THE HUSBAND HUNTERS Read online

  ‘I like the first choice,’ said Soph, looking at the column of lace. It was unanimously decided that the dress was perfect for Soph.

  ‘Thank God I’m last in the bride order,’ said Tash. I couldn’t have agreed more. It was going to be a difficult job to get her down the aisle. Tash and convention didn’t go together.

  ‘Yes, it’s going to be difficult,’ said Rach. ‘After all, we can’t do the impossible - unfortunately bigamy is still illegal in this country.’

  I can still remember the day when Tash first walked into our sixth form common room at school. Rach, Kaz and I were sitting on one of the tables by the coffee machine, swinging our legs and talking about whether my history essay was long enough. The double doors at the end of the common room opened and in walked this stunning girl. The entire room of sixth formers had stopped talking and stared at the newcomer. Tash was of oriental origin - we later found out that her dad had married a former Asian beauty queen and the result of their union was quite simply striking. She had the blackest silkiest hair you could imagine, cut in a bob with a fringe, which framed huge liquid brown eyes and olive skin. And right from the beginning, she oozed attitude.

  Three months later, she caused the school nearly to grind to a halt when she had an affair with the married geography teacher Rob Beale. We were all shocked to the core. The most racy thing any of the three of us had ever previously done was when Rach sent one of our teachers a Valentine’s card.

  After a month in a bed and breakfast with Mr Beale, who then went back to his wife, Tash never came back to school. Instead she got a job down at our stable yard, mucking out all the horses. She had never done it before, but she’d charmed the pants off Steve into giving her a job on a trial basis. And even though she’d never been one to get her hands dirty, she surprised us all by taking to the job like a duck to water.

  ‘Did you ever hear from Mr Beale again?’ asked Rach now, as we pushed our plates back and scraped our chairs away from the table for more stomach space. I had eaten so much pasta I looked about nine months pregnant. I undid the top button on my jeans and hoped the girls wouldn’t notice.

  ‘No,’ said Tash. ‘I saw him once on the other side of the road and waved to him, but he pretended not to have seen me. I can’t blame him really - it could have really wrecked his life. But I’m not all to blame,’ she said hurriedly, leaping to her own defence. ‘He didn’t have to come away with me, did he?’

  None of us actually answered her question. I picked up my fork and looked intently at it, Soph picked up a salt pot and studied it as though it was the most interesting thing she had ever seen, and Rach and Kaz looked away. Tash chose not to notice our lack of response and ploughed on.

  ‘Well, I’ve not always been attracted to married men,’ she reminded us. ‘What about Neil?’

  Tash had been in a normal functional relationship for twelve months when Neil popped the question. She had met Neil a few years ago whilst on a girls’ night out in Manchester. He was very ordinary. He had a sales rep job, drove a Vauxhall Vectra and had seven identical blue shirts - one for every day of the week. We were shocked when Tash announced that she had started dating him.

  She had always walked on the wild side - so what was she doing with conventional Neil. But Tash said she was tired of having wild and exciting relationships, and for once she wanted to settle with someone ordinary.

  And for twelve months she did just that and they even got engaged. But then he took her to Paris for the weekend two months later. They ended up having a massive row on top of the Eiffel Tower - actually it was only the middle level as Tash claimed afterwards he had been too mean to pay the extra few euros to take her right to the top - and in the middle of their heated row Tash had taken off her engagement ring and hurled it off the tower..

  ‘You should have seen the speed of him running back down those stairs,’ said Tash now, chuckling. ‘He could have qualified for the Olympics.’

  ‘Well, it was your one chance to get married and you blew it,’ I said, shaking my head at her. ‘Here’s us all desperate to get down the aisle - including you now - and you had the perfect opportunity.’

  ‘But he was so boring,’ said Tash. ‘If that’s what married life was going to be about, spending the next twenty years sitting across the table from him, asking him to pass me the salt pot, I’d rather scoop my own eyeballs out and eat them. I’ve got to marry someone really exciting, else I’ll get bored.’

  ‘Oh great,’ I said. ‘So not only have we got the difficult task of making sure you find a husband that isn’t already married, but it’s got to be one that is funny, clever, interesting, and as fit as George Clooney?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ smiled Tash. ‘And I won’t settle for anything less.’

  ‘Anyway, how was your blind date?’ asked Kaz. Tash rolled her eyeballs - she’s always been quite good at that, they really go right up and round.

  Tash had been out the previous night with her blind date Chris. She had been reluctant to go in the first place, but her friend Harry had persuaded her to give it a try. ‘He’s got a really floppy fringe,’ he had said desperately, when Tash had been on the verge of saying no. And that had lured her in. But the date had turned out to be an utter disaster.

  ‘Basically, Harry had completely lied to me,’ she said indignantly. ‘His hair resembled a hedgehog and there wasn’t a single hair flopping over his forehead.’

  Tash had cut the evening short saying she had to go and visit her mum, even though her mum had moved back to Hong Kong two years previously, and she had left the bar.

  ‘I did try,’ she added lamely. ‘At least I went and gave it a shot.’ We all shook our heads at her. It was a good job Tash was last in the bride order - we would all be at least ninety before we made it up the aisle if we had to get her hitched first.

  The minutes of the meeting came winging in the next morning.

  PROGRESS REPORTS.

  * Soph’s wedding plans are coming along nicely. Kaz to ring up the shop and arrange for Soph to have a dress fitting with the design we had chosen for her. (The girls are starting to fight over being bridesmaids for Soph now, so we decided that we would all be bridesmaids for each other’s wedding and all wear the same dresses for each one. So Rach was nominated to try and source five identical bridesmaids dresses.’

  * Unfortunately Tash’s blind date didn’t go according to plan as the aforementioned blind date had an unfortunately short hair cut. Possibility of sourcing a hairpiece in the form of a floppy fringe on the internet, which Tash could keep in her handbag and give to future blind dates.

  * Kaz’s voodoo doll has now made it on top of her desk in the staffroom, despite the advice of the HHC that it might look slightly mad. Kaz had proudly reported that James actually walked past her desk and stopped to admire the doll. ‘Is it a pin cushion? It’s really cute,’ he had said, on his way over to the head teacher’s office. (I privately thought that James was either really nice or really stupid as the doll didn’t look anything like cute. Despite Soph’s best efforts it still did look like something that would scare children at a hundred paces.)

  * A date was set for Rach’s hypnotherapy session with Soph’s mum who was actually quite excited at the thought of doing some hypnotherapy on a real live person. Soph had produced the rather odd-looking necklace that she’d rooted out of her attic, with a huge plastic red stone dangling on the end, like some big scary eyeball.

  * Bee reported that she hadn’t heard back from Paul Hardman and was given until the next meeting to get through to him on the phone, else she would have to go round to his house and smoke him out. (I really didn’t like the sound of that one, so I vowed to keep him on redial for a whole week until he answered.)

  * The first set of pictures were taken on Kazza’s camera to monitor the progress of the beauty flash balm. (I’d cheated and put on some tinted moisturiser.) Kaz said she was going to take pictures every week for the next eight weeks then see what a difference it had mad
e.

  Heck, I’d better get on with trying to phone Paul, I thought as I clicked the email closed. My time was rapidly running out. With all the effort I was putting in, he had better turn out to be The One, I thought crossly, dialling his number. The least he could do was return my call.

  The reception door opened and suddenly there was Rach. She had a huge plaster across her nose. I couldn’t believe it.

  ‘You’ve had a nose job,’ I gasped at her. Rach was always threatening that she was fed up with being a ‘hair trap’ and she was going to get her nose sorted once and for all. I never thought she’d actually go ahead with it, but she had just proved me wrong.

  ‘No, I walked into the glass door at the supermarket,’ she told me, grimacing. ‘I wish I’d had a nose job, I think it would have hurt less.’

  I sat her down and promised to make her a cup of coffee, when my phone vibrated on my desk.

  And there it was, Paul Hardman’s mobile number flashing up on my screen. ‘Oh my God, it’s him,’ I yelled at Rach, starting to hop from one foot to another. I felt like I was about to have a cardiac arrest at any moment. What on earth was I going to say to him?

  ‘Answer it,’ hissed Rach, pushing the phone towards me. I pushed it back to her like it was a hot potato.

  ‘I can’t,’ I said, feeling as though I was about to pass out, I was that flushed and sweaty, with my heart thumping against my chest.

  ‘It’s only Paul Hardman,’ she said, pushing the phone back towards me again as if we were playing some bizarre game of tennis. ‘You’ve spoken to him before.‘

  ‘Yes, but that’s when we were actually on a date,’ I hissed back. We both looked at the phone. It had stopped ringing. I looked at Rach and we both burst out laughing.

  ‘It’s not funny,’ I said, trying to glare at her. ‘Now I’ve got to ring him back.

  ‘Oh Bee, just do it and get it over with. You’ll have the HHC to answer to if you don’t.’ She had a point. The thought of explaining to the others that I hadn’t had the guts to speak to Paul was actually more terrifying than phoning the man himself. So I picked up the phone, pressed redial and took a deep breath. He answered after two rings.

  ‘Hi, Paul, it’s Bee,’ I said. ‘Remember me?’

  *******************************

  CHAPTER THREE

  Kaz wouldn’t look at anyone unless he was filthy stinking rich. I’d always thought that limited her choices, but Kaz was adamant. She had been brought up on a council estate with her mum and five brothers, and she’d vowed that she would marry well.

  It hadn’t been the best decision. She went out with Pete because he drove a Porsche, but then he’d given her a black eye and shortly afterwards she had ended up in Casualty with three cracked ribs. We’d tried to get her to press charges against him at the time, but she clammed up, and said that she wanted to get on with the rest of her life, try and forget about it.

  Now she had her eye on James, who was a history teacher at the school where she taught PE. James also had a girlfriend, but that hadn’t put Kazza off. And if the voodoo doll was anything to go by, it seemed that Kazza didn’t have much competition. She looked like Miss World in comparison.

  James’s family was loaded. He didn’t really need to work, but he loved history, so he wanted to teach it. He was one of those teachers who was passionate about his subject, but most of the time he might as well be talking to a brick wall. His pupils weren’t interested in learning about Henry the Eighth, apart from any gruesome details they could hear about Anne Boleyn having her head cut off. But James ploughed on, and anyway it didn’t really matter.

  His parents were so wealthy they had bought him his £500,000 house in leafy Alderley Edge, with its glass-fronted living room, and his meagre teaching wages bought him the few bottles of claret that he got through each week and paid a few necessary bills. He drove a luxury four by four, and Kazza had already earmarked that to pull her horse trailer to various shows that she wanted to compete at.

  ‘So have you made any progress with James?’ Rach asked her, one evening at we sat round at hers with a Chinese takeaway spread out in front of us on the living room floor. We were having a meeting but had decided we were too skint to go to the Italian.

  James had already admired the voodoo doll on Kazza’s locker in the staff room - which by now had about ten pins stuck in its various limbs. Each morning Kaz jabbed a new pin into the doll, and then enquired after poor Caroline, James’s girlfriend, expecting to hear him listing her various mysterious ailments. But so far Caroline had remained a hundred per cent healthy. In fact she was currently in training for a half marathon and glowing with health.

  ‘The other morning she had an ingrowing toenail that was causing her some real pain,’ said Kazza gleefully.

  ‘Had you put a pin in her foot?’ said Rach, grinning with excitement.

  ‘Well, it was in her leg,’ admitted Kazza. ‘Not quite her foot, but I’m sure it was referred pain. I think it’s working.’

  We decided that Kaz couldn’t rely on the voodoo doll alone to put Caroline out of the picture. She needed some real action.

  ‘Carry on sticking your pins in, Kaz,’ I said, catching sight of Kazza’s crestfallen face. She had been banking on the voodoo doll. ‘But you need to up your game now.’ We decided that it wasn’t really appropriate for Kazza to start flashing any cleavage at school to spark James’s interest. She had to wear her aertex PE shirts and that was final - she couldn’t look like she was going clubbing on the hockey field, else she might be sacked. We decided though that she could wear a shorter PE skirt, instead of her practical blue jogging bottoms. Kaz had good legs, if a little short, so they may well catch James’s eye.

  The meeting ended with Kazza taking the next lot of close-up photographs of us all.

  ‘I think Bee’s skin is the worse,’ she said, examining the back of her digital camera. There was no way I could be the worst. I had been sneakily putting on three times more Beauty Flash Balm that anyone else.

  I was so lost in thought that I didn’t even see the pin until it had dug into my arm. That’s the bad thing about Kaz having this blasted voodoo doll - she always has a supply of pins in her bag.

  ‘Hang on a minute, that wasn’t fair. You didn’t even show me a photograph of a toy boy,’ I shouted, rubbing at my arm, as everyone scraped back their chairs to leave.

  ‘There’s a young waiter over there,’ said Kaz, swinging her handbag onto her shoulder. ‘He’ll do. It’s for your own good, Bee,’ she added, flashing me a sweet smile before walking out the door. I made a mental note never to sit next to Kaz again at a meeting. I want to be as far away from her horrible pins as I can be. At this rate my arm is going to drop off from blood poisoning. And Paul Hardman isn’t going to want to marry me with one arm - especially as when he first fancied me, I had two.

  The minutes came through the following morning. I was still fuming with Kaz. She’d dug the pin in my arm so hard it had actually bruised.

  PROGRESS REPORTS.

  * Kazza to invest in a new PE skirt as her old black one isn’t short enough to show off maximum amount of leg. I also pointed out that she should buy a PE skirt with inbuilt gym knickers into it, as it wouldn’t be good if she stepped on a grate like Marilyn Monroe, and her skirt blew up to show all the cellulite on her bum.

  Kazza had replied hotly that she didn’t have any cellulite on her bum - well not as much as me anyway - and we were almost on the verge of getting up from our seats and hoiking up our skirts to compare before Rach quickly grabbed me and Soph grabbed Kazza and pulled us both back down again. I was glad. As much as I wanted to prove to Kaz that my cellulite was not as bad as hers, I had a particularly old pair of grey frayed knickers on, which I didn’t want the whole restaurant to see.

  I said that I was only thinking of Kazza and I didn’t want James to be put off by any bits of cellulite. She said that she was body brushing anyway at the moment every morning in the shower, and it was reall
y working. Everyone made a mental note to rush to Boots tomorrow and buy a body brush.

  Kazza grumbled that it was a good job that it was May and not November, as she wouldn’t impress James if she had mottled corn beef legs to put on show.

  Kaz to check the weather forecast each morning, before setting off in the tiny skirt.

  * Rach produced a leaflet on latex masks, for any future stalking requirements. (I had almost combusted with embarrassment at the thought of her stalking Paul a few weeks ago, so I was really enthusiastic about this one. If he’d ever seen her - and I’m sure he must have done as Rach has never done any proper stalking before - then I’m sure he won’t start dating me, just out of principle that I have a group of completely mad friends.)

  * (I loved this one.) Even bigger congratulations to Bee, who has managed to speak to Paul and arrange a date. Ha! I am the one who is making the biggest progress so far in the HHC. I’ve identified my potential husband and I’ve already arranged to see him.

  After playing phone tennis with Rach a few days ago, I had called him back and chatted to him. Well, I say chatted. It was more a few stilted sentences on my behalf. I had tried to sound normal and casual. Once we had had exchanged hellos - after all it had been nearly a year since I’d blown him out - I’d taken a deep breath. Then I casually made a suggestion.

  ‘I’m sure I owe you a dinner,’ I said to him. There was a few seconds’ agonising silence.

  ‘OK, that would be great,’ he finally said. I nearly squealed with excitement, then quickly turned it into a cough. We arranged to meet at the local bistro at the weekend, before hanging up. I obviously couldn’t wait until the next meeting to report my progress. So I had quickly dialled all the girls one by one and told them. I wish I had a phone that I could dial all the girls at once and we could have a five-way conversation, but unfortunately they haven’t been invented yet.