‘Morning!’ Lara was woken by Vicky shaking her. ‘Blinking heck, Lara, I thought you were dead for a minute. How could you have slept through all those bing-bong tannoy calls? They’ve been going off since six. Get up, you lazy sod. We’re in Rotterdam and I need a coffee.’
Lara opened her eyes and, for a split second, she expected to see Vicky’s teenage bedroom and not the cabin of the boat. She used to stay over at Vicky’s house a lot when she was young. The four of them were always camping out in each other’s bedrooms, but Vicky had the full top floor of their house to herself. And she had her own wonderful pink bathroom.
Lara always wanted a bathroom to herself and she was to get her wish. She and Freddie had designed their own new home, which would be ready for them to move into by Christmas. As a surprise for her, he’d altered the plans to make sure that she had both her own dressing room and her own bathroom. Then she could decorate it in pink with unicorns if she wanted to, he’d teased.
‘Here, this is your costume for today,’ said Vicky, and passed her a carrier bag. Inside it was a headband with two hens’ heads on wire springs fastened to it, and a T-shirt, with a picture of a hen’s head, and giant pink lettering: ‘LARA’S HEN DO – I’M THE HEN’.
‘You. Are. Joking,’ Lara said.
‘No, I’m not. You’re lucky you got this. You have no idea what Pip wanted you to wear.’
Fifteen minutes later, Lara was showered, dressed, wearing her headband and walking towards the meeting place in Costa with Vicky, who was wearing her own headband and ‘LARA’S HEN DO – CHIEF BRIDESMAID’ T-shirt.
Pip was feeling much better now that the boat had stopped moving. She and Jo had slept well, and had coffees waiting for the others. They could have had breakfast on board, but decided to have something in Amsterdam instead. A friend of Jo’s had told her about a little café that sold great food. It was called the Happy Pancake. In Holland pancakes were something special, Jo’s friend told her.
The bus journey from Rotterdam to Amsterdam took a little over an hour. Vicky sat with Pip in her ‘LARA’S HEN DO – BEST-LOOKING BRIDESMAID’ T-shirt. Behind them sat Lara and Jo, in her ‘LARA’S HEN DO – CLASSIEST BRIDESMAID’ T-shirt. She was too. Jo oozed magical classy vibes. She even made her hen-do costume look like something Coco Chanel had designed.
Jo was feeling guilty that Lara ended up sitting in the bar by herself last night.
‘I wanted to,’ Lara laughed. ‘I wasn’t ready for bed and it was nice sitting there, sipping a toffee vodka.’
‘Toffee vodka? That sounds yummy,’ said Jo.
‘The singer threw up over the curtains.’
‘No way!’ Jo gasped. ‘How awful, feeling crap but still having to go onstage and sing.’
Lara remembered then, waiting in the wings to go onstage and dreading it. Someone saying to her, Once you get out there, you’ll feel amazing. She hadn’t. All she wanted was to do what she had to and go home. Sometimes, when they were on the road, she didn’t finish until three or four in the morning. And then she collapsed into bed, too tired to undress. She didn’t feel the same thrill that Danny felt standing in front of a crowd, even if she pretended to him that she did. Until it made her so miserable that she could pretend no more.
‘First stop – a café,’ said Pip peering through the gap in the seats. ‘Then Anne Frank’s house, then the Van Gogh museum. That okay with you two?’
‘Sounds perfect,’ said Lara, who had been forced into letting her friends plan the day. But they had planned it knowing what she wanted to see most while they were there.
‘I can’t believe it. After all these years – three weeks and you’ll be Mrs Elmtree,’ said Jo. ‘It’ll take some getting used to, not calling you Lara Cliffe any more. I feel as if I’ve been Jo England for ever. The days of being Miss Jo Baker seem so long ago now.’
‘If I get married,’ said Lara, without thinking.
‘Eh?’
‘Nothing,’ Lara said quickly.
But Jo wouldn’t let it go. ‘No, Lara, what do you mean? You can’t just pretend you didn’t say it.’
‘It was a joke.’
‘Liar.’
‘Last-minute nerves, that’s all,’ said Lara. ‘I keep thinking about what happened last time I was supposed to get married.’
‘Last time you were getting married to a dickhead. That’s the difference, Lara. There is no way that Freddie would let you down and walk off into the sunset with another woman.’
‘I know,’ said Lara.
‘The man’s built you a dressing room and your own bathroom so you can poo in total privacy. That’s proper love, that is. Stop worrying,’ said Vicky.
Lara smiled. She had no doubt of Freddie’s feelings for her. He couldn’t wait to be married to her, couldn’t wait until she was Mrs Lara Elmtree. And Lara was as giddy as he was about it all. So why was she having all these stupid thoughts about past days and Danny Belfont? And was it fate that he was back in her life?
*
The bus dropped everyone outside the huge central railway station. They were to be back at five o’clock, which left them loads of time to do what they had to.
‘Right, the café is over there somewhere,’ said Vicky, pointing with one hand while holding her map with the other. ‘I’m flipping starving.’
‘Tell us something we don’t know,’ replied Pip. ‘I can’t understand why you aren’t forty stone with all you eat.’
Vicky had a very good appetite, but never put on any weight.
‘I do burn it off chasing around after four kids, remember,’ she explained. ‘Come on – this way, says the map. Look for a sign that says Dam Square.’
They followed her like baby ducklings behind a mama duck across the road, stepping over the many metal tramlines. Then they turned onto a wide, busy street full of shops selling everything from cheese to tulips, chips to clogs.
About halfway down, Vicky halted and nodded to a building on her right. ‘What do you think? Should we make a little stop here first?’
The sign above the open doorway said ‘SEXMUSEUM’.
‘You might pick up some tips for your wedding night,’ said Pip, giving Lara a nudge.
‘Or give them some tips of your own,’ cackled Vicky. ‘Come on. Breakfast can wait for half an hour. We can’t come to Amsterdam and not go in there.’
Pip attached her selfie stick to her phone and took a photo of them all standing outside and then they went in. It cost five euros each and the woman at the kiosk, who spoke very good English, told them that they were allowed to take as many photos as they wished inside. They took lots. And they giggled like teenage girls who had just found a dirty book on the back seat of a school bus.
Then they left to find the Happy Pancake, which was only a short walk away.
The café was joined to an old church and was clean and comfortable inside. They all ordered pancakes and coffee, which arrived in record time, delivered by a handsome young waiter.
‘I wouldn’t mind him with a fried egg,’ said Pip with a dirty laugh. She wasn’t usually the sort of person to make smutty remarks, so the others looked at her with raised eyebrows.
‘What?’ she answered their stares.
‘Eat your pancake,’ ordered Lara. ‘Or I’ll tell teacher.’
‘Funny.’
‘We have fast-track tickets, so we don’t have to queue at the Anne Frank House,’ said Vicky, checking in her handbag yet again to make sure she had brought them. She’d been worried sick about forgetting them.
‘How much did they cost?’ asked Lara, through a mouthful of pancake. She had cheese on hers. Jo had Nutella, Pip had banana and syrup and Vicky had apple and cinnamon.
‘Never mind how much they cost. I told you, Freddie’s footing the bill,’ said Vicky. ‘I tell you, Lara, you haven’t half landed on your feet with him.’
‘I have to admit, at first I was slightly worried,’ said Pip. ‘I did think, here she goes again. Another plonker.’
‘We all did,’ said Vicky with a nod.
Not long after Lara had passed Freddie the salt on the night they met, she went to the loo. Then Freddie tapped Pip on the shoulder and asked her if Lara was single.
‘Who’s asking?’ she said to him, wary of the big, bearded man.
‘Me,’ he said. ‘I’d like to ask her out, so is she . . . free?’
‘Not to plonkers,’ replied Pip, who was on her third glass of wine by then. ‘Are you a plonker?’
Freddie had laughed then. ‘Sometimes. But I’m a nice plonker.’
‘He is the best plonker on the planet,’ said the man sitting beside Freddie, turning in his seat to butt in.
‘Cheers, pal,’ Freddie said to him.
The friend turned to the rest of the table then. ‘This lady has asked if Freddie is a plonker. What do we think, lads?’
‘He’s a great plonker,’ said one.
‘The best,’ said another, and raised his glass as if toasting him.
‘You won’t find a better plonker than our Freddie,’ said another. ‘He’s the plonker of all plonkers.’
‘Lara’s coming back,’ Jo warned everyone.
Pip sometimes had nightmares in which she’d told Freddie that Lara wasn’t single. She was sure that, if she had, Freddie would have respected her answer and not asked her friend out. They would have gone their separate ways and probably never met again. But luckily she said, ‘Yes, she is single and her name is Lara. And if you ask her out and mess her around, you’ll have us three to deal with. And we can be really scary. Is that understood?’
‘Thank you,’ said Freddie with a grin. ‘I’ll let you get on with your meal in peace now.’
Just before the party of men left, Freddie leaned over Lara and asked if he could have a quiet word with her away from everyone. She had no idea what he could want, but still she had followed him to the corner of the room. There he’d told her that he would like to take her out for dinner and had handed over his number written on a scrap of paper. If she didn’t text him ‘yes’, he wouldn’t bother her again. If she did, he’d book a table for two at Bistro Marco on Sunday night at seven.
‘Bistro Marco?’ said Jo and whistled, when Lara told them all what he’d said.
‘Bistro Marco?’ said Vicky and smiled.
‘Bistro Marco?’ said Pip, impressed.
Bistro Marco was a very posh Italian on the edge of town.
But Lara had given up on love. She screwed up his number and put it in the bin at home. Then she remembered how polite he had been, a proper gentleman, and she fished the piece of paper back out. She texted YES to the number, met him at Bistro Marco, and here she was, three years later, on her hen do. Her friends loved Freddie, everyone loved Freddie. Even her mother, who’d treated all of her boyfriends as if they were clones of Danny Belfont, adored him. Her parents had finally met the man who was good enough for their daughter. The man who restored her faith in love, years after she thought she had lost it for ever. The man who put the sun back into her heart.