Lindsey Kelk Girl Collection: About a Girl, What a Girl Wants. Lindsey Kelk
me running out of teabags before there was such a thing as a twenty-four-hour Tesco in East London, or Amy walking out on her fiancé, Dave, three days before her wedding. She never had been good at making a decision and sticking to it. In the past two years she’d had three jobs and four zero percent credit cards, but when it came to me, she was as dependable as Ken Barlow and fiercely loyal. I couldn’t fault her.
‘I didn’t get a chance to punch anyone.’ I still couldn’t quite believe what had happened. I was redundant. I’d been called a lot of things in my time, but the ‘R’ word was the worst. ‘HR called me in. I thought it was just paperwork stuff for the promotion, and then they told me they were letting me go.’
The words stuck in my throat.
‘Nothing dramatic. Nothing exciting. Just restructuring.’
‘Are you OK?’ She eyed me cautiously, as though I might suddenly lose my tiny mind and bust up the entire apartment. It was fair. If I had been capable of feeling anything at all, there was a chance I might have. ‘Your job is, like, your everything.’
Just what I needed to hear.
‘I’m not anything,’ I said carefully. My mouth felt thick and the words weren’t coming out quite right. ‘I don’t feel anything.’
‘Nothing?’ Clearly I’d given the wrong answer. ‘Not angry or sad or confused or, I don’t know, stabby? Sometimes I feel stabby when I get the sack.’
Amy got the sack a lot.
‘Nothing,’ I repeated. ‘Just … a bit blank. A bit cold.’
‘Emotionally cold?’ She was far too eager for my liking. ‘Do you feel dead inside?’
‘Physically cold.’ Maybe calling her had been a bad idea. ‘And like I need a wee.’
‘Yet more disappointment.’ Amy dragged me through the tiny living room and into the kitchen to pop open one of the three bottles of cheap fizzy wine that were clinking together merrily inside a Sainsbury’s bag. ‘I don’t get it. Surely they can’t fire you. Everyone knows you’re the only one who does anything at that place. Have you gone mad? Did they fire you because you’re mad? What did Charlie say?’
‘He wasn’t in when I left.’ I accepted a Snoopy mug full of cava and gulped it down. Cheap fizz burned. Burning was good. ‘I don’t know if he knows.’
Of course Charlie would know. Everyone would know. Everyone would know that I had been fired. Every. One.
‘He hasn’t called?’ Amy topped me up before helping herself to a packet of Pop Tarts from my flatmate’s cupboard and sticking them in the toaster. I didn’t have the energy or inclination to stop her.
‘HR took my phone,’ I said, rummaging around in my handbag for my new-to-me iPhone. ‘Happily, I was the victim of a reverse mugging in the park and someone gave me this.’
My tiny bestie snatched the phone out of my hand and examined it carefully without asking me to elaborate. ‘Ooh, it’s a new one. Good result. Weird case.’
I took it from her, removed the offending cover and handed it back. ‘I can’t keep it. It’s stolen.’
‘Swapsies, then? You can have mine.’ She pressed several buttons and coughed before speaking. ‘Siri, why are Donovan & Dunning a bunch of wankers?’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean by that,’ he replied. Very diplomatic for an inanimate object.
I leaned against the kitchen wall, sipping my second, surreptitiously refilled mug of cava and staring out over the East London rooftops. They were exactly how I’d left them this morning. As I concentrated on the unchanging chimney pots, stupid things kept popping into my mind, like what was my mum going to say? What was I supposed to do when my alarm went off tomorrow morning? Would I end up homeless? I didn’t know how to go about getting a job. I’d been at Donovan & Dunning since I’d left uni. Before I left uni even – I’d interned there my entire final year. I was going to have to write a CV. Did people still have CVs? Was there something I was supposed to tweet? Maybe there was an unemployment app on my new phone. Most upsettingly, all of the unfinished jobs I’d been doing at work were bothering me. Someone needed to proofread the final air freshener presentation. And who else would take care of the copy for the new baked beans advert? Maybe they’d just lift it from an episode of Mad Men, save some time.
For the want of something better to do, I pressed my back against the cold kitchen wall and slid down to the floor. Ahh. That was better. Amy sat on the kitchen top, phone in one hand, Pop Tart in the other, gazing down at me with concern. It didn’t feel right. I was supposed to be the one who looked after her.
‘Tess,’ she said. I peered at her over the edge of my Snoopy mug with wide eyes. ‘You’re sitting on the kitchen floor in a piss-wet-through dress.’
‘I am.’ She was not wrong.
‘Your head is on the bin. And the bin smells.’
‘It is.’ Again, stellar observational skills. ‘And it does.’
‘Do you think you should maybe go and get changed?’
I didn’t think I should get changed. I was scared that if I took off my work dress I wouldn’t have anything to put on but my pyjamas, and if I put on my pyjamas I might never, ever take them off again. Had Michael remembered about lunch with that awful man from the car company? Eventually, Amy took my silence as a no.
‘How about a bath? You must be freezing?’
A bath sounded equally depressing. There was nothing to do in a bath that didn’t involve sobbing or razor blades. I wondered if Sandra the designer had remembered to change the colour of the squirrel in that paper towel concept.
‘Tess, I’m going to need some verbal feedback from you.’ Amy put down her breakfast long enough to snap her fingers in front of me. ‘What do you want to do?’
I looked up, pushed my scummy hair out of my face and shook my head.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I honestly don’t know. I don’t know anything.’
For the second time that day, I started to cry. My mother would be mortified.
With a sad sigh, Amy hopped down off the worktop and curled up beside me and the bin. ‘I know it must feel like shit,’ she said, sliding her arm between me and the wall and forcing a hug. ‘But you’re better than this. You know you’re amazing at your job. Whatever reason they have for whatever they’ve done, it’s going to be their loss. That place was killing you. You’ll have another job, a better job, at a better agency, this time next Monday. You know I’m right.’
Ignoring the fact that, despite having a first class degree in English and Media Studies, Amy’s longest career commitment to date had been as a ticket taker at the local Odeon, I decided to believe her. What choice did I have? I was good at my job. Charlie had once told me I was so good, I couldn’t just sell ice to Eskimos, I could convince them that my ice had been hand-carved by pixies and contained the frozen tears of unicorns and that they should thank me for giving them the opportunity to even think about buying it. I just needed a new plan. And some more crappy wine.
‘First things first – if you’re not going to have a bath, you at least need a shower.’ Amy kissed my cheek and jumped up to her feet. ‘You’re going to catch your death, and, quite honestly, I can’t look at your hair like that for one more second. You’re pretty rank.’
‘OK.’ I let her hoist me up to my full five feet and nine inches and wiped my cheeks with the backs of my hands. Sometimes she made me feel like a complete beast, her being all pixie-like and adorable and me being, well, five foot nine. My nan always told me I was statuesque, but really, who wanted to be a statue?
‘So you get in the shower and I’ll go out and get some proper food – you’ve got nothing in,’ Amy said, slapping me