Tales From a Hen Weekend Read Online Free PDF

‘Relaxing. Saving myself for tonight.’
    ‘Relax while you can, then,’ she says with a grimace. ‘Sounds like your mates have got a full programme of intoxication lined up for you.’
    Helen’s a bit strange.
    She’s the other fiction reviewer from Bookshelf. We split the fiction between us, right down the middle, the middle being a kind of cultural line. She takes the literary fiction, I take the chick lit. She deals with the crime, I deal with the romance. She reads serious, I read humorous. It works well. We don’t conflict with each other’s interests. And surprisingly we get on well together, too. Helen’s not like me at all. She’s forty, single, and determined to stay that way. She’s not gay, but she doesn’t like men either.
    ‘I don’t understand,’ she tells me sometimes, in tones of great exasperation, ‘why intelligent young women with university degrees, good careers and the world at their feet, should want to chuck everything out with the garbage as soon as some arrogant twat gets inside their knickers. It’s such a waste!’
    ‘But we can have both, can’t we? A career, a life of our own, and a man?’
    ‘Huh!’ she sniffs. The sniff speaks volumes. ‘Trust me, Kate, it just doesn’t happen. It doesn’t work out like that. You start living by your hormones, you sacrifice your own identity. Every time you fall in love, a few more brain cells die. Look at the heroines in the books you read. Do they strike you as being in full command of their senses?’
    I laugh at her. She’s so intense, she’s funny.
    ‘Have you been in love?’ I ask her quietly as we speed across the Irish Sea. I can’t imagine her willingly shedding any of her own formidable brain cells. ‘Has there ever been anyone special?’
    ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she snorts dismissively. ‘I haven’t got the time, or the inclination. Men bring you down, Kate. Sooner or later – whatever you think, however perfect they seem at the beginning – they bring you down to their own level. “Would a lark tie itself to a snake?”’
    It’s a quotation from a book she read last week. She told me at the time how impressed she was with it.
    ‘Not all men are snakes, surely,’ I smile.
    ‘“They slither in the dust,’ she continues. ‘They’d drag the poor lark along with them, breaking her wings. She’d never fly again.”’
    ‘Shit. Glad I’m not a lark,’ I say lightly, but she just shakes her head at me sadly. A lost cause.
     
    Lisa’s looking out of the window, watching the clouds, listening to her MP3 player. She’s smiling to herself. I wonder if it’s her music making her smile, or her own thoughts. What’s she thinking about? Richard? Mr Wonderful? I have this private nickname for him – don’t laugh – I’d never tell her, of course – Rick the Perfect Prick. I can’t help it: he’s such a goody-goody, he irritates the shit out of me. She talks about him as if he was the last angel in heaven, delivered to her personally as a gift from the gods. They never argue. He washes up every evening, gets up to the children if they’re sick in the night, brings Lisa flowers for no reason at all, tells her he loves her even after six years of marriage. She says they’re ecstatically happy. Ecstatically ! Says their sex life is fantastic, says she can’t wait for the kids to be in bed every night so they can get down to it. I should be pleased for her. Correction – I am pleased for her, of course – but I’m sorry; I just can’t see Perfect Prick in that light. It makes me cringe, to be honest. He might be very useful in terms of motor vehicle repairs, but I wouldn’t want him tinkering with my big end, not if he was the last man in the universe. Just as well we don’t all have the same taste in men, I suppose, or the human race would have died out almost overnight if Mrs Noah held fast to her underwear and said ‘Not tonight, Noah, and not ever again either, thank you very much, even if