Chapter 1
New Year’s Day. Four months, three weeks and two days after I walked into Jake Carpenter’s bathroom to find Fishpants Fraser, the Balham Bike, strapped spread-eagled to the heated towel rail, cheap cerise g-string hooked over one foot and Jake’s moony white bum hammering away like a roadbreaker between her duotanned thighs, I flump onto my squashy caramel suede sofa. Peeling a crust of chipped lime green glitter polish off my big toenail, I glance through the personal ad I scribbled on the back of a fag packet last night, while heavily under the influence of a bag of custard doughnuts and a bottle of cheap vodka.
‘Gawky ginger spinster, with lard addiction and weird gay man obsession seeks non-ginger, sport-hating, gay-looking straight male for meaningful relationship. Manic channel flickers, compulsive PlayStation addicts, mother fetishists and those with big boffin hair need not apply.’
I take a giant slurp of banana milkshake, hoick up my sloppy tartan jimjams to hack at an ingrowing hair on my shin and scan my ad one more time. Then I scrumple it up into a ball, cheerfully chuck it straight at the waste bin.
And firmly resolve to stay single.
It’s one-night stands all the way from now on.
That bit about me being a Ginge isn’t totally accurate. I’ve recently gone Nectarine. That’s what it said on the packet, anyway, although having seen the results, I think Neon Satsuma might be more appropriate.
The part about me looking for a man isn’t strictly true either. I might be single, but I’m not one of those mimsy whingers you see forever cluttering up the bars in Dean Street, flicking their hair about and blubbing into their Chardonnay because they’ve got fat bums and no bloke.
Not me.
I’m not saying I’m perfect. Sometimes, I can be a right cow. I’ve been known to do wees on people’s toothbrushes when they annoy me. I’m morbidly fascinated by news of terrible tragedies in the papers. Quite often, I don’t wash up for a week. Oh, I have my faults all right.
And crap taste in men is fairly high up on the list.
I am one tragic cow when it comes to choosing a partner. For a start, I was born with a wonky Gaydar. I’m a serial fancier of gay men. Show me a rampant homosexual male and I’ll try and get off with him. My judgement is famously bad. According to my personal Love File, I’ve met ‘Mr Right’ no less than three times. Oh, the first one reeled me in gently all right. Paid for everything, cooked me sumptous three-course dinners, bought me trinkets when I was depressed and was completely unselfish in bed.
Or so I thought.
It was when I opened my twenty-fourth birthday present that I discovered what he was really after. Tearing off the glittery pink paper in excitement, I was utterly gobsmacked to find myself gawping at a studded dog collar with matching lead. And then he hit me with it. Told me he’d always found sex with me a bit tame. Apparently, I could do so much more for his libido if I could only see my way clear to going down on all fours and barking like a dog once in a while.
It was all I could do to manage a feeble ‘Woof’ before bursting into tears, grabbing my coat and getting the hell out of there.
I fell in love with Mr Right The Second for a very simple reason. He ate fast. Which made me look positively dainty in restaurants. Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before all the chomping and slurping got to me and I started to hanker after a rather more sophisticated line in dinner party conversation.
Then along came Jake. And I only went and fell for him. Hook, line and crotchless knickers.
I’ve reeled, dazed with shock, from every relationship I’ve had the misfortune to totter into. Since I hit puberty, the needle of my Bullshit Barometer has wavered permanently on ‘Dangerously High’. I’ve taken so much crap I’m a prime candidate for Toxic Shock.
After the Fishpants fiasco, I was a walking bloody sewage farm.
I reckon it’s high time I settled for life in the single groove. OK, so it’s not particularly groovy right now, but things change, don’t they? At least I’m big enough to admit that in the race for romance, I’m a non-runner. On my personal Valentine menu, Bloke is Off.
I’ve done relationships and I prefer cake. Look at all the misery Jake caused me. And he wasn’t even on a par with Happy Shopper Arctic Roll. Oh no. My mind’s made up. Absolutely the only men I’m having any truck with in future are Ronald McDonald, Mr Kipling and Nick O’Teen.
You know where you are with them.
And, while we’re on that subject, just so you know where I stand food-wise, I’ll tell you that I don’t do dieting. I do pork pie sandwiches and black pudding fried in lard instead. I’ll jam down anything, apart from Liquorice Allsorts and the horrid jellery bits you get in fried eggs that look like snot. I gave up calorie counting two years ago, when I was breaking up with Tom. Tom was a poet who worked in Baby Gap to make women think he was sensitive. It was only when I’d finally decided that even if he wasn’t Mr Right, he was Mr Very Bloody Nearly, that I found out he was in possession of one GBH conviction and one (very current) wife.