Elle slumped her shoulders and stared at the Pret A Manger next to the bookshop, where busy office workers were coming out clutching baguettes and soup. She wanted to eat in Pret A Manger. She’d never seen them before she came to London and to her it seemed the height of glamour, to go into a shop with other office workers and buy a proper coffee and a croissant.
But she didn’t have the money for a coffee from Pret A Manger, nor a desk nor a job. Elle caught her bottom lip with her top teeth to stop herself from crying. Come on, she told herself, standing in the middle of the Strand as people pushed past her. Buy an Evening Standard, go back to Karen’s, have a cup of tea while you go through the Jobs section and you’ll feel much better. There’s something out there for you. There is.
The truth is, Eleanor Bee was starting to get desperate. It was April. She’d left Edinburgh University the previous summer, and was still trying to find a job. It seemed all her other friends had something to do: Karen had a job as a runner at a TV production company, her old university flatmate Hester was doing an MA in Bologna, and the other, Matty, was in teacher training college. Her ex-boyfriend Max was a trainee accountant, she’d bumped into him off Fleet Street the other day. It was just before an awful interview at an educational publisher where Elle had not really understood what they were talking about and when they’d said, So do you think that sounds like something you could do?, she’d replied, Sure, can I let you know? No, the grumpy, large, middle-aged man in cords had said. I wasn’t offering you the job. I was asking if you thought you’d be able to cope with the job. Thank you, we’ll let you know. She was sure bumping into Max was the reason she’d been so flustered. Not that she even cared about Max that much – he was using hair gel, for God’s sake, and kept getting out his stupid new CD Walkman to show off to her. But it was the principle of the thing.
In February, Elle’s best friend from school, Karen, had said she could come and sleep on her sofa. ‘You’re never going to find a job in publishing in a tiny village in Sussex, Elle,’ she’d said briskly. ‘Bite the bullet and come to London.’ And Elle had accepted, nervous but also overwhelmed with excitement. London. She’d dreamed of moving to London, of living in the big city, since she was a little girl. She’d conquer it. She’d own grey wellington boots with heels. And have a matching grey briefcase, like the Athena poster of the city girl hanging off the back of a Routemaster bus blowing a kiss to her handsome boyfriend that Elle still had in her bedroom.
But London was very far from the welcoming and bustling literary salon Elle had expected it to be. Notting Hill was grimy, full of cracked pavements and crack addicts, and sleeping on the floor in Karen’s was no fun. She’d been here two months now. She’d applied for every job going, written to every publisher she could find in the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook to ask them for work experience. But no one was interested. She was discovering she’d been totally naive to think they would be. She’d had four interviews, and this one today, at a major publishing house, was like the big one that had to work out, and she’d clearly totally one hundred per cent blown it. She’d thought she was so prepared: she had read everything, everything, in fact Karen said the trouble with her was she couldn’t get her nose out of a book.
She hated the way she spent her days now. She’d sit in the silent flat, feeling crappy about herself and knowing she should buck up, watching Richard and Judy and dreading the moment when Karen would get back from work and say, in an increasingly unsympathetic tone, ‘So, what did you get up to today then?’ Her social life consisted of going to the pub or sitting around in the dark flat off Ladbroke Grove waiting for the electricity meter to run out. Plus Karen’s other flatmates, Cara the chef and Alex the ad man, clearly found Elle a hindrance rather than a delightful addition to communal living.
On the Tube back to Notting Hill, Elle wondered for the first time if she should have come to London at all. It wasn’t how she’d expected it, and even though she was used to not fitting in, she’d never felt less welcome anywhere, in her whole life. It struck her that if she packed up her meagre possessions this evening and got a train first thing tomorrow, she’d be back at her mother’s by lunchtime. But then – what? She and her mother, in the converted barn Mandana had bought after the divorce, doing what? Would it be worse than being here? Probably not.
Elle had a stroke of luck as she got off at Notting Hill Gate. Someone had left an Evening Standard behind on a seat and she scooped it up. It was a cold April day and she shivered in her thin coat, the paper clamped under one arm, as she walked through the empty streets, trying not to let her mood sink any lower.
It was just really hard, though, trying to find your place in the world. At university it had been so easy. You knew where you were going each day, what you were doing, and with whom. After university, the rules had suddenly changed, and Elle felt she’d been left behind. But the irony was, she knew exactly what she wanted! She’d always known! She just wanted to work with books, to read fine literature, to meet authors and to learn to edit, to have conversations like those she used to have with her Victorian Literature tutor Dr Wilson, about the Brontës and Austen and whether Middlemarch was the great Victorian novel or not and … that sort of thing. Of course, she knew she’d have to start at the bottom – she didn’t mind that at all, in fact she rather thought she’d like it. But that didn’t seem to make a difference.
What am I going to do? she thought to herself, walking briskly, head down. Will I just be someone who falls through the cracks in society and never gets a job? And turns into one of those weirdos who keeps every newspaper from 1976 and carries a brown satchel and goes through the bins? Oh, my God, is that going to be me?
The cold sharp breeze stung Elle’s eyes. She wiped them with the back of her hand, and the Evening Standard dislodged and fell on the pavement, where a rolling gust of wind carried it off, into the middle of the road. She ran after it, and as she picked it up, noticed it was a week out of date. One whole week. She heaved her shoulders, and looked round for somewhere to dump the offending newspaper. There wasn’t even a bin and she wasn’t so far sunk into depression that she would just chuck it on the pavement. She stomped back towards the flat, muttering under her breath, not caring if she was taking one further step down the line towards being a newspaper-hoarding, bin-rifling weirdo, and thinking that the world was a cruel, cruel place.
ELLE SAT AT the kitchen table, reading the week-old newspaper and sipping a cup of tea, glad to be out of the cold, but still shaking at the injustice of the day she’d had. Absolutely no jobs yet again in the Evening Standard. She’d missed it last week; it had been sold out, and even if she’d had it a week ago it’d have been useless, unless she wanted to go into local government or work for a magazine called Red Knave, and she was sure she didn’t.
Washing-up was piled high in the sink. They’d had people round the night before; Alex had made pasta and a bong, and Karen had made everyone sing ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ into wooden spoons. Elle had wanted to go to bed early to prepare for her interview, but she couldn’t really get out her duvet and lie on the sofa while five other people were glugging Bulgarian white wine out of a screwtop bottle and yelling about the upcoming election.
Elle knew she should do the washing-up in a minute; perhaps then Alex would stop glaring at her when he came in and saying, ‘Oh. Hi.’ Which meant, ‘Oh. You’re still here, blighting my life.’ She didn’t like Alex much, all he seemed to do was show off his new mobile phone and take calls on it, then play Tomb Raider all weekend in the sitting room with his friend Fred. Elle had snogged Fred only the week before, more because she’d been trying to get to sleep and it seemed easier to snog him and then let them get on with playing Tomb Raider than tell them to leave. Plus Fred was actually an OK snog, even if she didn’t have much to say to him. He’d been there yesterday too – but he’d been in a funny mood, and she wasn’t sure he was interested any more, which wouldn’t be a surprise, to be honest. He had a job and a flatshare, he wasn’t sleeping in someone’s sitting room and reading