Lottie Project Read Online Free PDF Page B

in
my
rounders game, girls?” She’s so . . . slippery. You can’t suss out what she’s going to do next. Every time you get ready to hate her she’s funny and then when you start to think she’s an old softie she plays a trick on you.’ I was in the bathroom by this time, sitting on the loo.

    ‘She sounds a good teacher,’ Jo called. She followed me into the bathroom. ‘Do you think I look a bit older and more professional with my hair up? Yeah, I think so. Help me pin it up at the back, eh?’
    She’s usually great at fixing her own hair but her hands were all fumbly this morning, and she couldn’t eat any breakfast because she said she was too nervous.
    ‘You’ve got to eat something. You don’t want to faint dramatically in the middle of a job interview,’ I said.
    ‘Maybe I won’t
get
any interviews,’ Jo said. Then she stopped and took a deep breath. ‘No. I’ve got to think positive. Right, Charlie?’
    ‘You bet. Good luck, Jo,’ I said, hugging her.
    I hoped and hoped Jo would get a job that day. She went into town and she walked round in her high heels with this big bright smile on her face, going into all these different shops and introducing herself and asking and then nodding and walking out again, over and over, all day long. She came home and she kicked her shoes off and she howled. But then I made her a cup of tea and rubbed her feet and she stopped crying and the next day she tried again. And the next.
    A shop selling weird way-out clothes was advertising for staff but they said Jo wasn’t wacky enough. A big store wanted a sales assistant for their ladies’ dress department but they said Jo wasn’t mature enough. A snobby shop selling designer clothes made it plain Jo wasn’t posh enough.
    ‘This is hopeless,’ said Jo, sighing.
    She tried record shops, but she didn’t know enough about modern music. She’d been too busy bringing me up to dash down the disco. She tried bookshops, because she likes reading, but the only shop with a vacancy was full of all these studenty boys in jeans making jokey remarks, and the one with the scruffiest hair and the grubbiest T-shirt turned out to be the manager and although Jo said he was friendly it was obvious she didn’t fit.

    She charged out at seven in the morning on Friday to buy the local paper and she skimmed through all the small print looking for jobs.
    ‘Nothing!’ she said despairingly. ‘Well, no proper jobs. There’s bar work. But I’m not leaving you alone in the evenings.’
    ‘Don’t be daft. I’ll be fine. Go for it, Jo! You could learn how to make all those great cocktails with the little cherries and toy umbrellas. It would be fun,’ I said.
    Jo went to the pub to see what it was like.
    ‘It would not be fun,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t be making any cocktails there. Just serving pints of bitter to a lot of boring old men trying to look down my front. I could put up with that, but I wouldn’t be free till half past eleven every night and then I’d have to walk miles home unless I forked out for a taxi – and they were only paying fifty pounds for five full evening shifts. We can’t pay the mortgage with that.’
    Jo went back to the local paper. ‘The only other jobs are cleaning,’ she said.
    ‘What do you mean, cleaning? Like at Sketchley’s?’ I said.
    ‘No, not a dry cleaning shop. Cleaning ladies. You know.’
    I looked at Jo.
    ‘I can clean, can’t I?’ she said.
    ‘But you hate cleaning. Look at all the fights we have over whose turn it is to vacuum.’

    ‘OK, OK. But this is in a supermarket. You get socking great industrial cleaning machines. I quite fancy charging about with one of those.’
    She didn’t mean it, of course. She was just being brave.
    ‘It’s two hours every morning, that’s all. Sixty-two pounds,’ said Jo, tearing out the advert.
    ‘That’s not enough to pay the mortgage.’
    ‘I know. But look, there are heaps of other adverts for cleaners. I could go after