Husbands Read Free

resources depleted I found myself eating increasingly weird combinations, such as fillets of skinless, boneless fish (good) with cornflakes (slightly odd) or cold baked beans with spaghetti. That particular lunchtime I’d eaten a jar of anchovies and tinned rice pudding. My taste buds had been abused.
    ‘These are my favourite. I thought you’d like them,’ said the waitress, pointing to the buns.
    ‘Thanks,’ I muttered. Did I know this pretty woman with a dark, curly bob and a big grin? I didn’t think so but she was behaving as though we were friends.
    ‘Eat,’ she demanded. Obediently I picked up a bun and bit into it. Tiny flakes of cinnamon and sugar stuck to my lips. Warm dough melted on my tongue and it felt like heaven.
    ‘I’m Bella.’
    I managed to mutter, ‘Laura,’ before I started to cry. Bella handed me a tissue. I think she’d used it but I didn’t care.
    That was how Bella became my bezzie mate.
    Bella and I recognized in one another certain similarities. Not that she had been abandoned by her husband and left holding the baby, far from it. Bella had never been married and from what I could gather, back then, she wasn’t capable of staying interested in a relationshipwith a guy much longer than the initial three-month oh-la-la stage. But we were both travellers, both searching for something.
    I was born in Wollongong, Australia. It has everything a girl could ask for; a big port and a smelting and steel plant. Wollongong is the Oz aesthetic equivalent of Slough. Or so I’m told; I haven’t been to Slough so I might be doing one or the other of the two places a disservice. I’m the youngest of four children. My older brothers and sister all grew up gracefully, sat and passed exams, went away to uni, moved back home, married the neighbours and settled down to live the same lives as my parents had lived.
    For as long as I can remember I have wanted more. Not more money. When I was growing up we always had enough money but not too much, and as a consequence I’ve never given money much thought. I wanted more experiences. I wanted to see more, do more, feel, taste and touch more. I didn’t go to uni: instead of getting a degree I got several part-time jobs and started to save up for a ticket that would take me around the world. I wanted to see the Taj Mahal, the Empire State Building, the Eiffel Tower and all those other monuments that end up inside plastic domes that scatter snow.
    I wanted to meet different people from the ones in my neighbourhood; who were very lovely but scarily similar, in a Stepford wives sort of way. I left Oz in 1993, aged twenty-one, and set off on my big adventure. In truth, most twenty-one-year-olds embark on an adventure; it’s called life. But my adventure seemed to be more significant, more vital because it was
mine
.
    I worked my way across Europe. And it was every bit pure gold, just as I’d imagined, and sometimes it was as terrible as my poor mum feared. The highlights included working in a circus – not that I was doing anything exotic like a trapeze artist or a flame thrower – I sold tickets and mucked out elephants. Another highlight was meeting a French lesbian who became a great mate. Briefly I wondered if we should become lovers, just for the experience, but she introduced me to her brother who was just like her but with a dick so I had a thing with him instead. I saw the Eiffel Tower, the Vatican and the tulip fields in Holland. The low lights included being employed as a dunny cleaner in public loos in Spain and sleeping on a floor for three nights in Florence train station because I couldn’t get a job and I’d run out of money. Best not dwell.
    I met myriad people; some fascinating, some so dull they brought on rigor mortis, some astute – I’ll always remember their soundbites of wisdom. Some were totally nong yet their nonsensical chatter pops into my head at inconvenient moments. In 1998, aged twenty-six, I met Oscar. I’d never