What Rhymes with Bastard?

I confided in Jack: ‘It makes me so angry, Chief. I have you, and that’s just the most amazing thing, and I’m still sad. Why can’t I just be happy?’

‘That’s what you always say, and you never are. To be honest, I don’t think you ever will be.’

So I went to the doctor and told her I’d been feeling a bit blue. Without blinking, she wrote me repeat prescriptions for a thousand Prozac capsules. ‘You should be feeling better in about three weeks.’ I read that the side-effects included lower libido and increased homicidal urges.

As I made dinner, Tova would sidle in and tell me about her amazing life – the places she’d been, the people she’d met and the wild things she’d done. She could make anything dull, but next to this vigorously sprouting shrub, I felt like a limp, etiolated stem. To protect myself, I responded only to direct probes, such as ‘You’re from England, right?’

‘Yup.’

‘Hmm. Where else have you lived?’

‘Here.’

‘Just here? Well, where have you been, like long trips?’

‘Nowhere.’

‘Oh … Really?’

‘Really.’

She was all about the where, not the what. I couldn’t stand her, and boycotted the kitchen when she was around. Jack would come home from work to find me sitting on the bed with an open can of tuna and a bag of crisps.

‘Here’s dinner, Chief.’

‘Lins, can’t you at least make some pasta?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to talk to Tova while it boils.’

‘Well, you turn on the water, then I’ll go in a bit and sort it out.’

I agreed, but she caught me in the hall and pointed at my pink socks. ‘Look, Chico!’ she cried, laughing. ‘They match her sweater!’ I was a pink moth, writhing on a pin. ‘Ah, yes,’ she said, ‘I used to do that – match stuff. When I was much younger, of course.’

I reversed back into our room. ‘Jack,’ I hissed, ‘we have to get out of this place! I can’t stay indoors in the daytime because it’s like a dungeon and it makes me feel really sad and I can’t go outdoors because there’s nothing left to buy and I’m getting sunburned and I can’t stay indoors at night because I’m going to kill Tova and I can’t go out at night because there’s nowhere to go because I don’t have any friends.’

‘Let’s go for a walk,’ said Jack. ‘We can get some food, too.’

We clambered to the top of Lombard Street, a giant game of crazy-golf, twisting and turning down towards the mass of the city. Beyond the clustered lights lay the black expanse of the bay, and beyond that more land, more lights, more people, doing more interesting things than I was. It was time to confront the truth: I was not a writer, because writers write stuff.

‘Chief,’ I wailed, sitting down, ‘I’m just, like – nothing! And my face is all bumpy.’

It was true: I’d got a weird sort of rash. He patted my head. ‘It’s OK, you’re still the best rabbit in the world!’

My tears blurred the city into a twinkling puddle. ‘I’ll never write anything except recruitment ads!’

Jack held me close. ‘That’s OK, Bun. I’ll still love you more than anything in the world and I’d love you if you couldn’t even write your own name.’ He cradled my head in his lap and wiped my tears on his shirtsleeve. ‘Poor Bun. You’ve got mascara all over your face.’

Comforted, I grew calmer. We had a few minutes of silence while he stroked my hair. ‘It’s OK.’ I sniffed. ‘You know, I feel kind of a sense of relief. Denying it all this time, when it’s fine not to write stuff. Who cares?’

‘Well, maybe you don’t need it to be my lovely Bun, but you might need it to be a happy, fulfilled rabbit.’

How annoying. Not just the herbivore references – he wouldn’t let me off the hook. All of a sudden I had an idea. I sat up, still sniffing. ‘I know! I could write about all the freaks I meet here!’

He squeezed my hand. ‘That’s a great idea. You’ve got all this time, Bun, and you’ve not had it for years. You deserve to put it to good use. If nothing else, it’ll make you feel better. You can write short stories.’

‘Can’t do anything that long.’

‘Poems, then.’

‘Nobody reads poems except other poets.’

‘Hmm.’

‘What if I stuck a tune on top? Then they’d be songs. And maybe a few people will listen.’ I’d written a song once, to promote the use of dustbins on school premises. I was back on track, so we got some dinner, and then returned to the house, where Jack immediately conducted a bottom inspection. It was a new habit of his, and it got on my nerves.

‘Hmm, let’s see. Turn round.’ He put his hands inside my knickers and started feeling around. ‘Oh, it’s been trimmer – it’s been trimmer! You’ll have to keep hopping up those hills, Bun!’ Soon his hands were round my waist, then inside my shirt, and he seemed to have forgotten about my below-par backside. ‘I love you, Bun.’

‘I love you too, Chief.’

Lips met and tongues coiled together as he began to unpeel my skirt; my clothes always seemed to be falling off when Jack was around. Suddenly he disengaged. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘I’ve got an idea.’

‘What?’

‘Let’s do it standing up.’

‘What? No.’

‘Well, how about the other way, then? It feels nice, you know. I stuck that corn-on-the-cob up my arse and it was … you know … It felt good.’

I was sick of hearing about that damned thing, a plastic corn-onthe-cob vibrator we’d been given as a wedding present. I’d thrown it out after he’d claimed repeatedly to have stuck it up his butt. ‘Jack,’ I said, ‘I still don’t believe you did it. Or with the wine bottle.’

‘I did it! It was just the spout. Why don’t you believe me? Why would I lie?’

‘Look, Jack, I’m not having anal sex with you.’

‘So let’s do it standing up, then. Go on!’

‘No.’

‘Christ, Lins, you’re so boring.’ He went to bed in a huff, his face turned towards the wall. What was going on? He’d never asked for stuff like that when we were in London.

I spent much of the next day working out a song on my accordion. When Jack got home from work, he hugged me and the accordion, and asked if we could have sex standing up.

‘No.’

‘You can take the accordion off.’

‘No.’

‘Please, Lins. We always do it lying down.’

‘I like lying down. Why do something standing up when you can do it lying down?’

‘Go on.’

‘I want to play you my song.’

He stepped back and crossed his arms. ‘Go on, then.’

My Landlord is a Pervert

My landlord doesn’t live here, and that’s a piece of luck

Coz he isn’t very fussy about what he likes to fuck.

My landlord is a pervert, and that’s all right with me,

He keeps the house in order, and sometimes stays for tea.

He keeps his books at our place – philosophical texts,

Nietzsche, Kant and Hegel on the ins and outs of sex.

My landlord is a pervert, and that’s all right with me,

He keeps the house in order, and sometimes stays for tea.

He is awfully fond of enemas and he does them in the park,

Finds an unsuspecting vagrant and makes his muddy mark.6

My landlord is a pervert, and that’s all right with me,

He keeps the house in order, and sometimes stays for tea.

He is best friends with a male prostitute and a Satanist called Steve,

They hang out in hard-core nightclubs with sailors on shore leave.

My landlord is a pervert, and that’s all right with me,

He keeps the house in order, and sometimes stays for tea!

‘That’s great, Bun! So, can we do it standing up?’

‘No.’

‘Please.’

‘I’ll get cold.’

‘Go on – put your wedding shoes on and then you’ll be tall enough.’

He was starting to get snotty, and I couldn’t stand being frozen out. ‘Back in a sec,’ I said, and trotted off to the kitchen for a swig of vodka. The wedding shoes were six-inch platforms with black leather ankle straps. I did up all the little thongs and wobbled to a precarious upright.

‘Christ, Lins.’ He grinned. ‘You’re so fuckable! Stand up! There you go. See, we’re nearly the same height now so we can do it like this. It’ll fit.’

I felt horribly exposed without a bed on one side of me, like a giant whiting fillet. The 3-D nudity was especially awkward in those ridiculous shoes. And how was I supposed to come? I couldn’t twiddle myself to a climax with Jack in the way. Still, it was probably worth it; otherwise he’d be a grumpy sod. Five more minutes, I told myself, and I’d be back on the bed, reading my book.

‘Bend your knees a bit, Bun.’

I assumed the don’t-get-pee-on-your-shoes position while he shoved, blindly.

‘Help me, then, Lins. A bit of guidance, for God’s sake.’

I sighed. ‘Is this going to happen every time I wear these shoes?’

He oiled the machinery with spit and tried again. ‘Aah, that’s it.’ Uuup down up down up down up down up down up down up down up down up … My shoulder-blade kept knocking against the door jamb. And I was cold.

The best thing about fucking was that I got to lie down.

3: Work

‘You’ve got to have enough money. That’s the most important thing.’

Mum

If I’d held on to my career, it would have been easier to hold on to Jack. But who was I to make the rules when he made all the money?

As much as he despised his new job, he liked his new workmates: ‘They’re such a great bunch, Lins!’ Their interests ranged from drinking and smoking to talking in funny accents. They bonded through cigarettes, which had been Jack’s comfort since he was ten years old. After gargantuan efforts, I’d had him off them for a few months, but his new colleagues thought that true friends die together, and invited him for a smoke five or six times a day. Eventually, his resolve cracked and they initiated him into the gang with a flaming lighter. To his delight, he was then automatically included in the after-lunch pot-smoking sessions. He kept on telling me how cool they were, once you got to know them.

‘Mmm,’ I said.

‘They’re so social and loyal – it’s amazing.’

‘Mmm. Do they ever see anybody from outside of work?’

‘Well, they spend every Friday or Saturday night together, at any rate. I guess it’s pretty incestuous, though. Like, there’s this tarty account-handler whom everyone fancies, called Gayle – she’s really sweet, she’s got an amazing arse, you have to see it, she’s kind of pudgy but really cute-looking – and I thought it was just kind of light-hearted, but some of them are deadly serious about it. They’re fighting over her!’

‘Really? Who’s going to win?’

‘No one. She’s really smart. Dressing like that and acting flirty gets her what she wants, but I don’t think she’ll do it with any of them. They’re dying of frustration, but no one will actually ask her out.’

‘Do you fancy her?’

‘No, not really. Well, to be honest, I just want to fuck her up the arse.’

While Jack’s anal-sex fixation grew ever more intense and while – unbeknown to me – our relationship was careening towards the rocks, I remained jobless and increasingly desperate to get out of the house. I’d gaze at the towers downtown, speckled with a million windows, a million ways in, thinking that somewhere, in all of that, there had to be a little space for me. I longed to find a job, but I’d never had much luck in that department. After all, back in London, I’d worked in recruitment advertising.

What the fuck is ‘recruitment advertising’?

In London, you’re never more than eight feet away from a rat or a recruitment advertisement. This clandestine industry operates under the radar of normal human awareness, like the Masons without the handshakes and the (alleged) sex parties. Here’s what’s going on: some crap companies struggle to find good staff, others to find any staff at all. Instead of increasing salaries or improving working conditions, they prefer to spend their money on tailor-made propaganda with which to ensnare unsuspecting candidates. And that’s where the recruitment ad agency comes in. It’s not a field that anyone aims to get into, and this was how it happened to me:

In 1995, I graduated with no useful skills. I guarded books in the library of a stately home (where my parents discovered me asleep on the job, sitting upright in a chair), cleaned toilets and made coffee. I then worked on the till in Boots, tended a bar and worked in a cake shop – a nightmare for anyone with a potentially fatal allergy to eggs. In the new year, I went to Liverpool to volunteer in an arts centre for poor kids, where I learned that poor kids were scary. The centre was an unheated church, which was so viciously cold that I chose to run a bake-your-name-in-a-biscuit class, the lure of the oven outweighing the stress of working with eggs. Fifty hours a week I was embroiled in some farcical activity or other, entitling me to a mattress in an unheated, dusty attic. This was winter in the north of England. There was snow on the ground. I washed my jumper, hung it to dry in the basement and returned three weeks later to find it wetter than ever. No one ever took off their clothes except to have a bath. Three months of this was enough to give me some kind of lung disease, so Mum and Dad drove up to rescue me.

Next, I went to France with Jack, where I contracted chicken-pox, and ended up back with my parents, covered with pink spots. When I was up and about again, I got a job as a pizza waitress, and discovered too late that the uniform had short sleeves. I tried to cover up my arm scabs with concealer, but lasted only a day. Then I decided to go abroad, but an intensive Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) course took me no further than south London. Teaching English to Italians in Tooting (TEIT) was a three-hours-a-day gig that involved six trains, and I was fired before the summer ended.

All this time, I’d been applying for bottom-of-the-rung jobs in anything connected with words. Dozens of applications had resulted in just two interviews, both of which I’d mucked up by speaking with unrelenting sarcasm in a tremulous whisper. Eventually I realized I’d have to work for nothing, and condescended to contact the editorial departments of various magazines. To my surprise, they had all filled their slave-labour quotas, so I targeted the picture desks instead, hoping to get a toe in the door. My first ‘yes’ was from Tatler, so that was where I started. I didn’t know that it was a society-’n’-shopping rag for the landed gentry. Too late, I found myself knee deep in cashmere pashminas with matching handbags. For full-time grunt work, I got travel expenses, plus three pounds a day for lunch, which nicely plumped out my thirty-nine-pounds-a-week dole money. (Mum was taking care of my rent – twenty pounds a week for a mattress on the floor in a vicarage.) On my first day at the swanky office I wore a red wool dress I’d picked up in Portobello market. ‘I don’t believe it!’ neighed the editor. ‘A work-experience girl who knows how to dress!’

The magazine operated like a feudal society, in which the ideas came from half a dozen posh people, with unnervingly white teeth, who passed on the labour to an army of unemployed graduates. While we toiled away, the skeleton staff (no joke, they were all anorexic or dying to look it) spent their days blabbing on the phone, chewing salad leaves or getting their teeth polished. A typical day involved traipsing to New Bond Street to pick up a £5000 Loewe suitcase for a photo-shoot, then spending three hours on the phone fact-checking an insultingly vague, scrawled wish-list of dream luggage for winter skiing holidays.

But as those three excruciating months drew to a close, I was filled with dread. Worse was to come: I was scheduled for six weeks on the picture desk at Vogue. I’d been up there on various errands, and everyone had matching belts and nails, and pointy shoes that cost at least thirty pounds per toe. Every night I prayed to the media gods: ‘Please, let me get a job before I have to go to Vogue.’ In between, I had a placement at i-D magazine, the po-faced style bible for urban hipsters. Everyone was fashionable and cool. Because they weren’t fake, they weren’t friendly. The art director was indifferent, unshaven, and seemed surprised to see me. ‘I suppose you could do some photocopying,’ he mumbled. In desperation, I went to the loo, but I couldn’t get back into the office as I didn’t know the door code. Trapped in a cold, echoing corridor, I lost it. I ran from the building in a flood of tears. Hysterical, I phoned Mum, who listened sympathetically and advised me to catch the first train home.

And then the unthinkable happened – I got an interview. The job title was ‘journalist’. With glam mags on my CV, I felt it was within my grasp. This feeling was waning a week after the interview, when Jack decided to take action. He sat me on his lap and said firmly, ‘Now, Bun, call that bitch and tell her why you’re the best person for the job.’

‘I can’t. I’ll look desperate.’

‘Lins, you are desperate. Do it.’

‘What if I’m not the best person for the job?’

‘You are. Course you are. Now do it. Call her now. I’m right behind you.’

He held me tight, and I made myself do it, earning a big kiss and – after my trial period – eleven grand a year.

Eleven grand! It seemed a lot of money until I tried to live on it.

My new boss was a bitch. A smiley bitch with a fake laugh and bad suits. This tousle-haired Medusa barked orders in threes, and sneered when I asked her to repeat, so I’d go round asking people to guess what she wanted. ‘OK, here are the clues: umbrellas, under the window and Prince Albert.’ I’d walk round the block waiting for the tears to stop, hide in the loo or take refuge in the storage cupboard (where, contrary to office lore, I was discovered asleep only once). My job title was misleading: the place sold pictures, and I wrote the accompanying text, which helped sell the snaps, but rarely got published alongside them. I would whiz through my daily atch of fashion and celebrity snaps, then get to work on old stock – pictures of homing pigeons or the Queen Mother’s ready-to-run obituary. To break the tedium, I took down my trousers and modelled a fart-filter (my rear later appeared in a Swedish magazine), and interviewed a corporate shaman, who sat in the office burning sage while we danced to her drumbeat, snickering. I was sent out to interview a man who had been sexy in 1962.

I soon jumped ship and landed in the West End, next to the BBC HQ and the flagship branch of Top Shop, in the dark heart of recruitment advertising. My colleagues were all male, witty and self-deprecating. It was the first place where I felt I belonged to the gang, and our day-long banter detracted marvellously from the demoralizing work. Together we filled our days with useful activities: one tapped away at a screenplay laid out on his monitor to look like ad copy; others stood by the window, spotting stars going in and out of the BBC building, before joining the head of copy at the Dog and Pickle around noon. Later in the day we’d make paper costumes or throw things at each other, running up ads whenever there was a lull in activity.

My favourite client was Sun Valley, a chicken-processing plant in Yorkshire. Sun Valley was a great place to work for three reasons:

1 You got paid.

2 You got a free pair of rubber gloves and a hat.

3 You might not have to deal with giblets.

It was my job to convince unemployed locals that this was a marvellous career opportunity. I churned out dozens of variations on a feathered theme: Your beak break! Give us a wing! Our boss, the creative director, would descend unpredictably from his penthouse, and pace about, making us all nervous. One day, after I’d been there a couple of months, he leaned over my shoulder and said gently, ‘Could we have a word?’ I followed him into a small, cold room with no windows, where we sat down. ‘Linda,’ he said, ‘it’s been noticed that you leave work at five p.m. almost every day.’

‘Yes,’ I acknowledged. ‘That’s what’s on my contract.’

‘Ye-e-s,’ he said, ‘but it’s supposed to be a minimum.’

‘But I’ve always got my work done when I leave.’

‘Ye-e-s, but is it done to the best of your abilities? It’s about giving one hundred and ten per cent here. So, this weekend, I want you to ask yourself if you really want to work here at Jobfab.’

I was stunned. Nobody did a stroke of work after five. It was all right for the boys, but could I really stand another eight hours a week of indoor cricket, Tomb Raider and free beer?

On Monday afternoon, I met up again with my boss. I’d spent the morning in the loo with stress-induced diarrhoea, and I had nothing left to lose. ‘So, Linda,’ he began, ‘did you think about what we said?’

I nodded. ‘I guess I’m not as committed as the rest of the creative department.’ He made a ‘yes, indeed’ face. ‘I mean,’ I said, ‘you can tell that straight off from my Tomb Raider rating.’

‘Tomb Raider?’

‘Face it, my score’s way below the others. I’m no good at cricket, and I can’t drink half as much beer.’

‘So … ?’

‘So what I’m saying is, I think it would be best for everyone if I left, and tripled my income by freelancing at other agencies.’7

‘Now, hold on, Linda, let’s not—’

And thus began the next stage of my career:

Linda Robertson Nomadic Copywriter

[e-mail]

Exorbitant rates * No job too risible

This led to the same old rubbish, but at three times the pay. I’d sit in gloomy offices with sagging ceiling tiles, waiting for an account-handler to brief me on how to promote pest-control jobs with Hackney Council. I photocopied novels so they looked work-related, and read my way through the long, grey days, taking grotesquely extended lonely lunch breaks.

That was the past, and Tina was taking care of the future, right here in San Francisco. She got me an interview at her marketing agency, Think! ‘They’re all Mormons,’ she explained, ‘but they’re OK. Except David … He’s – well, you’ll see.’

David Aarse was her boss, and two weeks after my arrival in the city I found myself perched next to him on the San Francisco waterfront, blinking in the dazzling white light. The bay shimmered blue and white, and a fresh breeze tickled my arms. It was like having an interview in heaven – if this kept up, I’d get a tan. I took a deep, refreshing breath and turned to face my interrogator. The sun glowed like a halo through the bleached remnants of his hair, and black shades masked his eyes. As he flicked through my embarrassing portfolio, he muttered: ‘Crap … crap … crap … Art direction’s terrible … Now, that one’s OK …’ I tried to begin my spiel, but each time, he held up a silencing palm and flicked on through the book. Then, suddenly, he snapped it shut. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you can’t write, but I like your accent. Linda, are you funny?’

‘I think—’

‘Don’t think, do. That’s the Think! motto. Listen, Linda, we’re putting together an Internet movie, and we need an interviewer. Can you do it?’

‘Um, yes,’ I said, and cleared my throat. ‘I was told fifty to seventy dollars an hour is the going rate.’

David turned his face to the sky. ‘Well, Linda … I can only do twenty-five – an intern rate, I know, but it’s going to be worth it. You see, we’re in … what you might call an interesting situation.’