This had suddenly become very personal. Her breasts, as if inflated by some intense private emotion, were still rising and falling directly below my nose.
‘Then my parents split up. But I got sent to this wonderful speech therapist. She taught me how to speak clearly. She told me to go out and do something useful instead of sitting around feeling sorry for myself. “Always keep on the sunny side, Stacey,” she used to say. After I took my A-levels, I went into local government. I reckoned there were a lot of people out there among our clients who were worse off than me.’
I glanced down at her ankles. They seemed shapelier, but the ugly scars were still there.
‘That sounds a bit like me.’
‘You, Berthold?’ Her sweet face and direct manner, her own admission of vulnerability, invited confidence.
It was a long time since I had spoken to anyone about my breakdown. ‘I got depressed when my daughter died. Meredith, she was called. My wife blamed me. Our marriage broke up. My stutter started up again because of the stress. Not the best thing for an actor.’
‘You’re an actor?’
‘All the world’s a stage.’
‘Isn’t that a quote by Shakespeare?’
‘Absolutely. Shall we go and have a coffee? I know a nice p-place just up the road.’
Violet: Luigi’s
Violet feels she deserves a treat. She’s sat through an hour-long meeting with Marc this afternoon, avoiding his eyes and maintaining an air of utter cool throughout. Now she feels inexplicably sad, like she’s mourning for something inside her that has died. Though she’s still wearing the expensive uniform that goes with her job, her heart’s no longer in it. It’s not just Marc, it’s the whole idea of wealth preservation that once seemed so glamorous, and now just seems sleazy. She takes her laptop into Luigi’s to enjoy a real cappuccino while she checks her personal email and hunts for jobs online. There must be more worthwhile jobs out there.
She notices her eccentric neighbour Berthold is there too, sitting at a corner table deep in conversation with a pretty middle-aged woman with auburn hair. They both look a bit flushed. M-mm, she thinks. Something’s going on there.
‘Hi!’ she greets him, but he just smiles mysteriously. He is strange, but not half as weird as the old lady he lives with — who, according to Len the wheelchair man, is not his mother at all, but just pretends to be. His new love-interest looks nice though, despite her funny hairstyle.
She logs on. There are emails from Jessie and Laura asking how she’s getting on, and an invitation to a party at Billy’s tonight. And — her pulse quickens — here’s a response from a job she’d applied for, inviting her for an interview. It’s a junior position with an investment company based at Canary Wharf, a household name, at least in some kinds of households. Good pay; terrific prospects. It’s exactly what she’d been hoping for. But now she hesitates.
There’s also an email from an NGO promoting women’s enterprise in sub-Saharan Africa, inviting her for an interview. The pay is pitiful compared with the other, but the job is interesting and carries a lot of responsibility, and its African base is in Nairobi, so she’d be able to stay with her grandma. She can apply for both and make up her mind later.
Both jobs are asking for references, which is kind of awkward at the moment, but instead of just naming her professors at uni she writes an email to Gillian Chalmers, asking her to be a referee. She gets an automated ‘Out of Office’ response. Gillian Chalmers is in Bucharest but will attend to her message on her return; there is no indication when that will be. The closing date for both of the jobs is tomorrow. She takes her courage in both hands and fills in the forms online, naming Gillian Chalmers as her first referee.
Berthold: The Scottish Play
Mrs Penny phoned me next morning at nine o’clock. She said she had gathered together the singed and sodden forms from her office floor and wanted to express her gratitude. She didn’t refer to our moment of body contact, and I didn’t bring it up, but she did mention the coffee (Luigi had done us proud, with a double latte for me, and an extra-frothy cappuccino for her topped with chocolate, cinnamon and ground nutmeg), suggesting we might repeat the experience another day.
‘Absolutely,’ I said with faux enthusiasm, for I was beginning to regret my moment of weakness in the council courtyard. I’d detected a whiff of neediness in the way she had clung to me. There’s no bigger turn-on for a man than sexual desire in a woman. But if you surrender to the beast and sleep with them, you’re trapped. They suffocate you with their niceness, and next thing you know you’re sitting in the back row of the multiplex every Saturday, eating popcorn and watching George Clooney. No thank you. Add to this that she was a hostile agent of ‘Them’, on whose whim I could be ousted from my home if I put a foot wrong, and you can see why I was holding back.
Besides, I was now bracing myself for another bureaucratic hassle. In the words of the Immortal Bard, ‘When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.’ I had just received a letter from the Department of Work and Pensions, another outrider of ‘Them’, which winked at me evilly from its brown-envelope window.
We are conducting a radical overhaul of the system, which will put the needs of you the jobseeker first, it sneered, inviting me for a preliminary interview at Job Centre Plus to review my continuing entitlement to benefit.
I bumped into Legless Len in the ground-floor lobby, and learned that he had received one too. He was bristling with positivity.
‘I reckon they’ve found me a job, Bert. They reassessed my capabilities!’
‘That’s brilliant, Len.’
‘Let’s hope you’re in luck too, Bert.’
‘As the Immortal Bard would say, the miserable have no other medicine but only hope.’
‘That’s truly profound. I’ll add it to my collection of positive sayings.’ He wheeled away, humming cheerfully.
When I arrived at the Job Centre for my appointment, I found to my dismay that gorgeous Justin had gone, and the new representative of ‘Them’ was George McReady, a lean foxy gingery man with a goatee beard and a Dundee accent.
‘What happened to Justin?’ I asked.
‘He wasn’t meeting his tarrgets, Mr Sideboatum,’ he burred. ‘And you’re one of them. I see you were last employed four months ago, and that was only for two weeks.’
‘Two weeks is bloody good, in my line of b-business.’
‘Well, in my line of business it’s pathetic. How many jobs have you actually applied forr?’
‘Since then?’ I racked my brain. It all seemed to blur into one long haze of failure. ‘About ten. And f-four auditions.’ Possibly I was exaggerating a bit.
He perused a dog-eared document covered in Justin’s scribbles and ticks, and tutted.
‘According to your agreement, your tarrget is six applications per week. Of which two in six should lead to an interview.’
‘Six per week? That’s absurd. Six p-p-per month would be p-pushing it.’
‘Is this, or is it not, your signature, Mr Sideboatum?’ He pushed the paper towards me.
My chest tightened. My head started to spin. His name and the vague hint of menace in his Dundee accent brought up a strange bubble in my memory of a long-ago performance of the Scottish play at Newcastle in which I’d played the porter. To great critical acclaim, I might add.
‘Faith, sirr, it is.’ I could hear the tense hush in the theatre, the audience breathless in their seats.
‘When you signed, you committed yourself to six applications perr week. You’re bound by the agrreement, and you’ve not perrforrmed.’ He leaned across the desk with a leer, and I could feel the bones of my resolution snapping between his foxy jaws. ‘Do you have any excuse to offer?’