on – no one else got laid off? No other redundancies?’
‘No. No one. And Michael just announced that we won that air freshener account. Everyone was asking where you were. It’s mental. What exactly did he tell you?’
Reluctantly I went over the whole story, my heart sinking through the floor as reality set in. Donovan & Dunning weren’t restructuring. The only person being downsized was me, and it was working. I’d never felt smaller in my entire life. I just couldn’t understand why. What could I possibly have done wrong?
‘I’ll try to find out what’s going on,’ he promised when I’d finished. ‘Do you want to come over later? We could get very, very drunk and watch Top Gun?’
I did like Top Gun.
‘And I’ll buy all that girl shit you like? You know – wine, those massive cookies, chocolate that isn’t a Mars Bar?’
I also liked girl shit.
‘Come on, Tess, you’ll feel better. You know you want to.’
And I did want to. But the idea of curling up on Charlie’s sofa eating chocolates that weren’t Mars Bars while he sat there feeling sorry for me was too much to bear. The only thing worse than being in love with someone who didn’t love you was being in love with someone who pitied you.
‘I think I just want to go to sleep. I’m really tired,’ I said, rolling out of my towel and into the nightshirt underneath my pillow. So what if it was only midday. I was unemployed. ‘Call you tomorrow?’
‘Make sure you do,’ he said sternly. ‘It’ll be all right, you know. Love you.’
‘Love you too,’ I replied, wincing with every word. Not because he didn’t mean it, but because he did. Just not in the same way. ‘Oh, and Charlie – I know what you’re going to say, but could you make sure Sandra changes the colour on the squirrel?’
‘You’re hopeless,’ he sighed. ‘Will do.’
Hanging up, I shuffled my bum up the bed until I could kick my feet under the covers and pulled them up over my head. Vanessa and Amy were still going at it in the living room. I couldn’t even make out what they were arguing about at this point – it was just high-pitched squealing. It sounded like dolphins re-enacting Toy Story 3. And I hadn’t lied – I really was exhausted. Tomorrow I would get up and I would draft my CV. Charlie would have found out exactly what had gone down at work and I’d call all the lovely recruitment agencies and ad agencies and let them know that I was ready for a new challenge. Maybe if I just went to sleep, everything would be better when I woke up. That always seemed to work in the movies, after all.
In the four days that had passed since I’d been fired I had learned the following lessons. One: what worked in the movies did not work in real life. Two: advertising was the creative industry equivalent of the movie Mean Girls. Three: four days wasn’t long enough for your hair to start washing itself. Four: if, however, you just didn’t get out of bed, you stopped noticing that your hair smelled disgusting after two and a half days, so that didn’t really matter.
I had woken up on Tuesday strong, confident and fully committed to writing a new chapter in The Story of Tess. Amy called in sick with another migraine and played cheerleader, DJing a motivational mix of music from my largely unplayed music library. By midday, I had an amazing CV, I’d called and left voicemails with every advertising agency in London, and I’d drunk five and a half cups of coffee. Big cups. By four p.m., my CV had gone out to eight recruitment agencies, I’d been to the toilet six times and Charlie had reported back at least a dozen different rumours about my ‘no longer being with the company’. The three favourites seemed to be that I had been leaking information to a competitor, that I had blackmailed the company into promoting me, and, my personal favourite, that I’d been sleeping with Michael and that he’d sent me to France to have his baby. Because clearly it was 1852 and that’s what we did when we got knocked up by the boss.
At six p.m., after Amy had left for the bar job she occasionally bothered with, after Charlie had emailed me the fifteenth different rumour (that I was completing a sex change and would be coming back in the New Year as Terence), and after I had received the fifth phone call of the day explaining no one was hiring at the moment, that things were really tough right now and asking if I had considered retraining as a teacher, I gave up. As in, I took off my people clothes and put on my most disgusting threadbare flannel pyjamas, ate everything in the fridge and turned off my stolen phone. And when I turned it back on twenty-four hours later, the only people who had tried to contact me were Amy and Charlie. So I turned it back off again. The only bright spot was that when I left my room at EastEnders o’clock, Vanessa had mysteriously disappeared and taken her suitcase and toxic personality with her.
For the past seventy-two hours I had only got out of bed to pee, take something out of the fridge or fetch another Sex and the City boxset from the living room. No one ever got laid off in Sex and the City. And they all got the men they wanted in the end. Even if one of them was Steve. It did not make me feel better. I did not turn it off.
But three days later, the universe and Amy had decided enough was enough.
‘Get up, get up, get up!’ She started slapping at either side of my head and bouncing up and down on top of my bed. ‘It’s Saturday. You’ve got to get up. We’re staging an intervention.’
‘I don’t want to be intervened,’ I croaked, pushing Amy away and throwing myself face first into my pile of pillows. ‘Leave me alone.’
‘No, you’re not Anne Frank, you’re not hiding from the Nazis. It’s time for you to get your arse up and out,’ she said, jumping on my back and wrapping her legs around my waist. She was very strong for such a little girl. ‘You need to get in the shower. We’ve got places to go, people to see.’
‘Not possible,’ I remonstrated, pushing up onto all fours and trying to shake her off, but Amy clung to me as though she was riding a scabby horse. ‘Let me go back to sleep.’
‘We haven’t got time – I’m double-parked. Get dressed, you filthy mare.’
Of course the other person in Amy’s intervention was Charlie. I shook Amy loose and tried to push the dead cat on top of my head into something resembling a ponytail. It wasn’t like he hadn’t spent more than one night on my bathroom floor holding my hair back while I brought up half of the student union bar, but still, I tried to avoid looking like utter scum in front of him when I could. If I could.
‘How are you double-parked? You haven’t got a car.’ I blinked at the daylight and the very tall, very lovely man silhouetted by my window.
‘It’s mental, Tess. You just go on the Internet and ask a man if you can borrow one, and then you give him your credit card details and, fuck me, you’ve got a car,’ he replied. Sarcasm was not one of Charlie’s strong points. As opposed to his beautiful, floppy hair and wonderful eyes. And his long, long legs. And broad chest. I was going off topic.
‘If you hadn’t gone the complete Howard Hughes, you’d remember that this afternoon is my niece’s christening and we are attending,’ Amy said, releasing her kung fu grip and rolling across the bed as she wrinkled her tiny nose. Her black bob
