by Lisa Jewell
I could tell you about the fact that this morning I opened a parcel which contained my ex-girlfriend’s used tampon. That was nice.
Or I could tell you about the night I went out with my even exer-girlfriend and found out that she was in love with some guy called Drew who takes her to Zanzibar on holiday.
Or how about fancying my brother’s girlfriend so much that I’ve started wanking about three times a day and fantasizing about living in Beckenham. Hmm, are those enough experiences for you? he wanted to say? Will that do?
‘Er,’ he scratched his head, realized that that was unprofessional-looking and turned it into a hair-smoothing motion. ‘Well, I worked for Sotheby’s for a few months when I graduated.’
Emma and her bosoms nodded thoughtfully.
Ned felt his eyes start to water slightly as he tried to think of something impressive to say. ‘And then I pursued a career in retail.’
‘Uh-huh. What sort of retail?’
‘Well.’ He opened the vaults of his mind and tried to retrieve the relevant information. ‘Music. Erm, food. Clothing. Art. Furniture. Oh, yes, and, er, antiques. I’ve spent quite a lot of time working in, er, antiques.’
Emma raised an eyebrow at him and then looked down at his CV. ‘So I see,’ she said, ‘and that would be for G. London, Esq.’
‘Yes. That’s right. My dad.’
She smiled at him encouragingly. ‘And then you went to Australia, I see.’
Yes. In ‘98.’
‘And what sort of things did you do in Australia?’
‘Well, er retail. Mainly.’
She smiled at him and nodded.
‘Sports equipment. Art. Food. Some bar work. And I was working at an Internet café for a few months before I left.’
‘And what sort of positions did you hold within these various retailers?’
Jesus, he thought. This is a nightmare. A total nightmare. He’d thought his CV would have been sufficient. It was all there, he thought, every last pathetic detail of his retarded career. Why did she have to ask him all these questions? He flipped frantically through every facet of his career in retail trying to find the one occasion when he’d risen above the ranks of ‘bloke who stayed for six months and left before things got too serious’.
‘Oh, consultant, mainly,’ he said, nodding furiously, ‘I prefer to be at grass-roots level. I like that personal one-to-one connection with the customer. Well – liked, I liked it. Obviously, now I’ve had my time away, I’m looking for something a bit more, er… substantial You know.’ He rubbed his newly shorn chin and squinted at her.
‘Yes, absolutely,’ she said, ‘I can see that you’d want to move on. And what sort of career progression did you have in mind?’
‘Well, ideally I’d like to move out of retail, into something a bit more…’ Grown-up, he wanted to say. A proper man’s job with vast wads of cash and secretaries and business trips. Please. ‘Something a bit more… Well, let’s put it this way – it’s not my life’s ambition to be a retail manager. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a retail manager. But you know, all those keys, working Saturdays, it’s just…’ He stopped himself and took a deep breath. ‘I’d like more of an office type of job. Thing.’
‘OK.’ She scribbled something down on a piece of paper. ‘And what sort of experience do you have that might be relevant to an office environment?’
‘Well, I’m computer-literate.’
‘Any IT experience?’
‘Yes. I know my way around a computer.’
‘Would you consider IT-support work?’
IT support – weren’t they the smug guys without girlfriends who hated anyone who didn’t know as much about computers as they did? The guys who got paid to tell terrified secretaries to reboot their computers whenever anything went wrong? Er, no, thought Ned. No thank you.
‘Yeah,’ he said, trying to look positive, ‘I’d consider it, definitely.’
‘Great. And how’s your typing?’
‘Well, I can type. I’ve not been taught, or anything, but I can go quite fast.’
She smiled with what appeared to be genuine delight. ‘Wonderful! Let’s get you to do a little test, then, shall we?’
‘A test?!’
‘Yes. Nothing to be worried about. It only takes a couple of minutes.’
Ned gulped. Why were they making him take a test? He didn’t want to be a secretary – he wanted to have a secretary.
Emma stood up and beamed at him and led him through the posh offices to a small, somewhat foreboding-looking room containing a desk, a chair and a solitary PC. Ned felt his throat constrict and started to panic. This was like being asked to sit an ‘A’ level that he hadn’t revised for. A test. Shit. Besides the exams for his degree, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d taken a test – probably his driving test when he was seventeen, and that had been the single most terrifying experience of his life. In fact, when Ned thought about it he realized that not having to take tests any more was probably the single greatest thing about getting older.
Emma used the mouse to open up a program called ‘Trish’s Typing Test’, which was conducted by an animated woman in horn-rimmed glasses with drawn-on dimples and a pudding-bowl haircut. ‘Hi,’ she said in an electro-American accent, ‘my name is Trish. Welcome to my test. Please take some time to make yourself comfortable.’
‘OK,’ said Emma, ‘I’ll leave you to it. Just follow the on-screen instructions. And don’t worry if you mess it up. Just start the program again. OK?’ She flashed him her teeth and he flashed his back at her.
After she left the room he studied the screen and flexed his fingers. OK, he thought, typing test, no problem, I can do a typing test. Trish smiled at him unnervingly and brought him up some text, telling him in a really annoyingly patronizing tone of voice to relax, take it easy and not correct any errors as he went. A little clock started to tick away the seconds and Ned felt his gut clench up in utter terror. He took a deep breath and started typing.
Halfway through, he cursed and wiped a slick of sweat off his top lip. This was hideous, he thought, absolutely hideous. His hands had gone all stiff and unyielding. His brain stopped interacting with them entirely at one point and he just sat there, suspended, with his fingers hovering uselessly over the keyboard awaiting instruction from mission control. He tried to memorize whole sentences so that he wouldn’t have to keep looking at the text box and could just keep his eyes on the keyboard, but was unable to retain more than three words at any given time. After five minutes, this was what was on his screen:
Today teh world of secnt is being rediscoverd. The tail-blazers
and pioneer expolrers were the young. They ere the first to
realsie that out sense of smell can be ducated to be as receptive
to pelasures and and expereinces as our other senses. They have
learend to surround themselves with scent on a scale that the
Western worlkd has not known for hundreds, pergaps
thouasnds of years. They use scents with the same freedom as
did the people of aome ancient natoins long before the birth of
Christ. But they have an afdvantage over those earlier people’s. Living in the altter part of the 20th century, they are able to
enjoy scented products in a verity never before known
Five minutes – to type 120 words. That was… that was… shit. He couldn’t work it out, but it was bloody pathetic. He took a deep breath, gave Trish a stern, don’t-fuck-with-me look and started again. This time it took him five minutes and twenty seconds. His third attempt took him six minutes and eleven seconds and he was just about to launch into a fourth attempt when Emma walked back into the room.
‘So,’ she said, looking at him as if she had every faith in his typing ability, ‘how did you get on?’
Ned scratched his head. ‘Erm, not too well, I don’t think.’
Emma sat down and remained stoically unfazed by his paltry scores,
totting them up with a positive air that suggested that she believed Ned might secretly be a typing wunderkind.
‘Well,’ she said, scribbling something down and smiling at him, ‘it’s about, roughly, going on your first test, at least, about twenty-five words per minute. And I know how off-putting these tests can be. So, shall we say thirty-five words per minute?’
‘Yes,’ said Ned, wanting to fall to his knees, bury his head in her lap and never let her go. ‘Yes. That would be great.’
‘Good.’ She got to her feet. ‘Right. Let’s go back to my office and see if we can’t sort you out with something.’
Two hours later Ned found himself sitting in the reception area of a record company just off Soho Square. Emma had managed to find him ‘something’ all right; but, as much as Ned had been keen as hell to find himself some sort of gainful employment, to leap on to the career ladder and get going with the rest of his life, he hadn’t been quite prepared for it to start today. He wasn’t mentally ready to start the rest of his life just yet. He wanted another day just hanging around doing nothing. Or maybe two.
He would have dressed differently if he’d thought he’d be starting work today, worn different underpants, probably, different shoes. Still, he thought, £8.50 an hour. He couldn’t grumble about that. And it was only for the week. Maybe they’d run out of work for him again come Friday and he’d get a long weekend.
‘Ned London?’A man of about forty with a Hoxton Fin, dressed in head to toe Diesel, walked into reception with an air of complete and utter indifference. Ned suspected that greeting temps in reception was one of the things he hated most in the whole world. ‘You’re from the agency, right?’
‘Yes. From the agency. Hi,’Ned got to his feet and put out his hand.
‘Hi. OK. It’s already lunchtime. There’s fuck loads to do. You’re going to have to get your arse into gear. This way.’
Jesus, thought Ned, following him through corridors coated in gold discs and posters, what’s his problem? It’s not my fault it’s nearly lunchtime. It’s not my fault he wasn’t organized enough to get someone in this morning.
All Emma had told him about this job was that he’d be working in the PR department, helping them out with a ‘very important project’. Ned imagined a huge, open-plan office full of beautiful music-business girls all answering phones and talking to journalists at Q and the NME. He imagined being handed a list of journalists and having to phone them all and talk about some hot new band and try and set up interviews and arrange photo shoots.
‘OK,’ said Hoxton Fin man, who hadn’t even introduced himself yet, ‘this is where you’ll be working this week.’ He opened the door to what looked like some kind of store cupboard and switched on a light – to reveal what was undeniably a store cupboard. ‘Right. We’ve got three big releases coming out at the end of June. One album, two singles. Press packs have to be on journalists’ desks by Monday at the latest otherwise we’re fucked. OK? So…’ He led Ned to a corner of the storeroom, slit open a cardboard box with a scalpel and pulled out a piece of dark-blue card with the company logo printed on it. ‘Start by constructing the folders.’ He folded the piece of card deftly into a folder. ‘They’re in all these boxes here. There should be a thousand. Let someone know immediately if it looks like you’re going to run out. Then you need to collate the press information.’ He ripped open another cardboard box and pulled out a large Kodak box full of photographs of some twelve-year-old boy wearing hair gel and jewellery. ‘Biography on the bottom, press release on top of that, then a photo, a CD and a business card. You need to staple the business card on to this flap here. OK?’ He slammed the folder shut and looked at Ned accusingly, as if he was expecting him to say that no, it wasn’t OK, the photo should go in the middle.
Ned shrugged and nodded. ‘OK,’ he said.
‘Right. Good. Once you’ve worked your way through that lot, come and find me,’ He pointed to himself in case Ned was in any doubt as to who he was referring to. ‘I’m in the room over the corridor. OK? Photocopier is in there, too, if you run out of press releases. Coffee machine around the corner to your left. Toilets on the landing where we just came from. OK?’
‘OK.’
‘Right, then.’ Hoxton Fin looked at Ned awkwardly as if he’d just noticed that he was a sentient being, shoved his hands into the pockets of his trendy trousers and left the room.
Ned looked around disconsolately. It was horrible in here. There weren’t even any windows. And it was a really lovely day out, the sort of tentative spring day that made you want to open all the windows and feel the sun on your skin. And he was stuck in this room full of cardboard boxes assembling a thousand press packs for some tight-rectumed dickhead with a haircut he was ten years too old for. Great. Did people who worked in temp agencies have any idea, he wondered, what it was actually like at the places they sent you to? There they were in their lovely plush offices being all smiley and nice. They lulled you into a sense of belonging and security and then sent you out into the world to work in strange hostile places full of unfriendly people, to be the lowest of all possible life forms: a temp.
He pulled a card folder out of the box, studied it for a while and folded it up into the required shape. Shit – it wasn’t even difficult. It was piss-easy. He wasn’t even going to have the challenge of mastering some origami-type paper-folding skill while he was here. He dropped to his haunches and let his head fall between his knees. So, here he was. The first day of Ned London’s big new grown-up life and he was stuck in a stockroom, folding things up, just like when he worked at Benetton in 1995.
He stood up and tried to think positive. Think of your CV, he thought, think of having Electrogram Records on there. You never know who you’ll bump into at the coffee machine. Someone might take a shine to you and offer you a proper job, with a desk. And windows. You never know. It’s a start, he thought to himself, it’s shite, but at least it’s a start.
He went to the coffee machine and got himself a hot chocolate and then he came back and folded another folder, wondering where the hell this particularly miserable chapter of his life was going to lead him. His mind wandered as he folded some more and he started imagining the life that had petrified him so greatly in Wood Green on Friday night, the life of watching Simon ten-pin bowling and having his hair cut with Gervase. Now he could add sitting alone in a windowless room folding bits of card all day long to his unsavoury little vision of the future.
He sighed, sniffed and folded another folder.
Fifteen Stone and Three Pounds
‘OK, Tony. If I could just ask you to take off your shoes and pop yourself on to the scales.’
Tony crouched down to unlace his shoes and pondered the idea of using the opportunity afforded to him by his ‘starting blocks’ pose to sprint out of the door and keep running until he got home.
He slipped off his shoes and slowly climbed up on to the scales. This was it. He hadn’t weighed himself since the last time he went to the gym, about eighteen months ago. He’d been just over twelve and a half stone then. In his mind he’d gone up to about fifteen stone since he met Ness, but after Gervase’s comments on Saturday he was feeling hopeful for something around the fourteen to fourteen-and-a-half mark.
He took a deep breath and brought his second foot on to the scales. Jan slid weights across a metal bar until the bar balanced itself out.
And there it was – the grim truth, staring him mean-spiritedly in the face.
Fifteen stone and three pounds.
Fifteen stone and three pounds.
Tony felt blood rushing to his head with the shock of it. That meant that he must have been over fifteen and a half before he started losing weight. My God – he was absolutely enormous.
‘So,’ said Jan, oblivious to Tony’s trauma. ‘Ninety-seven kilos.’ She jotted down the hideous sum on a form she was filling out. ‘And what’s your ideal weight?’
‘Well,’ he said, dismounting the scales with a heavy heart, �
��I was about twelve and a half stone a year ago. I’d quite like to get back to that.’
‘OK,’ she scribbled that down, too. ‘That sounds like a perfectly healthy and realistic goal. Given your height and build.’
‘I’ve lost a few pounds already,’ he said, trying to inject something positive into what was turning out to be a miserable experience, ‘just by cutting back on the booze, not eating out so often, that kind of thing.’
‘Well done!’ She gave him an encouraging smile. ‘Now, if you’d like to put your shoes back on and fill out some forms.’
Tony filled out the forms quickly – he’d filled out similar things so many times in his life now. No diabetes. No allergies. No heart condition (well, not that he knew about, anyway). No serious operations. Blah, blah, blah.
‘Right, Tony. The meeting’s about to start. Are you ready to join us?’
‘Er, yeah. Sure.’
‘And don’t be nervous about being a man, Tony. We get quite a few boys in the group now – ever since we put Bryan on our posters. We’ve got one at the moment, actually.’
Tony smiled at her nervously.
‘And after the meeting, maybe you could stay behind for a couple of minutes. Just for a chat. I always like to have a little chat on the first week. Find out a bit more about what makes you tick. And you can find out a bit more about us. OK?’
‘Yeah,’ said Tony, ‘no problem.’
Jan pushed open a door and there it was. The group. Oh God. About twelve of them. All fat. All chatting like they’d known each other for ever. A particularly gruesome man in a red sweatshirt looked up and smiled at him joyfully. ‘Hallelujah,’ he said, in an extremely loud voice that suggested he was a man who always said everything in an extremely loud voice. ‘A bloke,’ he boomed. ‘Praise be to Allah. Save me. Save me from all these insufferable women.’