‘HR took my phone,’ I said, rummaging around in my handbag for my new-to-me iPhone. ‘Happily, I was the victim of a reverse mugging in the park and someone gave me this.’
My tiny bestie snatched the phone out of my hand and examined it carefully without asking me to elaborate. ‘Ooh, it’s a new one. Good result. Weird case.’
I took it from her, removed the offending cover and handed it back. ‘I can’t keep it. It’s stolen.’
‘Swapsies, then? You can have mine.’ She pressed several buttons and coughed before speaking. ‘Siri, why are Donovan & Dunning a bunch of wankers?’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean by that,’ he replied. Very diplomatic for an inanimate object.
I leaned against the kitchen wall, sipping my second, surreptitiously refilled mug of cava and staring out over the East London rooftops. They were exactly how I’d left them this morning. As I concentrated on the unchanging chimney pots, stupid things kept popping into my mind, like what was my mum going to say? What was I supposed to do when my alarm went off tomorrow morning? Would I end up homeless? I didn’t know how to go about getting a job. I’d been at Donovan & Dunning since I’d left uni. Before I left uni even – I’d interned there my entire final year. I was going to have to write a CV. Did people still have CVs? Was there something I was supposed to tweet? Maybe there was an unemployment app on my new phone. Most upsettingly, all of the unfinished jobs I’d been doing at work were bothering me. Someone needed to proofread the final air freshener presentation. And who else would take care of the copy for the new baked beans advert? Maybe they’d just lift it from an episode of Mad Men, save some time.
For the want of something better to do, I pressed my back against the cold kitchen wall and slid down to the floor. Ahh. That was better. Amy sat on the kitchen top, phone in one hand, Pop Tart in the other, gazing down at me with concern. It didn’t feel right. I was supposed to be the one who looked after her.
‘Tess,’ she said. I peered at her over the edge of my Snoopy mug with wide eyes. ‘You’re sitting on the kitchen floor in a piss-wet-through dress.’
‘I am.’ She was not wrong.
‘Your head is on the bin. And the bin smells.’
‘It is.’ Again, stellar observational skills. ‘And it does.’
‘Do you think you should maybe go and get changed?’
I didn’t think I should get changed. I was scared that if I took off my work dress I wouldn’t have anything to put on but my pyjamas, and if I put on my pyjamas I might never, ever take them off again. Had Michael remembered about lunch with that awful man from the car company? Eventually, Amy took my silence as a no.
‘How about a bath? You must be freezing?’
A bath sounded equally depressing. There was nothing to do in a bath that didn’t involve sobbing or razor blades. I wondered if Sandra the designer had remembered to change the colour of the squirrel in that paper towel concept.
‘Tess, I’m going to need some verbal feedback from you.’ Amy put down her breakfast long enough to snap her fingers in front of me. ‘What do you want to do?’
I looked up, pushed my scummy hair out of my face and shook my head.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I honestly don’t know. I don’t know anything.’
For the second time that day, I started to cry. My mother would be mortified.
With a sad sigh, Amy hopped down off the worktop and curled up beside me and the bin. ‘I know it must feel like shit,’ she said, sliding her arm between me and the wall and forcing a hug. ‘But you’re better than this. You know you’re amazing at your job. Whatever reason they have for whatever they’ve done, it’s going to be their loss. That place was killing you. You’ll have another job, a better job, at a better agency, this time next Monday. You know I’m right.’
Ignoring the fact that, despite having a first class degree in English and Media Studies, Amy’s longest career commitment to date had been as a ticket taker at the local Odeon, I decided to believe her. What choice did I have? I was good at my job. Charlie had once told me I was so good, I couldn’t just sell ice to Eskimos, I could convince them that my ice had been hand-carved by pixies and contained the frozen tears of unicorns and that they should thank me for giving them the opportunity to even think about buying it. I just needed a new plan. And some more crappy wine.
‘First things first – if you’re not going to have a bath, you at least need a shower.’ Amy kissed my cheek and jumped up to her feet. ‘You’re going to catch your death, and, quite honestly, I can’t look at your hair like that for one more second. You’re pretty rank.’
‘OK.’ I let her hoist me up to my full five feet and nine inches and wiped my cheeks with the backs of my hands. Sometimes she made me feel like a complete beast, her being all pixie-like and adorable and me being, well, five foot nine. My nan always told me I was statuesque, but really, who wanted to be a statue?
‘So you get in the shower and I’ll go out and get some proper food – you’ve got nothing in,’ Amy said, slapping me on the arse and pointing me towards the shower. ‘Hitler’s not due back any time soon, is she?’
‘Please don’t call her Hitler,’ I groaned. It was fair to say that Amy and my flatmate did not get along. Luckily, said flatmate was away all week. ‘She’s not home till the weekend.’
‘Thank. Fuck,’ Amy declared with exaggerated relief on her face. ‘She’s the last thing we need.’
‘Agreed.’ I hated to encourage the two of them when they went at it, but it was true, my flatmate was not the most supportive human in existence. If I could get through this week, get things back on track before she came home, life would be easier.
‘Right.’ Amy pulled her keys to my flat out of her pocket and used them as a tiny, shiny pointer. ‘So, shower and hair wash for you, Sainsbury’s and seven chocolate oranges for me, and we’ll meet in front of the TV for a Buffy marathon in fifteen minutes. And I’m only giving you one day off because tomorrow, every ad agency in the country is going to be fighting over you, and there’ll be no time for vampire-slaying then.’
I nodded, hugged her and shut myself in the bathroom, suddenly desperate to strip off my wet outer layer. Flinging the soggy shift against the bathroom tiles, it hit with a satisfying slap and I stepped under the shower with almost a smile. My skin was cold and clammy and the hot water stung in the best way possible. I could feel myself warming up right through to my bones, which at least meant I could still feel something. Seriously, someone needed to let London know that it was summer. We’d had about three days of legitimate sunshine since May and it was almost July.
‘Maybe I’ll go travelling,’ I told the rubber duck who lived in the corner of the shower. ‘Maybe I’ll go somewhere warm.’
‘With what money?’ he asked. That duck was so cynical. ‘You haven’t got any savings.’
Cynical he might be, but he was also right. Bloody duck. I’d spent the first half of my twenties getting into a really quite impressive amount of debt of both the student loan and credit card variety. Interning and assisting were not well-paid professions, and without the Bank of Mum and Dad to help me through the first few years, I’d had to rely on the kindness of strangers. That is, the graduate loans officer at HSBC. He’d been very ready to help and even more ready to take every penny of interest back. So no, I didn’t have any savings, but I didn’t really have any debt left either, so that was something. Sort of.
‘It’ll be fine,’ I told the judgemental duck as I lathered up. ‘Tomorrow I’ll email everyone I know at the other agencies. How many references