Rubber Gloves or Jimmy Choos? Read online

  After that, reason left me again (bloody unreliable that reason thing). The next plan of action was to beg my parents for money. I would go too. We’d travel together, and he would see how much he needed me. After all, who else was going to wash his underwear? My parents refused. I told Ben anyway and he sounded so relieved I cried and shouted at him and called him names. I also told my parents that I hoped they could live with themselves, knowing that they had ruined the life of their only daughter.

  By this stage reason was miles away and had been replaced by desperation. The last attempt I made was to tell Ben that I understood everything, including us breaking up, but that I needed to see him one last time, just to say goodbye. He was reluctant, but I pulled every emotional-blackmail trick in the book and he finally agreed. He drove to my parents’ house. He arrived looking as gorgeous as ever and we talked, or I talked. I asked him how he could just ignore everything we’d been through. He shrugged. I asked him if he had missed me at all. He shrugged. I asked him if he’d ever loved me. He shrugged. And so on. When it was time for him to leave, I did what any woman trying to hold on to her last bit of dignity would do. I threw myself on the floor and grabbed his ankles, refusing to let go. Ben went white, my father had to drag me off him and my mother told me to stop behaving like a lunatic. Then Ben walked out of my life. When he left I felt as if he was taking my life with him. It had been smashed beyond all recognition and now he was taking it to ensure that I could never put it back together. Reason and desperation had both left me, and they had been replaced by total desolation.

  I was alone. I had nothing. I lay on my bed staring at the pink walls, listening to songs about lost love, I listened to the Smiths, I refused to eat (apart from in secret), I cried a lot and my parents despaired. God, I knew I was being a self-absorbed bitch, but then, for some reason I couldn’t change. My parents, who had done nothing to deserve it, became the victims of my immature, brattish behaviour. They were worried about me. My father didn’t know what to do, so my mother sat me down one night, poured me a glass of wine and had a career chat. She said that if she had been born when I was and had the opportunities that women had today, her life would have been very different. ‘Ruthie, when I was young, women had limits put on them. We were expected to marry and have children and those were our priorities.’

  ‘You were lucky.’

  ‘No, not really. If I was you, I’d be really successful, I’d make something of my life, I would achieve things. The possibilities for you are endless, darling.’

  This really upset me. ‘But, Mum, you run a clothes shop, you and Dad have a great marriage, and you have me.’

  ‘I know, darling, and I wouldn’t give you and your father up for anything. And, yes, I do have a good life, but I have one shop and it’s hardly Harrods.’

  ‘You read too much Barbara Taylor Bradford. We have to do what’s right for us, surely.’

  ‘Of course, but the point is you can do whatever you want. You really can. I just wish you wanted things from life. I don’t want you to look back and regret things.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘No, I don’t really regret anything. I just wish there had been more choice when I was younger. Today marriage and children don’t signify the end of a woman’s career. They did in my day.’

  ‘Mum, do you think they got us the wrong way round? I mean, I should have been you and you should have been me.’ We laughed.

  ‘Ruth, I just want you to be happy, you know that, and you’re not. I want you to know that there’s more to life than Ben. I know you’re hurting, darling, and I hate to see you hurt. Just promise me one thing, that you’ll remember you can do whatever you want.’

  ‘OK.’ I had no energy to fight. So, because I was an only child and my mother was a huge supporter of women’s lib, I was educated and I went to university, I was expected to do things, or at least to want to do things, with my life. I couldn’t help but wonder why the hell I didn’t.

  My mother and father still hadn’t made any progress with my career, so they did what any loving parents would do: they called in Sarah. She arranged for me to visit her at her parents’ house in Berkshire and told me that the reason I had gone to university was for this moment: this was freedom, opportunity. Now I’d start my career. That’s what women did: they got careers, climbed ladders, wore suits, strove for designer handbags. Well, it all sounded perfectly appalling to me. I protested that I went to university to wear scruffy clothes (the ones my parents hated), to find men and drink cheap beer, but Sarah ignored me.

  Actually the conversation went like this. We were sitting in her garden drinking orange juice and catching a bit of a tan. The flowers were in full bloom and the air was sweet with their smell, bees were buzzing, the children next door were shrieking with laughter and Sarah’s dog, Monty, was sleeping peacefully in the shade. I was thinking how, as a housewife, I could do this all the time; Sarah was preparing herself to lecture me.

  ‘Ru, I’m taking you to choose a career or, at least, to learn about the options.’

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘A career, Ruth. You know, the thing that I have and Jess has and even Sophie has, the thing all women have these days. It could even be said that, in this day and age, your career is as indispensable as your favourite lipstick.’ Sarah smiled sarcastically.

  ‘Never, never could a career be as necessary as my favourite lipstick.’ I grinned back.

  ‘Yes, even for you. Now the first step is to choose one, then we’ll apply, then you can drag yourself from your melodramatic stupor and join the real world.’

  ‘Bitch. How could you? I’m not melodramatic, I’ve—’

  ‘Been dumped. I know. But how can you expect to get over the dumping without a job or at least a new challenge?’

  ‘I could always buy a new lipstick.’ Sarah hit me. ‘OK, you win, just don’t expect me to be happy about this.’ Huh, I’d show her.

  ‘Ru, we’ve all gone past the phase where we expect you to be happy about anything.’ Sarah was quiet but indignant, and I was offended. But, then, I didn’t really have a leg to stand on.

  The careers office, according to Sarah, was the graduate’s Mecca. This was where I’d find my enlightenment. This was where my new life would begin. Well, as a Mecca, the careers office was lacking in ambience and mystery. However, going there was certainly an experience. It was a vast expanse of files that held jobs: banking, marketing, computers, accountancy, consultancy, management, just about anything. None of it sounded like fun, and none of it sounded like me. I had to take one of those aptitude-test things, where you answer loads of questions and they tell you what you’d be good at. Sarah said I must have lied because my test said I’d make a good rocket scientist. Actually I did lie a bit, but I thought everyone did.

  By this point I was having fun (really), but I was no nearer to finding my future. So, out of frustration, Sarah chose a career for me, got all the information and the application forms. My chosen-for-me career was in the creative world of advertising. At the time I was horrified, but later with hindsight I was glad for a number of reasons: it is fiercely competitive, you have to know a lot about it and people who recruit in advertising would not hire someone who thought most advertising was corrupt and an insult to people’s intelligence. It was great. I applied for ten jobs. My parents were thrilled (‘Our daughter is thinking of working in advertising’), my friends thought I had suddenly become sane, but best of all was when I got my first ten rejection letters and everyone was really nice to me. I got so much sympathy, much more than when Ben left, and I had avoided being employed.

  I was tempted to make a career of applying for jobs that I didn’t have a hope in hell of getting, but there were a few problems with that. I was living at home now. The only home I had once again was my parents’, and since I’d gone to university it had felt less and less like mine. They insisted on trying to get me to find a job. Instead of realising that they were worried about me wasting my life, I got the feelin
g they didn’t want me there. That was my because-Ben’s-dumped-me-nobody-loves-me stage. I entertained the thought of having myself certified, on the basis that my emotions were so screwed up I was totally mad.

  The trouble was that since I’d left home, instead of building their lives around me, they had started to build them without me. Which I suppose was good for them but not for me, and I felt a bit of a spare part. They played golf on Sundays, then had lunch at the golf club. On Monday, my mother and her friend Amelia went to their women’s charity thing, and my father went back to the golf club. On Tuesday a group of four couples took it in turns to do dinner, on Wednesday they went to the theatre or to see a film, on Thursday they had a night in, on Friday they went out to dinner and on Saturday there was always a party. I found their social life quite exhausting. I was tired just thinking about it.

  This produced a number of problems for someone like me, the first being that my parents had accepted that I was grown-up and were getting on with their lives far too easily. You would think that having me home they would spend all their time with me. They’d fuss around me, they’d do everything for me, but no. They expected me to get on with my life, the life I had without them. They said things like, ‘I expect you’ll be glad we’re out of the way so you can get on with job hunting,’ and I’d say, ‘No, actually, I’m going to mope around and cry a lot because I’ve just been dumped and I would appreciate you staying around to give me sympathy,’ to which they’d laugh then go out anyway. In response I would keep my promise and mope and cry a lot.

  The truth was that by the time Ben left, just under two months after graduation and just under two months of my living with my parents, I wanted out. I was bored, I had no friends around and I had nothing to do. As a last resort I asked my mother to fix me up with some of her friends’ sons, but she refused, telling me that I needed a job not a man. I had no choice but to leave.

  The day of Ben’s flight, I got up early and decided to have a Ben day. (I wasn’t quite ready to stop acting like a drama queen, even if I was the only one to witness it.) I took out the shoe box in which I kept everything he’d given me; a couple of Valentine cards, some flavoured condoms, a hockey badge, a Kylie CD he gave me for my birthday, a Meatloaf CD don’t ask me why, a pair of his socks (I asked for them), and, well, that was it. I read the cards, they said ‘love, Ben’, both of them. I wore the socks and the hockey badge. I played the CDs. I didn’t know what to do with the flavoured condoms. I cried. At three in the afternoon his plane was leaving. I stared out of the window, wondering if I’d ever see him again. I had to face the fact that Ben was gone, but the thought of me and the rest of my life just kept sending me into despair.

  No one else could understand the seriousness of it. They kept saying that I was young, too young, we weren’t married and we weren’t even engaged. ‘You’ll meet someone else,’ they said. I could just go right out and replace Ben. Of course, I could just get up one day and find another man who would take the place of the man I utterly loved. The man God put on this earth to be with me, the man I was meant to be with. The man I loved (have I already said that?). Oh, I could replace him. I was young, lots of nice men out there, plenty more fish in the sea and all that crap. I hated people. Just because I wasn’t older and dumped, it wasn’t serious. People don’t seem to understand that true love knows no age limits. And if I had been in my thirties and Ben had dumped me, I bet you I’d have got a whole lot more sympathy. People would expect me to fall apart: ‘That was one of her last chances of walking down the aisle,’ or ‘That biological clock is going to have to stop now, isn’t it?’ But, no, just because I had nine years on the thirty-year-old, my heartbreak wasn’t taken seriously. The over-thirties should not have the monopoly on heartbreak, you know.

  By the time Ben was well on his way to wherever he was going I had started to calm down, partly because I had run out of things to rant silently about and partly because I was bored. Perhaps I could find someone else, if I had to. I mean, I knew that I would never get over Ben, with his floppy hair and beautiful smile, but I didn’t want to be alone. I tried to face facts. Ben was gone and I was alone. Those were the facts. In the end after much brain-scraping, I realised that the only sensible thing to do was get on with my life and wait for Ben to see he’d made a terrible mistake and come back for me.

  By the time my parents got home, I’d cried as much as I could and I’d also made a decision. Although I still had a broken heart, I would do as everyone wanted. I would move to London and get a job thing. I gave Sarah a call.

  Sophie had a very nice, very rich aunt who had bought a house in Clapham and decided, when Sophie wanted to move to London, she would let her and her friends have it for little rent to give them a helping hand with the massive difficulties facing young people today. Or something like that. The house had three bedrooms, but in my honour one of the downstairs reception rooms was turned into a fourth bedroom. Now, although not ready to make the commitment to live there, I arranged to stay while I attempted to find a job. Jess met me at the station. She looked even more glamorous than usual, and next to her I looked like a hick. We took the tube to Clapham Common and all the way she filled me in on the life and times of a young PR executive. She was so happy that I was happy too.

  We arrived at the house and I was surprised that it was quite pretty. Compared to our student house, with its ancient oven and stained bath, it was a palace. It was painted white, inside and out, and it had three floors, a fitted kitchen and a power-shower. My room had been the dining room so it was off the lounge. I nearly cried when I saw that Sophie had put in it a double bed, a wardrobe and a dressing-table (all from Ikea).

  It was quite a large house, and the lounge was huge so a dining table had been added to it. It had two vast yellow sofas and was light and cheerful. The kitchen was also big, with a pine table in the middle. As she gave me the tour, I knew she loved it here. She showed me the small patio garden she’d filled with pots of flowers, the first floor where Jess and Sarah had their rooms, and the bathroom. Her lovely attic room at the top of the house with skylights that meant she could hear every raindrop fall and feel the sun. I fell in love with it, it was a home.

  I was so happy to see Jess, Sarah and Sophie that I smiled, really smiled, for the first time in ages. I also bought lots of wine as a thank-you to them for putting up with me, and I felt safe again. We gossiped, they filled me in with tales of London, what they had been doing, who they’d met, and I made them laugh with tales of how I hadn’t been doing anything. Well, I managed to make it sound funny rather than sad. But we were together again, the four of us, and I knew that I was lucky because I wasn’t even near to being on my own.

  Sarah, who was working in recruitment, came up with my next plan of action. She had seen an advertisement in the Guardian for graduates and apparently there were loads of ‘great opportunities.’ The best thing was that you went to an agency and they found these jobs for you. Easy. So, again after lots of threats, I made an appointment.

  At the agency a cheerful girl, Sally, with a red-lipstick smile, interviewed me. She asked me loads of questions. What’s your greatest achievement? I felt I couldn’t say being rejected by Saatchi & Saatchi, so I said it was passing my degree. The smile on her face froze into a joker-like grin, so I embellished it: it was such a struggle, I said, for someone who didn’t have any parental support to go through university. I told her my parents thought I should have been working since I was sixteen. (I kept my fingers crossed and apologised silently to them.)

  Where do you see yourself in five years’ time? (Married to a rock star, five kids, a huge mansion, never working.) I said I saw myself wearing suits, carrying a designer handbag, and being a fair few rungs up the ladder I was about to start climbing. (Thanks, Sarah.) What is important to you? (God, this was beginning to sound cheesy.) The environment, world peace and getting a company car.

  Describe yourself in ten words or less. Intelligent, loyal, organised, team player, funny
. These were skills I thought might work. In reality, I am sometimes funny, perhaps intelligent – after all, I was good at education – but not very organised. I am loyal to the death but I don’t remember being in any teams. What I failed to add was that I’m highly sensitive, emotional, dependent and attention-seeking. Oh, and prone to odd bouts of being boring, not funny at all and totally neurotic.

  Anyway, I digress, that seemed to do it. Sally told me I’d be good in sales. This worried me: I had never sold anything in my life. It was media sales she was thinking of putting me forward for. (I didn’t know what that meant.) She arranged for me to have another interview with the agency, but this time in a group. This was another bizarre idea: I was going to get a job selling media and to get it I had to be interviewed with other interviewees. At first I wondered if group interviewing was like group sex, but one look at Lipstick Sally made me realise I was letting my imagination run away. Or perhaps group interviewing was really like group therapy: you all sat around the table and the person doing the interviewing was just going to pick the least mad of the bunch. If that was the case I had no chance. Sarah was encouraging. She explained that selling media meant selling space in magazines, newspapers or on TV. I still didn’t understand but in my apathetic state I didn’t care. Although when I told her how I’d impressed the interviewer with my answers she said they must have been desperate for candidates. With a lot of coaching from Sarah, I breezed through the group interview, and eventually I had a real interview to go to. Even though I was determined to dislike everything about the job process, I had a momentary lapse when donning my suit. I’d never admit it, but I was almost excited.

  The interview turned out to be another group thing: me and three others in a plush publishing house. They were looking for a number of candidates for a number of publications, all of which remained nameless. By this time I had envisaged selling ad space in Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Taller or any of the other glossy women’s magazines. I thought about all the free products, male models, glam lunches – they’d probably promote me to journalist or even, in my wildest fantasy, fashion editor. I thought maybe I’d got the A word, ‘ambition’.