Crazy Little Thing Called Love

Lucy’s mum, Stephanie, was lovely though, which was a complete surprise. If pushed Leila would have admitted to have been expecting a buttoned-up platinum blonde with manicured talons and a designer handbag. She absolutely wasn’t anticipating this wonderfully bohemian middle-aged woman bounding off the train, wearing a full-length paisley coat, with long curly greying hair. If Stephanie noticed Lucy’s lacklustre greeting and stiff embrace she didn’t say, just gave her daughter and Leila a wide smile as she took their arms and proclaimed excitedly that they were going to have so much fun.

The fact that each salon offered them a glass of champagne had lessened the pain but heightened the boredom. Leila was left sat by herself most of the time as Lucy was in the dressing room, and Stephanie was busy taking pictures of wedding dresses to send them to her son’s girlfriend who was also getting married soon. Every boutique was a carbon copy of the one before. Each had a plush cream carpet, shag, Leila thought it was called, giving an immature snigger inside. Big armchairs or sofas were flanked with side tables, usually circular glass ones, with a box of tissues perched upon them, for teary mothers no doubt.

As the hours ticked by, Lucy was getting increasingly annoyed with each assistant, who kept giving sharp intakes of horror when she mentioned that her wedding date was in five weeks’ time. ‘I’m sure you’re not trying to be deliberately difficult,’ Lucy told the last one. ‘So let’s try and make this work, shall we?’

‘Off-the-peg’ was a term Lucy appeared to find offensive, wrinkling her nose and shrinking back a few inches every time it was mentioned. Her binder was full of princess-type dresses, all carefully cut out of magazines and placed in the relevant colour-coded section of the folder, after Flowers but before Poems and Readings. It’s not that each boutique didn’t have the exact eye-wateringly expensive gown she wanted, it’s just it would take six–eight months to order and make. You’d have thought by the fifth time she heard this, Lucy would start to understand.

‘I could always run it up for you my love,’ Stephanie offered later that afternoon, holding out a tissue to her sobbing daughter. Lucy wasn’t an attractive crier, Leila thought, and felt immediately very bad for having that thought.

‘Run it up for me? Run it up for me? I don’t want a pair of bloody curtains Mother!’

That was a bit harsh, the poor woman was clearly trying to help. ‘Lucy, I think at this stage you have two options, buy something—’ Leila stopped herself just in time uttering a phrase that contained the word peg – ‘already made.’ Good save. ‘Or maybe think about having one of the designs you love made, either by your mum, who I’m sure is a very accomplished seamstress—’ Stephanie shot Leila a look of gratitude – ‘or someone else, but I think you need to call it a day at trying different shops. Salons. Whatever.’

‘I knew you’d try to sabotage today, I just knew it.’

Leila knew Lucy would be mortified if she realised that a little bit of snot was stuck to the outside of her nose and that her eyeliner had smudged on the left side. While this was immensely gratifying to see, and more than a little amusing, Leila knew that staying silent went against everything the new Leila stood for. So she passed Lucy a tissue and said, ‘Wipe your nose and your eyes and how about we both pretend you didn’t say that and I ring ahead to the next two appointments to see if they can do this dress any quicker?’

As luck would have it, there was a cancelled order at the next boutique in very similar measurements to Lucy’s. It was Lucy that cited this as ‘very lucky,’ Leila couldn’t help viewing it from the other side, thinking of the poor woman that drank the free champagne, paraded in her dream dress in front of her emotional mum and friends and then tearfully phoned to cancel a few months later. But for the purposes of familial harmony, Leila kept mute. Now was most certainly not the time to introduce the concept of perspective.

She must admit though, Lucy did seem to be extraordinarily fortunate. In the end Judy and Thomas hadn’t had to cancel the couple on the 1st July, they did that themselves. And Marcus had also bartered a great price for the original couple’s photographer who had already accepted a non-refundable deposit, which he knocked off Lucy and Marcus’s price. It crossed Leila’s mind fleetingly that this could possibly be that poor girl’s dress too, but that would be slightly too weird. If she was indulging her darker thoughts, Leila wouldn’t have put it past Lucy to try to break the other couple up just so she could glide into their day, but it was beyond spiteful of her to even think that. And in no way compatible with her new role of Champion of All Women.

‘So what’s next on the list then?’ They’d just dropped Stephanie off at the train station and decamped to a nearby wine bar to take stock of the day and plan the next few weeks. In the absence of a sister, female cousin or any of her friends at all, Leila and Tasha had been drafted in as bridesmaids. Not willingly. And Tasha was away at a yoga retreat in the Peak District, which was very conveniently timed to coincide with this shopping trip.

Her sister was still reeling from being told that her kids were not allowed at the wedding. ‘But they are your nieces and nephew!’ she’d railed at Marcus. But he was adamant that Lucy had vetoed all children, regardless of blood ties. So Tasha had booked her weekend away to deliberately coincide with dress shopping. Meaning that now it was all falling squarely to Leila. ‘It all’ being every damn detail of the wedding it seemed.

‘Ok, so table plans,’ Lucy said studiously, peering at the long list in front of her. ‘We have most of the RSVPs back now – Mum’s going to chase the rest – I can’t do that myself, it would be vulgar. And then we can start assigning table places. Leila, I’ve pinned some ideas onto Pinterest of what designs I want, so you can knock one up as you’re a designer.’

‘I design gardens Lucy, I’m not a graphic designer.’

Lucy looked at Leila blankly. ‘It’s all creative though, isn’t it? It’s literally just cutting out bits of card and mounting it on other bits of card, it’s not rocket science.’

If it’s not rocket science, Leila wanted to say, why aren’t you doing it yourself, now that you’ve given up your job purely to organise the wedding. She couldn’t believe it when Marcus told her that Lucy had resigned from her job as an event planner as she couldn’t manage the wedding and full-time work. ‘Poor lamb,’ he’d said, ‘the stress was really getting to her.’ But Leila knew that Judy was bearing the brunt of all the planning, ironic considering the nature of Lucy’s former career.

Judy had uncharacte‌ristically let slip on the phone to her a few nights before that she was finding Lucy ‘rather difficult’ to deal with, and that in all her years of working with brides, ‘Lucy has taken it to another level.’ She even persuaded Judy to change the curtains in the dining room as they didn’t match her flowers. Judy was incredulous when she told Leila this, yet still did it anyway, which Leila thought was the most incredulous thing. Since then, she had little sympathy for her mother’s tales of wedding woe. Yet here she was, nodding along like a mechanical dog, saying, ‘Table plans, ok. Anything else?’

‘Yes, I don’t know whether Marcus has mentioned this, but you need to bring a date. All the tables are for eight, and we can’t have one of seven, it would look unbalanced and just wrong.’

‘Um, ok, I’ll ask Shelley. She loves weddings, always up for a bit of usher action.’

‘No, no, it has to be a man, it’s boy girl boy girl seating, we can’t have two people of the same sex together, that would screw everything up.’

‘You’re sounding remarkably Republican there Lucy.’

The jibe was lost on her. Leila carried on, ‘But I don’t have any single male friends to bring, and you know I’m not dating anyone for another ten months.’

‘Sorry, but I’m not having your silly vow of celibacy ruin my special day.’

Again Leila found herself biting her lip. ‘Fine. I’ll find someone.’

‘No dreadlocks.’

‘Got it.’

‘He has to wear top hat and tails.’

‘Done.’

‘If he has tattoos he has to cover them up.’

‘This advert is sounding stranger by the minute.’

Lucy’s eyes widened, ‘You’re not really going to advertise to bring someone to my wedding?’

Leila considered carrying on the joke just for her own amusement, but GSOH didn’t seem to be one of Lucy’s qualities. ‘Of course not. I have just the chap. He’s a colleague, Jamie. Nice guy, been pestering me to go out for ages, I’ll ask him, but I’ll have to lay down some ground rules first.’

The conversation with Jamie the next day went exactly the way Leila anticipated. There had been a moment, a fleeting blink-and-you-miss-it-moment at last year’s staff party when their eyes locked onto each other’s and Leila was tempted to accept Jamie’s ever so eager advances, but as she stood there deliberating whether to or not a leggy intern grabbed Jamie to dance and the moment passed. She waited until the office had thinned out at lunchtime and followed him into the small pantry where he was meticulously measuring out his protein shake powder into milk. ‘Hey Jamie.’

‘Lovely Leila, how are you?’

‘Look, I have a favour to ask you. You can absolutely say no, although I hope you don’t.’

‘Intriguing. Go on.’ He leant back against the countertop. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, which made his biceps bulge a little. But then, he knew that. Leila was also heartened to see a tattoo-free forearm, which was another tick in a box.

‘My brother is getting married, which in itself is a miracle, and I have to take a date and—’

‘Yes.’

‘I haven’t finished my sentence.’

‘Yes I’ll come with you.’

‘But you need to know, I’m two months into a year of celibacy, and so we’ll be going to this as colleagues, friends even. But absolutely not as dates. It’s in Dartmouth, at my parents’ place, so I’ll book you a room, but a different one to mine. I’m just lowering your expectations now, so you’re not expecting a bit of wedding night fun and frolics.’

‘Message received and understood.’

‘Really?’

‘Really. Would love to come. And you know, if the romance of the occasion, and the free-flowing champagne, means that your mind changes as the night wears on, then that’s fine with me too.’

‘It won’t.’

‘But if it does.’

‘It won’t.’

‘But if it does.’

‘It’s on the 1st July, I’ll email you the details. I’m getting there a couple of days before so you’ll have to make your own way down, but I’ll pay half your petrol. Is that ok?’

‘Sure thing.’

As Leila left the pantry she heard him shout, ‘But if it does!’ She smiled as the door slammed behind her.

That evening she checked her blog statistics, she’d got another two-hundred and fifty followers over the last week, which took her total number to just shy of fifteen-hundred. And some had even started commenting too. At first they were just one or two words, like ‘Yes!’, ‘Me too!’ ‘I feel the same’, but then women started writing longer posts about their own lives and loves. Leila created another page on the site for women to share their stories, and it was garnering more and more clicks every day. The beauty of the internet meant it wasn’t just local London women logging on; she’d had women from Scotland, Switzerland, all the way to Bermuda and California joining in the discussions. Leila couldn’t help feeling a little proud that she’d created this forum for a community of women to come together, united in their tales of embracing single life.

It was the story of one woman, Namisha, that inspired Leila to set up a closed Facebook group in addition to the blog. Namisha had had an arranged marriage planned. She hadn’t been too happy with the idea beforehand, but her family had told her that she could be pro-active in finding the groom, so she relented. After months of chaperoned meetings with different prospective men, she finally found someone she clicked with. The wedding date was set, over eight-hundred invitations were sent out, she sat still for four hours having her hands painstakingly decorated with henna at her Mehndi party, and had a red silk sari specially made in India and flown over. On the morning of the ceremony, just as the ballroom of one of Manchester’s top hotels filled with guests, Namisha learned that the groom had run off with an American girl he’d been secretly dating for five years.

Although she kept her story brief and free from an outpouring of emotion, unlike some of the other recently-scorned singletons, the subtlety of Namisha’s pain was imbedded in every word. Every one of Leila’s break-ups had been a private experience, one where she alone suffered the pain and humiliation. She couldn’t imagine what that poor woman went through in such a public way. Within a couple of hours, twenty different women had offered Namisha support, soothing words and a couple of women local to where Namisha lived even offered tea and cake to accompany their sympathy.

This website was becoming more than just Leila typing a few lines as she had her dinner each night. This was a virtual club that was making a difference.

That wasn’t part of The Plan either.

***

There were only a certain number of ways you could organise twenty chairs in a small room, and Leila had tried all of them. Twice.

Rows were too formal. A circle too Alcoholics Anonymous. Around the edge of the room too pre-teen disco. She’d finally settled on having clusters of five seats around four tables, after all, Tasha did say that part of the workshop was going to involve writing. She put the three kettles on to boil, again. Everyone would be arriving in about ten minutes, and it would be good to be able to offer them a drink straight away rather than make small talk over the ever-increasing sound of bubbling water. And then remembered a warning she’d read once that you shouldn’t reboil water or it could cause cancer. She wasn’t sure of the validity of this, but now was not the time to worry about it. She had toyed with the idea of serving wine too – it was 7pm – but thought for this first meeting it would be good to start off sober. God, she wished she wasn’t so sensible, she could murder a glass of pinot grigio.

Iris from Ealing was the first to arrive, nervously peering around the door. She clutched her bag in front of her as though she was expecting Leila to mug her.

‘Hi,’ Leila walked towards her with her hand outstretched. ‘I’m Leila. You found us then? Thanks so much for coming, it’s really exciting doing this, we’ve got lots of great things planned, we’ve got two speakers at this workshop, and, oh, great one of them’s here now, why don’t you help yourself to tea or coffee Iris, there’s lots of different types – just all on that table over there, great.’

‘Where have you been?’ Leila hissed through her teeth at Tasha.

Tasha looked about the empty room, until her eyes stopped pointedly at Iris deliberating over peppermint or jasmine tea and said, ‘You’re right, I’m sorry, leaving you to riot control on your own was very thoughtless of me.’ She leaned over to kiss her sister’s cheek and whispered in her ear, ‘Calm down sweetheart, it’s all going to go brilliantly.’

Thirty minutes later, when every chair was filled, and twenty heads were studiously bowed, writing down their thoughts in twenty different types of handwriting, Leila allowed herself to breathe. Tasha and her friend Eva had put together a two-hour introductory session on mindfulness for the first twenty London-based women who replied. And the crazy thing was, she could have filled a room three times the size with the amount of people that wanted to come. She couldn’t believe she’d been so disparaging in the past about Tasha’s passion without really knowing too much about it, and it was incredible all the stuff she was saying. The whole premise of living in this exact moment and not letting your past or your future shape or affect your present, was something every woman in that room needed to hear and learn, and Leila placed herself firmly in that camp too. She’d spent so many years hankering after an ex, or impatiently awaiting the arrival of Mr Perfect, that she’d squandered the last decade looking back or forward and never stopping for a minute to just be.

‘Another key thing,’ Tasha intoned, ‘is acceptance. Welcome in your thoughts, the negative ones and the positive ones, but don’t see one as right, or one as wrong, give them space to exist, and don’t judge yourself. Tune into everything you’re feeling – the way the shower spray hits your body, the way a certain fabric feels, the smell of your perfume, the taste of your food – think and reflect on every sensation as you think or feel it.’

Leila was concerned beforehand that two hours sounded like an awfully long time to sit and contemplate your life, but the time just sped by, and it wasn’t until the office cleaners came in, that she realised that they’d even gone over time.

‘Ok everyone, we’re going to have to wrap it up now, but thank you so much Tasha and Eva for coming and imparting your wise words, and honestly, I am so humbled to be surrounded by so many inspiring women. Hopefully this is the first of many events and workshops that we do, and please, any ideas you have, or topics you’d like to focus on, just drop me a line, I’d love to hear from you.’ It was perhaps testament to how soul-revealing the evening had been, but every woman had entered the room giving Leila a handshake, and left it giving her a hug. That was pretty awesome.

‘You’ve got an amazing thing going here,’ Eva said as she gathered up all the pencils left on the desks. ‘To get all these different women in one space is marketing gold.’ Eva had left the world of corporate life coaching a few months previously to set up her own business. ‘I gave my card to at least half the women here tonight. By all rights, I should have been paying you for the exposure, not the other way round!’ Each of the women had paid a tenner to attend, and as Leila’s boss had let her have the training room for free and even thrown in the refreshments, Leila just split the two hundred between Tasha and Eva.

‘Eva’s right Leila, you could have run this evening at a profit tonight, and everyone would have still gone away feeling happy and fulfilled.’

Leila grimaced. ‘I know what you’re saying, but there’s something a bit distasteful at me making money from other people’s misfortunes. I mean everyone was here because they’d been unlucky in love, I don’t want to start monetising their healing.’

‘Think about it Leila,’ Tasha said, getting her car keys out of her bag. ‘You’re providing a service for these women – it’s like a member’s club – and if you started seeing it more like a business than a hobby, you could be making a pretty tidy side-line from it.’

Her sister’s words were going around her head on a loop all the way home. It was so far removed from the reasons she started the blog in the first place. Just three months ago, it was an online diary, a place for her to vent and explore her feelings, and now here she was, an event planner, party host, mentor and head girl of a sorority that was growing larger every day.

***

As she’d been spending so much time on her website, Leila was woefully behind in her work, so when the weekend rolled around instead of pottering around markets with her friends or having lazy lunches she was hibernating at home trying to meet her deadlines. Her phone was ringing for the fourth time in as many minutes and Leila couldn’t ignore it again. She hated being interrupted when creative brilliance was in full flow. Her company had pitched recently for a lucrative but immensely soul-destroying project doing the car parks and outside cafe areas of a chain of well-known supermarkets. It was the first time she had been chosen to lead a project in seven years of working there, and she needed to pull this off. Her dining table was piled high with blueprints and open books and markers, and huge unfolded plans had slipped off the table onto the floor, and somewhere under all this was her incessantly ringing phone.

‘Leila. Marcus.’

She couldn’t help but smile; her brother had such a knack for sounding so pompous. ‘Marcus, what do I owe this pleasure to?’ She was thankful it was him and not Judy who had phoned because she knew it wouldn’t be a long call. Marcus was known for his brevity, unlike her mother.

‘We had dinner with Tasha and Alex last night.’

‘Thanks for the invite.’

Marcus either didn’t hear her sarcastic retort, or more likely, just chose to ignore her, ‘And Tasha was talking about your blog and Facebook page. I had no idea it was doing so well.’

‘Too well at the moment! Work is so busy and then this is massively taking off, and I can’t justify spending all the time I do on something that doesn’t pay the bills.’

‘That’s why I’m phoning.’ He then reeled off a list of five or six clients of his legal firm, big companies that Leila had heard of, that were offering services that targeted professional single women. A bank that had special mortgage rates for single borrowers, a financial services firm that offered women better premiums on car and life insurance, a brand of wine whose latest advertising campaign focused on friendship and sharing, a sportswear brand that wanted to align itself with empowering women, and so on. ‘Don’t you see Leila,’ he continued, ‘your blog would be the perfect place for these brands to reach out to your women, and these people have cash to spend. Now I can’t be seen to be involved in this in any way, obviously, but if you were to send them a short presentation about you and your site, I promise you they’d be interested.’

‘Really?’

‘Really. They’d pay for ad banners on the site, sponsorship of any more events you have, they may well offer your followers discounts, freebies, incentives, you could run competitions for singles holidays, God Leila, you could do amazing things with it. Why don’t you talk to Dad about it? He does all the marketing for the hotel, and his strategy is sound. He’s set up barters with different companies and now they have advertising logos on their brochures. Or, and here’s an idea,’ his voice had changed from purely business to something verging on excitement, ‘You could run weekend retreats at Mum and Dad’s hotel during the off-peak season – it would help them out in the quieter months, and you could pitch it as a … what do you call it … “finding yourself” short break or something like that. Get the sponsors to pay to have their branding there, every woman pays two or three hundred quid as well, give half to the folks and you’re raking it in.’

‘And then there’s your cut too of course,’ Leila couldn’t help saying. It was so unlike Marcus to phone completely out of the blue just to offer some brotherly advice. Particularly now Lucy was firmly entrenched on the scene.

‘This first session is free. But I will charge to look over any contracts you sign.’

And there was the brother she knew and loved.

Chapter 6

Leila stabbed the last phallic-shaped straw into a lurid cocktail in Lucy’s kitchen, hearing the high-pitched shrieks of hilarity through the paper-thin walls. She paused to plaster her smile back on her face before re-entering the dining room.

‘What’s your favourite part of Marcus’s body?’ one of Lucy’s friends from her book club read out to a chorus of girlish giggles.

‘His forearms,’ Lucy replied. ‘He has amazingly strong forearms.’

Leila tried not to blink, and just focused on dividing out the drinks between the eight women, who were in various stages of inebriation, including, much to her complete embarrassment, her own mother, who was swaying glassy-eyed at the end of the table.

Lucy hiccupped after taking a small sip, ‘What’s in this one? It’s lethal!’

‘Um, lots of clear stuff and some blue stuff,’ Leila took a gulp of her own concoction without wincing. She’d passed the point that alcohol had any effect whatsoever. They’d spent the day gluing sequins onto stilettos as one of their hen party activities. Lucy had put Leila in charge of the day and evening, and then proceeded to forward Leila pins or links to exactly what it was she wanted them to be doing. So, early afternoon was glitzing up footwear, and then they had a mixologist come to the house and throw bottles about. Which Leila had to admit was pretty fun – hence her newfound talent for cocktail-making. Lucy had firmly rebuffed the butler in the buff idea, which was just as well as Leila had no intention of seeing a naked man for at least another two-hundred and forty-eight days anyway.