Free Fast Friends by Jill Mansell

sure,’ said Loulou
disdainfully. "They’d wet their knickers all right. But they aren’t
going to find out, are they? Because if you
so much as breathed one single word, my darling, I would garotte you
with your own cheese wire. And don’t think I’m talking about your neck.’
     
    Loulou Marks always maintained that
her earliest memory was of pointing to a stranger on a train and shouting, ‘Mummy, look at that ugly man.’ Her mother,
smacking her so hard that she hadn’t been
able to sit down for days, had uttered for the first – but by no means the last
– time those immortal words: ‘Loulou, don’t be so rude.’
    It was ironic, she felt, that her hugely successful living
was now made from being as rude as she liked, to as many people as possible. Insulting them came as naturally to
Loulou as breathing, and they
cherished her for her ability to come out with what everyone else longed to say but did not dare. By a stroke of marvellous good fortune what could have
been a handicap had turned instead into a wonderful way of making a
living and still having enough left over to satisfy her ludicrously expensive
tastes in cars, clothes . . . and men.
    Loulou married Jerry Nash on her nineteenth birthday. The wedding, held in church, was the whitest her guests
had ever seen, thanks in part to Celestine Marks’s fond belief that her daughter was still a virgin. She was also
practical enough to realize, however,
that the marriage was unlikely to last and insisted upon at least one church wedding, ‘Because in future you might only be able to do eet in Registry
offices, ma petite, and they are too ‘orrible for words.’
    Equally firmly convinced that this was the Love Affair of
all time, and that she and Jerry would live for ever in the most spectacular
married bliss imaginable – what did mothers know, after all? – Loulou happily
went along with Celestine’s plans. There were
a few anxious moments when Jerry announced that no way was he going to wear a morning suit, or any suit at all for that
matter; he was a singer in a band and he was going to wear his best pink lurex jacket with the silver
lapels and matching drainpipe trousers – or nothing.
    The anxiety and arguments lasted
precisely thirty-five min utes, until Richard Marks drew his prospective son-in-law into the less heated atmosphere of the kitchen and spoke to him
as persuasively as he knew how. When they
emerged, Jerry announced with a
casual shrug that OK, he’d wear the penguin suit after all, no big deal, and Celestine heaved a sigh of relief that could almost have been heard in Paris.
Richard, thinking that £500 was a
small price to pay for his beloved wife’s happiness, reflected at the same time with deep sadness that now
he knew precisely what kind of person his daughter was marrying.
    The wedding, amazingly, went off
without a hitch. The marriage itself, however, to no-one’s real surprise, was a ghastly tangle of hitches from start to finish and lasted
exactly seven months and three days. When
Loulou returned home from work one
day and discovered her handsome husband making love on the staircase to a
wanton looking redhead clutching a ‘Save
the Seals’ collecting tin, she wrenched the heavy tin from her hand and brought it down on Jerry’s head so fiercely that he slid out of the woman and down
the stairs with a series of jolts
which crippled his ardour for weeks. The
scalp wound, requiring seventeen stitches, was almost negligible in comparison.
    The divorce, on the other hand, had been the most painful experience of Loulou’s life, so painful that she
had dealt with it in the only way she knew how – by pretending that the
marriage had never happened. In the space of a fortnight she had found herself
and her five large suitcases a new life in Glasgow.
     
    ’Have you
done much bar work before?’ asked the bar manager, and Loulou fell instantly in love all over again. With his deep voice and brown eyes and black tangled