Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista (20 page)

‘You’ll never guess!’ I yelled excitedly to her, running out into the hallway in a skirt and bra.

‘You’re thinking of becoming a stripper?’ she ventured.

‘I’ve got an interview! It’s just for a temp job, but I think it could lead onto something permanent.’ Actually the temp agency had suggested no such thing, but it never hurt to be upbeat.

‘Brilliant news, Cass. Do you think that warrants opening a bottle of champagne?’ I said yes, of course, and we settled down on the sofa with our glasses.

‘So when’s the interview?’ she asked me.

‘Friday,’ I said. ‘Friday morning.’

Thursday passed fairly uneventfully in a blur of dog leads and job applications – two things I was hoping to be able to leave behind for good in a few days’ time. It wasn’t until the evening that things went downhill. Jake phoned at around six.

‘How’d the interview go?’ he asked, his tone flat.

‘It was fine . . . OK, you know.’ There was a long silence. I knew that something was up.

‘You know what, Cassie? I don’t know why you cancelled last night and right now I honestly don’t care. I find all this game playing unbearable. You obviously are better suited to rich City boys who treat you like shit.’

He hung up, leaving me standing in the kitchen with the phone to my ear, red-faced and crushed.

I wasn’t sure how he knew that I’d lied, but I had my suspicions, which were duly confirmed when Jude got home.

‘Did you talk to Jake at all today?’ I asked her.

‘Yeah. We had a bit of a weird conversation actually.
He was asking what time your interview was, and I said it wasn’t until tomorrow, and he was really insistent that it must be today . . . Anyway. I did eventually convince him that it was tomorrow morning, and then he just went all moody and silent and walked off. What’s that about?’

I admitted that I’d lied to him about the interview.

‘Cassie! You idiot. You could at least have told me that so we could have had our stories straight. In any case, you could have told him the truth. He’s a lovely guy, he’s not like—’

‘Dan? No, I’m sure he isn’t, but how could I have told him the truth, Jude? What was I going to say? “The thing is, Jake, I can’t go out with you tonight because I can’t have a shower and wash my hair. Why can’t I do that? Well, thinking that there was a slight chance that we might have sex on our first date, and being too broke to go to a salon to get waxed, I decided to attempt a bikini wax at home by myself and ended up giving myself second-degree burns on my inner thigh.”’ Jude started to giggle. ‘You see? Sometimes, truth-telling really is out of the question.’

The only good news of the week was that the interview with the temp agency went well. I had five whole days of real work set up: five days in which I would put on a suit and heels and wedge myself onto the tube with the rest of London (oh, how I’d missed that), five days in which I would eat sandwiches from Pret A Manger and drink coffee from Starbucks with
the rest of London, five days in which I would not have to be dragged around the freezing, muddy Common with five dogs attached to my arm, five days in which I would not have enough time to sit around the flat, moping about how rubbish my life is. I was going back to the City. I was going back to work.

Cassie Cavanagh
is still laughing at Christa

Bank balance: -£1,877.30
Weeks to go until the money runs out: One, possibly two. Unless I get very prompt payment for this temping job.

Monday
I couldn’t believe how excited I was to start my new (temp) job. I’d hardly slept the night before, I was like a five-year-old on Christmas Eve. I woke up at six, leapt out of bed as though stung and began preparing myself for the day ahead. I nipped downstairs to the newsagents and bought not just the
Guardian
, but the
FT
, too. I washed and blow-dried my hair, put on the very best of the suits I had left (dark grey wool from Max Mara, very fitted, very elegant, very grown up) and a pair of high – though not so high as to look frivolous and flighty – red heels. I didn’t have to be at the offices of Simmons & Blaythe until nine, but I set
off early at quarter to eight anyway. I was leaving nothing to chance. This was the best opportunity I’d had in ages.

Simmons & Blaythe is another London investment bank. It’s much smaller than Hamilton Churchill, and I quite liked the idea of working for them because they specialised in corporate finance rather than trading, so that would make for a somewhat less fraught atmosphere in the office. On the downside, corporate finance people worked every hour God sent – no market hours to follow – and I wasn’t quite sure how that would apply to personal assistants. I had read through all their corporate blurb and they seemed like pretty good employers – they even featured on
The Times
list of the best places in the UK to work, which is pretty unusual for a financial services firm. And although they were small they had offices in Hong Kong, Frankfurt and New York, so there might be opportunities to go abroad, if I could move up the ladder a little. Assuming, of course, that I lasted more than a week.

Simmons & Blaythe’s London offices were in Canary Wharf, like Hamilton Churchill’s, although they were situated in the less prestigious Number 25 Canada Square. Still, I had to recreate the journey that I used to enjoy so much, and even the unpleasant bits (the Northern Line, the Waterloo & City Line) brought back pangs of nostalgia. For once, everything ran smoothly. Trains arrived as I descended to the platform and parted immediately after I had got on,
there were no long, inexplicable delays in the middles of tunnels, there were no signal failures, no people taken ill on trains, no bodies on the tracks. It was one of those days when you wonder why everyone whines so much about working in London.

To get to Number 25, I had to walk past Number 1, my old stomping ground. Despite the sun barely breaking through grey clouds, I donned my sunglasses, just in case I bumped into anyone I knew and wanted to avoid. I had passed the main entrance and was just breathing a sigh of relief, believing I had snuck past unscathed when she appeared, walking in the opposite direction. Christa Freeman, dressed in a short (unnecessarily short, I thought) black skirt and jacket and waiting-list-only snakeskin heels from Miu Miu. She was striding towards me, her head held high, a trace of a smile on her lips. Bugger. She’d seen me. I steeled myself for an onslaught of patronising remarks. And then it happened. It was a glorious moment. Everything seemed to go into slow motion. As Christa stepped onto a grid covering the guttering outside the building, her stiletto heel slipped into the grate. She stumbled slightly, her smug little smile disappeared from her face. She righted herself just in time, but as she pulled her heel out of the grid there was a loud and satisfying snap. One of the heels on her £400 shoes had just disappeared, quite literally, down the drain.

I didn’t collapse into hysterical laughter. I didn’t even break stride. I just kept on going, calling out,
‘Morning, Christa,’ as I swept regally past her. When I glanced back over my shoulder I could see her hopping around on one foot, trying to keep her balance while peering desperately into the grate in an attempt to recover her heel, all the while revealing a good deal more of her stockings than I’m sure she intended. Maybe God doesn’t hate me that much after all. Or perhaps he just hates Christa Freeman too.

After an exceptionally good start to the morning, my day just got better. My boss for the week was Ms Stella Conrad-Pickles (a woman!), who was tall and thin and terrifyingly elegant but turned out to be lovely. She did not bark orders at me, she said please and thank you and smiled when she did so. Astoundingly, she even offered to drop in at Starbucks and buy
me
a coffee on the way back from her lunch. Extraordinary! Nicholas would sooner have taken out an eyeball with a fork.

The Simmons & Blaythe offices were much more civilised than Hamilton’s. People didn’t tend to scream at each other across the open-plan floor; some of them acknowledged the presence of the assistants – even temp assistants like me – occasionally with a smile. And the other PA in my section, an Australian girl called Becky, was a world away from Christa. She didn’t exactly greet me with a hug, but she showed me where everything was and how everything worked, she took me to the canteen at lunchtime and overall she seemed perfectly pleasant. By five o’clock (which was when Stella told me I could go, despite the fact
that I was supposed to work until six), I was convinced: this was the job for me. I just had to convince them of that fact, too. God, I love the City.

Wednesday
I hate the City. Everyone is shallow and consumerist, they’re obsessed with money and cars and clothes and things. Things, things, things. The men are pigs and the women know that unless they fit in with the boys they’ll be harassed to within an inch of their lives, so most of them ending up being pigs, too.

Tuesday went well, almost as well as Monday, but on Wednesday I was a little bit late getting in. Stella, who’d got stuck in traffic on the M25 on her way in from Tunbridge Wells, was also late – but she was late for a meeting with the board of directors, so it was an altogether more serious matter. She came haring into the office, threw her coat and bag at me (much in the style of Meryl Streep in
The Devil Wears Prada)
and hissed, ‘Where’s my Chai latte?’

‘I thought I’d wait until you got in before I got it,’ I explained nervously. ‘I didn’t want it to get cold.’

‘There’s a microwave in the kitchen, you moron,’ she snapped. A bit taken aback, I offered to go and get her one straight away.

‘Well, it’s too late
now
, isn’t it?’ she said witheringly, looking me up and down as she did so. I was wearing black trousers and a rather bobbly black jumper, my hair scraped back into a ponytail. I’d overslept a bit and hadn’t had the time to put the usual thought and effort
into my appearance. After Stella had disappeared into her meeting, Becky came over to my desk.

‘Stella prefers it if we wear jackets or shirts, not jumpers,’ she said. ‘She thinks it looks more professional.’ She said this without a smile. She obviously didn’t approve of my outfit either.

At the canteen at lunchtime I felt as though I was in one of those awful scenes from a US high school drama where the new kid walks around aimlessly while everyone else makes it quite clear that they don’t want him or her at their table. It wasn’t quite that bad – since most people didn’t know me they just ignored me – but when I spotted Becky, sitting with a couple of other girls in the corner, I could tell from the look on her face that she didn’t want me to join them. It was odd. We seemed to have got on fine on Monday. She obviously
really
disapproved of my jumper. Too bad. Since I was already approaching their table and couldn’t see anywhere else to sit, I just smiled cheerfully and asked, ‘Mind if I sit down?’

‘Course not,’ Becky said, without looking at me. She introduced me to the two blonde girls at the table who also said hello without really looking at me. I don’t recall their names.

‘So anyway,’ Blonde 1 was saying, ‘Sebastian wants to go to St Barts for New Year, but I’m like, God, really? Again? I’m so bored with the Caribbean.’

‘Oh, God, yah,’ Blonde 2 agreed. ‘Fregate Island, you know, in the Seychelles. That is like, totally the place now. It was on the Forbes list of the most
expensive hotels in the world.’

‘Oh, my God! Really? That sounds amazing.’

It sounds amazing? All you know about it is that it’s really expensive. Why is that amazing?

‘Yah, you should tell him that’s where you want to go. If he won’t take you I’m sure Charles would be happy to step in.’ They all cackled for a bit. I was having a hard time matching Becky with these two insufferable poshos. Why did they tolerate the Aussie?

‘Or you should get a villa on Necker,’ Becky said. ‘My dad took the whole family there for Christmas last year.’ Oh, OK, Daddy has money.

‘I know,’ Blonde 1 said, ‘I did think about that. But Sebastian keeps going on about the recession, about how he can’t count on a bonus this year, blah blah blah. Well, I’m counting on his bonus, so if he doesn’t bloody well get one …’ They all cackled again. I smiled weakly and regretted the decision not to go and sit by myself in the corner with the paper.

I thought back to my days at Hamilton, sitting sipping champagne with Ali and the other traders in the Beluga Bar after work. Is this what we sounded like? My God, Ali and I can talk about shoes and boys, we like nice restaurants and good hotels, but I don’t think we ever talked solely about things based on what they cost, or ranked people solely on the basis of how much they earn.

After a painful half-hour lunch, I returned to the office to find Stella flicking through the papers on my desk.

‘Cassie! There you are,’ she said, beaming at me. ‘Really good work on the PowerPoint presentation! This looks great!’ So, this morning I was a moron, this afternoon I am a genius. OK. ‘Listen, pop into my office for a bit, I’d like to have a chat.’

Oh, my God, I thought, she’s going to ask me to stay on. She’s going to offer me a job! Thank God for my PowerPoint skills.

‘Have a seat,’ she said, wafting her hand in the direction of one of the leather chairs facing her enormous desk. I sat down. ‘As you know,’ she said, ‘you’re here to replace Ellie, who’s had malaria, poor darling.’

‘Oh, how awful,’ I said.