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Don’t waste your time looking for more than sex with them. They can only relate to you from the waist down. They look round the women in this pub, all they see is a lot of convenient spaces. Somewhere they can park their amazing equipment. Till the urge passes. And they can get on with what really matters again. Mainly beer with the boys and football matches. The rest is patter. Just the money in the meter that lets you stay there till you get your business done.’
    Jacqui took a bitter gulp of Bacardi and Coke.
    ‘Well,’ she said. ‘If that’s the game, more than one can play it.’
    Kate winced. Some suspicion in her was worried that Jacqui was right. She didn’t want her to be right but almost envied her for her certainty. At least it made her connect directly with the world around her, even if she did it rather abrasively. At least she was dynamic.
    She seemed strong. Kate saw her as a kind of Boudicca figure. She
drove
through situations and her chariot-wheels had blades on them, very sharp blades. So what if some peoplewere hurt? It was mainly men she did the damage to and, post Kevin, she saw them as her enemies. At least she got where she was going. Didn’t she?
    Kate always felt that she wasn’t going anywhere. She was hanging about in the anteroom to her own life. If Jacqui was Boudicca, she was the Lady of Shalott. Weaving fancies inside herself and hardly daring to venture out into where things actually happened. Catching echoes of what it might be like.
    And Jacqui was honest – often brutally honest, but honest. She wasn’t. But to be honest you had to know what you thought about things. She didn’t. Maybe that was why she accepted so many situations without reacting to them in the way she really wanted to. She hesitated too much. At school she had been the type of pupil who knows the answers but is afraid to put up her hand in case she is wrong and makes a fool of herself. She would have liked to be able to run home, check it out in the
World of Knowledge
book her father had bought and run back into the classroom with her hand up. She was the type, except with Alison and Jacqui, who was likely to listen to nonsense or swallow a mild insult and postpone a reaction until she had gone back to her room and reprocessed the entire occasion in her head. She always thought exactly what she should have said when there was no one there to say it to.
    It was a kind of lying, not having the nerve to own up to the truth of where you were. It was a condition that had become more serious recently. It no longer applied only in incidental moments. It had taken up permanent residence in one particular area of her life. She could still hardly believe that she had lied to Jacqui and Alison about not being a virgin.
    That was one of the problems with lying. You spent so much effort sustaining the lie and elaborating on it that you almost began to believe it. There were times, remembering real situations like the one where she had had her pants off, when she could almost convince herself that what had happened was really a kind of sexual intercourse. She had to remind herself that it wasn’t. She was the only supposedly sexually experienced woman she knew with her hymen still intact. At least, she assumed it was. If it wasn’t, and her father insisted the culprit made an honest woman of her, she could probably look forward to marrying a bicycle.
    But now she was trapped in the pretence. She knew that in any future conversations with Jacqui and Alison she might have to wheel in another imaginary lover. She had even thought of a couple of names. It was getting ridiculous. There was only one way to stop it: do it for real.
    That wasn’t the only reason she wanted shot of her virginity. It was a total embarrassment, like a pimple that never burst. It was so unmodern. She felt she might as well be going about in a bustle and having the vapours. She had to do something. She didn’t know what but she had the vague idea