that being fired wasn’t personal was based on never having been fired but having had to let go others. Now I understand that it is personal, because my job was my life. Friends and colleagues have been incredibly supportive in a way, which makes me think that if I ever get cancer, I want to treat it alone without anyone knowing. They make me feel like a victim. They look at me as if I’ll be the next person to hop on the plane to Australia to become the next overqualified person to work on a watermelon farm. Barely two months have passed, and already I’m questioning my validity. I have no purpose, nothing to contribute on a day-to-day basis. I feel as though I am just taking from the world. I know that this is short-term, that I can fulfil that role again, but this is currently how I feel. Mostly, it has been almost two months and I am bored. I’m a doer and I haven’t been doing much.
All of the things I dreamed of doing during my busy stressful days have been done. I completed most of them in the first month. I booked a holiday in the sun shortly before Christmas and now I am tanned and cold. I met with my friends, who are all new mothers on maternity leave and extended maternity leave and I-don’t-know-if-I-ever-want-to-go-back leave, for coffee at a time of day that I have never had coffee before out in public. It felt like bunking off school for the day, it was wonderful – the first few times. Then it became not so wonderful, and I focused my attention on those serving the coffee, cleaning the tables, stocking the paninis. Workers. All working. I have bonded with all my friends’ cute babies, though most of them lie on their colourful mats that squeak and rustle if you step on them by mistake, while the babies don’t do anything but lift their lardy legs up, grab their toes and roll over on to their sides and struggle to get back over again. It’s funny to watch the first ten times.
I have been asked to be godmother twice in seven weeks, as if that will help occupy the mind of the friend who’s not busy. Both requests were thoughtful and kind, and I was touched, but if I had been working I would not have been asked because I wouldn’t have visited them as much, or met their children, and everything eventually relates back to the fact that I have no work. I’m now the girl that friends call when they are at their wits’ end, with their hair like an oil slick on their head, reeking of body odour and baby vomit, when they say down the phone in a low hushed voice that gives me goosebumps that they are afraid of what they will do, so that I run to hold the baby while they have their ten-minute shower. I’ve learned that a ten-minute shower and the gift of going to the toilet without a ticking clock restores much more in new parents than personal hygiene.
I spontaneously call my sister, which I was never able to do before. This has confused her immensely and when I’m with her she constantly asks what time it is, as if I’ve upset her body clock. I Christmas-shopped with time to spare. I bought actual Christmas cards and posted them on time – all two hundred of them. I even took over my dad’s shopping list. I am ultra-efficient, always have been. Of course I can be idle – I love a two-week holiday, I love to lie on the beach and do nothing – but only when I say so, on my terms, when I know I have something waiting for me afterwards. When the holiday is over, I need a goal. I need an objective. I need a challenge. I need a purpose. I need to contribute. I need to do something.
I loved my job, but to make myself feel better about not being able to work there any more, I try to focus on what I won’t miss.
I worked mainly with men. Most of the men were cocks, some were amusing, a few were pleasant. I did not like to spend any hours outside of work with any of them, which might mean my next sentence doesn’t make sense, but it does. Of the team of ten, I slept with three. Of the three, I regret sleeping with two; the one I don’t regret sleeping with strongly regrets sleeping with me. This is unfortunate.
I will not miss people at work. People are what bother me most in life. It bothers me that so many lack common sense, that their opinions can be so biased and backward, so utterly frustrating, misguided, misinformed and dangerous that I can’t stand to listen to them. I’m not pointlessly prickly. I like non-PC jokes in controlled environments where it is appropriate and when it is obvious that the joke is at the expense of the ignorant who say such things. When a non-PC punchline is delivered by someone who genuinely believes it to be true, it is not funny, it is offensive. I don’t enjoy a good debate about what’s supposedly right and wrong; I would rather everyone just knew it, from the moment they’re born. A heel-prick test and a jab of cop-on.
Not having my job has made me face what I dislike most about the world, and about myself. In my job I could hide, I could be distracted. Without a job, I have to face things, think about things, question things, find a way to actually deal with things that I have been avoiding for a long time. This includes the neighbourhood that I moved into four years ago and had nothing to do with until now.
It also includes what happens at night: I’m not sure whether I somehow managed to ignore it before, whether it has escalated, or whether my idleness has led to me become fascinated, almost obsessed by it. But it is ten p.m. and it is a few hours away from my nightly distraction.
It is New Year’s Eve. For the first time ever, I am alone. I have chosen to do this for a few reasons: firstly, the weather is so awful I couldn’t bring myself to go out in it after almost being decapitated by the door when I’d opened it to collect my Thai takeaway from the brave man who had battled the elements to deliver my food. The prawn crackers had practically dissolved and he’d spilled my dumpling sauce in the bottom of the bag, but I didn’t have it in my heart to complain. His long forlorn look past my front door and into the safety and warmth of my house stopped me from mentioning the state of the delivery.
The wind outside howls with such force I wonder if it will lift the roof off. My next-door neighbour’s garden gate is banging constantly and I debate whether to go out and close it, but that would mean I’ll get blown around like the wheelie bins that are battering each other in the side passage. It is the stormiest weather this country – Ireland – has seen since whenever. It’s the same for the UK, and the US is being pounded too. It’s minus forty in Kansas, Niagara Falls has frozen, New York has been attacked by a frigid, dense air known as a polar vortex, there are mobile homes landing on clifftops in Kerry, previously sure-footed sheep on steep cliff faces are being challenged and defeated, lying beside washed-up seals on the shoreline. There are flood warnings, residents in coastal areas have been advised to stay indoors by miserable saturated news reporters with blue lips reporting live from beside the sea. The road that takes me most places that I need to go has been flooded for two days. At a time when I’ve wanted, needed to keep busy, Mother Nature is slowing me to a standstill. I know what she’s doing: she’s trying to make me think, and she’s winning. Hence all thoughts about myself now begin with Perhaps … because I’m having to think about myself in ways I never did before and I’m not sure if I’m right in my thinking about those things.
The bark of the dog across the road is barely audible above the wind, I think Dr Jameson has forgotten to take him in again. He’s getting a bit scatty, or else he’s had a falling out with the dog. I don’t know its name but it’s a Jack Russell. I find it running around my garden, sometimes it shits, it has on a few occasions run into my house and I’ve had to chase it around and deliver it back across the road to the right honourable gentleman. I call him the right honourable gentleman because he is a rather grand man in his seventies, retired GP, and for kicks and giggles was the president of every club going: chess, bridge, golf, cricket, and now our neighbourhood management company, which handles leaf-blowing, street-lamp bulb replacement, neighbourhood watch and the like. He is always well turned out, perfectly ironed trousers and shirts with little V-neck sweaters, polished shoes and tidy hair. He talks at me as if he’s directing his sentences over my head, lifted chin and head-on nostrils, like an amateur theatre actor, yet is never blatantly rude so gives me no reason to be rude back, but just distant. Distance is all I can give someone I can’t truly fathom. I didn’t know until one month ago that Dr Jameson even had a dog, but these days I seem to know too much about my neighbours. The more the dog barks over the wind, the more I worry if Dr Jameson has fallen over, or been blown away into somebody’s back garden like the trampolines that have been garden-hopping
