I was bored.
Excruciatingly bored and as a result restless which was making me feel and act increasingly acerbic to everyone around me. That I was faced with the prospect a minimum of another three to four hours before I could escape the arduous torture that Jon and the newly monikered Evie Robert's Wedding had become did little to help my dour mood.
I had known Jon for over twenty three years, since meeting him at University. Given that in those subsequent twenty three years this was the third wedding I'd attended with his name on the invitation there was a line of thought that suggested that no matter how radiant the new Mrs. Roberts looked in a crisp white lace dress that clung to her slender frame as she sat beaming at the top table, she had her work cut out for her in respect to maintaining Jon's infamous roving eye.
"So you're still working in Sales then?" Alex Pettinger another former closer friend who I have probably not seen in at least 18 months enquires a little condescendingly as he pours himself a glass of Red Wine and negates to notice let alone fill my own empty glass.
"And Marketing?" I offer glibly, referencing the department I used to work within rather than the secrecy of the unemployed status I currently hold, unemployment that has been born of my own decision. "I've always enjoyed the lifestyle... and it more than provides for my needs."
I was not up for a dick measuring contest around the table of Ten, knowing full well if it came to comparisons of careers and wage packets, I was the runt of the metaphoric litter. There was a time when I had once aspired to such heights, when I had harboured the same energy and work ethic that had landed my former colleagues promotions, private offices and no doubt hefty tax bills by virtue of their elevated wages alone.
The time when the trappings of such a lifestyle gained by a hideous lack of work life balance had appealed to me, but those days had long passed, the life sucked out of me at times in the pursuit of perceived happiness. Not least on a succession of failed opportunities to internally ascend companies in either rank or stature, but also through several poorly considered switches to companies with whom given the benefit of hindsight I lacked anywhere near the commercial nous to develop myself as an individual.
I work to live these days rather than lived to work. The balance suited me. As I look around the table, I am happy with such a status quo. Equally I feel no need to impart any knowledge of the burgeoning new business plan I currently work on, even with financial loans already in place. To peacock such ambition of a proposed venture into self employed working status is of no concern of anyone else but myself. I'd hazard a guess, as I stop to consider the recent considerable deposit, that my bank account is actually the healthiest of anyone I am duty bound to make small talk with.
"Sorry to ask..." Alex asks anyway, "...but do you see much of Sarah anymore?"
"Given she can't fucking stand the sight of me... no not that much" I offer a little too honestly. "Or Jack for that matter,"
My response was meant as glib, but as I note the sharp snap of attention from several other faces around the table turn towards me I appreciate it may have sounded far more bitter than I had intended. Deciding not to dwell on the matter, with the exception of one set of eyes the eight others around the circular table had all attended my wedding eighteen years ago. They had all wished me well and no doubt complained then that the salmon starter served up to them that day had been 'a little paltry' whilst smiling inanely and quaffing down as much complimentary wine as they possibly could.
Weddings were an unnecessary sham as far as I was concerned, a notion that I had long maintained even when it had been my own supposedly big day. I had gone through the motions to comply with the needs of others by the expectation of tradition. I was more of the opinion these days that people should hold divorce celebrations, gather friends and family together in celebration of newfound freedoms. The hospitality industry is really missing a trick by not cashing in on such potential.
"I'm not sure why you'd be sorry to ask Alex...," I offer leaning towards him and his wife Debbie once general chatter had uncomfortably resumed around the table, "...I'm the one who was caught sleeping with Jack's incredibly attractive school teacher... Sarah and I were past salvation long before that happened though."
Alex offers an awkward little smile at the crassness of my comment while his own Wife can barely contain the sneer that curls at her lip. I had always suspected Debbie Pettinger had preferred my Ex-Wife's company over my own, that had always been apparent. The feeling was mutual I could not say that I missed the back and forth that our previously regularly and painstakingly dull dinner parties no longer provided since I had left my soon to be Ex-Wife. Quite frankly I would rather stay home for packet noodles and a wank on a Saturday night that choke down another of Debbie Pettinger's culinary creations born of the imagination of a celebrity Chef's latest cookbook. Her constant ability to manage to add no flavour to a plate of food was astounding. Life as a Fitness and Yoga instructor may well keep her in shape but she was far from achieving the self titled Stepford Wife status she desperately sought on the domestic front.
The uncomfortable conversation is disturbed by a young male Waiter who reaches between myself and Alex to collect the plate on which my own 'slightly paltry' smoked salmon starter had been consumed from. I let the conversation fall away as my eyes drift around the room, wondering if there were any better tables on which I could have been seated.
My eyes then unintentionally catch hers and she offers me a weak, slightly awkward little smile. The only person of genuine intrigue around the table was the one person I do not truly know, and the one who under the circumstances would be almost impossible to get to know.
Pippa Hunter the nineteen year old daughter of Gavin and Samantha Hunter. Gavin worked managed his own Public Relations firm and he no longer needed to boast how well he was doing, my oldest friend around the table and his family were very visibly dripping in wealth, on a superficial level at least. The shine to the heavily polished Black BMW SUV I had seen them arrive in earlier underlined that level of wealth in a very crass manner.
Samantha, a housewife now but a qualified Lawyer in her own right, and Gavin had been together since our second year at University. Much of her first year at University had been spent in the throes of a surreptitious relationship with myself under the pretence of the relationship she had kept with a long term partner who was studying elsewhere in the country. Essentially we had an arrangement where by we would regularly hook up for casual sex at the end of a night, following her intense periods of study when she needed a release or quite simply when we were bored and there was nothing else to do but fuck.
The memory of Samantha, Sam as she would always be known to me, had as a result forever stayed with me. The passion and energy of our purely physical relationship etched into my memory. Some girls stay with you like that for a lifetime, and every relationship I'd held since her was always compared to the energy and sordid pleasure gained of our regular hook ups ever since the first night spent together in a single bed in her forever untidy room on the fourth floor of Halls of residence on the University Campus.
As I glance from Pippa to Samantha who herself is squeezed into a jaw dropping navy blue fitted dress as she flicks through her phone looking as bored as her daughter I stifle a sordid grin of a memory. Knowing by trust the trust of our casual relationship I had been the one to take her anal virginity all those years ago.
My attention now falls back to Pippa trying desperately to keep my eye-line from the ample cleavage displayed by the light blue halter neck dress she wears that is decorated with pastel roses. Under the bangs of her dark blonde hair with mesmerising pale blue eyes young Pippa looks uncannily like her mother at the same age.
I had never quite understood how Gavin had wrestled Samantha away from her long term relationship or our own casual arrangement. Somehow, I had lost out to my then best friend, and Samantha's ambiguous morals did not extend to accommodating my needs once she had embarked on her relationship with Gavin. Much to my disappointment. His somewhat possessive nature possibly also explaining why even on the rare occasions we all saw one another over the preceding twenty years Gavin was forever keen to steer Sam away from my company.
Pippa holds her weak smile as I remind myself not to make her feel uncomfortable. Her right hand on which a number of gold bracelets sit reaches up to tuck her honey blonde hair back behind her right ear.
Our brief interaction lost then to the further intrusion of the same male waiter who now leans forward over her left shoulder to collect her plate. As he deliberately grazes past her I watch her eye-line meet his and Pippa offers the Waiter a far more endearing smile than she has afforded me, dare I suggests a flirtatious smile as I note her cheeks flush a little on the eye contact she briefly makes with the dark skinned waiter.
I grin a little recognising the same flirtatious little smile her mother would have offered to me twenty years earlier.
"Chicken or Vegetarian?" a second young male waiter offers from over my left shoulder.
