The Way It Never Was (14 page)

CHAPTER 17 -
WASH ON, WASH OFF

For the time of year, Broadstairs is cold today, so cold that the wind whistles through my flat and as the storage heaters only kick in when they feel like it I’m absolutely freezing, layered up to the max with not one, but two jumpers. Sitting in the lounge, I eat my toasted sandwich, staring absent-mindedly at yet another rogue hair extension of Claire’s lying there on the sofa. I keep coming across them around the flat in unexpected places, which is not terribly pleasant. It’s sort of like finding some sort of hairy pet in a food cupboard you weren’t expecting to find.

Earlier, on my way back from the Globe where I enjoyed an obligatory caffeine fix, I saw Scary Linda stomping up the hill.

‘Hey Linda!’ I studied her face closely, as there was something about her that was a little off. ‘You okay?’ Although dressed for business, she was looking more than a little lacklustre with bloodshot eyes and mascara running down to her chin.

‘Yes, well no, not really,’ she burst into tears, tucking her hair behind her ears. ‘Dave says that he wishes,’ she paused dramatically. ‘He wishes he didn’t live so far away. He hates the journey.’

Wow, this is a sharp departure from the other night when she was waxing lyrical on her perfect relationship. Within a short space of time, it would appear that Dave has gone from leaving love note trails around Linda’s flat to complaining that the train doesn’t have a buffet cart.

‘Is that all it is?’ I wanted to quiz her further, thinking that it was a little overboard to vent about trains when everyone knew they never ran on time.

‘Well,’ she said hesitantly. ‘I think it might also be that he accidentally stumbled upon the scrapbook.’

‘Oh,’ I sigh. ‘The Love Book.’

The other evening at ours, Linda happened to drop into the conversation that she had created a scrapbook made up of pictures of her and Dave, along with cut outs from magazines that detailed her living aspirations, where they might go on holiday, the appliances they might own and what their future children might look like. Overlooking the obvious – that being, with their gene pool Scary Linda and Dave were unlikely to produce beautiful babies – the book was ill advised on so many levels I couldn’t get my head round it, nor could Claire, to the point we discussed it after Linda gone back to her flat in a rare moment of solidarity.

‘This book must never see the light of day,’ said Claire darkly. The fact that Dave just happened upon it is not good news. In fact, from a ‘things not to do in the early days of courtship’ perspective, this is potentially catastrophic.

‘Anyhow, I just don’t want to talk about it,’ Linda said dramatically, cutting me off in my stride and walking up the hill. ‘I’ll let him cool down.’ Looking after her as she walks up the hill to work, it occurred to me then and there, that as sad as I still find the whole Joe break up, I’d rather it be down to timing than because I’d force fed my boyfriend to have a happy ending that I hadn’t actually yet got round to putting in the work for.

Imagining Linda now at her desk, barking shrill orders to her team to book her on a fly-drive quick smart – that or doing a spot of decoupage for a new ‘arguments’ page in the love book – I get on my hands and knees to scrub the kitchen floor.
Kate
,
why
haven’t
you
got
a
job
to
go
to
? As crappy as it is to clean up all the dirt, at least with cleaning there is a beginning, middle and end. I can see the overall purpose of it, rather than what I’ve been doing by way of work since I came home from Sydney, where lazy bosses can’t be bothered to communicate their strategy and just chuck more work your way until it just becomes a repetitive cycle. Maybe it’s because they too don’t really know what the point to it all is – I’m pretty sure that Barbara didn’t, what with her unnatural obsession with sandwich fillings.

And that’s when the penny drops. I suddenly realise what my problem is and the reason why I’ve been in the job wilderness for so long. I want to have a proper ending in what I do! I want files that stay filed, cases that stay closed. I want people that thank me and move on. And the work I did at the Globe the other day gave me just that – perfect, complete exchanges with people. No sooner had I dealt with a tricky customer, a new and shinier one would walk through the door. Every single time it was a different experience and I absolutely loved it. Looking back, I remember trying to explain why I loved café life to Joe in Sydney, but he just rolled his eyes over his free panini and said it wasn’t a proper job.
Well
,
you
were
wrong
Joe
!

I’ve had a similar moment of clarity before, where I reached a breaking point and knew I needed to do something different in order to have something different. Moments like that don’t happen often, but when they do, you somehow find a new way to move forward. It was several years ago now. I had just settled into university life and then graduated, finding myself a little out of step with the real world. Shock horror, my fluffy ‘ology’ degree didn’t translate into getting a foot on a ladder rung of any kind. Despite applying to everything across the board, I couldn’t get a job for love or money, not helped by the fact I’d done absolutely no constructive work experience of any kind. Any optimism I did have soon disappeared when I started having to hold down random jobs that I could have done if I hadn’t bothered with higher education – highlights of which included over-pruning trees in a fruit orchard, working on a speedy conveyor belt in a sandwich factory, and a job as a ‘port receptionist’ at a ferry terminal where I had to say ‘embarkation’ with a nasal voice over the tannoy.

I then saw an advert for a ‘sales executive’ working for a large newspaper group. Effectively hired to sell unwanted advertising space, at first I absolutely hated it and stammered my way through the script. For several weeks, I would just hole myself up in the toilets and drink copious amounts of Diet Coke to get through the day. One day though I gave myself a stern talking to.
Kate
,
if
you
stick
it
out
and
become
really
good
at
it
,
you
won’t
have
to
cold
call
anymore
. That same morning, I squared my shoulders and picked up the phone before I had time to think about it, treating every rejection like water off a duck’s back, skipping lunch and only stopping when it was time to go home.

‘Hello there, please can I speak to the person who handles your advertising. No problem, I’m sorry he’s off sick. I’ll call back,’ I would say and tick them off my list, before picking up the receiver to dial the next one.

In a wave of something bordering on obsession, I was driven and in acting confident I became so, ringing and ringing people, fine-tuning my pitch and never taking no for an answer, until I had not only filled my own trade page with ads but other people’s too. Before too long the bosses were promoting me and giving me entire features to sell and getting their long-term workforce to shadow me to find out my secret. I never told them that my success was mainly down to half a dozen Diet Cokes of a day and sheer bloody-mindedness on my part. The way I figured, I couldn’t prevent job rejection letters but I could damn well control whether someone took an ad out. The next couple of years then went by in a blur.

While I was carving out a successful reputation out in a cut-throat sales environment, things had gone a lot more smoothly for Stan. There were no cocks ups or unnecessary rites of passage. No, he was the proud owner of a first class degree from a redbrick university. He had never so much as dirtied his hands with factory work or tree pruning, but had instead got himself a summer lifeguard job, willing people to drown just to have something to do. Seamlessly, Stan then went from posing on the beach and warding off female attention, to starting a graduate training programme of his own at an international pharmaceutical company, where he stayed. Unlike me, who was still without a clue as to what I wanted to do but making it up as I went, Stan was all set.

Many months later, I happened to check my bank balance and realised that with all the commission I had earnt, I had enough money to do something big. Finally, I had the opportunity to have an adventure, so I called up Linda and booked myself a return ticket to Australia, complete with a working visa. When I told Stan of my travel plans, instead of being excited for me he seemed ever so slightly taken aback.

‘But you don’t do things like that!’ he said, spluttering into his beer in disbelief.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I snapped and waited for the answer.
Go
on
.
Get
out
of
this
one
Stan
!

‘Well,’ he said, looking like he was desperately thinking of how to best to say it. ‘You’ve never been interested in doing something like that before.’

Well that did it! For the first time in a long time, I was angry with him, almost to the point of no return. Just because he was all settled didn’t mean I was.

‘Well I am interested in doing something now!’ I said, furiously. ‘People do change you know.’ What I really wanted to say was:
Come
on
admit
it
.
You’re
just
annoyed
I’m
doing
it
first
!

And then with this indiscernible expression on his face, he just looked straight at me. ‘Kate, I just think you might regret it. It’s a big thing to do.’

Regret
it
? And to think I had a small pit in my stomach at the thought of not seeing my old friend for a while. Why, a little distance would do us good and would restore his opinion of me at the very least. I was adventurous, hell I was kerrayzee, me! I was going to do a thousand bungee jumps and brag about every single one of them on Facebook. The following month I handed in my notice, which went down as well as a pork chop at a bah mitzvah, given that the remainder of my team consisted of Karen who’d developed a stammer since working there and Kim who preferred having a fag break to picking up the phone. I wasn’t going to feel guilty, as I’d given my all. I flew to the other side of the world and there I stayed for the next two years.

Back to the present day and I’m about to give up on this floor cleaning malarkey. What is the point when Claire will just traipse around undoing all my hard work? Instead, I decide to chuck around the polish like there’s no tomorrow, dusting absolutely
everything
– fruit bowl and hair extensions included. I then start polishing my collage in the hallway. Along with memorabilia, there are photos of me through all the eras, the school years where I liked wearing cut off jeans and patterned sweaters, the ones from university where every single day I wore the same black dress, thinking that no one would ever notice. And then I see those pictures from time in CoogeeView, where there is something different about me, something that looks like I had come into my own – well that and the fact that I was tanned and everyone always looks better with a bit of colour don’t they?

Unsurprisingly, given the years we’ve been friends, there are lots of pictures of Stan, some from school – oh, and that one time he came to see me at university looking ever so slightly on the side of smelly, like he was in need of a good shower. There I am, wearing that same black dress looking really pissed off. That black dress was the only constant thing in my life at that time. Stuck miles outside campus, I’d never felt so homesick, that and disillusioned with the reality of university. I felt so emotional about it all that I couldn’t work out what the feeling was half the time. Where were the smug halls and the balls? There I was, living miles out from campus in student digs, on a course that had no more than eight hours of lectures a week. In contrast, there’s a picture of a rather smug looking Stan in co-ed halls at his redbrick, clearly having the time of his life.

Getting out my hoover with no suck, I look over at the collage. That photo of Stan with me at university brings it all back – his visit in that first term. I’d barely had a chance to settle in and ran on nervous energy most of the time, never daring to stay in for fear I was missing out on something. When Stan announced he was coming down for three nights, I was panicked, as just where was he going to sleep? I also had no clue what I was going to do with him, as I still didn’t have my bearings about where everything was or who anyone was called.

I really needn’t have worried though as Stan properly made himself at home, in every sense of the word. On the first night, he started snogging my housemate, a girl whose name escapes me – let’s call her ‘Whatserface’ – who had this really whiney voice and an unhealthy obsession with Celine Dion. What I hadn’t bargained on was that for the remainder of the weekend he acted like he was seriously dating Whatserface and pretty much ignored me the whole time. Within five hours of his arrival, I had gone from being number one friend to the annoying hanger-on. Then, after three days, he thanked me for a wonderful weekend, before leaving me to pick up the pieces and hear Celine’s ‘Think Twice’ on a loop, blaring out of the bedroom of a girl he had got to know better than I had.