The Thirty List. Eva Woods

      I clutched my posy of freesias, which was leaking water onto my ballet-length lace dress. My veil was snarled around my face, making me breathless. ‘Dad?’

      ‘Yes, Muffin?’

      ‘How do you know? I mean, how can you be sure? About the person you marry?’

      ‘Eh …’ He looked deeply uncomfortable, and not just because his tie was cutting into his neck. ‘You just meet someone, and you like them, and you make it work somehow. It isn’t hard. Not like Countdown.’

      ‘But at least Countdown has rules.’

      ‘You are … fond of Dan?’

      ‘Of course! Of course. We’re very happy.’ Eight years with barely a row, sliding easily into dating, cohabitation and now marriage. Of course we were happy. We’d even bought a house, in Surrey. After the wedding we’d be packing up and leaving Hackney with the police sirens and falafel joints and shop downstairs that still sold Panini stickers from the 2002 World Cup. Dan had casually suggested it a few months ago, right in the middle of wedding planning. There’d be more space, less crime, a garden. All those things you were supposed to want. I’d already given notice at my job in the cool little design agency above a tattoo parlour in Shoreditch.

      ‘Muffin,’ said Dad, growing alarmed at my failure to move. ‘We have to go in. Everyone’s waiting. Unless you …’

      ‘I’m fine! Fine! I’m just nervous!’ Through the crack in the doors, I could see eyes begin to turn, murmurs going up. Looking for me. At the front of the church, my sister, Jess, and my best friends, Emma and Cynthia, were already waiting in their lavender prom dresses. Jess as usual looked stunning. The vicar, a friend of Dan’s family, was in place. This was it, my moment. Just waiting for me to move forward.

      Gently, Dad took my arm. ‘Come on, Muffy. You don’t want to go back, do you, call it all off? Because if you do …’

      ‘No!’ I loved Dan. We had a whole life together. I remembered what he’d said to me yesterday, before he went to sleep at his parents: ‘I’ll never leave you, Rachel. I promise we’ll always be together.’ He’d even stroked my face, although it was encrusted in an avocado skin mask.

      ‘Even if I look like this?’

      He’d smiled. ‘You always look good to me.’

      Dad patted my hand. ‘Well, if you can’t go back, you have to go forward. Your time’s up, Muffy.’ He began to hum the Countdown theme tune. ‘Do do-do do-do …’

      ‘OK, OK. I’m ready.’

      ‘You know what marriage is, Muffy?’

      ‘A nine-letter word?’

      ‘It’s eight letters, Muffs. Honestly, Maths never was your strong point. Anyway, it’s not a word. It’s a sentence.’

      ‘Um, that’s not helpful.’

      ‘What I mean is, it’s a beginning. It’s not an end.’

      Far down at the end of the aisle, I could see the back of Dan’s head, his ears slightly red with the pressure of eyes watching him, his arms crossed in front of his dove-grey morning suit. I thought of our life together, our new house, our friends, our families. This was right. This was what you were supposed to do. I took a deep breath. ‘OK, Dad. Let’s do it.’

      ‘Excellent. Consonant, please, Carol!’

      The music changed. The doors opened. I started to move forward.

       Chapter One

       Two years later

      Things that suck about divorce, number three: at the exact moment your life has hit rock bottom, and all you need is a particular inspiring tune to lift your spirits and provide guidance and cheer, you can’t find the CD you want because your ex-husband, your soon-to-be ex-husband, has moved it and you can’t ask him where it is, because, you know, you’re getting divorced and it probably isn’t very high up his list of concerns.

      I was lying on the floor on my stomach, feeling under the shelving unit we use—used—to keep CDs in. Where the bloody hell was it? Why would he take the KT Tunstall CD? KT Bumstall, he called her.

      When my friends came back into the room, staggering under boxes, they found me still on the floor, weeping and trying to hum my own jaunty backing track in a voice choked with tears, dust and the two-bottles-of-Chardonnay hangover I was nursing from the night before.

      ‘Rach! What is it now? Did you find another one of his socks? Did you listen to your wedding first-dance song?’ Emma rushed over, dropping her box into Cynthia’s awkward embrace.

      ‘Careful, Em! That’s the Le Creuset in there! You could have crippled me.’

      I was babbling. ‘KT … Can’t find it … Need the song!’

      ‘What song?’

      ‘That one!’ In the depths of my grief, I couldn’t remember the name of it. ‘The makeover montage song. From The Devil Wears Prada. You know, the one that goes—do do do-do do-do-do. I need it! So I can walk along in great shoes and get a dream job and nice clothes, even if my boss is mean to me, and everything will be OK!’

      Emma and Cynthia exchanged a look, then Cynthia took out her iPhone and pressed some buttons. ‘Do you mean this one?’ ‘Suddenly I See’ began to play out of the phone, slightly tinny.

      I was still crying. ‘This is rock bottom! I need to listen to this song and then feel better and walk along in my heels. You see?’

      ‘You aren’t wearing heels, darling,’ said Cynthia kindly. ‘You think they’re tools of patriarchal oppression, remember?’

      On my feet were mud-encrusted purple welly boots, which I had donned for uprooting some of the plants I’d grown in the garden, thinking I might pack them in a box and take them with me, before realising this was crazy, as I had nowhere to live, let alone a garden. That’s what you do when you’re getting divorced. You go crazy. I started crying again. ‘I know! I don’t even have any heels! Everything is awful!’

      Emma and Cynthia had a quick muttered eye-rolling chat, and then Emma called out to me in a ‘talking to a mad person’ voice: ‘Look! We’re walking for you, love!’ They were marching up and down my soon-to-be-ex living room on the exposed wooden floor, Emma in sensible walking shoes and Cynthia in expensive brown knee boots.

      We had noticed several subtle changes in Emma’s character since she became a primary school teacher: one, an exponential increase in bossiness; two, a habit of asking did we want to go to the toilet before we went anywhere; and three, the total loss of any physical shame. Now she was prancing about the floor, accompanied by an eye-rolling Cynthia, who gamely waved her long limbs about, then broke off as the song stopped and her phone rang. ‘Cynthia Eagleton. No, for Christ’s sake, I said send them out already. Listen, Barry, this is a serious question—what do you mean that’s not your name? Never mind, I’m going to call you Barry. Can you not do anything for yourself? How do you manage to get out of bed in the morning? Just get it done.’ She hung up, sighing. ‘I swear it’s a miracle he can even blow his own nose, that boy.’

      ‘Was it hard for you to get a day off?’ I mumbled dustily.

      ‘Only about as hard as it was for Richard Attenborough and his mates to get out of that prison camp. But don’t worry, darling. I’m here to help. Barry, or whatever his name is, will just have to learn to tie his own shoelaces.’ Cynthia’s had a lot to contend with in life. Not just the fact her mum saw fit to call her Cynthia—there was some great-aunt’s will involved—but also the fact she was ten years older than her siblings, and the only one to be fathered by her mum’s