West End Girls

by Jenny Colgan

  “But then,” said Penny, “hold us back.”

  “Get up, get up!” shouted Penny the next morning, forcing her way into Lizzie’s room. Four filing cabinets filled with leaves were piled in front of Lizzie’s window. Lizzie had woken up a lot in the night, dreaming she was being buried alive. But now, as she woke, she realized where she was, and her heart leapt.

  “It’s a Chelsea morning! And we’re going on a job hunt!”

  “Aren’t we lovely privileged ladies living in Chelsea?” said Lizzie, sleepily rolling over. “I don’t have to go on a job hunt. I’m going out in my four-by-four to buy expensive belts and luxury wallpaper.”

  “No you’re not,” said Penny. “You’re pulling yourself together and you’re going to put food on the table.”

  “You don’t eat food,” said Lizzie. “And we don’t have a table. We have six tea chests stuffed with identical copies of the 1967 Cheltenham telephone directory.”

  “That’s detail,” said Penny. “We’re here now, and we’re getting out there. We are going to find jobs and then meet men. Who will buy us Range Rovers and think our penchant for luxurious soft furnishings is simply hilarious.”

  “Why don’t you just walk up and down the King’s Road in a negligee winking suggestively?”

  “Tried it. Up!”

  “What kind of job am I going to find anyway?”

  “Some crazy stamp-collecting one? I don’t know. It’s a new world out there.”

  “It’s a scary world in here. What’s for breakfast?”

  “Water,” said Penny. “But when we start making some money we’ll get a juicer and juice up fresh fruits and vegetables in the morning and have them with sunflower seeds and grass and things.”

  “Water?” said Lizzie. “Are you sure? Is there nothing else?”

  Penny rubbed the corner of her mouth. “Well . . .”

  “Are those crumbs?” said Lizzie. “What have you got? You’re holding out on me! Stop it!”

  Penny shrugged. “Well, maybe . . .”

  Lizzie leapt out of bed and into the kitchen.

  “Jaffa Cakes!”

  “And they’re not even store brand,” said Penny.

  “Nothing like a good breakfast to set you up for a busy day,” said Lizzie, munching happily.

  “But we’re going to get that juicer,” said Penny with a warning glint in her eye.

  “Yeah,” said Lizzie sadly. “You maybe. I think I’ll stick to a biscuit-based morning.”

  “OK,” said Penny. “Clothes next! What are you going to wear?”

  Lizzie’s face turned down. “Well, I was thinking of black . . . with a further helping of black.”

  Penny nodded thoughtfully. “Well, maybe you could think of it as artfully chic.”

  “The trousers have an elasticated waistband.”

  “Don’t eat any more Jaffa Cakes then.”

  “I won’t,” said Lizzie.

  “Good.”

  “I’ve finished them.”

  “Oh. They were meant to last us until teatime.”

  “Do you think the smashing orangey bit counts as one of my five portions of fruit and veg?”

  Ignoring her, Penny picked her way through the mess. “I’m going to wear my Dolce and Gabbana top.”

  “It’s so obviously fake,” said Lizzie. “You totally so obviously picked it up in Wellings market.”

  “It’s not,” said Penny. She picked up the corset thing from her suitcase and slipped it on over her tank top.

  “Penny, it says ‘Dolce e Banana’ on the front.”

  “Oh, who’d notice that?”

  “Only anyone leaning over to get a look at your tits, which as you stick them out all the time means absolutely everyone.”

  Penny sniffed. “We’ll just see, shall we?”

  “See what?”

  “Who gets a job the fastest.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Have a little competition, shall we?”

  “No,” said Lizzie. “We don’t need a competition. You’ll get a job the fastest. You’ve got blond hair and perky tits and you smile nicely and look like you might conceivably be up for it. I wear elasticated trousers. Can we not have a competition, please?”

  “You know, all you have to do is just drop a few pounds and you’d be really attractive, Elizabeth,” said Penny, looking serious.

  “Oh, and could we definitely not have the ‘all you have to do is drop a few pounds’ conversation,” said Lizzie. “It’s not as much fun for me as you seem to think, given how often you bring it up.”

  Penny stuck out her bottom lip. “Well. We’re in a borough with no unemployment whatsoever and a definite need for what us Essex girls do best.”

  “Drink Bacardi Breezers?” said Lizzie.

  “No.”

  “Go to Lakeside?”

  “No.”

  “Do the shitty jobs nobody else wants to do?”

  “No . . . uh, yes. Yup, that’s us.”

  Chelsea looked shinier in the morning. Lizzie wondered if the people here just spat out their chewing gum less than people in Brandford. But then she saw the massive street-cleaning machine purring up and down. So everyone who lived here just got more good things even though they had more to start with. That didn’t seem fair.

  But it was so lovely. It was early and clear and bright and the pavements were being polished. What was it Penny had said? “Remember: we’re looking for posh jobs in nice places where we meet nice men and you don’t have to get salad-bar bits in your hair.”

  She crossed the King’s Road, shivering slightly at the sight of the smart clothes shops. She certainly wasn’t going to start in there; if she was too scared to shop in them, she certainly wasn’t going to put herself through the humiliation of asking for a job there. Plus she feared that, for example, part of the interview might be having to get herself into an outfit they stocked, then all the other staff would come out and have a good laugh at her and she’d break the zip and be unable to get out of it and she’d end up three hundred quid down.

  No, not the clothes shops.

  Pondering whether to spend her last few pounds on a coffee so she had something to cling to as she pounded the streets, she wandered up past the rows of perfect, huge, white-stuccoed buildings—just like hers, she thought happily—interspersed with red mansion blocks. She wondered who lived in these, how there were so many rich people all living so close to one another. What did they all do? They couldn’t all be rock stars and bankers, could they? Maybe they could.

  Out of a large building with pillars on either side of the huge front door came a young family with a baby in a pushchair. The baby was snortling contentedly, and the couple, her with a lovely figure and long blond hair, him looking successful and well dressed, were laughing together at some little joke. Lizzie looked at them and found her teeth grinding slightly. She told herself they must be really unhappy underneath, or really nasty and were laughing horribly because they’d just ritually disembowled the underpaid foreign help. The idea that you could be rich, attractive, live here, and be happy . . . Well, Lizzie thought, she lived here now. She could be like that too. She was broke, chubby, squatting, jobless, and single, but apart from that they shared a postcode so they were the same really.

  The little family got into a beautiful shiny black car just as it started to rain. Probably on their way to the divorce lawyers, thought Lizzie, as she trudged on, getting wet.

  The Fulham Road was next up. It was full of rare book shops; incredibly expensive florists with about three carefully selected perfect blossoms on display; furniture showrooms that looked like they’d just been flown over from Versailles, and old-fashioned pubs quietly being scrubbed down, with beer being brought in and the doors and windows thrown open to get some fresh air. Lizzie wondered about a bar job. She could be the friendly, busty heart-of-gold barmaid cheerily serving foaming pints of frothy ale to the local squire’s son . . .

  Hmm. One of the bar s
taff threw a bowlful of soapy water out across the pavement, just missing her legs. She skipped out the way, and shot him a dirty look before she could help herself. Whoops. Maybe not apply there, then.

  Right, no clothes shop, no street cleaning, no bar work . . . this was getting ridiculous. Either they were going to starve to death or she was going to have to go in and ask someone about a job. The next shop she saw . . .

  The next shop was a smart-looking antiques shop. Nothing in the window had a price on it. She pushed on the door, before noticing there was a little bell she had to press before she could get in. Quickly she pressed it before she could change her mind.

  After an age, an old man wearing a bow tie came to the door.

  “How can I help you?” he said, looking at her somewhat distrustfully.

  “I was going to buy your entire shop but now I see your unpleasant face I’ve decided against it,” Lizzie wanted to say, but restrained herself.

  “Uh, hello there.” She took out her CV nervously. “My name’s Elizabeth Berry and I’m particularly interested in working in the field of antiques. So if you have a vacancy . . .”

  The man squinted at her.

  “Vacancy? What do you mean, if I die or something?”

  “No,” said Lizzie slowly, “I mean, if you need an assistant or something.”

  The man looked behind him into the empty shop.

  “Well, I suppose we could do with someone to manage the enormous queues in the mornings.”

  “There you go, then,” said Lizzie. “And I’m sure you’d need someone at lunchtime?”

  The man sighed. “OK. What’s your opinion of that piece there?”

  He pointed to an old earthenware vase. It looked like the kind of thing you could pick up at a furniture shop for about a tenner, and was entirely featureless.

  “It’s a vase,” said Lizzie. “Uh, and . . . very suitable for all sorts of places in the home. Indoors, outdoors . . .”

  “Well, well, well, it’s a classical historian,” said the old man. “Sorry, could you get off my step? I need to dust it for the hordes that come down here straight after queuing all night at Ikea. Oh, and it’s Abyssinian and worth thirty thousand pounds.”

  “That’s exactly what I was going to say next,” said Lizzie, but it was too late. She trudged across the road to the pub. The man who’d sent the water along the pavement was still out there, looking at her.

  “So, you’re really an antiques dealer but you want to work in a pub?” he said when she approached him, CV in hand.

  “No, I just want to work generally.”

  “Sorry, love,” he said. “We’re looking for people who really love pubs, you know, love the customers and all that.”

  Lizzie tried to think of a pub she’d been in where the bar staff had really loved her, but failed. She tried to smile, realizing as she did so that a) she seemed to be taking quite a lot of shit she didn’t really deserve, and b) she would never be able to go in that pub, or possibly any pub in the street ever again as long as she lived, and headed farther up the road.

  Everywhere it was the same. Skinny girls working in art galleries looked at her blankly and indicated that they thought she was trying to physically throw them onto the streets so she could have their jobs. Shop managers sniffed and, mentioning high interest rates and credit card debt, said they weren’t hiring staff, which made Lizzie shuffle uncomfortably. Specialist shops wanted to know if she was specially qualified, which seemed a bit unfair. There weren’t any stamp shops, she’d checked, and anyway, she didn’t want to go back to that. And why did everyone have to be so rude? She only wanted a job, not ten pence for a cup of tea. She’d now been sneered at by girls who looked twelve, pinched-nosed women in Chanel suits with foreign accents, fat men wearing waistcoats and polka-dot ties, and bar and restaurant staff from every country in the entire world. What had happened to low unemployment?

  Now she was getting too wet to be anywhere near presentable enough to go job hunting. Chelsea, soaking now, with shiny red postboxes and shiny red pensioners, no longer looked as if it was about to provide a backdrop to an Austin Powers spectacular. It looked hostile and hard and closed up. And she was hungry. Extremely hungry. Feeling in her purse she found a two-pound coin at the bottom. Right, that was it. Thank goodness she hadn’t had that coffee. She was going to find something to eat and . . . reappraise her options.

  She slunk into a little café on the corner, painted bright yellow on the outside, with cheerful hanging baskets. Inside it was dark and cozy, with wooden walls and tiles on the floor. Food was hung all around; large sausages and cooked meats from the ceiling, fresh fruit on the counter, and sweet-smelling herbs over the doorway. It all looked rather nice. Lizzie swallowed manfully and sat down, glancing around for a menu. What if it was one of these really expensive places that Penny went to with dubious men, places that charged a tenner for a piece of asparagus floating in olive oil?

  “Yes. What you want?” shouted the man behind the counter. Lizzie winced. She didn’t know what she wanted, but she’d quite like it to cost less than four pounds fifty.

  “Uh . . . have you got a menu?” she said quietly.

  “What’s that?”

  Oh, for goodness’ sake. It was entirely reasonable to go into a café and ask for a menu. He was just pretending not to understand her because her face didn’t fit around this stupid part of the world, and didn’t everyone like to make her know it.

  All the frustration of the morning—of being rejected and looked down on by every Tom, Dick, and Harry in the entire damn postcode—welled up in her suddenly, and she felt her face redden as she stood up.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Don’t bloody bother yourself. I’m fine, obviously. I’ll just go outside and lick the bloody McDonald’s boxes in the gutter, shall I? In fact, maybe I should look for a job there. After all it wouldn’t matter if I was all covered in grease and shit, would it? And I’d hate for anyone around here to trouble themselves.”

  She grabbed her handbag and headed for the door, shaking with humiliation and fury. The rain hadn’t let up in the slightest.

  “What? Hang on,” shouted the man, but Lizzie pushed at the door. Of course, it was a pull door. As she stood there, fuming, she grabbed it again just as a great big hand came out and stopped it.

  “Sorry. What is this babbling about? Are you OK?”

  Lizzie turned around. “I came in to eat and you were incredibly rude to me and everyone has spent the entire morning being incredibly rude to me and I’m just sick of it, OK? You can all take your Chelsea attitude and stick it up your arse.”

  “Wait, what . . .”

  The man stood back. He was dark and round, and Lizzie saw now his hands were covered in water and one was holding a huge, angry-looking langoustine. He also had a concerned look on his face.

  “Sorry . . . you came in and I have fish brains on my hands, I miss you. Bad fish brains, no?” He smiled at her apologetically. “We have no people today. Well, only me, as you can see.”

  His accent was difficult to place. She looked around.

  “Well, you’re not exactly busy, are you?”

  “You are very grumpy lady. Eleven o’clock is not the big time lunch rush.”

  He wiped his hands on a tea towel that was hanging out of the tie of the apron enclosing his capacious belly. “OK. You want lunch or you want to have big temper fit once again?”

  Lizzie attempted a half smile. “Well, I don’t know, do I? That’s why I need to see a menu.”

  “I do not have a menu.”

  “You’re too exclusive and smart to have a menu?”

  “I make whatever is good and fresh on the day. You do not like the sound of that?”

  “How much is it?” said Lizzie.

  The man looked her up and down, taking in her cheap shoes and elasticated waistband.

  “You are the first customer of the day and guinea pig, so you get a discount.”

  “How much of a discount?
”

  The man screwed up his face.

  “I can do you some lunch for . . . two pounds. That’s my absolute low price of the day for angry wet girls.”

  “Hurrah,” said Lizzie, then remembering herself, said, “Uh, that sounds nice. Thank you.”

  She sat down again as the fat bloke went to work behind his counter, chopping and stirring things up. She found herself watching him, engrossed in his work. Although short, he was large all over; his hairy forearms were like the hams hanging over his head, his stomach was massive; even his features were big. Mediterranean she would have thought, but his eyes weren’t black but a heavily fringed blue.

  “You want something to drink?” came the voice.

  “Tap water, please,” she replied.

  The man smiled to himself, then brought her a small glass filled with something light and golden and fizzy and delicious.

  “Here,” he said. “On me. As I am such a terrible host. And you have had such a terrible morning.”

  Lizzie accepted, feeling slightly giddy. Well, her day may have started horribly, but now a large stranger was giving her drinks and it was only eleven-thirty in the morning.

  “That’s delicious,” she said.

  “Prosecco. Better than champagne,” said the man.

  “Oh, yes,” said Lizzie. “Champagne gets terribly boring as the morning drink of choice.”

  The man laughed. “So why are you so sad, wet girl?”

  “I wasn’t miserable, I’m job hunting. Do you have any jobs free? No, you’re looking for someone with ten to fifty years’ café management experience, I do understand.”

  “Hmm,” said the man. “Job hunting is difficult. What’s your speciality?”

  “Stamp collecting.”

  “This is a popular job in England?”

  “Not as much as you’d think.”

  “Why are you looking in Chelsea? The people don’t collect stamps here. They work in American banks and make their tiny dogs wear clothes.”

  “I know,” said Lizzie. “But we just moved here . . .”

  “We?” said the man. Lizzie’s heart jumped. Oh, my goodness, was he hitting on her? Why would he ask if she was a “we?” Hang on, she thought, was she going to be some kind of unbelievably easy lay for a dodgy waiter type? But on the other hand, she thought with some remorse, her life was so barren these days a dodgy waiter type marked a blinding improvement in her love life. Boy, was that depressing.