Bachelorette quote and red lips on wrist

You will not believe the Saturday we have just had. Half past four and the beer garden was full of hen parties in pink sashes, and one of them came in to the bar with a clipboard and asked me to keep an eye out for a girl called Shelley who had wandered off towards the car park in a tiara and a borrowed cardigan. Her friends had written the rules on her wrist in biro before they left the flat. By the time I saw her the biro had run into a blue smudge, and the only line still readable was the one about the drink, because somebody had gone over it three times.

I sat the clipboard woman down with a shandy and rang the number her friends had squeezed in underneath, which went straight to a voicemail of someone shrieking the word Gemma. Gemma, it turned out, was the bride, and she was currently at the edge of the garden trying to get a fork out of the gravel with her teeth. Shelley was found ten minutes later sitting on the wall by the bins, perfectly calm, marking the back of a beer mat with a red lipstick kiss and telling the bins they were her best friends in the world.

I gave her a pint of water and a packet of ready salted, and she made me promise to write the word lost on the wall in chalk so the others could find her. I said I would, though I also said that a hen party which has to be reminded where it is cannot be trusted with a tiara, let alone a bride. She laughed so hard she had to hold her wrist to her chest, and the kiss on the beer mat smudged into a long red thumbprint across the table.

They left at nine, all of them singing, and Shelley waved the beer mat at me through the window like a boarding pass. I have pinned it above the till. If you come down in August, you can ask for the drink that is on the house, and tell me whether anyone has been found.

Love, Dorothy