My bridesmaid from hell
This is a true story about a toxic friendship.
“I’m so happy for you.” Her text message was almost instant and quickly followed by an excited “Show me the ring!”
I knew *Jess’s idea of an engagement ring was very different to mine. She exclusively dated men who she’d expect to blow three month’s salary - minimum - on a diamond with a glint to rival the Bishop Rock Lighthouse.
It was January 2007. I sat in a bed and breakfast in a small town on the north Yorkshire coast, trying to take a photo of my hand without my fingers looking like undercooked sausages. But the truth is, I didn’t think the ring was that important. It was just a nice prop my boyfriend had used for a brief moment of theatre, the object needed to complete the ceremony.
We’d driven to York and stayed in a hotel by the train station, wandered the ancient lanes of the Shambles looking for antique shops and stepped through the door of a promisingly un-grand looking market with walls of glass cabinets bearing crowded shelves of long-dead people’s things.
“I want a ring prised from the cold, dead hand of a woman who LOVED,” I proclaimed. I was being facetious, but what I meant was, not a new one. New jewellery looked a bit naff on me and it made no sense to buy a new ring when the shops were full of old ones.
The first display was dotted with dozens of modest Victorian solitaires, rounded stones on thin, pale bands. And then amongst them, I saw it. A skinny gold ring with three little stones set almost flat into a white gold setting. I felt like I’d seen it before even though I’d never particularly thought about jewellery or worn much of it in my life up until then.
But I had drawn it dozens of times, doodling it in the diaries I used to keep as a teenager. An absent minded sketch repeated over the years: two small circles either side of an oval and a thin band.
It felt weird, like there was no decision to make because the ring was making it for me. I pointed it out to the woman with the keys to the cabinet and she looked at me strangely. “You’re sure?” We’d only been there five minutes but it went straight onto my finger, ever so slightly loose as I held it up to the light.
“Yes please.” She rang it up, clearly dismayed at the thought of an imminently engaged couple doing the deed with an £80 ring. Once it was placed in a little box, Joel tucked it into his pocket and off we strode to the pub.
It was a premeditated act. The idea of him springing a ring on me, like a clown with a bunch of flowers, seemed weird to both of us. A few weeks before, sat in our local pub next to the pool table, ducking the cues when the players took their shots, we’d agreed we were obviousy going to get married one day, so why not get engaged on holiday? We thought York in January, to liven up a bleak month.
From York, we drove across the Moors and, as we rounded a bend in the road, the windscreen filled with a breathtaking feature called the Devil’s Punchbowl or the Hole of Horcum. The Lark Ascending came to its crescendo on the car stereo and we both started to cry.
Really, we should have pulled over and done it there and then but neither of us thought to, lost as we were in feelings as big as the landscape.
We checked into a B&B in Robin Hood’s Bay and headed down to the beach, nudging each other. The sun was all but gone and the sands were sodden from the recently departed tide. Out in the bay, men with lights on their hats dug for lugworms.
After admitting that the ground was too damp for kneeling, he got the ring box from his pocket, both of us grinning like fools, and muttered something about not knowing how to do it now that the moment had actually come.
Back in the room, my thumb hovered over the send button, even though I knew Jess would be as underwhelmed as the lady with the cabinet keys. A few minutes later, among the gushing delight of family and friends, her response arrived.
I can’t remember the exact words but it was the expected mix of ‘oh’ and ‘I guess it’s the type of thing you’d wear’.
It was the latest pass-ag salvo in a weeks-long silent war and it all started when I’d told her we were thinking of getting married.
Jess and I had met because we’d both dated the same guy. Well, she dated him. He just shagged me when he was bored and I didn’t grow proper boundaries until some years after that.
She was almost constantly effusive, an affectedly large plumb lodged in her mouth despite her solidly middle class upbringing.
She was living her dream with a big, bald guy (let’s call him Tony) who earned a mint in the city. She was definitely aware of my on-off f*ck buddy status (low) with Tony and I think she was keeping her enemies close when she sent a text inviting me for drinks.
A mutual friend told me to stop being a bitch and just say yes. And so began a tentative friendship of late night drinking in our favourite theatrical bar and her regular updates on her relationship with Tony. He was taking her to New York. She’d seen the diamond studs she wanted for Christmas. They were soooooo happy.
When they eventually broke up, the friendship became closer. We’d sit in that basement bar, fogged with the smoke of a thousand Marlboro Lights, and search for potential lovers at adjacent tables. I always felt like the fat friend and I wondered if maybe that was part of the appeal for her.
One night, she spotted a guy she liked and he asked her if she was going to a mutual friend’s Christmas party the following week. There began days of pleading. I had to come with her because she wouldn’t know anyone apart from the guy. I didn’t want to go. I was done with men and the empty validation of one-night stands. For the first time in ages, I just wanted to be left alone. But I gave in, obviously.
Under a street lamp a few blocks before we got to the flat in Clapham, she forced some mascara onto me, determined that I do some basic grooming before turning up at a party where there would be men, like some early noughties Mrs Bennet.
We got there unintentionally early and only five or six people were gathered in the kitchen. Blending in until the drink started to work was not going to be an option.
So I talked to a friendly guy in glasses, at first not noticing the effortlessness of our conversation. It was easy and unguarded and we stripped away the small talk before the end of the first drink. We didn't stop for the whole party.
If Jess hadn’t wanted to go so badly, Joel and I might never have met. I think about that a lot. No us, no kid. It’s unimaginable. I guess I felt like I owed her and I did thank her in my wedding speech. But that was the last time I would ever speak to her.
A year on from the Clapham party, when I told Jess that Joel and I had talked about getting married, the only way I can describe the look on her face was suspicious. Like she was trying to suss out what trickery I’d employed to get a proposal out of a man I’d only being seeing for a year.
She was single again and I understood how keenly she felt the pressure to couple up, how un-chill that was making her about her own dating life. But the vibe became quite uncelebratory to the point where I started to feel uncomfortable.
Before Joel and I were back from Yorkshire, the chirpy offers of help began, like Mary Poppins had jammed her foot in the door and wouldn’t let us close it. She hoped she’d make the bridesmaid shortlist (!!) smiley face smiley face, she gushed.
It was then that I decided not to have bridesmaids. I felt cold and taut inside, like the thing I should be excited about was going to be yanked out of my hands.
I’d never liked the idea of picking a squad, like the worst school PE lesson. Joel had a solid group of male friends to do stuff with, the stag, the night before the wedding and so on. I was suddenly aware of how uncertain I was of my own friend group. I couldn’t begin to rank them and I didn’t want to.
When push came to shove, I knew Jess would dominate because it was her personality. She organised, took over, breezed about the place giving the impression that it was all absolutely fine either way, but inside she was holding tightly onto control.
She was champagne and diamonds and New York. Our wedding would be a modest one and not the kind of modest where people ‘only’ spend £20k and opt for the chicken. Like actually modest, as in cheap.
We dry hired the function room of a small London museum, did a booze run to Calais and got all the guests to bring packed lunches. Of the hundred or so who came, only one TV comedian thought we’d been joking about the packed lunches and had to go to M&S for sandwiches. I did feel a bit bad, but we thought it was far more important to drink than eat at a good party.
Jess wasn’t taking my obvious reluctance to accept her help well. But she pretended, with increasing shrillness, that she was absolutely fine about it. Lovely, in fact. I think at one point, she was put in charge of ice, literally, like Phoebe in Friends, so that she had a focus for her intense desire to be of service.
I didn’t feel able to have the conversation with her because we didn’t talk honestly like that. How differently I’d do things now. Boundaries are a wonderful, wonderful thing. Most, if not all of the rest of our friends, understood that the wedding was about the two of us.
(Don’t get me started on the ‘friend’ who began an affair with one of my other friend’s fiancés just before the day and then announced she was having his baby. She tried to get him invited to the wedding so she could rub his now ex-fiancé’s nose in it. Weddings make people mental.)
I spent a lot of the build-up trying to manage other people’s expectations which I regret now.
I did insist on my idea for the dress though. I’d budgeted for a dressmaker and some nice corsetry to go underneath. I went shopping for the underwear and took another female friend with me. Then the news got back to Jess.
That’s when things got really deranged.
