‘Go on, Rose. Do yours!’ shouted Lizzie from the other side of the room.
She sighed. ‘Okay, Pip, go and sit over there,’ she said, pointing to the brown leather armchair.
There was music playing faintly in the background, although Rose couldn’t tell from where. It would have to do. She could just get this over with quickly. As Pippa sat down and Rose faced her, she could hear a furious cacophony of whispers forming behind her. She was sweating. Someone had changed the music and turned it up to top volume. ‘It’s Raining Men’ by Geri Halliwell filled the room. Jessie, who must’ve come up with the dare, gave her an encouraging thumbs up. This would be fine.
Rose started to sway her hips from left to right, lifting her hands up and moving them around Pippa’s neck. She could see from Pippa’s expression that this was uncomfortable for them both, so Rose turned around, and tried very hard to look down at the floor instead of directly at the women in front of her as she bent down and wiggled her bum in Pippa’s face.
This was mortifying; just a few more seconds.
‘You gotta take something off!’ shouted Jessie.
This was true. It wasn’t just a lap dance: it was a striptease.
Rose started to peel her green T-shirt up, suddenly very aware of the chill surrounding her stomach and the fact that she couldn’t remember the last time she’d done a sit-up. Pippa couldn’t look directly at her, but neither could Rose, instead fixing her gaze on a spot behind Pippa on the wall where yet another nineteenth-century landscape was hanging. She tried to think about how much something like that would cost as she pretended to pull her top over her head.
‘Take it off!’ shouted Fran.
Rose looked up. ‘I’m not wearing a bra.’
‘That’s fine!’
But Rose was adamant. She kept her T-shirt on and after a few more agonising seconds of terrible teasing and dancing, took a bow. Most of the girls cheered.
‘Always so timid,’ said Fran to the others.
Pippa’s university friends were harmless by comparison. They faded into the background when juxtaposed with Fran, Grace and Lizzie, who were constantly talking over one another, exchanging anecdotes at a volume that seemed to drown out everything else in the room.
They were midway through playing ‘Mr and Mrs’, Jessie playing a video of Mike answering how Pippa liked to take her coffee in the morning, when Tessa yelped ‘Holy shit!’ Jessie shot her a look of pure rage as she paused the clip.
‘Christ, Tessa, what is it?’ she asked.
Tessa was lost for words, her hands holding a phone, eyes glued to the screen. ‘I’m just, I’m just …’
Rose looked closer. It was her phone.
‘Oh for God’s sake,’ said Jessie. ‘Is this part of your dare?’
‘Tessa, why have you got my phone?’ Rose asked quietly, careful not to make too much of a fuss as she quickly rushed over to her.
Tessa moved away so Rose couldn’t take it from her.
‘Sorry, this is your phone?’ she asked, eyebrows raised.
‘Yes, please give it back,’ Rose replied, suddenly very aware this woman was a total stranger.
‘Ah well, you see my dare was to grab someone else’s phone and send a message to Mike from it telling him we were all snogging the strippers and I was just about to do it on Instagram and then I saw—’
‘Tessa!’ Rose shot her a look, pleading.
Tessa’s eyes met Rose’s and her expression changed. A tacit understanding was forming.
‘You don’t know what this is about,’ Rose whispered.
Tessa smiled and then nodded. ‘Sorry, guys. False alarm – Mike is private on Insta so, Rose, you actually can’t message him – as you were.’
Had everyone in the room been a little more sober, they would not have let this slide. Thankfully, everyone was drunk, including Nikki. Rose snatched her phone back and immediately put a passcode on it, astonished at her own stupidity.
Tessa crouched down on the sofa beside Rose.
‘I want that story later, please,’ she whispered.
Rose’s stomach flipped as she nodded, trying to think about how much she would have seen, and how much she would have to tell her.
By the end of ‘Mr and Mrs’, Rose was feeling drunk. Pippa kept getting the answers right to every question – her and Mike answered the exact same way when they were asked about how they met (behind the Portaloos at Glastonbury when they both skipped the queue to pee in the bushes) and their first kiss (a few minutes after they’d each had a wee). It meant the hens had been drinking shots of Jägerbombs every few minutes for the past hour. Rose had pretended to drink hers by fake swallowing and then quickly spitting it out into the empty mug she’d placed in front of her for that exact purpose – but Fran had spotted her.
‘Rose, you can’t spit it out!’ she said loud enough so that the entire room heard.
‘I just really hate Jäger,’ Rose replied, helplessly, looking around the room trying to find eye contact with someone else who also hated Jäger. No one looked up.
Fran handed her the mug back and demanded Rose drink it. She obliged, the sweet liquor lingering on the sides of her throat.
By the evening, Rose had taken to smoking as often as she could to get a break from the activities inside. Amazingly, this was something that Jessie permitted. Lizzie and Ruby were often outside, too, both smoking roll-ups that they were more than happy to offer Rose. Instead of smoking on the estate’s grounds, they’d chosen a small balcony off one of the guest bedrooms. It was removed: silent, peaceful and less intimidating. In the evening light, the vast acres of land surrounding Pippa’s home were in full view. Rose looked out onto a vegetable patch on one side, and what appeared to be a rose garden on the other, while Lizzie and Ruby mostly gossiped about the other hens. Rose didn’t need to say anything to learn, within a matter of five minutes, that Jessie was sleeping with her boss. ‘You’d think she’d be a little less uptight,’ laughed Lizzie. They continued to talk about the other girls in the group but Rose had zoned out.
Instead, her eyes and ears remained fixed on the world beneath the balcony. There were hedges that had been perfectly trimmed to represent every possible geometrical shape possible, even a hexagon. Further on, if she really stretched her eyes she could just make out the cool blue shape of a pool, enclosed by more hedges.
‘It’s pretty wild, isn’t it?’ said Lizzie, her head peeking over her shoulder, cigarette dangling to the right as ash stained the tiles on the balcony floor.
‘I had no idea it was like this,’ Rose replied.
