Sushi for Beginners

by Marian Keyes

  ‘To Lisa!’ Barry concluded. By then everyone was flushed and rowdy, so they raised their white plastic cups, sloshing wine and morsels of cork on to their clothing and, as they sniggered and elbowed each other, bellowed, ‘To Lisa!’

  Lisa stayed just as long as she needed to. She’d long looked forward to this leaving do, but she’d always thought she’d be surfing out on a wave of glory, already halfway to New York. Instead of being shunted away to the magazine version of Siberia. It was an utter nightmare.

  ‘I must go,’ she said to the dozen or so women who’d worked under her for the past two years. ‘I must finish packing.’

  ‘Sure, sure,’ they agreed, in a clamour of drunken good wishes. ‘Well, good luck, have fun, enjoy Ireland, take care, don’t work too hard…’

  Just as Lisa got to the door, Ally screeched, ‘We’ll miss you.’

  Lisa nodded tightly and closed the door.

  ‘– Like a hole in the head.’ Ally didn’t miss a beat. ‘Any wine left?’

  They stayed until every last drop of wine was drunk, every last crumb of Hula Hoop wiped off the tray with a licked finger, then they turned to each other and demanded in dangerously high spirits, ‘What now?!’

  They descended on Soho, swarming through the bars in a Friday-night, tequila-drinking, office workers’ maraud. Little Sharif Mumtaz (features assistant) got separated from the others and was helped home by a kind man whom she married nine months later. Jeanie Geoffrey (assistant fashion editor) was bought a bottle of champagne by a man who declared she was ‘a goddess’. Gabbi Henderson (health and beauty) had her bag stolen. And Ally Benn (recently appointed editor) clambered on to a table in one of the livelier pubs in Wardour Street and danced like a mad thing until she fell off and sustained multiple fractures to her right foot.

  In other words, a great night.

  2

  ‘Ted, you couldn’t have come at a better time!’ Ashling flung wide her door and for once didn’t utter her most overused phrase, which happened to be, ‘Oh shite, it’s Ted.’

  ‘Couldn’t I?’ Ted sidled cautiously into Ashling’s flat. He didn’t normally receive a welcome this warm.

  ‘I need you to tell me which jacket looks nicest on me.’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’ Ted’s thin, dark face looked even more intense. ‘But I am a man.’

  Not quite, Ashling thought, regretfully. What a great pity that the person who had moved into the flat upstairs six months ago, and had instantly decided that Ashling was his best friend, hadn’t been a nice, big, pulse-rate-raising man. And instead had been Ted Mullins, needy civil servant, aspiring stand-up comedian and small and wiry owner of a push-bike.

  ‘First, this black one.’ Ashling shrugged the jacket on over her white silk ‘interview’ top and magic lose-half-a-stone-in-an-instant black trousers.

  ‘What’s the biggie?’ Ted sat on a chair and wound himself around it. He was all angles and elbows, pointy shoulders and sharp knees, like a sketch drawing of himself.

  ‘Job interview. Half nine this morning.’

  ‘Another one! What for this time?’

  Ashling had applied for several jobs in the past two weeks, everything from working on a wild-west ranch in Mullingar to answering phones at a PR company.

  ‘Assistant editor at a new magazine called Colleen.’

  ‘What? A real job?’ Ted’s saturnine face lit up. ‘Beats me why you’ve applied for all those others, you’re way overqualified for them.’

  ‘I’ve low self-esteem,’ Ashling reminded him, with a bright smile.

  ‘Mine’s lower,’ Ted shot back, determined not to be outdone.

  ‘A women’s magazine, though,’ he mused. ‘If you got it you could tell that crowd at Woman’s Place to stick it. Revenge is a dish best served cold!’ He threw back his head and gave forth a hollow series of fake Vincent Price-type laughs. ‘Nnnnyyyywwwwahwahwahwahwahwahwah!’

  ‘Actually, revenge isn’t a dish at all,’ Ashling interrupted. ‘It’s an emotion. Or something. And not worth bothering about.’

  ‘But after the way they’ve treated you,’ Ted said, in wonderment. ‘It wasn’t your fault that woman’s couch was ruined!’

  For more years than she cared to remember, Ashling had worked for Woman’s Place, a weekly, unglossy Irish magazine. Ashling had been fiction editor, fashion editor, health and beauty editor, handiworks editor, cookery editor, agony aunt, copy editor and spiritual advisor all rolled into one. Not as onerous as it sounds, actually, because Woman’s Place was put together according to a very strict, tried-and-tested formula.

  Each issue had a knitting pattern – almost always for a toilet-roll cover in the shape of a Southern belle. Then there was a cookery page on buying cheap cuts of meat and disguising them as something else. Every issue had a short story featuring a young boy and a grandmother, who were sworn enemies at the start and firm friends by the end. There was the Problem Page, of course – invariably with a letter complaining about a cheeky daughter-in-law. Pages two and three were an array of ‘funny’ stories starring the readers’ grandchildren and the cutesy things they’d said or done. The back inside cover was a platitudinous letter, supposedly from a clergyman, but always scribbled by Ashling fifteen minutes before the printers’ deadline. Then there were the Readers’ Tips. And one of these was the unlikely instrument of Ashling’s downfall.

  Readers’ tips were pieces of advice sent in by ordinary Josephine Soaps for the benefit of other readers. They were always about making your money go further and getting something for nothing. Their general premiss was that you needn’t buy anything because you could make it yourself from basics already in the home. Lemon juice featured heavily.

  For example, why buy expensive shampoo when you could fashion your own from some lemon juice and washing-up liquid! You’d like highlights? All you need to do is squeeze a couple of lemons over your hair and sit in the sun. For about a year. And to remove cranberry juice from a beige couch? A mix of lemon juice and vinegar would do the trick.

  Except it didn’t. Not on the couch of Mrs Anna O’Sullivan from Co. Waterford. It all went horribly wrong – the cranberry juice became ever more tenacious so that even a Stain Devil couldn’t budge it. And despite magnanimous usage of Glade, the entire room stank of vinegar. On account of being a good Catholic, Mrs O’Sullivan was a woman who believed in bloody retribution. She threatened to sue.

  When Sally Healy, the editor of Woman’s Place, launched an investigation, Ashling admitted that she’d invented the tip herself. Readers’ contributions had been thin on the ground that particular week.

  ‘I didn’t think anyone actually believed them,’ Ashling whispered, in her defence.

  ‘I’m surprised at you, Ashling,’ Sally said. ‘You always told me you’d no imagination. And Letter from Father Bennett doesn’t count, I know you crib it from The Catholic Judger, which, incidentally – keep it to yourself for the moment – is about to go to the wall’

  ‘I’m sorry, Sally, it’ll never happen again.’

  ‘I’m the one who’s sorry, Ashling. I’m going to have to let you go.’

  ‘Because of a simple mistake? I don’t believe you!’

  She was right not to. The real reason was that the board of Woman’s Place were concerned about the plummeting circulation figures, had decided that the magazine was looking ‘tired’ and were on the hunt for a fall guy. Ashling’s cock-up couldn’t have come at a better time. Now they could just sack her instead of having to shell out a redundancy payment.

  Sally Healy was distraught. Ashling was the most reliable, hard-working employee one could have. She kept the entire place ticking over while Sally came in late, left early and disappeared for Tuesday and Thursday afternoons to collect her daughter from ballet lessons and her sons from rugby practice. But the board had made it clear that it was either Ashling or her.

  As a sop to her long years of faithful service, Ashling was allowed to hold on to her job until she got another
one. Which, hopefully, would be soon.

  ‘Well?’ Ashling smoothed out the front of her jacket and turned to Ted.

  ‘Fine.’ Ted’s shoulder bones rose and fell.

  ‘Or is this one better?’ Ashling pulled on a jacket that seemed to Ted to be identical to the first one.

  ‘Fine,’ he repeated.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Either.’

  ‘Which one makes me look more like I’ve got a waist?’

  Ted squirmed. ‘Not this again. You’re obsessed with your waist.’

  ‘I haven’t got one to be obsessed with.’

  ‘Why can’t you go on about the size of your bum, like normal women do?’

  Ashling had very little in the way of waist but, as always with bad news pertaining to oneself, she’d been the last to find out. It wasn’t until she was fifteen and her best friend Clodagh had sighed, ‘You’re so lucky, having no waist. Mine is tiny and it just makes my bottom look bigger,’ that she’d made the shocking discovery.

  While every other girl on her road had spent their teenage years standing in front of a mirror agonizing over whether one breast was bigger than the other, Ashling’s focus was lower. Eventually she got herself a hula hoop and set to it with gusto in her back garden. For a couple of months she rotated and whittled, day and night, her tongue stuck earnestly out of the corner of her mouth. All the mammies from the neighbouring families looked over their garden walls, their arms folded, nodding knowingly at each other, ‘She’ll have herself hula-hooped into an early grave, that one.’

  Not that the non-stop, obsessive whirling had made any difference. Even now, sixteen years later, there was still an undeniable straight-up-and-down quality to Ashling’s silhouette.

  ‘Having no waist isn’t the worst thing that could happen to someone,’ Ted encouraged from the sidelines.

  ‘Indeed it isn’t,’ Ashling agreed with unsettling joviality. ‘You could have horrible legs too. And as luck would have it, I do.’

  ‘You don’t.’

  ‘I do. I inherited them from my mother… But so long as that’s all I inherited from her,’ Ashling added, cheerfully, ‘I figure I’m not doing so badly.’

  ‘I was in bed with my girlfriend last night…’ Ted was keen to change the conversation. ‘I told her the earth was flat.’

  ‘What girlfriend? And what’s this about the earth?’

  ‘No, that’s wrong,’ Ted muttered to himself. ‘I was lying in bed with my girlfriend last night… I told her the earth was flat. Boom boom!’

  ‘Ha ha, very good,’ Ashling said weakly. The worst thing about being Ted’s favourite person was having to be the guinea-pig for his new material. ‘But can I make a suggestion? How about, I was lying in bed with my girlfriend last night. I told her I’d always love her and never leave her… Boom boom,’ she added wryly.

  ‘I’m late,’ Ted said. ‘D’you want a backer?’

  Often he gave her a lift to work on the back of his bike, en route to his own job at the Department of Agriculture.

  ‘No thanks, I’m going in a different direction.’

  ‘Good luck with the interview. I’ll pop in to see you this evening.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it for a minute,’ Ashling agreed, under her breath.

  ‘Hey! How’s your ear infection?’

  ‘Better, nearly. I can wash my hair myself again.’

  3

  Ashling eventually decided on jacket number one. She could have sworn she detected a slight indentation roughly halfway between her breasts and her hips and that was good enough for her.

  After agonizing over her make-up, she plumped for muted in case she came across as flighty. But in case she looked too drab she brought her beloved black-and-white pony-skin handbag. Then she rubbed her lucky Buddha, popped her lucky pebble in her pocket and looked regretfully at her lucky red hat. But just how lucky would a red bobble hat be, if worn to a job interview? Anyway, she didn’t need it – her horoscope had said that this would be a good day. So had the angel oracle.

  As she let herself on to the street she had to step over a man who was sound asleep in the front doorway. Then she pointed herself in the direction of Randolph Media’s Dublin office and, walking briskly past the Dublin city-centre gridlock traffic, repeated over and over in her head, as advised by Louise L. Hay, I will get this job, I will get this job, I will get this job…

  But what if I don’t? Ashling couldn’t help but wonder.

  Well, then I won’t mind, well, then I won’t mind, well, then I won’t mind…

  Though she’d put a brave face on it, Ashling was devastated by the turn of events with Mrs O’Sullivan’s couch. So devastated that it had triggered one of the ear infections that always showed up when she was under stress.

  Losing one’s job was embarrassingly juvenile, not the kind of thing that happened to a thirty-one-year-old mortgage holder. Surely she should be past all that?

  To stop her life unravelling, she’d been job-hunting with a passion and putting herself forward for everything remotely feasible. No, she couldn’t lassoo a runaway stallion, she’d admitted in her interview for the wild-west ranch in Mullingar – she’d actually thought the position they were interviewing for was an administrative one – but she’d be willing to learn.

  At each interview she went for she repeated over and over that she was willing to learn. But of everything she’d applied for, the job at Colleen was the one she really, badly wanted. She loved working on a magazine and magazine jobs were rare in Ireland. Besides, Ashling wasn’t a proper journalist: she was simply a good organizer, with an eye for detail.

  The magazine arm of Randolph Media was on the third floor of an office block on the quays. Ashling had found out that Randolph Media also owned the small but growing television station, Channel 9, and a highly commercial radio station, but these apparently operated out of different premises.

  Ashling came out of the lift and scooted down the corridor towards reception. The place seemed to hum with activity, people rushing up and down carrying bits of paper. Ashling thrilled with excitement that peaked into nausea. Just before the reception desk, a tall, messy-haired man was deep in conversation with a tiny Asian girl. They were speaking to each other in low tones and something in the nature of their exchange gave Ashling to understand that they wished they could shout. Ashling hurried on; she didn’t like rows. Not even other people’s.

  She realized how badly she’d misjudged the make-up situation when she got a gander at the receptionist. Trix – that’s what her namebadge said she was called – had the glittery, luscious-sticky look of a devotee of the more-is-more school of slapplication. Her eyebrows were plucked almost into non-existence, her lipliner was so thick and dark she looked as if she had a moustache, and her entire head of blonde hair was caught up in dozens of tiny, evenly spaced, sparkly butterfly clips. She must’ve had to get up three hours early to do it, Ashling thought, highly impressed.

  ‘Hello,’ Trix growled in a voice that sounded as though she smoked forty cigarettes a day – which coincidentally she did.

  ‘I’ve an interview at nine thi–’ Ashling halted at the sound of a loud yelp behind her. She looked over her shoulder and saw the messy-haired man nursing his first finger.

  ‘You bit me!’ he exclaimed. ‘Mai, you’ve drawn blood!’

  ‘Hope your tetanus is up to date,’ the Asian girl laughed scornfully.

  Trix clicked her tongue, flung her eyes heavenwards and muttered, ‘Pair of gobshites, they never stop. Take a seat,’ she told Ashling. ‘I’ll tell Calvin you’re here.’

  She disappeared through the double doors and Ashling wobbled down on to a couch, beside a coffee table which was strewn with all the current titles. The sight of them sent her nerves into sudden overdrive – she so badly wanted this job. Her heart was pounding and her stomach sloshed bile. Absently she rolled the lucky pebble through her thumb and finger. Through a gauze of trembling anxiety she was semi-aware of the bitten m
an slamming into the gents’ and the little Asian girl stomping to the lift, her curtain of long black hair swishing to and fro.

  ‘Mr Carter says go on in.’ Trix was back and doing a bad job of hiding her surprise. For the past two days she’d been plagued by nervous interviewees who’d been kept waiting by her desk for up to half an hour at a time. During which Trix had had to hold off ringing her friends and fellas and deal with the interviewees’ pleading questions about what their chances of getting the job were. And to add insult to injury, she knew for a fact that all Calvin Carter and Jack Devine were doing in the interview room was playing rummy.

  But Calvin Carter had been deserted by Jack Devine, and he was bored and lonely. Might as well be interviewing someone as doing nothing.

  ‘Come!’ he commanded, when Ashling knocked timidly on the door.

  He took one glance at the dark-haired woman in the black trouser-suit and immediately decided against her. She just wasn’t glamorous enough for Colleen. He didn’t know much about girls’ hair, but he had a feeling that it was usually more elaborate than this one’s. Wasn’t it normal to have a kind of interfered look to it? Surely it shouldn’t just hang there on her shoulders, being brown? And fresh-faced is all very well when you’re a milkmaid, but not when you’re an aspiring assistant editor of a sexy women’s magazine…

  ‘Sit down.’ He supposed he’d better go through the motions for five minutes.

  Breathless with the desire to do well, Ashling sat on the lone chair in the middle of the floor and faced the man who sat behind the long table.

  ‘Jack Devine, the MD for Ireland, will be here shortly,’ Calvin explained. ‘I don’t know what’s keeping him. First up,’ he turned his attention to her resumé, ‘you better tell me how to pronounce that name of yours.’

  ‘Ash-ling. Ash as in cigarette ash, ling to rhyme with sing.’

  ‘Ash-ling. Ashling. OK, I can say that. Alrighty, Ashling, for the past eight years you’ve been working in magazines…