The Surprise Party

If there is one thing Priya Shah has learned from organizing surprise parties, it is that the surprise is the easy part. What is genuinely difficult is everybody else. For Jonty's fortieth, she had booked the back room of a bar in Ponsonby, ordered a cake shaped like a kayak and sworn twenty-three people to secrecy. It was the twenty-fourth person who nearly brought the whole thing crashing down.

That person was Mia, Jonty's partner of six years and, in theory, Priya's closest ally. It was Mia who had supplied the guest list, Mia who had promised to get Jonty to the bar at exactly seven o'clock on the Saturday, and Mia who, from the very first planning meeting, began behaving in ways that made no sense at all.

First she asked whether the party could be moved to the Sunday. Then she wanted to know if the bar had a microphone. Then, a week before the big day, she called Priya in a mild panic to ask whether Jonty's parents were coming, and when Priya said yes, of course they were, Mia said "Oh no" and hung up. "What she needs," Priya told her roommate that evening, "is a holiday. Or a doctor."

The real trouble started on the Thursday. Jonty, who was not normally a suspicious man, came home from work to find Mia whispering on the phone in the garden. Later that night he found a receipt for forty mini quiches in her coat pocket. By Friday he had decided, with the cheerful certainty of a man who reads too many thrillers, that his partner was planning to leave him, and he turned up on Priya's doorstep to ask what she knew.

Priya, who was a terrible liar, did the only thing she could think of. She told him that Mia had been organizing something, that it was a nice something, and that he would find out on Saturday, and then she shut the door before he could ask anything else. She leaned against it, breathing hard, and sent Mia a single message: "What on earth is going on?"

Mia's reply came twenty minutes later. "Can you meet me? Now? I need to tell you something." They met in a cafe on Karangahape Road, where Mia, looking as though she had not slept for a week, finally explained. It wasn't the party that had been worrying her. It was what she was planning to do at it. She had a ring in her bag. She had been carrying it around for a month, waiting for the right moment, and she had decided that the right moment was Jonty's fortieth, in front of everyone he loved.

"That's why I needed the microphone," she said. "And that's why I panicked about his parents. His mum cries at adverts. If she cries before I've even asked, I'll lose my nerve." Priya stared at her for a long moment, and then began to laugh so hard that the man at the next table moved his coffee. It wasn't Jonty who needed protecting from the secret, she realized. It was the secret that needed protecting from Jonty.

On the Saturday, Jonty walked into the back room at seven o'clock precisely and was suitably astonished. He blew out forty candles on a kayak, made a speech in which he thanked Priya three times, and apologized to Mia, rather sheepishly, for having suspected her. Then Mia picked up the microphone. What happened next is still described, by everyone who was there, as the best surprise any of them has ever seen.

Jonty said yes before she had finished the question. His mother cried, naturally, but by then it no longer mattered. And what Priya remembers most clearly, even now, is not the ring or the speech or the forty mini quiches. It is the look on Mia's face as she put the microphone down: the face of someone who had kept the biggest secret in the room, and kept it, just about, until the very end.