A Year of Being Single: The bestselling laugh-out-loud romantic comedy that everyone’s talking about. Fiona Collins

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       Chapter Seven: Imogen

      Imogen left her mum’s house to walk to the train station. She took in a deep breath of the damp, cold mid-March air, the month still in lion mode not lamb. She’d stayed over last night and it was a relief to be out of there.

      If she was honest, she felt trapped at her mum’s – the green carpet everywhere, the tired décor, the carriage clock on the mantelpiece loudly ticking the hours away. It was claustrophobic. Last night she’d retreated to her old bedroom at 9p.m. when Mum retired, and had read lying on her stomach on the bed with her feet dangling off the end, like she’d always used to.

      Her bedroom was exactly the same as it had always been. Peach, tiny floral print wallpaper. A scratched white desk with flaky bits of exposed wood, long before shabby chic became fashionable. A sink in the corner. She was the only one of her friends who had one and she used to have it edged in Aapri facial scrub, a tiny bar of wrapped soap, Anne French cleansing milk and an Impulse body spray: Temptation. Still there, on the wooden, wall-mounted shelves, were an ancient Pippa doll (hair cut off, of course) an old cassette machine onto which she’d tape the Top 40 (swearing if the DJ dared talk over the beginning of a record), and a 1986 annual, full of tips on how to get a boyfriend.

      In that peach room she had dreamed of having a man. A Prince Charming. The person to take her away from all this. (Ha! Well, that hadn’t worked! She was right back where she started.) She saw how it affected her mum, being alone, with no man to share her life with. Imogen’s father, or the sperm donor, as she liked to put it, had not stuck around. Mum had had a wild and passionate affair with him in her late teens, then he’d moved back to Brazil. That wasn’t as glamorous as it sounded: he wasn’t Brazilian, he just lived there. He’d made little contact once he realised he had a daughter, only sending the occasional, half-hearted cheque. When Imogen was a teenager she’d dreamed of flying to Rio to build a relationship with him but now she didn’t; he’d proved himself not to be worth the effort.

      Imogen, the serious schoolgirl with the A grades, was not going to end up alone. She was going to bag herself a great man. The best she could possibly get, and she’d work at it as hard as she studied. She treated having boyfriends at school like a career, trying to climb a rung up the ladder each time. Each boyfriend had to be better than the last.

      She reached the end of her mum’s road and headed smartly down the next. She felt happier the nearer she got to the train station – there were shops and convenience stores and takeaway places and noise and smells and life. She was more comfortable in an urban environment; suburbia didn’t suit her. She’d loved drunks shouting outside her window at 3a.m. in Putney, all the noise and the bustle. And she loved going to London to work, despite the fact she hated her current job. Thank God it was Friday.

      She had become an actors’ agent at twenty-two, after being an assistant agent for three years and an intern for one. She had been one of eight agents in a big company. It was a busy, glamorous job – sending actors for castings, negotiating contracts, dealing with actor’s egos, schmoozing casting directors and producers at lunches and dinners. She loved it.

      Her glory days, she called those early years. She went to places like the Met Bar and the Titanic. She got drunk and went home to Putney in mini-cabs. She knew a lot of TV blondes and once snogged one of Supergrass’s roadies, in the VIP area of a festival. She drank red wine in fancy restaurants until her teeth were black, and she’d grin at herself in posh Philippe Starck-type toilets that had no locks on the door, and think she not only had it all, but she had it all before her. They were the good old days – apart from one small blip. Her days in the sun.

      She smiled as she remembered them, as she fed her ticket through the barrier and climbed the steps to Platform One. Her glory days had lasted for a long time. Even after she’d had to move back to Essex, she’d tried to keep them going. She was still out every night, watching plays and productions with up-and-coming actors in, attending networking dinners in trendy restaurants and, before the Man Ban, dating the most eligible and unsatisfactory men in the capital.

      The last train back to Chelmsford had been a good way of separating the wheat from the chaff. After ten past midnight bad decisions about men were all too easy to make. The only time she’d missed it and had to get a cab all the way home was after a fantastic night salsa dancing with an investment manager from Deloittes. Their revelry had ended drunkenly at 2a.m., the cab cost her £140 and there had been no return on her investment. Deloittes Man turned out to have a wife, five children and a house in Mayfair that he got a £15 taxi home to.

      The last train to Chelmsford had also stopped her from bringing any men back to the boxy new build she was slightly ashamed of. That’s what hotels were for.

      Imogen got on the train. She frowned, as the only remaining seat was next to a woman eating a very smelly ‘breakfast bagel’ that looked like it had a full B&B fry-up stuffed into it. She squeezed as close as she could to the window, got out her Kindle and wondered exactly how, last November, she had suddenly got fed up with it all. Being an agent. At the time her thought processes seemed quite clear: she was forty, she fancied a career break, a change. She’d been an agent for twenty-two years. She couldn’t climb any higher with it. She’d done it all. It was getting boring.

      She thought she’d see what was out there. Sniff around a bit. Maybe get a job in a different field, like television. Television production, maybe. She had a lot of skills. She could temp. She’d met someone who’d told her it was brilliant. You could get a foothold in the door of a new industry but at the same time enjoy a sense of freedom. You could walk out that door whenever you liked. And there was no pressure. Imogen was sold.

      She left her agency, Potters, in a triumphant cloud, with a loud and boozy champagne send-off, then, within days of joining a temp agency, got a job at Yes! Productions, covering someone’s maternity leave.

      She pushed open the door there now. The trendy reception area always met her with a pepper and ginger biscuit-infused room spray that made her sneeze. She’d suffered it all week and had just about had enough of it.

      ‘Morning, Imogen.’

      ‘Ach-oo! Sorry. Morning, Fred.’

      She always had to show her pass, everyone did, no matter how long they’d worked there. Fred once refused to let Marge the cleaner in, because she’d forgotten hers, and she’d worked there for ten years. It was an independent production company. They made sitcoms and the occasional gardening programme for the BBC.

      As she walked to her desk, a formidable figure was lurking.

      ‘When you’re ready, Imogen.’

      ‘Yes, Carolyn.’

      Carolyn Boot. Tyrant was way too mild a word for her.

      Carolyn disappeared into her office. Imogen would follow, in approximately one minute, once she’d taken her coat off, to have her Daily Diary Meeting with her. It was Friday the 13th, but every day was unlucky for Imogen at this job.