktails in the staffroom and you got pished pished pished.’ Rhonda was hooting now. Actually hooting like an owl because she was laughing so hard. ‘And then I gave you a boob tube and my favourite silver trousers to wear…’
‘And I looked like I was about to re-enact the moon landing,’ Ailish giggled, trying to hold her drink steady and failing miserably. Not that much different from 1991.
‘I’m seeing a whole new side of you lot,’ Alexis chuckled, as she continued to shape Gwen’s short grey pixie cut. Her hair had regrown with a salt-and-pepper hue after her last round of chemo and it looked fabulous on her. Over on the other side of Gwen, Kaden was working product into Rhonda’s mass of curls before her blow-dry, and Roxy was currently loading Ailish’s hair up with more tinfoil than a roast chicken. It would have been a natty accessory to the silver outfit back on the night in question.
‘Anyway, yes, I won’t dispute that I was slightly on the inebriated side of sober, and may have fallen into a large, misplaced plant pot when exiting the salon, but if you two had been sensible enough to take me home at that point, then it would have been a sliding doors moment.’
‘I think that was my fault,’ Gwen joined in. ‘I decided that we should go to this little Italian place I’d been in the week before, because I’d totally fancied one of the waiters.’
‘But you didn’t tell us that,’ Ailish countered. ‘You just said something about pasta being the best thing for sobering me up.’
‘I may have slightly manipulated that situation,’ Gwen conceded and Ailish forgave her immediately because it was just so bloody amazing to be sitting here with her and to be watching her come alive again for the first time in ages. Today was turning out to be the best medication for all of them.
‘So you two took a very tipsy me – I still can’t handle any more than three drinks in a twenty-four-hour period – along to this gorgeous little Italian place that turned out to be Gino’s. And that started something that lasted for decades.’
Ailish tried to wrap the story up there, because whatever was in her cocktail had suddenly, out of nowhere, caused her chin to wobble and her windpipe to tighten. Decades. All wasted. Because Eric had decided to take a wrecking ball to their lives. Sometimes she wondered if there would ever be a time when she didn’t think of him and feel devastated about what he’d done. She’d just begun to drift back down that wordless path to grief and regret, when she realised that everyone had gone silent. Raising her gaze, she saw five pairs of eyes, all staring at her questioningly.
‘What?’
‘We’re waiting for the bit about the life-changing choice and the sexual encounter,’ Rhonda informed her, harping back to the checklist that had sparked this conversation.
Gwen was leaning forward, eager for the details. ‘And don’t leave anything out because I haven’t had so much as a snog for the last two years and I might need instructions.’
Ailish felt her toes curling. Why was she the centre of attention in this little cabal right now? That was Rhonda’s natural habitat. Maybe Gwen’s when she was feeling up to it. Ailish had always much preferred the side-lines and the ‘here for backup only’ position.
‘Also,’ Gwen went on, ‘I remember this night very clearly, so don’t think you can skip over anything. We want all the gory details.’
Ailish sighed, cornered, with no weapons to shoot her way out of this.
‘Okay, so we get to the restaurant and it’s pretty quiet because it’s only about seven o’clock. Obviously now we know that things get going there much later on New Year’s Eve, so that’s why there were only a few tables taken. Anyway, we had dinner, and, of course, the most handsome guy I’d ever seen brought our pasta out.’
‘Dario!’ Rhonda sniggered. ‘That man has aged like a fine wine. He still sets my ovaries spinning.’
‘And mine,’ Gwen piped up.
Ailish barrelled on, desperate to get this over and done with. ‘Correct. Anyway, so you were right, the pasta did help to make me feel a little more sober…’
Rhonda looked very proud of that. ‘Told you.’
‘However, the bottle of wine Gwen ordered for the table counteracted that pretty quickly.’
Gwen gave an apologetic shrug. ‘Sorry, but we were twenty-one, and I just wanted any excuse to make the handsome big guy keep coming back to our table. I’m only human.’
‘I’d still do that now and I’m thirty-seven,’ Alexis said with a wink. The manageress had reached the end of the styling stage of Gwen’s hair transformation and had taken a break to fill up all their glasses with their chosen beverages. Ailish was very aware that they were getting preferential treatment due to hobnobbing with the salon owner. She took a sip from her refilled cocktail glass and psyched herself up for the next bit.
‘Next thing we know, the whole place began to fill up – honestly, it was like someone had stopped a bus outside and everyone had piled in. An older man, who turned out to be Gino, the owner of the restaurant,’ she added that in just in case the hair squad weren’t aware of that. ‘…turned the music up, and within a couple of hours, it’s the maddest, most fun party ever. Everyone was having a great time, and even if I was seeing double, I was loving it.’
‘It hasn’t changed. Still the best time ever. Always has been,’ Rhonda sighed, smiling. Then she suddenly realised what she’d said and blurted, ‘Apart from the year before last, obviously. That was a shit show. But… but… fuck it, let’s not talk about that. Let’s stay in happier times. Keep going, doll.’ She prompted Ailish again.
‘Hours later, everyone was on their feet and mingling and a conga line was working its way through the tables, and I don’t quite remember how or why, but I’d somehow ended up standing at the bar. There was another guy there already – around my age and handsome in a too-good-looking, Don Johnson from Miami Vice kind of way.’
‘Who’s that?’ Kaden asked, pulling his phone out to google him, to much eye-rolling from Gwen, Rhonda and Ailish, until he blurted, ‘Holy shit, I’d fancy him myself.’
‘Exactly,’ Ailish agreed. ‘I’d caught eye contact with him a couple of times and I think he thought I was interested. Actually, I was just seeing double and trying to focus because I figured he was way out of my league. But, anyway, Dario had come back with a tray of empty glasses and somehow we got talking. I had my glass in my hand so I was still drinking and swaying, and the next thing, Gino was up on a table and all I heard was ten, nine, eight…’
‘I’m on a knife-edge here,’ said Roxy, who had finished the foils and was now staring at Ailish’s reflection in the mirror, waiting to hear the rest.
‘I was on a knife-edge back then too,’ Ailish admitted. ‘It was almost midnight, I was standing next to two of the most attractive men I’d ever seen – and we were just about to get to the bit where it hits midnight and you kiss the first person you see. The countdown kept going. Five… Four… Three… And then, before I knew what had happened, Mr Suave Stranger, Don Johnson-lookalike, at the bar had moved around so that he was in my eyeline too…’
‘It’s like watching a train crash in slow motion.’ Kaden winced.
‘And then it hit midnight, and the place went wild, and I had two choices – kiss the totally gorgeous waiter or the totally gorgeous stranger beside him and… well…’
‘You kissed the stranger,’ Gwen stole the punchline.
‘I did! What was wrong with me?’ she said, with a dramatic shrug. ‘I kissed bloody Eric Ryan.’
‘Hang on, who’s Eric Ryan?’ Alexis asked, missing the link.
Gwen filled in the blanks. ‘The stranger. The man she then married. And divorced.’
Ouch, that still stung. Which, Ailish knew, was pathetic. She should be way past that stage by now.
‘And then?’ Rhonda was on a mission to get to the juicy bit.
‘Well, then I spilled the red wine that I was holding all down the front of my borrowed boob tube, so I went off into one of the bathrooms to wash it. They have three individual unisex cubicles in the back,’ she explained to Kaden and Roxy. ‘And somehow I happened to take Eric Ryan with me. The next thing I was taking my top off to wash it in the sink, and I flashed my boobs at him, and we stayed in there snogging for half an hour.’
Ailish felt her face begin to burn, and she couldn’t believe she was saying this aloud, but she was in too deep to back out now.
‘And there may or may not have been some fondling, but I can’t possibly confirm,’ she said, trying to restore some dignity, while the others found much hilarity in her discomfort.
‘So what happened to the big sexy waiter?’
Gwen sheepishly raised her hand. ‘I think I might have swooped in and kissed him. I was pretty fast on my feet in those days,’ she chuckled.
Ailish could actually feel tears popping onto her bottom lids, but for once they were tears of laughter. Or joy. Or maybe just huge bloody relief that Gwen was still here to reminisce with them.
‘So there. That’s the story. That night, I chose to kiss Eric. And do a few other things. The next morning, I was so absolutely mortified at what I’d done, I agreed to go out with him again. I think I just wanted to show him I wasn’t the kind of girl who got up to no good in restaurant toilets. Also, I was very hungover and in no state to make a sensible decision. If I had decent pals, they’d have intervened,’ she added, feigning side-eye at the other chairs. ‘Not long afterwards, we got hitched and we were married for over thirty years. The end.’
There. That was it. The story of her life.
Roxy was almost as invested in the story as she was in Ailish’s hair make-over. ‘Did you ever regret it? Choosing your husband, I mean.’
Ailish thought about that for a moment. Did she? It would be easy to say yes, given what had happened over the last two years, but the truth was that up until then, she’d honestly thought they had a great marriage. She’d fallen madly in love with Eric, and she’d stayed that way for many years. They’d been truly happy. And, of course, the biggest factor of all was Emmy. There was not a single thing she would do differently, if it meant she wouldn’t now have her favourite person in the world.
‘No,’ she answered honestly. ‘Because we had a good life and a really happy family for a long time.’
‘Okay, I get that,’ Roxy said. She’d taken a step back from her foil mountain and was talking to Ailish via the mirror again. ‘But don’t you ever wonder, just for a minute, what it would have been like to be with the other guy? The sexy waiter?’
Ailish dropped their eye contact as she felt a red heat begin to tingle in her neck again.
‘Well, maybe once or twice…’