‘We were thinking about “Waterfalls”. Or Poppet’s quite keen on “Whole Again”, but Nic hates Jenny Frost.’
He frowned. ‘I meant us.’
‘Oh, sorry. I thought you didn’t like doing the whole,’ Lizzy made finger quotes, ‘“couples doing couples” thing.’
‘Yeah, with fancy dress.’ He gave her a nudge. ‘What’s your favourite duet? You can choose anything you want.’
‘“Summer Nights” is always a good one.’
Justin screwed his face up. ‘Too cheesy.’
‘“Islands in the Stream”?’
‘Same. It needs to be something more contemporary.’
‘How about Beyoncé and Jay-Z, “Bonnie and Clyde”? At least we get the couples theme in somewhere.’
‘It’s got loads of rapping in it.’
‘I thought you said you used to MC round all the clubs in Basingstoke when you were younger?’
Justin looked vaguely irritated. ‘I just haven’t had the chance to practise for ages. I know! Let’s do that “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling”.’
‘Didn’t you want something contemporary? It’s not exactly very romantic either,’ Lizzy joked.
‘
Top Gun
is number three in my top five films!’ He was all buoyed up again. ‘I’ll go and put our names down.’
The deck below was packed. Someone had just finished murdering Bruno Mars and now it was Lizzy and Justin’s turn.
‘I’ll go first,’ he told her. ‘You can come in on the chorus.’
Lizzy had no idea he’d take it so seriously. They’d had a powwow at the side of the stage to get “in the zone”, and Justin was now strutting round with his microphone. She watched him blow a kiss to the crowd as the intro started; who’d have thought there was such an entertainer lurking inside him?
A minute later Lizzy was just wondering whether to get down and leave him to it when Justin suddenly turned round and threw himself down in front of her. ‘Baby, baby …’ he crooned.
‘I’d get down on my knees for yoooo,’ the crowd sang along.
It all happened in a split second. Lizzy and Justin’s eyes locked. There was a shout from the crowd.
‘Oh my God! He’s going to propose!’
The music suddenly cut off. A chant started up. ‘Ask her, ask her, ask her!’
Lizzy caught a glimpse of Poppet’s face across the sea of people in the room. Her mouth had formed into a little ‘O’.
Justin scrambled to his feet. ‘Well, the thing is …’ His microphone screeched horribly.
‘Just ask her!’ someone cried.
‘The thing is …’ He gave a weak smile. ‘I guess this has just taken me a bit by surprise.’
‘No it hasn’t, you were going to propose tomorrow!’ shouted a girl dressed as Joan of Arc who Lizzy had never met before.
What the hell?
‘I was?’ Justin asked.
Joan of Arc pointed at Poppet. ‘That’s what she said in the queue for the loo.’
‘I was joking!’ Poppet wailed. ‘Me and Nic were just saying how hilarious it would be if he actually did ask Lizzy to marry him!’
Standing beside Poppet, Nic put her head in her hands.
‘So you
have
been talking about it with your friends?’ Justin said uncertainly.
‘No! I mean, yes, but not seriously! In a kind of “Oh my God, can you imagine!” way, like Poppet said. It’s what girls do, isn’t it? Anyway,’ Lizzy added lamely, ‘my mum said it first, not me.’
‘Your
mum
thinks I’m going to propose?’
Lizzy gave him a desperate smile. ‘You said you had something special to ask me at lunch tomorrow?’
‘Speak up!’ someone cried. ‘I missed that!’
Justin’s face had turned the same colour as his khaki jumpsuit. ‘I was going to ask if you wanted to go on a mini break.’
‘A
mini break
?’ Lizzy’s words echoed round the room.
‘Yeah,’ he said uncertainly. ‘Did you really think I was going to ask you to marry me?’
‘No! But, well, I thought you might be going to ask me to move in.’
‘What? No way! What I mean is,’ he said hurriedly, ‘it’s a bit too soon to be thinking about that.’
He’d subconsciously taken a step back from her. Lizzy started having the strangest out-of-body experience.
I’m not standing up here
, she thought to herself.
This isn’t happening.
The room had gone deathly quiet. Justin turned to Lizzy. ‘You’re a really nice girl and we have lots of fun,’ he told her. ‘But you’re moving
way
too fast.’
‘So why ask me on a mini break?’ she asked feebly.
He gave a helpless shrug. ‘Everyone else seemed to be going on them. I got a really good deal on this hotel with a golf course and it had a nice spa. I thought you could go there while I played a few rounds and went to the gym …’ He trailed off.
Lizzy’s throat had dried up to the point where she was no longer capable of producing saliva. ‘So basically you’re saying I was your plus one on a sports holiday?’
‘I wouldn’t put it exactly like that,’ he said uncomfortably. ‘We’d get to spend some time together as well.’ Lizzy searched in vain for Poppet and Nic. But all she could see were the mesmerized faces of their audience looking back at her.
Justin’s eyes were flicking towards the emergency exit. ‘You’ve got the wrong end of the stick,’ he told Lizzy. ‘I just thought a mini break would give us the chance to spend some proper time together, you know, and see how things go. But all this talk of marriage …’
‘But my mum said it, not me,’ she said miserably.
He wasn’t listening. ‘If you’re thinking like this now, what are you going to be like in a year’s time? Planning our children’s names?’
He caught sight of Lizzy’s guilty expression. ‘Oh come on!’ she protested. ‘We’ve all had the old “what we’d call our kids” conversation.’ She appealed to the crowd. ‘Haven’t we?’
Her words faded into the deafening silence. Justin shook his head violently. ‘You’ve forced me into a corner. I’m sorry, Lizzy, but you were never the girl that I was going to marry.’
There was a collective ‘
Ouch!
’ across the room. Justin put his hand on her arm, like a vet about to put an elderly dog out of its misery. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. ‘It’s over.’
Lizzy could feel the blood rushing into her ears. A hundred pairs of eyes were boring into her, sealing her hot humiliation. What happened next was so left field and unexpected it took everyone by surprise, most of all her. She put her hands on Justin’s shoulders and pulled him towards her. A look of surprised relief crossed his face as he thought she was about to give him a magnanimous hug, then Lizzy headbutted him, hard.
It was bad enough getting dumped by your boyfriend in front of a room full of people. Especially when one of those people records the whole thing on their camera phone. But by far the worst thing is when that person decides to put the footage on YouTube.
By midday on Sunday ‘Girl Who Gets Jilted at 30
th
Birthday and Headbutts Boyfriend’ had three hundred thousand hits and rising. To compound Lizzy’s shame, the ginger beard had muffled her voice, so it was only Justin who you could hear. It was all there in excruciating detail: Lizzy in her floppy hat looking like a confused Weeble, Justin delivering his devastating line:
I’m sorry, Lizzy, but you were never the girl I was going to marry
, Lizzy’s head jerking forward like a giant woodpecker, and Justin staggering backwards holding his hands over his bloody nose. The footage ended abruptly at that point, but the damage had been done.
Lizzy was still hiding under her duvet, where she’d been for nearly twelve hours straight.
‘Are you sure I can’t get you anything?’ Poppet was perched on the end of the bed in a hoody of Lizzy’s that was too big for her. She hadn’t stopped apologizing all night.
‘I’m fine.’
‘This is all my fault! If only I hadn’t said anything! Do you really hate me?’
‘Of course I don’t hate you.’ Lizzy’s voice didn’t feel like her own. Nothing felt like it was her own. Was this how a person felt when they were suffering from posttraumatic stress syndrome?
‘Are you sure you haven’t hurt your head?’ Poppet asked.
‘No.’
It was true. Somehow Lizzy had known instinctively where to headbutt Justin and cause the maximum damage whilst leaving herself without even a mark. It was like something primeval had reared up out from the depths of her soul. Lizzy had never so much as bitch slapped anyone in her life. It was shocking to discover she was capable of such off-the-wall violence.
She heard Poppet gasp. ‘You’ve got another ten thousand hits on YouTube! What if you go bigger than “Gangnam Style”?’
An hour later Lizzy’s identity was leaked when someone uploaded a Facebook picture of her with a triple chin on to one of the gossip websites. Journalists started to cluster outside her block of flats and rang the doorbell constantly, until Poppet bravely went outside and disabled the bell by bashing it with a wok she’d found collecting dust at the back of the cupboard. Afterwards she tried coaxing Lizzy out from under the duvet with a cup of tea, but Lizzy wasn’t having any of it.
‘I just want to be left alone. How did these people find me?’
‘Why don’t you take the hat off, at least?’ Poppet suggested. ‘It must be really hot under there.’
Lizzy made a
meurgggh
noise.
‘I know, I’ll make you some toast! The sell-by date on the bread is last week but I’ll just cut the mouldy bits off.’
Lizzy heard Poppet leave the room again. It did smell like something had died under the duvet.
My dignity
, Lizzy thought. She was still in the Henry VIII costume, as if it were armour protecting her from the full horror of what had happened.
She shuffled miserably round the mattress trying to find a cold spot. There had been no word from Justin. They were meant to have been sitting down for their romantic lunch by now and planning their mini break. Instead, Lizzy was newly single, humiliated on a national scale and wearing a pair of polyester breeches that had disappeared right up her bum crack.
How had this
happened
?
Part of her was still expecting Justin to rock up with a sheepish smile on his face. He would admit he’d just freaked out and hadn’t really meant it, and that he’d deserved the bloody nose. Or else a camera crew would spring out of the wardrobe and tell Lizzy she’d been the victim of a TV prank. Lizzy would take it all with good grace and coolly remark that she didn’t want to marry Justin anyway. She’d come out of the whole thing really well and it would make Justin realize what he’d lost and decide that maybe he
did
want more than a mini break. Henry VIII would become the nation’s most popular choice for fancy dress and everyone would live happily ever after. (Once Lizzy had made her errant boyfriend suffer for the appropriate amount of time.)
Justin didn’t come round. There was no camera crew hiding, no matter how many times Poppet searched the flat. By 3 p.m. ‘Girl Who Gets Jilted at 30
th
Birthday and Headbutts Boyfriend’ had reached six hundred thousand hits and Lizzy had twenty thousand new Twitter followers. People were retweeting the link as far as Uzbekistan and China. Someone had set up a fake Twitter account
@DumpedHeadbuttGirl
and was tweeting things like, ‘Butt out you lot, my love life is none of your business,’ and ‘All the single ladies, all the single ladies! *weeps silently and stabs Beyoncé poster in eye with pencil*.’ Someone else had even created a Vine set to the eighties power ballad ‘Love Is A Battlefield’, where the infamous moment was on slow-motion constant repeat.
‘That one’s actually quite funny,’ Poppet accidentally said in front of Lizzy, before swiftly pressing ‘hide’.
At 4.15 p.m. Nic called from the airport. Poppet put her on speakerphone.
‘Has she spoken yet?’ Nic asked.
‘The odd word,’ Poppet sighed. ‘She’s still refusing to come out from under the duvet.’
‘Lizzy, you listen, OK? Justin is a
massive wanker
who didn’t deserve you in the first place.’
‘She’s worried he’s going to press charges for GBH,’ Poppet told her.
‘He’s lucky you didn’t kick him so hard in the bollocks he’s blowing them out through his nose. He hasn’t got a leg to stand on. Look, they’re calling my flight. I’ll call you when I land.’
Lizzy continued to lie there in the fetid dark, trying not to breathe in the noxious fumes from her own body.
Welcome to Duvetland! A place where humiliated exes come to fester.
‘Oh dear,’ Poppet suddenly said.
Lizzy stuck her head out. ‘What is it?’
Her friend smiled nervously. ‘You’re on the
MailOnline
.’
Lizzy grabbed the laptop. She was at the top of the infamous ‘Sidebar of Shame’. The caption read: ‘Hell hath no fury! PR Lizzy Spellman Unmasked as “Girl Who Gets Jilted at 30
th
Birthday and Headbutts Boyfriend” Goes Viral.’
‘Don’t get upset!’ Poppet implored her. ‘Remember that YouTube video of that American girl who was walking along texting in a shopping mall and she fell into a fountain! That was
way
more embarrassing.’
It was official: Lizzy’s life was OVER.
Lizzy woke with a start. What a horrible nightmare. The fancy-dress party, the YouTube viral, the gang of paparazzi outside her flat. It had felt so
real
…
A horn went off right by her ear, nearly giving Lizzy a heart attack. It was her ‘Sherwood Forest’ text alert. It was from Nic.
How are you feeling? Has Twat Face got in contact to say sorry yet?
Oh God! It hadn’t been a nightmare! The events of the last twenty-four hours flashed through Lizzy’s mind like the reel from a horror film. Her laptop was on the bed next to her, still open on the last
Daily Mail
article about her: ‘Unmarried Women in Japan Hold Candlelit Vigil for Lizzy Spellman’.
There was no way she could go to work. She sent her boss a text and crawled back under the covers. She’d have to hire someone to do
her
PR at this rate.
Poppet called on her way to a client meeting. ‘Have the reporters gone yet?’
‘There’s even more of them,’ Lizzy said wearily. ‘They’ve started putting twenty-pound notes through the door trying to bribe me to talk to them.’