The Girl You Left Behind

and watched television with the sound down and
     when I remembered, periodically, why I was at home in the middle of the day I had felt
     an actual brief pain in my chest.
    ‘I wasn’t expecting
     you.’
    ‘I got fed up at home. I thought maybe
     we could do something.’
    He looked sideways at me. There was a fine
     film ofsweat on his face. ‘The sooner you get another job, babe,
     the better.’
    ‘It’s all of twenty-four hours
     since I lost the last one. Am I allowed to just be a bit miserable and floppy? You know,
     just for today?’
    ‘But you’ve got to look at the
     positive side. You knew you couldn’t stay at that place forever. You want to move
     upwards, onwards.’ Patrick had been named Stortfold Young Entrepreneur of the Year
     two years previously, and had not yet quite recovered from the honour. He had since
     acquired a business partner, Ginger Pete, offering personal training to clients over a
     40-mile area, and two liveried vans on the HP. He also had a whiteboard in his office,
     on which he liked to scrawl his projected turnover with thick black markers, working and
     reworking the figures until they met with his satisfaction. I was never entirely sure
     that they bore any resemblance to real life.
    ‘Being made redundant can change
     people’s lives, Lou.’ He glanced at his watch, checking his lap time.
     ‘What do you want to do? You could retrain. I’m sure they do a grant for
     people like you.’
    ‘People like me?’
    ‘People looking for a new opportunity.
     What do you want to be? You could be a beautician. You’re pretty enough.’ He
     nudged me as we ran, as if I should be grateful for the compliment.
    ‘You know my beauty routine. Soap,
     water, the odd paper bag.’
    Patrick was beginning to look
     exasperated.
    I was starting to lag behind. I hate
     running. I hated him for not slowing down.
    ‘Look … shop assistant.
     Secretary. Estate agent. I don’t know … there must be something you want
     to do.’
    But there wasn’t. I had liked it in
     the cafe. I liked knowing everything there was to know about The Buttered Bun, and
     hearing about the lives of the people who came through it. I had felt comfortable
     there.
    ‘You can’t mope around, babe.
     Got to get over it. All the best entrepreneurs fight their way back from rock bottom.
     Jeffrey Archer did it. So did Richard Branson.’ He tapped my arm, trying to get me
     to keep up.
    ‘I doubt if Jeffrey Archer ever got
     made redundant from toasting teacakes.’ I was out of breath. And I was wearing the
     wrong bra. I slowed, dropped my hands down on to my knees.
    He turned, running backwards, his voice
     carrying on the still, cold air. ‘But if he had … I’m just saying.
     Sleep on it, put on a smart suit and head down to the Job Centre. Or I’ll train
     you up to work with me, if you like. You know there’s money in it. And don’t
     worry about the holiday. I’ll pay.’
    I smiled at him.
    He blew a kiss and his voice echoed across
     the empty stadium. ‘You can pay me back when you’re back on your
     feet.’
    I made my first claim for Jobseeker’s
     Allowance. I attended a 45-minute interview, and a group interview, where I sat with a
     group of twenty or so mismatched men and women, half of whom wore the same slightly
     stunned expression I suspected I did, and the other half the blank, uninterested faces
     of people who had been here too manytimes before. I wore what my Dad
     deemed my ‘civilian’ clothes.
    As a result of these efforts, I had endured
     a brief stint filling in on a night shift at a chicken processing factory (it had given
     me nightmares for weeks), and two days at a training session as a Home Energy Adviser. I
     had realized pretty quickly that I was essentially being instructed to befuddle old
     people into switching energy suppliers, and told Syed, my personal ‘adviser’
     that I couldn’t do it. He had been insistent that I continue, so I had listed some
     of the practices that they had asked me to employ, at which point he had gone a bit
     quiet and suggested we (it was always ‘we’ even though it was pretty obvious
     that one of us
had
a job) try something else.
    I did two weeks at a fast food chain. The
     hours were okay, I could cope with the fact that the uniform made my hair static, but I
     found it impossible to stick to the ‘appropriate responses’ script, with its
     ‘How can I help you today?’ and its ‘Would you like large