My Fake Wedding(8)

Still, I can’t help feeling a bit sorry for the poor cow. Anyone could see Sam didn’t really love her. He took me out for dinner on her birthday because I’d just been dumped. She must have been a bit doolally in the first place to have been so totally sucked in by him.

‘She sensed he was cooling off so she asked him to go for a walk on Wandsworth Common,’ I tell the others. ‘Wanted a chat.’

‘Actually—’

‘Shut up, Sam. I’ll tell it. I know it better than you.’

‘That’s because you make half of it up.’

‘Shh. Anyway, they drank a bottle of wine in the pub first. Then, when they sat down to talk, he fell asleep. The silly bitch waited an hour and a half for him to wake up. And when he did, guess what?’

‘He gave her the old “it’s not you, it’s me” bullshit and left?’ Janice hazards a guess.

‘Spot on. What a waste of a Saturday afternoon. She could’ve gone shopping instead.’

‘You bastard, Sam,’ Janice says. But she bats her eyelashes at him as she says it. His eyes widen in terror and he shifts away from her slightly.

‘You are a bastard, Sam,’ I tell him. ‘You’re a Quick Erection, Instant Rejection merchant just like the rest of them.’

‘I’m not.’

‘You are. You wouldn’t have got away with that with me, you wanker,’ I tell him, in no uncertain terms. ‘I’d have got your knob out and left you there with it lolling out of your flies. Not that anyone would have noticed, what with you having a dick like a bit of Heinz spaghetti.’

‘And how would you know?’ Sam grins.

He has a point. I might have known him all my life but Sam could have a willy like a lump of baloney sausage for all I know. I change the subject. ‘What about you, George? What’s your New Year’s resolution?’

For a second, George looks uncharacteristically wistful.

‘A baby,’ he says firmly. ‘I’d like to get a baby. My maternal instincts are kicking in. I could hardly dance in the club last night because my biological clock was drowning out the beat of the music.’

Oh good giddy God.

‘And I saw a lovely one the other day in Harvey Nicks.’

‘Clock?’

‘Baby,’ he says despairingly. ‘Great cheekbones for one so young. And it was wearing this gorgeous little Gucci cashmere thing with poppers. Don’t suppose you’d care to oblige, would you, Katie? Provide the oven if I supply the bun, sort of thing?’

‘Fuck off,’ I tell him. ‘I wouldn’t bonk you if you were the last man on earth.’

Actually that’s not true. George isn’t the sort of man you’d kick out of bed for farting. If he were straight, he’d be quite a catch. I, for one, would shag him like a shot. It’s my personal tragedy that he is, as my mother puts it, ‘riding the other bus’. If he offered me the chance of a quick bunk up I’d leap at it like a Jack-in-the-box. But it’s not very likely, I’m afraid. George has always preferred to go in the back door. Gusset-wise, he’s as safe as industrial-strength Durex.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he scoffs. ‘You haven’t got a penis. Why would I want to shag you?’

‘What then?’

‘I thought we could baste one,’ he says. ‘Like Max and Jacqui did in Brookside. You’ve always said you don’t want your own kids.’

‘Too bloody right,’ I mutter. ‘Giving birth gives you Stilton cheese veins in your legs and bunches of grapes dangling out of your bum.’

‘We’re eating,’ says Sam, rubbing a hand through his shock of hair and making it stick up even more.

‘What’s your point?’ George asks innocently.

‘My point,’ I tell him sternly, ‘is that I’m blithered if I’m widdling the equivalent of the Empire State Building through a drinking straw just so you can satisfy your ego by carting it around like a Prada handbag. The answer’s no, George. N bloody O.’

‘You wouldn’t be able to cope with the birth,’ Janice points out.

‘Neither would Katie.’ Sam shovels in doughballs.

‘The blood and the stitches would make you barf,’ I remind George.

‘Probably wouldn’t need stitches, the men you’ve had,’ Janice jokes. ‘Be like waving a finger of fudge round the Lincoln Tunnel.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ I say. ‘I’m not the one who stakes out haulage companies in search of nice bits of rough. What if you didn’t like the look of it?’ I get back to George’s and my imaginary basted baby. ‘You wouldn’t be able to send it back. You can’t just order a baby as if it’s a pizza and then return it if you don’t like it. What if it comes out dog ugly?’