About a Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

tiny, shiny pointer. ‘So, shower and hair wash for you, Sainsbury’s and seven chocolate oranges for me, and we’ll meet in front of the TV for a Buffy marathon in fifteen minutes. And I’m only giving you one day off because tomorrow, every ad agency in the country is going to be fighting over you, and there’ll be no time for vampire-slaying then.’
    I nodded, hugged her and shut myself in the bathroom, suddenly desperate to strip off my wet outer layer. Flinging the soggy shift against the bathroom tiles, it hit with a satisfying slap and I stepped under the shower with almost a smile. My skin was cold and clammy and the hot water stung in the best way possible. I could feel myself warming up right through to my bones, which at least meant I could still feel something. Seriously, someone needed to let London know that it was summer. We’d had about three days of legitimate sunshine since May and it was almost July.
    ‘Maybe I’ll go travelling,’ I told the rubber duck who lived in the corner of the shower. ‘Maybe I’ll go somewhere warm.’
    ‘With what money?’ he asked. That duck was so cynical. ‘You haven’t got any savings.’
    Cynical he might be, but he was also right. Bloody duck. I’d spent the first half of my twenties getting into a really quite impressive amount of debt of both the student loan and credit card variety. Interning and assisting were not well-paid professions, and without the Bank of Mum and Dad to help me through the first few years, I’d had to rely on the kindness of strangers. That is, the graduate loans officer at HSBC. He’d been very ready to help and even more ready to take every penny of interest back. So no, I didn’t have any savings, but I didn’t really have any debt left either, so that was something. Sort of.
    ‘It’ll be fine,’ I told the judgemental duck as I lathered up. ‘Tomorrow I’ll email everyone I know at the other agencies. How many references have I written in the last year?’
    The duck didn’t answer. He was cynical and rude.
    ‘So many. I have written so many. I must have all the emails for the HR people somewhere.’
    And I had. Aside from being amazing at my job, I was also one of the longest servers at D&D. They had a pretty high staff turnover, and for reasons I’d never really been able to understand before today, no one liked asking HR for a reference.
    ‘I don’t need to panic about this,’ I carried on. ‘It’s a hiccup. I’ll be in a new job by Monday. A better job. The best job ever.’
    Well, maybe not the best job ever. I was really going to struggle to get the job of Alexander Skarsgård’s fang fluffer on the next season of True Blood . But still, never say never. I would go and work for a better agency. I would work on bigger accounts. I would manage a team who didn’t sniff the permanent markers when I wasn’t looking. It was time to dream the big dreams. Maybe I could even leave London. I knew a couple of girls who had got transfers over to New York. Maybe I could go and work in the States for a couple of years, do the whole Sex and the City thing. Or maybe even Australia. I’d heard there were a lot of opportunities in Australia. I hoped I’d be able to convince Charlie and Amy to come with me without too much violence.
    I stayed in the bathroom, scrubbing away shame and disappointment and the top two layers of my skin until I heard the front door go and the TV come on. Wrapping myself up in the biggest, fluffiest towels I could find, towels that obviously weren’t mine, I emerged from the bathroom ready to tell Amy all about my plans. Much to the duck’s dismay, I was totally smiling.
    For all of three seconds.
    ‘Are those my towels?’ My flatmate, Vanessa, stood in the middle of the living room with a very unimpressed look on her face. ‘Because if they are, you’re going to need to replace them.’
    Oh. Fuck.
    ‘Can’t I just wash them?’ I asked, my fragile positive attitude shattering all