Chapter 1

 

Keira looked up and down the street, she was told the Old Church Hall was down Patterson Street, but she had walked up and down this road twice and nothing looked like a Church Hall or even a Church. She was feeling depressed, nothing in the town seemed to be where people told her, either that or people didn't like her, and she was being thwarted at every point to do anything.

She had moved into the town almost five months ago when she'd decided to take a position in the firm and that required her to move from her hometown. Since her divorce had been finalised, she'd had no reason to stay back there and decided to make the move and find new friends. All her so-called friends seemed to vanish once she was a single woman again and as for the friends her and her husband shared, well, they had backed away pretty quickly. It had been him that couldn't keep it in his trousers, but she was treated like the leper, suddenly all the happy families acted like she was some woman on a mission and was going to fuck every single one of their men.

She had been lonely back in the old place, but now she has moved she is no better. Five months and she had not met anyone she could call a true friend.

Her neighbour who was one of the few people she had talked to outside of work, had suggested that she should go to the local church with her, and she had been nice, she was nice Keira corrected herself as she thought. She could have been a friend if she would simply not talk so bloody much. She never shut up. Keira had invited her in for coffee one Saturday morning and two hours later she almost had to throw her out of her house, she would not leave and would not shut the fuck up.

To get her out of the house she agreed that she would go to the church with her, she would have agreed to anything if it would relieve her of her voice.

She wasn't a religious person, didn't believe in an almighty god who just looked down and fucked up as many lives as he could. Oh yes, he was a man, he had to be. Nobody except a man could screw so many things up and still expect to be worshipped.

Anyway, she had proof that God was a man. If you read the bible, she wanted to tell her neighbour when she had rattled on about the church, God had made it ok for a man to have several wives. Why, she thought, a man can't satisfy one woman let alone several? It should have been one woman having several husbands, at least then she would have a chance of getting an orgasm once in a blue moon.

She had done what she promised and on the next day she was taken to church. She was quite pleased she hadn't burst into flames when she stepped through the doorway, however after an hour of the service and the preacher prattling on, she wished she had.

After the formality of the self-opinionated dick head spouting his rhetoric that was as old as it was sexist, her neighbour had introduced her to the oldest women she had ever seen. Keira did like the idea that she herself was the youngest in the room even if she was in her early forties.

She sat all nice and correct as she sipped tea and listened to the pointless chatter. It was suggested that she could help at the jumble sale the next weekend as there was never enough helpers. As the inane chatter continued, she felt that she had two ways of getting out of the church, one was to gouge her eyes out with a blunt spoon in front of them all, and the other way was to say yes and condemn herself to a day of sorting old clothes and watch old women fighting whilst they try to snaffle the best items on offer.