Life and Limb Read Online Free Page A

and nodded.
    â€˜I had to cough up two hundred kroner. Which I assume you will refund.’
    He stared back at her, and she went on.
    â€˜Don’t spend too long on the phone calling family in Australia.’

I t was supposed to hurt. It. She never thought of it as anything other than It . Just as she never thought of him as anything other than Him . She had never tried to analyse why. Because she knew that once she started to analyse, there would be no end to it.
    Kirstine – known as Kiki – Laursen leaned back in her chair and listened to the music booming down to her from the stage. Her fishnet-stockinged legs and stilettos were dancing a jig under the table. The advertised blues evening at Fatter Eskil – not a club she frequented – was better than she had expected. The room was packed and the atmosphere good.
    â€˜I’m going to the bar. Anything you want?’
    Kiki shook her head at Nina’s question. It wasn’t alcohol she needed. Even though she wasn’t working the following day, and Monica was minding her children. She was after something else, and Susanne’s hen’s night would serve as well as any other evening on the town.
    She looked around her circle of girlfriends, each dressed worse than the next. The bride-to-be won hands down. For the occasion she had been made up like an overripe princess and forced into a costume worthy of a yodelling Heidi. Just a few hours ago she had been in the centre of Aarhus selling red roses to male passers-by for a kiss. She had also been subjected to the attentions of a male stripper who, like the pro he was, had pretended he found her immense body sexy. The stripper was the only item on the program Kiki had taken any interest in. He was a fit guy with muscular thighs and a six-pack, no doubt about that. Broad at the shoulder and narrow at the hip, just as she liked. Shame he was gay, though, which obviously she kept to herself. No reason to burst anyone else’s bubble.
    Mmm, they were a good bunch, her friends. They were there when you needed them, and that had to be the most important criterion – never mind their dubious dress sense and peculiar choice of partners. Susanne would soon be joining the club. On Saturday she would be marrying the world’s most boring man – aka the ever-neat Ulrik with blue, perfectly ironed shirt and matching tie and his two perfect children with clean nails and water-combed hair from an earlier (imperfect, one must assume) marriage. It was actually frightening to have so little influence over your friends’ choice of partners.
    She tried to imagine Susanne and Ulrik having sex but had to give up. Perhaps they could find something to get up to under the doona with the lights off. The odds weren’t good, though.
    The number was over and the audience was clapping. She got up.
    â€˜I’m just going to the loo. Will you keep my seat?’
    The others nodded. But she could see in their eyes that they knew: Kiki’s on the prowl now. Something’s going to happen.
    On her way out she scanned the room. Smoking was still permitted here and a fog had formed in the club; it seemed too cramped for all the people. That was how she liked it. Cramped, so you touched – a breast against a man’s shoulder, her arm against a hand holding a glass of beer. A little ‘sorry’ and then the pretend-casual eye contact.
    That was how you caught men. It was simple. She had never had any problems – nor any great successes, either. It had never made her happy, although that wasn’t the aim. She didn’t really have an aim, she thought, aside from assuaging her hunger.
    â€˜Nice tights.’
    Was there disdain in the voice? The man behind the words stood propping up the bar. She had seen him before, at the Bridgewater Hotel a good hour earlier. Was it coincidence that he was here now? He didn’t look like the Fatter Eskil type, but then she probably