You Have to Make Your Own Fun Around Here

by Frances Macken

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind putting it in writing. We have to have things in writing.’ The employee manual says we’re to have everything in writing.

  Within a half an hour, Edwina storms over towards me clutching a sheaf of papers and shaking them. ‘Who changed the copy? Who’s responsible?’

  ‘The client said to change it. She sent an email to the whole team. Look.’

  Mervin, Edwina, et al,

  Enlushing? Do I need to FedEx a thesaurus? Our brand trades on science, not claptrap. Please switch to the copy I signed off on last week, and stop being so damn ridiculous.

  Cindy

  Edwina glares at me for a long moment before settling down on the rubber exercise ball she uses instead of a chair. She pinches the bridge of her nose, inhaling slowly and loudly.

  ‘When you have a chance there, Edwina, you might help me find the budget for the TuffOats account. I’ve looked all over the system and I can’t find it.’

  ‘Fuck’s sake. The budget was set up in Q2 when we won the contract. It’s obviously in the Q2 file drive.’ She bobs up and down on the exercise ball, making scuff-scuff sounds on the carpet. ‘I don’t know what you’re doing here, Katie. You’re incredibly green around the gills. Even for a beginner.’ She flips her face back to her computer screen. ‘All the country people coming up to Dublin should be turned back at Kinnegad,’ she says under her breath, all the words strung together, and it’d make a person feel awfully unwelcome. It’d make a person want to turn back for the familiarity of home.

  Neil reaches over and taps me on the arm. ‘Come with me.’ I walk in his wake through the open-plan office, past rows and rows of pale-faced account executives. The other account executives have their own exclusive scene going on where they quote from obscure television shows at one another in the kitchenette, and swap the punchlines of dead comedians, and you couldn’t say that any of them are especially friendly. I learned long ago that people from Dublin have their friends already made and haven’t the need for new ones, and country people would nearly knock you over with the friendliness by comparison.

  Myself and Neil take a flight of stairs to the unoccupied floor above the agency, where there’s a rusted door with a sliding bolt. Neil draws back the bolt and we walk out onto a neglected terrace with a thick-crusted layer of pigeon droppings on it. He takes a joint from his shirt pocket and crouches away from the breeze, lights the joint effortlessly and tosses the used match over the side of the building. ‘There are some things you need to know,’ he says, toking off the joint. ‘About working here.’

  ‘Like what.’

  ‘You need to stop being friendly. It makes you look weak.’ He moves to pass the joint to me and I decline. ‘It’s always the country people who come in trying to be friendly. It tends to backfire.’

  ‘Uh, okay.’ He might be right. The friendliness hasn’t endeared me to anyone. The friendliness has sent people scattering. ‘Can I get your advice on something? It’s just I think I’ve got off on the wrong foot with Edwina.’ It seems I never know whether it’s better to be saying something or nothing.

  ‘It looks like she’s got it in for you.’ Neil gazes out across the drab, colourless cityscape. ‘She likes to, uh, break people.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘She wants to prove to herself that she’s the best at everything. The only way she knows how is to bring other people down.’

  ‘Jesus. What can I do to improve things?’

  ‘First, you’ve got to pass your probation. But it won’t be easy.’

  ‘How’d you pass yours?’

  He blows out. Grimaces. ‘I’m not gonna lie. It was really rough. One time I had keyhole surgery to have my gallbladder taken out, and that night I was on a conference call with the guys at TuffOats. I had to be at my desk at seven the next morning, and I had to pay a nurse to come to the office and take out my stitches. But I got through it.’ He smiles a sad and desperate smile. ‘And it’s all worked out. I passed the probation and now I’m a part of something that’s cool and worthwhile and a lot of my friends are pretty jealous to be honest.’

  I think I’m after ending up in the wrong place.

  The three of us are up late and talking about what we’re earning at work. Norma’s completing her diploma to become a schoolteacher, and says she feels secure in the knowledge that her salary can only rise as the years progress, even if she has no job at the present time. Meanwhile, Nuala’s earning seven grand more than me as a recruitment specialist, and she has health insurance and a pension out of it. ‘That’s a very poor salary,’ says Nuala to me. ‘If you’re going to stay on in that place, you should ask for a raise.’ It’s a bit rich coming from her mouth, herself being the one who got the job for me in the first place. I’d say she got a tidy commission out of it. The resentment is beginning to rise up within me. I could do with having more suitable, like-minded friends, and neither Nuala nor Norma has the special ingredient.

  ‘I’m only on probation. I can’t ask for a raise.’

  ‘You’re cracked in the head,’ Norma says, and her nose has never looked so pointy. ‘I don’t know of anyone who comes home at that hour of the night, every night of the week. Not to mind working through the weekend.’

  When Norma’s gone off to bed, Nuala says, ‘I’ve a few clothes you might like. I’ve left them in on the bed for you.’ I go into the box room and there’s four or five navy tops on the bed, and the top with the woollen roses on it too. I wouldn’t be caught dead in any of the tops. Nuala must think I’m in a bad way if she’s giving me her old things.

  I leave it a full fortnight before returning to Bean & Gone. I barely manage it, with all the anticipation, but I know it’s the right thing to do. You can’t have a fella thinking he has you too easily. You can’t have a fella knowing you’ve been counting down the hours, sneaking glances out of windows to catch sight of him coming and going from work. I’m half afraid I’ll land down and Luc will be holding another girl’s hand at one of the circular tables, but instead I find him hunched over and turning the key in the lock on the shutter. ‘Oh. Am I too late?’

  He turns and rises to his feet. ‘Hey,’ he says, smiling. ‘The dishwasher’s broken. We had to close early.’

  ‘I’ll call in another time, sure. You probably want to head home.’

  ‘How about we hang out for a while.’ He throws his head. ‘Come on.’

  Myself and Luc meander along the silent street together, the streetlights pooling on mercury puddles. It’s hard putting one foot in front of the other with all the adrenaline coursing through me. He stops in front of a pub. ‘You want to have a drink?’

  I smile at him. ‘I could do with a drink alright.’ I’m glad to be going in for the drink. The drink might consolidate the thousand million feelings I’m experiencing and make some kind of sense of them. We go inside the warm burgundy pub and find a table, and Luc goes up to the bar. When he’s back with the drinks, I tell him, ‘I’ve the photographs with me.’

  He rubs his hands together and pulls his chair in closer to the table. ‘Let’s see.’ I take out the sturdy envelope with my best photographs inside. Over several minutes, Luc looks through them carefully. ‘You ever thought about exhibiting?’

  ‘Oh, stop. They aren’t that good.’

  ‘I’ll talk to Marco. His dad manages an exhibition space in Paris. Why don’t you give me your number and I’ll give it to him.’ I write my number out on a beermat and he puts it in the inside pocket of his leather jacket. I know the talk of the exhibition space is only a ruse for getting my number, and that’s fine by me. ‘You know, Katie, you and me have a lot in common,’ he says, looking me intently in the eyes. ‘You’re a dreamer. I’m a dreamer too.’ This couldn’t be going any better. It’s all unfolding in the best way.

  ‘I suppose we are. Dreamers.’ Like with like. ‘It’s hard-going, though. Wouldn’t you agree?’

  ‘Absolutely. And not everybody gets it. The creative spirit. It can be hard
to find your place in the world,’ he says, supping on his beer. ‘A lot of people are jealous. People who know they’re nothing special. People with nothing to offer.’

  ‘There’s a lot of hoping and wishing. It can be very tiring, following your dream.’

  ‘Hey. It’s more tiring if you don’t. You don’t want to have any regrets.’ It’s great having someone to talk to like this. Someone who understands. It’s like a meeting of minds. He sets down his beer on the table. ‘I’m gonna go have a cigarette. You smoke?’

  I haven’t tried smoking before. I hope I can get it on the first go. ‘I’ll have one alright.’

  Outside on the street, a tribe of tourists wearing Viking hats and capes rumbles along the cobblestones bellowing the lyrics to ‘Wonderwall’. Luc rolls cigarette papers with his fingers, dabbing with his tongue. ‘It’s really tough to roll cigarettes here. The wind blows the tobacco everywhere. And every time I buy new papers, they turn to mush in my pocket from the rain. It’s the worst.’ I watch him draw the first drag, cigarette pinched between thumb and forefinger, and now he’s looking into the distance, into the future, like there’s something painful in his past. Or perhaps I’m only imagining it.

  ‘How are yourself and Nuala getting on?’

  Luc rubs his forehead. ‘Ah, shit.’ He runs the tip of his tongue over his upper lip. ‘Do we have to talk about that? It’s a little heavy.’

  ‘We can talk about something else if you want.’

  ‘I mean, we’ve gone out a couple of times. And Nuala’s good for the soul. She’s trusting and sweet. But.’ He breathes out. Bristles. ‘You’re gonna hate me.’

  ‘I won’t hate you.’ Holy God. What’s coming next?

  He hesitates. Looks down at his shoes and then back up at me. ‘That night at Club Dynasty. I had no place to stay. I didn’t have enough cash for a hotel or a hostel or anything. I was pretty fucked.’ He only stayed with Nuala to sleep in a bed. Jesus.

  ‘Why have you kept seeing her on the Friday nights?’

  ‘I share a room with Marco. He has a girl over on Friday so I think I should have some fun too. I’m a shit, huh. A big French shit.’

  ‘Do you think you’re going to want a relationship with her?’

  ‘A relationship? Pfft. It won’t come to that.’ It’s himself and myself that are dreamers. Like with like. ‘I just hope she’s not in too deep.’

  ‘I understand. I get it. As soon as you’re close with someone, they make things uncomfortable. They hold you to a standard that you can’t meet. They expect things from you that you’re not willing to give.’ I think I’m saying the right things. I feel that I’m being honest and speaking from the heart, and coming out with feelings I’ve harboured myself.

  ‘Yeah.’ He eyes me curiously. ‘Yeah. I think it’s something like that. People expecting too much from each other.’ We stand close and we kiss. The white fire consumes me. I feel as though I won’t eat for at least a week, won’t sleep for two.

  ‘It’s been great hanging out,’ he says, pulling out of the kiss. ‘I’m pretty tired. We call it a night?’

  ‘I was about to say the same thing.’ I would have stayed out all night with him. I would have had ten glasses of wine and smoked forty cigarettes if it meant staying out all night with him.

  Luc accompanies me to a taxi rank, and I return to the apartment high on wine and rapture. This’d be some story to tell Evelyn. This is like something Evelyn would do, and Evelyn’d get away with it. I wonder if, in some way, I’m living vicariously through Evelyn, or if, somehow, Evelyn’s living vicariously through me.

  Nuala turns from the television where herself and Norma are watching Big Brother. ‘Where’ve you been?’

  ‘Work,’ I tell her.

  Norma peers over at me and purses her lips. ‘You look like you’re on drugs.’

  I go into the box room and lay face down on the cool pillow. This is what it feels like. This is how I’ve been waiting to feel. Not only that, but Luc’s the sort of person with a dream too. It’s the most attractive thing about him. He gets it. And he gets me.

  ‘We’re gonna rule this campaign, Mervin. I’ve got it so fucking integrated,’ Edwina says, bobbing up and down on the exercise ball. Scuff, scuff, scuff. ‘Mm-hm. I’ve always got room for another client. I was getting bored.’ She ends the call, looks over at me and says, ‘It’s time for you to take on more responsibility.’ The new client is in New York, she says, and they’re five hours behind, and she tells me to expect late evening calls. The developers working on the campaign are based in India, and they’re six hours ahead, and she tells me to expect early morning calls. ‘Let’s see if you can hit the ground running,’ she says before cracking open a pineapple-flavoured energy drink.

  ‘I’m sorry this is happening to you,’ says Neil, and I don’t decline the joint. I’m into the smoking now in a big way. We have smoking breaks on the hour every hour. ‘Edwina’s sort of out of control.’

  ‘She has me working around the clock. Is it even legal? A person could die from a lack of sleep.’ I could fall asleep now and drop off the side of the roof terrace and slam into the pavement below, and I don’t think that’d even work to rouse me.

  ‘It’s the culture,’ he says. ‘And Mervin likes it this way. You know, maybe you should cut your losses.’

  Nuala and Norma are on high alert: there’s a hot-water bottle in the bed every night when I get home, and my pyjamas laid out on the radiator. I sleep, at most, for five hours per night, before hauling myself into the agency at cock crow for conference calls with the web developers. I develop conjunctivitis in both eyes, chomp on caffeine pills and live off Chinese food delivered to my desk. Neil runs out to Bean & Gone at intervals to pick up coffee and pastries, and I rack up fifty-seven missed calls from Mammy and Daddy. Mammy texts: What sort of a life are you living up there? We never hear from you.

  I go and sit on the toilet and stare at the poster tacked to the back of it: a kitten hanging onto a washing line with the words ‘Hang in there’ at the end of the poster. I don’t know how much longer I can hang in there for.

  I haven’t heard from Luc in eleven days. I’m up to high doh, wondering have I misread the signs or said the wrong thing. Maybe I’d be better off with a fella from down home.

  Nuala taps on the thin door of the box room. I wouldn’t mind but I’m pure strung out with exhaustion. I was up all night working on a pitch for an organic tampon brand, and all day I’ve been seeing abnormal flashes in my peripheral vision. I call for her to come in and she sits on the end of the bed and tells me tearfully that Luc has ended things. She invited him over for chilli con carne, and he came over and ate it, and he even had a second plate, and then he ended things. ‘The bastard. If he’d had the manners to call me and tell me before I went to the supermarket, I wouldn’t have spent all that money on the chilli con carne.’ I wonder what can it mean, Luc ending things with Nuala. It’s been a fortnight now since we went to the pub together, when I kissed him and gave him my number on a beermat. ‘I told him I had a dream about him,’ she says. ‘It might have scared him off.’

  ‘You can’t go telling a person you had a dream about them. There’s no predicting how they’ll react.’

  ‘I know that now. I’d never again do that.’ She gestures for a hug. Tears stained with mascara seep onto my pyjama top.

  ‘Yourself and Luc aren’t right for one another,’ I say firmly. ‘He isn’t a straightforward person.’

  She comes out of the hug and looks at me with glistening wet eyes. ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘You want someone who’s easy to figure out when you’re in a relationship. Any kind of relationship.’

  ‘You’re right,’ she sighs. ‘It’s just I thought I’d at least be engaged by now. That was always the plan. I thought I’d meet a nice fella in college. I thought I’d be married by twenty-five.’

  ‘You can’t plan your life like that, Nuala. There are too many unknown factors.’

 
; ‘You’re right,’ she repeats, tracing a pattern on the duvet with her finger, and then she says, ‘I’m surprised you haven’t met anyone nice yourself. It doesn’t make sense. You’re so pretty and interesting. I thought even Luc had a thing for you at one point,’ she says, and I try to appear taken aback. I’ve had the sense, on occasion, that there’s something Nuala sees in me that she’d like for herself. ‘If you don’t mind me saying, Katie, you can be a bit distant. It’s like you take too long to get to know people. You’re guarded. I think people feel they’re not worthy of your friendship. People get frustrated with that and they move off.’

  I don’t like this. ‘I don’t think that’s true, Nuala. I’ve a lot of people in my life.’

  ‘You’ve been up in Dublin for several years, Katie, and you’re still only friends with myself and Norma. And you’ve never had a boyfriend. Do you not think that’s unusual?’

  ‘I’ve loads more friends than yourself and Norma. Loads more. You’ve just never met them.’

  ‘Forget I said anything.’ She hops up off the bed and makes for the door. ‘Never mind me. I’m not thinking straight. I’m upset.’

  ‘Whatever, Nuala.’ Dickhead. Who does she think she is, coming in here and making out that I’m slow to make friends. I just haven’t met the right people up in Dublin.

  I suppose it was inevitable. I fall asleep on the bus and end up travelling a loop of the city and back out to the bus depot in Donnybrook. ‘You’ve missed your stop, love,’ the bus driver shouts out of his cabin.

  It feels as though I’ve been wakened by way of electric shock. ‘Holy God. Can you take me back into town?’

  ‘I’m finished me shift. You’ll have to ask God to phone you a taxi.’

  Jesus. Saint Jude. I’m two hours late for work. I scramble up the steps of the office building, skid across the waxed lobby floor and slam on the elevator buttons. I’m only dropping my coat over the back of the chair when Mervin’s door swings open. ‘You might grace us with your presence, Katie.’ Fuck. The pale-faced account executives whip their heads round like ostriches as I undertake the walk of shame into Mervin’s office. Edwina’s seated next to him with her arms folded and wearing a silk turban on her head.