‘I’m not, I’m just saying, it’s nice to finally know what it’s like to be a boy. To have one small insight into it for a day.’

‘You’ve always wanted to be a boy, deep down,’ he said, taking the trousers out of their press. ‘Peter Pan.’

‘I don’t think a man will ever know and understand me as well as you do, Joe.’

‘Yes, he will,’ he said. ‘And I’m glad it’s not that fifty-foot cunt.’

‘Joe.’

‘I’m sorry, but I am.’

‘I knew you didn’t like him that night you met him. You were rubbish at hiding it.’

‘Can I ask you something now that it’s over?’

‘Yes.’

‘How big was his cock?’

‘I’m not answering that.’

‘I’m not jealous or anything, I’m just intrigued because sometimes those big blokes actually have quite stumpy ones. But then maybe they only look stumpy in comparison to the rest of their body when they’re naked, and actually they’re normal sized?’

I stood in front of him and adjusted his tie like a mother sending her son off to his first holy communion. ‘His cock was as big as your heart, my darling Joe.’

‘Oh, shut up, mate,’ he said through a guffaw.

‘I’m not that bothered by big cocks anyway. Only prudes claim to love big cocks.’

‘So true,’ he said. ‘And massage oils.’

I was regularly reminded when I spoke to Joe of how much of ourselves we had created together. In pubs, on our sofas, on long car journeys in those seven years of our relationship, we devised language that was so deeply embedded in our brains, I couldn’t trace which jokes were his and which ones were mine.

‘Now,’ I said, holding his shoulders, ‘I get the feeling Lucy doesn’t want people to know we were together, so when people ask me how we know each other today, what do I say?’

‘Tell them the truth,’ he said, putting his arms around my waist. ‘Tell them we grew up together.’

We held each other tightly. It was a rare moment of unguarded sentimentality for Joe and me.

‘This is exactly how it was meant to turn out.’

‘It was,’ he said, placing his lips to my cheek and holding them there for a few seconds before giving it a parting kiss. ‘And I wouldn’t change any of it.’

When we arrived at the church, Franny was already there performing unnecessary maid-of-honour duties. Lucy was apparently worried the ushers would ‘hand out the order of services wrong’, so instructed Franny to go ahead early and oversee us. Franny acted out how to pass an order of service to each guest to the four hung-over ushers. When guests started trickling into the church, she stood next to me to monitor the first few and make sure I was getting it right.

‘This is very fun,’ she said, brushing the lapel of my navy suit that I’d matched with a pale-blue silk shirt.

‘Thank you.’

‘I can’t get away with tailoring, sadly, too busty.’ She pushed her breasts out a little further. She was swathed in long, floaty grey viscose. ‘Right, I better get going.’

‘When does the bridal party car arrive?’

‘Cars,’ she said. ‘Five cars.’

‘Why five?’

‘There are fourteen of us bridesmaids.’

‘Fourteen?’

‘Yes. Lulu’s got a lot of best friends. We’re very much a sisterhood.’

‘Seems it.’

‘See you down the aisle!’ she said.

Katherine and Mark were among the first to arrive. Katherine looked exquisite in high-necked pale-yellow silk that poured over her pregnancy bump like hollandaise on a perfectly poached egg. Olive was with Katherine’s parents for the weekend, but she stressed that it was only because she ‘might make a noise in the service’ and not because she didn’t want her there. Mark told me he definitely didn’t want her there and had, in fact, already drunk two tinnies in the passenger seat on the drive here. Dan and Gethin arrived shortly afterwards, their baby daughter attached to Dan’s chest. Both of their faces were heavy with exhaustion and bliss, languor and panic, which I had come to recognize as the expression of new parenthood.

Our uni friends trickled in, most of whom I now only saw at weddings, and, as always, I remained perplexed at the cruel lottery of male hair loss. The boys who had once arrived in halls with luscious great big handfuls of golden hair had ended up with flaxen mist passing over their heads. Men who had full coverage at the last wedding suddenly had a perfectly circular patch of bare scalp positioned neatly on the top of their heads like a skin yarmulke. It was almost enough to make me think women have an easier time of it.

Lola was one of the last to arrive, wearing a neon tangerine maxi dress with a matching floor-length cape that made her look like a Hogwarts pupil at a 2006 new rave party. There were large artificial gardenias positioned in her hair. She had been to a speed-dating event the night before that had ended with no matches but instead all the female attendees going to a nearby bar until four a.m. Andreas, while remaining WhatsApp’s most active member of the community, had started ignoring her messages – the speed dating was to open up her options again.

The ushers took their pews and Joe stood at the top of the aisle, shifting his weight from foot to foot and nervously adjusting his tie. I mouthed at him to stop fiddling. And then, the wedding march began. Seven rows of two bridesmaids, in various arrangements of the same grey viscose, came down the aisle carrying pink peonies, all looking incredibly pleased to be in the chosen cohort. We’re very much a sisterhood – I could never get on board with this sort of girl-gang feminism, the groups of female friends who called themselves things like ‘the coven’ on social media and exhibited moral superiority from simply having a weekly brunch with each other. Having friends doesn’t make you a feminist; going on about female friendship doesn’t make you a feminist. I tried to calculate the original line-up of So Solid Crew, the UK garage band played at my noughties school discos, and I think that Lucy’s array of bridesmaids was the exact same headcount.

Lucy looked like the perfect classic bride – angelic, feminine, in love and expensive. She wore a cream strapless dress with an enormous A-line skirt that looked like it could house all fourteen of her bridesmaids in its diameter. Over the top, she wore a cream lace jacket as a gesture of modesty and her hair was wavy in a precise way. Her father – rough-skinned, overly roasted from Marbella sunshine and with a squashed face – grasped her hand with his. He lifted her veil at the end of the aisle and kissed her on the cheek, his face pinched with withheld tears. He held on to her hand a little while longer, then she turned to Joe with a smile.

I still didn’t know whether I ever wanted to get married. I did know that if I did, the likelihood was my father wouldn’t be there. Or if he was still around, at that stage he’d probably be unable to process what was happening. Getting older was an increasingly perplexing thing, but these moments – understanding that potential future memories were being taken from you year on year, like road closures – were the very worst of it.

I wiped under my eyes with the flats of my forefingers and Joe did the same as he wept and Lucy beamed. She held his hand to steady him. The rest of the wedding was as protracted and anticlimactic as every other English church wedding I’ve ever attended. An old priest who knew nothing about the bride other than she’d been christened at the church thirty years ago made some strange jokes. Everyone ignored references to God and that the couple should inexplicably love God more than they love each other. Everyone giggled at that weird bit in the vows, which I’ve never heard a priest pronounce as anything other than ‘seksual union’. There were some forgettable readings from some freckly cousins. There was one terrible music performance which made everyone’s sphincters clench on the cold wood of the benches (Franny, a capella ‘Ave Maria’). Hymns were pitched too high and collectively sung in a feeble, reedy voice. We chucked some pink and violet confetti that had the texture of gerbil bedding at the exiting bride and groom.

Lola was already holding two glasses when I saw her on the lawn of Lucy’s family home at the reception.

‘It’s real champagne,’ she said. ‘How amazing is that? Here, have one.’

‘This is quite a pad,’ I said, looking at the large white 1920s house in front of us.

‘Her dad paid for it twenty years ago in cash, apparently. Gangster.’

‘No, he’s not.’

‘Yes, he is.’

‘You’re being a snob because he wears gold jewellery.’

‘Nina, I’m being serious, ask anyone who knows her. There are photos in the downstairs loo of him with the Kray twins. And he disappeared for six years in the eighties after he killed a man.’

‘Gangster don’t live in Surrey.’

‘Are you joking, they all live in Surrey. That’s why they do what they do. So they can send their kids to a school with a tennis court and have a Jag XK8 parked on a gravel driveway.’ Lucy walked past us and waved regally. Lola beckoned her over. She gave us both a delicate kiss on the cheek so as not to ruin her immaculate make-up.