Where Have All the Boys Gone?

‘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.’