Charlotte Butterfield - A Beautiful Day for a Wedding - This year’s Bridget Jones!

The door to the bedroom was ajar, and, not having fully shaken away her intruder theory, Eve approached it cautiously. ‘Coco? Coco?’ A shoebox lay open at the foot of the bed, its lid chewed off. The distinctive red soles of Tanya’s prized black patent Louboutin heels were thankfully unmarked by tiny teeth marks, but instead, they’d been used as a portaloo. ‘Oh, sweet Jesus.’

At the sound of her voice, a sleeping Coco eagerly jumped up from the satin pillows she’d been snoozing on and gave a yelp of sheer joy. Flinging herself at Eve, in all her stinky glory, she covered her with slobbery kisses, which Eve couldn’t help but tearfully return. ‘Oh God Coco, I’m so sorry, please don’t tell anyone,’ she picked her up, snuggling her face into her fur. ‘It’ll be our secret.’

After giving her some water and filling her bowl with dried pellets that promised they contained organic chicken, she grabbed her lead from the back of the kitchen door. The destruction of the flat could wait, it was more important to breathe air that hadn’t been contaminated by excrement.

‘No offence Eve, but I don’t like your ideas for the hen party.’

Any sentence that starts off with the words, ‘No offence’ could surely only ever result in the other person being immediately and instinctively offended, Eve thought. And how on earth did Tanya know what her plans even were as they were meant to be top secret? Every subject line of every email Eve had sent about the hen do had said so. In capitals. As if she had read Eve’s mind, Tanya followed up with, ‘Maggie forwarded me the emails.’

Maggie. Eve should have known. One of Tanya’s work colleagues, who Eve had not yet had the pleasure of meeting, had Replied All to every message, finding fault with each element.

‘I mean, a roller disco? What were you thinking Eve?’

‘We used to love the roller disco!’

‘When we were at university! I do not want to turn up to my wedding in a plaster cast!’

‘So I guess that you don’t want to go zorbing either?’

‘No, Eve, I do not. Honestly, I thought that you of all people would be able to come up with something original, fun, and safe for us all to do. It’s meant to be in three weeks’ time!’

‘What do you mean, me of all people?’

‘You work for a wedding magazine, Eve! If anyone should be able to pull a fantastic hen do out of a hat, it should be you.’

‘To be fair Tanya, it’s taken flippin’ ages to get everyone to confirm if they can come or not, then everyone had a different idea about what it was they wanted to do – you’d already vetoed any kind of cocktail-making, naked male bodies and making things.’

‘How many cocktail-making hen parties have you been to?’ Eve didn’t say so out loud, but Tanya had a point. ‘And I’m going to be looking at Luke’s naked body for the rest of my life, I don’t particularly want to see another one on my hen do.’

‘Which is why I made the plan I did, there’s not a cocktail or a penis in sight.’

Eve’s colleague, Kat, the magazine’s beauty director who sat at the adjacent desk to Eve’s, raised a pencilled-on eyebrow at hearing Eve’s last sentence.

Tanya wouldn’t let up. ‘So out of everything else in the world we could do, you chose roller disco and zorbing?’

‘And a meal out; believe me, finding a restaurant that would cater for a vegan, a coeliac, a lactose-intolerance, a shellfish allergy and two nut allergies, was pretty bloody difficult. You have very tricky friends.’

‘Yes, Maggie told me that you’ve booked a Lebanese place. I hate Middle Eastern food.’

‘Hate’s a pretty strong word Tanya, how can you hate an entire continent’s cuisine? I’m sure there’ll be something you’ll like.’

‘I doubt it.’

‘That’s the spirit,’ Eve said, cradling the phone under her chin while she scrolled through the local dog shelter’s website for photogenic mutts for a feature she was writing on Instagram engagements. She had a lovely image in her mind of two cute dogs holding up a sign saying, ‘our humans are getting married’.

‘Are you being sarcastic?’ Tanya barked. ‘This is the only hen do I’m ever going to have, Eve, and I want it to be perfect. I want a country club, a few beauty treatments, lots of champagne and sushi.’

‘You said you wanted it to be a surprise.’

‘Well, I don’t. That’s what I want.’

‘You could have saved me about thirty hours of planning and phoning round if that’s what you had just said in the beginning you know?’

‘You’re one of my best friends, you’re meant to know what I’d like.’

Labelling the two of them ‘best friends’ was a bit of a stretch. Eve was starting to realise that being contacted by Tanya out of the blue to be asked to be her bridesmaid, a decade after they were at university together, had little to do with nostalgia or fuzzy feelings of friendship and more to do with Tanya wanting to take advantage of Eve’s little black book of wedding contacts.

Eve absentmindedly pulled another paperclip out of her stationery pot and added it to a long line of clips that was now stretching across her desk. ‘Fine. Leave it with me.’

‘Oh, and one more thing, do you have your ears pierced?’

That was an odd question. ‘No, why?’

‘Could you get them done before the wedding? I’ve bought all the bridesmaids the same earrings to wear on the day as your gift from me.’

This took the biscuit. ‘Um, not really Tanya, I’ve never liked the idea of it.’

Eve could sense Tanya’s lips pursing over the phone line, possibly accompanied by a hint of an eye twitch too. ‘Maybe you could think about it, Eve.’

‘I have thought about it Tanya, and I don’t want to do it. I’ve got long hair anyway, so you wouldn’t even see them.’

‘Well, I want you to wear it up, nothing fancy like mine’s going to be, just a simple ponytail.’

Eve wanted to say more, to inject her friend with a hearty dose of realism and perspective right into her toned behind, but instead took a deep breath. ‘A ponytail is not a problem, the ear piercing is. But I promise you it’s not going to ruin your day.’ Eve hung up the call and slammed it down on her desk.

Kat looked up from a row of carefully-ordered pink lipsticks that were standing sentry on her own desk for a feature called Kiss-proof lipsticks that will stay on your lips not your groom . ‘Which one of your bridezillas was that?’

‘Tanya. Taking bridezilla-dom to another level entirely. I now have to find a country hotel that can fit twelve women in for beauty treatments in three weeks’ time. And a Japanese restaurant that doesn’t use shellfish and delivers to the arse end of nowhere. Oh, and she wants me to mutilate my body in order to accept my present which has quite clearly come from the heart.’

Sighing, Eve turned back to her computer screen. Her Dear Eve inbox was heaving under the strain of the many unread emails that had come in over the weekend. As well as writing three or four features for Your Wonderful Wedding per month, Eve was also the magazine’s resident agony aunt. But as wedding magazines were beautiful and aspirational, and not angst-ridden drama sagas like her last magazine, What a Life! , most of the questions were about how to stop the groom’s buttonhole from drooping, rather than anything more gritty. It made a nice change to be writing about the highest point in someone’s life rather than their lowest. Writing features with headlines like Blooming lovely , or Love at first blush certainly beat ones like My nephew is also my uncle or Why our 50-year age gap doesn’t matter.