Lady Desperate

Chapter 1

It's a work-free day for Jane this Saturday morning. She perches on the bed, cuddles her cat, while peeping out of the window from her Menlyn flat. Heavy on her mind is her shambolic romantic life, which gives her headache every morning.

"This is not the way I planned my life," she says as if someone is listening.

Of all the men in that expensive San-Marino courthouse, none consider her worthy to date. All the suitable blokes in the whole of Menlyn ignore her, she believes. Can it be her dress code which doesn't conform to those of other ladies around? Or is it even her smallish stature that leaves her looking up to most people? Questions spill in heaps as her face crumbles with no one around to fix her troubles.

"But for how long will this continue, uh? Thirty-four and gainfully employed, yet no man to call mine!" she shakes her head and swaps her pyjamas for a towel.

It's time to get serious about her future. Returning from work every day to meet her cat isn't her ideal lifestyle. She grew up in a loving family back in Ethiopia, where her parents showed love to their three children. That's the kind of life she craves, but how will that play out now when forty will soon knock on the door? Will she still be a spinster by then? Arrgh!

An hour later, at half-past nine, Jane jumps into her Toyota Yaris car, ready to visit a dating agency in the neighbourhood. At five feet six inches, she's not a dwarf. Why then will Menlyn men skip her for the taller and supposedly better-looking ones? Her face is pleasing to look at — many of her colleagues had said so.

"I must do something about this today," she hisses while driving through the courthouse exit gates.

As she swerves into the highway, her last relationship which ended in disaster takes hold in her mind. A mere three years ago feels like a decade already. Martin had come across as a perfect gentleman when they met at the Menlyn Mall. His baritone voice vibrated in her ears whenever he spoke and his dimple could make one offer him an eye.

If only she'd known early enough that he wasn't for real, the three precious years of her life wasted nurturing a dead-rubber affair could have been better utilised. Leaving him was a struggle but was a relief too. Going back to that abuser is a taboo. The brute is not fit to live among humans. That he didn't even look back is a blessing. That's not the man one will be proud to call an ex.

After they called it quits, only three men proposed 'til date. And those looked like retired railway workers queueing up for pensions. Despite being in her mid-thirties, she won't spend the rest of her life with a spent man under the guise of being married. Able-bodied young men strode the neighbourhood, what would she do with wrinkled bones? She ditched them in quick succession and looked forward to better suitors.