It's Got To Be Perfect

by Claire Allan

  The samples. Shite. The samples. A horrible, horrible sinking feeling crept right up through my body from the very nails on my toes to the split-ends of my hair. I nodded to Bob while trying to crane my neck to see out of the door of his office to the vicinity of my desk where I hoped against hope that the big brown box of perfectly presented samples of lip gloss, complete with press releases and kisses from my very own mouth, was not there. I prayed that I had simply forgotten that I had sent them and that it was not the case that I actually hadn’t sent them. Straining my neck until my muscles starting to ache, I spotted a trace of brown cardboard and I felt any and all resolve I had start to crumble.

  “Haven are really keen that the coverage is in as soon as possible, so let me know by noon how you are getting on,” Bob said and I felt an actual cold sweat break out all over my body. Until that moment I don’t think I ever really knew what a cold sweat was – but there it was. All cold and sweaty and I felt as if I might actually throw up right then and there. Fionn glanced at me and instantly recognised the look of horror on my face.

  “Are you okay?” she mouthed and I kind of nodded and shook my head at the same time and then gasped about needing air and stumbled out of the office.

  Yes, the brown box was at my desk as indeed were the press releases that should have been with the country’s media already. And there was no way they were going to get there anytime soon – I could hand-deliver the local ones – but the rest of them? Shit. Unless the Tardis was real and was available for hire, I was buggered. I felt the air leave my lungs. Bob might have been considerate and understanding the previous week but there was no way he was going to understand this. This was not understandable. And it was bad enough I had almost lost two of the company’s biggest clients the previous week – now I was on course for a hat trick.

  I kicked the box out of sight and lifted the bottle of water from my desk and took a long drink to try and settle myself. When that didn’t work, I stepped outside to get a breath of fresh air, only to be confronted on the back steps by a concerned-looking Fionn and even more concerned-looking Bob.

  “Is something up?” he asked.

  I thought about lying for a split second. It would have been relatively easy to lie but he would find out some time and I figured that honesty was the best policy – or at least in this instance the lesser of two evils. I had a notion that fecking up would be bad enough, never mind fecking up and then lying about it. I was skating on thin ice as it was – not coming clean would have been career suicide. Admitting my mistake was more like a gentle career mercy-killing.

  “The samples. I didn’t send them. I’m sorry. They are all there, ready to go. I kissed all the press releases. I packed them in envelopes with heart-shaped confetti and tissue paper and everything. They look really good. They just didn’t get posted. I’m sorry.”

  Bob looked at me and looked at Fionn and threw his hands skyward. “Annie, how many chances do you want? Haven are going to go mental when they hear this. The products are launching on Thursday and you are telling me not a single beauty editor or journalist has the press release?”

  “I’ll sort it,” I said weakly.

  “How, Annie? How on earth are you going to sort this? This should have been out last week at the very latest. There are only so many times I can cover your back.”

  “I know, I know,” I said as Fionn looked on aghast.

  “I’ll get a courier – get them out as soon as possible.”

  “A courier is not in the budget,” he said matter of factly.

  “I’ll take the hit. Take it out of my wages,” I offered, mentally working out that if I didn’t eat, drive or wear any clean clothes for the next month I could just about cover it.

  “That’s not the point, Annie. Jane from Haven will be on the phone to me later and what am I supposed to tell her? I know things are tough for you at the moment but they are tough for everyone. But I don’t see the rest of my staff come in here and make balls-up after balls-up. I let the Manna thing go, because you know I figured your personal life was your own business and that Pearse was a wanker anyway – but this. Annie. I can’t let it go.”

  “I know,” I said even more weakly.

  “Bob . . .” Fionn started, but he raised his hand in a very clear sign that she was to say no more.

  “Go home. You’re suspended until I work this out. And we will be getting a courier and it will be coming out of your pay packet and while you are at it, you can draft a letter of apology to Jane.”

  “I will,” I nodded.

  “Don’t think this is over, Annie. I’ll have to talk this through with HR. For now just go.”

  “I’ll just grab my bag.”

  “No. Stay out of the office. Fionn will get your bag. Just go, Annie. I’ll be in touch.” He was somewhere between apoplectic with anger and simply at the end of his tether with me and I couldn’t blame him. I would boot me out too. I would do worse than suspend me. I would sack me. And I couldn’t quite believe that he hadn’t dismissed me then and there, on the spot. My fight, I realised, had well and truly gone. All I needed now was the roof to fall in on my flat, or my car to get stolen and my life would be just fecking perfect.

  Was it really only a matter of a few weeks before that my life – while not amazing – had at least been in control? I’d been in a relationship. I’d been good at my job. I had been not at all sullied by a hairy Donegal man. Darcy had been with Gerry and all had been right with the world.

  I nodded at Bob because I couldn’t speak.

  Fionn reached towards my arm, but I shrugged her away. “I’m okay,” I lied. “I’m absolutely okay.”

  I went for a walk along the beach. This was probably – if not definitely – another one of my Very Bad Ideas. It was meant to clear my head and stop me from going home and contemplating jumping out the window – but it didn’t. In fact it just made me stand, staring at the familiar window of a familiar house and wondering if the fact that there was a car on the driveway meant that he was inside.

  It wasn’t that I had any urges – at least not those kinds of urges anyway. That said, an hour or two lost in someone else could take away my attention from myself and the mess I was in. Even if Ant did not want to marry me, or even love me, I knew that he wanted me in a very different kind of way and that felt nice. I needed someone to want me even if ultimately that wanting would be exceptionally self-destructive.

  I looked up at the window and imagined him there – lying on the bed, all hairy and masculine and powerful. I knew that if I went and knocked on his door he could make me forget all about everything. Damn it, when I was with Ant there were times when I wasn’t even able to remember my own name, or what day it was or who was the President of the United States or anything. Those were fine moments.

  I stared for a few minutes more and walked on, faster and faster along the beach and out of sight of his house, telling myself that if I still felt the urge to do something reckless by the time I had walked the length of the beach and back I would march up to his front door and let him do whatever the hell he wanted with me. And I wouldn’t care. Not one bit.

  I strode on, the warm sun beating down on my neck. Around me families, with kids on school holidays and cool-boxes filled with egg-and-onion sandwiches, laughed and joked. It struck me that children don’t give a damn about the freezing cold water off Inishowen beaches. It also struck me that those parents – those ones shouting like mad people at their children to calm down and not throw jellyfish at each other – had exactly what I wanted. They had what I wanted and Fionn wanted and Darcy wanted. But none of us had it and I wondered if we were bad people in some way. Having that – a family, a car to take you to the beach and a cool-box with egg-and-onion sandwiches – was all we wanted and yet we didn’t have it. None of us. What a fecking big lie we had been told when we were promised it all and told those fairy tales over and over again, as if it was our destiny as women to meet our perfect men and run off into the sunset. I�
�m willing to bet Cinderella never found herself suspended from her job and marching up and down a beach to stop herself sleeping with the wrong man just to take her mind off her cesspit of a life.

  I slumped to the sand, kicked off my shoes and let the warm grains envelop my toes. I glanced up and could see those families having their fun day out and I wanted my fun day out.

  But at least I knew then that I would never find it with Ant. The answer to what was wrong in my life did not lie in his arms, and certainly not in his bed. And no matter how appealing the view from that room over the coast was, it would absolutely, no doubt about it, be the very worst thing I could do at that time. So I ignored the car on the driveway, and the open windows and the general gorgeousness of it all and got back into my car and drove as far from that beach as I could. Which was in fact back to my own house as I had to conserve all my money and energy, being that there was a very high possibility that I would be jobless and perhaps even homeless soon enough.

  As I wandered around the flat, I was struck with a whole new love for it. Yes, of course I was being overly dramatic and definitely over-emotional but now, thinking that if Bob decided my job really was a thing of the past I could lose it altogether, I suddenly didn’t mind all the quirks. In fact, I loved them. I no longer coveted Darcy’s apartment (well, not that much, anyway). I just wanted my own. And my job. And my car. And my life – back the way it was. Except, of course, not really the way it was because I hadn’t been happy with Pearse. I reminded myself of that as I poured an emergency glass of wine and climbed to the roof terrace to look out over the city.

  It was still work time for the vast majority of gainfully employed – not suspended – people and I looked out at the roofs of their offices and homes and thought about how everyone else in the world was just getting on with things while I seemed to be stumbling from one disaster to another.

  I texted Fionn just to ask if Bob had indeed organised a courier and I asked her to email the press list and vowed that I would personally call them all and let them know something special was on the way. I would also send Bob a very grovelling email to apologise profusely and without reservation for my mistake. After that I would probably drink myself into oblivion – but not before deleting Ant’s details from my phone in case of drunken moments of weakness.

  Climbing back down to the living room I fired up the laptop, lifted my phone and set to work. I might not be able to save this situation entirely but I would go down trying.

  By five thirty I had phoned every journalist in my PR list and smarmed them with my best PR smarmy voice. I had talked up the new Haven Lip Gloss to make it sound as impressive as the cure for cancer, an infallible way to predict the lotto numbers and a magic weight-loss tool all at once. All that and it came in a range of colours and trends to suit every mood, every outfit and every woman. I didn’t stop until the Haven lip glosses were the most highly anticipated cosmetic product of the year and I had been promised extensive coverage in beauty pages the length and the breadth of the country. I had even managed to persuade one very minor celeb to be seen slapping it on outside a nightclub that week when the paparazzi were sure to be about. She had promised to pout like a good ’un and I had promised to send her enough lip gloss to keep her gob shining for the next three years.

  The email to Bob had been more difficult to write. I wanted to get across just how very sorry I was, without selling my soul into the bargain. I wanted it to get to the point without crossing over into the style Bob himself liked to use. I could do creeping to make up for my misdemeanours but what I could not, and would not, do was sink to using clichés and metaphors and other such waffle. I told him I had messed up. I apologised. I explained just how much of a mess my head had been in lately and why – leaving out the details of my interlude with Ant. I stressed to him that I loved my job. I was good at my job and I would be even better at it if he could just overlook this one last transgression. I hoped that was good enough, because if it wasn’t I didn’t quite know what the hell I was going to do with my life.

  I sat back and topped up my glass, looking out the window and letting the gentle breeze wash over me. My head hurt. A tight band of pressure wrapped around my temples, making me feel as if my eyes were just about ready to pop out of their sockets.

  I didn’t want to think, even for one second, that things could only get better from here on in because that was a sure-fire way of ensuring that they would only get worse. Sod’s Law seemed to see me as a walking, breathing example of itself at the moment.

  Nonetheless the mad and foolish notion took me to phone my mother. I wasn’t going to tell her just how shit things were – it would only confirm her worst suspicions about me – but I wanted to hear her voice and I wanted her to actually know she was talking to me this time.

  I listened to the ringing tone of the phone – the one long beep which indicated I was calling overseas. I could imagine her now – laid out like Lady Muck on her sun lounger slathered in Factor Four, her cursory nod to sun safety. She’d be wearing a bikini more suited to a nineteen-year-old and a colourful scarf woven into a turban on her head. She would lift the phone from where it rested always within hand’s grasp and answer as she always did.

  “Hola!”

  “Mum,” I said. “How are you?”

  “Darcy, is that you?”

  “No, Mum, it’s Annie.”

  “Oh Annie, darling. How are you? Is anything wrong? Sorry to ask but it tends to be the case that when you call something is wrong.”

  “No,” I lied, “I just wanted to say hello.”

  “Well, hello, darling. Tell me, have you thought about getting rid of that wee flat of yours yet? Only Dad and I are talking about selling the house and wondered if you would want to buy it? I mean, if you had the deposit and all.”

  “No, Mum. I’m still here.”

  “Suit yourself,” she sniffed and I wanted to sniff back that my flat was actually lovely but that would start an argument and I was all done with arguing for today.

  “Oh, Mum, I love you,” I said, and I meant it.

  “And I love you too, darling,” she said and my heart felt as if it had broken in even smaller pieces than before.

  When I put the phone down, leaving the email to Bob unsent for now, I walked to the sofa where I lay down, adopting my very best woe-is-me pose – but not before unplugging the phone and switching off my mobile. If I was going to wallow in self-pity then I sure as hell was going to wallow in style. If I’d had the energy I would have got up and pulled the curtains closed so that I could wallow in darkness. I might even have been tempted to go and put my pyjamas on and maybe my old, fluffy, worn-out dressing gown and go into proper wallow mode. There might even have been a Radiohead CD lurking somewhere I could have listened to. If I had the energy. But I didn’t. I didn’t have the energy for anything other than low-level wallowing. In fact, by the way I was feeling just then and there, I didn’t think I would ever have the energy to lift my head off the sofa cushions again. I could quite happily have just stayed there, forever, until I died and the stench of my rotting body crept downstairs to my neighbours. It would be an awful tragedy and Bob would be sorry – especially when they found the unsent email to him on my laptop. In fairness, with the copious amounts of apologies and details of just how shite my life had been of late it read a little like a suicide note. Could you actually manage to die through apathy and nothing else? Although if I never got off this sofa again it would probably be the starvation and dehydration which would do it. I would make a lovely skeleton.

  Swigging the last of my wine, I stared at the ceiling and listened to the traffic on the streets below before pulling the throw from the back of the sofa and pulling it up over my face to block out the light. I was asleep in seconds.

  30

  It took a while for me to register just what exactly was going on. I startled, somewhere between being awake and sound asleep, as the buzzing noise grew louder. It was dark. I was disorientated. Ther
e was a greatly unattractive puddle of drool on the cushion where I had been lying. Sitting up, I knocked the empty wine bottle over and struggled to find the light-switch for my table-lamp.

  The buzzing just grew worse and more insistent and I put my hands over my ears. My head, I realised, was thumping and my mouth was like a furry boot. I couldn’t figure out what was happening or where the noise was coming from and I just wanted it to stop. Rubbing my eyes and focusing on the room around me, it dawned on me that the buzzer was my doorbell and whoever it was buzzing like a mad person was certainly not intending to go away anytime soon.

  I got up and lifted the handset. I muttered a muffled hello and was greeted with a semi-hysterical Fionn on the other end.

  “Jesus, Annie. Are you okay? Let me in!”

  I didn’t answer – my brain still not engaged enough to say anything remotely intelligible – but I pressed the door-release button before stumbling to my impossibly large bathroom and splashing water on my face. Looking up into the mirror I saw a trainwreck of smeared mascara and bed-head staring back at me. My face looked just about as crash-hot as my life felt.

  I was just towelling myself off when Fionn burst through the bathroom door, a look of abject panic on her face. Behind traipsed a somewhat worried-looking Alex.

  “I couldn’t get a hold of you,” she said breathlessly. “We couldn’t get you. I’ve been trying your phone all afternoon. And your mobile all evening. And I sent emails and I even phoned Darcy but no one knew where you were and you were strangely calm when you left work and believe me, Annie, I know when it comes to you, strangely calm is never good. Are you okay?”