Where Have All the Boys Gone?. Jenny Colgan

      ‘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?’

      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.

      ‘Yes, she is,’ said Miko.

      ‘But still gets dickheads.’

      ‘Who do you get then?’ asked Miko.

      Terence, clearly. He’d seemed all right when they’d met at that barbecue. OK, there’d been lots of other people there, and quite a lot of beer, but now…As if doing the opposite of reading her mind, Terence confidently placed a podgy hand on her knee. Inside, Katie recoiled.

      ‘I just want you to know,’ he said, boozily breathing in her face. ‘I’m just in this for a bit of fun, yeah? Nothing too serious.’

      Katie hadn’t liked the way the conversation with Miko was going.

      Really, what was wrong with her? True, Katie Watson would never win any international modelling competitions. She liked to watch documentaries where hatchet-faced women run up to lanky adolescent girls in the street, whisking them off to new modelling worlds of fun and rock stars in Milan and Tokyo, but she never kidded herself that was her destiny. Olivia said once this had happened to her, but although she certainly was lanky, Katie thought she might have been a) telling a fib (not out of character for Olivia), or b) been a victim of a misunderstanding concerning teenage prostitution.

      Katie was, well, cute, she supposed. ‘You’re a cutie,’ her ex-boyfriends had said. None of them had ever said, ‘Katherine Watson, you are the most staggeringly beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life. I would kill for you. I would lie down and die for you. Your muddy-coloured eyes sparkle like moonbeams; your soft lips, though not in the Angelina Jolie class, are like peaches. Your wide hips are life in my hands and your slightly short stature I consider nothing but a delight.’

      Still, it made her look younger than she was, that was something about having a pixie face and a pointed chin. Although she was definitely growing out of the age where she could wear pigtails to accentuate trying to be cute, which she supposed had benefits in no longer having men ask her how long her stockings were.

      OK, on a level of perfectly scientific analysis, she was better looking than about sixty-five per cent of the people she had been to school with and, according to Friends Reunited, every single one of them now had kids. All of them. Even Magda with the Sellotape on her glasses and you couldn’t tell if she was looking at you or not. Even Mary Tracey Frances McGoolie, who gave off BO like a blowtorch. And, up until now, Katie hadn’t had a date for four months.