I used to want to be a journalist. So I apply to various magazines and papers, hoping that they will offer me an internship. At first I don’t hear from any, and I worry that I will be unemployed for the foreseeable future.
But then a local magazine gets back to me, offering me two weeks of work experience over the summer.
I jump at it.
The guy I have been corresponding with about the placement is Doug. He peppered his e-mails with elaborate turns of phrase that were supposed to look casual but didn’t and kept harping on about an interview he’d recently done with Vince Cable. When I imagined him behind the keyboard, I saw a balding, slightly plump fifty-year-old man, probably wearing a knitted tank top.
But Doug, who meets me in the entrance hall, is not fifty. Doug is about twenty-five, has surfer-blond hair, electric-blue eyes, and skinny jeans. He is, quite frankly, probably the most attractive person I’ve ever seen. He introduces himself and leads me upstairs to “meet the team.”
It is not glamorous. The software is stuck somewhere in 2005; the blinds don’t work and are missing half of their slats; the carpet, I am told almost immediately, comes from a Dumpster. But there is something warming about it anyway: the promise of sparky, creative people, hammering stories out at their computers; photoshopping and designing page layouts and constantly popping out for cigarette breaks.
Which is why it is all the more aggravating that my head won’t shut up.
My first task is to research a piece about local vintage experiences. Doug tells me to trawl the web for the best way to go retro in Surrey. It is cheesy and old hat, but it’s also the sort of piece I know I can do. It’s essentially a Google-and-bullshit job; I just can’t get to the bit where I open Google.
Every interaction so far has been like watching a vase shatter into hundreds of tiny pieces that can’t all be picked up; everything I do sets off a chain reaction of words. And I can’t keep going to the bathroom to write them in my notebook, because I don’t want to be remembered as the nervous intern with the shits.
So I will do what I did at nursery. I will wait until lunch, when I can go somewhere private for a scribble fest. In the meantime, I will hold the words in my head. But I’m terrified I’ll forget some. What is the point of writing a good piece, if I do awful things that I can’t remember (but which everyone else can)?
It takes about forty-five minutes to identify the words I need to hold, during which time I continuously type, delete, and retype the ultimately crap sentence “There are many ways to go vintage in Surrey,” hoping I look so busy that no one will notice my private chaos.
I use a ballpoint pen to write down the first letters of words on my hand so I have some cues for later. I haven’t done this since I was in the hospital. This is a bad thing to start doing. But I want this work experience to go perfectly, so everything has to be remembered.
“Does everything have to go perfectly?” Dr. Finch says loudly, as though she is in the room. “Is perfection ever truly attainable? And, say it were, would it be desirable?”
“We do have notepads, you know! We’re shabby, but we’re not that shabby!” calls Doug from his desk.
Shit.
Brigitte, the French production manager who has been sitting behind me, spins around.
“Ooh la la!” she exclaims. “Your hands are so red! You should not be writing on them! They must be agony! Here, have some hand cream.”
“Thanks.” I blush. “They’re, uh, they’re a bit sensitive, yes. Thank you,” I say, massaging in the cream.
Sensitive?
I turn back to the computer. The seven words generated from that interaction demand my full attention. I spend a couple of minutes sorting them before opening Google, knowing that I urgently need to start going vintage in Surrey.
I lift my hands, poised to type.
Any second now I will start typing.
Any second.
But I can’t.
I am gripped by the sudden fear that I’m about to start Googling lewd things.
This is too much.
“I need a brew,” announces Doug to the room. “Lily, do you want to help me do the tea run? I can show you where everything is.”
“Uh . . . Yeah, sure.” I smile.
Doug rounds the room, sweeping mugs off people’s desks and putting them on a grimy silver tray.
“You can make the tea,” he says. “I’ll do the coffees. Tea bags there, hot water there, milk in the fridge. Sugar in that pot.”
I have four teas to make, two of which must be sweet. I worry that instead of spooning sugar into them, I’ve pulled some rat poison from my pockets and sprinkled it in. There is a toilet coming off the kitchen. This is unhygienic. I convince myself that I’ve quickly whizzed in there when Doug’s back was turned and pissed in the mugs.
People cannot drink these teas. It’s not going to happen. I tip three of them down the sink, quickly, before Doug can stop me (I’m not concerned about mine being contaminated, because you can’t go to prison for poisoning yourself, especially if you’re dead).
“Why would you—”
“Doug,” I say, preparing to fill up the IDIOT category, “I don’t think I’ve made the teas how they wanted them. Can you make them, and I’ll watch so I get it right next time?”
Doug raises an eyebrow and laughs.
“It’s tea, not rocket science!”
Great. Sexy work guy now thinks I’m a total moron. I resolve to get out of all future tea making. I don’t care if it’s a rite of work-experience passage. No one is going to die on my watch.
Bill, the editor-in-chief, calls me into his office.
I sit in the swivel chair across from his desk and try to keep as still as possible to minimize wrongdoing.
“I’m very impressed with your vintage piece,” says Bill. “I think we’ll run it next month.”
“Thank you.” I try to smile the right amount—enough for him to know I am pleased by the compliment, but not so much that I look deranged. I do not tell him, or anyone, that I wrote the vintage piece at home, as I did everything else I was set this week. Away from prying eyes, with all lists in order and only Tubby for company.
The next comment takes me off guard.
“Would you like a job?”
“I . . . uh . . . Yes! I would love a job!”
“How are you with websites?”
“I’m not great. But I could learn.”
The vintage piece needs images to go with it. I manage to get some beautiful sketches of 1960s outfits on mannequins from the owner of a nearby shop I’m featuring. They’re perfect—but they’re original hard copies, and Brigitte says we need digital versions or they can’t be laid out on the page.
The sketches are too big for our scanner, which means I need to go to the photocopy shop and get them scanned there. Brigitte says it’s close—if I get the bus, I can be there and back in less than an hour. I place the sketches in the giant plastic folder they arrived in and set off.
The flood starts before I’m even out the door. The things I’ve done wrong this morning take center stage, and I’m so engrossed in them that it takes me by surprise when I find that I have arrived and walked into the shop. A man comes out from behind the counter and shows me what to do. Each page gets scanned and whizzed onto Brigitte’s memory stick. I pay and leave. Simple. Job done. But—
I still have to sort out all the stuff from this morning. Dazed, I get on the bus and try to smooth it out. After thirty minutes I’ve not gotten anywhere with it. And wait—none of this looks familiar. Where am I? I ask the driver. He says I’ve taken the bus in the wrong direction. So off I get, panicking that it’s now going to have taken me longer than Brigitte said. Never mind, I’ll go back in the other direction, and while I’m doing that I’ll sort the stuff in my head out. Wait, where am I now? I’ve taken the wrong bus entirely. Oh shit, oh shit, shit, shit. I’m going to be so late. I’m going to ruin everything. I get off the bus and look at the bus map. My lists are fizzing, demanding proper attention. Okay, I’ll stand here and sort them out, then I can concentrate properly. But that just makes me lose another ten minutes, and I’m no closer to fixing them. I look at the bus map again.
There’s no space in my head for it. It might as well be in Spanish.
I’m going to run, I’ll just keep running, one foot in front of the other, until the list goes away and—
I don’t want you to have to deal with this on your own, said Mum. I want to help you, but you need to let me in.
My hands do my thinking for me. I take my mobile out my pocket and press the green call button. Mum answers after a few rings.
“Hello?” The line is funny—echoey, like she’s in a big cave. I hear the rhythmic plod of a distant ball going back and forth—the squeak of sneakers on a vinyl indoor court.
“Help me!” I wail. “I’ve gotten two wrong buses and I’m late and I’m going to fuck it all up! Please come and get me and help me find my way back to the office!”
“Darling, hi, I’m at my tennis lesson. Are you okay? Slow down, what happened?”
I try to explain, but I’m finding it hard to breathe.
“Okay,” she says. “Okay, I’m coming! I’m in Fulham, though. I may take a little while. Just stay calm. Stay calm!”
I see a National Health Service hospital up ahead. I find myself walking through the doors and taking a seat on a plastic chair in the waiting room. I text Mum and let her know where I am.
My phone is ringing. It’s Mum.
“I’m here!” she says. “Come outside! I’m just on the left.”
There she is sitting in the silver Beetle—her accomplice, the loyal witness of our woes. I get in next to her. She’s in full tennis whites—a sweatband round her head, sporting a spaghetti top and a tiny Adidas tennis skirt.
“Did you really want to go to hospital?” she asks.
“I just didn’t know what to do. I was scared.”
“Do you want to go back to work?”
“I think so.”
“Okay!” She hammers the address into the satnav and starts to weave through traffic.
It doesn’t take very long.
“Darling, it was pretty much round the corner!”
She parks on the opposite street, and I feel my courage fail me. I feel extra stupid, knowing how close we were.
“I can’t go in,” I say.
“You can! It won’t be as bad as you think, I know it.”
“You go!” I’m five years old again, seeing the world from behind the pillar of a parent’s leg. “You have to! Explain to them that I’m really sorry, but I can’t do it.”
“Me? Like this?” She gestures to her outfit.
“Yes!”
“No!”
“Yes!”
“All right! All right. Fine!”
As I see her stand up to go, the ridiculousness of how it’s going to look hits me full throttle.
“I’m Lily’s mum,” she’ll say, as the whole office turns to gawp at her bare legs. “I was just playing a spot of tennis when I received a call from my distressed daughter, to tell me that she couldn’t work out how to read a bus map . . .”
“Okay, wait! Don’t go. I can do it.”
“Good,” she says, sitting back down. “I wasn’t looking forward to that. Go—don’t waste any more time. You’ll be fine. I believe in you!”
I run out the car and only look back once. My mum, my one-woman fan club, is cheering me on.
Back on the editorial floor, there is no trouble awaiting me. Just a few colleagues, who think it’s hilarious when they find out that I got so lost.
Mum was right. I’d swelled up a storm that only I could see.
Here’s to the strong ones. Here’s to the ones who never give up.
Dad and his girlfriend Charlotte—blond, yoga teacher, super hot—have moved to Oxford to do up a vicarage and start a family.
Ella and I are visiting them for the weekend.
“We need to get in the car,” says Dad on Saturday morning when we’ve finished catching up over brunch and I have told him about the job offer. “We’re going on a trip.”
The four of us pile into the Porsche Cayenne. Charlotte, who is six months pregnant, sits in the front, absent-mindedly stroking the neatest bump known to womankind.
We glide down country lanes before joining the motorway, headed toward our mystery location. We exit in Reading, cruising down suburban streets, before pulling up at a row of ugly bungalows.
“What do you want for your twentieth birthday?” Dad said.
“A puppy!” I laughed, not really thinking anyone would deem me responsible enough.
Two months ago I turned twenty. I know where we are.
“Dog breeders always live in the weirdest places,” confirms Dad.
“Oh my god!” I grin. I flash back to all those years ago, when we picked Tuffy up in similarly mysterious circumstances. Dad has always loved surprises.
We get out of the car, and Dad rings the bell. I see shadows moving toward us through the glass, and hear hurried footsteps getting closer. A stocky man in a polo shirt with a big pearly-white smile and a tanned face opens the door.
“Hi! I’m Bert! You must be here to see the puppies! We only have two left now! Breeding runs in my family, we’ve been doing it for generations!” says Bert. He is one of those people who end every sentence on a high note. I feel like I’ve just walked onto the set of a low-budget advert.
“Please, come in!”
The four of us follow Bert through the kitchen and into a utility room, where two balls of white fluff are curled up at the back of a newspaper-lined cage. Their mum snoozes in a basket at the other end of the room.
“You can pick whichever one you like!” says Bert, opening the cage door.
I don’t want to pick a dog. Showing such brazen favoritism will invariably end up as a very red item in multiple categories.
“Aww, that feels kinda unfair!” I say, trying to keep it light and airy, while disliking myself for adding an Americanized twang to the word kinda, and joining Bert by soaring up on the word unfair.
“I’m sure neither of them will be offended!” comforts Bert awkwardly.
“I’ll just take whichever one comes to me first,” I say, getting down on my knees in front of the open cage.
The slightly larger puppy, who has been looking us up and down since we walked in, pads out of the cage and tries to scramble onto my lap. He slips down the first two times, before giving me a cute, wide-eyed look that seems to say This is the part where you help me, so I scoop him up. He stares up at me triumphantly, little black nose twitching, tail wagging on my thigh. He looks like a Rocky.
“You can’t take him upstairs!” Mum said. “Oh my god. What if he has an accident?”
“Then I’ll clean it up.”
“But you hate dirt. Surely dog pee in your room is your worst nightmare?”
“It’s puppy pee. It doesn’t feel that bad. It’s like when Ella and I used to share a bath and Ella would pee in it and I would squeal and you told me not to worry because baby pee is magic healing water. ‘They filter Evian through babies’ bladders,’ you said. Do you remember that? Well, now I sort of have the same positive feeling toward puppy pee.”
“You are a nutter!” Mum laughs. She clasps her hand to her mouth.
I put Rocky at the bottom of the staircase, but the first step is twice his height. He stares from me to the step and then back to me, sticking his pink tongue out a little in concentration. Then I realize he probably hasn’t seen a staircase before. What must it be like to not know what a step is? I’d love to go back to that level of development. I’d love to learn everything all over again, but learn it right this time. I’d love to return my brain to factory settings.
I pop Rocky on my bed. I start checking things so that I can sit down and snuggle with him. I flick all the plug and light switches on off, on off, on off, and open and shut the blinds nine times. Rocky has sat up and is looking at me. He tilts his head at me, like he is wondering what the hell I am doing. He yaps once, high-pitched and deliberately. I would never normally do my routines in front of anyone, but I didn’t count Rocky because I thought he would have no idea what I was doing. But he has noticed that something isn’t quite right.
Even a puppy knows what I’m doing is odd.
I now feel awkward about carrying on.
I sit down on the bed and pick him up, stroking the velvety soft arch between his eyes. He relaxes; his eyelids droop.
“What do you think, Rocky? Should I take the job?”
He stretches his tongue out lazily and licks my palm. Then he falls asleep. I start telling myself that if he opens his eyes when I ask the question again, then it means I should take the job and that it will go well for me. Then I remember that I am not supposed to engage in magical thinking, and that it is not sensible to ask a puppy for advice.
The euphoria of the job offer dazzles less now that a couple of days have passed. I think I should probably be realistic and tell Bill that I might be able to take the job in a few months. But what reason am I going to give? Personal reasons? Having “personal reasons” always makes you sound unemployable.
And will the job still be there?
I toy with the idea of deciding that I’m just going to do it anyway and get better somehow, but then I remember the times that has gone wrong before.
“I know you really don’t want to,” says Mum after dinner. “But why don’t you try going to a support group? I’m not saying Dr. Finch can’t help you. I think she helps, but trying something else really can’t hurt. Would you try it? For me?”