I Think I Love You Read Online Free PDF

college with a degree that was lower than his abilities but still far better than he deserved—given that he had spent his final year honing his pinball skills in the arcade on Brighton pier—he had pretty much reached the end of the road. That long, glittering road marked Graduate Opportunities. After that, he stumbled onto the potholed, dusty path where the unchosen have to accept that, instead of a career, they will be lucky to end up with a paycheck.
    The closest Bill had gotten to an occupation worthy of his potential was being shortlisted for a traineeship with one of London’s top advertising agencies. He had endured a two-day assessment at a hotel in the Cotswolds with fifteen ruthless individualists all competing to show how well they worked in teams. Bill had shone in the copywriting exercise, but during the product pitch he had become insanely irritated by a girl called Susie. You could actually see the agency’s directors watching Susie and writing down adjectives like
bubbly
and
warm
.
    After a brand-recognition exercise for a disgusting new fruit cordial, one of the directors said, with unfeigned eagerness, “Susie strikes me as being a real people person.”
    It was the first time that Bill had come across the expression, and he hated it on sight. What other kind of person was there for crying out loud? A scorpion person?
    It was bad, obviously, that Bill had spoken these thoughts aloud, and even worse that the meeting room had fallen into a silence colder than church on Christmas Eve. So it was probably inevitable that he would be sent home early, deposited unceremoniously at Banbury station with his overnight bag and a complimentary bottle of Jungle Qwash, because he was not enough of a people person. On balance, Bill thought that he was ready to sell his soul, but it turned out he wasn’t prepared to suppress everything that made him who he was just to flog an orange drink that burned the roof of your mouth and made you thirstier than a beaker full of bleach.
    Not long after the advertising fiasco, there was a promising interview for a local radio station. He pictured himself at the microphone, preferably in the late slot, playing a roster of obscure but addictive songs to sobbingly grateful listeners. He would wear headphones the size of boxing gloves. He would become a cult. Instead of which it was made clear, by a claret-nosed station manager named Dodge, that Bill’s gifts would be dedicated entirely to filing—to the plucking of discs, not of his own choosing, from the station’s record library, and their careful replacement after airplay. He was offered the job on the spot, with an extra five pounds slapped on to the weekly pay packet “if you don’t mind a bit of cleaning,” which he did, actually. “Pride comes before a fall,” his mother used to warn. It was not a saying that Bill had ever understood, but at that moment, as he refused the offer with alacrity, he felt both proud and fallen. He remembered looking back at the figure of Dodge, who stood in reception, unsurprised, blowing his nose and staring long and hard at the contents of his handkerchief.
    There were some rewards. Over the barren weeks of applications and rejections, Bill had time, at least, to improve his fingering on the guitar. He also grew a small experimental beard, which he hoped would be construed by those in the know as an affectionate tribute to EricClapton, but which was described by his sister Angie, whom he ran into just off Denmark Street, as “seaweed clinging to a rock.”
    It was around this time that his girlfriend, Ruth, started to lose patience with him. When they first met, in his final year at Sussex, Ruth thought she had a catch. She thought she had bagged herself a boyfriend who was going places in the world, and those places clearly did not include the Camden dole office.
    As the weeks dragged on, Bill had time to develop a theory of jobs. He reckoned you could get an accurate measurement of how