Where Have All the Boys Gone?(3)

“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, tawny-coloured Italian girl passing her desk, who worked in the marketing department. “How did your blind date go?”

Lucca swung her heavy beige-blonde hair in a circle. “I know why you call it ‘blind date’ now,” she hissed.

Miko shrugged. “Why?”

“Because I want to stab my eyes out with fork! Tell me, why does he think I am interested he meets Robert Kilroy-Silk?”

Katie and Miko both shrugged.

“Why he want tell me—before drink before dinner even that he is not ready for long-term relationship?”

“Would we be better off with Italian boys?” asked Katie sympathetically.

“No! Only if you be their mother always.”

Lucca made a wild emphatic gesture that indicated a general wrath towards the male species altogether and headed off to dish out more abuse to the coffee machine.

“Lucca’s much more beautiful than me,” mused Katie sadly.