Unsuitable Men Read Online Free PDF Page A

takeaway menu. These were the supermarket shopping choices of a female of the species.
    Auntie Lyd was right. Even bloody Ticky Lytton-Finch was right. He had another woman.

3
    It was a bit of a surprise to me to find that I genuinely wanted to talk about Martin to Ticky when I got into work. Perhaps it was because Auntie Lyd was being annoyingly
dismissive every time I tried to bring him into conversation. She held up a silencing finger whenever I mentioned his name; I would have got more sympathy from Mr Bits, her ancient marmalade cat.
And perhaps it was because I had realized, while gnashing my teeth and wailing into my pillow (thank goodness Auntie Lyd had given me one of the rooms at the very top of the house), that I appeared
to have very few friends left who were exclusively mine, rather than mine and Martin’s. I couldn’t call up Darren and Rebecca, or Anna and Max; for all I knew they were already
arranging cosy paired-up evenings with Martin and Whoever-she-was. I was outside of the couple zone for the first time in eleven years, and I couldn’t bear that any of them might see me
pressing my face up against the glass, pleading to be let back in. I’d called Mum in Spain, where she lived with Steve, husband number four, but she’d been busy heading out to a golf
lesson and hadn’t had time to chat for long. I had even been desperate enough to consider calling Dad, before realizing that it would alarm him too much if I deviated from our usual scheduled
calls at Christmas and birthdays only.
    I’d spoken to my old university flatmate Caroline – first-time mother of a three-month-old baby – who had burst into sleep-deprived hormonal tears as soon as she heard my
voice. I didn’t dare make it worse by telling her about Martin. And by the time I hung up I didn’t have the energy to face another rebuff. It seemed that, for all of my defensive
insistence that I had plenty of other people to talk to, Ticky was the only one actually available.
    Whatever my reasons, Ticky didn’t seem remotely surprised by my sudden urge to discuss everything with her. She took it as her due; of course it was only a matter of time before I would
volunteer my personal life for her dissection.
    ‘I think this is, like, raaahlly healthy, Roars. First step to recovery and all that. So, like, tell me about the other woman,’ she said, propping her elbows on her desk and resting
her chin in her hands. ‘Who is she?’
    I felt my eyes fill with tears.
    ‘I don’t know who she is,’ I said. ‘I don’t care.’ That was a lie. I was desperate to find out who Martin’s new woman was. I’d already spent an
unhealthy amount of time on his Facebook page this morning, scrutinizing tiny thumbnail photographs of every woman on his Friends list. I had narrowed it down to a shortlist of ten before forcing
myself to de-friend him for the sake of my sanity. But I wasn’t about to share that with Ticky; I was too ashamed of my stalker-like behaviour.
    ‘Yah, yah,’ nodded Ticky with approval. ‘Totes the right attitude, Roars. There’s no point obsessing over his new bird. You’ll drive yourself crackers. How long do
you think it’s been going on?’
    ‘Months,’ I intoned glumly. ‘He had a weekend away last month and now I think he must have been with her.’
    ‘No way – the weekend in Wales? But he said he’d gone with his schoolfriends Paul and Al!’
    Ticky’s elephantine memory for detail never ceased to amaze me. She could remember everything about people’s personal lives to the most ridiculous degree. If you said that you were
going to a wedding on Saturday, Ticky would remember immediately, although you had mentioned it only once before, that this was the wedding of Annabel and Marcus, and wasn’t she the one whose
father had left his wife for her sister, necessitating some complex extended-family seating arrangements? If she ever focused her uncanny talent for recall on her job, she would be