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The day after. 10th September
Did it really happen? There was a pain in my chest where my heart used to be and my body felt weak, so it must have done. George. What had gone wrong? I needed to speak to him but I couldn’t bear to look at my phone. Where even was my phone? My brain flicked back to the chaos of getting bride-ready and all the messages gushing in before I turned it off. I slid open the drawer next to my bed and there it was. Black and blank and nestled in my knickers. I had half a mind to throw it in the bin and ignore the inevitable outpouring of pity but avoiding it would only prolong the agony. Better to get it over with. I held the side button down until my phone vibrated into life and watched the screen light up like a Christmas tree, silent for about half a second before the pinging started, like an alien’s laser gun. Pingggg, ping-ping-ping, ping, PING. No. It was too much. I switched off the sound, dropped it back in the drawer and buried it under a stack of bras.
‘Good morningggg,’ Mum’s gentle voice came through the door as she quietly knocked. ‘It’s nearly midday. Are you awake, my darling?’
‘No,’ I said, slamming the drawer shut and pulling the duvet over my head.
She came in and sat on the bed beside me, followed by a Basil-esque thud, as he snuggled down at my feet.
‘Are you sure? I’ve made you a crispy bacon and tomato sandwich, just the way you like it,’ she said, wafting the delicious smell around to attract me like a human tapeworm. It worked. I poked my head out to find Mum with a sandwich in one hand and a cup of tea in the other.
‘Oh Holly,’ she said, with tears in her eyes, ‘my baby, what happened? What was George thinking?’
‘I don’t know, Mum,’ I said, feeling numb. ‘What am I going to do?’
‘Can you still go on your honeymoon? Or can you claim it on the insurance?’
‘I don’t think wedding insurance covers the groom changing his mind.’ I took the tea as Mum stared into space and started eating my sandwich.
‘But what…?’
‘I don’t know, Mum,’ I said again. None of us knew.
‘Have you heard from him?’ she asked, clearly as baffled as I was.
I shrugged. ‘Probably. I’m currently incommunicado.’
I pulled my knicker-drawer open, fished my phone back out and handed it to her. I couldn’t face the verdict.
‘112 new messages and 15 missed calls,’ Mum said, her eyes wide, ‘112! Well, George is bound to be one of them, isn’t he?’ She handed it back and I had a quick scroll. All the missed calls were from George. He’d been trying to get hold of me since 6 a.m. I went onto my messages, which were in total chaos, and could be split into three easy categories:
The pre-wedding, ‘Good luck Mrs-B-To-Be’ messages.
The increasingly panic-stricken, ‘trying to reach you’ George messages.
The ‘Is everything OK, hun?’ post-apocalyptic, non-wedding messages.
Everyone I cared about and respected, everyone I’d ever known, in fact, ‘just checking in’. My school friends, our uni friends, my gran, Lilian, Margot, Jeff, EVERYONE. I burst into tears and Mum grabbed the tea as it started to spill in my lap, taking a good slurp to wash down my bacon sandwich.
‘Oh God, Mum, how can this be happening? My life is ruined.’
My phone started ringing as I scrolled, and I dropped it like a hot potato. George. I was going to faint. I couldn’t bear to speak to him. I didn’t want to speak to him. Oh FFS. I had to bloody speak to him. My face went hot, and my heart was hammering as his name loomed large on the screen and the ringing continued. Maybe he was calling to apologise. To explain that it had all been a huge misunderstanding.
‘Quick!’ Mum said, unable to take action, with her hands now full of my breakfast. I was desperate to hear his voice and dreading it at the same time. I swiped the green button and held my breath.
‘Hello?’ I breathed into the phone.
‘There you are! I thought you were never going to answer!’ He boomed his greeting with a joviality that belied the seriousness of the situation. Yes, here I was. And there he was. As if nothing had happened and my entire life hadn’t been blown apart.
‘Yep,’ I said, flatly.
‘Holly, I’m so sorry,’ he said, then took a long pause. ‘I kept thinking I’d change my mind but I left it way too late to tell you. Obviously. We should have had the conversation months ago.’
‘The conversation…?’ I parroted back. I couldn’t think of my own words.
‘We’ve both known for a long time that we aren’t right for each other,’ George said.
‘Have we?’
