Nash, being sporting in more ways than one, doesn’t give me a hard time over it. In fact, it turns out I can play a useful role by arriving early at the serviced penthouse apartment we’re renting for the night, just around the corner from Spitalfields Market: I can stock up on champagne and nibbles ready for when she and the rest of the battle-weary hens arrive. I’m more than happy to oblige. Crucially, there’s no risk of bruising – at least not until later in the night, when the fridge has been emptied – plus I quite like the idea of having a whole penthouse and a fridgeful of booze to myself, if only for a couple of hours. Maybe I should host a small, intimate pre-party party.
Ironically, as it turns out, by the time the big day arrives, I’m pregnant. But only six weeks pregnant, so it will have to remain my dirty little secret. Even if I was further gone, we couldn’t steal Jonny and Nash’s wedding thunder, so telling the family will have to wait until after they’ve tied the knot. I dutifully lay on the bubbles for the others, as promised, adding a few bottles of iced tea for myself, but my heart isn’t really in it. It’s one thing feeling like a party pooper for not being game for a bit of on-the-ground combat against a bunch of off-duty investment banker stags at the Canary Wharf paintballing centre, quite another not being able to join in the heavy drinking that will follow. A text arrives from Emma, chief bridesmaid, saying they’ve taken enough of a pounding and are on their way to the flat. I sit down in the impersonal open-plan living area to wait, staring wistfully out of the acres of glass. Shoppers head for shops, groups of friends sit and laugh outside pubs, pints in hand, the usual queues at the cashpoint. I feel old and sad and like I have the worst case of PMT imaginable.
The others arrive and as soon as their war wounds have been compared and tracksuit bottoms swapped for skinny jeans, the focus turns to refreshments. ‘No, not for me, thanks,’ I say, for the third time, as another well-meaning friend of Nash’s slides a glass across the breakfast bar to me. ‘I’m on antibiotics.
‘No!’
‘Yes. I’ve had this crappy bronchitis for ages and haven’t been able to shake it off…’ I cough loudly to hammer home the point.
‘Not even one glass?’
‘Unfortunately, no. They’re the strong kind… I’ll probably end up in hospital if I risk it.
Dinner is at a crab shack on the King’s Road. I perk up immeasurably as soon as our 15-strong group piles in the door. This is not the kind of place where rocket and Parmesan feature on the menu. Rather, everyone is given a large bib to wear and eating with one’s fingers is actively encouraged. With steaming platters of seafood and Desperate Dan-sized racks of ribs this good and plentiful, I don’t even mind that I can’t join in on the cocktail front. Is there anything better to wash coleslaw and garlic bread down with than Coca Cola anyway?
It’s when we get back to the apartment that I begin to feel queasy. More alcohol supplies have been bought and the music cranked up. One girl mentions in passing that she’s got some MDMA, somebody else skins up a spliff. I lean out of the window and hold a cigarette between my fingers, not once raising it to my lips. I thought it would be comforting, but it turns out to be more like torture. Taking a direct hit on the arse with a paintballing capsule would have been far less painful.
Really, though, I don’t have any idea what torture is until midnight, when the stripper arrives. A roughly hewn kind of cute, and as cocky as his website promises, he rises above the catcalls and giggles, having clearly developed a thick skin after many years in the business. He asks for a stiff drink and a room in which he can get changed. I twiddle my thumbs in apprehension as the others giggle tipsily. All I want is to be cosy at home with Shaun and the cats and our big ocean liner of a bed.
The guy knows how to keep an audience waiting until the excitement is at fever pitch, but, finally, someone gets the signal and puts on the CD he brought along. The room is filled with the first few bars of You Can Leave Your Hat On. ‘Louder,’ comes Mr Full Monty's voice from the master bedroom. ‘I can hardly hear it!’
And then he appears, to a huge round of applause, strutting his stuff on the mezzanine level of the apartment, resplendent in a grubby uniform that must have once been white, vaguely reminiscent of the one worn by Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentleman. The air is filled with shrieks and whistles, which get higher-pitched and louder as the guy ripples and bulges his way down the stairs and takes centre stage. Or, to be more accurate, takes the spot where the coffee table has been moved out of the way to make room for him.
It’s instantly apparent that what he lacks in rhythm he makes up for in confidence, but even so, when the baby oil comes out and the trousers come off, the rictus grin on my face is beginning to ache. Emma passes round pink feather boas, which shed faster than a white Persian cat on a little black dress, and Nash does her best to hide between Michelle and Alexis. Not that it does her any good, of course, her being the bride-to-be. Soon, the stripper has her wedged between his Ben Hur-esque thighs and reluctantly massaging oil into his pecs while everyone else crowds around to take photos.
The show goes on as one song segues into another, the wooden floor by now liberally scattered with pink feathers and smears of baby oil. When, eventually, the bloke reaches his grand finale, he actually pauses, and, with a note of humility creeping into his voice, asks: ‘Do you want to see everything or is that enough for you?’
For £200, he’s not going to get out of this gig with his modesty intact. His jock strap comes off and there’s a crescendo of charitable cheering and less-charitable sniggering. My clapping is genuine: I’m just glad it’s all over. I’m even beginning to convince myself that holding another cigarette out of the window and watching it burn down to the filter is a good idea.
But it’s not quite over yet. It turns out that this guy's also been booked to serve drinks and mingle. With his jeans back on, but chest still bare and gleaming, he takes his barman duties seriously. I repeat my I’m-on-antibiotics line several more times, finally conceding that he can at least bring me another peach iced tea from the fridge. He works hard for his money, making sure he flirts and chats with everyone, before finally picking up his cash and taking his leave.
There’s a palpable sense of relief when he’s gone and everyone is free to talk and laugh about him with impunity. More drinks are poured and the volume on the stereo rises. Tired and unable to say how well I’ll be able to resist any further temptation on the alcohol or disco biscuit front, I say goodnight to Nash and slope off to one of the bedrooms, wondering what time the first train leaves for Brighton in the morning. I try not to think about our old flat, an easy five-minute walk from here.
The rest of the hens enjoy a karaoke session till 4am. Two hours later I creep through the sleeping bodies and empty glasses and head to London Bridge station. Clubs are emptying and I join a steady flow of trashed party people, thinking, with a kind of incredulity, ‘I’m pregnant’, over and over again. I buy The Guardian and wait an hour and ten minutes until the Brighton train pulls up to the platform. Brushing a few pink feathers off my jeans, I curl up into a corner of the carriage and, before I can even remember whether or not I took my folic acid last night, am sound asleep.
‘It’s not that I usually find alcohol so difficult to say no to,’ I tell Shaun, at a de-briefing session in bed, as soon as I get home. ‘In fact, I’ve always thought of booze as being a pleasant accompaniment to cigarettes, rather than the other way round. But I can now say that the exception is when it’s a social event where the express purpose it to get pissed.’
Shaun kisses me, his virtuous pregnant wife, on the nose. ‘At least you made the most of the meal,’ he reminds me.
A few weeks later, in Sardinia for Jonny and Nash’s wedding, friends are too busy commenting on how they never realised how big my tits were to notice that I’m not drinking and put two and two together. ‘Oh, it’s just that you don’t usually see me in a bikini,’ I say, breezily. I accept a glass of wine with every meal we sit down to, then slide it over to Shaun to drain when he’s emptied his own. Luckily, sunglasses during the day and the cover of darkness at night hide the fact that my husband is generally well on the way to being pissed by halfway through the 'secondi' course.
When the wedding party moves to the linen-dressed tables in the orchard and the vast Italian buffet, I switch back to drinking iced tea. After a round of speeches that has everyone on their feet applauding, Jim, a friend of Nash’s from years ago, starts handing out toxic-looking shooters made from banana liqueur and ginger beer that he swears taste like Doctor Pepper. I pass mine over to Shaun after he has knocked back his own. I do the same with the next one. And the next.
The wedding party proceeds to the private beach at the front of the villa for a 3am swim. Shaun passes out on our bed, the sheets in a tangle around his legs. This is not such a bad thing when it transpires that the bride’s new wedding band has slipped off in the ocean. If Shaun had lost his I think I would have demanded a divorce, the way my hormones are flying around right now.
A few days later, when the happy couple are about to leave for a love-nest in the Sardinian mountains, the rest of us to the airport, we all muck in cleaning up the communal areas of the villa, adding the inflatable lobsters that we brought to the huge, outside toy box for other future renters to enjoy. We pack candles and give bouquets of flowers to the owners of the property, and empty the fridge and pantry. There’s just one puzzle that remains.
‘How can we have so much alcohol left,’ wonders my father, a life-long expert in calculating how many bottles are required per head for any social function.
‘I know, it’s ridiculous,’ says my Scottish mother, looking pained at the thought of all that waste.
‘Anyone who has room in their cases, please take as much as you can carry,’ says the father of the bride, waving his arm expansively across the table that’s practically buckling under the weight of all that glass.
My God, I think. So this is the impact on bar stock when I’m not drinking. The scales fall from my eyes.
Before I can get too introspective, Shaun takes one of the leftover bottles of champagne from the fridge and brings it outside to the terrace, where my parents are enjoying their last few hours of sunshine before we leave for Cagliari. Jonny and Nash come wandering over to join us, and I call my sister and her boyfriend.
‘I’m packing,’ Jemma yells. ‘What do you want?’
‘We have something to tell you,’ calls Shaun, while I eye up the bottle he’s hiding behind his back, noticing the drops of condensation sliding down its neck.
I can practically taste it already.
