The Wish List
Jane Costello was a newspaper journalist before she became an author, working on the Liverpool Echo, the Daily Mail, and the Liverpool Daily Post, where she was Editor. Jane’s first novel, Bridesmaids, was an instant bestseller. The Nearly-Weds won Romantic Comedy of the Year 2010, Girl on the Run was shortlisted for the Melissa Nathan Award for Romantic Comedy 2012, and her latest novel, All The Single Ladies is yet another bestseller. Jane lives in Liverpool with her boyfriend Mark and three young sons. Find out more at www.janecostello.com, and follow her on Twitter @janecostello
Also by Jane Costello
Bridesmaids
The Nearly-Weds
My Single Friend
Girl on the Run
All the Single Ladies
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2013
A CBS COMPANY
This paperback edition published 2013
Copyright © Jane Costello 2013
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.
The right of Jane Costello to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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PB ISBN: 978-0-85720-556-8
EBOOK ISBN: 978-0-85720-557-5
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.
Typeset by M Rules
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
For my brother Stephen
Acknowledgments
There are so many talented people at Simon & Schuster working behind the scenes on my books that I could easily fill more than a page with their names. But I’d like to say a special thanks to just a few of those – Suzanne Baboneau, Ian Chapman, Kerr MacRae, Clare Hey, Maxine Hitchcock, Emma Harrow, Dawn Burnett, Sara-Jade Virtue, Alice Murphy, Ally Grant and Lizzie Gardiner. I’m so grateful to you all.
Thank you, as ever, to my brilliant agent Darley Anderson and his Angels – Clare Wallace, Rosanna Bellingham, Camilla Wray and Andrea Messant.
Finally, thanks to my parents Jean and Phil Wolstenholme, my lovely children, and my boyfriend Mark O’Hanlon.
Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you did not do than by the things you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
Mark Twain
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Epilogue
Prologue
Opening my eyes has never been so excruciating. I can manage but a tiny slit, one that involves a degree of movement as painful as it is infinitesimal.
Don’t let me give you the impression it’s only my optic system that’s troubling me, though. I’ve been awake but immobile for several minutes wondering what hideous torture device has been used to peel the lining from my guts. I’m cheek down on a pillow, contemplating why my tongue feels three times its usual size and is holding what can be no more than a quarter of its normal water content.
‘Urghhh . . .’
My fetid groan sounds like that of a recently exhumed corpse attempting to come back to life. Then I feel it beside me. Movement.
My eyes spring open, sending a slice of pain through my frontal cortex. I take in my surroundings and two horrible facts become instantly apparent:
I am in a bedroom.
And it’s not mine.
I squint through evil shafts of sunlight that stream through grubby vertical blinds and bounce off a snowstorm of dust particles.
The floor boasts the sort of swirly carpet fashionable in public houses of the 1970s – only this one doesn’t have the benefit of the dirty ash of several thousand discarded fags trodden into it. It is psychedelic to a nauseating degree: an angry clash of paisley patterns in orange-brown shades that range from tartrazine to dog poo.
In the corner is a greying Formica dressing table with intermittent gilt edging, next to it is a faux-teak chest of drawers, and the main door looks as though the only possible thing it can lead to is a basement full of dead bodies.
The flicker of a red LED drags my attention to the bedside table, where a solitary item sits entirely out of place: an Alessi alarm clock, straight out of the design pages in GQ. It reads 08.26.
I feel the quilt slide slowly across my back, as if someone’s pulling it sleepily towards them. I freeze again, my chest hammering.
There is a living, breathing person next to me, of that there is no doubt. Who that person is, is quite another question.
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My mind starts whirring while I attempt to piece together the events of our girls’ night out. I remember chatting to the barman . . . then the guy who looked like Ryan Gosling . . . then there was that paramedic – oh God, I’ve come home with the paramedic! He was supposed to be helping that poor woman in labour in the restaurant above the bar. The swine! She could’ve been stuck there, swimming in her recently broken waters, while that guy was downstairs picking me up!
Then it hits me. There was someone after the paramedic. I think.
There’s only one thing for this.
Painfully slowly, I attempt to move my head to the other side so I can get a look at exactly who I’m sharing these bedclothes with.
It takes several seconds, not only because I don’t want to wake him up, but also because my mouth appears to be stuck to the pillow with an adhesive of similar quality to No More Nails.
My bed partner has his back to me.
A broad, muscular back with a small mole on his shoulder and a faint tan line round the neck. I carefully push myself up, freezing each time he stirs, until I have a side view of his face.
He has long, dark eyelashes with a tiny blob of sleep in the corner, a straight nose and soft, parted lips from which he’s snoring lightly. He’s handsome, if dishevelled, and I’d put him in his early thirties, though he could be younger. Then it comes back to me. It’s the guy who looks a bit like Tom Hardy! The guy with the lovely . . . I breathe in his smell and have my first and only positive experience of the day.
He moves again, pulling the duvet over himself. Adrenalin rushes through me as my immediate priority slaps me in the face: I’ve got to get out of here.
I manoeuvre myself to a sitting position, making absolutely sure that the bedding touching him doesn’t move, and realise I’m wearing my clothes from the night before. I’m torn between revulsion and relief.
I slowly swing my legs out of bed, fully expecting to see my Karen Millen jeans, but I am confronted instead by something that makes me gasp. My legs. Not my jean-clad legs, you understand. Just my legs.
Struggling to breathe, I manage to stand and at that point spot something that confirms categorically that I did something very, very bad last night. My knickers. Only, they’re a long way from the piece of anatomy they’re supposed to cover – and are caught around the toes of my right foot.
‘Oh. My. God,’ I whisper.
The implications of this engulf and appal me.
Not only have I breached my no-more-than-four-drinks rule – the one that’s remained unbreached since 2001 – but I have had a one-night stand. The thought sends a wave of nausea through me. The closest I’ve ever got to recklessness before this was leaving my antibacterial hand gel at home.
With my heart racing, I drag my tangled underwear up my legs, silently tug on the jeans – which I locate on the other side of the room – and, after three or four minutes of silent but hysterical surveillance, throw on my high heels, one of which had somehow made its way behind a maroon velour curtain.
I creep to the door from hell, not risking a backwards glance, and step out of the room into a hallway. Then I realise I’m in a flat, not a house, although that doesn’t alter the decor, which is even more retina-burning here than in the bedroom.
I am feet from the front door when I career into something large and hurtle to the floor, generating a noise comparable in volume to that of a runaway boulder smashing into the side of a mountain.
I blearily register that it’s one of those inflatable space hoppers with ears for handles and a smiley face painted on the front. Then I register something else. The bedroom door is opening . . .
I scramble to the front door, open it and throw myself out. Then I sprint down the street as fast as is possible in two strappy sandals with only one heel between them.
Chapter 1
One week earlier . . .
Have you ever stumbled across something you completely forgot existed, but the second it’s in your hand, your head floods with memories?
That’s what happens when I discover the list.
It was the picture of my mum blowing out candles at her thirtieth-birthday party that tumbled out of the photo box first. It’s not the best image of her. It has that slightly blurry quality of most pre-digital snaps – from the days when you could count on only two pictures in a film of twenty-four not to have decapitated the subject matter.
But you can see this much: she’s laughing. Her face is full of joy, her eyes sparkling with life. She looks so carefree. And she was. The date on the back is 17 January 1988. Just a few weeks before everything changed.
The picture belongs in an album that fell out of my photo box – the one I had to wrestle from the cupboard to reach my overnight bag. It’s not the only thing that puts a momentary halt to packing for my forthcoming weekend away.
The list is written on a folded piece of A4 paper tucked in the back of the album. The handwriting is neat and distinctively teenaged, embellished enthusiastically with biro hearts and several declarations that ‘Cally luvs Johnny’.
I instantly recall when we composed it.
It was during one of the revision sessions I had with Cally and Asha, probably during a break – we had at least four per hour to minimise the risk of ‘burning out’, as I remember.
It also must have been during a temporary ceasefire in the constant war between my older sister, Marianne, and me; that’s the only explanation for her inclusion.
I can picture every one of us, although whether the uniform ‘Rachel’ haircuts, Doc Marten boots and blue mascara are real detail or my imagination at work, I couldn’t tell you.
It is dated 1997 – the year Tony Blair came to power, the world was introduced to Harry Potter, and I broke my ankle dancing to ‘Groove is in the Heart’ by Deee-Lite at Mark Blackman’s party.
We were fifteen years old. Underneath are four signatures – Marianne Reiss, Emma Reiss, Asha Safaya and Cally Jordan. And finally there’s the hilariously grand declaration that we will ‘undertake to do our utmost to perform the above achievements to the best of our abilities within the agreed and specified timescale’.
It sounds terribly serious.
As I take a last look at the picture of my mum, something occurs to me. Fifteen years on, perhaps we didn’t take that list seriously enough.
Chapter 2
I’ve always been unconvinced by the concept of a fish pedicure. Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for spa days. I simply fail to comprehend how shoving your feet in tank of marine life so the tiny vertebrates can banquet on your blisters is a better alternative to a pumice stone from Boots.
‘Emma, it’s lovely,’ declares Cally, wiggling her toes. ‘Just get your feet in.’
I peer into the bowl, where the fish are swarming round her toes, battling for space like the stars of a sex-education video.
‘These fish are illegal in America,’ I inform her.
‘I don’t think they carry the death penalty.’
I’m in Edinburgh with Cally and Asha after being invited by my sister, Marianne, five months after she relocated here. She promised a ‘lovely, relaxing weekend’ for my friends and me. Only, it didn’t start well.
The four-and-a-half-hour journey from Liverpool – which involved wrong turns, Cally flinging the satnav out of the window and a set-to with an HGV driver at Westmorland Services after she squirted his Cornish pasty while cleaning the windscreen – was far from serene.
But by the time we’d arrived at the spa, swathed ourselves in fluffy white robes and proceeded with our lavender oil massages (which admittedly has left me smelling Shake ’n’ Vac-ed), we were well on our way to chilling out.
Cally is taking that mission very seriously. And I can’t blame her.
My best friend’s two-year-old son, Zachary, might look gorgeous, with a smile that makes that kid from Jerry McGuire look as cute as Les Dawson. But even his devoted mother admits he’s redefined the term ‘terrible twos’ and has a simila
r effect on passers-by as a rampaging velociraptor.
Despite my efforts to get Cally out more, her childcare is limited. She already relies on her mum a lot and Zachary’s dad is not on the scene to help out. Which means this weekend is the most excitement she’s had in a while. Especially since becoming a mum had a more fundamental effect on Cally than any of us could have imagined.
It’s not that she looks any different from before. If anything, she’s more attractive, with generous Mad Men curves, lustrous strawberry-blonde hair and bright green eyes that no sleep deprivation dulls.
But she is different, at least in one way.
‘So, Cally, do you think you might meet someone this weekend?’
She looks at me like I’ve escaped from somewhere that serves antipsychotic drugs for breakfast.
‘I’ve got a bed all to myself – with lovely white sheets, no small child and no prospect of being woken at three thirty in the morning with a request to watch Toy Story for the fourth time. There’s no way anyone else is getting in it with me.’
There was a time, not so long ago, when this statement could never have been attributed to my best friend.
When she was fifteen, Cally was boy mad (even if her experience was theory-based and derived from a combination of bonkbuster novels and Brook Advisory Centre leaflets). When she was twenty-five, she was man mad (in the three years we lived together the rare Sunday mornings were those when I didn’t bump into a strange man in the kitchen).
These days, she isn’t anything mad. Instead, she is celibate. Defiantly, unapologetically so.
On the day Cally became pregnant as the result of a one-night stand she lost interest in the opposite sex and never regained it. I thought this might change when she returned to work at a big accountancy firm after maternity leave. I was wrong.
‘Emma – seriously – this is only a half-hour session. You need to get your feet in.’
The door opens and in walks Asha.
‘How was your massage?’ I ask.
‘Utter bliss,’ she smiles, sitting next to me and fixing her robe. I can’t help but notice that the spa technician, supposedly just sipping sparkling water on the opposite side of the room, is sizing her up. Not in a bad way – it’s just that Asha has incredibly striking looks and people of both genders find it impossible not to look twice.