Read Where Have All the Boys Gone? Online
Authors: Jenny Colgan
Where Have All the Boys Gone?
Jenny Colgan
For my beloved boys, Mr and Baby B.
There is a very small envelope of seduction time available between the stages ‘just pissed enough’ and ‘disastrously over-pissed’, and suddenly, Katie wasn’t sure she was going to make it.
This man sitting in front of her wore little heels on his shoes, she remembered, swaying slightly. She’d noticed under the chippy, awkwardly tiny bar table in this stupid new bar called Square Root. OK, he was her first date in four months, and she had her best bra on, but still, she really ought to have paid more attention to the shoes…it was just, it had been a difficult week.
It had started on Sunday. Louise was still on her international bang-athon, leaving her and Olivia, who came around on Sundays to avoid getting inky fingerprints on her pristine white sofa, studiously reading the papers, watching
EastEnders
and ignoring the obvious sounds of sexual intercourse coming from the spare bedroom.
‘How come Kat Slater is really fat and covered in slap and millions of men are in love with her?’ Katie had asked.
There was a particularly vigorous grunting noise.
‘Umm,’ Olivia squeezed her eyes shut. ‘For the same reason everyone’s in love with Phil even though he looks like a barnyard animal. Drugs.’
‘OK,’ said Katie loudly, ‘I UNDERSTAND.’
There was an endless tense moment next door as everything went quiet. The two girls looked at one another. There was a pause. Then the ritual banging started again.
‘Jesus,’ said Olivia. She looked at Katie. ‘Couldn’t you have bought a bigger flat?’
‘In North London?’ Katie nodded. ‘Sure! I should have gone for the rooftop swimming pool. And the maid’s quarters. I’m a complete idiot.’
‘I’m just saying.’ Olivia believed in karma and therefore probably did think having a tiny flat and a huge mortgage in Kentish Town was Katie’s fault.
Katie loudly turned the page.
‘Bloody hell!’ she exploded.
‘What? New revolutionary soundproofing spray just invented?’
‘No.’
‘New laws make it easier to expel noisy tenants?’
‘No.’
‘Sex makes you put on more weight than Atkins’ diet?’
‘Look,’ said Katie, pointing at the paper.
Olivia squinted at it upside down.
‘“Women Going Men Crazy,”’ she read out loud. ‘You really have to stop buying these women-hating papers.’
They both read the article rolling their eyes. It asserted that their generation of women was a clutch of uncontrollable pissed-up hose-monsters on the loose, terrorising the five nice remaining men in the world. The problem was, from the sounds next door, it was tricky to disagree.
‘It says here that there’re no men left and we’re all going barking. Well, that would explain a lot,’ said Olivia.
‘If that’s true, why is it him in there who’s doing the barking?’
Suddenly there was a high-pitched wailing sound.
The two girls looked at each other.
‘I’d start a round of applause,’ said Olivia, ‘if I’d heard even the tiniest little peep out of Lou.’
‘Also, we want to pretend absolutely nothing just happened,’ said Katie, turning back to her paper. ‘It says we’re all drunken slutbuckets.’
‘slutbuckets? Really?’ said Olivia.
‘Honestly, I haven’t yet thought up a better way to cope with the modern London man,’ said Katie sadly.
The door opened down the corridor, and the paperthin walls shook slightly. The room they were in, Katie’s living room, had a band of old kitchen on the far side. The estate agent had assured her this would make it wonderful for entertaining. In fact, it merely made sure that Katie never ever cooked fish.
Louise tiptoed in, ostentatiously yawning. She had great legs, which she ignored, and a big nose, which she fixated on.
‘Ooh, just been asleep…thought I’d have a bit of a lie-in…tea…I think…’
The other two girls looked at her and waited.
‘Sleepy sleepy sleepy…’ continued Louise, trying to turn on the kettle in an overtly surreptitious manner.
‘I heard about this girl once,’ said Olivia. ‘She told terrible lies and then one day she got run over by a car because she was such a terrible liar. Karma.’
‘Yes. Her name was Chlamydia,’ said Katie sternly. ‘Chlamydia Liar.’
Louise rolled her eyes.
‘OK. OK. I met someone.’
‘Someone? Or something?’
She shot the two girls a look.
‘I just had sex with a man. Which is more than you two have done for months.’
‘I don’t think I’ve seen a man for months,’ said Olivia. ‘What are they like?’
Louise shrugged.
‘Umm…they have less hair than us in some bits. And more in other bits.’
‘Like monkeys,’ added Katie helpfully.
‘What else?’ Olivia was handling the kettle now, so it was filthy organic green tea in the offing.
‘Umm, they have these kind of lever thingies,’ said Louise.
‘What do they do?’ asked Katie.
‘They go up and down,’ said Louise, stirring in three sugars whilst Olivia gave her a disapproving look.
‘The way they work is, in Soho, other men have a hole shaped like the lever,’ said Olivia. ‘The two bits fit together.’
Katie took her horrid tea and went back to the sitting-room area of the room.
‘Ahh,’ she said. ‘Will we ever get to meet one of these remarkable specimens?’
Louise looked guilty.
‘Uh, maybe not this one,’ she said.
In Square Root, Terence – that was his name – was explaining how he’d dicked someone over at work in revenge for beating him on a deal. This was the date Katie had been looking forward to for weeks. She’d come to view it as the end of an intolerable dry spell, the way a prisoner views their parole date.
She took another sip of wine, feeling groggy. One shouldn’t really place such high expectations on things.
Why was Terence wearing a Burberry cap that also said Von Dutch on the front? And what was underneath it?
‘Fing is,’ said Terence conclusively, ‘I’m all for equal opportunities, and I don’t care if it was a bird – she still had it coming to her.’
Then, on Tuesday morning, she’d run into Olivia on the Tube. It was an unseasonably hot day for early in the year, and everyone in the rush hour was miserable in woollies and heavy jackets. Katie was a master of the Tube; avoiding eye contact, walking past buskers and unfolding her
Metro
with a hearty flourish. She may not like London all the time, she often pondered, but by God, she
belonged.
Olivia was Katie’s boss and, behind the scenes, secret friend. It was a bit like having an office romance, with the result that at work she was a lot harder on Katie than she would have been otherwise. At least, that was Katie’s hypothesis.
‘I wouldn’t have minded,’ said Katie, swinging off the filthy Tube holds and wondering as usual if anyone ever washed them. They were squeezed together in a carriage full of women, jolting their way into Soho where they worked. ‘But I did see him. He was even worse than he sounded.’
Olivia rolled her eyes. ‘How could he not be? She practically dug a tunnel to get him out of there. Bald fat midget?’
‘Fat beardy twat face.’
Katie shook her head. Poor old Louise had never been the same since Max left.
‘Well, we were watching
EastEnders.
A world where people fancy Shane Ritchie is obviously a place where things have gone very very wrong for women.’
They looked around the carriage. The scent of perfume
was strong in the air. An elegant woman – one of those types that can pull off casually draped scarves – was skilfully applying lipstick despite the motion of the rickety old train. Three others stood buried in women’s magazines and copies of
Metro;
a couple were hidden behind novels. On the seats were three men buried in newspapers, ferociously showing how post-feminist they were by not giving up their seats. A mixed group of backpackers stood at the end, but they existed in the parallel universe of travellers; Kiwis and Australians and South Africans and Poles and cheap nights in special bars and internet cafés and their own magazines. But the vast majority of the carriage was female. Dozens of them. Katie squinted. Had it always been like this? Was she only just noticing?
Olivia was rudely reading someone’s paper over their shoulder. She nudged Katie suddenly.
‘Look at that.’
‘No! It’s rude!’
The woman whose paper it was turned around and Katie got a dirty look. She felt hard done by and narrowed her eyes back. Had she been this aggressive before she moved to London?
‘Look,’ whispered Olivia this time, scarcely quieter.
Katie didn’t get it, the paper was full of its usual rubbish. Olivia was trying to indicate a corner with her eyes, like someone in a coma. Eventually, with lots of grumpy snuffling from the woman to indicate that, though not the type to instigate physical violence, she certainly did not approve of the practice of newspaper stealing, even a free newspaper, and if she could move in the packed sardine tin she would, thank you, Katie saw it.
‘Final census results for London’ said the headline. ‘According to the 2001 census, women outnumber men in the capital by 180,000.’
Olivia was wiggling her eyebrows madly. ‘See?’
‘See what?’
‘What the papers are saying is
true.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, what do we say every time we walk into a bar?’
‘It smells bad in here?’
‘No.’
‘We’re getting too old for this?’
Olivia rolled her eyes. ‘OK, besides that.’
‘Where have all the men gone?’
‘Bingo.’
‘Well, that –’ the woman holding the paper was no longer sniffing, but listening to them intently ‘– that’s our proof. We’re the L.O.S.T. generation of women.’
‘The what?’
‘London-On our Own-Single-Twentysomethings.’
‘That doesn’t sound so bad,’ said Olivia.
‘It’s bad! It’s bad! It says so in the paper.’
‘Stop worrying about it! What kind of a feminist are you?’
‘One that wants the right to decide if I want a bloke or not.’
‘OK,’ said Olivia. ‘And…do you?’
‘YES!’ said Katie. ‘And men can sense it. That’s why I never meet any. I give off strange vibes.’
‘Ssh now,’ said Olivia.
‘OK,’ said Katie. They travelled on in silence for a while.
‘You know Louise’s fat beardy twat face didn’t even call,’ she said finally.
Olivia rolled her eyes. ‘Probably staying in and washing his hairs.’
‘There are NO MEN,’ sighed Katie for what felt like the nine millionth time.
‘Yeah,’ said a voice near their ankles. They both looked down. An extremely short, sandy-haired man with a nose like a sun-dried tomato was addressing them both.
‘What?’ said Olivia, loftily.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘You mean, there’s no tall rich men.’
‘No, we don’t,’ said Katie. ‘Do we?’
‘You’re wearing a wedding ring,’ said Olivia suspiciously.
‘She’s gorgeous,’ said the little chap. ‘And twenty-four.’ He looked at them pointedly.
The woman who’d been holding the paper looked down too.
‘You are right you know,’ she said to the girls, her initial frostiness thawing. ‘The paper says so. But I knew it anyway. Statistically, there are no men.’
An obviously gay man standing next to her raised an eyebrow and flared just one of his nostrils.
‘You think that,’ he said.
All three women rolled their eyes.
Another woman leaned over. This was unheard of in the Tube in rush hour; an actual conversation. This woman was tall, skinny and wearing lime green fishnets and what looked like a bin bag.
‘I work in fashion,’ she said.
‘No kidding,’ said Olivia.
‘No men,’ said the fashion woman.
‘Publishing,’ said the woman with the newspaper. ‘No men.’
‘Try being a nanny!’ came a squeaky Scandinavian voice from the back. ‘Only married creeps there!’
The little man looked smug and grabbed Katie’s skirt.
‘I’ve banged them all,’ he whispered.
Katie hadn’t minded so much at the time – after all, she had a date, the date she was now in the middle of. Terence had now embarked on a story about a fantastic deal he had made at work that had made everybody else look like idiots, except for him. This, it came to her in a moment of clarity, was why she was getting drunk. And she should leave quickly, just in case she tipped over the edge and suddenly started finding him inexplicably attractive.
She’d asked around the office, pretending it was research. Working in PR, as Katie and Olivia both did, you could pretend a lot of things were research.
‘Well, what do you think?’ she’d asked Miko in the office, who was trying to be sympathetic and maintain her perfect inch-long fingernails at the same time. ‘Are there really no men?’
‘Yeah,’ said Miko lazily, peeling off a strip of old polish. Katie couldn’t bear it when she did this. Katie herself was doing a wrinkle check in the cosmetic mirror Miko kept on her desk. She felt troubled.
‘I mean,’ said Miko, ‘they’re just spoilt for choice, aren’t they?’
Katie thought about this for a second. ‘You think…what, men are just too nonchalant with all the women around now?’
Miko shrugged. ‘Well, look.’ She indicated the trendy sloped glass wall which overlooked the lobby of their Covent Garden building. Katie looked down. It always made her feel slightly sick, as if she were going to fall in.
‘Girl girl girl,’ intoned Miko as people walked through the door. ‘Fat bloke. Girl girl girl. Hairy-wristed bloke shagging that girl there. Married too. Girl girl girl.’
Katie sat back. ‘So, what – you’re saying the men all have two women each and there’s still lots of girls left over?’
She thought back over the men working in their office. There were two. Fat Paul who did the books and smelled of egg sandwiches, of which he consumed copious amounts, leaving a trail of watercress wherever he went, and a small gremlin in the IT department who veered away from direct sunlight. Both had unexpectedly attractive wives who turned up stoically at the Christmas party knowing everyone was looking at them thinking, ‘Really? Is he fantastic in bed?’
‘Hi Lucca,’ shouted Miko to the gorgeous, tawnycoloured Italian girl passing her desk, who worked in the marketing department. ‘How did your blind date go?’