‘Ah…’ Clodagh couldn’t remember.

‘Have you typing and shorthand?’

‘Yes.’

‘How many words a minute?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I just type with my first two fingers,’ Clodagh elaborated, ‘but I’m very fast. As fast as some people who’ve done a course.’

Yvonne’s child-like eyes narrowed. She was annoyed, although not to the extent that she would have you believe. She was just playing, having fun with the power she had. ‘So can I take it that you don’t actually have any shorthand?’

‘Well, I suppose, but I could always… No,’ Clodagh admitted, having run out of energy.

‘Have you any basic word-processing skills?’

‘Ah, no.’

And even though Yvonne knew the answer, she asked, ‘And you’re not a graduate?’

‘No,’ Clodagh admitted, fixing Yvonne with one normal eye and one red-veined one.

‘OK.’ Yvonne exhaled long-sufferingly, licked a finger and used it to smooth down a ragged corner of the CV. ‘Tell me what you read.’

‘How do you mean?’

There was a pause, so tiny it barely existed, but Yvonne had created it to convey what a hopeless idiot she thought Clodagh was.

‘FT? Time?’ Yvonne prompted. She didn’t exactly sigh, but she might as well have. Then she added cruelly, ‘Bella? Hello!?’

All Clodagh read were interiors magazines. And Cat in the Hat books. And occasional blockbusters about women who set up their own businesses and who didn’t have to sit through humiliating interviews such as this one when they wanted a job.

‘And I see you count tennis among your interests. Where do you play?’

‘Oh, I don’t play.’ Clodagh gave a near-teenage giggle. ‘I mean I like watching it.’

Wimbledon was about to start, there had been lots of pre-transmission publicity on telly.

‘And you go to the gym?’ Yvonne read. ‘Or do you just like watching that too?’

‘No, I really go,’ Clodagh said, on much more solid ground.

‘Although that hardly counts as a hobby, does it?’ Yvonne asked. ‘That’s like saying sleeping is a hobby. Or eating.’

This caught Clodagh on the raw.

‘And you’re a regular theatre-goer?’

Clodagh wavered, then admitted, ‘I’m not really. But you’ve to put down something, don’t you?’ (When Clodagh and Ashling had finally stopped inventing joke hobbies such as rally driving and devil worship, and had tried to assemble a list of real ones, pickings had been slim.)

‘So what are your interests?’ Yvonne challenged.

‘Ah…’ What were her interests?

‘Hobbies, passions, that kind of thing,’ Yvonne said impatiently.

Clodagh’s mind had frozen. The only thing she could think of was that she liked playing with her split ends, peeling the broken bit along the shaft of the hair, seeing how far up it would go. She could spend hours amusing herself thus. But something stopped her from sharing this with Yvonne. ‘You see, I have two children,’ she said feebly. ‘They take up all my time.’

Yvonne flashed her an if-you-say-so glance. ‘How ambitious are you?’

Clodagh recoiled. She wasn’t at all ambitious. Ambitious people were weird.

‘When working at the travel agent’s, what gave you the most job satisfaction?’

Making it through the day, as far as Clodagh remembered. The idea was – and it was the same for all of the girls she worked with – they went in, suspended their real lives for eight hours and poured their energies into enduring the wait.

‘Dealing with people?’ Yvonne prompted. ‘Ironing out glitches? Closing a sale?’

‘Getting paid,’ Clodagh said, then realized she shouldn’t have. The thing was, it had been a very long time since she’d done any kind of interview. She’d forgotten the correct platitudes. And, as far as she remembered, she’d always been interviewed by men before, and they’d been a damn sight nicer than this little cow.

‘I’m not really interested in working in a travel agent’s again,’ Clodagh said. ‘I wouldn’t mind if you got me a job in a… magazine.’

‘You’d like to work in a magazine?’ Yvonne pretended she was finding it hard to stifle a smile. Clodagh nodded cautiously. ‘Wouldn’t we all, dear?’ Yvonne sang.

Clodagh decided she hated her, this powerful, merciless child. Calling her ‘dear’ when she was half her age.

‘What kind of salary did you have in mind?’ Yvonne asked, turning the screws.

‘I don’t… ah… I hadn’t thought… What do you think?’ Clodagh handed the last vestiges of her power over to Yvonne.

‘It’s hard to say. I don’t have much to go on. If you’d consider retraining…’

‘Maybe,’ Clodagh lied.

‘If anything comes up, I’ll be in touch.’

They both knew she wouldn’t be.

Yvonne accompanied her to the door. It gave Clodagh savage pleasure to see that she was slightly pigeon-toed.

Out on the street, in her hateful, ridiculous, expensive suit, she walked slowly to her car. Her confidence was shattered. This morning had been a terrifying lesson in how old and useless she was. She’d hung all her hopes on a job but, manifestly, the world of work was a too-fast place which she didn’t have the skills to belong to any more.

Now what was she going to do?

34

On Tuesday morning, Lisa was pawing the ground and champing at the bit outside Randolph Media, desperate to get in. Never again would she endure a weekend like the one she’d just had. On the bank-holiday Monday, she’d been so bored that she’d gone to the cinema on her own. But the movie she’d wanted to see had sold out, so she’d ended up having to go to something called Rugrats Two, sharing the cinema with what seemed like a billion over-excited under-sevens. She really hadn’t known there were that many children in the world. And how ironic that the people she was spending so much of her time with lately were children…

She glared at Bill the porter, as behind the glass door he jingled his keys to let her in. It was all his fault, the lazy, workshy old bastard. If he’d let her come to work over the weekend she’d never have found out how empty her life was.