Always the Bridesmaid

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‘I was going to clean this evening,’ I lied, ‘but I thought essential bonding time with my best friend in the entire world was more important. Do correct me if I’m wrong.’

‘You might actually be.’ Sarah slapped both of her hands down on the kitchen counter and gave me a grim smile. ‘This place is a human rights violation.’

‘Shut up and drink your gin,’ I said, poking my way to the back of a cupboard to find clean glasses. ‘Shona was a real bitch today.’

I’m not proud of myself, but I was putting off talking about the divorce until I had at least one drink in me. I had no idea how to talk about the divorce. If I’d had advance warning, I might have bought in a lot of ice cream and dug up my Pretty Woman DVD, because that’s what we did when Dave Stevenson stood her up for the lower sixth Halloween disco. I didn’t know the protocol for this one.

‘I know we give you shit about it, but you need to find a new job,’ Sarah said, moving a pile of creased sweatshirts from the settee to the armchair and sitting herself down. ‘I can’t believe you got a mammogram for her. Your boss shouldn’t really get a say in your tits unless you’re sleeping with them for a promotion.’

‘How do you know I’m not?’

‘Because of that time Lauren kissed you at the uni ball to impress Stephan Jones and you threw up immediately afterwards.’

‘That was as much to do with Aftershock shots as my aversion to lipstick lesbianism,’ I replied. ‘I could be a lesbian.’

‘You couldn’t even get through an entire series of Orange Is the New Black.’

‘Yes, but that was because I live in mortal fear of going to prison and ending up as someone’s bitch,’ I pointed out. ‘Not because I’m scared of a loving, respectful, consensual partnership with a lady.’

‘You’re not gay, Maddie,’ she said. ‘You’re just a wimp.’

‘Yeah, I know,’ I said, chopping up a sad-looking lemon for our gin. ‘That’s one of the upsides of having a gay sister. You don’t run around going “I wish I was a lesbian, it’s so much easier”, because it isn’t.’

Sarah nodded and held her hand out for a red wine glass full to the brim with gin and tonic. ‘Remember that girl she was going out with in her first year at Durham? What a cock.’

‘It’s not just the chaps,’ I agreed. ‘Women can be just as bad.’

‘Yeah, well, I’m pretty anti-man right now,’ she said, nursing the glass but not drinking.

Here it was. The Talk. We were going to have the talk and I was going to be supportive and caring and she would leave here knowing that she was an incredible person who, in spite of all the pain she was going through, was utterly and completely loved. I was going to say just the right thing.

‘Yuh-huh.’

I suck so hard.

Thankfully, Sarah didn’t seem to mind my friend fail and took it upon herself to start talking anyway. I dropped a lemon in her drink, sat myself down and held my glass tightly. All I needed to do was listen.

‘Things had been shit for a while,’ Sarah said. ‘I suppose I got used to it. He was out a lot and I’ve been working so much … you don’t realize how quickly things can go wrong. It’s got to be three months since we even had sex. I just didn’t realize.’

I nodded in silence. Three months. Was that a long time? I’d forgotten.

‘Then he comes home one day and out of nowhere he’s like, it isn’t working, I want a divorce. Just like that, he wants a divorce.’

‘So, what actually happened?’ I asked, treading as carefully as I knew how. ‘What exactly did he say?’

These were the same two questions I’d been asking her about boys since we were eleven. The fact that we were thirty-one and still having the same conversations was impossibly depressing.

Sarah took a deep breath and blew it out in one big huff.

‘It’s so ridiculous, saying it out loud,’ she said, her big blue eyes tearing up already. And as we’ve established, Sarah is not a crier. ‘It was Saturday, he’d been at the football with Michael and some of the others all day. I was a bit pissed off because, like I said, we hardly ever see each other and he was out so late, and he didn’t tell me what time he’d be home.’

‘So you were perfectly entitled to be annoyed,’ I said.

‘Exactly,’ she nodded, swiping at a stray tear before it messed up her eyeliner. ‘So I was making dinner when he got in, and he got a beer out of the fridge and I said dinner was almost ready and could he open the wine, and he said he didn’t want wine and I said I wanted wine, and he said he wanted to go out and I said I’d made dinner, and he slammed down his beer on the kitchen top and it spilled everywhere, and then he said “This isn’t working”. And yeah, it went from there.’

Sarah was still staring at her gin instead of drinking it, but I was halfway down mine.

‘It’s weird, isn’t it?’ she said, tapping her bitten-down nail on the rim of her glass. ‘You think these things are going to be dead dramatic, and then they’re not. You’re doing something painfully normal and having a totally average chat, and then, there it is. He just says it, just like that. It’s not working. He wants a divorce. Dunzo.’

‘Did he actually say he wants to get divorced, though?’ I asked, looking for a silver lining in this epic pile of shit. ‘Maybe he means he wants a break. Or he wants to fix things? This might be his way of getting your attention.’

‘He’s got that,’ she replied in a voice so light it felt like her words might float away before I heard them. ‘He’s already moved out. He slept on the settee on Saturday and went to stay at his mum’s on Sunday. He’s not coming back, Maddie. He emailed me today to say he’s got a lawyer and I should do the same.’

‘Oh, bloody hell.’ I squeezed her ankle, the most easily accessibly appendage, while she chewed on her bottom lip in an attempt to stop the tears from coming. She’d been gnawing on that thing for so many years I was amazed she hadn’t chewed it right off. ‘Why didn’t you call me before? I could have done—’

‘Absolutely nothing?’

I had never felt so useless in my entire life. I wanted to help but didn’t know how, and when your entire existence is based around being The One Who Helps, that is majorly distressing.

‘I started about a million texts, but I couldn’t work out how to say it,’ Sarah said. ‘Plus I had a yoga workshop.’

I paused, mid-sip. ‘You went to a yoga workshop? The day after your husband told you he wanted a divorce?’

‘I’d already paid for it,’ she said, daring me to argue. ‘And what was I supposed to do − sit around and cry all weekend?’

‘I don’t know whether to be massively impressed or have you sectioned,’ I said. ‘So that’s it? It’s happening?’

Sarah tilted back her glass and chugged it down in three big gulps.

‘When I try to think about it,’ she said, ‘it’s like my brain shuts down. I can’t even process it. Then I’ll be sat having a wee and I’ll look at my hand and think, do I have to take my wedding ring off? Has he already taken his off? I actually googled how long it would take for the groove to go away.’

She held up her hand and stretched out her bare fingers. I felt my own face crumple a little bit as her tears started to come in earnest.

‘Turns out it takes longer than a week,’ she gasped, clenching her hand into a tight fist. ‘I can’t believe that he’s doing this and he’s happy about it. How can someone who said they loved you every day for a decade suddenly decide they don’t any more? I’m sitting at home every night, sleeping in the spare room because I can’t stand to be in our bed, and he’s happy.’

‘Do you think he’s cheating?’ I asked.

She fidgeted with her top button for a moment and then shook her head.

‘No,’ she said with certainty. ‘He said he isn’t.’

‘Right,’ I replied.

‘Why?’ Suddenly she wasn’t looking nearly as certain. ‘He wouldn’t. Would he? Do you think he is? Have you heard something?’

‘Of course not,’ I replied instantly, squeezing her foot to calm her down.

Another white lie in the name of friendship.

Of course I thought he was cheating. Why else would he suddenly decide he wanted to abandon his wife and marriage without giving it a second thought? They’d been together since uni, inseparable for a decade, and now he had randomly decided it wasn’t working out? I remembered when Seb left me, wonderful Shona reminding me that most men don’t leave until they’ve got the next thing lined up. I scoffed at the time but of course, it turned out she was right in my case. Not an insight I would share with Sarah at this stage, perhaps.

‘I don’t want to get divorced,’ Sarah said, her watery blue eyes meeting my red-rimmed green ones. ‘I don’t want to have to tell people I’m divorced and sit there while they wonder what’s wrong with me or do exactly what you just did and assume he was cheating on me. What’s going to happen to me now?’

I stared blankly at the TV that I’d muted when I heard the doorbell but not turned off. A cartoon played silently in the background, a happy dysfunctional family, husband, wife, three kids.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, not wanting to lie any more than I had to. ‘But I do know we’ll get through it. I don’t know what else to say that won’t sound like a load of annoying clichés.’

‘I’m only thirty-one,’ Sarah said, gripping the stem of her glass until her knuckles turned white. ‘I’m not the first person in the world to get divorced, am I? Better now than ten years down the line when we’d have two kids in the mix, isn’t it?’

‘Course.’ I wondered how many times she’d told herself that already this week. ‘You’re totally right.’

‘All I want is to not feel like this any more,’ she said wearily, putting down her glass and pressing the heels of her hands against her eyes. ‘It’s like the worst hangover ever. I feel sick and empty, and every time I forget about it for a moment, it comes back and punches me in the face. And the only person who could make me feel better about it is the person who’s causing it. I hate him so much I can see it, but all I want is for him to come home and tell me he’s changed his mind.’

That part I recognized. ‘Really? You’d take him back?’

‘I don’t even know,’ she laughed, sounding sour. ‘I don’t know what I’d do. How would I ever trust him? I’d always be waiting for him to do it again, wouldn’t I?’

For want of a better response, I shrugged.

‘So what the fuck do I do now?’ Sarah asked, dropping her head against the back of my saggy settee. ‘Am I just supposed to sit here until it stops feeling like someone ripped my insides out with a fish hook?’

‘Would it help if I made you a kale smoothie?’ I offered.

‘It might,’ she said, pulling my hair. ‘But I think I’d rather have another gin.’

‘Good because I don’t have any kale.’ I grabbed the bottle off the coffee table and topped her up. ‘Let me get the tonic out of the fridge.’

‘Don’t bother,’ she said, taking a glug then holding up her glass. ‘To fresh starts, Maddie. Cheers.’

‘Cheers,’ I echoed, wondering whether or not there ever was such a thing as a fresh start, or whether you just picked up a new set of problems.

I can’t believe Sarah is getting divorced. It’s bizarre: I’ve known her for two-thirds of my life, and for the first time ever, I have no idea what to say to her.

Divorce. She’s getting a divorce. I don’t know anyone who got married and isn’t married any more other than Lauren’s parents, and I don’t really know them. It’s so weird. When you’re single you don’t think about that bit, even though in this day and age you’re fully aware of that bit. Getting the ring on your finger is the goal: the white dress, the John Lewis wedding-present list, worry about the rest of it afterwards. Getting married means you’ve won, and I hate thinking like that, I do, but let’s be honest, that’s just how it is. In our super progressive, equal rights, modern society, it’s the one thing no one wants to say but everyone is thinking, however messed-up it is.

Until you’re married, you’re a loser, no matter how great you are at everything else. But what does that make someone who gets divorced?

Divorce is something that happens to my parents’ generation, not my friends. Like in year nine, when everyone’s mum and dad suddenly split up and no one talked about it until Jane couldn’t come to your ice-skating birthday party because she ‘had to see her dad on Saturdays’.

Shit, who will get their cat? They both love that cat. Won’t somebody think of the children?