She lay down on the hotel bed and stared at the ceiling. It was only six o’clock and the summer evening light would, depressingly, go on for ever. She could lie here and stare at the ceiling or watch television and order room service. Neither appealed, so she decided to brave a Saturday bank-holiday evening in York, not a light undertaking. At least it wasn’t a race day, an event that also attracted large groups of inappropriately dressed young women, who could be distinguished from the regular hens by their fascinators, a ludicrous item of headgear if ever there was one. And they were all so fat! How did they manage in toilet cubicles and cinema seats? You could be squashed to death by one of them if you weren’t careful.
It was early yet but when she left the hotel Viola discovered that the stags and hens were already out in force, already astonishingly drunk. She shuddered to think what kind of state they would be in later. Some of the stags were in fancy dress—a whole group (a bunch she should call them, she supposed) of men dressed in banana costumes were streaming down the steps into the Slug and Lettuce by the river. Most, though, were just in blokey uniform—clean jeans and T-shirts, reeking of aftershave, muscle already turning to flab. The girls were tribal, wearing T-shirts that picked out their affiliations in rhinestones—“Claire’s Hen Party,” “Hens in the City,” “The Only Way Is Darlington”—the last a particularly deluded group, in Viola’s opinion. Pink was the order of the day for the girls—pink cowboy hats, pink T-shirts, pink tutus, pink sashes. They were the kind of girls who thought cupcakes were sophisticated. Cupcakes were another bugbear of Viola’s. They were just buns, for heaven’s sake! Why all the fuss? To make money, of course.
She caught sight of the deely-boppers (pink, naturally) on the heads of a flock of girls (“Hannah’s Horny Hens”) who were flapping around at the traffic lights on Lendal Bridge, uncertain where to take their patronage next. Viola hadn’t seen deely-boppers since the Eighties. Bertie had a pair when she was a child, silver tinsel balls that bobbed around on her little head like insect feelers. And—Viola suddenly remembered—a pair of spangled silver wings that went with them. A moth, not a butterfly, Bertie said. A little jab to the heart. You had to be careful of the jabs—if you had enough of them they could weaken the fabric of the heart, open up fault lines, fissures and rifts, and before you knew where you were the whole brittle structure could shatter into a thousand tiny pieces. Viola’s heart was being held together by sticking plaster and glue. Was that a good image? She wasn’t sure.
Bertie, against Viola’s advice, had insisted on sleeping in her silver wings. The next morning, when she discovered they were crushed beyond repair, she had sobbed inconsolably. “Well, you should have listened to me, shouldn’t you?” Viola had said. “I told you that would happen.”
Sow and reap, Viola. Sow and reap.
Bringing up the rear of Hannah’s Horny Hens there was a couple of older, rather disconsolate-looking women—a mother of the bride and an aunt or prospective mother-in-law, perhaps. Their sagging bodies struggled uncomfortably with the tight pink T-shirts, let alone the rhinestone epithet inscribed across their wobbling bosoms. (“Good corsetry,” Viola Romaine confides conspiratorially, “that’s the secret to looking good for the older woman.” Sunday Express, Life and Style, 2010. That was not what she said! Completely misquoted.)
Would this be herself one day, Viola wondered? After all, Bertie might decide, in her own post-ironic fashion, to have a traditional hen night (“Bertie’s Babes”) and inflict humiliation on her retinue. She would have to meet someone to marry first, of course. It was beginning to look as if Viola would never know the redemption of being a grandmother. Sunny may as well have been a monk from the sound of it and Bertie didn’t seem to date at all, or if she did she certainly didn’t tell her mother about it.
Hannah’s Horny Hens seemed to come to an unspoken decision and the bevy wheeled away down Rougier Street. As they passed in front of her Viola realized, to her embarrassment, that the wobbling deely-boppers she was staring at were actually stubby little penises. Without warning the penises lit up and began to flash and the hens cawed raucously at each other. Viola found herself blushing as she hurried on to the familiar comfort of Bettys. A sanctuary from dystopia, a reliably clean, well-lighted place.