All women are bastards... Jimmy Collins, competent middle-manager by day, suburban rockstar by night - has just been dumped and he's not taking it very well. Even a visit to his stylist can't cheer him up.
He decides to take control of the situation, convincing his friends to help him find the perfect girl - beautiful (but loyal), smart (but not too smart), confident (without being a feminist), an expert bun-maker; who's indifferent about shopping, enthusiastic about Star Trek and scornful of self-help books.
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Extract:
Dancer, lover, drinker - never knew which one to pick, 'Til I found them all in one girl and I called her Superchick!
JIMMY COLLINS
One:
Four bags of peanuts, three pints of Guinness, two Hamlet cigars, and a fairly dodgy glass of red. All in one trip. Without even using a tray. Not bad for a Sicilian, thought Marco, as he put the glasses down onto the table with a small flourish and looked around at the lads with a wry grin. They weren't even looking at him. Not two weeks ago, in this very pub, he'd gotten a big cheer and a round of applause for doing the very same thing. And tonight? Nothing. Not a bloody sausage. They hadn't even noticed the deft footwork and sprightly pirouette he'd had to use to avoid the old guy who'd stumbled out of the toilet right in front of him and nearly upended the lot. He sat down with a sigh and took the peanuts from his breast pocket, passing them around.
'Cheers Marco,' said Jimmy.
'Good man Marco,' said Norman.
'Arrivederci mon Frauline,' said Aesop.
Jimmy, Norman and Aesop all took the top two inches off their pints and put them down. Marco took only the smallest sip of his red but managed, as always, to look like John Wayne while doing it. It was the only reason the lads didn't take the piss out of him for drinking wine in the first place - he was a cool *******. It wasn't that he didn't like Guinness; it was the volume of the stuff that you were expected to consume, in any given session, with which he took issue. He'd even tried going the whole hog - twelve pints of the stuff - one night soon after he arrived in Dublin eighteen months previously, but that had been a mistake. He rose first thing the next morning for what was to be his customary sunrise wee-wee but quickly found his need more pressing. The ensuing thirty minutes put many aspects of Marco's life into perspective for him. It was that long before he was able to emerge from the bathroom and stagger back to bed, ashen-faced and shaken. He curled up with his fists tucked into his belly, waiting for Death to take him, and decided then and there that no amount of acceptance from your peers was worth whatever had happened to his insides during the night. If that cast an aspersion on his manhood around here, then that was just the way it was going to have to be. He'd wear a bloody dress before he'd do that to himself again.
Jimmy had asked him about the whole John Wayne thing. How did he manage to look so cool, drinking wine out of a stupid little glass like that? Marco had shrugged in that Mediterranean way and pouted.
'I am Italian. I drink wine.'
That didn't help Jimmy much, but he had to admit that Marco looked the absolute business - pinkie up in the air and all - and so he tried it himself one night. His little experiment in Latin sophistication ended, however, when Aesop told him to cop ******* on and get himself a pint before he turned the place into a bleedin' homo's bar.
Tonight they were there for Jimmy. Not that they wouldn't have been there anyway. It was Sunday and they often went for a pint on a Sunday night. But it was different this time. Jimmy was having a bit of trouble with Sandra and they were all there to show some solidarity. Basically, she'd dumped him.
ISBN 9781856354646
