Chasing Men Read Online Free PDF Page A

my ten green bottles.’
    ‘Chasing men isn’t the problem,’ the old lady said loudly. Her speech had become slower and grander: she, too, had drunk more than her normal quantity on an empty stomach. ‘It’s spotting the defects from the distance, so you can be choosy. Then, if they’re any good, catching them and holding on to them.’
    ‘All advice gratefully received, but I’m not sure that’s on the agenda. Yet.’
    ‘You’ve been hurt. I can see that.’ Sally spoke quietly. ‘I’m impressed that you’re putting on a brave front. But there are lots of ways you could meet new men, and make friends. Not just those Telegraph ads. Even if you didn’t want to … you know. Take it any further.’
    Hetty was drinking her fourth glass of wine. Her tongue was loosened and she giggled again. ‘Oh, Lord, Sally, sex with strangers. Are you about to warn me to carry condoms?’
    Sally gaped. The old lady swivelled round in her chair and stared. ‘ If you go chasing men, dear, do choose clean ones,’ she said.
    ‘Yes, Mother,’ Hetty answered, and hiccupped slightly.
    Sally stubbed out her cigarette and immediately lit another. ‘We haven’t decided anything and it’s getting late. What are you going to do?’
    Hetty remembered the pizza leaflet and made a decision. ‘Enough talk for one night. I am going to phone out for a Meat Feast with garlic bread,’ she announced. ‘With chocolate chip ice cream to follow. Would anybody like to join me?’

Chapter Four
The Odd Couple
    Hetty was beginning to find her bearings. The children from the downstairs flat, whom she took to be the McDonalds’, had scurried past her one morning. A boy and a girl, aged about five or six, though not twins, in the uniform of the nearby primary school. Mrs McDonald, a dumpy woman in her mid-forties, had bobbed quickly behind them with an anxious look, carrier-bag on her arm. There had been no time to exchange pleasantries, and Mrs McDonald did not appear to want to. You can be sociable or not as you wish, Mrs A had said; apparently, the McDonalds did not wish.
    Mrs A would greet her cheerily; indeed, made it her business to greet everyone who came near the block, often by leaning out of the window. It must be her method, Hetty reckoned, of coping with life alone, though ‘alone’ was hardly an apt description. Some of those the woman hailed would accept her offer of a cup of tea, as Hetty had. The postman did every Saturday, the milkman on pay-days, though he confided in a whisper to Hetty that that meant The Swallows had to be at the end of his round.
    The newsagent did not deliver. ‘I’m here from five a.m.,’ he whined. ‘Enough.’ To spite him, Hetty bought a copy of the Big Issue from a scruffy man who crouched on an orange-box nearby, and whom she had seen roundly cursed by the shopkeeper.
    The Big Issue seller had looked her over in a fashion that made Hetty distinctly uneasy. She hoped he would not start following her home. He was dirty, his oiled jacket greasy with caked food, his fingers brown from cigarettes. One lip had an ulcer. Whatever he had been before fate brought him to this, he was not a pretty sight.
    She was musing thus in the little supermarket, and thinking that she should not make snap judgements: perhaps the man had had bad luck and his current state was not his fault. Maybe selling the magazine was his first small step back to civilisation. She joined the queue absentmindedly.
    Suddenly another image came into her view. And made her stare openly.
    This man was impossibly handsome, with a shock of tousled golden hair, blue eyed. Over six foot. Probably around thirteen and a half stone. Breathtaking. He was in the queue ahead of her. Hetty rebuked herself. She might not be in the business of chasing men, but it was undeniable that she had begun to notice them, both good and bad. Unfortunately, her taste and preferences had been formed years before, when she was a twenty-something on the lookout.