seventeen

It’s still light when I get home. I watch TV in the living room and eat a microwave meal.

It turns dark outside and my Mum gets home from work.

‘Why’s it so dark in here?’ she asks and then switches on the main lights in the living room.

‘Did you see what came in the post this morning?’ she asks.

‘No.’

‘Here,’ she hands me a thick, glossy catalogue advertising a multitude of degree courses. On the cover, a black boy, an asian girl, a white girl with long blonde hair and a white boy with short brown hair are lounging on some grass all smiling or laughing at each other.

‘They look like they’re having a great time.’ I say, and go back to watching TV.

‘I just think that it’s something you should really consider, precious.’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘I don’t want to keep on nagging you, but I really think it’d be a great opportunity for you. I know your Dad would have wanted you to go.’

I get up and go up to my bedroom.

I realise I have two missed calls and one text. They are all from Sarah. I read the text and laugh and then feel bad for laughing. It’s like watching someone in the street trip over: pangs of sympathy are mixed with relief that it’s not me. I consider phoning her but I decide I’ll wait until tomorrow.

It’s late, but I don’t feel tired so I decide to go downstairs and eat some ice cream. My Mum is in he living room with a glass of wine, watching TV. I walk past the living room door and she says sorry.

‘Don’t be,’ I say, over my shoulder, nonchalantly.

I sit in the living room with my Mum in silence. I eat my ice cream; she drinks her wine. When I finish I take my bowl into the kitchen and rinse it in the sink.

We say night to each other as I pass the living room and go up the stairs and go back to my room.

sixteen

I walk from the library to work. It’s not far, just a ten-minute walk going through town. I walk past the café where I handed my CV in. There isn’t a sign in the window anymore. I don’t know if this means that they have found someone or they just haven’t started calling people about interviews yet.

I look at my phone.

No messages. I guess I should keep on looking for new jobs anyway, just in case.

The town centre is empty and I walk with an unbroken stride. I don’t actually realise just how fast I am walking until I get to work fifteen minutes early and have started to itch at the beginnings of a sweat.

I take my coat off and fold it into my bag, which I then hang up in my locker in the staff changing rooms.

There’s one chef in the kitchen: it’s not Ant. Mozart isn’t there yet either. A knot of nervousness unties and reties itself in the pit of my stomach. I want them both to be here just so the initial awkwardness is out of the way.

There are a few people on their lunch break in the restaurant. I start cleaning the empty tables that occupy 60% of the restaurant. Spray, wipe in circular motions, then on to the next table.

There are two people at the other side of the room. They are not saying anything to each other. One of them pulls their phone from out of their pocket and starts stabbing at it intently; the other sighs and balances their head in their right hand.

I finish two more tables before going over to ask if everything is okay. The one balancing their head in their right hand looks up at me and says,

‘Can we get the bill, please?’

I go and get them the bill and two imperial mints on a tiny plate. They pay by card.

After they have left I go to clear up their table. On the tiny plate is a receipt for their bill, £3.65 in change and two imperial mints. I put the money in the tip glass behind the counter and put the imperial mints back with the rest of them.

My shift is only half over and I feel exhausted. My eyes feel like they don’t belong inside their sockets; like they are made out of a synthetic material that my retinas are allergic to. I rub them and try and read a newspaper at the bar. My eyes keep on wandering off the page though.

My boss comes into the restaurant and asks how my first day back is going. I ask if I can go home early and he says that it is fine and there will be enough staff to cover anyway. He doesn’t seem pissed off and I’m not sure if this means there’s something wrong.

I go to the changing room and take my bag out of my locker, then make my way out of the back entrance and walk to the bus stop. Outside, it has gotten cold. I open my bag and take out my coat.

The bus peers round the corner at the end of the road before it pulls out and comes rolling up towards me. I stick my left arm out into the road until it had stopped right in front of me. I go to step onto the bus, but some people are getting off first. An old woman that has a plastic cover over her hair is pulling one of those bags on wheels behind her. A man behind her is lifting the bag over the gap between the bus and the pavement. His back is bent so his blond hair hangs down in front of his face. A knot in my stomach unties and reties itself. He looks up at me.

‘Hi,’ I say with a certain amount of surprise.

‘Hallo.’

‘I’m going home,’ I say, lifting my hand in a half wave.

‘See you soon.’

I sit next to the window near the front of the bus and look outside. I think of how indifferent Mozart seemed to me. The same thoughts spin round in my head, but no progression is made with them. I try to think of something different, but eventually it winds up back at the same thoughts.

fifteen

I leave for work a bit earlier than usual because I want to take the Mozart CDs back to the library.

I get to the library and the man with the John Lennon-style glasses is there again, sitting in the exact same seat I saw him in before. In front of him are stacks of newspapers. His arms are lying by his side and his head is laid back. If his eyes were open then they would be looking straight up at the ceiling, but they’re not. Instead, his mouth is wide open.

At first, he is completely still. I wonder if he’s dead or something. Then suddenly he gives a loud snort and wakes himself up. He looks around the room, either to see where he is or to see if anyone saw or heard him. He then wipes some saliva from his chin and starts sorting through the papers in front of him.

I take the CDs out of my bag and hand them to a young guy in a black shirt and jeans, standing behind the counter. He has an ID badge on a strip of material around his neck – this is the only way I know he works here.

He smiles as I hand him the CDs and says ‘thanks.’

I take my earphones out, to make sure I don’t shout at him and say thanks back. I can still hear my earphones quite clearly now they are unplugged from my ears and I am sure he can too.

I walk past the library after I leave and glance through the open window at the side of the building. The man in the John Lennon-style glasses has fallen asleep in his chair again.

fourteen

I have never had a sick day. Not since year 6 in primary school and not until last week when I got a concussion at work. But even then I had the following week off as holiday.

When I had that sick day in year 6, it wasn’t a test day or anything. It was a Wednesday: PE day. I had complained to my Mum of a stomach-ache at breakfast that morning, but she must have assumed I was faking it. Even though I had never had a sick day before then. She drove me to the school gates and dropped me off.

‘Hurry up then,’ she said as she lent across me and opened the car door. It took me about fifteen minutes after we had our carton of milk in the morning for me to throw up all over the table in front of me. I remember a couple of the girls screaming and some boys laughing and shouting in excitement as cereal and milk that had turned to mucous came out of my mouth and nose.

The next thing I remember was sitting outside the principles office with my bag at my feet and a sick bowl in my hands, waiting for my Mum to pick me up. I remember feeling hungry and taking a chocolate bar out of my lunch box. Mrs Blackwell, the mother of a boy in my class, walked past and said,

‘Hmpf! She can’t be that sick if she’s eating chocolate!’ as if talking to someone else who was backing up her judgement. I’m not too sure exactly what she did at the school, but she wasn’t a teacher. I folded the wrapper around the remains of my chocolate bar and out it back in my bag as I waited for my Mum to show up.

When my Mum got me home she made me change into my pyjamas and go straight to bed. She checked on me every hour or so to see how I was. But now that I had actually been sick I really didn’t feel too bad anymore. So as soon as she left my bedroom I would get out from under my covers and start playing with my toys.

At dinnertime she asked me if I thought I would be able to hold something down. I said I would and we went downstairs and ate Garlic Kiev’s and chips and watched the news. Afterwards, we had neapolitan ice cream and I sat on the sofa with my Mum and she brushed my hair: it was very long back then; down to my coccyx. Even though I had spent most of the day in bed I thought I might fall asleep right there.

She then got up and went upstairs. When she came back down she had two books and my pencil case in her hand. One of the books was my exercise book; the other was a maths textbook. She set them up at the dining room table and told me I could make up for the work I missed at school today.

The next thing I remember was having a long argument with her about how it was PE today and it was maths tomorrow. I think I actually screamed, I MISSED PE TODAY about twenty times in a row until I ran out of breath, while my mother just stared at me with her arms crossed. She would then reply calmly,

‘Well then, you’ll be ahead of everyone else tomorrow won’t you?’

Neither of us listened to each other and I ended up locking myself in the bathroom, sobbing to myself as my Mum banged on the bathroom door, telling me if I didn’t study now then I would regret it later in life. She then left and came back fifteen minutes later. I was still crying and sniffing up my own snot.

She tapped on the door gently,

‘Baby,’ she would call me, ‘I need the toilet.’ She then paused and continued, ‘Listen, you know I love you, don’t you? I’m just trying to do what I think is right, and what I think your father would have wanted. It’s not easy for me, you know?’

There was silence, except for the hum and whir of the extractor fan, which the light switch turned on automatically. I got down from the toilet seat and undid the lock. I had stopped crying but my face felt puffy, red and wet. I opened the bathroom door and my Mum was standing there, her face puffy, red and wet. She dropped to her knees and hugged me tightly and we both started crying again.

This was the last sick day I ever took off work until last week, when I hit my head on the back of the door to the walk-in freezer at work and got a concussion. Today is my first day back since then and I am seriously considering calling in sick for the first time ever. My phone is in my hand. It would be an easy call to make, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. I put my phone down and get out of bed. I pick up my towel off the back of the radiator in my room and go to the bathroom.

I wrap a towel around my head and slide down into the bath. I listen to the radio for three songs before getting out and brushing my teeth. My Mum yells from the bottom of the stairs that she is leaving and hopes I have a good day at work. I say thanks, toothbrush still in mouth. The front door slams shut as I spit the white froth into the sink. I wipe my mouth and look at myself in the mirror. I smile. I force an outwardly positive image.

thirteen

I am a camera watching my ex come out of the kitchen at work and sit opposite me – or an actor playing me. There are similarities, but I know for certain that it’s not actually me. I’m worried that the person playing me is going to say something stupid. I see myself sitting opposite him, awkward. I am wearing big sunglasses, a tank top and hot pants. I have sunburn on my shoulders. He asks me how I’m doing.

I reply, ‘Fine. You?’

‘Yeah I’m great,’ he says. ‘Been doing lots of fucking.’

My head is shaved and I am a whole foot smaller. It must be a different actor. We are in a club and I am crying. I ask him why he doesn’t love me. I am weeping like a toddler in a supermarket.

I wake up to my phone ringing. At first I am annoyed that I have been woken up, then I remember that it might just be the café phoning me about interviews. It’s not.

‘You’ve got to help me. I think I have Chlamydia,’ the voice on the other end tells me.

‘You think?’ I ask. I can hear my voice and it sounds like a voice that has just been asleep for 6 hours.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you. I’ve been up all night, you see. I just didn’t know who else to call.’

Sarah was my friend for most of our school lives. We always seemed to wind up in the same classes and we hung out with the same group of friends, but I don’t think we were ever particularly close. I'd received a couple of e-mails from her since she went to university in September, but this is the first time she has called me. I try to think if she has ever called me before. She must have at some point but I can’t think of any right now.

‘Have you had any tests done?’ I ask her.

‘No, not yet. God, I don’t know what to do. Fuck, I feel like such a slut.’

‘You’re not a slut.’ I tell her.

Sarah then tells me, at length, how she slept with her flatmates boyfriend and then found out last night while they were out at a club that her flatmate has Chlamydia. I stop listening for a minute and take the phone away from my ear to look at the time. It’s half five in the morning. I listen a bit longer. She keeps on repeating things. Maybe this is because I am not saying anything and she thinks I am not listening. Maybe she’s just a bit drunk. She then tells me: ‘I can’t tell anyone this but you. Every one else will think I am such a big slut.’

I tell Sarah to get a test done at a clinic. I then tell her it’s Monday morning and I need to start getting ready to go to work. After about four 'bye’s and three 'speak to you soon’s I hang up the phone and get ready for what I have been dreading these past seven days.

twelve

I go to Costa and order a Latte and poppy seed muffin before asking if they have any job vacancies – there weren’t any signs in the window. The girl behind the counter tells me that they don’t and I begin to feel embarrassed. I take my coffee and go and sit over on a bar stool in front of the open window looking out onto the high street. The track changes on the stereo and it is soft folk music. It sounds like a mobile phone advert.

I’m still feeling the sting of embarrassment after asking if they have any jobs available. I feel the barista’s laughing eyes burning into my back. I think about just leaving my endless coffee and getting out of there. Then I freeze.

Out of the front window I think I see my ex walking down the road. He has been at university for the past nine months now. I haven’t heard a word from him since he left.

It was his idea to break up, but to tell you the truth, I was relieved when we did. I was always looking at it from an outside perspective and thinking how weird it all was.

I feel the panic run through my body at the thought of having to talk to him. He probably doesn’t want to talk to me either. I’m nervous. I slide off the stool to go to the toilet and take a final look out the window just so that I am certain it is him, but he’s not there anymore.

I go to the toilet anyway so I have some time to sit down and collect myself.

After I leave the coffee shop and go to the next one, twenty meters down the road. There’s a handwritten sign in the window that reads: ‘Waitress required. F/T. Experience essential.’ Etc.

I take a CV out of my bag and walk in. There are three people behind the counter: two girls and a guy. The shortest girl comes over to me and asks if she can get me anything. I ask if the job in the window is still available. She says yes and I hand her the CV that I have in my hands. She holds in straight in front of her face, looks at me and smiles.

‘Great!’ she tells me. ‘We’ll probably call you in a couple of days to let you know when interviews are.’

I leave the shop feeling excited. I go home.

eleven

I can see everything in my room. It is pitch black but I have been awake so long that my eyes have adjusted to everything. I think about getting up and going downstairs to get a drink but then I tell my self that I will never get to sleep if I do this.

I am at my Gran’s and she keeps on cooking me plates and plates of oven chips. Her electric oven doesn’t cook the middle of them and I can’t get any ketchup out of them glass bottle. I stick a knife through the whole and it all comes out over my arms and hands. I am shocked by how much there is because there seems to be a lot more than the bottle can actually hold. I am now covered in ketchup. My Gran shouts at me in a terrifying voice, ‘what do you think you’re doing?!’

I start to cry.

I wake up sweating with a dry throat and a headache. It's sunny. I have a pint of water and a paracetemol for breakfast before taking the dogs into the garden. Mum has already left for work. I put the CVs I printed off at the library yesterday in my bag and get the bus into town.

Dust rises from the seats towards the roof of the bus. I can taste the dust in the back of my throat when I breathe. The bus is empty and I enjoy the short journey into town, without any stops. My headache has cleared now. I feel revitalised. I feel like a yogurt advert.

I have a look around some charity shops and end up buying a blue jumper for £4.

Walking towards a Costa - of which I have a picture in my head of a ‘barista position available’ sign in the window - a girl starts walking towards me. She walks past me and I look at her. She is looking straight back at me and I think she wants to punch me. I imagine her clenched fist pounding hard against the side of my face and me falling to the floor. I feel the shock overwhelming the pain of the punch as I lie there thinking about why she has just hit me. Why has she just hit me? Maybe she knows me or knows something about me that offends her. I think it’s unlikely as I can’t think of anything that I’ve done recently that would offend anyone really. Maybe she is Mozart’s girlfriend/wife. I dismiss this instantly because if she were then she would have no reason to want to hit me anyway, unless Mozart had told her he was in love with m or something. And even then, how would she know what I looked like?

The thought of why this woman would want to hit me – in actually fact she hasn’t said a word to me – lingers in my thoughts as I carry on walking. I assess my self. Perhaps it is the way I am dressed, I think. Maybe this is enough to take a dislike to someone. I decide not to think about it anymore before my thoughts begin to manifest in the form of a stomach ulcer.

ten

I get in and Mum is home already, talking on the phone. She waves me over whilst saying, ‘She’s just walked through the door, just this second.’

She hands me the phone and mouths to me, ‘it’s Grandma.’

‘Hi Grandma!’ I try to sound as cheerful as possible.

‘Hello dear, listen, I won’t keep you long I just wanted to see how you were doing after your nasty fall. Mum told me all about it. What a brute!’

‘Yeah I’m fine now. Don’t worry about it. I’ve just got back…’ I try to fit in.

‘Oh good, good. And Mum says you’re quitting your job? Well you don’t want to stay in a job like that do you? And I guess it’s only temporary. You’ll be off to university in September, won’t you?’

‘Err…I’m still not sure about that Grandma…’ I'm rolling my eyes and looking over to my mum who is nibbling on food from the fridge and opening a bottle of wine.

My Gran continues, ‘Well I’m sure something better will come up in no time.’

I grind my teeth and say, ‘Fingers crossed. I plan on handing my CV in to a few places tomorrow and I was going to look on the Internet for some jobs tonight.’

‘Oh that is good. Well good luck my dear. Best of luck.’

‘Yeah. You too.’ I’m not sure what I mean by this.

‘God bless dear. God bless,’ she says before being replaced by a dial tone.

I picture her going to her arm chair and putting on an oxygen mask just to catch her breath back.

nine

I go to sleep. I toss and turn for a bit and think I am just going to lie awake in bed all night. Then it is morning and I get up and take the dogs into the garden before making breakfast. I think I could live like this forever, but by the time it is lunch I am bored out of my head and nothing is on TV.

It’s ten-to-two when I decide to get the bus into town and go to the library.

I walk into the library through the swinging metal gate that has always been there for as long as I can remember. I go over to the computers. You have to book when you want them on most of them, except one. The one at the end you can log in for fifteen minutes without booking, as long as it is free. I log in and go to my e-mail account. I download the file I have sent to myself and print off five copies. This costs me £1.50 in total, and I push my coins, one-by-one, into the machine to release the pages that tell the story of my whole working career. Double-spaced with education, work experience, employment history, references and contact details. Just stretching to the two-page mark. I collect them together and go to the desk at the far end of the library to ask if I can borrow a stapler. There is a woman there in her late forties. Crows feet are embedded at the sides of her eyes. She hands me the stapler reluctantly, like I am about to use it in some perverted sex act. I take them stapler and my ten pages of A4 paper and go and sit in one of the big comfy chairs in the magazine section.

At a table near me, a man sits with a stack of different newspapers. He looks like he’s in his sixties but his clothes are very youthful. Grey hair pokes out from underneath his cap and he has round, John Lennon-type glasses on. I pretend to read for a bit because I want to see just how closely he is reading the newspapers in front of him. I can’t tell if he’s reading any section in particular. Maybe he is researching something. I push my curiosity to the side for now and start to staple the pages together.

I finish stapling the pages. I hold them together, up right, and tap them against my knees to straighten them out before placing them in my bag.

I walk over to the CD section. I’m not really too sure why I am looking through them. There’s nothing there I want to listened to. Most of the CDs booklets are tattered and torn and where in the charts about seven years ago. I wonder why I am wasting my time looking through the CDs and again turn to leave. The classical shelf is facing me and the eyes of old portraits of men in wigs meet me. I look back at them and step up to the section marked ‘M.’

The entire ‘M’ section is filled with double and triple CDs of music by Mozart (Wolfgang Amadeus). I look through them one by one then go back to some, pick up two at a time and compare. To be honest I don’t have a clue. CDs are a pound for a week. I take one with two violins on the cover over to the desk along with the stapler that is still in my hand. The woman at the counter grabs the stapler and the CD and then asks me bluntly for my card. She scans the card and CD and then asks me for the pound. She thrusts her arm out at me with the CD and my card at the end. I take them and say thanks. She says ‘thank you’ while clicking away at something on the computer screen in front of her.

I think it must be quite nice to be a librarian. I tell myself to look for library jobs when I get home.

It is five o’clock and the library is almost about to close. Having not eaten since breakfast my stomach now feels like it is digesting itself. I start walking home.

Walking home from town takes about forty minutes. At the thought of a forty-minute walk some of my friends would call a taxi or their boyfriends and get home this way. But I don’t mind. I don’t even mind that I have to walk next to a busy road most of the way. To the other side of me are the subtle variations of suburban front gardens. Tulips, fir trees, brick wall, rose bush, hollies, wooden fence, landlocked boat. Then I look over the other side of the road, in a gap between a row of trees. The view stretches for miles and there are untouched fields folding over each other. Green, yellow, brown, orange. I enjoy every step.

eight

It may be the worst mistake I have ever made, but I hand in the letter anyway.

When I give the letter to my boss he sighs and gives me the pissed off look he always gives me, in any situation. I look at his balding head. There’s a line where his hair once reached. It’s like someone has torn it right off and just slapped some sliced meat in its place.

He tells me I have to give four weeks notice, but I have the next week off because of my concussion. So that leaves three weeks before I can leave. He says I have to work these or else he won’t give me a reference. So, now I have a week before I have to go back there; a week before I have to think about dealing with everything I have so far managed to avoid; a free week to start looking for a new job.

When I go to give my notice in I go through the front entrance and go the same way when I leave. This way I avoid the kitchen entirely, minimizing my chances of seeing Mozart or Ant. I picture Mozart looking up at me from his sink and saying ‘hallo.’ I picture Ant making some comment about my breasts being small.