Bad Penny by Penny Birch Page B

me.
    â€˜You’re Penny, aren’t you?’ he asked.
    â€˜Yes, you remember me,’ I replied.
    â€˜Sure I do,’ he answered. ‘You’re Katie’s little friend.’
    I nodded, although less than flattered by being described as Kate’s ‘little friend’, especially as I’m actually a month older than Kate.
    â€˜Is Katie around?’ he asked hopefully.
    â€˜No, she’s married now,’ I answered, not at all surprised that his first interest was in Kate.
    â€˜What?’ he demanded. ‘Not to that ponce Toby?’
    â€˜Yes and no,’ I replied, thinking that Carl was the only person on the world who could consider the brash, very obviously male Toby a ‘ponce’. Toby had come to the island with Kate before their marriage, much to Carl’s disgust.
    â€˜How’s that?’ he queried, his Neanderthal brows knitting in perplexity.
    â€˜She married Toby,’ I explained, ‘but they didn’t even last a year. He turned out to be a complete bastard.’
    â€˜Did he?’ Carl asked.
    â€˜Yes,’ I pointed out patiently, ‘so Kate left him and they got divorced.’
    â€˜So she’s not married?’ he demanded.
    â€˜Hang on, hang on,’ I continued, ‘I haven’t finished. She met this guy called Jeremy and married him a soon as the divorce came through. He’s an advertising executive, they live in Sonning Common and have two daughters, Pippa and Jemima.’
    â€˜Oh . . . right,’ he answered and then stopped and looked around the room before turning to me with what I suppose was supposed to be a winning smile but was in fact an extremely dirty leer.
    â€˜What about you, then?’ he asked.
    It couldn’t have been more obvious if he’d flopped his cock out and asked if I fancied a suck. I played along, though, giving him a potted history of my last five years and accepting his offer to join his friends. I wasn’t entirely flattered but was telling myself that his response was typical and at least pleasantly virile. I was also wondering why he had looked round the room before issuing his invitation. Possibly he’d been checking for anything better in the way of talent, or possibly he’d been making sure whoever his current girlfriend was wasn’t around.
    â€˜Look what I’ve found,’ he addressed his mates as we approached the table.
    They greeted me cheerfully, and I had to explain why I wasn’t with Kate again. There were five of them and no girls, for some reason, and they seemed more than happy to pay court to me once they were sure Kate wasn’t around. It is nice being the centre of attention of five men, but in this case it was rather like being the lone female in a pen of rutting boars – the lone female pig, that is. Not that I minded, as I’ve always liked to think of male sexuality in terms of something primitive and uncontrolled.
    Carl and his friends were certainly primitive and hardly controlled, but I made a big effort to be sweet and giggled in all the right places instead of making the sarcastic remarks that came to mind. I was very aware that I was playing a game and acting a part designed to produce a particular result. It was something that I could never have done as a teenager and, as the evening went on, my confidence gradually returned. The feeling of déjà vu didn’t go away, though, but became stronger, until it really felt like six years had never happened.
    They were trying to get me drunk and I let them, accepting half-pints of cider and then several glasses of gin and lime. They also kept testing me, making little comments to see if I would be shocked and giving half-joking suggestions. I played along, pacing my drinking as best I could and very aware of their games. Thus, when Carl’s friend Gary played an old trick on me, I knew exactly what was going on.
    He was standing up with a pint in