‘He threw you out in the middle of the night? What a gent!’ Alan began to laugh. At his familiar giggle, Leela started laughing too. It was in fact quite funny.
‘He said I should stick around until he could slowly push me away. So he wouldn’t feel bad about being rejected. Then I went out with someone else for a few weeks, but he dumped me.’
Alan roared with laughter. ‘That’s genius! Well, you have to have a rebound thing. It’s the rule.’ He laughed more. Leela looked at him with some disbelief, but then she chuckled too. They would reappear, these people, through the years, unexpectedly and infrequently, and sometimes they would be comforting. Especially the boys you had never been attracted to, and who had never been attracted to you, but who accepted you as a familiar part of their earlier life.
She glanced at Alan, whom she hadn’t seen for a few years. What would he be like as he grew older, with a wife, children? Would he remain so laughing and pleasant, so simple? There were the other familiar but strange faces around the table, and near the bar in a knot. Amy was there. Leela saw a flash of her red hair, and heard her laugh; she was telling a story in the middle of a small circle.
A packet of crisps lay open on the table: it had been torn along one side and opened out. Just a few morsels of crisp remained, and shiny tracks of fingers on the foil.
The second time she sent her email of resignation it was accepted. She was told to leave by the end of the week. She called some of the temping agencies she had earlier worked for. She went to reregister, at Fenchurch Street, at South Molton Street, at Berners Street. She typed sample texts, and got eighty per cent accuracy, seventy per cent speed.
There wasn’t much work going, the agency representatives said. They looked her over. Pencil skirt, white shirt, high heels. ‘You must wear heels,’ Amy had hissed, in an exasperated moment of drunken candour. ‘Otherwise people won’t take you seriously.’
‘How long are you available for?’ asked Estelle at South Molton Street.
‘Six months at least, though I’m looking for a permanent post, obviously,’ said Leela firmly. This, she knew from experience, was the optimum lie. Less than six months was too little for the rep to make much commission; wanting to temp forever marked you out as feckless. ‘It gets harder to get a temping job when you’re over thirty,’ she remembered a woman at the reinsurer’s office telling her, as though these typing and filing posts, paid hourly without sick leave, were exceptionally desirable.
The morning after Leela had reregistered in South Molton Street and Estelle had pursed her lips and said, ‘There’s so little right now – but are you available for the odd day if someone’s off sick?’ and Leela, again mendaciously, had said, ‘Oh totally, of course, just call’, her mobile buzzed at 8:14.
It was cold and dark. She had her head under the duvet, where she preferred to keep it these days. It best allowed her to smell her own fetor, to keep her eyes closed, to cry and scream silently into the padding, to pretend that the disappointing world did not exist.
Now the phone was ringing.
She lifted her head. To be sure, it was cleaner outside the duvet. It was colder too, and she heard a medium-weight rain falling with dreary regularity in the backyard.
She remembered her promise of willingness to Estelle and wanted to laugh.
‘Hello?’
‘Leela?’ Estelle’s voice was sharp. The phone had been ringing nearly long enough to go to voicemail; she would have had to call other people if Leela hadn’t picked up.
‘Speaking,’ said Leela brightly.
The job was in Notting Hill, quite near Roger’s flat. For the next three weeks she trailed there, waiting to be humiliated when she bumped into him. She replayed the moment when he’d turned to her gravely and said, ‘I know this is going to hurt you but I have to say it. I don’t want a relationship.’
‘I know,’ she had said quickly, but he’d prolonged the conversation anyway. She hadn’t cried then, and he’d stopped her near his door to give her a lingering, unwanted hug, after which he’d pulled back and appraised her with his large, hazel eyes. ‘You don’t seem that upset,’ he’d noted.
After three weeks, Leela called in sick, filed her time sheet, and on Sunday sent Estelle an email saying that her grandmother – she had none left, but felt a warm, sentimental pang for herself as she typed it – had been taken ill. She had to go to India.