THE HUSBAND HUNTERS

by LUCY LAING

‘No, it’s true, I read it somewhere,’ said Tash. ‘And it’s really agonising. It’s like a long eel with barbed teeth and it goes right up inside, stays in there, and then goes septic.’

  ‘It sounds absolutely horrible,’ I had said, feeling a bit green. Rach, who had been the only one of us to get an A in GCSE biology, had wanted to try and grow a willie-seeking fish thingy, just in case Henry decided not to go down the Amazon.

  ‘Let’s hope that you lot get me a bit closer down the aisle this time,’ Soph said, at our next meeting.

  ‘Your school reunion’s coming up,’ Rach reminded her. ‘Forget all the geeks with their chins full of spots and the jocks with their sweaty gym kits, I bet you won’t recognise half of them. Just think of the new pool of male talent that it could throw up.’

  ‘I’m more likely to throw up at the sight of them,’ grumbled Soph. ‘I really don’t know if it’s a good idea, girls.’

  We all turned on her.

  ‘Soph, this club orders you to go to that reunion,’ demanded Kazza. ‘And you know the rules. You need to find a man to go down that aisle with, and the school reunion is the ideal place to start looking. Just think, you’ll already have so much in common with a man you meet at the reunion – you’ll practically have grown up with him.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ said Soph, laughing, holding up her hands in defeat. ‘I’ll go.’

  Rach then said she’d spotted Paul Hardman in town the other day, buying a takeaway coffee at the local deli.

  ‘Oh my God, what did you do?’ breathed Kaz, as if Paul was some Hollywood star who had just flown in from New York or something.

  ‘Well, I didn’t want to let him see me,’ admitted Rach. Oh no. I didn’t want to hear what was coming next. I had this awful vivid image of Rach stalking him through town like some crap spy, leaping into doorways so he didn’t see her. And then him knowing all along that some mad friend of mine was following him because she couldn’t spy her way out of a paper bag, and him asking me about it when I did actually get the courage to phone him.

  ‘He never saw me,’ Rach said excitedly. ‘Luckily I had a hood on my jacket and I pulled it up and got some dark sunglasses out of my bag. It was raining, so I looked a bit odd wearing sunglasses, but no-one seemed to notice.’

  I buried my head in my arms and leant forward on the table. I didn’t want to hear any more. Bizarrely the girls didn’t seem to cotton on that Rach could have just ruined my future chance with Paul, and were hanging on her every word.

  ‘But then he disappeared into the bank and I went in after him but no-one else was in the queue, so I thought I might look a bit mad so I left,’ she finished up.

  Thank God for that, I thought, lifting my head off the table. Perhaps I did have some guardian angel looking down on me after all.

  ‘Do me a favour, Rach,’ I said, weakly. ‘Don’t apply for M15 and give up your day job just yet. Next time you see Paul in the distance, walk the other way. Please.’

  ‘OK,’ she said, huffily. ‘I was only doing you a favour, to see if he was meeting a girl or anything.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Tash suddenly, taking a sip of her coffee and wincing as it was so hot. ‘I think it would be a good idea for Rach to see a hypnotist.

  ‘Whatever for?’ I asked, puzzled. ‘Well, you once said that you thought that Rach’s whole attitude toward men stemmed from you, Bee, swiping the first boy that she fancied from under her nose.’

  Oh God. I really didn’t want Tash to bring that up. It had been pushed under the carpet for the last fifteen years and Rach and I had never really talked about it again. Rach and I had been best friends ever since the age of four when I’d pushed a slug into her mouth in a sandpit, but we’d had a massive falling out when at the age of fourteen we’d both fancied the captain of the boys’ football team, Pete Griffiths.

  Rach looked at me with a smirk.

  ‘It’s true, Bee - you could have scarred me for life.’

  ‘So’, went on Tash. ‘I think that Rach should have some hypnotherapy, and whoever does it can take her back to when she was fourteen and see if she does still feel strongly about what happened.’

  ‘Oh great, so she travels back in time on some couch and I’m there holding her hand, and then she suddenly thumps me in the nose with all her years of built-up resentment and frustration,’ I retorted. ‘That’s a brilliant idea - you can forget that.’

  ‘Actually I quite fancy the idea of being hypnotised,’ Rach said, looking at me with a glint in her eye.’ It could be fun.’

  That was typical of Tash to go stirring up an ancient hornets’ nest between me and Rach. I sat there sulking, mopping my bread into my pasta sauce.

  ‘C’mon, Bee, it will be fine,’ soothed Kaz, as Rach nipped to the bar to ask for another bottle of red wine. ‘It might even be fun to watch - if she goes back to a past life or something and she tells us that she was some seventeenth-century maid who was seduced by some wealthy landowner or something, it would be better than watching Pride and Prejudice.’

  I couldn’t help but smile.

  ‘Knowing my luck, I will also have been in some past life with her and I will turn out to be the wicked housekeeper who beats her for having an illicit affair with the master of the house. Then I’ll end up being punched twice in the face,’ I said.

  I scraped back my chair to declare the meeting closed. Kazza suddenly grabbed my arm.

  ‘Not so quick,’ she instructed, fishing in her handbag. My reactions weren’t fast enough. Bemused, I looked at the ripped-out picture in front of me from one of the celebrity magazines. It was Clive Owen, brooding and gorgeous, with dark eyes. Before I even had time to drool, Kaz stuck something sharp into my arm. ‘Owwww,’ I yelled.

  ‘That was your first treatment,’ Kaz said, smiling as she put the pin back in her handbag.

  I was really annoyed. ‘That hurt, Kaz,’ I complained.

  ‘Well look at Clive now,’ she instructed. And I had to admit she was right. Clive had suddenly lost some of his attractiveness.

  ‘That’s it, I don’t need any more treatment,’ I grumbled to Kaz.

  Climbing into my Mini outside the restaurant a few minutes later, I was still rubbing at my arm.

  I couldn’t wait to get into work next morning, to see if there was an email from Kaz with the minutes of last night’s meeting. And there it was, the little envelope flashing in the corner of my screen. I clicked open my email.

  PROGRESS REPORTS.

  * Soph’s wedding to be discussed in more detail at the next meeting, as reminder of the last wedding disaster proved a bit painful. Proposal to skip onto planning the next few weddings for the next few weeks.

  * Willy-seeking catfish. Rach re-raised the possibilities of breeding some of these fish for later use. Tash said we didn’t want to be seen as using torture tactics, and asked could we go to prison for it, but Rach quite excited at the thought of becoming willy-seeking catfish breeder, especially as she has a spare room in her flat which she could turn into a lab.

  * Beauty Flash Balm. Each girl, except Bee, to go to the department store in town to get a tube. Tash said she swore by it to make her skin look younger. Bee barred from Beauty Flash Balm as she can’t be trusted to handle a toy boy satisfactorily.

  Kaz then took a picture of everyone close up with her digital camera as she is going to keep a photo diary of our transformations. (Hated having the close-up photograph. Kept blinking at the last minute, which annoyed Kaz no end.)

  * Rach’s hypnotherapy session. Soph’s mum to do the first session, as she is reading a book on self-hypnosis. Soph said she had a big pendant with a stone on the end that we could use to swing in front of Rach’s eyes. And Soph’s mum also had a posh chaise long in her front room that, as long as Soph’s ancient cat Tilly was turfed off it, would make a perfect therapist’s couch.

  * Rach is worried that she is allergic to cats, and will spend the time sneezing instead of looking at the swinging pendant. Rach to take two antihis
tamine tablets before the session. Bee to make sure that she sits more than arm and feet length away from Rach when she’s on the couch in case things get violent. (I make mental note to be extra nice to Rach over the next few days to try and get in her favour in this life, which hopefully she will remember if she is plunged into a past one.)

  * Congratulations to Bee, who has actually rung Paul Hardman. (I smiled at that one, as I had done a brilliant job – okay, so he didn’t actually answer the phone, but I managed to leave a squeaky message asking him to call me. I had tried to deepen my voice halfway through the message, which had sounded like I’d suddenly had a sex change so I had to hurriedly turn it into a cough. But I think I did pretty well. Now all I had to do was wait for him to return my call…God I hope he does, else the girls will have me driving round to his house and hammering on the front door, and I’m not sure I’m ready for a face-to-face confrontation yet)

  * Kaz’s voodoo doll has passed inspection. Soph was correct, it doesn’t resemble Kermit the Frog now, a bit more like Miss Piggy. But according to Kaz, who has now conveniently changed her story, James’s girlfriend looks piggish anyway and has very small close-set brown eyes, instead of big frog-like eyes. We were all a bit dubious but we let that one pass as the girls have worked so hard on the doll. She proudly produced the first pin and stuck it into the top of the doll’s leg to christen it. (I was just glad that pin went in her leg and not my arm again, so I clapped extra hard.)

  I clicked off the email and reached into my desk drawer and pulled out my tube of Beauty Flash Balm. I had persuaded the girls to let me join in the experiment and had promised not to get carried away by any potential toy boys.

  I squeezed an extra bit out and rubbed it onto my face. I could almost feel my skin tightening instantly. It was cheating as Kaz’s firm instructions had been to apply it twice daily, and I’d already put it on four times this morning. But all’s fair in love and war, I thought as I screwed the top back on.

  I wondered if Tash was thinking the same thing - she could have done with a bit of Beauty Flash Balm in her life over the last few years. Perhaps her life would have turned out differently. Perhaps the married teacher she had fallen in love with a few years ago would have actually left his wife for her if she had. Mind you, who’s to say his wife hadn’t been applying the stuff with a trowel herself. Maybe…

  ‘Bee,’ roared the model agency director, in my ear. I jumped out of my skin and dropped the precious tube of Flash Balm on the floor. ‘Could we have you back on this planet long enough to book a job for me.’

  I hurriedly got the huge heavy book of models out of my desk drawer and peeling a contacts sheet off the top of my in-tray, started to knuckle down to some work. But all I could think of was how on earth I was going to persuade Paul Hardman to go on a date with me. I sighed so hard that a sheaf of papers blew off my desk.

  Nick, one of the agency photographers who was looking through some images on the computer screen, glanced up.

  ‘What on earth’s the matter, Bee,’ he asked, bending down and helping me pick up my papers. ‘You look as though your cat has just died.’

  ‘It’s worse than that,’ I moaned, pulling off my jacket, sitting down on my swivel chair. ‘I’ve got to get a date with this guy.’

  Nick laughed. ‘I’m sure he’d be thrilled to see your face now, at the prospect of meeting him. Who are you dating, Hannibal Lector?’

  I told Nick about Paul, and how I’d first dated him twelve months back, but now the HHC thought he was going to be my Mr Right, so I had got back in touch with him.

  Nick looked confused. ‘You mean you’ve got your friends to judge your boyfriends to make sure you find Mr Right, instead of doing it yourself? But that’s not how it should be done.’

  ‘Yes, I know that,’ I snapped. ‘But I’ve done such a crap job myself over the years, and so have they.’

  I told him about Rach’s boyfriend sleeping with her sister, about Soph’s failed wedding, how Kazza’s boyfriend had hit her, and Tash’s penchant for married men, especially teachers. The explanations took most of the afternoon, and by the end of it, Nick’s eyeballs were nearly popping out of his head.

  ‘Yes, I see,’ was all he could say when I finished explaining about all our disastrous love lives. ‘I agree you could all do with a little help - to say the least. But do you really have proper meetings about it, with progress reports and minutes. Are you serious, or are you having me on?”

  I know it sounded a far-fetched idea, but as I explained to Nick, it was the only way that we could do it properly. I told him about our regular meetings in the Italian, and how Kaz always typed up the minutes the following day.

  ‘You lot are mental,’ he said, but there was a look of admiration in his eyes. ‘But if it works - who cares,’ he added, picking up the phone as it started to ring.

  I didn’t care if Nick thought I’d lost the plot. If it got me Mr Right, then I was prepared to do anything it took.

  Nick had known me for years anyway. We had both started working at the model agency at the same time, and he had a great sense of humour. The girls had teased me about him when I first started at the agency, as we sat next to each other all day. But Nick just wasn’t my type, as I patiently explained to all of them, as they had clustered around me, desperate for some gossip. He was ten years older than me, and his hair had already started to turn grey at the temples. But it wasn’t attractively greying like George Clooney - it stuck out at all angles, as he never went to a salon to have it cut. His mate Danny did it with an electric shaver for him once every few months.

  Nick didn’t care what he looked like, which isn’t great for a photographer at a model agency. He still wore a short ‘eighties-style leather jacket that he’d bought when he’d been at university twenty years earlier. I had nearly vomited when I first saw it hanging on the back of his chair. It was a really unattractive pale brown colour, with a motorbike motif stitched on the back. Scarlett’s boyfriend Simon had actually asked to borrow it for an ‘eighties fancy dress party once, and Nick had said. ‘Yeah, sure,’ and had handed it over. He hadn’t even seen the funny side of it. Simon had put it on, and Scarlett and I had nearly wet ourselves laughing at him. Nick still didn’t understand what we were laughing at, even when Simon started prancing campishly around our living room.

  When Nick first started at the agency, he had teamed the hideous jacket with some tight pale-blue jeans and black t-shirts, which he seemed to have a constant stack of. The only thing I’d ever managed to achieve with his dress sense was to eventually get him out of those tight jeans and into some trendier baggier dark blue ones.

  Nick had had various girlfriends over the years, and a few months ago, had just started seeing a student from the local university. I teased him mercilessly over it as she was only twenty-two and in her final year.

  ‘You’re thirty-nine, and she’s twenty-two,’ I had pointed out to him. ‘You’re almost old enough to be her dad – that’s gross.’

  ‘She’s very mature for her age,’ he argued, but I still carried on teasing him relentlessly.

  When I now explained to him all the finer points of the HHC, I finished by pointing out that I was no longer twenty-two and couldn’t flash my pert boobs at an older man, who would just come running and drooling. It had to be done in a more subtle way.

  ‘When you reach thirty, and are still unattached, you can come across as desperate,’ I explained to him, carefully. ‘So by having my friends monitor my progress they can make sure I don’t come across as some mad old witch who is desperately trying to clamber off the top shelf.’

  Nick nodded, but he still didn’t look as though he really understood. And when he had a nubile twenty-two-year-old waiting for him at home, I can’t imagine he really cared what a dried up crone like me was doing to try and bag herself a man.

  ***

  ‘Right,’ said Kazza importantly as we sat down at the usual round table that our favourite waiter had saved for us
that evening.

  ‘Has everyone managed to do some dress research?’ We all nodded like obedient schoolgirls and pulled folders out from our bags.

  We had decided that we had to choose wedding dresses for each other, so I had chosen for Soph. I’d spent the last few nights poring over bridal magazines trying to find out what suited Soph and had almost cracked under the pressure of her being the first bride destined to walk down the aisle. It was all right for the others, Soph had to say ‘I Do’ before their dresses would even be needed.

  ‘Calm down, Bee,’ said Scarlett, when she had walked in the lounge last night to see me madly flicking through magazine after magazine and hurling them on the floor in desperation. Eventually with Scarlett’s help, and a couple of brandies to help me see the dresses in a more relaxed way, I finally settled on five possibilities. I carefully cut round the designs and pasted them onto sheets of paper. It was 3 a.m. when I finally finished. ‘C’mon,’ I’m going to bed,’ Scarlett said, yawning. ‘I’ve got to be up in three hours.’

  I displayed my choices on the restaurant table.

  ‘I like that one,’ said Rach, pointing to my first one, a white column of lace with a matching little bolero jacket. One by one the girls approved my choices for Soph, until they got to the last one. It was bright red with black fuzzy netting jutting out underneath. The girls stopped and looked at me.

  ‘What the hell is that?’ demanded Soph. I had to admit it, it was a little bizarre, but I seem to remember after a few decent double brandies I was starting to think that Soph needed to wear something a bit alternative.

  ‘No, Bee - unless we issue every guest with a pair of brandy goggles as they enter the church,’ said Kaz firmly, screwing up that dress and lobbing it at the bin in the corner.