The Wedding Diary (Choc Lit) by Margaret James Page B

living incarnation of the Antichrist.
    What was she going to do?
    Start an online manhunt, she supposed. Post Jack’s picture all over the world wide web, captioned
have you seen this man
and offering a reward for information?
    ‘Excuse me?’ said the sixty-something woman.
    ‘Yes?’ said Cat.
    ‘There is another way, you know.’ The woman offered her a brightly-coloured leaflet. ‘If you’re troubled in your mind, that devil’s brew will only make things worse. But if you let the good—’
    Cat tuned out and, when the trolley next came down the aisle, she bought another shot of devil’s brew. She stared out of the window. Somebody or something was messing with her mind. But it wasn’t Jack. It wasn’t Fanny. It wasn’t Rosie, Caspar or the boy photographer.
    Who was it then, she asked herself, as she drank her vodka and wondered why she felt so very strange.

Sunday, 15 May

    ‘Okay, what’s the problem?’ Jules enquired.
    ‘Why does there need to be a problem?’ Adam shrugged. ‘Why shouldn’t I get drunk with an old mate?’
    ‘Your oldest, dearest mate,’ corrected Jules.
    ‘Yes,’ said Adam, nodding. ‘You’re absolutely right, and it’s your round. I’ll have a black and tan and a Macallan chaser, if it’s all right with you.’
    But this had been at ten o’clock, and now it was gone midnight. Adam had passed the awkward stage of being an uptight, stiff-necked Anglo-Saxon. He wanted to confide, have therapeutic, meaningful discussion, man to man. He wanted to be in a Cheyenne sweat lodge or a Californian man cave, not in a crowded London pub with an extended licence and a football-pitch-sized pull-down screen.
    Jules must have felt the same.
    Or, at any rate, he put his arm round Adam’s shoulders and gave him a big hug. ‘What’s bothering you?’ he asked, as he picked up his own Macallan chaser from yet another round. ‘It’s not that bird again?’
    ‘It isn’t Maddy, if that’s who you mean.’
    ‘You’ve got yourself a different bird?’ Jules grinned. ‘Well, nice work, my friend! What’s this one like?’
    ‘It’s not a girl, exactly.’ Adam was now light-headed with fatigue and fumes of single malt. ‘It’s more about what girls can do to you.’
    ‘Oh.’ Jules switched his grin off and put on his family doctor face. ‘Some trouble in the trouser region, right?’
    ‘No.’ Adam thought about it for a moment, wondering if he should tell his friend about the girl from Chapman’s yard, the one who was engaged, but who had somehow got inside his head and made herself at home there?
    But in the end he found he couldn’t do it. He’d sound so pathetic, such a loser, such a fool. There’s this girl, she’s in my mind, he’d say, and Jules would laugh and say I can’t believe I’m hearing this, why isn’t she in your bed?
    ‘If it’s not a bird, and if it’s not trouser trouble, it can’t be too bad,’ said Jules. ‘Mate, I said—’
    ‘I heard you.’
    ‘You’re overworking, though – bombing up and down the motorways, Cornwall one day, Dorset, Middlesex and bloody Gloucestershire the next. You don’t know if you’re coming or going. You need to take time out.’
    ‘You could be right,’ admitted Adam.
    ‘Of course I’m right,’ said Jules. ‘You need to chill a bit. You need to have a little holiday.’ He looked down at his empty glass. ‘You need to buy a round, as well.’
    This is wrong, thought Cat. It’s more than wrong, it’s totally insane.
    Since meeting Adam Lawley once again so unexpectedly, she’d thought about him all the time. On the train while coming home from Dorset, while she ate a takeaway in front of the TV, while she took a shower, then dried her hair, then went to bed – he wouldn’t go away.
    She spent the whole night dreaming about Jack. But Jack was somehow all mixed up with Adam. Now the dawn was breaking, all the street lights had gone out, and she was still confused.
    Why should she obsess about this