‘Mmm,’ I said.
‘They’re so social and loyal – it’s amazing.’
‘Mmm. Do they ever see anybody from outside of work?’
‘Well, they spend every Friday or Saturday night together, at any rate. I guess it’s pretty incestuous, though. Like, there’s this tarty account-handler whom everyone fancies, called Gayle – she’s really sweet, she’s got an amazing arse, you have to see it, she’s kind of pudgy but really cute-looking – and I thought it was just kind of light-hearted, but some of them are deadly serious about it. They’re fighting over her!’
‘Really? Who’s going to win?’
‘No one. She’s really smart. Dressing like that and acting flirty gets her what she wants, but I don’t think she’ll do it with any of them. They’re dying of frustration, but no one will actually ask her out.’
‘Do you fancy her?’
‘No, not really. Well, to be honest, I just want to fuck her up the arse.’
While Jack’s anal-sex fixation grew ever more intense and while – unbeknown to me – our relationship was careening towards the rocks, I remained jobless and increasingly desperate to get out of the house. I’d gaze at the towers downtown, speckled with a million windows, a million ways in, thinking that somewhere, in all of that, there had to be a little space for me. I longed to find a job, but I’d never had much luck in that department. After all, back in London, I’d worked in recruitment advertising.
What the fuck is ‘recruitment advertising’?
In London, you’re never more than eight feet away from a rat or a recruitment advertisement. This clandestine industry operates under the radar of normal human awareness, like the Masons without the handshakes and the (alleged) sex parties. Here’s what’s going on: some crap companies struggle to find good staff, others to find any staff at all. Instead of increasing salaries or improving working conditions, they prefer to spend their money on tailor-made propaganda with which to ensnare unsuspecting candidates. And that’s where the recruitment ad agency comes in. It’s not a field that anyone aims to get into, and this was how it happened to me:
In 1995, I graduated with no useful skills. I guarded books in the library of a stately home (where my parents discovered me asleep on the job, sitting upright in a chair), cleaned toilets and made coffee. I then worked on the till in Boots, tended a bar and worked in a cake shop – a nightmare for anyone with a potentially fatal allergy to eggs. In the new year, I went to Liverpool to volunteer in an arts centre for poor kids, where I learned that poor kids were scary. The centre was an unheated church, which was so viciously cold that I chose to run a bake-your-name-in-a-biscuit class, the lure of the oven outweighing the stress of working with eggs. Fifty hours a week I was embroiled in some farcical activity or other, entitling me to a mattress in an unheated, dusty attic. This was winter in the north of England. There was snow on the ground. I washed my jumper, hung it to dry in the basement and returned three weeks later to find it wetter than ever. No one ever took off their clothes except to have a bath. Three months of this was enough to give me some kind of lung disease, so Mum and Dad drove up to rescue me.
Next, I went to France with Jack, where I contracted chicken-pox, and ended up back with my parents, covered with pink spots. When I was up and about again, I got a job as a pizza waitress, and discovered too late that the uniform had short sleeves. I tried to cover up my arm scabs with concealer, but lasted only a day. Then I decided to go abroad, but an intensive Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) course took me no further than south London. Teaching English to Italians in Tooting (TEIT) was a three-hours-a-day gig that involved six trains, and I was fired before the summer ended.
All this time, I’d been applying for bottom-of-the-rung jobs in anything connected with words. Dozens of applications had resulted in just two interviews, both of which I’d mucked up by speaking with unrelenting sarcasm in a tremulous whisper. Eventually I realized I’d have to work for nothing, and condescended to contact the editorial departments of various magazines. To my surprise, they had all filled their slave-labour quotas, so I targeted the picture desks instead, hoping to get a toe in the door. My first ‘yes’ was from Tatler, so that was where I started. I didn’t know that it was a society-’n’-shopping rag for the landed gentry. Too late, I found myself knee deep in cashmere pashminas with matching handbags. For full-time grunt work, I got travel expenses, plus three pounds a day for lunch, which nicely plumped out my thirty-nine-pounds-a-week dole money. (Mum was taking care of my rent – twenty pounds a week for a mattress on the floor in a vicarage.) On my first day at the swanky office I wore a red wool dress I’d picked up in Portobello market. ‘I don’t believe it!’ neighed the editor. ‘A work-experience girl who knows how to dress!’
The magazine operated like a feudal society, in which the ideas came from half a dozen posh people, with unnervingly white teeth, who passed on the labour to an army of unemployed graduates. While we toiled away, the skeleton staff (no joke, they were all anorexic or dying to look it) spent their days blabbing on the phone, chewing salad leaves or getting their teeth polished. A typical day involved traipsing to New Bond Street to pick up a £5000 Loewe suitcase for a photo-shoot, then spending three hours on the phone fact-checking an insultingly vague, scrawled wish-list of dream luggage for winter skiing holidays.
But as those three excruciating months drew to a close, I was filled with dread. Worse was to come: I was scheduled for six weeks on the picture desk at Vogue. I’d been up there on various errands, and everyone had matching belts and nails, and pointy shoes that cost at least thirty pounds per toe. Every night I prayed to the media gods: ‘Please, let me get a job before I have to go to Vogue.’ In between, I had a placement at i-D magazine, the po-faced style bible for urban hipsters. Everyone was fashionable and cool. Because they weren’t fake, they weren’t friendly. The art director was indifferent, unshaven, and seemed surprised to see me. ‘I suppose you could do some photocopying,’ he mumbled. In desperation, I went to the loo, but I couldn’t get back into the office as I didn’t know the door code. Trapped in a cold, echoing corridor, I lost it. I ran from the building in a flood of tears. Hysterical, I phoned Mum, who listened sympathetically and advised me to catch the first train home.
And then the unthinkable happened – I got an interview. The job title was ‘journalist’. With glam mags on my CV, I felt it was within my grasp. This feeling was waning a week after the interview, when Jack decided to take action. He sat me on his lap and said firmly, ‘Now, Bun, call that bitch and tell her why you’re the best person for the job.’
‘I can’t. I’ll look desperate.’
‘Lins, you are desperate. Do it.’
‘What if I’m not the best person for the job?’
‘You are. Course you are. Now do it. Call her now. I’m right behind you.’
He held me tight, and I made myself do it, earning a big kiss and – after my trial period – eleven grand a year.
Eleven grand! It seemed a lot of money until I tried to live on it.
My new boss was a bitch. A smiley bitch with a fake laugh and bad suits. This tousle-haired Medusa barked orders in threes, and sneered when I asked her to repeat, so I’d go round asking people to guess what she wanted. ‘OK, here are the clues: umbrellas, under the window and Prince Albert.’ I’d walk round the block waiting for the tears to stop, hide in the loo or take refuge in the storage cupboard (where, contrary to office lore, I was