Page 24 of The Wedding Forecast

‘Your mum seems nice,’ Mac says.

Again, I don’t know if he’s being sarcastic or serious. Why is this man so hard to read?

‘She can be a lot,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry about the Tom Hanks questions.’

‘She’s funny,’ he says, and then he adds, ‘You can see how much she loves you.’

It’s a slightly odd thing to say and it’s in this moment, as I scrutinise his face, I remember. His mother died. A few years after we finished uni. I remember Luke telling us. I am mortified this information slid out of my memory so easily. I remember talking with Hayley, asking her if Luke was okay after the funeral, because we were young and funerals were strange, foreign things, especially funerals for parents, especially funerals for parents who died unexpectedly. (It was a brain aneurysm; the details are rushing back to me.) It hit Luke hard, this woman he’d known for all of his childhood dying suddenly. I remember wondering if Mac was okay, although I didn’t know him at all, so it was more of an imagined thought, this poor guy, a friend of a friend, losing his mother.

How self-absorbed has the Joel situation made me that I forgot that about Mac entirely? That a pair of pants has taken up more mental space for me than someone’s dead mother. I feel the urge to say something, but I have no idea what. Yes, my mother loves me, I’m so sorry about yours? I don’t know what kind of relationship he had with his mother.

‘She does love me,’ I reply, after letting his words sit there for too long. I scramble to find something else to say, to move the conversation on. Or maybe that’s wrong, and he wants to talk about mothers. Maybe I should bring up the fact I know about his. I hesitate. He looks over my shoulder.

‘There’s Patrick,’ he says.

‘Where?’ I say, swinging around.

I spot him walking through the glass doors. Very tall, quite thin, pale, a head of curly red hair, which I like—there is something immediately endearing to me about red-headed men. He’s wearing a shirt that looks a touch too big on his skinny frame, camera bags in hand. He’s cute. He’s objectively cute. Hayley makes an excited face at me and hurries over to us.

‘Tall,’ Mac notes, still standing beside me.

‘He’s tall,’ Hayley says breathlessly, grabbing my arm.

Bobbi and Mum are on her heels.

‘That’s Patrick,’ Bobbi says, in a stage whisper. ‘See how tall he is!’

‘Almost six-four, he told me,’ Mum adds.

‘I have noted his height,’ I say. You would think I had some kind of height fetish.

We’re now all crowded together, a focal point in the room, drawing attention.

‘Please let this be the last thing anyone says about him tonight. At least until we are out of the restaurant,’ I whisper. ‘And no looking at him. Or me. I can’t attempt to flirt under these conditions, with you all commenting and watching.’

They all nod solemnly, even Mac, who looks amused. I can’t flirt under any conditions, really, as I have discovered in my brief single time. I’m a writer, I should be excelling at the dating apps with my funny banter, but men never seem to understand my tone, or my jokes. Or we’ll text on and off for days and then they’ll suddenly ghost me. Once I thought the conversation was going fairly well, we were getting into territory that was almost interesting, and he wrote, ‘Sorry gotta bounce, this conversation is dry as fuck.’ The breathtaking rudeness, the casual cruelty, the lack of care, the time I wasted imagining a future with someone because they wrote one message that could be interpreted as charming if you were being very, very generous and then the next day they say something so appalling you want to give up on all of humanity.

Online dating chips away at your confidence, slowly, slowly, and then all at once, until you are a shell of who you were. This is my assessment after spending twenty-one days on one app and going on two in-person dates before deleting them all late one night in a fit of despair. I will throw myself into flirting with Patrick for no other reason than this is an opportunity to do it in real life.

Also, imagine the speeches at our wedding, imagine our origin story, if we did get together. I can’t give up the chance to have a story that great. A psychic foretold us! Or maybe it’s not great. Maybe he—and more importantly, whoever is listening to me tell the story—would always be left wondering if I only dated him because of his name. No, it’s a good story. I can change it, make it work. I will say I didn’t know his name was Patrick until after I met him and thought he was cute.

Hayley has gone to greet Patrick, and I move towards where Luke is standing, realising too late that Joel and Bianca are joining him at the same time, and now we are stuck in a circle together. Bianca is sipping a Coke and looking pale.

‘How’s work?’ Joel asks me.

‘Fine,’ I say. ‘Good.’ Work is not fine or good. I work in digital marketing for an insurance company—a reasonably well-paid, stable and incredibly boring job that involves every piece of copy I write being cleared by a team of lawyers before it sees the light of day—and I detest my new boss, Marco. Joel used to enjoy hearing the minutiae of my work woes, but the days of us sharing those details are clearly over.

‘And the book release? I saw you in the paper,’ Joel says. To an unknowing bystander, this would sound like it might be a nice gesture, to mention my media coverage, but the piece in the paper that Joel is referring to was in fact more humiliating than anything else. It was an interview, and I am aware how rare it is to get an interview in the mainstream media, where book coverage is limited and fleeting, so I can’t complain, especially as a debut author. All publicity is good publicity, as my sweet publicist Claire has said multiple times. But the paper sent a photographer as well as the journalist for the interview, and the photographer encouraged me into a series of increasingly ‘zany’ shots, with an array of props, that I went along with because I’d had three coffees and a night of insomnia beforehand. The end result is a close-up of me holding a kitchen knife near my face and smiling in a maniacal way (never mind that there are no knives or stabbings whatsoever in my book), with the headline ‘This writer’s secret to success? Murder!’.

Bobbi had it laminated and she stuck it on the window of her bookshop next to a display of several copies of my book. Mum carried it everywhere with her for a month. I wouldn’t be surprised if she pulled it out tonight. Maybe she already showed Patrick. I can only imagine what Joel thought when he saw that picture.

‘The book is going great,’ I say, smiling in a way that I hope gives off the vibe that I am a bestselling author who doesn’t trifle herself to read her own media coverage or reviews. Oh, there was an article in the paper? Again? Pffft. Goodreads? Never heard of it. Definitely don’t have it bookmarked on my browser. When Joel leans over to say something to Bianca, I drop my smile and turn to make my escape.

And I bump straight into Patrick.

‘The famous Anna,’ he says, reaching out a hand to steady me.

‘Oh no, you’ve met my mother,’ I say and he laughs.