Wedding Night

in my computer screen and I lean forward in horror. I have a Nerf bullet stuck in my hair.
    Great.

3

LOTTIE
    I didn’t sleep all night.
    People say that, and what they mean is: I woke up a few times, made a cup of tea, and went back to bed. But I
really
didn’t sleep all night. I counted every hour going past.
    By one A.M. I’d decided that Fliss is totally, utterly wrong. By one-thirty I’d found myself a flight to San Francisco. By two A.M. I’d written the perfect, loving, and passionate proposal speech, including lines by Shakespeare, Richard Curtis, and Take That. By three A.M. I’d filmed myself making it (eleven takes). By four A.M. I’d watched myself and realized the horrible truth: Fliss is right. Richard will never say yes. He’ll just get freaked out. Especially if I make that speech. By five A.M. I’d eaten all the Pralines & Cream. By six A.M. I’d eaten all the Phish Food. And now I’m slumped on a plastic chair, feeling nauseous and regretting the lot of it.
    A tiny part of me still wonders if by walking out on Richard I made the biggest mistake of my life. If I’d hung on, bitten my tongue and never mentioned marriage, might our relationship have worked out? Somehow?
    But the rest of me is more rational. People say that women work on intuition and men on logic, but they’re talking rubbish. I studied logic at university, thank you very much. I
know
how it goes. A=B, B=C, therefore A=C. And what could be more logical than the following detached and succinct argument?
    Premise one: Richard has no intention of proposing to me; he made that fairly clear.
    Premise two: I want marriage and commitment and, hopefully, one day, a baby.
    Conclusion: Therefore I am not destined to be with Richard. Therefore I need to be with someone else.
    Other conclusion: Therefore I did the right thing, breaking up with him.
    Further conclusion: Therefore I need to find another man, who
does
want to make a life with me and
doesn’t
get that wide-eyed, starey look at the very mention of marriage, like it’s such a terrifying idea. Someone who realizes that if someone spends three years with you, maybe they
are
thinking of commitment and kids and a dog, and … and … decorating a Christmas tree together … and why is that such a bad thing? Why is it so totally and utterly off the agenda and unmentionable? When everyone says we’re such a great couple and we’ve been so happy together, and even your own
mother
was hinting that we might end up living near them, Richard?
    OK, so maybe not that succinct. Or detached.
    I take a sip of coffee, trying to soothe my nerves. Let’s say I’m being as calm and logical as one could expect in the circumstances, which are that I had to catch the 7:09 to Birmingham on no sleep and all the
Metros
had already gone. And I’m about to give a recruitment talk to a hundred students in an auditorium that smells of cauliflower cheese.
    I’m with my colleague Steve, in the “backstage” room to the side of the auditorium, and he’s sitting hunched over his coffee, looking about as perky as I feel. We do a lot of these recruitment talks together, Steve and I, in fact we’re quite the double act. He does the science side; I do the general stuff. The idea is, he blows away all the students with how cutting edge our research-and-development department is. And I reassure them that they’ll get looked after and their career will be an exciting one and they’re not selling out.
    “Biscuit?” Steve offers me a chocolate bourbon.
    “No, thanks.” I shudder. I’ve already crammed enough trans fats and food additives into my body.
    Maybe I should go to some hard-core boot camp. Everyone says running changes their life and gives them a new outlook. I should go to some retreat where all you do is run and drink isotonic drinks. In the mountains. Or the desert. Something really tough and challenging.
    Or do Iron Woman.
Yes
.
    I reach for my BlackBerry and am about to Google
hard-core running camp iron woman
when the careers officer appears round the door. We haven’t been to this particular college before, so I hadn’t met Deborah before today. Quite frankly, she’s weird. I’ve never met anyone so tense and jumpy.
    “All OK? We’ll start in about ten minutes. Keep it quite brief, I would.” She’s nodding nervously. “Quite brief. Nice and brief.”
    “We’re happy to chat to the students afterward,” I say, hefting a pile of “Why Work at Blay