The Way It Never Was (2 page)

‘Barbara,’ I began, but as though I had not said a word, she just continued talking over me.

‘Mabel believes that you’re a bad example to the other EA’s. She says that she needs you to engage better so she can fully implement her support strategies to circle back on her execution of real time synergy for the next level drill down.’
Support
strategies
?
Synergy
?
Drill
downs
? Only Mabel could talk this lingo to make it seem like there was some grand purpose to it all – some science other than doing the shitty admin jobs that no one else wanted to do. Silently, I automatically reached for my trusted lip-gloss in my pocket. I opened the pot and started circling the goo round and round my lips with my little finger, as though I was stroking a lamp trying to conjure up a genie to grant me a few wishes.
Please
genie
–
tell
me
what
to
do
. Nothing.

‘Look.’ Barbara started pacing the room. ‘You make great spreadsheets and you book meetings very quickly,’ she said, clearly thinking that I would be flattered by all these accolades being bestowed upon me. ‘However, despite Mabel’s – how shall I put it – indiscretions’, she said, alluding to the awkward episode where our illustrious EA leader used the company pool phone to send a PXT of her boobs to married Simon in Accounts. ‘She proves that she is dedicated to Jam Jam and takes pride in every aspect of her job.’

‘Barbara. I’m really sorry but I will never be Mabel.’ I blurted out, my voice sounding slightly more ‘Tarzan’ than ‘Jane’ than intended.

‘What is it that you trying to tell me Kate?’ I paused for a second by way of checking in with myself where I was going here.

And then I knew. ‘Well, I would like to leave.’ I wanted to say a whole lot more, but experience had taught me to be practical here. It was all very well pouring a jug of water over my boss’s head and giving her some smart-arsed reply like you see in films, but I needed this month’s salary.

‘You want to do
what
?’ She looked at me as though she couldn’t quite believe what I just said.

‘I don’t want to work here anymore. I would like to hand in my notice,’ I reiterated, warming up to the idea the more I said it.

‘Well this is a first,’ she said, shaking her head in disbelief. Given what she was like to work for, I somehow doubted this. ‘But if that is what you want then you must pack up your things immediately.’ Such urgency seemed a little excessive as I was hardly working for the F.B.I.

‘Would you do me one thing for me though?’ I stopped expectantly in the doorway, waiting for something profound, something that would resonate with me in years to come, something I might be able to use in a speech when accepting an award for something or other.

‘Would you get me a spicy prawn bagel before you go?’

CHAPTER 2
- ALL YOU CAN EAT

With his dark grey suit and cerise pink tie, I spy my older brother sitting in a booth in the window of a brightly lit diner in the middle of Leicester Square. He’s drinking a bottle of beer, oblivious to being watched by masses of gawping tourists. Even as his sister, I can see that Dan comes firmly within the category of ‘eligible’ – 33 years old, handsome, single (because he works all hours and has no interest in listening) and wealthy (although you would never guess that from his middle-of-the-road taste in eateries). He also has lots of friends and, judging from our regular get-togethers, a ridiculously active social life. Whenever we meet up, his phone continually beeps at him with texts, all of which he replies to, which makes for a highly enjoyable three-way conversation.

Admittedly, it’s taken a while for Dan to reach this stage. Believe me, I’ve witnessed it all: the bleached mullets, the over-ripe grungy look, the metro-sexual do – even the grade one buzz cut that showed off his receding widow’s peak. Now he’s looking decidedly respectable, I think he’s reached his physical zenith. Just.

I, on the other hand, am five years younger and have perfectly pleasant features – nice eyes, decent complexion, full lips. I also know that I don’t have anything so striking to put me in the super league. I’m just your average woman who knows what lipstick shade suits me, has a pair of big lycra pants for special occasions and regularly wishes I owned more than three outfits.

Looking up at me, Dan frowns. ‘Do you want to be any later? You know I have another thing to go to tonight.’

Feeling immediately annoyed by his underwhelming greeting, I look around me. ‘Low key you said. Last time I checked there were a load of nice places round here. But nope, you had to pick this one,’ I groan. ‘Why on earth not there?’ I point at the rather fancy looking fish restaurant over the road. ‘Or even there?’ I wave in the direction of a buzzing sandwich eatery that advertises happy chickens and organic quinoa.

Squinting in the unforgiving light, I slide into the booth. Within seconds, the waiter appears and hands us two enormous plastic menus. He then pours us out some tap water and quickly talks us through the specials using lots of words like ‘jus’ and ‘medley’ as though he were reading a fast moving autocue. Clearly, this will be no long lingering dinner.

My brother watches the waiter wander off. ‘Kate take a chill pill okay? Don’t want to sound like a knob but seriously, I eat out so often that after a while scallops become boring. This. Does. The. Job.’

Dismayed that I’ve just been told to take a ‘chill pill’, I bypass the fancy descriptions and look down at the pictures of the food displayed in the menu to see what takes my fancy.

‘Where do you have to go onto anyway?’ I ask, looking up at him, but he just smiles and taps his nose at me as though to tell me to mind my own – that is, until I kick him under the table, the way only siblings can.

‘Okay, okay, I have a blind date. A friend of a friend of a friend whom he insisted I’d hit it off with. I just hope she’s not plug ugly, you know – the type with a great personality,’ he says, making finger quotes.

I splutter on my drink. ‘You’re such a gentleman Dan.’ Sitting there looking so very pleased with himself, Dan is not simply unfiltered - he’s a walking liability. Seriously, it’s no wonder he never gets past the first date.

‘Try not to say that out loud, it makes you sound well, just rude. You’re as bad as Liv,’ I wince, thinking of my best friend who’s so similar in manner that the one time they met, they seriously clashed.

‘Kate, you always gravitate towards blunt people like me,’ smiles Dan and I shrug nonchalantly, inwardly debating whether to follow suit and volunteer that I am now jobless.

‘How’s work?’ I ask. Truthfully, I’m not entirely sure what Dan does for a living and have long since given up trying to find out. All I know is that it is something high up in banking and my brother, being a nice guy, humours my complete ignorance so keeps it to human interest only.

‘Well Katie Kate, you’ll love this. You can relate to working with annoying arseholes. Got a new guy in. Thinks he’s the bomb.’ He then proceeds to tell me in great detail about this new colleague over from the Australasian division, who has been brought in at the same level as Dan but is actually treating him like an employee.

‘You know, he puts on a bit of a nice guy act but I actually think he has a game plan. Talks up at the end of every sentence just to prove he’s lived in the southern hemisphere. Short too – swear he wears stacked heels.’

I hate hearing this kind of anecdote from Dan because invariably I get impassioned on his behalf, only to find that nothing gets resolved, and then we can’t talk about it without him getting irritated about being reminded that he’s failed to address it.

‘Just cc everyone in on everything you do. Cover your back,’ I offer by way of advice. As far as I’m concerned, ‘CC’ is as essential as unplugging the PC at the back when it isn’t working.
I
should
have
cc
-
ed
and
bcc
-
ed
a
few
more
times
myself
.

‘It’s okay, I’m on it,’ Dan says, shoving in a mouthful of coleslaw, reminding me that I still haven’t eaten.

I take my plate and head towards the bright light of the salad bar that has a dozen people all crowded round it with ladles in hand. A few minutes later, with my plate accidentally stacked high with ‘salad’ items (deep fried mushrooms – who knew), I squeeze myself back into the tiny booth.

‘Tiny plate,’ I say defensively, as Dan goes to the gym five days a week at the crack of dawn and sports a six pack, so can justify eating the entire salad bar, whereas I depend on having a flat with no lift and five flights of stairs.

Conscious of the tourists outside staring in like we’re animals in captivity, I decide to tackle the salad that is threatening to spill everywhere, the only way I know how – stabbing at it layer by layer in a rather aggressive manner.

Through a mouthful of chicken, Dan manages to talk. ‘Okay, Kate, I get it. Stop being arsey about this place. It’s ruining dinner.’

I put my fork down. ‘Oh I can’t help it Dan. I have had a rubbish day.’ There, I said it, finally. I need to fess up, to tell the truth to my brother. ‘I lost my job,’ I say.

Dan splutters. ‘Back up a little. Did you say you lost your job?’ I nod, raising my eyes to the heavens as though to say what a silly person I am.

‘What happened? Was it Babs?’

I shake my head. ‘No it wasn’t.’

Taking a huge gulp of beer, he looks thoughtful. ‘Was it PXTing Mabel?’

I shake my head again. ‘Nope’.

Dan knows all too well that given my chequered job history, this guessing game could take about a year. ‘Just dish the dirt. Stop being so cryptic, it’s not that suspenseful you know,’ he pleads, waving his fork at me. ‘C’mon. Who what when how?’

Squaring my shoulders, I take a deep breath. ‘I quit.’ My brother’s face registers complete and utter disbelief.

‘Come again?’ he asks and I repeat myself slowly.

‘I quit. You know, walked out.’

Taking his napkin, Dan waves it in the air as though lassoing a horse, attracting a few glances from fellow diners. ‘Alle-friggin-lujah! The first ballsy thing you’ve done for ages!’ Out on the street, a small audience is forming at the silent film playing out in front of them.

‘That’s not kind Dan,’ I say. ‘Oz was two years ago. I’ve done okay,’

I give him one of my looks to try and silence him as he’s talking really loudly but he’s having none of it. ‘Err, yeah, if okay means you’ve just got too lazy to do anything about your mediocre career,’ he grins, showing me the contents of his dinner stuck between his teeth. Shall I tell him? No, I won’t. Let him grin at his hot date all night. ‘You used to be happy Kate. You used to like work. You then came back from Sydney and now you’re in what – your twelfth job?’

I try and floss some unidentifiable salad bit from my teeth with my tongue as I mentally add up the amount of jobs I’ve had. ‘Eleven if you really want to know.’ I say defensively. ‘I’m not the first person who hasn’t quite found what they’re supposed to be doing you know. You’re being a little harsh.’

Given how my day has unfolded, I am in no mood for honesty from the one person who should indulge me, but at the same time as it’s my brother I can’t expect to have it any other way.

‘Well, let’s look at the evidence,’ Dan says, munching on an olive and spitting out the pip into his hand. ‘Once upon a time you had ambition – enough for both of us actually. You had a sales career that you were seriously good at. And you were also the life and soul of the party. I mean, boys fancied you.’

I look up from my salad. ‘They did?’

Ignoring me, he continues. ‘The trouble was you then buggered off for a couple of years to the other side of the world, only to then come back and wind up being the world’s worst secretary. The end. Ta-dah!’ My heart now pumping, I’m trying to take in his somewhat brutal take on my situation. ‘In fairness, your career has not been totally shit – just a little I don’t know,
average
for what I expected from you,’ he says, by way of an afterthought, as a man in a nearby booth with a Red Sox baseball cap turns around and smiles at him in encouragement.

What
is
this
–
Oprah
? I glare back at them both. ‘Listen, it’s good to bond with you, but to be honest I don’t need you pretending like you’re the wise one in
Dawson’s
Creek
,’ I say. ‘You do know that today of all days I have absolutely no comebacks.’

I stab a new potato in despair, as any high I had of walking away from my job is now a distant memory. Dan leans over and pats my arm by way of saying sorry and we carry on eating in silence, crunching and munching, chewing and slurping. I catch sight of my reflection tackling Chinese noodles covered in thousand-island dressing and immediately stop mid-mouthful. I look red and stressed and have some gloop on my chin.

‘So how’s that really annoying flatmate of yours?’ Dan changes the subject onto relatively safer topics.

‘Err, still annoying,’ I groan. ‘Latest one is that it’s unacceptably cold and she wants to pay less rent.’

‘Claire was a cow at school. Shock horror, she’s still one now,’ reminds Dan, shaking his head. ‘Tell her she doesn’t wear enough layers – you know, always got those boobs out on display. No wonder she’s freezing.’ I snort my drink through my nose and dissolve into laughter and just like that, the mood shifts slightly and we sit in comfortable silence.

‘Just think, no more commuting for a bit,’ my brother toasts me and drains his beer. Dan’s right. This is a positive. No more commuting to London: No more hitching a ride with the milk float going up the hill at five thirty in the morning: No more doing my make-up wonkily on the train: No more crumpled cheap suits that stand out next to my impeccable colleagues: No more people that pretend to never recognise me on the platform despite seeing them every single day: No more finding my ticket and dropping my library card in the process: No more being late for work yet again and using the same excuse: No more conducting a phone conversation on the train, only to be cut off every five.

‘This is not a dream scenario you know. I have to get back to it. I need to pay my mortgage.’ I sigh, prodding a cherry tomato cautiously for fear it will fly across the room.

‘What’s the ‘it’ you’re referring to precisely?’ Dan asks, waving his fork at me. ‘You can’t do any more administration Kate. You’re clearly shit! Do something different.’

It’s official; the bluntness of this conversation has ruined my appetite, so much so I down all tools. I’ve not even reached the radioactive coleslaw halfway down.

‘Wouldn’t taking charge of your destiny be awesome hey?’ Dan says and despite myself, a smile appears on my face. For just when Dan couldn’t sound more corporate, he then uses traveller vocabulary and you get a little hint that it wasn’t that long ago that he too lived out of a rucksack and smelt a bit sweaty.

‘Wish I’d made the most of it though. You know, the time on the train,’ I confess. It’s true. In the time that I’d been commuting from Broadstairs to London, I’d like to say I used the opportunity of a finite time period, but the truth is I didn’t, far from it. What started out as having plans to write a novel, learn a language and solve World Peace, soon gave way to sleeping pressed up against the window with my drooling mouth vulnerably open. On the nights I didn’t put a pair of knickers in my handbag and crash with friends in town, I would rush up the underground escalators in the quest to nip to M&S and buy a tiny bottle of wine to take the edge off the day on the train home. By the time I got home to Broadstairs, I’d be warm and fuzzy – and seriously dehydrated. So much for the journey being the destination.

With dinner over and the bill paid for by my kind brother who clearly feels sorry for me, I follow him out onto the street.

‘Anyhow, let’s talk more about this Liv,’ says Dan, putting the collar up on his cashmere overcoat and sticking his hands in his pockets. ‘She sounds cool.’