Jill Steeples - It's Now Or Never

She probably thought I had a drink problem, it was only ten-thirty in the morning.

‘Oh no, I don’t want a drink. It’s just that I was in here last night and I left something behind.’

‘Ah okay. What was it? I’ll take a look for you.’

‘It was an envelope with my name on it. Jen Faraday. The guy I was with left it behind the bar for me.’

Her eyebrows flickered at me doubtfully before she wandered off, straight to the till, where she retrieved the envelope from the small gap down the side and waved it in the air.

‘This is it, isn’t it,’ she said, still holding it aloft.

‘Yes, thank you.’

I held out my hand to take it off her, but she snatched it away, a triumphant smile on her face.

‘I’m really sorry, but I can’t give it to you. It says quite clearly on here, “not to be opened until April 2016”. That’s a year away. Sorry,’ she said, far too delightedly for her own good.

‘Yes, but it is actually my envelope, for me,’ I said, getting irritated now by her unwavering presence between me and the letter. ‘Could I just have it please?’

‘No.’

‘Right.’ I leant over and snatched it out of her hands – quick as a ninja warrior, she snatched it right back again. For a moment there I thought about tackling her, grappling her to the floor, and reclaiming what was rightfully mine, but I was worried about being arrested and ending up in a prison cell for common assault. Besides, weighing up the situation, she seemed so much more agile and fitter than me and I had a suspicion I would be the one to come off worse in any wrestling competition.

‘Right,’ I said again, with authority this time. ‘Just to let you know, I will be speaking to your manager about this.’

‘I am the manager.’

‘Right. Well that’s fine. Absolutely fine.’

I turned on my tail and marched out that wine bar, determined never to set foot in there again. Well not for another year at least. That’s if I hadn’t forgotten all about that wretched letter by then.

Chapter One

‘You’re what?’

‘I know! It’s all a bit mad. It’s been a bit of a whirlwind actually. Everything’s happened so quickly, but I wanted you to be the first to know.’

Woah! Hang on a minute here. This couldn’t be so. Some things in life are taken as a given and right at the top of the list of given things was, numero uno :

I, Jen Faraday, would be the first to marry out of me and my best friend Angie, because I am the marrying type. And Angie is not. And I’d been in a nine-year relationship with my long-term boyfriend, who was the reliable steady type, and with whom I’d visited bridal fairs and drawn up invitation lists and decided on a colour scheme. Coral and mint, in case you’re interested. Angie wasn’t even in a relationship because she’d ditched her on-off totally unreliable scumbag of a boyfriend because of his wayward tendencies.

Admittedly, there had been a slight hitch to my plans when my reliable steady boyfriend had shown a bit of uncharacteristic get-up-and-go and had… got up and gone, deciding that he didn’t want to get married after all. Well not to me at least. He convinced me it was a mutual decision, but on reflection I think it was more mutual on his part than on my own. Within three months he’d met someone new, married her and now they were expecting their first baby together. Who doesn’t love a happy ending?

‘It’s Tom actually. We’re back together.’ Angie did have the good grace to look sheepish as she imparted this bit of earth-shattering news. ‘We’re going to make a go of it.’

‘Tom? Scumbag, grotbag Tom? But you said…’

‘I know what I said, but he’s changed, honestly he has. And please don’t call him that, Jen. Not any more. The break up was the best thing that could ever have happened to us. It’s made us realise how we feel about each other. We want to spend the rest of our lives together.’

‘Blimey.’

A tiny part of me died inside. No, scrub that. A huge part of me died. Angie was my partner in crime, my soul sister on the singles dating scene. How would I ever cope in those murky waters without her?

‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing?’ I protested. ‘I’d hate to think you were making a mistake. You were doing so well, Angie, getting over Tom. Why go back? Isn’t that what you’re always telling me? That I need to look forward and not dwell on the past?’

‘That’s the whole point, Jen. I’m not going backwards. I’m moving forwards with Tom. A new promise, a new life together. Besides, this is different. We’re very much in love.’

Eugh! I resisted the urge to throw up over the carpet. The only thing stopping me was the fact that it was my carpet and I’d be the one to have to clean up the mess.

Love? Ha! I thought I knew what love was until Paul had pulled the rug from beneath my feet. And if I could get it quite so wrong after nine years, how would I ever be able to know how to get it right again? Against all the odds Angie had managed it and now, without so much as a backwards glance, she was leaving me behind, floundering all alone in a lonely single wilderness. Every part of my life had hit the buffers. I’d come to a shuddering halt with a neon ‘No Way Out’ sign flashing in front of me, while everyone around me was moving forward with their lives, going off in exciting new directions.

Panic constricted my throat.

‘Wait for me,’ I wanted to shout. The life train was about to leave the station and I hadn’t even bought my ticket yet.

I consumed a sigh. To be honest, it wasn’t only Angie’s unexpected imminent departure over to the other side that was depressing me. For months now I’d been fighting the feeling that I’d stepped into a gooey patch of quagmire on the way to my full and exciting life and somehow I’d got stuck, knee-high in a puddle that I had little hope of pulling my feet out of.

My love life was non-existent, I’d been stuck in the same job for years and I’d suddenly realised that all those things I was going to do when I was a fresh-faced eighteen-year-old straight out of school just hadn’t happened. I hadn’t gone to university, I hadn’t travelled the world, I hadn’t had a mad and passionate affair with a gorgeous older man and I hadn’t even been sky-diving or skinny-dipping in an azure-blue sea. The list of things I hadn’t done yet was endless.

It didn’t help that Gramps was acting like a lovestruck teenager. When your elderly granddad was seeing more action than you were then something was definitely wrong. Honestly, it was ridiculous. Only the other day I’d popped round to see him and found him up in the spare bedroom, surrounded by cardboard boxes and black bags.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I only came up here to find my best shirt. The one with the double cuffs. I’m off to a tea dance this afternoon with the lovely Marcia.’ He adopted a dancing hold and gave a twirl around the spare bedroom, a bloom to his cheeks. ‘But then I got distracted by all this mess. I think this room is well overdue a clear out, don’t you? Maybe I’ll give it a fresh lick of paint too.’

I grunted my reply. Marcia was bossy and brash, wore over-bright orange lipstick and heels I suspected were far too high for a woman of her age. I didn’t know what Gramps saw in her.

I cast a gaze over the room with its daisy sprig wallpaper and soft yellow curtains. I’d slept in this room hundreds of times over the years, as a child and then as a teenager, and even now occasionally at Christmas and Easter – the room’s cosy familiarity was always fondly reassuring. Why mess with things now?

‘Aren’t those Nan’s old knitting magazines?’ I said, noticing the pile by the doorway.